Aimé Césaire

Born on June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, the second of seven children in a family where his father worked as a tax inspector and his mother was a seamstress, Cesaire won a scholarship to the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris at eighteen. There he met Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, and together they forged the concept of Negritude, a defiant reclamation of Black identity against the assimilationist pressures of French colonial culture. His long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), part surrealist incantation, part anti-colonial manifesto, exploded the conventions of French verse and earned the admiration of Andre Breton, who wrote the preface to its 1947 edition and called it "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our time." Discourse on Colonialism (1950), a searing prose essay, dismantled the moral pretensions of European civilization with surgical fury. He returned to Martinique and entered politics, serving as mayor of Fort-de-France for fifty-six consecutive years, from 1945 to 2001, while also representing Martinique in the French National Assembly. His play A Tempest (1969) rewrote Shakespeare from Caliban's perspective, turning the colonial subject into the protagonist. Cesaire died on April 17, 2008, at ninety-four, and Martinique gave him a state funeral attended by the president of France.

A scholarship student in Paris in the 1930s, Césaire met Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Léon Damas of Guyana, and amid a culture demanding they erase their origins the three coined a word in defiance: négritude, the proud reclamation of Blackness. It became a movement, and the seed of his life's work.