The poet of Negritude - first word

African Arts, Summer, 2002 by Edris Makward

Leopold Sedar Senghor's unforgettable poems proclaimed a world view that, in his eyes and mind, characterized all the black peoples of Africa and of African descent. When he died last December in Normandy, France, at the age of 96, most of the world had become familiar with his name because of his prominence as the statesman who led Senegal to independence in 1960 and who then, after retiring from the presidency, became the first black man to be elected to the prestigious Academie Francaise. Senghor will also be remembered by many scholars, educators, and art lovers as the Poet of Negritude, together with his life-long friend and fellow traveler, the Martiniquan poet, educator, and political figure Aime Cesaire. Senghor was also a relentless promoter of the arts and the cultures of Africa throughout a multifaceted career which spanned more than seven decades of a long life filled with remarkable achievements. In addition to seven volumes of poetry, some dating from his student days in Paris, in the early 1930s, he also wrote numerous essays, lectures, and speeches which have been collected in three volumes published by Editions du Seuil, Paris.

In Paris Senghor pursued his education begun in his native Senegal. Like other students and young intellectuals from different parts of the French colonial empire, he was involved in a passionate search for his identity and his people's place in the world. This search would lead this group to the elaboration of Negritude, defined initially and reiterated again and again by Senghor as "simply, the values of civilization of the black world taken in their entirety."

For several decades Senghor continued to develop his reflections on the concept of Negritude and its implications for the place and the contributions of black people in an imaginary gathering of the nations and peoples of the universe, "au rendez-vous du donner et du recevoir." However, the central components of his thought are most convincingly expressed, in original images and rhythms, in his early poems collected in volumes entitled Chants d'ombre (1945), Hosties noires (1948), and Ethiopiques (1956). Here he develops themes such as the powerful African belief in the relationship between the dead and the living:

    Woman, light the clear oil lamp, let
    the Ancestors
    come and chat around as parents do,
    with the children in bed.

He contrasts this everyday continuity with the absence of any real remembrance in European cemeteries, even on All Saints Day, when people are supposed to be visiting and paying their respects to the dead. In "Chaka," a poem celebrating the historic Zulu king and warrior as a true hero of Africa, he offers a vivid vision of the colonial invaders with their technological advances:

   They are landing with rulers,
   set-squares, compasses, sextants
   White skin, clear eyes, bare speech
   and thin mouth
   And thunder on their ships.

This same collection includes the frequently anthologized poem "New York," which reads as another statement of the itinerary that led to the concept of Negritude. Here the poet reiterates the initial attraction of the white world with its dazzling skyscrapers and the beauty of its "long-legged golden girls." But quickly oppressed by the absence of real humanity, he calls on white Manhattan to let in the more soulful Black Harlem:

   New York! I say New York, let the
   black blood flow into your blood
   Cleaning the rust from your steel
   articulations, like an oil of life.

Remarkably, Senghor was already sharing these preoccupations with his younger compatriots in Senegal as early as 1937, that is, at the height of colonial domination. Thus, he ended his lecture called "The Cultural Problem in French West Africa," given at the Dakar Chamber of Commerce during a summer visit from metropolitan France, with this quote from "Banjo," by the Harlem Renaissance poet and novelist Claude McKay:

   To immerse oneself in the roots
   of our race
   and build on our deepest foundation
   is not to return to a state of savagery:
   it is to return to our culture.

It is universally accepted that the word Negritude first appeared in print in the initial 1939 publication of Aime Cesaire's "Cahier d'un retour pays natal" in an obscure Parisian periodical. It is also a fact, however, that Senghor's 1948 Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue francaise (introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre's landmark essay "Black Orpheus") was the true manifesto of Negritude. It was followed almost immediately by the appearance of the first issue of the journal Presence Africaine.

Many younger African intellectuals have quarreled with Senghor for what they saw as misguided statements, such as "Emotion is Black, as reason is Hellenic," or "European reason is analytical through utilization, and Black reason intuitive through participation." Senghor would always protest that he never said that Blacks were without reason, but rather that their reason was of a different nature--not discursive but synthetic, not antagonistic but sympathetic. The reservations of African writers and intellectuals of the generation of Wole Soyinka, Stanislas Adotevi, and Chinua Achebe can be summarized in Soyinka's own words. He saw the Negritudinists' response, "I feel, therefore I am," to the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" as only "countering one pernicious Manicheism with another." However, such reservations have not tarnished the respect, inspiration, and intellectual influence Senghor generated throughout the African continent and beyond, and across several generations.