[In the following excerpt, Anyinefa examines Senghor's contribution to negritude ideology and his portrayal of African-Americans in “To the Black American Troops,” “Elegy for Martin Luther King,” and “To New York.”]

And I told myself of … New York and San Francisco
not a bit of this earth not smudged by my fingerprint,
and my calcaneum dug into the backs of the skyscrapers and my dirt
in the glory of jewels!
Who can boast of having more than I?
Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama.
Monstrous putrefaction of ineffective revolts,
swamps of rotten blood
trumpets, absurdly stoppered
red, blood-red lands of one blood.

Aimé Césaire, Return to my Native Land

Le fait est donc là: il n'y a pas
de négritude de demain. Ce
matin, levé avant les coqs,
Caliban, l'homme des bonnes tempêtes
de l'espérance, a vu l'Orphée noir de sa jeunesse
remonter des enfers avec une
fée sans vie dans ses bras.

René Depestre, Bonjour et adieu à la Négritude

The facts are there. There will be no
négritude of tomorrow. This
morning, having risen before the rooster,
Caliban, man of many stormy hopes,
saw the Black Orpheus of his youth
come back up from Hell with a
lifeless fairy in his arms.

The representations of other countries and their peoples and cultures constitutes undoubtedly not only one of the oldest and most popular literary topics but also one with the most fearsome ideological and socio-political effects. Is there still a need to remind ourselves that the invasion and colonization of Africa were more or less direct consequences of the ways in which she was represented by the West? Western discourse has most often been—and still is—a hegemonic, racial, and racist one. Emerging about half a century ago, one of the primary objectives of African literature in European languages was precisely to correct the rather negative image of Africa provided by Western literatures, to counter the derogatory hetero-image with a positive self-image. This literature thus immediately presented itself as a counterdiscourse against a certain type of Western discourse. Given that all discussion about the Self is simultaneously a discussion about the Other and vice-versa, this literature turns toward the Other as well, which in this case is the West. It is in light of the construction of identity of the Self through the apprehension of the Other that this study addresses the representation of the United States of America （referred to here as “America,” according to a well- established custom）, by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Bernard B. Dadié, and Emmanuel B. Dongala, three authors from francophone sub-Saharan Africa.

To see or to apprehend the Other always implies a relationship based on real or symbolic power, as Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out in “Black Orpheus,” his celebrated introduction to the first anthology of Black francophone poetry edited by L. S. Senghor:

When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground? Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you—like me—will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen.

Ever since the works of Michel Foucault—in this particular case I have in mind Discipline and Punish and The Archeology of Knowledge—we recognize that any discursive formation aims to appropriate for itself a space of power. African discourse on the West does not seek—and cannot seek—to have the same type of hegemonic power as its Western counterpart because of the peripheral position from which it elaborates itself and because of its deeply reflexive character: directed toward the Other, this discourse has no other target than its own source. The point, actually, through the apprehension of the Other, is to constitute one's own identity, to free one's self in face of the Other's discourse on the Self. It is in this idea that the power of the African discourse on the Other resides.

Aside from the perspective that our three authors have on America, it is to be noted that the concept of “race” determines to a great extent its representation, especially since the image of America developed by Senghor, Dadié, and Dongala is based on racial notions. I will attempt to show how the texts discussed in this article reproduce the most common myths of America, and yet illustrate in particular the relationships that Black African intellectuals have maintained with this country. In general, there are two positions that structure these relationships. For Senghor and Dadié, America is the Other, but an Other that is at the same time the Self due to the Black community of African descent. In contrast, for Dongala, any link in identity with America is flatly rejected: she is simply the Other. Essentially, as we will see, emerging beyond this representation of America will be a debate about Négritude between its partisans and its opponents. My discussion will thus embrace this dual aspect of the representation of America. First of all, I address texts that subscribe to the theories of Négritude through their portrayal of America, and then those that do not. To finish off, I will open my discussion to the current debate around the concept of “race”: if it is epistemologically problematic, it does not remain any less operational, politically, psychologically, and culturally, and must be, as Paul Gilroy wrote, “retained as an analytical category not because it corresponds to any biological or epistemological absolutes, but because it refers investigation to the power that collective identities acquire by means of their roots in tradition” （There Ain't No Black）.

Without retracting the genesis of Négritude, a philosophical-literary movement whose kinship is commonly attributed to the troika formed by Aimé Césaire, Léon Gontrand Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor—to which many studies have been devoted—let us keep in mind that Négritude seeks to defend and bring recognition to Black civilization. It claims that all Black people, regardless of their historical or geographical situation, would share the same cultural values, defined in opposition to and distinct from those of the West. Furthermore, Négritude would aim at a civilisation de l'universel where the divergences between African and Western cultures would be reconciled—in short, it would envision a cultural métissage.

