[In the following excerpt, Vaillant discusses the significance of Senghor's formative years in France and his early poetry.]

On the eve of World War II, Tours was a calm little town in the Loire Valley slightly to the south and west of Paris. The people of the region were known as bon vivants, lovers of good food and wine. They were sunny, like their rich and fertile countryside. Tours is, and was when Senghor arrived, a town typical of provincial France and the French heartland. Senghor particularly enjoyed the fact that it had been a Roman settlement, Cesarodunum, and remained rich in signs of its Roman and early Christian history. It encompassed, therefore, all he thought best in French culture.

In the fall of 1935, the forty-four children who arrived for their first day in sixth class met an unexpected sight. They knew they were getting a new teacher, an agrégé from the University of Paris, who was better educated than many of their other teachers. They expected him to be poised and well-prepared. When they entered their groundfloor classroom, the found a man who seemed confident and well-educated but who was black. They had never seen anyone like him before. Senghor sympathized with the awkward situation of the director of the school, who must have wondered how best to present the new teacher to the students' parents. As it turned out, Senghor quickly won the children's confidence as an excellent classics teacher. He set out to teach Latin as a living language and managed to avoid the monotonous declension of nouns and verbs that had characterized his own learning of the classical languages. …

The diversity of levels on which Senghor existed is most evident in the poems he wrote during his years in Tours. Most of them were not published until later, but it seems clear that it was during this often lonely period that Senghor first realized his vocation as a poet. His earliest published poems provide a revealing glimpse of the emotions and concerns that preoccupied him then and would continue to preoccupy him in the future. Senghor has emphasized that in 1935, the same year he moved to Tours, “I discovered myself such as I was.”

This coming of age was not an altogether happy one. It was accompanied by moments of doubt and even despair. Looking back, Senghor recalled it as a time of fervor and perpetual tension. He, Césaire, and a few other black friends with whom he met during his trips to Paris resisted taking the easy road of assimilation, becoming the educated black Frenchmen so dear to sentimental colonial bureaucrats. They accepted a call to live life honestly and dangerously, and saw themselves as New Negroes with a mission to spread the word. The struggle to express what they felt led, according to Senghor, to “literary work which was morally, how shall I put it, physically and metaphysically lived right up to the edge of madness.” Their inner turmoil was experienced as illness. Césaire actually had a nervous collapse in the fall of 1935. The breakdown was attributable partly to overwork in preparation for the Ecole Normale competition, but it also coincided with Césaire's attempt to absorb the shock of his encounter with Paris and, through Senghor, with Africa.

Senghor has written that Césaire and he suffered through this period together. To a point their anxiety stemmed from the same source. Césaire's attempt at cure mirrored Senghor's, though each was filtered through the prism of a different temperament and personality. There was the further difference that Senghor, unlike Césaire, had a personal memory of a real Africa. Césaire saw Senghor as the more fortunate of the two for this reason. Looking within, Césaire discovered emptiness, whereas Senghor discovered warm memories of another world. Nonetheless, as they came to know each other, each began to see that his individual dilemma was not simply a personal misfortune or the result of undue sensitivity, but the effect of a structure created by a historical relationship between black and white developed over hundreds of years. The Afro-French society of Senegal, the transplanted and mixed culture of the Antilles, as well as the promises and conditions of French education for blacks, had left a difficult legacy. Césaire and Senghor discovered that the educated black man trying to live in France suffered from this situation in the extreme.

The severity of this strain was illustrated dramatically for them by the suicide of a black French-speaking writer, the Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo. Rabéarivelo's death received considerable publicity in the Paris press. His last diary, published in the Mercure de France, revealed that in taking leave of life he had left “a kiss to the books of Baudelaire,” Senghor's favorite poet. This event shook Senghor and his circle, who identified Rabéarivelo's situation with their own. Both Senghor and Damas wrote about it. Damas observed that the suicide was partly the result of “despair brought about by a sense of the uselessness of all effort, by uprooting and exile in the very land of his ancestors [he was in Madagascar at the time of his suicide], … but also illustrated the drama of a man who has crossed very quickly, too quickly, the stages of civilization. Rabéarivelo aspired high, not just to be the equal of the white, but to be an intellectual. Yet he became a being apart, neither fish nor fowl, and suffered for it.” Senghor reflected on Rabéarivelo's suicide somewhat differently. He saw it as one possible outcome of the failure to make peace within one's own personality. When a man has become French by education, he feels himself an outcast in his own land. This makes Rabéarivelo's suicide understandable. Senghor was determined to integrate in himself the best of both worlds and to be comfortable in both. He understood that this would be impossible without the reevaluation and acceptance of the core values of the Africa of his childhood. This was a part of his basic identity, the remnants of childhood that must be preserved. It would require the creation of a new person with a new voice. The voice would be neither French nor African, for the man was neither French nor African. It would be that of a new historical personage, the French Negro. The whole quest, as Senghor put it, was “nothing but a quest for ourselves.” It was no idle or vain goal, but a vital necessity.

