First president of Senegal and former member of the French Academy, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) was also one of the faithful companions of the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in the adventure of the negritude movement.
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The statesman and writer Léopold Sédar Senghor died exactly twenty years ago, on December 20, 2001. Author of ten collections of poems and as many essays unanimously hailed by critics at the time, this aggregate of grammar, respected member of the French Academy from 1983 until his death was also the first student that Aimé Césaire met at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, when he arrived in the capital in 1932 to continue his studies. It was Senghor who introduced him to real Africa, far from colonial representations, before accompanying the Martinican in the adventure of the negritude movement.
With the cultural turmoil of the 1930s in which the young Césaire immersed himself – literature, surrealism, Marxism, African-American music – Senghor’s influence was decisive. The African student quickly binds himself with Césaire, his “bizut” as he said, introduces him to his prestigious new high school and introduces him to his comrades. “We formed ourselves against each other by exchanging our books, our readings “, Césaire said in the film by Martinican director Euzhan Palcy, “Aimé Césaire. A word for the 21st century” (JMJ productions, 2006). “Exchanging our thoughts, arguing. Designing together. Designing the future together “.
Through Senghor, it was a whole continent that I encountered. A land of which I had no idea, a very vague, very confused image. It was he who brought me Africa. That’s all and it’s huge.
“I had the feeling that I had a key that allowed me to understand my country. To understand Martinique, to understand the West Indies, you had to take this detour. We had to start with Africa“, continued Aimé Césaire.”Senghor is Africa in itself, such as eternity carries it. It is eternal Africa. Senghor never doubted. It has never been torn.“
► Aimé Césaire recounts his first meeting with Léopold Sédar Senghor at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, in September 1932 (at 5:45 in the video)
The tear of which Aimé Césaire speaks is the one which bursts into the “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal”, his later poetry as well as in the “Discours sur le colonialisme”, where the Martinican writer expresses all the fractures social and psychological issues of his country. On the other hand, Senghor’s writing is much calmer, sometimes even serene when he mentions his region of Senegal. Difference from the African born and implanted in his land and his millennial culture, whose ancestors did not know the transshipment and slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.
Steadfast friendship
So Senghor l’Africain will open the door he needed to the Antillean Césaire. With other students (the Guyanese Léon Gontran Damas, the Martiniquais Suzanne Roussi, who would become the wife of Césaire, Gilbert Gratiant, etc.), they published the first issue of the review L’Etudiant noir in March 1935, which marked the beginning of the negritude movement. After their studies, Senghor and Césaire will meet again on numerous occasions. In the National Assembly where both were members of their respective territories, before the independence of Senegal, and of course in the cultural field.
They will participate together in the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, in Paris in 1956, then in Rome in 1959. Aimé Césaire will then go to the first Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966, at the invitation of his friend Senghor, now President of Senegal independent. Ten years later, the latter will fly to Martinique where he will meet Césaire, then deputy mayor of Fort-de-France, for an official visit. Until the end of his days, the Martinican writer will keep an unwavering friendship for Léopold Sédar Senghor, never failing to recall what he owed him on the literary level.