Certainly, one of the most characteristic aspects of Négritude is the homage that its writers pay to the great figures of African history. Senghor above all stood out in this kind of panegyric. With regard to America, Senghor composed two poems devoted to African-Americans: “To the Black American Troops” and “Elegy for Martin Luther King.”

On many occasions the Senegalese poet had to stress the theoretical influence exerted on the founders of the Négritude movement by the African-American authors of the Harlem Renaissance （see, e.g., Senghor, Ce que je crois）. Yet beyond the acknowledgment of this intellectual debt, there also remains the fact that Black America plays a strategic role in the development of the concept of Négritude as suggested by Abiola Irele: without her, the all-inclusive racial project of Négritude would be impossible: “African cultural survivals in the New World have frequently been adduced as evidence of the persistence of an African nature in the New World Negro and this argument served black nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic as the emotional level of their reaction against the West.” This observation explains the African- American presence in Senghor's oeuvre, not only in his theoretical essays but also in his poetry. “To the Black American Troops” and “Elegy for Martin Luther King” eloquently illustrate the racial and historical link between Africans and African-Americans; they celebrate the pride of the race and highlight its contribution to the universal civilization as it is understood by their author.

In “To the Black American Troops” （Black Hosts [Hosties noires]）, Senghor addresses the Second World War and the role that African-American soldiers played in this conflict. The poems in this collection are above all dedicated to the famous Senegalese soldiers of the French colonial army, soldiers whom Senghor presents as sacrificial victims, offered in redemption for the sins of the West. This idea is at least suggested by the unexpected and oxymoronic title of the collection. By putting the predicate “Black” next to “Hosts,” Senghor uses a reversal technique unique to the Négritude writers, which privileges the color black at the expense of the white, to emphasize the spirit of sacrifice of Black people, their altruism, and humanism, as well as to inscribe their place in History.

“To the Black American Troops” is divided into three narrative sections. At first, the poet fails to recognize the African-Americans because of their “prison of sad-colored uniforms” and because of the “calabash helmet without plumes,” the “tremulous whinny of [their] iron horses / That drink but do not eat.” For the poet, the war is responsible for this state of non-recognition. It came to distort, so to speak, the image of Blacks in his eyes. But then, through physical contact, he recognizes his brothers and in them the African continent and its essence: “I just touched your warm brown hand and said my name, ‘Afrika!’ / And I found once again the lost laughter, I greeted the ancient voices / And heard the roar of Congo waterfalls.”

By confronting the terms of non-recognition and recognition, the author elaborates upon a series of opposing images. In the first section of the poem （non-recognition）, not only are the war and its attributes full of negative connotations, but “I did not recognize you,” the formulated expression of unfamiliarity becomes a refrain. The second part （recognition）, however, is exempt from all adverbs of negation in the construction of the image of Africa, which presents itself here as an ideal human and natural setting. The second part of the poem is therefore linked as an antithesis to the first. The mode of representation is manichean: the poet establishes a contrast between the sad, violent, and unnatural world of war and the natural and warm world of Africa. The syntagm that sums up this recognition is obviously “Afrika,” used in a metonymical manner. Alone by itself, it symbolizes the origin, the ties of blood. In this process of non-recognition/recognition, there is definitely criticism of Western civilization and its war-like, quarrelsome, and violent qualities. Often, the celebration of the Black race and Africa goes hand in hand with a critique of Western values.

Once his Négritude is rediscovered—or rather, “felt”—in the African-Americans, the narrator will be confronted by the harsh reality of war, and thus their factual otherness. It will be necessary for him to resolve the apparent conflict of the identification of the Self in Otherness. First of all, he will question the responsibility of his brothers in the atrocities of the war: “Brothers, I don't know if it was you who bombed the cathedrals, / The pride of Europe, / If you were the lightning of God's hand burning Sodom and Gomorrah.” This doubt is purely rhetorical. The poet is conscious of the violence committed by his brothers, but how can he ideologically reconcile this with the nature of the “Black” （warmth, joy of life, the natural）? In the third line, there is already a shift in guilt: African-Americans, actors turning into instruments in the hands of God, a suggestion itself subject to doubt. In the following line, the poet absolves them across the board: “No, you were the messengers of his mercy, / The breath of spring after winter.”

The allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah suggests that violence was generated by Europe herself: God would have punished her for her sins. Thus the real violence of the African-American soldiers is ignored in order to focus only on its end: the liberation of the French. If there is in this poem an intention to criticize violence and aggressiveness, it seems to address Europe rather than the African-American soldiers who would not be engaged in the war except in altruism, a spirit of sacrifice and a desire for peace: “To those who have forgotten how to laugh … / Who know nothing more than the salt taste of tears / And the irritating stench of blood / You bring the springtime of Peace and hope at the end of waiting … / Black brothers, fighters whose mouths are singing flowers, /—O, the delight of life after Winter—I salute you / As messengers of Peace.”

At the end, the narrator has a positive image of the African-American soldiers, and commends their contribution to the institution of peace in Europe. Like their Senegalese brothers, they sacrificed their life for world peace: together, they contributed to the redemption of Europe. If this poem celebrates anonymous African-American figures, in another poem Senghor praises the glory of a particular person in his “Elegy for Martin Luther King” （Major Elegies）. This elegy is comprised of five stanzas. In the first, the poet-politician expresses first of all his powerlessness with regard to the international political climate characterized by the antagonism between the Americans and the Soviets, the constant ghostly reminder of the atomic war, and the specter of drought that ravages the Sahel. It is only in the last line that one falls upon King's death:

Who said I was stable in my mastery … / Who said, who said in this century of hate and the atom bomb / When all power is dust and all force a weakness that the Super Powers / Tremble in the night on their deep bomb silos and tombs, / When at the season's horizon, I peer into the fever of sterile / Tornadoes of civil disorder? … / … but the words like a herd of stumbling buffaloes / Bump against my teeth and my voice opens on the void … / I lost my lips, threw up my hands, and trembled harshly. / And you speak of happiness when I am mourning Martin Luther King!

Thus, the death of King comes back at a particularly critical moment in the life of the poet-politician. His happiness and his assurance are only appearances, and the death of King will serve to express his fragility. The death will also recover a symbolic aspect that the poet will let unfold in the rest of the poem.

In the second stanza, the coincidence of the death of King and the national holiday of Senegal gives Senghor an opportunity to develop the theme of seeming happiness and that of personal unrest. We are in the year 1969, and the poet remembers the commemoration of the eighth anniversary of the national holiday in his country. This joyful memory does not fail to evoke the memory of King's death: “I saw laughter stop and teeth become veiled with blue-black lips, / I saw Martin Luther King again, lying with a red rose at his neck.” The poet then recalls the deportation, the subjugation into slavery, and the discrimination against his Black brothers. He then sees the death of King as a heavy loss in the struggle for civil rights. Pain is deeply felt by the poet, who has become the confidant of the utter disarray of all African-Americans. His compassion for and identification with the African-Americans is all the more comfortable since the date of April 4 marks a double history: the victory of Senegal over colonialism—hence its death—and the death of King: “And I felt in the marrow of my bones voices and tears come down, / Ha! A blood deposit of four hundred years, four hundred million eyes, / Two hundred million hearts, two hundred million mouths, two hundred million useless deaths / Today, my People, I felt that April fourth, you are vanquished, / Twice dead in Martin Luther King.” The poet then crowns King as the king of peace and exhorts his people to mourn him, to pray to God, to double the prayers for King and for the end of the drought.

In the third part, three years after the death of King, the poet describes the scope of the drought and its economic and ecological consequences, then evokes the wars of Vietnam and Biafra, which he interprets as divine punishment. The poet deplores the death of King, the intercessor of God for Man: “Lord, last year you were never so angry as during the great Famine / And Martin Luther King was no longer here to sing of your wrath / And appease it. …” At the end of the third part, the poet himself pleads for the mercy of God and wishes that the message of non-violence of King will be heard: “Lord let the voice of Martin Luther King fall on Nigeria and on Negritia.”

In these first three sections, it is thus the national and international context, in which the poet marks King's death, that seems important. Yet the punctual return to King himself, especially at the end of these sections, refreshes our memory of him and allows the poet to stress the impact King has had on the history of his time. The poet presents him simultaneously as the apostle of peace, the hope of all African-Americans, and the Christ of modern times. And lastly, the date of King's assassination ties his destiny more than ever to that of the Senegalese.

