Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

News just in that he great Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire died this morning in Fort-de-France, Martinique where he had been hospitalized for a week. Here a link to a 1994 interview in the Nouvel Observateur.

oh friendly light
oh fresh source of light
those who have invented neither powder nor compass
those who could harness neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither the seas nor the sky but those
without whom the earth would not be the earth
gibbosity all the more beneficent as the bare earth even more earth
silo where that which is earthiest avout earth ferments and ripens
my negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of day
my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth’s dead eye
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience

— from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith