A Césaire Chronology

1913	Birth of Aimé Fernand David Césaire on June 26 in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, where his father managed a sugarcane plantation. The official date is June 25.
1924	Family moves to Fort-de-France, the colonial capital, after Fernand Césaire enters the colonial tax department, substantially improving the family’s prospects.
1924–31	Secondary education at the Lycée Schoelcher, where L.-G. Damas from Guyana is also a student.
1931–35	Scholarship student at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he undergoes intense preparation for the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), which has formed the intellectual elite of France since Napoleon I founded it. Meets L. S. Senghor and has his first contact with colonial African students.
1935	In March assumes editorship of Martinican student paper, which he renames L’Étudiant noir. His original proposal, L’Étudiant nègre, is refused by fellow Martinicans, who find it injurious. Senghor joins him in opening the paper to broader examination of the condition of black students who are attacked, morally in the press and physically in the streets, by fascists. Both the concept and the word Négritude first appear here.
	Succeeds against general expectation in the entrance examination for ENS, but experiences exhaustion and depression over the summer, which he spends with Petar Guberina on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. View of the island of Martiniska triggers memories of home that Césaire begins to transfer to a notebook.
1936	First return to Martinique in five years during summer vacation. In December, in a state of heady enthusiasm, reads L. Frobenius’s Histoire de la civilisation africaine (History of African Civilization) with Senghor.
1937	Marries Suzanne Roussi, a student at the University of Toulouse and friend of his sister Mireille, in July. The couple moves into student quarters at the ENS where the first of their six children is born.
1938	Césaire reads a draft of his long poem aloud to L.-G. Damas; some think it was turned down by one or more publishers during this period.
1939	Professor Petitbon at ENS recommends his student’s poem to the editor of the avant-garde magazine Volontés, which publishes the “Notebook” in the August issue, its last. Césaire writes a new, more definitive conclusion at the editor’s suggestion. Senghor has a poem in the same issue, which also publishes translations of poems by Vallejo, Paz, and Neruda.
	Césaire fails the final examinations at the ENS, blaming his lack of concentration on his writing. He returns to Martinique, only weeks after his poem appears, with offprints that will prove invaluable in launching his career as a poet.
1939–41	Aimé Césaire makes a profound impression on students at the Lycée Schoelcher, to which he returned as a teacher of literature and classics after an eight-year absence.
1941	In April, the first issue of Tropiques is published by the Césaires and several of their colleagues. A freighter chartered in Marseille by the Varian Fry group who helped intellectuals and artists escape occupied France deposits André Breton, Wifredo Lam, Claude Lévi-Strauss and others in Fort-de-France for an extended stay. A reading of the “Notebook” has a galvanizing effect on Lam, who undertakes to publish a Spanish translation in Havana. Breton’s chance discovery of Césaire’s poem “The Thoroughbreds” in Tropiques encourages him to take the younger poet under his wing as part of the internationalization of surrealism.
1942–43	In late 1942 Breton receives from Césaire a completely revised version of the Notebook, for which he writes the preface “A Great Negro Poet.” Originally scheduled to be published bilingually in 1943 by Brentano’s in New York, the Cahier / Notebook is issued four years later.
	Poems collected under the title The Miraculous Weapons (Les Armes miraculeuses) in 1946 are published through the efforts of Breton and other surrealists in New York and throughout the western hemisphere.
1943	Lydia Cabrera’s translation of the 1939 “Notebook” is published for the first time in book form as Retorno al país natal with a preface by Benjamin Péret and three line drawings by Wifredo Lam.
1944	Invited to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, for a stay of several months, Césaire reads a paper on “Poetry and Knowledge” at an international conference on epistemology. The text, his Ars Poetica for the 1940s, is published in Cahiers d’Haïti in December 1944. A few weeks later an edited version appears in Tropiques.
1945	At the first elections after the war Césaire is elected the Communist mayor of Fort-de-France and Deputy from Central Martinique to the French National Assembly.
1946	Césaire co-sponsors the law that ends colonial status for the French West Indies and Reunion Island.
	Breton’s publisher Gallimard issues Les Armes miraculeuses, which reveals Césaire’s poetry to the French for the first time, the 1939 “Notebook” having gone unnoticed in France.
1947	In January Brentano’s publishes in New York the version of the Notebook Césaire had revised in 1942. In March a substantially different version, completed as much as four years later, is published in Paris by Bordas. For decades it was thought the two were identical; André Breton prefaced them both.
	Césaire gives moral support to Alioune Diop who founds the magazine and publishing house Présence Africaine, but he does not publish with them for another nine years.
1948	Césaire’s second major poetry collection Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil cou coupé) is published by K, which specializes in surrealism. Sartre’s essay “Black Orpheus” prefaces Senghor’s anthology of new poetry from Africa and the diaspora; it will remain in print for at least half a century and will have a major influence on readings of Césaire’s poetry.
