The Poet’s Africa: Africanness in the Poetry of Nicolas Guillen and Aime Cesaire

Nicolas Guillen and Aime Cesaire are considered to be among the foremost Caribbean poets of the 20th century, yet they are rarely treated together. This work deals with the two writers within a comparative framework, exploring their poetry as the exemplification of Negritude art and writing from the Caribbean. The author uses non-canonical theories of literary and cultural analysis to discuss the relationships between creative writing, the idea of Africa and the rediscovery of African values in the Caribbean, and to propose and demonstrate an original Caribbean poetics, anchored in Africa’s cultural systems and linked to Afro-American protest thought. Each of the book’s chapters focuses on an aspect of the literary development of the African heritage and of the black condition illustrated by Guillen and Cesaire. The first chapter offers an introduction to the genesis of Caribbean rhetorical interest in Africa, from the 1920s onward, and places Guillen and Cesaire in the context of Negritude. Chapter two addresses the European othering of Africa and the Negritude critique of this within the non-African traditions. Guillen’s and Cesaire’s response to the European concept of the universal is discussed in chapter three, while chapter four demonstrates the ways in which blackness is caught between racial otherness and trying to integrate into the Caribbean social order. The final two chapters provide an analysis of the polyrhythmic unity of the African cultural system that allows Guillen and Cesaire to make technical innovations. A conclusion acknowledges the writers’ place in Caribbean creative writing.