MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Léon-Gontran Damas (1912-1978) was a French poet, politician, and one of the founders of the Négritude movement together with Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. This anthology was published in 1947 a year before Senghor’s pivotal work Anthologie de la nouvelle poésienègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French) and served as a manifesto for the movement. It contains poems by French-speaking authors from six regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, The Antilles (Guadeloupe and Martinique), Guyana, Indochina, Madagascar and Réunion island, with many of the poems published for the first time. The publication is significant in a political sense as it represents an attempt by colonial-era writers to deconstruct and transform French language and culture, in order to create a new and authentic poetic language and culture, “equal and fraternal to the French one”. In the introduction, Damas pays tribute to Étienne Léro (1910-1939), who is considered to be the first French poet of African descent to publicly identify himself as a Surrealist. Surrealism, with its ideas of refusal of bourgeois society and its privilege of the unconscious in its quest for freedom and self-fulfilment, was adopted by some Négritude theoreticians. Moreover, it provided them with an emancipatory approach to the language. Forging nouns, inventing names (like the term Négritude itself), breaking with orthodoxies and introducing new rhythms and styles of typography, they sought to find the ways to transform the coloniser’s language into a language of their own.