The Responsibility of the Artist, an essay by Aimé Césaire

We are at a solemn moment, the moment when colonialism is not dead, alas, but at any rate already knows itself to be mortal. Colonialism is still able to crush and oppress, perhaps more savagely than ever. One thing is sure, however: It is mortally wounded, it knows it is perishable and has lost its historical assurance.

And isn’t the best indication of this – the sudden popularity of that neologism which is presently winning an important place in current usage? I mean the word “decolonization.” The truth is that our contemporaries have confusedly understood the great phenomenon that is now in process and which, once we have attained a proper perspective, will cause people to characterize our epoch by saying that, just as the nineteenth century was the century of colonization, the twentieth was the century of decolonization.

But, one might say, if this is the direction the century is taking, then all one has to do is let things follow their own course and decolonization will come about by itself. We must realize something once and for all: decolonization is not automatic; better: not all decolonizations are equally valid. Decolonization is not automatic. This means that decolonization is never the result of a “fiat” by the colonizer’s conscience. It is always the result of a struggle, always the result of pressure. Even when it is accomplished peacefully, decolonization is always the result of a rupture.

I said too that not all decolonizations are equally valid. The proof is the unequal development of the liberated countries: some have difficulty ridding themselves of the aftereffects of colonialism while others blossom quickly and lully in the bright sun of independence.

These two general considerations are what fix the real dimensions of our legitimacy and of our responsibilities as men of culture.

Our duty as men of culture, our noble duty, is this: to hasten decolonization and, in the very heart of the present, to make ready for good decolonization, a decolonization without aftereffects.

But what does hastening decolonization mean? It means that, in whatever way possible, we must hasten the maturation of popular self-awareness, without which there will never be any decolonization.

It is perfectly true to say that national sentiment generally survives in the most immediate and also most obvious fashion, and in the face of the strongest colonial oppression, among the common people.

But it is also true that this immediate sentiment must be authenticated, propagated, and purified. This sentiment must be fashioned into a consciousness; that is, a radiant sun. No one is in a better position to do this than the man of culture.

The point is not some messianic conception of the artist or writer. And I will never say, with the romantics, that poets and writers create nations or national values. It is a question of something much simpler, which is this: It is the man of culture who gives form and expression, through creation. And by the very fact of its being oppressed, and therefore brought to light, this expression itself creates or dialectically recreates in its own image the sentiment of which it is by and large the emanation.

There is never a paucity of national sentiment: there is only an insufficient number of men of culture. National sentiment is eternal and ubiquitous: it may be restrained, it may assume unexpected, even ridiculous forms, but it is, even in the most assimilated, that is, the most disadvantaged countries, and it contains the potential for the entire cultural renaissance. But this sentiment must be detected; it must be magnified; it must be given back its value in the world of false values. And this is precisely the role of the writer and artist, and forms the basis of his legitimacy.

One need look no further for the secret of the “poetic” expansion in the emerging nations. Westerners say, “It’s strange: their need is technicians and they’re developing poets.”

The people can be trusted in this. They know what they need better than anyone else does. They know it intuitively, and they know that all creation, because it is creation, is participation in a liberating struggle.

One may explain it however one likes: the expansive power of the word; better, the power of action.

The colonial regime is the negation of action: negation of creation. In colonial society there is not merely a master-servant hierarchy. There is an implicit hierarchy between creators and consumers.

Under good decolonization, the colonizer is the creator of cultural values. And the colonized is the consumer. And everything is fine so long as nothing disturbs this hierarchy. There is a law of comfort in all colonization: “Si prega di non disturbare.” Please do not disturb.

Cultural creation disturbs, however, precisely because it is creation. It upsets things, and the first thing it upsets is the colonial hierarchy, for it turns the colonized consumer into a creator. Within the colonial regime itself it gives the historical initiative back to those from whom the colonial regime has made in its mission to rob all such initiative.

