1944 · Haitianyear only
Aime Cesaire spends a month lecturing in Haiti and the room changes
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In 1944 the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire and his wife Suzanne Cesaire came to Haiti for a month of lectures organised by the Congres de la Connaissance. Cesaire later said Haiti was where negritude first stood up, a debt he traced to the Haitian writers Antenor Firmin and Jean Price-Mars and to the revolution that ended in 1804. Before he arrived, Jeanne Sylvain, coeditor of La Voix des Femmes and a member of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, wrote to her siblings that a Martinican poet, or possibly a Guadeloupean, was expected in September. By October she had been to the lectures and told them he spoke about literature marvellously and that she had learned there were more Haitian philosophers than she had known about. Sanders Johnson keeps that flicker of uncertainty in the record on purpose. The Sylvain sisters had worked closely with Price-Mars, so this was not ignorance. It is what a political idea looks like before it hardens into a name. The lectures fed the surrealist current in Port-au-Prince and the awakening that produced 1946.
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