Lucy Dacus famously said "always an angel never a god" and perfectly encapsulated the feeling of never quite being at the forefront, always cast into the shadows. Is it the eternal plight of women then, to be erased from the textbooks, the movements, from history itself?
The Negritude movement, an anti-colonial cultural and political movement attributed to Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Césaire, and Leon Damas, was a truly revolutionary movement of 1930s, 40s and 50s Paris. Widely considered as the inauguration of Black humanism, this literary, cultural, and intellectual movement also signalled the birth of a Pan-Africanist philosophy. The movement was a cornerstone in the rejection of colonialism. It called for a widespread Black community of all those who lived under the lasting impacts of colonialism including the seemingly perpetual dependence on the west, and its far reaching impact is unquestionable. Though the impact of the movement cannot be understated, it is also important to acknowledge the erasure of the women vital in its creation. The androcentricity and heavy reliance on traditional gender roles evidenced in all of the ‘founding fathers’ works must also be acknowledged. Though a movement based on inclusion, the erasure of women’s work from the movement, including Suzanne Césaire’s work which this article will focus on, reveals the hostilities rampant in the movement’s foundational ideals and the wider francophone world at the time.
This article focuses on the work of Suzanne Cesaire; writer, scholar, anti-colonialist, feminist, and a vital figure in Martinican literature. Written out of the Negritude movement and history as a whole due to her marriage and later divorce from Aime Césaire. Her male counterpart wrote of Martinique as a mute and sterile land with an exoticized and eroticized feminine topography. Césaire wrote of Martinique as a vibrant place of potential, of social, socio-economic and cultural complexity, and as a place of women who were far from passive and rather connected the nation's history with an evolving future. At a time when Martinican intellectuals were focussed on Blackness in Africa, Césaire looked to the US liberation movement for inspiration. Now termed the 'Madonna' of francophone modernism by recent critics for her open embrace of the cultural diversity and vitality of the Black Americas, it is some 50+ years since her death that she is being recognised as more than a footnote in her husband's works. So, why is it that for so long she was forgotten?
Born in 1915 on the then French colonial territory of Martinique, Suzanne Roussi completed her schooling on the island in the French education system. She then studied literature in Toulouse and successfully made her way to the highly selective École Normale Supérieure, where she would meet fellow student and future husband Aime Césaire in 1936. They married in 1937 and had their first child in 1938 before returning to Martinique to teach. Co-founding the Martinican literary journal Tropiques in 1941, Césaire would publish seven essays in the four years the journal was active. Tropiques has been hailed as one of the, if not the most influential francophone Caribbean journal of the time and a source of opposition to the Vichy government that ruled Martinique at the time. She would, however, be written out of works surrounding Tropiques, with the focus from both critics and the public almost entirely placed on her husband instead.
The end of Tropiques in 1945 also served as the ending for Suzanne Césaire’s career as a writer, now a mother of six and the wife of the deputy to the French National Assembly for Martinique. The expectations of unquantified labor that now faced her were immense, and it is fair to assume that this is likely one of the overarching reasons why she stopped writing. There is almost nothing written on Suzanne Césaire between 1945 and 1963, when she divorced Aime Césaire. It is only in recent years following the publication of T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s ‘Negritude Women’ in 2002 that her works have been examined since her death in 1966. Unfortunately, with almost none of her works translated to English or accessible online, she still remains a figure in the shadows.
A comparison of her work to that of fellow Negritude writers reveals the depth that their work lacked, and the reliance the men of the movement placed on gender roles, an uncomfortable truth that went against their motto of inclusivity. In Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Aime Césaire’s most notable publication, the narrator invokes “the male thirst and the stubborn desire” and women are depicted as nothing more than vessels of the future: “come the ovaries of the water where the future wriggles its tiny little heads”. In comparison is the work of Suzanne Césaire, in which she writes “here too, people are born, live, and die; here, too, the whole drama plays itself out”. Her works include complex female characters, and whilst the land is still feminized, it is with a complexity and depth that was not seen in the works of her male counterparts.
The male voices of the movement heavily relied on gender stereotypes to tell tales of rebellion against the allegory of colonial force, and yet gave little space for female voices in rebellion. 19th century France, following its defeat in the Haitian revolution turned to the Black female body in order to rearticulate notions of true masculine national identity. France concentrated on the construction of Blackness in order to reconstruct Whiteness. By objectifying and constructing Blackness as something that was comedic yet hypersexual, the French attempted to reinvigorate their own identity that was based on white masculine prowess and strength. The story of Saartjie Bartman, who became known as the “Hottentot Venus” is the epitome of the relationship between colonial exploitation, White masculinity and Black femininity. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Negritude movement, born in Francophone countries, relies on similarly reductionist expectations of gender in its pledge for liberation. Whilst the objective may have been to emancipate African culture and promote a shared consciousness, the archetypal gender roles upon which the literature is expanded mean the liberation that is spoken of is only achievable through the subsequent erasure of female agency. The very fact that Suzanne Césaire was a Black woman meant her experience was entirely different from that of her male counterparts, and that she could speak of a world that would perhaps negate the tales that they told as if they were absolutes.
Though her work was ground-breaking and her wider role in the founding of the Negritude movement unquestionable, the agency that Suzanne Césaire gave the women in her writing and distancing from gendered roles did not fit into the formula of liberation that the male heads and faces of the movement imagined. The reduction of Suzanne Césaire to a footnote in the stories of Aime Cesaire’s life and stripping of her agency is reflective of the forceful removal of agency of Black women as a whole in history. It highlights the need to return to what we ‘know’ to re-examine the voices that may have been erased from the wider story.
Further reading
Emily C. Sheffield, ‘The Unsung Mothers of Negritude: An examination of the efforts of Women behind the movement’, Global Africana Review, 2, (Spring 2018), pp.2-10
Jacqueline Couti, ‘Am I My Sister’s Keeper? The Politics of Propriety and the Fight for Equality in the Works of French Antillean Women Writers, 1920s-40s’, in Felix Germain, Silyane Larcher, Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016’, (Nebraska, 2018), pp.129-144
Kara Rabbitt, ‘In search of the missing mother: Suzanne Cesaire, Martiniquaise’, Research in African Literatures 44:1, 2013, pp.36-54
Shiera S. el-Malik, ‘Intellectual work ‘In the world’: Women’s writing and anti-Colonial thought in Africa, Irish studies in International Affairs, 24, 2013, pp.101-120
T Denean Sharpley-Witing, Negritude Women, (Minnesota, 2002).
Sall, Korka, ‘Negritude Feminisms: Francophone Black Women Writers and Activists in France, Martinique, and Senegal from the 1920s to the 1980s’, (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2021).
Cuadra, Bridget, ‘”We Were but Women, Real Pioneers”. La Depeche Africaine, La Revue du Monde Noir, and the Women-Centered Origins of the Negritude Movement’ (Proceedings of the National Conference on undergraduate research, Kennesaw State University, 2019).
Emily Eyestone, ‘Cannibalizing Paradise: Suzanne Cesaire’s Ecofeminist Critique of Tourist Literature’, Island Studies journal, 17:2, 2022, pp.52-73