The examples provided by Césaire and Rabéarivelo suggest that Senghor was not being overly melodramatic when he spoke of his quest for a new identity as “a question of life and death.” The price of failing to achieve equilibrium, he wrote in his reflection on Rabéarivelo, is despair. And, elsewhere, discussing Rabéarivelo and suggesting that he himself was no stranger to this despair, “I would never commit suicide because I think it is giving up. It is the acceptance of defeat. For me, suicide is cowardice. And the fault I scorn the most is cowardice.” Despair is also one of the most deadly sins for the Christian, as suicide is considered a crime against God. Senghor's deep Christian belief and his long Christian education helped provide the framework for resisting Rabéarivelo's choice. They promised Senghor that an alternative was possible.

Poetry gave both Césaire and Senghor, and their friend Damas, a language and form in which to express the problem and to reach toward its solution. In Césaire's case, recovery from a psychological breakdown coincided with his sketching out the first draft of a long prose poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal （Notebook of a Return to the Land of Birth）. In Senghor's, it led to the discovery of a vocation for poetry that allowed him to recognize himself “such as he was” and to write the poems that make up his first published collection of poetry, Chants d'ombre （Songs of, or from, the Shadows）. In both cases, it led, as it had for the heroes of Maurice Barrès who had so attracted Senghor in his student days, to a return to the traditions of their homeland.

Césaire's Cahier is transparently autobiographical. It presents in poetic form an account of a metaphoric return to his native land, a trip mirrored by Césaire's actual trip to Martinique in the summer of 1936. He looks open-eyed at his island and accepts the fact that this is his only home. Senghor has emphasized repeatedly how close in their thinking he and Césaire were at this time; thus Césaire's account is valuable for what it suggests about both men. Césaire sets out to assess his native island with an objective eye for the first time. He sees a people who are browbeaten, disease-ridden, and poor. He sees a land that is ugly, with a stench of poverty, “rotting under the sun.” He sees hunger and suffering, a place where the river of life has been blocked up and lies, torpid, in its bed. He accepts this as the reality of his home and of his personal past. He sees also that he is connected by virtue of his black skin to the experience of all black men, black men of Africa, Haiti, Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama. He accepts their history as his—the ugliness and ignorance, the poverty and disease, the slavery and cannibalism. This is a real and inescapable part of the black experience. Both the exotic Negro of French invention and the black Frenchman are myths created by white Europeans. To the rest of the world, he now hurls a challenge: “Adapt yourself to me. I do not adapt myself to you.” He will cheer for those who are nothing. They at least are not cynical or corrupted by the exploitation of others. This does not mean that he hates other races, only that he will exalt in his own. He accepts unconditionally his membership in a race with a grim and degraded past. In the future he will stand up, as he has not done in the past, and other Negroes will stand up with him. Exoticism and illusion are not fit food for a man. They cannot nourish his growth. Man must stand on what is real. No matter how unpleasant that reality is, only it can provide a steady foundation. For Césaire, in this poem, the progression is simple. First, he will recognize the location of his true homeland; second, he will look objectively at it; and third, he will accept it for what it is. Then, and only then, can he move forward. No more self-deception or seeing himself reflected in the eyes of others.

Senghor saw his task as somewhat different. If Césaire and the black population of Martinique had in fact lost all traces of their distant African heritage and been left only with poverty and slavery, he had not. Senghor argued that blacks had been taught for centuries that they had thought nothing, built nothing, painted nothing, sung nothing, and that they and their culture were nothing, the “tabula rasa” of French mythology. This was the stuff of his schooldays, when his French teachers had reminded him over and over again that they had driven barbarism and sickness from his country and had brought him the benefits of civilization. But while he was learning this from his French teachers, he had also known something else, something that he had for a time discounted. He had a direct experience of the African village, of Djilor and Joal. This knowledge contradicted the French doctrine that Africa was a blank page, totally without culture. What Senghor had now to do was to stop pretending either that the French teaching was correct or that it did not exist. He had to acknowledge that most Frenchmen considered blacks inferior men whose best hope was to become discolored Frenchmen. He finally realized that he could never achieve self-respect as long as he continued to pretend that he and the French saw no difference between him and them. Like Césaire, Senghor resolved to confront these attitudes and teachings with another reality. He, too, would make the metaphoric and symbolic trip home.

The poetry Senghor wrote in Tours reflects this resolve. It evokes and examines his childhood heritage and accepts it as an inextricable part of his own personality. The subjects of these poems, their shifting emphases and rich ambivalence, provide a glimpse of Senghor's inner self and the associations that rang through his memory at this time. While it is always dangerous to assume that the voice of a poem and the actual voice of a writer are identical, in Senghor's case the connection seems close indeed in these early poems.

