Aimé Césaire: No to Humiliation

The only young adult 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.