JEAN-PAUL SARTRE once described Aime Cesaire as a poet who "snatched" surrealism from the Europeans and turned it against them. One of the best-known Black Francophones, Cesaire not only assimilated the dominant culture to attack it eventually, but he transcended the physical and psychological ruins of colonialism and built a new aesthetic. Aime Cesaire: The Collected Poetry shows the evolution of Cesaire's style in a complete and annotated text.

Born in Martinique in 1913, Cesaire grew up with the French prose classics and the poetry of Victor Hugo. His family had middle-class aspirations and so emphasized the value of French culture that Creole never became a viable means of expression for Cesaire. Sent to study in Paris at age 18, he met Leon Damas and Leopold Senghor and began to formulate his theory of negritude.

The Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in 1939, is an extended lyric poem, and was the first appearance of "negritude" in print. In choosing the word, its creators had simply latinized the derogatory word for black in French (negre) and attached an augmentative suffix. Lacking in English ****equivalent, the term has no absolute definition. Cesaire chose to show negritude in relation to its negation so as to illustrate its strength:

my negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of day

my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth's dead eye

my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

it takes root in the red flesh of soil

it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky

it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience

To understand the significance of the negritude movement, one must understand how Cesaire succeeded in expressing revolutionary ideas in the rigid structure of the French language. Cesaire's skill with the language has provoked many people to conclude that his poems are merely intellectual word games, but the play of words and rhythms is precisely one of the ways Cesaire infuses French with the elements of negritude. In "Batouque," the title word is like the clap of hands, regularly punctuating the phrases as clapping in a chant. The words tumble forth and build to a feverish pitch that is drilled into the mind by the incessant chorus batouque.

Unfortunately, some of Cesaire's dexterity in French suffers in the translation. For example, "ils tirent a blanc," has to be literally translated so that the double meaning of shooting blanks and shooting whites is obvious. There are other places where the translation falters: In "Tom Tom II," "a petits pas de pluie de chenilles" translates to "with baby steps like a rain of caterpillars," which not only sounds inane but loses the alliteration and onomatopoeia of the original. The English and French versions are on opposing pages so that the reader can concentrate on one version and refer to the other when necessary.

Cesaire's poetry was clearly influenced by Rimbaud and Baudelaire, as well as by the works of the American primitivists from the Harlem Renaissance, particularly Claude MacKay. But it was the style of the French symbolists he most admired. The first line of "The Griffin" ("I am a memory that does not reach the threshold") is reminiscent of the opening of Nerval's "El Desdichado," and Cesaire's use of the Alexandrine meter recalls Baudelaire's poems. However, his exotic images were not correspondences to a higher world, but the very natural environment of Martinique and Africa (which he had seen and Baudelaire had not). His affirmation of African values through a European language allowed Cesaire to infuse his poetry with politics. Negritude, at first merely a stylistic definition, came to reflect the political dilemma of newly-liberated African and Caribbean countries.

Cesaire entered the world of politics after a seven-year visit to Haiti, which he felt demonstrated the possibility of Caribbean independence. In 1945 he was elected Martinique's Deputy to the National Assembly in Paris to form the constitution of the Fourth Republic. His collections of poetry during this period, published as Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil Cou Coupe). The Miraculous Weapons and Lost Body combine his surrealistic style and a growing violence in his verse:

then it is no use for me to press my

heart against yours/nor to lose my-