Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

BOOKS
Black Writing : this is u, thisisu
NOTED
"Now if a man's mind is impartial in receiving tradition he examines
it with all due care so that he can distinguish between the true and the
false; but if he i.s pervaded by attachment to any particular opinion or
sect he immediately accepts any tradition which supports it; and this
tendency and attachment cloud his judgement so that he is unable to
criticize and scrutinize what he hears, and straightway accepts what is
false and hands it on to others . . . .
-Ibn Khaldun
The term Negritude, created by the brilliant West Indian poet Aime
Cesaire, and nurtured to maturity by Leopold Sedar Senghor (the poet/
politician of Senegal), can help us understand where the black writer
is in this country today . Negritude, in essence (as I understand it)
denotes that particular quality, those certain nuances which are universal
to the thought, action, and behavior of black Africans .
The concept of Negritude has been, and to some extent still is, of
fundamental importance in the writings (literature) of black Africans
trained in the French-speaking areas, i .e ., by those writers who have,
willingly or unwillingly (whatever the case may be), adopted French
cultural habits as part of their life-style . Negritude came into existence
not purely as the result of French culture but as a needed reaction to
French classical education . Suddenly, black Africans, stranded together
(in time of crisis the weak and strong seek out their own) in some
French bar "intellectualizing" and "rationalizing" their existence, became
keenly aware of the fact that they were blackmen, but (most important)
they finally realized this in the most profound terms that were
non-white, too . Negritude, in its final analysis, can be considered the
anti-thesis of everything French, i.e ., everything anti-black, everything
white . The French-African finally realized that he was accepted by the
dominant white French society only because he was willing to subordinate
his blackness and become as French as possible . This meant,
among other things, that the African had to adopt the dress, mannerism,
culture and religion of Western civilization . Thus, the policy of
assimilation was used to systematically destroy the mind and total identity
of black Africans ; stripping him completely of his African-ness, his
blackness, leaving him more French than African . That's the context
in which Negritude grew ; it became that rebellious force used by the
French-Africans to try and recapture their past, their culture, their religion,
themselves and most of all their future .
With Negritude the African writer did an about-face and decided
to exalt, seek, recreate and contain his African-ness, rather than contiming
to run away from it or to cover it with the appropriate French
substitutes. This new literary movement to which Cesaire helped give
NEGRO DIGEST March 1969 5 1