The first theme Senghor takes up is that of exile. Its direct connection to his life as an African student in Paris is clear. He expresses feelings of isolation among strangers, of unease, and of a keen, almost unbearable love for the absent one, Africa. The theme of exile and return, providing opportunity for loving descriptions of home and immersion in memories of childhood, is an understandable one for any student far from home. For Senghor it had a special significance. Immersing himself in memories of childhood, sharing them with sympathetic West Indian friends, and writing about them provided Senghor a source of pleasure and companionship. It lent dignity and wider significance to what otherwise might have been solitary day-dreaming or a grim quest. C‚saire and others, hungry to learn about Africa, encouraged him to continue in this direction.

Senghor writes lyrically of his childhood home, Joal, and the nights of Sine:

Woman, lay on my forehead your perfumed hands, hands softer than
fur
Above, the swaying palms rustle in the high night breeze
......
Listen to its song, listen to our dark blood beat, listen
To the deep pulse of Africa beating in the mist of forgotten villages.

Working on these poems in his room, Senghor could travel home in his mind's eye and give outlet to his nostalgia. He could write of his beloved uncle, Waly, his mythic and noble father, the dignity and riches of traditional kings, and the peace and calm of evenings in the still villages. Such was the inspiration for one of his most often quoted poems, a poem written in praise of the beauty of the black woman and of the Africa she embodies:

Naked woman, dark woman
Firm-fleshed ripe fruit, sombre raptures of black wine, making lyrical
my mouth
Savannah stretching to clear horizons, savannah shuddering beneath the
East Wind's eager caresses.
Carved tom-tom, taut tom-tom, muttering under the Conqueror's fingers
Your solemn contralto voice is the spiritual song of the Beloved.

Senghor celebrates the particular texture and physical presence of a concrete place and time, the Africa of his childhood. It is a pure and integrated world that is, to use his own phrase, innocent of Europe.

Into some of Senghor's evocations of Africa, however, creep signs of the European. Even as he remembers Joal with the beautiful women in the cool shade of verandahs, King Koumba Ndofene Diouf, and the rhapsodies of the griots, he also hears with pleasure pagan voices chanting the “tantum ergo,” and sees the Catholic religious processions that gather by his grandfather's house in Joal. They, too, are part of his remembered Africa. They appear in the poem as totally compatible with the rest. Both elements are part of a harmonious memory.

These poems are consistent, affectionate, and whole. The merging of Africa, paradise, and childhood is complete. If Baudelaire taught that all great poets are inspired by childhood, Senghor happily bears him out in finding in the kingdom of childhood his chief poetic inspiration. Such an imaginative return also offers the poet an opportunity to relive a period when his experience was integrated, before he felt the impact of the French in Africa or the adult experiences of dislocation and division. With a flash of insight, Senghor acknowledges that childhood and Africa are linked with Eden in his memory, there confused and inseparable. Like Eden, his childhood Africa offered him a place of perfect harmony between man and his surroundings. Perhaps even more important for Senghor, it was the time of emotional peace and internal harmony. In Eden man and God lived in accord. Man did not yet know sin, which cuts him off from an integrated communion with God. In Senghor's imagination Eden and the Africa of his childhood are one and the same, what he calls the kingdom of childhood, to which he can return at will for inspiration.

When Senghor writes of his present situation and feelings, however, the poet's attitude and mood become far more complex and varied. He finds no single consistent stance toward the French world, at least not in his early poems. Even the notion of exile becomes more complex. At times, the poet focuses on the physical exile that leads to solitude and isolation. But he finds that his solitude is deeper than mere physical absence from Africa. He is further isolated by specific qualities of French life. Even this, however, is not the full measure of his separation. He suffers most of all from “that other exile harder on my heart, the tearing of self from self / from the language of my mother, from the thinking of my ancestor, from the beat of my soul.” This wrenching of self from self leads to an almost overwhelming sense of being two.

The poet realizes that he has internalized both his African and his French upbringing, and finds the two sets of values and behaviors to be at odds. The colonial administrator and educator Georges Hardy had warned that French schooling could lead Africans to live in two separate worlds and that this could have dire results. For most African children, the French world was but an artificial and temporary existence, while their real world remained securely that of Africa. For Senghor, however, the balance was far more even. He loved France and French culture. He also loved his native Africa. If he was to find a new voice as a French Negro, he had to resolve this problem of twoness. For him, the French Negro could not be the black Frenchman of colonial policy, the Frenchman who happened to be black. That black Frenchman was doomed forever to second-class citizenship. Nor could the French Negro be the African innocent of Europe. Senghor would have to be a black man first, who then acquired French culture and put it to work for his own purposes. It was too late to reject his laboriously acquired French education, nor did he wish to. A linguistic solution of this dilemma, simply by fusing together two words, an adjective and a noun, “Negro” and “French,” and announcing oneself a “French Negro” or a “New Negro,” was a declaration of intent, but only a first step. What might seem but a small shift in emphasis required in fact a basic redefinition of the nature and possibilities of the black man.

