When Aimé Césaire returned home to Martinique in 1939 as an idealist young man after living in Paris, he was shocked by the residents, who had become so accustomed to their inferior position in society that they no longer cried ‘of hunger, of poverty, of revolt’ but were ‘strangely chattering and mute.’<sup>1</sup> Compelled to unify the black people, Césaire sought to give them a new collective identity, which would empower them to rise above their oppression. This awakening of black collective consciousness was the essence of the Négritude movement.<br><br>A poet and playwright from Martinique, Césaire was one of the founding fathers of the Négritude movement. Led by black writers from France’s African and Caribbean colonies in the 1930’s, the movement is a revolt against colonial values and a celebration of African culture. <br><br>The first literary expression of Négritude can be found in Césaire’s masterpiece, the epic poem ‘Notebook of a Return to the Native Land’. Written in an autobiographical style, the poem is an important expression of Césaire’s anticolonial values. In his search for solidarity amongst his home town’s black residents, Césaire is unable to create for them a shared identity based on African heritage alone: ‘We’ve never been Amazons of the King of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana’. <sup>2</sup><br><br>He concludes that to transcend their passive identities black people must accept their shared origin. Confronting their colonial past would unify and empower them to rise above their oppression. This realisation led to the birth of the Négritude movement itself. <br>