[In the following essay, Moore surveys the relationship between politics and Negritude as it is expressed in the works of various authors identified with the movement.]

It is my hope to say something new about politics and Negritude, although that isn't easy because it is a much-trodden field. I certainly don't want to thrust at you reflections with which you are probably already quite familiar.

So I thought we might take as a starting-point the observations of Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquan writer of Negro origin, who spent a good deal of his life in France and, latterly, became the head of a mental hospital in Algeria. He looks at the problem of colour (if you can call it a problem) from the point of view of an Antillean. He doesn't claim to be an African. He keeps insisting that what he says is true of the Antilles. He doesn't say it is true of anywhere else. He looks at these problems also as a psychiatrist who has been concerned with treating people whose mental condition may be related to some of the conflicts and stresses of racial contact. And in his book, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs—the title of which seems to very well project, I think, the central issue that he is concerned with—he says,

The black is a black man. That is to say that as a result of certain aberrations—what are, in effect, aberrations—he is established in the breast of a world from which he wishes he could escape. The problem is an important one. We are concerned with nothing less than to liberate the man of colour from himself. We will go very slowly, for there are two camps—the white and the black. Keenly we will interrogate. We will question the two metaphysics, and we will see that they are frequently blended. We shall have no pity for the ancient administrators of old and the missionaries of old. For thus, those who adore Negroes, are just as sick as those who hate them. Conversely, the black man who wants to whiten his race is just as sick as those who preach the hatred of the whites.¹

Now, he goes on to say that to take a language is to assume a world. That the French language, in particular, is a language by which this whole system of what one might call racial snobbery—that is, an idea of hierarchy based on colour with the blackest at the bottom and the whitest at the top—projects itself upon the coloured man. He speaks, of course, from the point of view of an Antillean who has no choice about that language. It is the only language that he has; the language he grew up with; the one through which he must educate himself, and through which he is forced to advance himself.

Intimately related to this question of the hierarchy of colour is the hierarchy of social values: the planter pseudo-aristocratic values of the white man in the Antilles: the bourgeois values, obsessed with respectability, obsessed with climbing up the colour ladder and not going down it, of the mulatto middle-classes; and what he bluntly calls the inferiority of the black man, at the bottom of this system in every sense. He quotes examples of this obsession from books like Nini, a novel about Senegal; a book called Je suis Martiniquaise, and a book by René Maran, who was a Negro of Guyanese origin. This is an obsession with marrying upwards in the coloured system and not downwards—and he quotes examples of this not only on the part of women, but also of men. It is a determination that whatever one does once one has ceased to be completely black, whatever one does, one must marry someone lighter than oneself. And to fail to do so is to outrage not only your own standards, but those of all your relatives, because your parents might say, ‘Look, you've thrown away the thing that we achieved. We've managed to get you three shades lighter, now you've gone and married a black man. We're going to go back to being black again.’ This is why it leads to serious ruptures within the existing social system if people do this. Of course, he is not saying that they shouldn't do it, he's endeavouring to objectivize this kind of situation.

Now I think some of what we think of as the politics of Negritude begins right here with these two metaphysics, and I think we see these beautifully portrayed in a poem that you may know, by Léon Damas, one of the first writers associated with the Negritude movement. It is a poem called ‘Hiccups’. Léon Damas is specifically a man of colour, but not black. He's midway, one might say, a sort of a brown man from Guyana. One concludes from this poem that his background was of this petit-bourgeois kind, which was absolutely obsessed with getting further up this ladder of colour, and, also, what went with it: the ladder of social prestige, the ladder of social influence, and so forth:

In vain I swallow
three or four times daily
seven mouthfuls of water
yet my childhood comes up in hiccups
          and shakes my instinct like
          a policeman a ruffian
Catastrophe
tell me about the catastrophe
tell me how
My mother wanted a son with good table manners
          hands on the table
          the bread is not to be cut
          the bread is to be broken
          the bread of the Lord is not to be wasted
          the bread of the sweat of your father's brow
          the bread of bread
A bone has to be gnawed with moderation and restraint
the stomach must be content with little
a moderate stomach behaves and does not belch
a fork is not a toothpick
one does not blow one's nose
in front of everybody
and then keep upright
do not wipe the plate with your nose
and then and then
and then in the name of the father
          of the son
          of the holy ghost
at the end of the meal
and then and then
and then the catastrophe
talk to me about the catastrophe
tell me how
My mother wanted a well trained son
          if you don't learn your history lesson
          you shall not go to mass on Sunday
          your behaviour on Sunday
          this child is a disgrace to the family
          This child in the name of God
          be quiet
          did I not tell you to speak French
          French as in France
          The French of French people
          Real French French
Catastrophe
tell me about the catastrophe
Tell me how
My mother wanted a son a son of her mother

(Note that, ‘a son of her mother’—a reference to the kind of scale that I was trying to suggest.)

          you do not greet the neighbour
          again your shoes are full of dirt
          and if I catch you again in the street
          in the bush or in the savannah
          in the shadow of the war memorial
          and you are playing there
          and you are romping about with one
          with one who has not been baptized
Catastrophe
tell me about the catastrophe
tell me how
My mother wanted a son
          really do
          really mi
          really fa
          really sol
          really ti
          really do
          re-mi-fa
          so-la-ti
          do
And now I must hear you absconded again
from your violin lesson
A banjo
are you saying a banjo
what do you say
a banjo you really say banjo
no my dear
you must know that we suffer
neither ban
nor jo
a mulatto does not do that sort of thing
you leave that to the negroes(2)

Now, this then is the kind of situation from which Damas is trying to escape, and the tension that exists in his early poetry, in a volume like Pigments, is the tension between this kind of background and the difficulty of finding something else to be. There is another poem of his in which he rejects the impedimenta of European society:

I feel ridiculous in their shoes
And in their collar like a factory funnel
And with the little glass of hot water
That they offer you in the afternoon(3)

This, he rejects, and at the same time he can't really identify himself with an Africa that he doesn't know. He is not one of those writers that overcome this by romancing about a shattered golden age from which everybody was uprooted by slavery—seeing this simply as an aspect of the modern capitalist system. He doesn't want to look back at Africa as something existing like a kind of pre-natal bliss in the womb of time in the way that some other Caribbean writers do in that period, particularly in the thirties. Yet, in a sense, he wants to recapture some kind of unity of being, and I think the great search in early Negritude literature, whether it be of Antillean origin or of African origin, is for this kind of unity of being. Occasionally, he appears to be seeking for an inner kind of primitivism, but I think it's really only a mood with Damas—it's not a programme. I'm thinking of another well-known poem of his, ‘Black Dolls’ (‘Limbé’):

Give me back my black dolls
To disperse the image of pallid wenches—vendors of love
Going and coming on the boulevard of my boredom.
Give me back my black dolls
To disperse the everlasting image
The hallucinating image of overdressed and heavy marionettes
From which the wind brings misery.
Merci.
Give me the illusion never to appease
The exposed need of roaring demands
Under the unconscious disdain of the world.
Give me back my black dolls
To play the simple games of my instincts,
To rest in the shadow of their laws,
To recover my courage, my boldness,
To feel myself myself,
A new self from the one I was yesterday.
Yesterday without complications;
Yesterday when the hour of uprooting came.
Will they ever know this rancour of my heart?
In the eye of my mistrust too late opened
They have stolen the space that was mine,
Custom, days, life, song, rhythm, effort, pathways,
Water, home, smoking grey earth, wisdom, words, palaver,
Ancestors, cadence, hands, standards, hands, trampling the soil.(4)

At this point, the poem seems to be reaching through some kind of a mist; and already there seems to be a sort of consciousness, within the poem, that the black dolls don't quite subsume what he's looking for—and the movement becomes a groping one. But then he pulls back to the black dolls in the last line, ‘Give me back my black dolls, my black dolls, black dolls, dolls’. I think a poem like this could be seen as a piece of deliberate primitivism, if we ignore its ironic intention. And this, of course, was one escape that some people saw. But I think it savours of the condition which Gênet perhaps identifies better than anybody else, of playing a rôle which is projected upon you by the other race.

