The Poetic Ideologies of Negritude

Duuna Desir

Research Paper

Presentation

Pan-Africanism

12/3/13

Negritude • Blackness

• Awareness and cultivation of the Negro heritage, values and culture

• A movement widely known as both a literary and ideological movement

Thesis

By examining these writers, their works, and critiques of other poets, my research will make a closer examination of what the Negritude movement has made to the diaspora, and where that influence has brought awareness and change.

The Beginning

Paris: The HubDuring the 1930s’, Paris was the Hub for young black intellectuals and Scholars. • Politics• Socialism• Art

Les Trois Pere

• While going to school in the 1930s, they met as students

• Cesaire and Senghor joined with Damas in 1934 to found “L’Etudiant noir” or “The Black Student”, a short lived small magazine• Explored American derived ideas of the

Negro Renaissance.• The first of its kind

Leopold Sedar Senghor Aime Cesaire Leon Damas

Creation of Negritude• The movement of Negritude was created on the bases of universal

equality and commonality of black identity as a spurning of French Colonial rule and racism.

• No reform was in sight and the colonizers were justifying their political and economic dependence

• As an effective revolution, “ We first had to divest ourselves of our barrowed attire---that of assimilation ---and assert our being , that is to say our negritude”-Senghor

• The word “Negritude” is significant both for its emotional impact on the French –speaking person and for its translation into English

• For the French, the term negre was one of scorn and the more acceptable term was “noir”,which is parallel to the English language reversal of values involved in the preference of “black” to “Negro”.

• It was however Cesaire who coined the term a decade later in 1945 in his publication , a poem called Notes on a Return to the Native Land

Leopold Sedar Senghor• From Senegal, later becoming the first

president of Senegal for over 2 decades.• Is regarded by many as one of the most

important African intellectuals of the 20th century.

• He studied and graduated from the University of Paris, afterwards spending 3 years in the “Lycée Louis-le-Grand”

Retained the spirit of Method, which was his desire for clarity, objectivity and efficaciousness

• A period of soul searching = ideologies of negritude

• He helped form the Association of West African Students with the aim of aiding black students to assimilate European culture without severing themselves from their origins.

• Senghor is essentially a poet of meditation, of nostalgia, a weaver of songs about what is closest to his heart.

Night of SineWoman, place your soothing hands upon my brow,Your hands softer than fur.Above us balance the palm trees, barely rustlingIn the night breeze. Not even a lullaby.Let the rhythmic silence cradle us.Listen to its song. Hear the beat of our dark blood,Hear the deep pulse of Africa in the mist of lost villages.

Now sets the weary moon upon its slack seabedNow the bursts of laughter quiet down, and even the storytellerNods his head like a child on his mother’s backThe dancers’ feet grow heavy, and heavy, too,Come the alternating voices of singers.

Now the stars appear and the Night dreamsLeaning on that hill of clouds, dressed in its long, milky page.The roofs of the huts shine tenderly. What are they sayingSo secretly to the stars? Inside, the fire dies outIn the closeness of sour and sweet smells.

Woman, light the clear-oil lamp. Let the AncestorsSpeak around us as parents do when the children are in bed.Let us listen to the voices of the Elissa Elders. Exiled like usThey did not want to die, or lose the flow of their semen in the sands.Let me hear, a gleam of friendly souls visits the smoke-filled hut,My head upon your breast as warm as tasty dang streaming from the fire,Let me breathe the odor of our Dead, let me gatherAnd speak with their living voices, let me learn to liveBefore plunging deeper than the diverInto the great depths of sleep.Three books of poems

• Songs of Darkness• Black Host• Ethiopics

Prayers to the Masks Masks! O Masks!Black mask red mask you white-and-black masks,Masks at the four points the Spirit breathes from,I salute you in silence!And not you last, lion-headed Ancestor,You guard this place from any woman’s laughter, any fading smile,Distilling this eternal air in which I breathe my Forebears.Masks of maskless faces, stripped of every dimple as of every wrinkle,You who have arranged this portrait, this face of mine bent above this altar of white paperIn your image, hear me!Now dies the Africa of empires—the dying of a pitiable princessAnd Europe’s too, to whom we’re linked by the umbilicus.Fix your immutable eyes on your subjugated children,Who relinquish their lives as the poor their last garments.May we answer present at the world’s rebirth,Like the yeast white flour needs.For who would teach rhythm to a dead world of cannons and machines?Who would give the shout of joy at dawn to wake the dead and orphaned?Tell me, who would restore the memory of life to men whose hopes are disemboweled?They call us men of cotton, coffee, oil.They call us men of death.We are men of dance, whose feet take on new strength from stamping the hard ground.

