The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire

This chapter examines the forms of classicism that proliferate in the writings of the Martinican poet-politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), focusing in particular on his 1963 drama The Tragedy of King Christopher. The classical form of tragedy, mediated through Nietzsche, provides Césaire with a way of reconsidering the reverberations of the Haitian revolution throughout the black Atlantic as a foundational event of black identity. Césaire uses tragedy to dramatize the story of Henri Christophe, the creator of a monarchy in the northern part of Haiti in the early nineteenth century, as a way of instructing his audience on the urgent issue of black political organization in the mid-twentieth century.