M7 Aimé Césaire

Négreries: Black Youth and Assimilation (1935)

Négritude was a cultural and political movement that emerged in Paris in the 1930s, led by three African and Caribbean students: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), Léon Damas (1912–78) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001). The concept was first alluded to by Césaire in a passionate tract against assimilation, published in the inaugural edition of the trio’s magazine L’Étudiant noir (The Black Student) in Paris in March 1935.

Négritude sought to reclaim the value of blackness and African culture, taking its inspiration from the Surrealist group Légitime Défense and, later, the Harlem Renaissance. The group’s members wrote of the wounds of physical and cultural displacement suffered by African diasporic people, and the need for a connection with their homelands in Africa. Their robust and eloquent criticism of colonialism was tempered by their appreciation of European culture – a paradox that would later be addressed by the social theorist Paul Gilroy in his influential book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993).

During the Second World War the movement gained momentum when its founders left Paris for the Caribbean and Africa, causing new forms of Négritude to arise in these locations. These included Creolization in the Caribbean, the École de Dakar in Senegal (M78) and the Natural Synthesis movement in Nigeria (M18). Négritude was also supportive of the Pan-African project (M39), although their philosophies differed. Césaire himself moved to the island of Martinique, where, together with his wife – the writer Suzanne Césaire – and Légitime Défense poet René Ménil, he published the Surreal and anti-colonial literary review Tropiques, which promoted poetry, freedom and the marvellous. In later life he became a leading politician and president of the regional council of Martinique.

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What is difficult is not to ascend, but in ascending to remain oneself.

– Michelet

One day, the Black seized hold of the White’s neck-tie, grabbed a bowler hat, dressed up in them, and left laughing …

It was only a game, but the Black did not let himself take it as a game. He became so accustomed to the neck-tie and the bowler hat that he ended up believing he had always worn them. He made fun of those who didn’t wear them at all and disowned his father whose name is Spirit of the Bush … This is a bit of the history of the pre-war Negro, who is only the Negro before reason. He sits down at the school of the Whites. He wants to be ‘assimilated.’

I would gladly say that it is madness, if I didn’t remember that, in a certain sense, the madman is always ‘the man who has faith in himself,’ and because of that saves himself from madness.

If assimilation is not madness, it is certainly foolishness. To want to be assimilated is to forget that nothing can change animal nature. It is to misunderstand ‘otherness,’ which is a law of Nature.

This is so true that the People, elder brothers of Nature, warn us of it every day: A decree says to the Blacks: ‘You are similar to the Whites. You are assimilated.’

The People, wiser than the decree because they follow Nature, shout to us:

‘Begone! You are different than us! You are only aliens and negroes.’ They deride the ‘Black man with a bowler,’ bully the ‘poorly whitened,’ and bludgeon the ‘negro.’

I confess that it is justice, though unfortunate for the one who needs to be convinced by means of a cudgel that he can only be himself.

Moreover, it is enough to reflect on the notion of assimilation to see that it is a dangerous business for the colonizer as well as the colonized.

The colonizing nation that ‘assimilates’ another quickly becomes disgusted with its own work. Copies only being copies, the prototypes have the contempt for them that one has for apes and parrots. For if man is afraid of ‘the other,’ he also has an aversion for the similar. It is the same for the colonized. Once similar to the one who has molded him, he no longer understands the contempt of the latter, and he hates him. In a like manner, I have heard it said that some disciples hate the master because he still wants to remain the master when the disciple has ceased being a disciple.

Thus it is true that assimilation, born of fear and timidity, always ends in contempt and hatred. It carries within it the germs of struggle. The struggle of self against self, that is to say, the worst of struggles.

For this reason, Black youth turns its back on the tribe of the Old.

The tribe of the Old says, ‘assimilation.’ We respond, resurrection!

Black youth of today want neither enslavement nor assimilation. They want emancipation.

They will be called ‘men,’ because only man walks without a tutor on the great roads of thought. Enslavement and assimilation resemble one another. Both are forms of passivity.

During these first two periods, the Negro has been equally sterile.

Emancipation, on the other hand, is action and creation.

Black youth wants to act and create. It wants to have its poets and its novelists who will speak to it. It wants to have its misfortunes and its greatness. It wants to contribute to universal life, to the humanization of humanity. For that, it must preserve itself or find itself once again. It is the primacy of the self.

But to be oneself, it is necessary to struggle. First struggle against the misguided brothers who are afraid of being themselves, the senile mob of the assimilated.

Then struggle against those who want to inflate their egos, the legion of the assimilators.

Finally, to be oneself, it is necessary to struggle against oneself. It is necessary to destroy indifference, extirpate obscurantism, strike sentimentalism at its root, and Meredith tells us what, above all, must be cut:

Black Youth, it is hair that keeps you from acting. It is the desire to conform, and it is you that carry it.

Crop your hair close so that this desire may escape.

Cut your hair.

It is the first condition of action and creation.

A long head of hair is an affliction.