Plenty of European spokesmen have been saying ever since the end of the First World War (which caused a certain disenchantment with European civilization), ‘Look at the black man. Look at his spontaneous joy and gaiety, and his instinctual richness and his freedom from our over-intellectualized existence!’ Now, it is possible to respond to this sort of thing as quite a number of poets, particularly in the Antilles, did in the early days of Negritude and Negroism by saying, ‘Yes, all right, this is a good rôle for us to play. Let's celebrate all the respects in which we are different. Let us revel in rhythm, in primitivism, mumbo-jumbo, bongo-bongo and all the rest of it.’ And you can find poems which virtually revert to a sort of bongo-bongo at certain points in their structure. But I don't think this is really the intention of Damas's poem. I think the intention of that poem is really to seek for this kind of unity of being, and he only sees it, for purposes of the mood of this poem, in terms of being given back his black dolls. The search doesn't stop there, as the poem shows at the point where it seems, as I say, to drop the dolls for a moment and turn to face this misty opposing presence through which it is groping for the thing it wants.

Now, Césaire is certainly the most formidable poet of the Antilles in this movement of Negritude. He also, in his first poem ‘Cahier D'un Retour Au Pays Natal’,⁵ appears sometimes to be offering the same kind of complementary rôle to the Negro. The white world is this; therefore, let us be that. The white world is too competitive; it is obsessed with its own concepts of power; it's obsessed with speed; it's steel-hard; it's a mass of right angles; it externalizes everything; it abstracts everything. Let us be everything that the white world is not, in order to complement the white world and build a new total civilization. But again, I think that Césaire becomes dissatisfied with this kind of rôle—even within the bounds of that poem—because he has a programme within the poem of saving the Negro, the black man, from his poverty and the squalor of the society which he inhabits in an island like Martinique. And this programme itself seems to challenge the basis of racialism; and, therefore, to challenge the basis of any philosophy which suggests that certain qualities are intrinsic in one race, and other qualities are intrinsic in another race. Césaire is sufficient of a Marxist to at least contemplate the idea that racism is primarily an economic phenomenon; and that if you could conceive a society in which all the people at the top are black—at the top in all senses (I mean political, economic, social prestige)—and brown people in the middle, and the whites at the bottom; then you would get a complete reversal of the racial attitudes that we are so familiar with, a carbon copy, upside-down.

This would be the pure Marxist viewpoint. In fact, I have heard many Marxists put this forward. That it is quite wrong to feel bitter about racism, because it is simply an aspect of economic organization and it will change as economic organization changes. Of course, we know it won't, because there is a long time-lag even if we accept the Marxist thesis. We know that there is a long time-lag, because people take some time to adjust to a changing situation. But, at the same time, I don't think we can reject this kind of formulation, and we must recognize that this formulation hovers on the frontiers of Negritude; particularly at the point, where, for purely strategic reasons of French political life, both the major African nationalist party and the deputies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyana identified themselves with the Communist Party in the French National Assembly.

I think during that period we find a specific recognition, in a thing like Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism,⁶ of the force of the Marxist thesis on this subject of race and economics. But I don't think that Senghor, for example, is ever very convinced about this, or about Marxism. That's why, earlier, we find him groping towards a concept of African Socialism, a kind of socialism which is not simply a fragment of international Communism or international Socialism, but something special which is rooted in African social organization—in some innate quality of the African, of the African Negro—a phrase that recurs over and over again in Senghor's work. This is something that is peculiar to him, that peculiarly suits his genius, his contribution to the world. Other forms of organization will always be alien to him. He must have a Socialism that is specifically African—uniquely African—different from any other Socialism.

