RIP Aimé Césaire

Maybe it just means I'm getting that much closer to death myself, but I feel like too many of the imprescindibles are leaving us these days. Martinican poet and revolutionary (valga la redundancia) Aimé Césaire died today in the island's capital Fort de France.

At 94, Césaire was around to see, and help bring about, the decolonization of his homeland, of Algeria (he was Frantz Fanon's mentor), the Black Power and Pan-Africanist movements. Not all those enterprises worked out perfectly, but they were still essential in moving realities.

Not only was he the founder of the pan-Black Négritude movement, and author of earth-shaking works like Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) and Discourse on Colonialism, but he had a long political career as well.

He helped draft the legislation that turned France's Caribbean colonies into départments d'outre-mer and represented Martinique in French National Assembly. Representing the Communist Party, he was mayor of Fort de France from 1945 until 2001. Himself to the end, last year he refused to meet with Nicholas Sarkozy for his colonialist positions, instead supporting Ségolène Royal.

Reading Césaire's work as a graduate student opened up so many things for me: thinking of the tropics as a source of knowledge (not just a shadow of EuroAmerican originality), finding that punk spirit of creation-in-destruction in his quest for a new language to properly describe new realities, knowing that home and the world are not separate things, and that a lifetime's sustained fight for liberty is a worthy endeavor, even for a writer of ephemeral things.

Check a multimedia (image/sound) homage funded by UNESCO featuring work inspired by Césaire's universe and images. Love this quote from Césaire for the "necessary utopias" section:

Liberty is an act, a fruit. It is nothing more than actualization without end. At the end of the 20th Century, it is nothing more than a serene dream. Ideologies, with their heavy certainties, have shown their limits. Does the need for utopia reside in us, like a hardheaded dream? (My trans.)

Césaire is for me an example of how crucial it is for us to see how splitting the atom of language can happen even from a tiny island. Or rather, that the best views of the world as it is and as it can be only ever really happen from some sort of tiny island, or forgotten hill or lonely desert.

[pix of Césaire young, with Francois Mitterand and by the Caribbean via www.matinikphoto.com]