Aimé Césaire I The unisex organic cotton t-shirt

Material: 100% organic cotton

Fit: regular

Fabric weight: 180 g/m²

The fabric of this product is certified for its organic cotton content.

For this portrait of Aimé Césaire, Olivier Bonhomme draws inspiration from the visual language of sweatshirts and T-shirts from leading universities. He depicts a young Césaire as a “top-of-the-class” student, placing the poet of Négritude within this collegiate world.

Bonhomme’s distinctive bold lines and use of colour give the portrait its character: a colourful man of letters whose presence asserts Césaire’s rightful place in the history of thought and poetry.

THE POET OF NÉGRITUDE
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE (1913–2008) – MARTINIQUE

Born in 1913 in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Aimé Césaire studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and then at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1939, he wrote Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, one of the foundational texts of the Négritude movement.

A teacher at the Lycée Schœlcher, he was elected to parliament and became mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945, holding these offices until 1993 and 2001 respectively. A driving force behind the law that made Martinique a French overseas department, he nevertheless denounced the “brutalisation of Europe” in Discourse on Colonialism (1955). In 1956, he resigned from the French Communist Party and went on to found the Martinican Progressive Party.

A major figure in anticolonialism and Pan-Africanism, Césaire is among the world’s most widely read poets and writers. Following his death on 17 April 2008 in Martinique, he was honoured with a state funeral and tributes from around the world.