Lnegritude results from an active and offensive attitude of the mind. It is a start and a leap of dignity. It is rejection, I mean rejection of oppression. It is a fight, that is to say a fight against inequality. It is also a revolt. But then, you will say to me, revolt against what?
I do not forget that I am here in a cultural convention, that it is here, in Miami, that I choose to say it. I believe that we can say, in a general way, that historically negritude has been a form of revolt first of all against the world system of culture as it was constituted during the last centuries and which is characterized by a certain number of prejudices, of presuppositions which lead to a very strict hierarchy. In other words, negritude was a revolt against what I will call European reductionism.
I mean this system of thought or rather the instinctive tendency of an eminent and prestigious civilization to abuse its prestige even to create a vacuum around it by abusively bringing back the notion of universal, dear to Léopold Sédar Senghor , in its own dimensions, in other words to think the universal starting from its only postulates and through its own categories. We see and have seen only too well the consequences that this entails: cutting man off from himself, cutting man from his roots, cutting man from the universe, cutting man from human and isolate it, ultimately, in a suicidal pride, if not in a rational and scientific form of barbarism.
But, you will tell me, a revolt which is nothing but a revolt is nothing more than a historical impasse. If negritude was not a dead end, it was because it led elsewhere. Where was she leading us? She led us to ourselves. And, in fact, it was, after a long frustration, it was the grasp by ourselves of our past and, through poetry, through the imagination, through the novel, through works of art. , the intermittent flash of our possible future.
Tremor of concepts, cultural earthquake, all the metaphors of isolation are possible here. But the bottom line is that with it was started a business of rehabilitating our values for ourselves, deepening our past by ourselves, re-rooting ourselves in a history, in a geography and in a culture, the whole being translated not by an archaistic pastism, but by a reactivation of the past with a view to its own overtaking.
Literature, shall we say?
Intellectual speculation?
Without a doubt. But, neither literature nor intellectual speculation is innocent or harmless. And, in fact, when I think of the African independence of the 1960s, when I think of this surge of faith and hope which aroused, at the time, an entire continent, it's true, I think of negritude. , because I think that negritude has played its role and perhaps a capital role, since it has been a ferment or catalyst role.
That this reconquest of Africa itself was not easy, that the exercise of this new independence involved many misfortunes and sometimes disillusions, it would take a culpable ignorance of the history of humanity, of the history of the emergence of nations in Europe itself, in the middle of the 19th century, in Europe and elsewhere, not to understand that Africa, too, inevitably had to pay its tribute at the time of the great change.
But that's not the point. The bottom line is that Africa has turned the page on colonialism and turning it has helped to usher in a new era for all of humanity.
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Aimé Césaire: "no to humiliation" _1ere_ed - closing and switching to 9782330039288
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Features
| Release Date | 2015-01-21T00:00:01Z |
| Language | French |
| Number Of Pages | 90 |
| Publication Date | 2015-01-21T00:00:01Z |
