The French Cultural Centre in Libreville, Gabon, played to a packed house last night during the official presentation ceremony of a book edited by the University Press of Gabon (PUG) in remembrance of the Martinique poet and politician, Aimé Césaire, who passed away on April 17, 2008 in Fort-de-France. In Césaire, le veilleur de consciences “we have attempted to erect a lyric memorial to this great poet,” said Steve Robert Renombo, one of the co-authors of the book. “It’s a book of the heart.”
The book launch followed a mass gathering the day before to mark the first anniversary of the death of Césaire, “the advocate for negritude.”
The photo above of Césaire in 1993 is by Chester Higgins Jr. for The New York Times.
For more go to http://www.apanews.net/apa.php?page=show_article_eng&id_article=96689
This book sounds great. Another good book that pays tribute to Cesaire is Christian Filsotrat’s Negritude Agonistes, Assimilation against Nationalism in the French-speaking Caribbean and Guyane. It has excerpts from the issue of L’Etudiant Noir… when Cesaire first used the word negritude. People are calling this the “missing link.”
By: C. Delia on June 25, 2009
at 12:06 am