This theme of separation, internal fracture, and the search for wholeness adds a more sombre dimension to the theme of exile. This is the note that dominates Senghor's first published collection of poetry, Chants d'ombre （Songs of, or from, the Shadow）. So long as he felt these inner divisions, he could not rest. As he explored their nature and consequences, he was comforted by knowing that his painful experience was shared by men like Césaire and Maran, as well as by men who had lived before him and whom he knew only through their writings, such as the black American Dr. W. E. B. DuBois. Senghor was astonished, he later wrote, to discover such kinship in the writings of DuBois, a man living so removed from himself in both time and place. In expressing what he called his constant sense of twoness, DuBois had put the problem of the black man in a white man's world with stark clarity. His writings further convinced Senghor that all black men shared a common experience.

W. E. B. DuBois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, almost forty years before Senghor's birth. The worlds in which the two men grew up bore no resemblance. They did share, however, the experience of moving at a very young age into a world dominated by whites who had certain preconceptions about black people. DuBois grew up in the little New England town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and received a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an institution whose relative prestige among Americans rivals that of Louis-le-grand and the Sorbonne among the French. He, like Senghor, was able to excel according to the white man's standards. Yet though DuBois got a degree from Harvard and studied in Europe, when it came time for his adult career, race became the decisive factor. DuBois had to look for employment, as did another black Harvard graduate, Alain Locke, at a black institution such as Fisk, Howard, or Atlanta. Similarly, Senghor was constantly reminded in small ways that, despite his unusual success in the French system, he was not French and never could be. Biology and birth proved decisive in such matters. When DuBois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, three years before Senghor was born, he was in his mid-thirties, a gifted and successful young man who appeared to have a promising scholarly career ahead of him. In his book, DuBois describes the position of the black man in America. Living in the American world, he observes,

yields him [the Negro] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

DuBois, like Senghor in his poetry, identifies several dimensions to the problem of “twoness,” and of the black man in the white man's culture. On the first and most obvious level, the black self seen through the eyes of whites is an inferior person in every way. He has invented nothing, has done nothing, and is nothing. He can be only an object of contempt, curiosity, or pity. As the dictionary Senghor used at school put it, Negroes are inhabitants of Africa who form a race “inferior in intelligence to the white race called Caucasian.” But there is a second part of the problem, both more subtle and more intractable. The educated black American not only is seen by others as inferior but also sees himself as inferior, for he sees with eyes shaped by white values and culture.

DuBois offers a precise description of Senghor's experience. Though African by birth, Senghor had become French by education. He was taught to see Africans as French people saw Africans. No allowance was made for the fact that he himself happened to be African. Nothing in his education encouraged or even allowed him to have a clear sense of himself as an educated black person. According to his French culture, to be black and educated was a contradiction in terms. There was no such person. Hence the sense of twoness. It was not simply a question of being buffeted by the insolence of others. The struggle was between two warring parts of the self. Under these circumstances, to become an integrated, single person with a clear voice was a difficult achievement, and yet to fail was to pay an enormous price. The suicide of Rabéarivelo illustrated just how high that price might be for a sensitive person. Given DuBois's powerful description of an experience Senghor felt to be his own, it is small wonder that Senghor later called DuBois one of the fathers of Negritude and firmly believed that the essential black experience was shared by black men everywhere.

Senghor explored this experience of twoness in his early poetry. The poet discovers first one and than another rift in his personality. At the most obvious there is a division between the outer self he presents to the world, that of the dutiful teacher who “smiles but never laughs,” and an inner self, brooding about his African roots. The outer self, carefully constructed to hide emotion, is calm and serene; the inner self is in turmoil. This dichotomy is the subject of Senghor's first extant reliably dated poem, “Jardin de France” （“French Garden”）:

Calm Garden
Grave Garden
Garden with evening eyes
Lowered for the Night
.......
White Hands
Delicate motions
Soothing gestures
.......
But the tom-tom's call
bounding
over continents
and mountains
Who will quiet my heart
Leaping at the tom-tom's call
Violently
Throbbing?

Here the calm, French surface is barely able to contain the African heart that stubbornly leaps to the beat of the drum. The stolid measured rhythms of being in the French world contrast stylistically with the flowing energy of the lines describing the inner African being, reinforcing the explicit content of the poem. It is a contrast parallel to that of the later poem “Portrait,” in which the poet expresses the discontinuity between his inner world and that of the French in which he lives, but also acknowledges the appeal of the French world. The spring of Touraine is sweet and makes advances, totally unaware of the poet's “imperious Negritude.” The poet makes no attempt at reconciliation of any kind. He is simply descriptive.

At times, the poet wishes only to bury his African side. When he first arrived in Paris, for example, Senghor shared the French view about Africans' lack of contribution to world culture: “Had our black skins allowed it, we would have blushed for our African birth … the [African] people made us secretly ashamed.” This is the attitude of his schoolboy verse written in imitation of the French romantic poets, an attitude that later made him so ashamed that, as he wrote to Maurice Martin du Gard, he destroyed this early work. It is an attitude he admitted openly only after he had cast it off. In a poem entitled “Totem,” he writes of being pursued by a heritage he cannot shake:

In my inmost vein I must hide him
My Ancestor with the skin storm-streaked with lightning and thunder
My guardian animal. I must hide him
Lest I burst the dam of scandal.

