French poet and playwright, co-founder with Leópold Sédar Senghor of négritude, an influential movement to restore the black man´s cultural identity as an African, totally independent of the culture of white colonialism.
He was educated in Paris and in the early 1940s returned as a teacher to Martinique, where he engaged in political action in response to a mandate to free his fellow blacks. Viewing the plight of the black man as only one facet of the proletarian struggle, he became a deputy to the Constituent Assembly in 1945 and temporarily joined the Communist Party.
He found that Surrealism, which freed him from the traditional forms of language, was the best expression for his convictions. He voiced his ardent rebellion in a white man´s language heavy with African imagery.
In the fiery poems of Cahier d´un retour aun pays natal (1939) and Soleil-cou coupé (1948), he lashed out against the opressors.
Césaire turned to the theatre, discarding négritude for black militancy. His tragedies are vehemently political: La Tragédie du Roi Christophe (1963), a drama of decolonization in 19th-century Haiti, and Une Saison au Congo (1966), the epic of the 1960 Congo rebellion and of the assassination of the Congolese political leader Patrice Lumumba. Both depict the fate of black power as forever doomed to failure.
Césaire´s message, rising above his own hatred and calling for universal brotherhood, comes from the Antilles -at the crossroads of America, Africa and Europe- to reach all men.
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