Aime Cesaire

Cesaire, poet born in Martinique coined the term Negritude • When joining Senghor and

Damas to found The Black Student , the goal was to reunite black people who are considered French by law and nationality to their own history, traditions and languages , to the culture which truly expresses their soul. A decade later, the leaders began to see the concerns of negritude as encompassing all persons of African Decent.

• Not until the 1960s was the concept further enlarged to stress the role of black cultures on a universal basis.

Aime Cesaire

On their seperate quests for artistic expression, Cesaire wrote in 1938 (published later), Notes on a Return to the Native Land, which is a free-form, free verse poem that is book length at 25 y/o after seven years of schooling abroad

His style is filled with surrealism as the voice creates its own language , beat and alterations of rhythm .

Leon Damas

• First of the three founders to publish his own book of poems called “Pigments”

• When pigments appeared in 1937, it caused a sensation • Damas insisted on the term

negre (scorned) to represent the pride of the “New Negro”

• Pigments marked the beginning of a trend in France, where “negre”,was given a positive emphasis now marking the awareness and acceptance of one’s condition.

• With a few years, Cesaire would complete the process by coining the term negritude

• Senghor once described Damas’s poems as “charged with an emotion concealed by humor and irony”

WhitewashIt may be They dare toTreat me whiteThough everything within me Wants only to be blackAs Negro as my AfricaThe Africa they ransacked

White

Abominable insultThat they’ll pay me dearly forWhen my Africa The Africa they ransacked Is determined to have PeacePeace Nothing else but peace

White

My hatred grows Around the edges of their villainyThe edges of the gunshotsThe edges of the pitching Of the slave shipsAnd the fetid cargoes of the cruel slavers

White

My hatred swells Around the edges of their cultureThe edges of their theories The edges of the tales They thought they oughtTo stuff me withFrom the cradle onward While all the while Everything within me Wants to be blackAs Negro as the Africa they robbed from me

Harlem Renaissance

Writers such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and many others all influenced the Negritude Movement

In 1903 , W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk” spoke of a double consciousness , that of both being American but also Negro, highlighting a historical race rooted in the African continent . Garvey did the same by developing a racial consciousness in his “Back to Africa” movement.

As with the cultivation of the Negro identity, these themes began to creep into negro writing.

What is Africa to me:Copper sun or scarlet sea,Jungle star or jungle track,Strong bronzed men or regal black.- Cullen “Heritage”

Harlem Renaissance Senghor in 1966 rendered homage to the black Americans who preceded him:Yet I must render to you, Negro Americans, what belongs to Negro Americans: the merit of having invented, before all others, perhaps not he word but certainly, what is more important, the concept, the ideology of negritude….without overlooking the role played by Haiti, the fact remains that you were the ones, between the years 1920 and 1925, who started the Negro Renaissance and gave birth to the New Negro, conscious of his negritude, determined to live it: to defend it and make it famous.

Of Claude Mckay, Senghor considered him “the real inventor of negritude”, In that he was the first to propound awareness, pride , and international expression of the black reality.

The Women of Negritude

• Literary Salon

&Magazine

In 1960, Senghor reveals in a letter

“we were in contact with these black Americans during the years 129-1934, through Paulette and Jane Nardal who with Dr. Sajous (a Haitian) had founded La Revue du monde noir. The Nardal’s kept a literary salon where African Negros, West Indians and American Negros used to get together”

The Nardal Sisters

Nardal wrote : “The trio took up the ideas tossed out by us and expressed them with flash and brio …..we were but women, real pioneers ---lets say that we blazed the trail for them”

Nardal Sisters & others Recognized in a few works as movement midwives rather than architects

The sisters and other women go on to write their own publications

• Jane Nardal who published poetry under the name “Yadhe”, invoked Africa in her poems before it became fashionable

• Jane also wrote on black humanism as well as other topics

• Paulette published in all six of the released magazines on a variety of related topics• Influenced by the new Negro movement as well as

Garveyism, Nardal’s pieces clearly articulated what would become defining characteristics of Negritude thought , namely Pan-Africanism, the affirmation of black peoples and their cultural productions and the rehabilitation of Africa

Findings:

• Poetry has been the single most important artistic manifestation of the black world cultural and intellectual movement since the close of WWII due to movements such as this

• Negritude and all those involved have given the African diaspora a history to be confident in

• Awareness about black history, culture , language and art.

• The deposit it makes into the African diaspora is one that pieces together the gap left long ago with UNITY, PRIDE IN SELF & IN AFRICA.

• These leaders have used this movement to contribute to black humanism, Pan-Africanism, black internationalism , black culture and black universalism