Aimé Fernand David Césaire (; ; 26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was an Afro-Martinican French poet, author, and politician. He was one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature and coined the word "" in French. He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He was also the Mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years, from 1945 to 2001.
His works include the book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939), Une Tempête, a response to William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), an essay describing the strife between the colonizers and the colonized. Césaire's works have been translated into many languages.
Student, educator and poet
Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, French Caribbean, in 1913. His father was a tax inspector, and his mother was a dressmaker. "Although in his Cahier he evoked his childhood as poverty-stricken and squalid, his family was part of the island's small, black middle class." His family moved to the capital of Martinique, Fort-de-France, in order for Césaire to attend the only secondary school on the island, Lycée Victor Schœlcher. He was not happy there, and found the town's racial and class bigotry to be upsetting.
They lived near Mount Pelée, and Césaire often described himself as possessing similar characteristics to the volcano—impulsive, unpredictable, and explosive.