The fourth part of the poem describes the assassination itself. The Biblical inspiration of the poet is at its paroxysm here. The assassin is compared to the messenger Judas, and King implicitly to Christ. It is the month of April, and the calendar undoubtedly lends itself to this parallel. In a dramatization of the scene, the poet describes in minute detail the gestures of the assassin while he has King dream his famous dream of a non-racist America: “He [King] sees curly, blond heads, dark, / Kinky heads full of dreams like mysterious orchids, and the blue lips / And the roses sing in a chorus like a harmonious organ. / The white man looks hard and precise as steel. James Earl aims / And hits the mark, shoots Martin, who withers like a fragrant flower / And falls.”

In the last part of the poem, the poet has a vision. Martin Luther King is resuscitated, and the drought has ended in Africa. In heaven, the chosen whites and blacks, coming from all levels of society, are seated around God the Father to whom the poet pleads: “Mix them so, Lord, / Beneath your eyes and white beard.” The poet then draws up a long list of White and Black American heroes, among whom we find, of course, Martin Luther King. For the poet, they are the milestones along the road toward racial peace. America appears to him as a paradise where Whites and Blacks live peacefully side by side. King's dream is confused, though, with the poet's vision, which praises the coming of a harmonious American society: “I sing with my brother, Rise Up Negritude, a white hand / In his living hand, I sing of transparent America where light / Is a polyphony of colors, I sing a paradise of peace.” The elegy then finishes with a positive vision transcending the drought and the discrimination against African-Americans. As Janice Spleth noted, death is the principal theme of Senghor's elegies. Yet, it is never experienced as an end in itself, but rather as the possibility of regeneration, the possibility of better tomorrows. If Spleth attributes this positive note of the Senghorian elegy to an influence of African values, it is clear that in this case the influence is rather biblical. It is in this sense that King, whose departure is mourned by Senghor, becomes the redeemer of the evils conjured up in the poem.

Senghor often said that his movement was about affirming the values of Negro-African culture, letting the value of Blacks flow into the universal culture, while establishing a fruitful dialogue between the culture of Black people and the cultures of other people in the world. The poems presented here are a poetic illustration of this agenda. The poet puts his art in the service of his ideology in his representation of African-Americans.

Senghor's desire to account for the American Blacks in his elaboration of the concept of Négritude and its illustration is found again in the poem titled “To New York” （Ethiopiques, 1956）. In the beginning of the poem, the poet finds himself in Manhattan. The fascination aroused by the beauty of the city and his confusion in face of the height of the buildings are doubled by feelings of total displacement and spiritual discomfort provoked by the not-so-friendly setting:

New York! At first I was bewildered by your beauty, / Those huge, long-legged, golden girls. / So shy, at first, before your metallic eyes and icy smile, / … And full of despair at the end of skyscraper streets / Raising my own eyes at the eclipse of the sun / Your light is sulfurous against the pale towers / Whose heads strike lightning into the sky, / Skyscrapers defying storms with their steel shoulders / And weathered skin of stone.

Manhattan is a cold place. It can fascinate the visitor but is devoid of any human or spiritual dimension. The poet is exasperated at the end of a couple of weeks: “But two weeks on the naked sidewalks of Manhattan—Two weeks without well water or pasture … / No laugh from a growing child … / No mother's breast, but nylon legs. Legs and breasts / Without smell or sweat. No tender word, and no lips, / Only artificial hearts paid for in cold cash.” What is lacking in Manhattan is Nature and the emotional and natural presence of Mankind, both sacrificed on the altar of materialism. Everything here seems artificial; even love is distorted and impersonal. Manhattan is a dehumanized place, ruled by stress, noise, and a total absence of emotions.

In the second part of the poem, the poet finds himself in Harlem where he discovers a completely different world, full of colors and smells, sensuality and love, and a joie de vivre. Harlem is the temple of music and dance, the ruler of the night. Yet the poet finds that Blacks suffer there as well. At the end of the second part of the poem, he calls upon the city of New York to hear the rhythm of its African-American area. The beginning of the third part reiterates this calling but in a much more urgent and imperative manner: “New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood. / Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life / Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines.” In this appeal, the poet not only pleads for a cultural métissage and the recognition of the Black culture of Harlem, but also insists on the regenerating role that the latter could play in the highly modern and technical American culture. The image of New York that Senghor presents is rather a kind of face of Janus, a city with two quite distinct features: on one side, the white city, on the other, the black city. The poet faces two contradictory realities that seem to define New York, and he seeks to transcend them in his appeal. He wishes to go beyond the differences in a dialogue, in an interpenetration of different cultures, in a bringing together of the Self and the Other. This poem, apparently inspired by a visit to New York, illustrates better than any other the ideology of N‚gritude according to Senghor. …

The texts of Dadié and Senghor, aside from their critique of American civilization, attempt mainly to underline the importance of African-Americans in global history to forge links between Black Africans and Americans. …

The image of America for these three authors [Senghor, Dadié, and Dongala], beyond its content, depends largely on the discussion of Négritude, notably whether Black America should be included and accounted for in the construction of （Black） African identity. The concept of “race” thus remains operational in taking into account certain aspects of cultural expression in Africa. In fact, it comes as no surprise that it seems to determine African-American literary relations—at least from the standpoint of francophone literature. Not only has the latter incurred a debt to the authors of the Harlem Negro-Renaissance, but, in addition, the African imagination, precisely in this case, can neither undo itself nor escape the determinism of the abominable memory of the slave trade, a racial and racist phenomenon par excellence.

