Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This brief biography looks at one of the most influential writers from the francophone Caribbean. Aim C saire was a poet, playwright and politician, who, along with L on-Gontran Damas from French Guiana and L opold 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. C saire'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, C saire 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 C saire's life in his never-ending decolonizing battle.