Book discussion: RETURN TO MY NATIVE LAND

You are welcome to join in on our next meetup 

  • Tuesday 24th October 2017
  • 18h00 sharp

 .... as we celebrate Aimé Césaire's revolutionary poem of passion, uncertainty and contradiction. 

Please ensure you have read the poem, otherwise a section of it. 
The book is currently available at most Exclusive Books stores (further details on acquiring the book are available upon RSVPing via the www.meetup.com app link):
http://meetu.ps/c/3tMcd/vXyYW/f

"Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was born in in Basse-Pointe, a village on the north coast of Martinique, a former French colony in the Caribbean (now an overseas département of France). His book Discourse on Colonialism (1950) is a classic of French political literature. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1956) is the foundation stone of francophone Black literature: it is here that the word Négritude appeared for the first time. Négritude has come to mean the cultural, philosophical and political movement co-founded in Paris in the 1930s by three Black students from French colonies: the poets Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana; Léopold Senghor, later President of Senegal; and Aimé Césaire, who became a deputy in the French National Assembly for the Revolutionary Party of Martinique and was repeatedly elected Mayor of Fort-de-France. As a poet, Césaire believed in the revolutionary power of language, and in the Notebook he combined high literary French with Martinican colloquialisms, and archaic turns of phrase with dazzling new coinages. The result is a challenging and deeply moving poem on the theme of the future of the negro race which presents and enacts the poignant search for a Martinican identity. The Notebook opposes the ideology of colonialism by inventing a language that refuses assimilation to a dominant cultural norm, a language that teaches resistance and liberation." 

Notice Details
Category Events
Posted 20 October 2017
By Clint Le Bruyns
Tel
From UKZN
Audience
Howard College Staff  Howard College Students 
Edgewood Staff  EdgWood Students 
Medical School Staff  Medical School Students 
PMB Staff  PMB Students 
Westville Staff  Westville Students