Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

irth started in 1939 when the Parisian Review published his Cahier
D'un Returr Au Pays Natal (Journal of a Return to my Native Country,
which has since been re-issued in book form by Presence Africaine)
. The Journal and later poems gave impetus to what is now considered
Negritude . But Negritude itself (the concept of) goes back
a little further (to about 1927) and was called Negrismo . Negrismo
started in Cuba and was, as was Negritude, influenced by Africa and
all things African . Cubans, as well as Africans, had grown up under
the white ruling class which tried to destroy everything anti-white (anti-
Western) or anything remotely connected with Africa . Negrismo grew
rapidly and influenced such writers as the Cuban poets Ramon Guirao
and Nicolas Guillen and the Puerto Rican poet Luis Pales Matos .
Thus, the frame of reference that the African and Cuban writers used
to work in has been established . To bring the concept of Negritude
a little closer to home I refer you to Leopold Senghor's definition :
"Negritude is the` sum total of the values of the civilization of the
African World . It is not racialism, it is culture . It is the embracing
and domination of a situation in order to apprehend the cosmos by
process of coming to terms with it. . . . Negritude as we had then
begun to conceive and define it was a weapon of defense and attack
and inspiration . . . ." Actually, Negritude is the sum total of black consciousness
and, when used, is not only applicable to literature but to
all forms of art, e .g ., painting, sculpture, dance, music, etc . Ezekiel
Mphahlele, who most certainly is not a proponent of Negritude, relates
this sum-total feeling in his The African Image: "It is rather the
assimilated African who has absorbed French culture, who is now
passionately wanting to recapture his past . In his poetry he extols his
ancestors, ancestoral mask, African wood carvings and bronze art and
tries to recover the moorings of his oral literature ; he clearly feels he
has come to a dead-end in European culture, and is still not really
accepted as an organic part of French society, for all the assimilation
he has been through . As a result, French-speaking African nationalists
have become a personification of this strong revulsion. . . " I think
that, by lightly reviewing the idea of Negritude, it will enable us to
better understand the thought and meaning of blackwriting .
How alike blackpeople in this country are to the assimilated French-
Africans . However, in our case the term assimilated can be substituted
with the euphemism integrated. Blackwriting as we view it today is
the result of centuries of slavery and forced alienation from Africa
and one's-self. We've been exiles in a strange land where our whole
life-style repeatedly comes into contradiction after contradiction . Blackwriting,
to the Afro-American (as is Negritude to the French-African),
is the antithesis to a decadent culture that has systematically, over the
centuries, debased and dehumanized us with the fury and passion of
an unfeeling computer .
Literature produced by blackhands is not, necessarily, blackwriting.
What has to be embodied in blackwriting, first and foremost, is that
consciousness which reflects the true black experience ; the true Afro-
American experience ; written and related in a style indicative of that
experience. Which may mean, as I believe it does, new forms and
(Continued on page 78)
52 Morch 1969 NEGRO DIGEST