[In the following essay, Kennedy identifies poetry as one of the most significant artistic expressions of Negritude, briefly outlining the rise of the movement and discussing its major poets, including Senghor, Damas, and others.]

Poetry has been the single most important artistic manifestation of the black-world cultural and intellectual movement which, since the close of World War II, has come to be known as “negritude.” This anthology traces its development by gathering, translating, and commenting on key texts of black poetry in French since 1900, and by situating the men who wrote them. In all, twenty-seven poets are represented by approximately 170 poems. These poems, together with the commentaries, offer a broad perspective of the poetry of black self-awareness in French, a body of work still neglected and too little understood in the English-speaking world.

Until very recently, most of the poets included in the present volume were relatively unknown in America. Aimé Césaire's long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notes on a Return to the Native Land), which coined the word “negritude,” was published in 1944 in France, with a preface by André Breton, and enthusiastically received. Three years later, a French-English edition of Notes, still the “lyrical monument” of this group literature, was published in New York by Brentano's, in a translation by Lionel Abel and Ivan Goll under the title Memorandum on My Martinique. Despite Breton's laudatory preface, the American edition of the work seems to have vanished virtually without leaving a trace. By 1947 and 1948 the negritude poets were already making their mark in France, in anthologies edited respectively by Léon Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Another ten years were to pass, however, before black poets in French would begin to make any impact on English-language readers.

In April 1959 a special Africa issue of the Atlantic Monthly, illustrated with photographs of African sculpture, offered translations of short poems by David Diop, Léopold Senghor, and Tchicaya U Tam'si, along with three African folk songs transcribed by Léon Damas. In the early 1960s translations of the same poets, plus two others—Birago Diop and Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo—appeared occasionally in little magazines (notably the Nigeria-based Black Orpheus), and in a few African, British, and American anthologies devoted to Africa. In 1964 a first volume of poems by Léopold Senghor, selected and translated by two British scholars, John Reed and Clive Wake, was published in England and reprinted in New York the following year.

The American public had little or no notion that the new African poetry in French was closely related not to the African poetry of English-speaking neighboring lands, which blossomed later under different influences, but to the work of contemporary black West Indians. Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Jacques Roumain, poets from the French Caribbean, shared with the French West Africans the international racial awareness summarized by “negritude”; indeed, the two groups of writers had created it together during their student years in Paris on the eve of World War II; they were soon joined by the Madagascan writer Jacques Rabémananjara. If the importance of the Caribbean poets was mentioned, they were carefully set aside and dismissed by anthologists of the Africans as a separate group. Despite their growing interest in continental Africa, British and American scholars also ignored the fact that both these groups of poets had been strongly influenced, thematically and stylistically, by American poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

During their student days in France in the 1930s, many young African and West Indian poets-to-be read Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Sterling Brown, both in English and in French translations, and were deeply struck by their ideas and their approach to literature. The Africans and West Indians even came to know several of the black American writers personally on the latters' visits to Europe. Revolutionary in its day, Hughes's declaration of the 1920s, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” became one of their rallying cries. The carefree spontaneity of ethnic life in Claude McKay's novel, Banjo, became another romantic ideal for the Senghor-Damas-Césaire generation.

In the early 1960s the American civil-rights movement was forcing reforms that had a great impact on American society. The new black self-awareness was also giving birth to a new generation of black American poets: LeRoi Jones, Donn L. Lee, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and others. They rarely knew or read French, and generally had little more than a nodding acquaintance with the black French-language poets whose work has such strong thematic and stylistic parallels with their own. As late as the fall of 1969, Julius Lester, surveying the black literary scene in The New York Times Book Review, decried the absence of English-language editions of the uniquely important black French-language writer, Aimé Césaire. At the start of the 1970s, it was still only Africa, the black poets of Africa, and writings on African themes that were thought to be of interest to the American reading public, and only these had been published.

Senghor's subtle response to racism, the carefully mastered anger, for example, in many of his World War II poems, Hosties noires (Black Host),¹ was overlooked. David Diop's “Africa!” “Vultures,” or “A Time of Martyrdom” were sometimes included by anthologists who noticed the younger Senegalese was violently anticolonial, but no one translated his poem on Emmett Till, whose more universal protest against racial injustice strikes closer to home. Bernard Dadié's moving “I Thank You, Lord, for Having Made Me Black” was likewise omitted from English-language anthologies of this era.