As such, the near total of the other texts on America, as I have been able to know them, show more or less a particular interest in the condition of African-Americans （slavery, fight for civil rights, discriminations, etc.） in the name of racial solidarity. Interestingly enough, all of these writers are Senegalese. The influence exerted by their elder, Léopold Sédar Senghor, is evident in the archeology of the representation of America. Thus, the racial question counts as one of the most prominent aspects of this representation of America.

Compared to the image of Europe that is offered by Black African francophone literature, and the image of France in particular, I believe that the image of America does not show many great differences: the content of the images and their functions are generally the same, but the criticism of American society definitely stings more: it seems that America is this “super- European monstrosity” that Sartre speaks about in his introduction to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. Consequently, one understands the rarity, if not the non-existence, of an image of America as an Eldorado. This is explained not solely by the profoundly tragic nature of the images tied to this country, but also by the fact that the historical bond and the cultural exchange that have contributed to the forging of the image of paradise in the case of France, for instance, are absent in this case. Moreover, the human contact generating this type of image is limited.

Finally, we must note that the texts cited, with very few exceptions, are written prior to 1960. How can one explain the absence of the theme of America in francophone literature in the last three decades? This phenomenon, in my opinion, is not foreign to the history of Négritude. The Pan-Negro discourses having lost their vigor in Africa, the need to identify oneself with the Blacks of the Diaspora and to take interest in their problems becomes less and less felt. The period of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and George Jackson seems to have passed. Since their deaths, would Black America have no longer produced any political and cultural figures of the same caliber of these heroes to raise the recognition, the respect, and the pride of the Black race? The preoccupations of African writers seem simply to be elsewhere.

In effect, since the end of the '60s, they concentrate instead on the socio-political conditions of postcolonial Africa, as Dongala does in Un fusil dans la main. Yet if it is true that this novel is critical of the theories of Négritude, it tends at the same time to formulate an “authentic” discourse on Africa, and in this sense aims toward an ideological end similar to that of Négritude. However, the epistemological and philosophical approach underlying this identity project is different.

The writers of Négritude locked （Black） African identity into a racial essentialism, which presents itself in opposition to a Western discourse on Africa, yet partakes of the dualistic structure and the same discourse it seeks to negate. Different critiques of Négritude have insisted on the mimetic character of the movement （see, e.g., Mudimbe and Diawara） and have reproached, from a Marxist perspective （see, e.g., Adotévi and Boukman） its racist and conservative character, its lack of historical perspective. As for Dongala, he places his novel completely in the context of the contemporary history of Africa in a struggle against Western imperialism. It must be emphasized, however, that the discourse in Un fusil dans la main does not escape a certain racial determination. …

The thematization, the celebration of the race is no longer common practice today in Black African francophone literature, but the problem of difference is not, for all that, over. It is posed in a different way, no longer in essentialist terms, but in cultural terms. The cultural and the racial intersect, as Walter Ben Michaels proved in a study on cultural identity in the United States: “Our sense of culture is characteristically meant to displace race … but culture has turned out to be a way of continuing rather than repudiating racial thought. It is only that appeal to race that makes culture an object of affect and that gives notions like losing our culture, preserving it, stealing someone else's culture, restoring people's culture to them, and so on, their pathos.” Besides, how would this difference be able to disappear from a literary tradition that is expressed in the language of the former colonizer, this Other in the first place? Even the linguistic frame of this literature betrays this difference forever, as is suggested by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:

Black writing … served not to obliterate the difference of race; rather, the inscription of the black voice in Western literatures has preserved those very cultural differences to be repeated, imitated, and revised in a separate Western literary tradition, a tradition of black difference.

We black people tried to write ourselves out of slavery, a slavery even more profound than mere physical bondage. Accepting the challenge of the great white Western tradition, black writers wrote as if their lives depended on it—and, in a curious sense, their lives did, the “life of the race” in Western discourse.