Quotes & Sayings About Negritude

Like the scorpion's question mark
drawn in the pollen on the canvas of the sky and of our brains at midnight — Aime Cesaire

And if all I know how to do is speak, it is for you that I shall speak. My lips shall speak for miseries that have no mouth, my voice shall be the liberty of those who languish in the dungeon of despair ... And above all my body as well as my soul, beware of folding your arms in the sterile attitude of spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of pain is not a proscenium. — Aime Cesaire

It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude. — Frantz Fanon

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it. — Frantz Fanon

Although skin color is undoubtedly the most salient signal of racial identity in America, other actual or imagined bodily features have also been seen as distinctive markers of Negritude. These include the shapes of heads, feet, lips, and noses as well as the texture of hair. — Randall Kennedy

What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied in all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful. If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man - alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other. — John Howard Griffin

Measured by the clock click of the serpent-minute
the explosion
after which it is proper to appreciate that
the brutal fist of the terrorist crack of dawn has just
planted at the top of the most forgotten poui
its adornment of fire
its dolmen of blood
its flag of rage and renewal — Aime Cesaire

The forest remembers that the last word can only be
the flaming cry of the bird of ruins in the bowl of the storm — Aime Cesaire

The thick stream of air hauled toward the summits
first the great horses of noise reared against the sky
then sluggishly the great limp octopus of smoke
a derisory spitter injecting the night with
the insolent perfume of a citronella lamp
and a wind swept down on the islands
to be riddled by the suspect violence of the locusts ... — Aime Cesaire

Your face
like a village asleep at the bottom of a lake
which is reborn to daylight from the grass and from the year
germinates — Aime Cesaire