Also unknown in America—on the grounds that he was a Caribbean (and therefore automatically a “marginal” poet)—was Léon Damas, who in 1937 had stung the French, in his volume entitled Pigments, with lines like these:

… I always feel about
to foam with rage
against what surrounds me
against what prevents me
ever from being a man

and the Haitian Jacques Roumain, whose Bois d'ebène (Ebony Wood), poems published in 1944 after his untimely death, included:

We're simply
done
in Africa
in America
with being
your negroes
your niggers
your dirty niggers
we won't take it any more …

Until now, except for a few American black poets and intellectuals—notably Langston Hughes, Samuel Allen, Mercer Cook, and the Trinidad-born Wilfred Cartey—and a few white academics, the work of Aimé Césaire and other French Antillean poets remained virtually unknown in the United States, and unpublished. During the early 1950s when he lived in Paris, Samuel Allen recalls, he fruitlessly sent dozens of letters, articles, and poems he had translated to numerous American literary magazines on behalf of the editors of Présence Africaine. It was fifteen or twenty years too soon, he concluded, for this literature or its ideas to make their mark in America.

Jean-Paul Sartre's essay “Black Orpheus,” however, published as a preface to Senghor's anthology in 1948, had even then called attention to the racial themes in both the new West Indian and, to a lesser extent, the African poetry in French. In addition to Sartre's essay, there were, by the late 1950s, Samuel Allen's valuable article “The Black Poet's Search for Identity,” and Muntu, by Janheinz Jahn, the German popularizer of African culture. There were also the literary articles and poems regularly appearing in Présence Africaine, and the limited editions of many individual poets it published. A few African and West Indian writers—Senghor, Césaire, Glissant, Dadié—were published by the large French houses. By 1962 the first literary history and criticism of the negritude poets was published by the Belgian scholar Lilyan Kesteloot.² Her short study of Césaire in the popular Poètes d'aujourd'hui series appeared shortly thereafter, as did Armand Guibert's volume on Senghor. Robert Boudry's little-known but valuable booklet on the Madagascan poet Rabéarivelo was published by Présence Africaine in 1958. These were among the indispensable sources on which foreign scholars could rely for a guide to the new black writers, for essential background and bibliographic information.

Even during the 1960s “negritude” was touchy, vague, mystical—a much-misunderstood affair. Certain of Senghor's early statements seemed to suggest that there were genetic rather than cultural differences of sensibility between blacks and whites. These were anathema to English-speaking black writers such as Ezekiel Mphalele, a self-exiled victim of apartheid South Africa. The young Nigerian Wole Soyinka made fun of them with his witticism on tigers and “tigritude.” A similar skepticism toward negritude has affected the newer generation of English-speaking writers who emerged in the late 1960s from East Africa: the Ugandan Taban Lo Liyong and the Kenyan James Ngugi. Like Mphalele and the Nigerian poets and novelists, they wish to create and be judged by universal standards of art, to draw freely on whatever inspiration and models they choose. To them negritude has suggested a romanticization of Africa, an aesthetic restriction to some doubtful “universal black style,” an emphasis on traditional African literary forms; in short a limitation of the artistic vision to that which flatters, that which protests, that which has social or political usefulness, rather than to an individual search for truth.

To some of these writers of various nationalities “negritude,” “black culture,” or “negro-ness” has often looked like the sterile rhetoric of some new form of segregation rather than of pan-ethnic liberation.

It is perhaps significant that the young Nigerian poets nurtured at Ibadan in the late 1950s and early 1960s found formal and stylistic inspiration in such Americans as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, but not at all in black American poets—unlike their French-language counterparts. The decade of the '60s appears to have had a similar effect on most Ghanaian and Sierra Leonean intellectuals as well. More pressing needs and preoccupations in those years took precedence over an exploration of their potential relationship to the rest of the black world. Soyinka's sarcastic attitude toward negritude can perhaps best be understood as a rejection of any overly simplistic view of universal black solidarity—literary or otherwise.