And, elsewhere, “it pursues me, my black blood, right into the solitary heart of the night.”

Even as he is trying to hide his ancestor, and so to escape his black blood, Senghor realizes that this is impossible. The advantage may be, as the poet suggests in “Totem,” that the ancestor protects him from his naked pride that might lead him to develop the “arrogance of the lucky races,” and from the weakness of civilized man. These arguments are not altogether convincing. The poet seems to be casting about for some consolation for his inescapable blackness. It is a great effort. Senghor had to “hypnotize himself,” he said later, to find all that belonged to white Europe, its reason, its art, and its women, ugly and insipid.

The arrangement of the individual poems in the Chants d'ombre collection reflects what Senghor calls the order of their general inspiration, if not the actual dates of composition. The progression from poem to poem therefore parallels his own evolution, at least as he later came to see it, and the stages he went through in his growing self-awareness.

The first poem in the collection, “In Memoriam,” finds the poet in Paris in his room, alone, apprehensive about the crowd of men “with faces of stone” who await him in the street below. To escape them, and to avoid going down into this world, he dreams of Africa, his race, and the dead ancestors. With images of African power, he builds a protective wall between himself and the world outside. At the end of the poem, he reluctantly gives up this secure fortress and goes out into the world, where he resolves to live with “his brothers with the blue eyes and hard hands.” Several short poems that convey similar attitudes are followed by the poems singled out above for their clear, unambivalent evocation of the nights of Sine, Joal, and Djilor, the beauty of the black woman and of Africa, and the comfort and strength of the ancestor. In one poem, however, entitled “Le message” （“The Message”）, the ancestor accuses the poet of ignoring the family songs, of learning new languages, and of memorizing an alien history of other ancestors, the Gauls. The poet is accused of becoming a doctor at the Sorbonne, bedecking himself with diplomas and surrounding himself with piles of papers. The ancestor questions why he has done this, and whether it has led to happiness. Return to me, the voice urges.

At this point in the poetic cycle, the poet finds himself once more in Paris. But now his attitude is somewhat different. In “Neige sur Paris” （“Snow on Paris”）, Senghor evokes the sterility and cold of the city. Whiteness and snow bring death, not purity or innocence. The poet is no longer content with seeking refuge in memory. Rather, he is ready to accuse the white hands “that whipped slaves / … that slapped me / … that delivered me to solitude and hatred / … that cut down the forest of palms which dominated Africa / … to build railroads / They pulled down the forests of Africa to save Civilization,” because they were weary with their own failures and shortcomings. The expression of anger and bitterness is new. The poet feels these emotions strongly and no longer needs to hide them. Nonetheless, Senghor pulls back from closing even this single poem in anger. He ends with a prayer to the Christian God, and with the resolve not to use up his hatred on “the diplomats who bare their long canine teeth and who, tomorrow, will barter black flesh.” He promises that he will achieve reconciliation in the warmth of God's sweetness and embrace his enemies as brothers. Even though he is angry with the Europeans' ravaging of Africa, he still recognizes their God as his God and accepts the Christian goal of reconciliation.

The poet now considers contributions that Africans can make to the European world. If the Africa of the empires has died an agonizing death, Europe, too, is suffering. Like the good Samaritan who gives up his last garment for another, the African will give life to the dying European world. He will provide the leaven for the white flour, the grease for the city's rusty steel, “For who would teach rhythm to a dead world of machines and cannons? / Who would shout the cry of joy to wake the dead and the orphans to the dawn? / … / We are the men of the dance, whose feet gain strength by striking the hard earth.”

This new stance is not firmly held. Triumph is followed by defeat. At times, as in “Totem,” he still wants to hide his ancestry. He writes of false starts, setbacks, frustration, and depression. In two poems that come at this point in the collection, “Ndéssé ou ‘Blues’” （“Ndéssé or Blues”） and “A la mort” （“To Death”）, Senghor records a youthful surge of life and promise that is blighted, confused, left without outlet or direction: “My wings beat and bruise themselves on the bars of a low sky.” A child races gaily after a ripe fruit. It rolls under a palm tree, and the child is flattened abruptly to the ground. The poet is pressed down, stopped, smothered. He feels a vivid loss of well-being. Disappointment and the chilling winter rains, too, are the poet's inescapable companions.

