Saturday 28 March 2015

103rd 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

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