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ABSTRACT
Aimé Césaire's Letter to Maurice Thorez is sad a commentary on the controversial and uneasy relationship between the Marxist Internationalist Left and Third-world anticolonial activists. Written shortly after the Second Congress of Black Writers and Intellectuals, the Letter forcefully reintroduces race and the colonial question at the heart of battles that were being waged mainly along ideological lines. Césaire articulates the repudiation of Communist paternalism on the imperative, for colonized elites, to reclaim the historical initiative, therefore elevating the duty of responsibility as the ultimate test of decolonization. I contend, however, that this radical anticolonial stance ought to be nuanced by the pragmatism that characterized Césaire as the politician and chief advocate for departementalization. Césaire's resignation from the French Communist Party, against the background of the Algerian war against French domination, could also be defined as both a powerful "discourse on colonialism" as well as a political, intellectual, and ideological declaration of independence. The Letter, both a mirror and a vanguard call to action, deserves it rightful place in the glorious archives of men and women who stood up against colonial dehumanization, that is, who made this world more humane for both colonizers and colonized.
The postcolonial condition entwines the history of individual trajectories that most often merge into collective history, with the most minor details of the personal story finally finding greater significance in the global movement. Aimé Césaire's intellectual, political, and literary trajectory exemplifies the postcolonial condition lived out as an experience of colonial and imperial domination, lived as the impossibility of totally nullifying the connection imposed by the colonial situation, and finally, lived as struggle against that domination. Viewed from that angle, Césaire's oeuvre is a "chronique des révolutions politiques et culturelles qui ont marqué le processus de libération du monde noir" 'chronicle of the political and cultural revolutions that marked the black world's process of liberation' (Toumson 15). The Discourse on Colonialism, "bréviaire de tous les militants anticolonialistes en lutte contre la domination européenne" 'the breviary of all militant anticolonialists in the struggle against European domination' (Toumson 138), and the Letter to Maurice Thorez without doubt constitute two reference points in the theoretical articulation of this literature of struggle.
In 1946, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire was elected Representative of...