I think that when we are considering the politics of Negritude, we do have to make up our own minds about this question if we are going to see clearly where other people stand in relation to it. We have to make up our own minds how far racialism is a purely economic phenomenon in origin, and how far it is something else. How far is it true to suggest that there is some kind of instinctual animosity between races based simply on pigmentation; and how far is this something that is conditioned entirely by my idea of your status, governed by your colour, because I have become habituated to a situation in which I can judge your status, your power, your position in relation to me purely by your pigmentation. I am not sure that the writers we are dealing with have always made up their minds about this, but I think we have to make up our minds about it in order, as I said, to see where they appear to stand in relation to this question.

Senghor, in his poem ‘New York’ puts forward, I suppose, the classic statement of the complementary view of the Negro's rôle, and he ends the poem with the very improbable conjuration to New York to ‘Let black blood flow into your blood’, the most forlorn piece of advice, I suppose, that has ever been given.

New York, I say to you: New York let black blood flow into your blood

Can you imagine the white suburbs hearing that advice today?

That it may rub the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life,
That it may give to your bridges the bend of buttocks and the suppleness of creepers.
Now return the most ancient times, the unity recovered, the reconciliation of the Lion the Bull and the Tree.
Thought linked to act, ear to heart, sign to sense.
There are your rivers murmuring with scented crocodiles and mirage-eyed manatees.
And no need to invent the Sirens.
But it is enough to open the eyes to the rainbow of April
And the ears above all the ears, to God who out of the laugh of a saxophone created the heaven and the earth in six days.
And the seventh day he slept the great sleep of the Negro.(7)

This is the last section of ‘New York’. The whole sense of the poem (it is too long to read) is that here is Manhattan, this place of which the beauty is so dazzling simply because it is so sharp, so angular, so cold, so plastic-wrapped and polythene-finished. And then there is Harlem, in which the mangoes of love roll under the hooves of the police horses, and so forth. He wants to marry these two elements and produce out of them a whole America. Perhaps James Baldwin wants to do it too, but Baldwin, of course, would never express it quite so boldly as, ‘Let black blood flow into your blood.’

With Senghor, we do come upon some of the things that happen, or may happen, to Negritude when it comes home to Africa. There were so many things that the group of Negro students who found themselves in Paris in the thirties and early forties had in common. They had in common subjection to a policy of assimilation which, when it was rationalized and perpetuated, became what, if we wish to be Marxists, we may regard as part of the innate dynamics of the situation. In other words, you had a situation where—whatever the education or policy had been, whether it had been an assimilationist policy or not—power was held by white people and not by black people, where in order to move freely—even relatively freely—in the middle reaches of that power system, you needed a knowledge of French, and you needed to be able to understand and refer to the culture which the Frenchman enjoyed. But the system of education was a huge rationalization of this power-system and an attempt to perpetuate it: an attempt to perpetuate it by making this the only series of criteria by which any kind of value could be judged. The degree of approximation to the ‘homme civilisé’ became the test of everything.

They had in common the experience of colour, they had in common a relatively exploited status in an economic and political sense. But what they didn't have in common was an experience of Africa, of current Africa, contemporary Africa. This, I think, is where Negritude upon African soil begins to acquire some flavour of its own. And in particular, I think, in the work of Senghor and some other writers, it begins no longer to be so universalizing in its outlook. There is a great emphasis in the Negritude literature of the late 1930's on the universal problem of the exploited races. This is most recently expressed of course in Fanon's last book, The Wretched of the Earth.⁸ There is an emphasis on the fact that there is so much that the Indo-Chinese, the Madagascan, the African, the Caribbean Negro have in common. Not only the fact of French colonialism, but also the whole structure which subjects them and which aims to perpetuate their subjection is identical in all these places. Therefore, their programme must be identical, and therefore their literature, their culture should celebrate these common elements and this universality which will enable them all to become men, and, by becoming men, to enrich human civilization.

