The death last week of Aimé Césaire brings to a definitive close one of the most significant episodes of black literary and intellectual history, that represented by the Negritude movement. With Léon Damas from French Guiana and Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal, Cesaire formed a triumvirate who gave voice and form to Negritude as a concept and a movement.

After the death of Senghor in 2001, Césaire was the last survivor of an early generation of French-speaking black writers who, in the years between the two World Wars, called into question the French colonial order and challenged the discourse of empire by which it was rationalized. It is safe to say that Cesaire's work represented the most vehement expression of this anti-colonial stance, and indeed the most powerful evocation of the black experience in its full historical scope and emotional range.

In order to understand the acute sense of historical grievance conveyed by Cesaire's work, we need to recall the predicament of black intellectuals of his generation, a predicament that grounded in the humiliation they had internalized as an urgent factor of their black self-awareness. For Cesaire, the primary reference point for the complex of emotions of the colonial experience was the memory of slavery, the historical antecedent to his status as colonial subject.

The correlation between the systematic devaluation of the indigenous cultures of Africa and the constant denigration of the black race from the 18^th Century on, gave a special dimension to the psychological malaise that came with being a Caribbean: There was always the burden of being in such ambiguous relation to French society and culture.

All Césaire's work, even at its most assertive, flows from the fraught nature of grappling with a divided consciousness. When he met Senghor in Paris in 1930s he became aware of an African dimension to his being, even as the ancestral continent remained a distant vision.

But it was his discovery of the Harlem poets during this period that pointed him toward what would become the central inspirational force in his work, one that would find magnificent expression in his masterpiece, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to My Native Land], an epic of black consciousness that undertakes an expansive and dramatic exploration of the collective experience of the race. It is at the very center of this poem that Césaire has placed the redefinition of the black self for which he coined the term 'negritude.'

'my negritude is not a stone, its deafness heaved against the clamor of day

my negritude is not a film of dead water on the dead eye of earth

my negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral

it delves into the red flesh of the soil

it delves into the burning flesh of the sky

it digs through the dark accretions that weigh down its righteous patience.'

(Translation by Gregson Davis)

The exultant tone of this passage and the passion that runs through the poem account for the fact that 'Cahier' is held as the founding text of Negritude, and embraced as an original militant posture even among those who reject Senghor's elaboration of the term as expressive of a black essence. 'Cahier' is also read as the lyrical equivalent of the poet's forceful indictment of the colonial enterprise in his Discourse on Colonialism, a work whose significance derives not so much from its sociological analysis of the phenomenon it examines as from its moral appraisal of the actors involved in the colonial adventure and its insistence on the inevitable dehumanization of the colonizer.