French-English bilingual edition. André Breton called Césaire's Cahier'nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. It is a seminal text in Surrealist,French and Black literatures - published in full in English for the first time in Bloodaxe's bilingual Contemporary French Poets series. Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was born in in Basse-Pointe,a village on the north coast of Martinique,a former French colony in the Caribbean (now an overseas departement of France). His book Discourse on Colonialism (1950) is a classic of French political literature. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1956) is the foundation stone of francophone Black literature: it is here that the word Negritude appeared for the first time. Negritude has come to mean the cultural,philosophical and political movement co-founded in Paris in the 1930s by three Black students from French colonies: the poets Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana; Leopold Senghor,later President of Senegal; and Aimé Césaire,who became a deputy in the French National Assembly for the Revolutionary Party of Martinique and was repeatedly elected Mayor of Fort-de-France. As a poet,Cesaire believed in the revolutionary power of language,and in the Notebook he combined high literary French with Martinican colloquialisms,and archaic turns of phrase with dazzling new coinages. The result is a challenging and deeply moving poem on the theme of the future of the negro race which presents and enacts the poignant search for a Martinican identity. The Notebook opposes the ideology of colonialism by inventing a language that refuses assimilation to a dominant cultural norm,a language that teaches resistance and liberation.
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books LtdISBN: 9781852241841Dimensions: 216 x 138 mm
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