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'We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.'
This blazing autobiographical poem by the founder of the négritude movement became a rallying cry for decolonisation when it appeared in 1939. Following one man's return from Europe to his homeland of Martinique, it is a reckoning with the trauma of slavery and exploitation, and a triumphant anthem for Black identity, one which reclaims and remakes language itself.
'Nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time' André Breton
'A Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exploding' Jean-Paul Sartre
'The most influential Francophone Caribbean writer of his generation' Independent
Translated by John Berger and Anna Bostock
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Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a Martinican poet and politician who played a leading role in the struggle to liberate the French colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. Renowned for co-founding the Négritude movement, Césaire was a pioneer in surrealist poetry. His achievements as a writer were recognised worldwide with awards including the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Laporte Prize, the Viareggio-Versilia Prize for Literature, and the Grand Prix National de Poésie; in 2002, he was made Commander of the Order of Merit of Cote d'Ivoire. His works include the plays A Tempest (1969) and A Season in the Congo (1966), the searing political essay Discourse on Colonialism (1956), and the long poem Return to My Native Land (1950), dubbed "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time" (Andre Breton).
John Berger was born in London in 1926. His acclaimed works of both fiction and non-fiction include the seminal Ways of Seeing and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972; his translations include Brecht's Poems on the Theatre and Mural by Mahmoud Darwish. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, to live in a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.
Anna Bostock was a Russian-British translator, intellectual and feminist. She was born in China in 1923 and later moved to England, where she began to work as a translator after the Second World War. She died in 2018.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer, poet, and academic who works as an associate professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He is the author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections: Thinking with Trees, winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry, and Self-Portrait as Othello, a Poetry Book Society Choice, which won both the Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes. His memoir, The Possibility of Tenderness, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2025. He’s the author of Théâtre dialectique postcolonial, and a second monograph, Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits, is published by Oxford University Press.