A Poetics of Anticolonialism

Monthly Review, Nov, 1999 by Robin D.G. Kelley

Discourse was not the first place Cesaire made the case for the barbaric West following the path of the civilized African. In his Introduction to Victor Schoelcher's Esclavage et colonisation, he wrote:

The men they took away knew how to build houses, govern empires, erect cities, cultivate fields, mine for metals, weave cotton, forge steel.

Their religion had its own beauty, based on mystical connections with the founder of the city. Their customs were pleasing, built on unity, kindness, respect for age.

No coercion, only mutual assistance, the joy of living, a free acceptance of discipline.

Order - Earnestness - Poetry and Freedom.

Reading this passage, and the book itself, deeply affected one of Cesaire's brightest students, named Frantz Fanon. It was a revelation for him to discover cities in Africa and "accounts of learned blacks." "All of that," he noted in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), "exhumed from the past, spread with its insides out, made it possible for me to find a valid historical place. The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago."

Negritude turned out to be a miraculous weapon in the struggle to overthrow the "barbaric Negro." As Cedric Robinson points out in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, this was no easy task, since the invention of the Negro - and by extension the fabrication of whiteness and all the racial boundary policing that came with it - required "immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies of the West." An entire generation of "Enlightened" European scholars worked hard to wipe out the cultural and intellectual contributions of Egypt and Nubia from European history, to whiten the West in order to maintain the purity of the "European" race. They also stripped all of Africa of any semblance of "civilization," using the printed page to eradicate their history and thus reduce a whole continent and its progeny to little more than beasts of burden or brutish heathens. The result is the fabrication of Europe as a discrete, racially pure entity, solely responsible for modernity, on the one hand, and the fabrication of the Negro on the other.

Yet, despite Cesaire's construction of pre-colonial Africa as an aggregation of warm, communal societies, he never calls for a return. Unlike his old friend Senghor, Cesaire's Negritude is future-oriented and modern. His position in Discourse is unequivocal: "For us the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. . . . It is a new society that we must create, with the help of our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days."

Then comes the shocking next line:

"For some examples showing that this is possible, we can look to the Soviet Union."