Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aimé Césaire (1939)

At the end of the small hours: the line tolls through the poem again and again, like surf returning to a shore, carrying Aimé Césaire home to Martinique to see it whole at last. He sees the hungry town and the rotting shacks, and on the streetcar the comic, degraded man he is ashamed to find himself laughing at with everyone else. And out of that shame, the poem turns volcanic. This is the work that gave the world the word négritude, and it does not argue for Black dignity so much as erupt with it, refusing the cold inheritance of conquest and claiming instead those who invented nothing, explored nothing, and gave themselves utterly to the living heart of the world. Watch the verse climb off its knees and stand, page by page, until the island itself seems to lift toward the sun. Read it aloud. It was built to land like a thunderclap, and it still does.