(DOWNLOAD) "Aime Cesaire (1913-2008): the Passion of the Poet (Obituary)" by Tydskrif vir Letterkunde ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Aime Cesaire (1913-2008): the Passion of the Poet (Obituary)
- Author : Tydskrif vir Letterkunde
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 171 KB
Description
The Balata road mounts through the primitive forest of Martinique straight up to Morne-Rouge and beyond, towards the plateaus of Ajoupa-Bouillon, Lorraine and Basse-Pointe, where the poet was born, and where one discovers and one experiences "the great hysterical lapping of the sea". No one knows, no one can say, at what point, on this road, you leave the south of the country, with its dry radiance, its tamed beaches, its preoccupied lightheartedness, to enter into the domain of this north, with its heavy rains, and at times fog, where fruits, sweet chestnuts and apricots or terebinth-scented mangos, are heavy and present, and where one can hear the faint echo of storytellers and drummers. No doubt, we are all planted thus in our various childhoods, immobile, as in the red mud that marches boldly up to the Peru and Reculee hills. But the youth of the poet is also marked by quiet wanderings. In the years immediately preceding the world war, the second, he was a student in Paris, having left the hills of northern Martinique, and the Schoelcher High School in Fort-de-France. He discovered what was called the old continent, but more than that he encountered Africa, "gigantically crawling its nudity at the foot of Europe where death sweeps the land in large swathes". This is not the discovery of the explorer, but that, essential, of the son who returns to the source of his passions and anxieties. Among the Africans, West-Indians, Guyanese, Malagasies, natives of Reunion, who then comprised the intellectual emigration of the colonies to Paris, and who formed the margins of another of type emigration of the same origin, factory workers and sub-proletariats, as they were called at the time, and who would later be officially and systematically organized in keeping with the needs of post-war reconstruction, (some of us remember the famous Bureau de migration des Departments d'outremer (Bureau of Overseas Emigration), the very efficient Bumidom, which functioned until the beginning of the 1960s), Aime Cesaire was already a militant, who accompanied the writing of the reviews L'etudiant noir (The Black Student) and Legitime Defense (Self Defense), and probably attended the meetings held in Mrs Paulette Nardal's home, for the defense of the West-Indian and black personality. He met the Senegalese Leopold Sedar Senghor and the Guyanese Leon Gontran Damas, with who he was soon to form the inseparable negritude trio, but most of all, on his own, as we could say, at any rate through a powerful effort, that went ignored at the time, it was in 1939, in a text published in province in a review called Volontes, which entered history because of this, that he unleashed, like a powerful kick aimed at a land which was nonetheless remote, Le cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land) , which I would immediately rank alongside Saint-John Perse's Eloges, published previously in 1917, and Rene Char's Hypnos, which followed in 1943, at the time of the French Resistance: one of the very great poems of our day, and which, in my opinion, signifies over and beyond its reputation as a militant work of art.
 "Aime Cesaire (1913-2008): the Passion of the Poet (Obituary)" by Tydskrif vir Letterkunde ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}