Aimé Césaire is undoubtedly one of the most famous personalities from Martinique in the world. The poet and politician revealed himself to the world for his anti-colonialist speech and also his defense of oppressed peoples. His quotes are taken up all over the world as messages of hope but also flashes of thought. Here is a look at the most famous and poignant poetic, political, literary and oral quotations of the Chantre of Negritude.
My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the prison holes of despair.
God's own pencil is not without an eraser.
Scientific truth has for sign coherence and efficiency. Poetic truth has beauty as its sign.
Negritude results from an active and offensive attitude of the spirit. It is a start, and a start of dignity.
All men have the same rights... But of the common lot, there are some who have more powers than others. There is the inequality.
Since you handle invective so well, you could at least bless me for teaching you to speak.
It is time to put to reason those Negroes who believe that the Revolution consists in taking the place of the Whites and continue, instead, I mean on the backs of the Negroes, to do the White.
In politics, when I hear one of these big technical words, I cringe, and I always look for the infamy behind it.
Africa is like a man who, in the half-light, rises and finds himself assailed from the four points of the horizon!
I still have hope because I believe in man. Maybe it's stupid. Man's way is to accomplish humanity, to become self-aware.
I refuse to despair because to despair is to refuse life. We must keep our faith.
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems that arise from its functioning is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to turn a blind eye to its most crucial problems is a damaged civilization.
A civilization that fiddles with its principles is a dying civilization.
What is a man's life? It is the fight between light and shadow. It is a struggle between hope and despair, between lucidity and fervor... I am on the side of hope, but of a hope that is conquered, lucid, out of all naivety.
What is a man's life? It is the struggle between light and shadow. It is a struggle between hope and despair, between lucidity and fervor. I am on the side of hope, but of a hope that is conquered, lucid, out of all naivety.
For me, there is never any imprisonment in an identity. Identity is rootedness. But it is also passage. Universal pass.
The man of culture must be an inventor of souls.
Europeans believe in "the" civilization while we believe in "the" civilizations, in the plural, and "in" the cultures. The progress with this declaration is that all men have the same rights, simply because they are men. And these rights, you claim them for yourself and others.
We were interested in indigenous literature, in popular tales. Our doctrine, our secret idea, was: "Negro I am and Negro I will remain". There was in this idea the idea of an African specificity, of a black specificity. But Senghor and I have always been careful not to fall into black racism. I have my own personality and, with the white man, I am in respect, a mutual respect.
Liberty, equality, fraternity, always advocate these values, but sooner or later you will see the problem of identity appear. Where is fraternity? Why has it never been known? Precisely because France has never understood the problem of identity. If you are a man with rights, with all the respect you deserve, then I am a man too, I have rights too. Respect me. Then we are brothers. Let's embrace. This is brotherhood.
That's what culture is: it's everything that man has invented to make the world livable and death confrontable.
For us, the choice is made. We are among those who refuse to forget. We are among those who refuse to accept amnesia as a method. It is not a question of fundamentalism, nor of fundamentalism, even less of puerile navel-gazing.
I ask too much of men! But not enough from the Negroes, Madame! If there is one thing that irritates me as much as the words of the slaveholders, it is to hear our philanthropists proclaim, in the best of spirits no doubt, that all men are men, and that there are neither whites nor blacks. It is to think at ease, and out of the world, Madam. All men have the same rights. I agree with that. But of the common lot, there are some who have more duties than others. There is the inequality.
An inequality of summations, do you understand? To whom will one make believe that all the men, I say all, without privilege, without particular exemption, have known the deportation, the trade, the slavery, the collective ravishment to the beast, the total outrage, the vast insult, that all, they have received plastered on the body, to the face, the omni-niant spit!
Only us, Madam, you hear me, only us, the Negroes! So, to the bottom of the pit! That's how I hear it. At the bottom of the pit. That's where we scream; from there we yearn for air, for light, for sun. And if we want to go back up, see how the foot bends, the muscle tightens, the teeth clench, the head, oh! the head wide and cold !
And this is why we must ask more of the Negroes than of the others: more work, more faith, more enthusiasm, one step, another step, another step, and hold on to each step! I am talking about an unprecedented rise, gentlemen, and woe to the one whose foot falters!
Don't mind my black skin: it's the sun that burned it.
To leave. My heart was rustling with emphatic generosity. To leave... I would arrive smooth and young in this country mine and I would say to this country whose silt enters the composition of my flesh: "I wandered a long time and I return towards the deserted hideousness of your wounds". I would come to this country of mine and I would say to it: "Kiss me without fear...And if I know only how to speak, it is for you that I will speak".
And coming I would say to myself: "And above all my body as well as my soul, beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a show, because a sea of pain is not a proscenium, because a man who cries is not a bear who dances...
It would be necessary first to study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to stultify him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, to violence, to racial hatred, to moral relativism, and to show that, each time there was in Vietnam a head cut off and an eye gouged out and that in France one accepts, a girl raped and that in France one accepts, a Malagasy tortured and that in France one accepts, there is an achievement of civilization which weighs of its dead weight, a universal regression is taking place, a gangrene is being established, a center of infection is spreading and that at the end of all these violated treaties, of all these propagated lies, of all these tolerated punitive expeditions of all these prisoners tied up and "interrogated", of all these patriots tortured, at the end of this encouraged racial pride, of this spread lactancy, there is the poison instilled in the veins of Europe, and the slow but sure progress of the enslavement of the continent.
And this is the great reproach that I address to pseudo-humanism: to have shrunk human rights for too long, to have had, to still have, a narrow and fragmented conception of them, partial and biased and, all in all, sordidly racist...
No, never in the balance of knowledge will the weight of all the museums in the world weigh as much as a spark of human sympathy.
I understood once and for all that you should not attack a beast if you are not sure to kill it.