1949	Publication of Lost Body (Corps perdu) with thirty-two engravings by Picasso in a limited edition for collectors.
1950	Publication of Discourse on Colonialism (Discours sur le colonialisme), whose polemical condemnation of colonialism and the racism attendant upon it gives a strong sociopolitical slant to readings of Césaire’s poetry.
1956	Césaire joins the Présence Africaine publishing house in June with a heavily revised edition of the Notebook that adds new sociopolitical material and minimizes the use of surrealist metaphor that had characterized the two 1947 editions. Petar Guberina, a friend from Césaire’s student days and a Yugoslav university professor, prefaces the volume. The back cover of the edition for the first time frames the Notebook as a clearly African poem. Subsequent editions of the Notebook present minor changes.
	Présence Africaine issues a revised edition of the Discourse on Colonialism and publishes the first theatrical version of And the Dogs Were Silent. Gallimard keeps the oratorio version as part of The Miraculous Weapons through the 1971 edition.
	“Culture and Colonialism” (“Culture et colonisation”) powerfully reinforces the main points of the Discourse when Césaire reads it at the first congress of Negro writers and artists in the Sorbonne in September. It receives considerable coverage in the press.
	In October he resigns from the Communist Party of France in a resounding open Letter to Maurice Thorez, the First Secretary. Césaire’s letter, composed before the Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising, responds to deeper and long-standing grievances over the party’s attitude toward decolonization and ethnicity.
1958	Césaire founds an independent Martinican Progressive Party (PPM), affiliated in the French legislature with the Socialists. He continues to serve as Deputy from Central Martinique until retirement in 1993.
1960	Césaire publishes Ferraments (Ferrements), a collection written in the previous decade, which puts the new sociopolitical stamp on his poetics. His historical essay on Toussaint Louverture reinforces the notion that his poetry and politics share an identical vision.
1961	In editing Solar Throat Slashed for his new collection, Cadaster (Cadastre), which also includes Lost Body, Césaire cuts out thirty-one of the most markedly surrealist poems and rewrites twenty-nine others to bring them into line with his new poetics. From this date until the Wesleyan University Press bilingual edition in 2011, the original Solar Throat Slashed is effectively forgotten.
1963	Césaire’s play The Tragedy of King Christophe (La Tragédie du roi Christophe) examines the risks run by a newly independent black republic, holding up Haiti under King Christophe as a mirror to new African states. He takes a critical approach to the lyrical and heroic version of Negritude he had championed two decades earlier.
1966	Seuil, which in 1960 became the publisher of his new poetry apart from the Notebook, issues Césaire’s play A Season in the Congo (Une Saison au Congo), in which he treats the fate of Patrice Lumumba and the rise of Mobutu Sesi Seku as a tragi-comedy.
1969	In his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest for a black theater published by Seuil, Césaire interprets Caliban as a revolutionary Malcolm X and Ariel as an accommodating Martin Luther King Jr.
1976	Désormeaux (Paris and Fort-de-France) publishes an expensive three-volume edition of Césaire’s Oeuvres complètes edited by his son Jean Paul.
1982	A new poetry collection, moi, laminaire… published by Seuil, takes an elegiac approach to the problems Césaire had addressed aggressively forty years earlier. At the heart of the collection is a series of seven poems that comment on engravings by Wifredo Lam, who was very ill during this final collaboration. Lam dies in 1982.
1983	Présence Africaine publishes a new French edition of the Notebook with Breton’s well-known “A Great Negro Poet” as the afterword. Breton’s framing of the poem begins a revision of the anticolonialist stance of the mid-1950s and 1960s. Maximin and Carpentier reproduce this text in their edition of La Poésie.
1992	The library of the National Assembly (Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale) buys the annotated typescript of the “Notebook” used by the printer for Volontés in 1939. The typescript contains late manuscript additions and a letter to the editor.
1994	D. Maximin and G. Carpentier publish Césaire’s collected Poésie at Seuil, including twenty-two new poems under the title Comme un malentendu de salut. The edition is annotated except for the 1983 text of the Notebook.
2001	In February Césaire presides over his final municipal council meeting as mayor of Fort-de-France. He is eighty-eight years old and has served for fifty-six years. His constituents know him as Papa Aimé.
2005	Césaire as honorary mayor of the city refuses to receive Nicolas Sarkozy because the French government had recently passed a law that called for the recognition of the positive aspects of colonialism.
2008	Césaire dies on April 17 at age ninety-four. Three days later he receives a national funeral in Fort-de-France. Nicolas Sarkozy as President of the Republic participates in laying to rest the Martinican who had refused to receive him three years earlier.
2011	On April 7 Nicolas Sarkozy gives a speech on the steps of the Panthéon, where France honors its great men and women, praising Aimé Césaire and inaugurating the plaque that memorializes the poet-politician.