introductionxxviiresting poetic work. The Francophone selections in this volume are from
African, Canadian, and West Indian sources—each with its unique heri-
tage and context. The celebrations and authorial conditions of national
independence are of crucial importance. Independence was won by Tuni-
sia and Morocco in 1956, and by Algeria in 1959, and by the Central
African Republic in 1960. During the 1960s in Africa and the Caribbean,
in spite of independence, writers continued, for financial reasons, to write
in French, the language of the former colonizer, which entailed psycho-
logical conflict or, at the very least, a dose of ambivalence.
In the 1930s, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Léon-Gontran
Damas founded the influential négritude movement, which sought to
restore the cultural identity of colonized Africans. The Martinican Aimé
Césaire coined the term négritude in an article written for the student
newspaper L’Étudiant noir. After taking his exams in 1935, the poet spent
the summer in his homeland, a sojourn that inspired what is probably the
best-known epic poem of return in French literature: Cahier d’un retour
au pays natal. Returning once again to Martinique in 1939, this time for an
extended period, Césaire expounded his theory of the image, in the same
aesthetic spirit as André Breton and the Surrealists, who defined the
theory of the image, after the poet Pierre Reverdy, as the clash between
elements from di√erent fields, providing a powerful jolt to the creative
spirit. As Césaire claims in the celebrated essay ‘‘Poésie et connaissance’’
(Poetry and Cognition), ‘‘It is through the image, the revolutionary im-
age, the distant image, the image which overturns all laws of thought, that
man finally breaks through the barriers.’’∑ That influential essay first
appeared in the journal Tropiques, edited by Césaire, his wife Suzanne
Roussy, and others. (It was by chance that Breton, in Martinique on his
way to the United States from Marseilles, saw the first issue of Tropiques in
a shop window—a Surrealist coincidence, like his famous spotting of
Giorgio De Chirico’s painting The Child’s Brain in a gallery window in
Paris, at which sight he leapt o√ the bus to take a closer look.)
In the meantime, Léopold Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas were
working in Paris, where, in the 1950s, they contributed to the journal
Présence africaine, founded by the Senegalese philosopher Alioune Diop.
African writing was now well enough established to support both a jour-
nal and the anthology Nouvelle somme de la poésie du monde noir. Albert
Memmi’s highly influential essay ‘‘The Colonizer and the Colonized’’
appeared in 1957. Little by little, the countries of the Maghreb (Algeria,
Morocco, Tunisia) gained their independence.∏ The relation of Fran-
cophone literature of negritude (such as Césaire’s work, Senghor’s Chants
d’ombre of 1945, and the journal L’Étudiant noir) to the black literature of
the Harlem Renaissance, especially to the writings of Countee Cullen,
Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay, is well documented.