I think Negritude in Africa tends to assume a rather more local field of reference, and this comes up in this insistence upon African Socialism as the programme of political and social action. And what goes with that—the attempt to feed into a new synthesis, into a new culture (a neo-African culture as Jahn calls it) all those elements of African traditional civilization which are felt to be of absolute validity for the coming world in which Africa will pour its riches into a common pool. We can be misled about this, I suppose, by assuming that Senghor is a rather special case because of his profound Christian piety, because of his concern with reconciliation, because of his desire always to make the initial gesture of resentment, the gesture of bitterness, and, at the end of the poem, to bring everything to a harmonious conclusion. So often in his poetry we close on a note of reconciliation, a note of unity, an emphasis upon the complementary nature of African and European civilization. We may assume that this is rather special to Senghor, but I think a poet we could oppose to him, merely because his tone is more militant, would actually be a more special case. I am thinking of David Diop. For though of African descent—being half Camerounian, and half Senegalese—he sees Africa at a great distance. I think he sees it at the same kind of distance that many West Indian writers see it. It is something that he doesn't really know, that he hasn't proved upon his pulses. Therefore, in David Diop's poetry, we do find (although it was written in the fifties) this emphasis upon the universal dilemma of the man of colour—a universalizing tendency, a call to the barricades for everybody from Indo-China to the Caribbean. ‘Listen, comrades of the struggling centuries’⁹ and so on. In his poetry, we find references to Madagascar, we find references to Indo-China and to Negro America. Again, in Diop we don't find this emphasis on reconciliation. We don't find any suggestion that what is needed is a marrying of what Africa can give to Europe, or what the black world can give to the white world, to make a richer total civilization. The tone throughout is one of rejection—rejection of what the white world stands for, in favour implicitly of what the black world stands for. It is a rejection of one set of values, one system, in favour of another.

In those days
When civilization kicked us in the face
When holy water slapped our cringing brows
The vultures built in the shadow of their talons
The blood-stained monument of tutelage
In those days
There was painful laughter on the metallic hell of the roads
And the monotonous rhythm of the paternoster
Drowned the howling on the plantations
O the bitter memories of extorted kisses
Of promises broken at the point of a gun
Of foreigners who did not seem human
Who knew all the books but did not know love
But we whose hands fertilize the womb of the earth
In spite of your songs of pride
In spite of the desolate villages of torn Africa
Hope was preserved in us as in a fortress
And from the mines of Swaziland to the factories of Europe
Spring will be reborn under our bright steps.(10)

All right, what is the programme that underlines this kind of poetry? Is it African Socialism? No. Is it international Socialism? International Communism? It doesn't appear to be specifically that. Is it the substitution of an African civilization for a white civilization?—the removal of one and its replacement by the other? Again, we are not quite sure whether it is that. So I think that Diop is another of those poets who sets us thinking about just what he, himself, is advocating; and what his own attitude is to the phenomenon of racialism—not the phenomenon of race (we must not get involved in that) but of racialism.

Now, in all this literature, I think up to about the late 1940's or early 1950's, the literature of Negritude is in a posture of facing towards the white world. The expression it wears on its face may vary; it may be one of reconciliation; it may be one of bringing gifts to enrich the common store; it may be an expression of hatred; it may be an expression of rejection; it may be an expression of hope; it may be one of disappointment; it may be one of grief; but the face is towards the white world, towards Europe.

I don't want to trespass on Clive Wake's territory which, I believe begins about 1950, but I do think that, since my theme is Negritude, and his is not specifically Negritude, we ought to consider now another question: How far is Negritude the child of a particular historical moment, as I think Sartre suggested in ‘L'Orphée Noir’?¹¹ He called it the true revolutionary poetry of our time¹² (he was writing nearly twenty years ago when he said that) and he was suggesting then that the true revolutionary poetry is a sort of torch which passes from one hand to another. At that particular moment of historical time, it was in the hands of the Negro races because this was the moment of their revolution, of their emancipation, their throwing off of the shackles of servitude. And he says:

What did you expect to hear when you took the muzzle off those lips?
Did you expect to hear yourself overwhelmed with praises and love?(13)

Fanon has a comment on that. He says, ‘Do not expect to see anything in my eyes but a perpetual question.’ Well, I have already quoted the bit about lips, but Sartre goes on to say, ‘What expression did you expect to see in those eyes when you took off the blinkers?’ and so on. Fanon's comment helps to bring us up to date. Is Negritude that, or is it, as Jahn suggests, the only valid way for African poetry to be written?¹⁴ Or is it simply a question of a kind of value brought, it seems, from outside literature, which gives the accolade of approval to everything that bears the marks of Negritude, and proclaims this as the only valid African literature? Or, is it something much more Protean than that—which is not the child of a particular historical moment, which is not the only valid way for Africans to write poetry, but which is a valid way for African poetry to be written, and which is continually changing its aspect so that if we try to fix it in a historical moment and say ‘this is Negritude and that isn't’, we are missing the point? Is it capable of change? Is it capable of developing with the developing situation? Is it capable of changing its habitation, and the face that it shows to the world, and yet being Negritude? Well, I am not going to give an answer to that question because I don't really know it. But I am inclined towards the last view, because I think that it is a much more enriching view, and it is one that dictates less to literature. I have a particular dislike of people who dictate to writers—what they should or should not be, or even what they are.

I would like to end by trespassing a little bit outside my strict chronological limit, and look at a poet who seems to me to be—if there is such a thing as Negritude and if it does have any kind of ultimate validity—to be a poet who is carrying it forward to the era when Africa's face is no longer just towards the white world, but towards itself; when the hatred may be a hatred not of Europe but for other Africans, for what they do or don't do, or for what they do to each other. It may be a rejection of certain things which have taken root in African society and not things which can be shrugged off as being imported by a colonial power. The hope may be a specifically African hope, the agony a specifically African agony, and I think we find this in Tchicaya U'Tamsi, a poet of the Congo (Brazzaville). Here he is writing at the time of the Congo mutiny in 1960, when the Belgian paratroops had dropped again into the country, and there was so much strife going on—not only between Katanga and the rest, but in other areas, in Kasai and various other parts of the Congo. There were struggles which were partly racial, partly tribal, and so forth. And he is looking at all this from Paris, and he doesn't like himself for looking at it from Paris. He says at one time, ‘I spit into the Seine like all honest poets.’¹⁵ But he is looking at it with the whole of himself. The whole of his attention is turned upon the Congo, and what is happening there in his own Africa, in his own country—because this boundary between Belgian and French Congo is meaningless, to Tchicaya and to many people who live on the shore of that great river.

You must be from my country
I see it by the tick
Of your soul around the eyelashes
And besides you dance when you are sad
You must be from my country
Keep moving time is waiting to seduce us
Learn from this that the oil in your lamp
Is really my blood brimming up
And that, if it overflows, you musn't light your lamp
We must have a dark corner somewhere
For our ancient orisons
All of us from the same umbilical cord
But who knows where we fetch
Our awkward heads
Often the silences
Reeking of iodine
Ravage us
With lecherous resolves
For my beardless conscience
Ravage us alone.

Notice the phrase, ‘All of us from the same umbilical cord. But who knows where we fetch our awkward heads.’

It seems to me that the trouble with the complementary theory of race relations, if I may sum it up in that way, whether it comes from an African source or from a white source, as it does with somebody like Laurens Van Der Post, is that it dictates the rôle of the other part of the unity. It says I want to be this, therefore you must be that, so that together we can make a nice egg-shaped thing. I want to be intellectual. You must be emotional. No, no, you mustn't be intellectual, that's my part, you must be emotional, and you must feed my over-abstracted aetiolated pale existence with your fullness of life. Now, I don't know, but it seems to me that I wouldn't like to be dictated to in this way, and I think that Tchicaya is one of the people who can't and won't be dictated to as to the rôle that he should play. And he keeps referring in his poetry to his awkward head. It's the head that prevents him from accepting the traditional colonial rôle. It's the same head that makes it difficult for him to accept what is happening now:

                                                            You are falling into the trap
                                                            Go on!
I will give you my head
Against your lingering fear of water
Or else, these erupting pestilences
Of my heart
To buckle your loins against my passion.

Again, he is a poet who is continually, as it were, striking chords from parts of his anatomy. One of his favourite images is that he finds it very difficult to bend himself to Christian faith. His poetry is full of a tremendous sense of the instruments of Christ's passion and so forth—the resurrection—but he can't bend to it because he says he is a vertebrate and Christianity is, to him, an invertebrate religion. So there's his head which makes him awkward and makes him refuse to play some kind of complementary rôle; there is his backbone which makes it difficult for him to bend. All the parts of his body gradually become animated in his poetry with some kind of objective significance of this kind. The lines in his hand are almost an image of the river itself, the great Congo, ‘unfolding flowing through time-unfolding destiny’. And he ends this section of his poem,

Thus following the path of this river to the sea
To mingle with the salty current my candour
Allotting from sea to source the tide-mark
At the whim of a Congolese will
And then giving
All the water hyacinth to toil for mercy
Putting fresh cresses on the neuralgic joints
Not tattoos upon the cheeks of the Congolese
So that seeing them beautiful
Each may dance with sadness
Toilers also
My filth, the slow waters,
My sadness,
Following the ways of this river to the sea,
If grass must come to the cheeks of the savannah
I forget to be negro so as to forgive
I will not see my blood upon their hands
The world will repay me for my mercy

So, in Tchicaya, in this series of poems, which were written at the time of the Congo crisis, we find not the Senghor kind of reconciliation, but one which is dictated by his own need for growth, his own need to keep flowing; and so he says two or three times in this section of the poem (I have just quoted one), ‘I will not see my blood upon their hands, I forgive them in order to be Negro’—‘Negro’ here is used in the sense of wholeness, in order to be a whole person. He is not suggesting that other than Negroes can't be whole people, but ‘in order to be a whole person, I will refuse to see my blood upon their hands’.

I think it is going to be interesting to look in the next few years at the poetry that comes out of Africa, perhaps specifically French-speaking Africa, because I think we must recognize that Negritude, if it means anything, has been largely a phenomenon of Franco-phone African literature. It will be interesting to see how far the writers themselves give us evidence on which we can base a decision about this question that I put to you earlier—What is Negritude? What is its relation to the stream of time? What is its relation to this question of ‘intrinsic racial qualities’, or, on the other hand, to qualities which are intrinsic in a particular organization of society which places one race here, and another race there?

Notes

1. Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, Editions de Seuil, 1952—trans. Black Skin White Masks by Charles Lam Markmann, MacGibbon & Kee, 1968. (Moore's own translation, cf. Markmann trans. p. 10.)

2. Léon Damas, ‘Hiccups’ (trans. S. Akanji), in Black Orpheus, No. 7.

3. Black Orpheus, No. 2.

4. Léon Damas, ‘Black Dolls’ (‘Limbé’), Black Orpheus, No. 2.

5. Aimé Césaire, Cahier D'un Retour Au Pays Natal', Paris 1939, 1956.

6. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Paris, 1955.

7. Léopold Senghor, ‘New York’ (trans. Arnold von Bradshaw, Modern Poetry from Africa, Penguin, 1963, 1965, 1966).

8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington, Penguin 1967.

9. David Diop, ‘Listen Comrades’, Modern Poetry from Africa, ed. Moore and Beier, Penguin 1963.

10. David Diop, ‘The Vultures’, Modern Poetry from Africa, p. 59.

11. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘L'Orphée Noir’, trans. Black Orpheus by S. W. Allen, Présence Africaine, Editions Gallimard, p. 11.

12. Sartre, p. 7.

13. Sartre, p. 7.

14. Janheinz Jahn, Muntu—an Outline of Neo-African Culture—Faber 1961, pp. 140-55.

15. Felix Tchicaya U'Tamsi; this and the following translations are by the author of this article and come from the collection published by Editions Oswald, Paris.