Tim Keane wrote about Black Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire who disseminated the brutality of colonialism in his work:
Since Césaire’s death in 2008 at age 94, as democracies devolve into autocracies and wealthy nations sidestep poorer ones on our endangered planet, Discourse on Colonialism remains prescient about the barbarity that informs civilization. In literary terms, its enduring relevance tends to overshadow Césaire’s standing as the most influential Modernist poet in Caribbean literature, an imaginative writer who molded the French language to make a personal poetry characterized by hypnotic physicality, ritualized anguish, and metaphorical exorcisms.
About Aimé Césaire
Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, in 1913. After moving to the capital, Fort-de-France, to attend the only secondary school on the island, he moved to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on a scholarship. There, he passed the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure, co-created a literary review called L’Étudiant noir (The Black Student) and helped to start the Négritude movement.
Reading list
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- Notebook of a Return to My Native Land: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
- Return To My Native Land
- Journal of a Homecoming / Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
- Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82
- A Season in the Congo
- Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Other Poems
- Solar Throat Slashed
- Resolutely Black: Conversations with Francoise Verges