The only YA book to tell the story of Aimé Césaire, the rise of
Negritude, and the crusade for Black African and Caribbean
independence from colonial rule.
Aimé Césaire was a poet and, later, a politician from the Caribbean
island of Martinique, who spoke out against the sufferings and
humiliations endured by the peoples of the former French colonies. In
Aimé Césaire: No to Humiliation, we are with Césaire in 1930s
Paris. The young Martinican poet and his friends Léopold Sédar
Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas are launching the Negritude movement.
Together, they celebrate their Black African roots, protesting French
colonial rule and policies of assimilation. They invite West Indians,
Senegalese, Guyanese, and others to reject the suffocating French
colonial presence and to take pride in their accents, their cultures
and their shared histories.
Aimé’s great book-length poem, Notebook on the Return to the
Native Land, and other works, are a global inspiration. His speeches
enliven the crowds back home in Martinique, and he rises in the
political arena, defending Martinican identity. As a writer, as the
Mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy of the French National Congress,
Aimé Césaire continues to write and to fight against colonial power
and for the dignity of Black peoples everywhere.