In the next long poem, “Que m'accompagnent kôras et balafong” （Let Me Be Accompanied by Köras and Balafong）, Senghor returns to the theme of Africa the unspoiled, where Africa, Eden, and childhood merge in an eternal present. In this realm, man is always whole. It is a wholeness that encompasses both Christian and African worlds and lies at the center of Senghor's being. In his original plan, this was to be the title poem of the collection. The poem recalls, in loving detail and long, hypnotic rhythms, the Africa of childhood. It states the poet's dilemma: Must he choose? It is no longer a question of rejecting the call of his ancestor for the inviting world of the French, or of forgetting Europe in the warm embrace of his native land. Either choice would diminish the poet. He finds that he is “deliciously torn between these two friendly hands / … these two antagonistic worlds / When mournfully—ah! I no longer know which is my sister and which my foster sister.” He feels deep love for both. Not to choose but to hold them simultaneously in his desire: “But if I must choose at the hour of the test / I have chosen my distressed people, my peasant people, the whole peasant race throughout the world / … To be your trumpet!” And with that choice, the poet heralds a new mission, listening to the new voices and the song of “seven thousand new negroes.” And yet it is still not really a choice, for he takes with him to this Africa a friend from the Breton mist. In Europe he will play the trumpet of Africa for European ears. In Africa he will introduce the good European. Senghor aspires to be like Maran, to whom the poem is dedicated. The poet will combine the strengths of both traditions to serve his people. What makes this poem extraordinarily successful is that it is in itself a tour de force of harmonized styles and symbolic references, an extraordinary blend of classical, French, and African allusions. It resounds with the music of the African instruments that are called for as accompaniment, as well as with classical echoes of Virgil and pious Aeneas, the Roman exemplar of filial piety. It also evokes the Christian Eden and God's promise of redemption to those who are worthy. The effect is a rich harmony, the enhancement of each by the other, for which Senghor yearned in his own life.

The next few poems speak of the difficulty of departure, of giving up the physical and emotional comfort of Africa to return, as he must, to Europe. The poet does not doubt that he must return. The collection closes with a poem that appears from internal evidence to have been written during World War II. It is called “Le retour de l'enfant prodigue” （“The Return of the Prodigal Son”）, and is dedicated to Senghor's nephew, the son of Hélène Senghor, Jacques Maguilen Senghor. Here the theme of deserting the ancestors, of guilt and the need for forgiveness, is explored directly. Tired from years of wandering and exile, the prodigal son has returned home, to the herdsman who shared his childhood dreams, and to his ancestors who have withstood the passage of time unchanged. He seeks from them pure water to wash away the mud of civilization that clings to his feet. He seeks peace, guidance, and strength. In this search, the poet makes a pilgrimage to the ancestral tomb, the Elephant of Mbissel, the tomb Senghor had first visited as a child on his trip from Djilor to mission school and had recently revisited on his trip to Senegal, the tomb where his father now lay buried. Prostrating himself, the poet invokes the African idiom of praise, to the ancestor and his noble lineage, to the greatness and riches of the kings of Sine. He thanks his fathers, who have not allowed him to fall into hatred when faced with “the polite insults and discreet allusions” he has had to endure. To them he confesses his apparent disloyalty and friendship with the princes of form. He has eaten bread that was bought with the hunger of others and has dreamed of a world “in brotherhood with my blue eyed brothers.” It is true. Senghor did thirstily drink in French culture, enjoy European friends, and imagine a life of success and general acceptance in the European world. He did neglect his ancestor. He hid him. He pressed on to become an accomplished intellectual, one of the princes of form. For this, the poet now begs forgiveness from his family, the ancestors, and the land. He has recognized that, like the mythic Greek wrestler Antaeus who was invincible as long as his foot touched the earth, his strength depends on contact with his native soil.

Having thus humbled himself and praised his ancestors for their power and endurance, he invokes the most glorious of them and entreats them to hand on to him the knowledge of the great wise men of Timbuktu, the will of the conqueror Soni Ali, the wisdom of the Keita, kings of Mali, the courage of the guelowar, conquerors of Sine, and the strength of the tiedo, the fierce armed slaves. He offers to give up his life in battle if he must, but in return he asks that the forces of past heroes live on in him, that they make of him their “master of language … their ambassador.”

This prodigal son, unlike the son of the Biblical parable, does not wish simply to be forgiven by his father. He does want forgiveness, indeed the very title of the poem implies that he will be forgiven, but he also wants something more. He wants his father's blessing on his future life in a different world. Senghor wants to serve his people, not just as the trumpet that blares out his people's virtue and strength, as he had put it in “Que m'accompagnent kôras et balafong.” He wishes now to be an ambassador, the man who represents and explains his people to alien lands, a trumpet that will play a melody Europeans can understand. In closing the poem, the poet evokes both the emotions that pull him back and the sense of duty that propels him forward. First the familiar evocation of childhood, the security and refuge, “to sleep again in the cool bed of childhood,” and then the reluctant departure: “Tomorrow, I will take up again the road to Europe, the road of the ambassador / Longing for my black homeland.” This poem, meditative and reflective, calm and measured in tone, expresses a firm determination to take on a mission on behalf of his people. The poet sees his calling as one that requires not simply self-expression, the strident note of the trumpet, but interpretation, the diplomatic skill of the ambassador. He must express his experience and that of his people in a way that can be understood by people of another world and culture. He embraces the duty of becoming a spokesman whose message is intelligible, not simply a poet who allows himself the self-indulgence of beautiful words without regard for his audience.

