The book entitled “Aime Cesaire” by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw , is a Caribbean biography

series from the University of the West Indies press Jamaica and was published on 30th June
2021 The cover of the book is coated in teal and mustard and has a beautiful black and
white photo of Lucille Mair smiling. The book contains eight (8) chapters with 88 pages
that display the life, impacts and contributions of Lucille Mair to Jamaican and by extent,
the Caribbean. Mr cesaire was a was a French poet, author, and politician who was born in
Basse-Pointe, Mart on june 26, 1913he was also (family life) and was known for his
cofounding with Léopold Sédar Senghor of Negritude, an influential movement to restore the
cultural identity of black Africans. Césaire is a recipient of the International Nâzim Hikmet
Poetry Award, the second winner in its history. He served as Mayor of Fort-de-France as a
member of the Communist Party, and later quit the party to establish his Martinique Independent
Revolution Party …….. . His works include the book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays
natal (1939), Une Tempête, a response to Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and Discours sur le
colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), an essay describing the strife between the colonizers
and the colonized. His works have been translated into many languages.

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw (born 1964)[1] is a Trinidadian writer and academic, who is Professor of
French Literature and Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies. Her writing encompasses
both scholarly and creative work, and she has also co-edited several books. Walcott-Hackshaw is the
daughter of Nobel Prize laureate Derek Walcott.

Born in Trinidad in 1964, Walcott-Hackshaw studied in the United States, returning to Trinidad in
1992.[2] She has co-edited several books and has written scholarly essays and articles particularly on
Francophone Caribbean literature.[3] Her first collection of short stories, Four Taxis Facing North, was
published in 2007, later being translated into Italian. Her first novel, Mrs. B, was published in 2014,
when it was shortlisted for the “Best Book Fiction” in the Guyana Prize for Literature.[4] She has
published book reviews and creative writing in such journals as The Caribbean Review of Books and
Small Axe,[5][6] and her short stories have been widely translated as well as anthologized, including
in Trinidad Noir: The Classics, edited by Earl Lovelace and Robert Antoni (2017),[7] and New Daughters
of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby (2019).[8]

Aimé Césaire, in full Aimé-Fernand-David Césaire, —died April 17, 2008, Fort-de-France), Martinican
poet, playwright, and politician, who was cofounder with Léopold Sédar Senghor of Negritude, an
influential movement to restore the cultural identity of black Africans.

Aimé Fernand David Césaire (/ɛmeɪ seɪˈzɛər/; French: [ɛme fɛʁnɑ̃ david sezɛʁ]; 26 June 1913 – 17 April
2008).[2] He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature"[3] and
coined the word négritude in French.[4] He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and
served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of
Martinique from 1983 to 1988.
Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, France, in 1913. His father was a tax inspector and
his mother was a dressmaker. He was a lower class citizen but still learned to read and write.[5] His
family moved to the capital of Martinique, Fort-de-France, in order for Césaire to attend the only
secondary school on the island, Lycée Victor Schœlcher.[6] He considered himself of Igbo descent from
Nigeria, and considered his first name Aimé a retention of an Igbo name; though the name is of French
origin, ultimately from the Old French word amée, meaning beloved, its pronunciation is similar to the
Igbo eme, which forms the basis for many Igbo given names.[7] Césaire traveled to Paris to attend the
Lycée Louis-le-Grand on an educational scholarship. In Paris, he passed the entrance exam for the École
Normale Supérieure in 1935 and created the literary review L'Étudiant noir (The Black Student) with
Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas.[a] Manifestos by these three students in its third number
(May–June 1935)[8] initiated the Négritude movement later substantial in both pan-Africanist theory
and the actual decolonization of the French Empire in Africa. In 1934 Césaire was invited to the Kingdom
of Yugoslavia by his friend Petar Guberina where in Šibenik he started writing his poem “Notebook of a
Return to the Native Land”, which was one of the first expressions of the concept of Négritude.[9] Upon
returning home to Martinique in 1936, Césaire began work on his long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays
natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), a vivid and powerful depiction of the ambiguities of
Caribbean life and culture in the New World.

Césaire married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Roussi in 1937. Together they moved back to
Martinique in 1939 with their young son. Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-
France, where he taught Frantz Fanon, becoming a great influence for Fanon as both a mentor and
contemporary.[10] Césaire also served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, writer Édouard Glissant.

Aime Cesaire was a poet, playwright and politician, who, along with Leon-Gontran Damas from French
Guiana and Leopold Senghor of Senegal, founded the Negritude movement in the 1930s. The men had
come together as young black students in Paris at a time when the French capital had become the locus
of ideas on black identity and pan-Africanism. The Negritude movement called for a cultural awakening
of African heritage, a rejection of Western ideology that inherently saw blacks as inferior to whites, and
a reclamation of what it meant to be black. Cesaire's first major and most famous poetic work, Cahier
d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), explored the contours of this
African heritage and his complex identity as a black man born under French rule on the Caribbean island
of Martinique. Throughout his long political career, which lasted for most of his life, Cesaire fought not
only for his own people but for those who had been wronged by vestiges of colonial regimes. This book is
an exploration of Cesaire's life in his never-ending decolonizing battle.

