Cesaire at 70. Marxist revolutionary. For a quarter century, representative from Martinique (near Grenada) to the French Assembly. For four decades, father-apologist for the ideology of negritude. Leading Third World intellectual. French playwright and surrealist poet. "Whoever would not understand me," he writes, "would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger." Now perhaps, with [The Collected Poetry by Aime Cesaire], we can begin to understand this tiger….

One now sees that there are two styles in Cesaire's life work, two minds at work: the influence of Andre Breton and other surrealists, encouraging him to take at random the mythologies and landscapes of black Africa and the Caribbean in defining negritude; and the influence of American black poets of the Harlem Renaissance, encouraging him to take images of glory from slavery and segregation in making his definition. The surrealism liberated him, but I'm not sure how effectively it served Cesaire in liberating the Third World ("my colonized hells")—and that has been one of Cesaire's motives.

As surrealist, he could write of "this mouthful of stars revomited into a cake of fireflies" and of "this knife stab of a vomit of broken teeth in the belly of the wind" and feel that he was breaking up old forms, old minds—making "a sport of nigromancy," he calls it. But these bursts, beautiful and barbarous, called more attention to him as maker than they did to the world he wanted to make. For decades he found the surreal aesthetically revolutionary, but in the face of the torture and the suffering, he has pretty well abandoned it as a luxury…. Cesaire shocked with his surrealism but probably had more of an effect as shocking champion of negritude, the international brotherhood of all black men…. This side of Cesaire caught on all over the world—but less as a man with a program than a man with an exemplary voice.

Cesaire's more political poems make connections—with the reader, with systems of thought, with history, with society. He calls them "sublime excoriations of a flesh fraternal and whipped to the point of rebellious fires." (pp. 1, 10)

The most recent poems of Cesaire, especially his "Ferraments," are more politically aggressive, louder, more anxiously reaching for an international audience, more the shouts of the atoning liberator….

Cesaire, like Whitman, waits for a response from his people, waits for new life from them, waits for them to follow him….

As Cesaire himself has moved from his early platforms on through to reform, from the hope of the artful to the uses of art to inspire hope, he has, in various ways, been trying to say that there is, in the awful, awe-filled blackness of blackness, plenty of light. (p. 10)