Introduction Summary

Aime Cesaire demolishes the idea that poets make terrible politicians. He is known as the progenitor of Negritude, the first black pride movement, as well as a major voice of Surrealism and a great French poet. Cesaire is equally revered for his role in modern anticolonial and Pan-African movements. He uses poetry as a potent weapon in any movement whose primary goal is freedom. Cesaire is born on June 25, 1913 in Basse-Pointe, Martinique where he and his five siblings are raised by their dressmaking mother and their father, a local tax inspector, and the Cesaires live close to the edge of rural poverty. At age eleven, Aime Cesaire is admitted to Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France because he is a brilliant student, and when he graduates in 1931, he moves to Paris and enrolls in Lycee Louis-le-Grand to prepare for Ecole Normale Superieure, a high-level teachers'...