Césaire, Aimé - Hunt Hawkins (essay date December 1986)
Hunt Hawkins (essay date December 1986)
SOURCE: Hawkins, Hunt. “Aimé Césaire's Lesson about Decolonization in La tragédie du roi Christophe.” CLA Journal 30, no. 2 (December 1986): 144-53.
[In the following essay, Hawkins addresses Césaire's skepticism regarding decolonization and the actions of King Christophe as portrayed in The Tragedy of King Christophe.]
In his speech “L'homme de culture et ses responsabilités” delivered to the Second International Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Rome in 1959, Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet-statesman, proposed a number of tasks for his audience. One duty was “de rétablir la double continuité rompue par le colonialisme, la continuité d'avec le monde, la continuité d'avec nous-mêmes.”1 Since colonialism had balkanized the African people in space and interrupted African history in time, the black artist was obliged to recover the precolonial...
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