INTERFUSION OF ENCOUNTER, PERSECUTION, MEMORY AND LONGING IN NEGRITUDE POETRY AS REFLECTED IN DAVID DIOP'S AFRICA AND THE VULTURES

A locution coined in the 1930s by the Afro-Martinican French poet Aimé Fernand Césaire, the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Senghor, and Léon Damas of French Guiana, “negritude”, implied a reaction against the European colonization of Africa and its legacy of cultural racism. The poets of the Négritude movement sought to examine and uphold the unique aspects of their African cultural roots. Cesaire thought that Negritude is simply one’s recognition that one is black, one’s culture and existence as black. The movement has also been considered the black colonized people’s salvaging of their own identity and consciousness. Concomitantly, a literary and ideological movement, Negritude eschewed European colonization, and expressed an intense pride in “blackness” and traditional African culture and ethics. Cesaire, Senghor and Damas published the journal wholly dedicated to Negritude under the title L’ Etudiant noire (The Black Student) in 1934