It is noteworthy that the poet never suggests that his Christianity may be one of his sins against his ancestors. Why should they not be jealous of his worship of an alien God? Instead the poet blends traditional and Christian imagery so that each reinforces the other with grace and fluidity, proof in itself, it might seem, that the choice to serve his ancestor is in harmony with loyalty to his Christian self. Style and meaning are fully adapted to each other. The model for the African Prodigal Son is taken from the Christian Bible. This confident and successful synthesis would seem to reflect the deep level of Senghor's faith and the degree to which he felt it to be compatible with the values of Africa. Of all that he had learned from the French, the Christian belief was most deeply rooted in his personality. The sound of tantum ergos chanted in African rhythms blended with his earliest childhood memories. He found nothing discordant in this. He knew Christian belief to be an essential part of French culture as well, albeit one deserted by most intellectuals of his own generation. Nonetheless in Christianity Senghor found a system of values he felt to be acceptable in both his worlds. Perhaps this explains why it proved such an effective anchor for him throughout his life. It not only was the first formal intellectual discipline he met in his seminary education but also provided the music, catechism, and values of his earliest schooling. In a phrase to which he returned again and again, Africa-Eden-Childhood, he asserted the identity of Africa, the original Christian paradise, and his childhood self. To be a Christian was a way to be whole, to serve both African and European and to replenish the dogged strength which, to use DuBois's phrase, was necessary to hold warring selves together. Looking forward to the future, Senghor also found in Christianity the promise that reconciliation is not only favored by God but always possible in the world God created.

In the collection taken as a whole, Senghor traces an evolution that bears every mark of being his own. There are many shifts of mood along the way in the poems, as there undoubtedly were in his own life. Admiration for the French, love of their culture, fear of them, and the desire to hide his African ancestor alternate with their opposite, refuge in Africa, the paradise innocent of both Europe and the industrial world. The poet is angry at the French for what they have done to Africa. Elation at finding an apparent solution, the return to his African roots, is followed by despair at finding that it is not truly a solution at all, but only a momentary respite. The poet finally reaches a position he hopes to make his own, that of ambassador of his people to Europe, trumpet of his people to the French world, and a Christian. This persona need not feel the guilt of desertion because he will serve his people. At the same time he will also be free to continue the life of an intellectual in Paris.

This interpretation of Chants d'ombre is supported by a letter Senghor wrote to René Maran shortly after it was published. Thanking Maran for reading the collection, he continued, “no approval could be more precious than yours … By your double culture, French and African, you were more qualified than any other to judge these songs in which I wanted to express myself authentically and integrally, where I wished to express the ‘conciliating accord’ that I force myself to realize between my two cultures.” Elsewhere he wrote: “It is exactly because Eden-Africa-Childhood is absent that I am torn between Europe and Africa, between politics and poetry, between my white brother and myself … As for me, I think that to realize myself as a man, it is essential for me to overcome negation, to bridge the chasm.” To build these bridges and unite his disparate selves was the task Senghor had to take on in order to become whole. In the most basic way, he had no choice: he was the two. But the difficulty of achieving the integration and perspective from which to begin his adult work required all the strength and self-discipline he could muster. He still felt as if he teetered precariously over the chasm. His chosen self was not yet natural for him. It was a solution to which, as he put it, he “forced myself.”

In a letter he wrote during the war to Maurice Martin du Gard, Senghor explained how important language and poetry had been to him during this period. He had begun writing verse in the style of the French romantics while still at lycée. Later, while at the Sorbonne, he had been influenced by the Surrealists and also had begun to learn about Africa through the writings of ethnographers and “above all Negro-American poetry. I even met some Negro-American writers. These discoveries were true revelations for me which led me to seek myself and uncover myself as I was: a Negro [nègre], morally and intellectually interwoven with French. I then burned almost all my previous poems to start again at zero. It was about 1935.” By the gesture of destroying his previous work, so theatrical and uncharacteristic, Senghor dramatized his determination to break sharply with his past. “Since then, I have wanted to express something. It is this ‘New Negro,’ this French Negro that I had discovered in myself.” Here Senghor used a literal translation of Alain Locke's term, until then not used in French, choosing the pejorative nègre rather than noir.” Furthermore, Senghor continued, in order to express this new departure, he could not use the classic French verse form but had to create a new verse form to convey “the Negro rhythm while respecting the order and harmony of the French language.” As a poet, he would use a new style to express his new voice.

The words of the psychologist Erik Erikson, who studied what he called the identity crisis both among his young patients and in some historical figures, express what Senghor experienced during this time: “There is a moment in life when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood; he must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and expect him to be.” And historically great men, Erikson continues, “although suffering … through what appears to be a prolonged adolescence, eventually come to contribute an original bit to an emerging style of life: the very danger which they have sensed has forced them to mobilize capacities to see and say, to dream and plan, to design and construct in new ways.” Such young people then experience a “kind of second birth.” Sometimes the creative person will experience more intensely what is shared to a lesser degree by a number of his contemporaries. When this is true, and if he is able to find a solution that makes sense to others, and if he is sufficiently gifted to express this hard-won new perspective in words that resonate in his contemporaries, he may become a leader of his generation.

