With the end of World War II and the eruption of the anti-colonial revolutions that would sweep the world, under the shadow of the A-, later H-bomb and its threat of universal catastrophe, this self-conscious Blackness would emerge as a poetic force in the Negritude movement spearheaded by Césaire and, subsequently, in the work of Beat-Surrealist poet Bob Kaufman. Breton quoted Césaire’s declaration, “We belong to those who say no to darkness” (Breton, “A Great Black Poet,” in Césaire 2001, x, xi), and that darkness – of Fascism, of the colonial order, and of the capitalism that makes both these aberrations possible - can, in Césaire’s poetics, be overcome only by a negating, incandescent Blackness. Recalling his first encounter with Martinican poet Aimé Césaire’s writing in 1941, André Breton observed that “what was said there was what had to be said,” thus placing under the sign of necessity the audacity and expressive freedom he perceived in that work. Image Credit: Virgie Ezelle Patton, Black ‘m-Oceans: Mourning Day & Night, (1985-2012), Oil on Canvas, 72 x 48, Courtesy Ezelle-Patton Family Collection
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