On the black American scene “negritude” has had its difficulties, too. Asserting that “very few American Negroes are of pure African blood,” Ralph Ellison has commented at length on the “Americanness” of black American experience:

… The American Negro people is North American in origin and has evolved under specifically American conditions; climatic, nutritional, historical, political and social. It takes its character from the experience of American slavery and the struggle for, and the achievement of, emancipation; from the dynamics of American race and caste discrimination, and from living in a highly industrialized and highly mobile society possessing a relatively high standard of living and an explicitly stated equalitarian concept of freedom. Its spiritual outlook is basically Protestant, its system of kinship is Western, its time and historical sense are American (United States), and its secular values are those professed, ideally at least, by all of the people of the United States.

Culturally this people represents one of the many sub-cultures which make up that great amalgam of European and native American cultures which is the culture of the United States. This “American Negro Culture” is expressed in a body of folklore, in the musical forms of the spirituals, the blues and jazz; an idiomatic version of American speech (especially in the Southern United States); a cuisine, a body of dance forms and even a dramaturgy which is generally unrecognized as such because still tied to the more folkish Negro churches.³

“It is not culture which binds the peoples who are of partially African origin now scattered throughout the world,” Ellison continues, “but an identity of passions. We share a hatred for the alienation forced upon us by Europeans during the process of colonization and empire, and we are bound by our common suffering more than by our pigmentation. But even this identification,” Ellison maintains, “is shared by most non-white peoples, and while it has political value of great potency, its cultural value is almost nil.”⁴

In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin writes of the ten years he spent as a young man in Paris, “involved, in another language, in the same old battle; the battle for his identity.” Baldwin describes his reaction to meeting French-speaking black students from Africa:

… there begins to race within him, like the despised beat of the tom-tom, echoes of a past he has not yet been able to utilize, intimations of a responsibility he has not yet been able to face. …

They face each other, the [American] Negro and the African, over a gulf of three hundred years—an alienation too vast to be conquered in an evening's good will, too heavy and too double-edged ever to be trapped in speech.⁵

In Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin asks, and answers, the question, “Do the earth's black populations [have] anything that can legitimately be called a culture?” His response is close in spirit to Ellison's. After brilliantly characterizing the widely disparate personalities and viewpoints of the delegates, and reacting strongly himself as an American, Baldwin concludes:

… there was something which all black men held in common, something which cut across opposing points of view, and placed in the same context their widely dissimilar experience. What they held in common was their precarious, their unutterably painful relation to the white world. What they held in common was the necessity to remake the world and no longer be controlled by the vision of the world and of themselves held by other people. What, in sum, black men held in common was their ache to come into the world as men. And this ache united people who might otherwise have been divided as to what a man should be.⁶

“An identity of passions” that black men held in common (Ellison's phrase) is precisely the theme that emerges most forcefully from the pages of this anthology. It runs through Césaire's Notes, from the first evocation of the imprisoned Toussaint Louverture to the final picture of the poet himself atop the mountain on his island. The image recurs in a dozen powerful variations in the poems of Roumain, Dadié, David Diop, U Tam'si, Maunick, and in Depestre's “Ballad of a Little Lamp.” The reverse images also abound, particularly in the poems of Damas, in Césaire's Notes and in Glissant's The Indies—the sensations of choking oppression, of human beings denied their integrity.

The ultimate effect of this poetry is supremely ethnic, but also more than ethnic. As Sartre put it twenty-five years ago, “This poetry, which at first appears racial, is ultimately the song of every one and for every one.”

Throughout human history, art and literature have given the most illuminating and enduring record of peoples and civilizations. One may, like Ellison, have serious reservations about whether there is some universal African-derived common-denominator culture of black peoples. One may share Baldwin's uncertainty about “the despised beat of the tom-tom,” the implications of an African past one “has not yet been able to utilize.” Where literature is concerned, one can at least postulate that identities of passion have produced, and will continue to produce, writings from the Negro diaspora that will be significantly related in theme, in subject matter, and perhaps as well in style. But the question cannot even be intelligently discussed without careful comparative studies of these contemporary literatures, which exist in poems, plays, novels, short stories, and essays by peoples of African descent in Africa and the rest of the Western world.

The First World Festival of Negro Art held at Dakar in 1966 was based on the assumption that there was such an international relationship in all the arts. Whether or not one subscribes to this assumption, one has to admit that the Festival called well-deserved attention to many artists and art forms still known only locally, highlighting their relationship to one another by genre, subject matter, style, and language. The literary awards given at the Festival constituted the first critical survey of black literature on an international basis.⁷ Virtually ignored at the time in the United States, the English-language literary prizes honored several Americans, including Kenneth Clark for his sociological study Dark Ghetto, and LeRoi Jones for his one-act plays. Robert Hayden, who won the Grand Prize for poetry, was scarcely known in the United States at the time, but has since published two volumes of poetry and begun to earn the reputation he deserves. The greatest contribution of the Dakar literary awards, however, was to underscore the fact that black literatures are thriving, that they have an international past, present, and future deserving not only an international readership but the continuing evaluation and attention of informed observers.

There already exists a small but growing international community of scholars devoting their careers to the study and teaching of black literature. It is they, and their students, who will be the translators, critics, anthologists, biographers, historians, editors, teachers, and interpreters of these writings throughout the world in years to come.

To accept the concept of an international black literature as valid and useful is by no means to suggest that writers of African descent can be viewed or judged only on an ethnic basis. Langston Hughes, for example, is indisputably an American writer, whose work is part of the mainstream of twentieth-century American literature. Yet, as a black writer expressing a particular personal and group sensibility, Hughes's work has had, and will doubtless continue to have, an impact on writers in lands as far-flung as South Africa, Haiti, and Senegal. Similarly, while Aimé Césaire of Martinique is a poet, essayist, and playwright intimately connected with French culture, French surrealism, and the French literary heritage, it is above all as a black man that he addresses the world and his people. “We reclaim ourselves with precocious insanity, with blazing madness, with tenacious cannibalism. Accommodate yourselves to me. I do not accommodate myself to you!” he cried by way of literary manifesto many years ago in his magazine Tropiques.

There is a character in Genet's The Blacks who declares, “Make poetry, since that's the only domain in which we're allowed to operate.” From the mid-1930s until the eve of African independence, direct political action was in general immediately and forcefully repressed in the French colonial empire. Poetry, rather than the essay or any of the more extended literary forms, became for black French-language intellectuals a powerful emotional and aesthetic outlet.

That the negritude movement has produced so many artists of the first rank is, on one level, a tribute to the French culture they both acquired and transformed. On another level, making, reading, absorbing, and responding to negritude poetry became a form of “consciousness-raising,” through which one participated in forging a new vision of self and group. Negritude poets have often addressed their poems to one another like open letters. A poem is sometimes one half of a dialogue in which ideas and feelings are exchanged. The “Introductory Poem” of Senghor's World War II book Black Host, for example, is dedicated to Léon Damas, and constitutes Senghor's reply to the final sardonic call to action in Damas's Pigments.

Similarly, David Diop and Francesco Ndintsouna salute Damas's “They Came That Night” with their own imitations of his signature poem about the European violation of Africa. The dedication makes their borrowings an explicit homage. Jacques Roumain's and Sanghor's debts to James Weldon Johnson, and David Diop's often subtler debt to Roumain and Césaire are remarked on later in this volume.

By 1950 the work of the elder generation of black poets was having great impact on a new generation of students from the colonies. Thanks to Présence Africaine and the activities of S.A.C. (The Society of African Culture), postwar black students knew and read their elders and followed their debates, both poetic and ideological. Many tried their hands at poetry themselves, publishing their verse in often short-lived student magazines, in privately printed vanity editions, or even in the pages of Présence Africaine.

By the 1960s the best of this new black literature, not only poetry but folk tales, stories, novels, plays, and essays, was being included in school and college programs in French West Africa, Africanizing a curriculum that had long focused on French culture alone. In the present decade the same literature may well find a place in American college and school curricula that have too long emphasized the cultures of Western Europe alone.

