Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
Aime Cesaire
A homecoming poem that turned a slur into a banner.
A long, incantatory prose poem in which the Martinican writer returns imaginatively to his Caribbean home and to Africa, turning the colonial insult of Blackness into a source of pride. Cesaire coined the term "Negritude," the founding idea of a francophone movement that affirmed Black cultural identity against pressure to assimilate into French culture. The poem joined surrealist language to anticolonial defiance.
Its legacy. The founding literary work of Negritude.
- Author
- Aime Cesaire
- First published
- 1939
- Genre
- Poetry
- Theme
- Pan-Africanism, Race and the Diaspora
More from Pan-Africanism, Race and the Diaspora
- The Souls of Black Folk — W.E.B. Du Bois
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."
- The Black Jacobins — C.L.R. James
The Haitian Revolution told as the only slave revolt to build a nation.
- The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality — Cheikh Anta Diop
A claim that the pharaohs were Black, and that Greece borrowed from Africa.
- The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness — Paul Gilroy
Black identity as a ship in motion, not a flag over one homeland.