Aimé Césaire Quotes

I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.

I have said — and this is something very different — that colonialist Europe has grafted modern abuse onto ancient injustice, hateful racism onto old inequality.

In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties – it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.

I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

And let me die suddenly, to be born again in the revelation of beauty….And the revelation of beauty is the wisdom of the ancestors.

Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.

I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.

There’s room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.