Since the 1930s black French-language, or “negritude,” poets have reflected not only an awareness of their ethnic past but a sensitivity to current events. Damas in Pigments, published in 1937, was even then aware of the horror of Nazi racism toward the Jews and its threatening implications for the black man. Poems of Roumain in the early 1940s, of Césaire and David Diop in the late 1950s, react to incidents of racial injustice in America as well as those in the French colonies and South Africa. Maunick's “Seven Sides and Seven Syllables” projects images of the racial incidents in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early 1960s and of his visit to Nigerian shrines later in the decade. In his newest, untranslated book of poems Fusillez-Moi! (Shoot Me!), Maunick responds to the tragic Biafra—Nigeria War. U Tam'si's poems reflect the bitter experience of the Congo in the '60s, of his friend Lumumba's death as well as the more hermetic record of his personal life. Depestre's Arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien (Rainbow for the Christian West) protests the American involvement in the Bay of Pigs, while his most recent work, Cantate d'octobre (October Cantata), is inspired by the death of Che Guevara.

Living amid the ferment of four generations of twentieth-century life, many of the poets in this volume, whether West Indian, African, or Indian Ocean islanders, have played a significant role in politics. Two paid for their political beliefs with their lives, meeting death at the hands of their own countrymen: Massillon Coicou of Haiti in 1908, and Fily-Dabo Sissoko of Mali in 1964. Others, such as Bernard Dadié of the Ivory Coast or Jacques Rabémananjara of Madagascar, knew the grim walls of French colonial prisons in the 1940s and 1950s. Some, such as René Depestre or Edouard Maunick, still live in exile from their native lands whether by choice or by necessity. From the lifelong deeply religious conservatism of Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, moreover, to the equally lifelong revolutionary communism of the Haitian René Depestre, these poets represent every shade of political opinion.

From a literary viewpoint, they present a similar range, from the personally accented classical verse of Durand, Coicou, Laleau, and Maran of the “tracing-paper poet” generation to all the idiosyncratic variations of free verse style of the negritude group: the hallucinatory fantasy world of a Rabéarivelo; the ironic, staccato malaise of a Léon Damas; the pounding militant vision of a David Diop or a Jacques Roumain; the nostalgic evocations of the Senegalese past of a Senghor or a Birago Diop; the lost Africa depicted by a Paul Niger, a Guy Tirolien; the powerful voodoo exorcism of a Depestre; the great dramatic sweep of an Aimé Césaire; the dazzling self-deprecatory irony of Tchicaya U Tam'si or Léon Damas; the simple lyricism of Sissoko, Yondo, or Bernard Dadié.

Because the emphasis of this anthology has been not only literary but also historical and social, literary criteria have obviously not been the sole factor in determining its contents. The object has been to present a representative spectrum of black poets from the former French colonial empire. The twenty-seven poets were born and raised in six nations of West and Central Africa; on islands in the seas of two hemispheres, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. They come from vastly different points on the globe; they come from all sorts of family backgrounds and economic levels. They are city, country, and village people, with varying educations, who have made their living in many different callings. Sometimes they are widely traveled, with the unsettling experience of living in other cultures for extended periods of time—like Senghor, Tchicaya U Tam'si, and Edouard Maunick. Sometimes, like the extraordinary Rabéarivelo of Madagascar, they lived their entire lives within a few hundred miles of the place of their birth. Most grew up in intimate contact with either Christianity—usually Roman Catholicism—or Islam, and often with some form of African animist tradition as well. Many emerge from traditional African cultures, or, like Depestre, from a Haitian culture close to its African roots, and their poetry bears these rich traces.

However different the background—geographical, economic, educational—of the twenty-seven poets whose works are presented in these pages, they speak to us with beauty, humor, eloquence—and often anger—that transcends the barriers of race and language. In projecting their private visions, fears, and frustrations, they allow us to see and feel what they have felt and seen, and to discover anew the bonds that unite us all in brotherhood.

Notes

1. The title's double allusion is to African soldiers who were both “black victims” and sometimes, by sacrificing their lives, a “black host” or offering, in the Eucharistic sense.

2. Published in English as Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974).

3. Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964)

4. Ibid.

5. New York: Dial Publishing Co., 1964

6. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1961. (Italics added)

7. For a more detailed account see Ellen Conroy Kennedy, “A Literary Postscript on the Dakar Festival,” African Forum, Summer, 1967, pp. 54-58.