Dear Editor,
“At the end of the small hours”. The phrase that is reiterated many times in Aime Cesaire’s “Notebook on a return to my native land” served as the departure point for some of the greatest lyrical and revolutionary verse ever to be written.
Aime Cesaire is now dead. A light that declined into that final darkness at the end of his 94 years. The great poet and essayist whom Derek Wallcott said he expected to have been awarded the Nobel Prize died in his native Martinique after a long life of political action and reflection.
Cesaire as a writer is listed by Prof Harold Bloom as author of work that has earned a place in the worldwide canon. Cesaire is undoubtedly one of the greatest poets that humanity has known. His “Notebook” written in the 1930s is one of the best works ever composed in the French language.
It is significant not only for its contribution to the denunciation of racism and colonialism, but for the way in which it takes poetry onto a higher plane.
Cesaire’s juxtapositions of ideas and images, the transitions from one conceptual and lyrical domain into another, the range of allusion, the bitter and the comic, makes of this work a distinctive and unrivalled contribution to letters.
One expects that the Caribbean community will join the rest of the world in paying him homage.
Stabroek News, which quoted from the “Notebook” in an editorial some time ago ought to carry some extracts.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
