The Center for International Exhibition and Performance since 1987
Aimé Césaire - Un Homme Une Terre/ At the End of Daybreak
Sarah Maldoror 1976. 57 Min.
Aimé Césaire was a surrealist, essayist, activist and one of the founders of
the négritude movement, a progressive artistic and political current that
defended black culture, strongly tied to marxist and anti-colonial ideals. In
Aimé Césaire, un homme une terre, Sarah Maldoror paints a portrait of
her friend Aimé Césaire, who was a Martinican poet, politician, essayist,
activist and one of the founders of the négritude movement, a progressive
artistic and political current that defended black culture.
With remarks by Denny Mwaura
Denny Mwaura is a Chicago-based curator and writer. He is the Assistant
Director of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago. Exhibitions and
public programs he has organized and supported include The Mask of
Prosperity, Earthly Visions: Inside the Climate Crisis, Gravity Pleasure
Switchback, Reckless Rolodex, A Species of Theft, and Young, Gifted and
Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art at
Gallery 400; Malangatana: Mozambique Modern at the Art Institute of
Chicago; and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Speculative Archives at
Conversations at the Edge. He has authored texts on artists, including
Amanda Williams, Max Guy, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Senzeni Marasela.
Mwaura received his MA in Art History from the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago and is a recipient of the Schiff Foundation Fellowship for
Critical Architectural Writing.
ABOUT AIMÉ AND SUZANNE CÉSAIRE
Aimé Césaire was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician.
In the 1930’s Césaire received a scholarship to attend the prestigious Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris.
There he met a Senegalese student, the future poet and African politician Léopold Senghor. In 1934
Césaire, with Senghor and Guyanan poet Léon Damas, founded the student journal Etudiant Noir (Black
Student). This group of Black Francophone intellectuals developed the concept of “Negritude,” the
embrace of Blackness and Africanness as a counter to a legacy of colonial self-hatred.
His intellectual work is tied to anticolonial movements. Author of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (first
published in Spanish 1942; original French version 1947; translated as Memorandum on My Martinique,
1947), a widely acknowledged masterpiece documenting the 20th-century colonial condition. Also an
accomplished playwright exploring the paradox of Black identity under French colonial rule. Césaire’s
shift to drama in the late 1950s and 1960s allowed him to integrate the modernist and surrealist
techniques of his poetry and the polemics of his prose to resist the powers of colonial domination.
Suzanne Césaire was a theorist affiliated with the négritude movement and with
surrealism. She was one of the first theorists to emphasize the potential of the multi-
ethnic and multi-natural composition of the Caribbean and called for an experimental
cultural appropriation rather than a return to essences or assimilation.
Most of the Césaire’s work was published in the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques,
which she co-founded along with her husband Aimé and fellow lycée teachers.
Published during the fascist Vichy government, the journal established a dialogue with
surrealism both as a means of cultural liberation and as a means to obscure political
messages for the censors. In her contributions, Suzanne Césaire heavily reappropriated
colonial stereotypes such as the ‘cannibal’ and the ‘lazy negro’ as provocations for both
colonizer and colonized to re-examine deeply internalized (self)perceptions. This
strategy of inversion was even used in a letter of protest against the impending
censorship of the journal.
Overall, the négritude writers’ embracing of a black identity was regarded as scandalous
at the time, even by fellow black intellectuals including Frantz Fanon. The search for
empowerment in an alignment with the bodily – along with the natural and the cosmic –
was dismissed as escapist, narcissist or even fascist. This danger was recognised by
Suzanne Césaire and reflected in her wariness of essentialisms. For instance, while
embracing blackness as a unifying force against oppression, she proposed that ‘it is not
a question of a return to the past, of resurrecting an African past that we have learned to
appreciate and respect. On the contrary, it is a question of mobilizing every living force
mingled together on this land where race is the result of the most continuous brazing’