Senghor wrestled for several years with this question of his identity and his place in the world. He had tried to become what the French admired, a dutiful black Frenchman. Yet in Paris he realized that he was no Frenchman, and that the way French students approached life was, for him, “a perpetual subject of astonishment.” He also realized that most Frenchmen considered him first and foremost black, and that for them, to be black was to be inferior. In his first stage of self-discovery, Senghor and his West Indian friends met this French racism with a racism of their own. They accepted the racist premise that black men were basically different from whites, but rejected the way in which Europeans evaluated this difference. Yet even as he was pursuing this discovery of his Negritude, Senghor was confused by his continued attraction to the French, to their culture and their world. He felt at home among his French friends and did not want to give them up. He spent time both with them and in the company of the students of color. Each group welcomed him, but each saw only part of what Senghor felt himself to be. This put him off balance. His intellectual solution remained at odds with his emotional experience, and he suffered from a real depression.

Even his friends seemed not to sense that his surface equilibrium was not the natural expression of a man at ease with himself but rather the hard-won result of enormous self-control. Any doubts, hesitations, or self-revelations that might have allowed his friends to share his intimate experience remained strictly hidden, then and throughout the rest of his life. When he did describe his inner troubles, it was always from a distance, as something that had been felt in the past but since mastered and placed into its proper perspective. Only one of his contemporaries, Marc Sankalé, a Senegalese physician who knew him in Paris in the late 1930s and early 1940s, sensed this other side. Drawing perhaps on his powers as a clinician, Sankalé observed that Senghor domesticated his body with demanding daily exercises and a frugal regime and applied the same discipline to his mental life and his personal life. Every minute of his time was used for some necessary activity. Sankalé was intrigued that such a methodical, orderly person would write a poetry marked by reverie, escapism, and fantasy. He found Senghor contradictory, both eloquent and withdrawn, lively and solemn, and noted what he called a mystical fervor in his exaltation of Negro-African culture, a fervor that had something “pitiful about it.” Senghor wished himself to be heart, mouth, and trumpet of his people, Sankalé continued, but his was not a real Africa. Though Senghor, the poet, acknowledged that he had fused Africa-Eden-Child-hood in his imagination, Sankalé implied that this confusion was not simply a poetic convention but a basic and even desperate need. As a result of his strong will, Sankalé concluded with no small admiration, Senghor had become “the complete Man he wanted to be.”

The effort Senghor put into this enterprise was no secret to Senghor himself, even it if remained hidden to many of his admirers. Almost twenty years later, in 1950, he published a confident article in which he discussed the future of French Africa. He ended this article on a personal note, choosing one of the most powerful metaphors a Christian has at his command, that of rebirth:

May I be permitted to end by evoking a personal experience? I think of those years of youth, at that age of division at which I was not yet born, torn as I was between my Christian conscience and my Serer blood. But was I Serer, I who had a Malinké name—and that of my mother was Peul? Now I am no longer ashamed of my diversity, I find my joy, my assurance in embracing with a catholic eye all these complementary worlds.

Such was the confident integrity of the mature Senghor at his most assured. But the continuing strain of this achievement was a constant companion. A few years later, when he was in his mid-50s, Senghor wrote:

In fact my interior life was, very early, divided between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the requirements of Negro-African culture and the requirements of modern life. These conflicts are often expressed in my poems. They are what binds them together.

Meanwhile, I have always forced myself to resolve them in a peaceful accord. Thanks to the confession and direction of my thinking in youth, thanks, later to the intellectual method which my French teacher taught us.

This equilibrium … is an unstable equilibrium, difficult to maintain. I must, each day, begin again at zero, when at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning I get up to do my exercises. In effect, this equilibrium is constantly being broken. I must not only reestablish it but still perfect it. I do not complain about it. It is such divisions and efforts that make you advance by one step each day, and that make for man's greatness.

The achievement, maintenance, and expression of this balance became the task of Senghor's maturity. Above all, he wished to avoid sharp conflict or rupture with France, with Africa, with friends, and, most important, within himself. In his poetry, he often addressed the themes of wholeness and integrity and their connection to the preservation of vitality. In his scholarly life, he worked to analyze and describe African culture in order to increase African self-knowledge and French understanding. Later, in his political life, he took on an additional and enormous task: to persuade his countrymen and the French of the validity of his vision. He then threw his considerable energy into seeking first cooperation and then independence from France without rupture or total separation. And finally, after Senegal's independence, he tried to further the interests of independent Senegal in a close and special relationship with the former colonial power. His public goals represent his determination to create in the outside world a situation congruent with the balance he had had to create within himself.