104th birthday of Léon-Gontram Damas

(Born 28 March 1912, Cayenne, French-occupied Guiana)

Poet, editor, philosopher, academic, co-founder, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, of the 1930s-1940s “negritude” intellectual movement of African affirmation in Paris, France, and whose demonstrable volume of poetry, Pigments (1937), gives notice of the engaging trajectory of the movement:

… my hatred thrived on the margins of culture

the margin of theories the margin of idle talk

with which they stuffed me since birth

even though all in me aspired to be [African]

while they ransacked my Africa

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe