Aimé Césaire - Bio

We are by definition complicated beings. That is the general rule for any society but one that is particularly applicable in the case of societies where complex layers of sediment have been laid down as a result of the inequalities of colonial life. Not everything was negative, far from it. The hybridization of which we are the outcome has achievements and positive values to its credit wherein the West and Europe also had their share.

The Abbé Grégoire, Victor Schœlcher - and all those who spoke out and still speak out, who campaigned for human rights without distinction of race and against discrimination, these were my guides in life. They stand forever as representatives of the West’s great outpouring of magnanimity and solidarity, an essential contribution to the advancement of the ideas of practical universality and human values, ideas without which the world of today would not be able to see its way forward. I am forever a brother to them, at one with them in their struggle and in their hopes.

I believe in the redeeming power of words, but not without love and humanism. I really do believe in human beings. And I find something of myself in all cultures. We are all taking part in the same great adventure. That is what is meant by cultures, cultures that come together at some meeting-point.

We have never regarded our specificity [negritude] as the opposite or antithesis of universality. It seemed to us or at least to me to be very important to go on searching for our identity but at the same time to reject narrow nationalism. Our concern has always been a humanist concern and we wanted it to have roots. We wanted to have roots and at the same time to communicate. I think it was in a passage in Hegel that we found this idea about specificity. He points out that the particular and the universal are not to be seen as opposites, that the universal is not the negation of the particular but is reached by a deeper exploration of the particular.

The West told us that in order to be universal we had to start by denying that we were black. I, on the contrary, said to myself that the more we were black, the more universal we would be. It was a totally different approach. It was not a choice between alternatives, but an effort at reconciliation. The identity in question was an identity reconciled with the universal. For me, there can never be any imprisonment within an identity.

Identity means having roots, but it is also a transition, a transition to the universal.

Nature and history have placed us at the crossroads of two worlds, of two cultures, if not more. And so I have tried to reconcile those two worlds, because that was what had to be done.

I believe in the importance of exchange, and exchange can only take place on the basis of mutual respect.