The years of World War II were ones of great intellectual activity for the Césaires. In 1941, Aimé Césaire
and Suzanne Roussi founded the literary review Tropiques, with the help of other Martinican intellectuals
such as René Ménil and Aristide Maugée, in order to challenge the cultural status quo and alienation
that characterized Martinican identity at the time. In this sense, according to Ursula Heise, the
publications of the French botanist Henri Stehlé in Tropiques in the early 1940's, concerning the
Martinican flora,[11] and "the invocations of Césaire to the Antillean ecology operate as indices of a
racial and cultural authenticity which is distinguished from European identity...".[12] During an interview
granted in 1978, Césaire explains that his aim for including these articles in Tropiques was "to allow
Martinique to refocus" and "to lead Martinicans to reflect" on their close environment.[13] Césaire's
many run-ins with censorship did not deter him, however, from being an outspoken defendant of
Martinican identity.[14] He also became close to French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent time in
Martinique during the war. The two had met in 1940, and Breton later would champion Cesaire's work.
[15]

In 1947, his book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, which had first appeared in the Parisian
periodical Volontés in 1939 after rejection by a French book publisher,[16] was published.[17] The book
mixes poetry and prose to express Césaire's thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a
colonial setting. Breton contributed a laudatory introduction to this 1947 edition, saying that the "poem
is nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times."[18] When asked by René Depestre
about his writing style, Césaire replied by saying that "Surrealism provided me with what I had been
confusedly searching for."[19]

In 1945, with the support of the French Communist Party (PCF), Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-
France and deputy to the French National Assembly for Martinique. He managed to get a law addressing
departmentalization approved unanimously on 19 March 1946.[20] While departmentalization was
implemented in 1946, the status did not bring many meaningful changes to the people of Martinique.

Like many left-wing intellectuals in 1930s and 1940s France, Césaire looked toward the Soviet Union as a
source of progress, virtue, and human rights. He later grew disillusioned with the Soviet Union after the
1956 suppression of the Hungarian revolution. He announced his resignation from the PCF in a text
entitled Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Letter to Maurice Thorez).[21] In 1958 Césaire founded the Parti
Progressiste Martiniquais. With the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, he dominated the island’s political
scene for the last half of the century. Césaire declined to renew his mandate as deputy in the National
Assembly in 1993, after a 47-year continuous term.[20]

His writings during this period reflect his passion for civic and social engagement. He wrote Discours sur
le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), a denunciation of European colonial racism, decadence, and
hypocrisy that was republished in the French review Présence Africaine in 1955 (English translation
1957). In 1960, he published Toussaint Louverture, based on the life of the Haitian revolutionary. In
1969, he published the first version of Une Tempête, a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play The
Tempest for a black audience.

Césaire served as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He retired from
politics in 2001.
Later life

In 2006, he refused to meet the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Nicolas Sarkozy, a
probable contender at the time for the 2007 presidential election, because the UMP had voted for the
2005 French law on colonialism. This law required teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and
recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa", a law
considered by many as a eulogy to colonialism and French actions during the Algerian War. President
Jacques Chirac finally had the controversial law repealed.[22]

On 9 April 2008, Césaire had serious heart troubles and was admitted to Pierre Zobda Quitman hospital
in Fort-de-France. He died on 17 April 2008.[23]

Césaire was accorded the honor of a state funeral, held at the Stade de Dillon in Fort-de-France on 20
April. French President Nicolas Sarkozy was present but did not make a speech. The honor of making the
funeral oration was left to his old friend Pierre Aliker, who had served for many years as deputy mayor
under Césaire.[24]

Legacy

Martinique's airport at Le Lamentin was renamed Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport on 15
January 2007. A national commemoration ceremony was held on 6 April 2011, as a plaque in Césaire's
name was inaugurated in the Panthéon in Paris.[25] He was also proclaimed as a national hero in
Martinique.[26]

Poetically, Césaire's legacy is far-reaching in poetry both from his time and beyond. Most notably, his
relation to Frantz Fanon, famed author of Black Skin, White Masks, as mentor and inspiration is tangible.
Fanon's personal testimony in Black Skin, White Masks explains the "liberating effect of Césaire’s word
and action" that he felt in traversing the changing colonial landscape.[27] More generally, Césaire's
works conceptualized African unity and black culture in ways that allowed for the creation of black
spaces where there previously were none, from the establishment of several literary journals to his
reworking of Caliban's speech from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Césaire’s works were foundational for
postcolonial literature across France, its then colonies, and much of the Caribbean.[26]
Portrait produced by Hom Nguyen for the Musée de l'Homme in 2021 for the Portraits de France
exhibition.

In 2021, the Musée de l'Homme for its Portraits de France exhibition paid tribute to Aimé Césaire
through a work by the artist Hom Nguyen.[28]