Negritude

Author(s): Leopold Sedar Senghor

Source: Indian Literature , JANUARY-JUNE 1974, Vol. 17, No. 1/2 (JANUARY-JUNE
1974), pp. 269-273
Published by: Sahitya Akademi

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23329885

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 Negri tude

Leopold Sedar Senghor

Mr President, my dear fellows, kindly allow me to call

you by the name of fellows since you are giving me to-day
the singnal honour of receiving me, as an Honorary Member,
in this your famous Academy. How can I conceal my deep
emotion, I who have been an old admirer of the Indian Civili
sation, from those years when, as a student, I used to delight
myself away by the enchanting spell of the poems of Rabindra
nath Tagore.
I dare believe that this reason influenced your choice, but
most certainly so, the very many links, political, economic and
mainly cultural, binding the Indian sub-continent and the
African continent, and which have bound together men and their
civilisations.

One of your Ministers asked me, the other day, what exactly
was Negritudes I think that the distinguished honour you give
me to-day certainly proceeds from this particular fact that I
belong to that small group of students who, in the thirties, in the
quartier Latin of Paris, launched the Negritude movement. The
idea since, spread over Africa, crossed the Atlantic and reached
the Pacific Islands, as it will be proved at the Second World
Festival of black Arts which will take place in Nigeria in 1976.
I wish to begin by saying a few words on the very concept of
negritude. Our English-speaking brothers translate it either by
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 INDIAN LITERATURE

blackness, or simply by negritude. We should particularly not

confuse this latter word with that of nigritude, which the Harrap's
Dictionary translates by "noirceur" (or "of a black colour")
in French. The point here is less the colour of the skin than the
warmth of the soil.
The word was quite rightly coined by my friend the west
Indian poet Aime' Gesaire. He as well, could also have said
negrite', for the suffix—ite and itude, derived from the Latin
suffixes—itas and itudo, have roughly the same meaning. If
Cesaire chose the suffix itude it was because it had a more con
crete and more vital meaning.
In as much as the word latinite (latinity in English) expresses
a concept which defines the qualities of Latin civilisation, the
word negritude expresses the same for the whole range of values of
civilisation of all black peoples in the world.
If we consider the example of black Africa, the first among
these values, which is of philosophic nature, is that for all black
people, the soul is incarnated within the body and more gene
rally the spirit within the martter. In other words the matter
and the spirit are in a dialectical relationship, bearing in mind
that it was the spirit which first informed the matter.
In the field of politics, I shall point out the pattern of commu
nity mindedness. In the traditional negro-african world, the
society was made-up of concentic communities scaled up one
over the other, from the family cell to the kingdom and in which
various socio-professional groups were linked up with each other
by a system of reciprocal integration.
In the field of arts, the values of negritude can be essentially
summed up in the rhythm and the symbolic image. I generally
define the negro-african work of art-poem or narration, paint
ing or sculpture, music or dance—as an image or a set of
rhythmical images.
Symbolic image did I say. In Nigritia, every work of art
is an image-with-a-sign, with a signification, that is so say a
meaning. Thus the negro-african poem is a network of meta
phots. The meaning of the analogical image however is effici
ently expressed—I was tempted to say elucidated—only by the
rhythm. You do know of the negro rhythm since it conquerred the

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 NEGRITUDE

world through jazz and modern music. It is altogether unity

within diversity, a repetition which does not repeat itself, a step
aside within a regular movement: the swing as the Americans
call it.

I have often been asked—mostly by readers in doctoral thesis.

—which influences had marked me.
Like any other young man learning his trade, I began by
imitating the poets I used to read and whose works had been
explained to me during classes: the romanticists first, then the,
french symbolists. Yet, I did not feel at all at ease in my first
lines, written in French. The French rhythm, with the same
number of syllables for all verses of a poem, dissatisfied me
quite particularly. This until I discovered the negro-african
poems and first, those of amy native village: the community
of Joal-Fadiouth.
My initiators, those I call my Three Graces were our village
poetesses: Marone N'Diaye, Koumba N'Diaye and Siga Diouf.
It was when I translated their poems that I better understood
the values of Negritude. As a matter of fact their poems are
always a texture of metaphors, and I had to have them explained
to me. Besides, they also are rhythmical poems which can be
either sung or recited.
And their poems chanted the virtues of the gods and of black
men: their feeling for the divine, their feeling for the community,
their feeling for beauty. For a beauty which is harmony, like
in these verses:

Qui l' a empörte',

0 qui l' a empörte'
Uhomme a la peau moue,
Beau Sur V areue,
Et beau les yeux fermes—

who killed him,

0 who killed him,
The man with the dark skin,
Handsome in the arena
And handsome with his eyes closed?

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 INDIAN LITERATURE

Indeed the very meaning of the Serer word "Jag" is

Harmonious.
As you noticed, some of the values of Negritude are similar to
those of Ind.ian.ity. Only it so happens, that in the case of India,
these values were re-thought and assimilated by the aryan
reason. In other words, Indianity is a symbiosis of the compl
mentary values, of the Aryans and Dravidians—with mongolian
grafts which gave them like a more subtle fragrance of their
perfume.
Ancient Egypt, the mother of civilisation, was somehow like
that: the symbiosis between the values of the "Ethiopians", as
the Greek called the Black, and the values of the "Moors" as the
same greek used to call the white with a darker skin.
It was the same symbiosis which I found in reading your
great Rabindranath Tagore, with, once again, a subtle dialectic
of the soul. This indeed created a deep influence in me.
I must now conclude. I somehow sinned in presenting to
you the Negritude movement as a linear movement, like the
regular lines of the discursive reason of Europe. In reality, our
movement developed like a drama in three stages. • •
We began by being violently opposed to the european reason,
I might even say to Indo-European reason which is discursive but
dichotomic. Then, the experience of nazism cured us and we
parted from "negritude-ghetto" or, as Jean-Paul Sartre puts
it, from "antiracist racism". We then discovered that the first
great civilisations, which were born in the latitude of the Medi
terranean—from the Egyptian to the arabic civilisation, through
the Indian and Greek civilisations—had all been civilisations of
cultural miscegeneation and first of biological miscegenation.
For us therefore Negritude, to-day, consists in grounding
ourselves deeply in the values of the black peoples, but, at the
same time, also in opening ourselves to other civilisations: to the
European civilisation for sure, which, though furthest away from
us, marked us a lot, historically, but also to civilisations that are
closer to us, like the Indian civilisation and the Arabo-berber
civilisation.
My closing remark will therefore be a wish: a wish that his
meeting might not simply be a rose in the Spring, but the Sowing

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 NEGRITUDE

of seeds which will yield, in a few years, the most , abundant

harvest. Our respective civilisations—the Indian and the
African civilisations—are, once again, symbiosis between North
and South. It is now high time that we should supplement them
with yet a more enriching symbiosis between East and West,
between Asia and Africa. In order to create a large harmonious
symphony that would spread all over our planet Earth.

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