Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 in Martinique in the French Caribbean. He left for Paris in 1931 at the age of 18 with a scholarship for school. During his time at the Lycee Louis-le Grand, he helped found a student publication, Étudiant Noir. In 1936 Césaire started working on his famed piece “Cahier” which was not published until 1939. He married fellow student Suzanne Roussi in 1937, and the couple moved back to Martinique with their son in 1939. Both Aime and Suzanne got jobs at the Lycee Schoelcher. In 1945 Césaire began his political career when he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy in the Constituent Assembly on the French Communist Party ticket. During the 1940s, Césaire was busy writing and publishing many collections of his work. He seemed to be influenced by art because he wrote a tribute to a painter named Wilfredo Lam and one of his collections has illustrations by Pablo Picasso (Césaire xxxviii). In 1956 Aime Césaire resigned from the French Communist Party and two years later he began the “Parti Progressiste Martiniquais.“ During these years Césaire attended two conferences for “Negro Writers and Artists” in Paris.

In 1968 he published the first version of Une Tempête, “a radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest” (Davis xvi). He continued on with his writings of poetry and plays and retired from politics in 1993. All of Césaire’s writings are in French with a limited number having English translations.

Césaire began to focus on drama with the use of the poem “Chiens.” The poem contains different dialogues in it so Césaire made it into a play. In 1968 he published, Une Tempête, a version of Shakespeare’s famous play The Tempest. He wanted to reflect black America in this play but the setting is the Caribbean. Davis argues that “The central paradigm of the colonizer / colonized relation, as it is constructed in The Tempest, embraces the totality of the black experience in the New World” (157). Césaire wanted to depict Black life in America. Many critics believe Césaire’s version of The Tempest is about the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and the struggle for absolute power. In the play, Prospero is the master of the two men Caliban and Ariel. Prospero is the colonizer and both Caliban and Ariel attempt to gain their freedom from him. Caliban’s approach to freedom is through rebellion while Ariel tries “to appeal to his [Prospero’s] moral conscience” (161). In the end, Caliban’s rebellion fails when all he wanted was to be his own master. In his final speech, Caliban charges Prospero with lying to him and holding him inferior. It is a classic example of the colonized rejecting the colonizer. This is a quote taken from this final speech by Caliban:

This final scene in The Tempest shows Césaire’s attitude towards colonization. The colonizer imposes on the colonized all kinds of lies. The colonizer makes the colonized feel unworthy of living.