And this is why the colonizer can only look with suspicion at all indigenous artistic creation. He can try to put up with it. He can even try to use it. But, basically, all indigenous creation is something out of the ordinary, and therefore dangerous, for the colonizer. If one wants a proof of this, among many others, one need only recall the beginnings of Negro literature in France and the scandalously hostile situation that developed around Rene Maran or a Rabearivelo thirty years ago… They constituted a scandal by their very existence. And to the same extent that artistic creation is dangerous for the colonizer, it is heartening, in the proper sense of the word, for the colonized. It counterbalances the inferiority complex which it is the mission of all colonization to instill in the colonized.

And this is why we must create… Yes, in a word, it is the poets, the artists, the writers, the men of culture who, by blending memories as well as hopes in the everydayness of suffereing and denials of justice, must constitute those great reserves of faith, those great silos of strength where, in critical moments, the people can craw the courage to assume their own destiny and to shape the future. Some have said that the writer is the engineer of souls.

At our present conjuncture we are propagators of souls, multipliers of souls, and, at the outer limit, inventors of souls.

I also said that it is the mission of the black man of culture to prepare good decolonization, not just any decolonization.

It is clear that for us there is not, and cannot be, any decolonization that is bad in itself for the very simple reason that the least good of all decolonizations will always be miles superior to the best colonizations. But I do maintain that there are degrees within decolonization: that not all decolonizations are equal, and if “good decolonization” can only be defined by opposition to a “less good decolonization,” I shall say that within its very independence the latter thinks only of utilizing colonial structures which have been adapted to a new reality, whereas true decolonization understands that its task is to make a definitive break with colonial structures.

All too often one sees genuinely colonial or colonialist structures perpetuated or reconstituted in the bosom of societies which constitute the nations that have been liberated from the colonial yoke. Or again, typically colonialist phenomena are liable to recur at moment within the bosom of imperfectly decolonized nations. These phenomena are no longer utilized by a colonizer or an imperialist but by a group or class of men who are thereafter in the position of epigones of colonialism, using the instruments invented by colonialism.

Think of the race struggles in Central or Latin America and you will see that what is involved there is the heritage or survival of the colonial regime in countries which, however, acceded to independence one-hundred-and-fifty years ago. We have to realize one thing: the fight against colonialism is not over as fast as one thinks, nor because imperialism has suffered military defeat.

In brief, we cannot be concerned merely with displacing colonialism or internalizing servitude. What is necessary is to destroy it, that is, tear out its roots. This is why true decolonization will either be revolutionary or will not exist. This view enables one to understand how vain is the temptation among certain people to give credit to the idea that the stages and transitions between the colonial period and the time of liberty must be handled gently. Indeed it is Europe which, knowing the inevitable outcome, invented the theory of stages in order to forestall it.

This has always been a temptation for the West. Ever since the rampant slavery in French-ruled territories prior to 1848, good souls and good minds (which, moreover, had been won over to the idea of emancipation) advocated the idea of necessary stages. I am thinking here of the French historian de Toequeville who agreed with the principle of emancipation but immediately qualified and temporized. “Think: hurtling Negro slaves into liberty from one day to the next—catastrophe! And first of all, catastrophe for the slave himself!” It was therefore necessary to have a period of apprenticeship for freedom and to undertake to get the Negro slave to the point where freedom would one day be “bearable.”

This is the same theory which is today being applied to national populations. No longer able to oppose the colonial peoples by a brutal refusal, one promises them independence, but it is independence on an installment plan. First comes the apprenticeship for independence. [Just as] slavery cannot be a school for the freedom, colonialism cannot be a school for independence. They are of two different orders, and one will never give rise to the other except by breaking and rupture.

And if we refuse the entire idea of apprenticeship, and if we believe that the passage from colonization to true decolonization can only be made through rupture, then this further increases and more completely defines our responsibilities as men of culture. For in the bosom of the colonial society, it is the man of culture who must spare his people the apprenticeship for freedom. And the man of culture, the writer, poet, or artist, makes this possible because creative cultural activity, which outdistances the concrete collective experience, already serves as that apprenticeship within the colonial situation.

We have been warned against the temptation to believe that an indigenous culture can ever be restructured within a colonial context. Restructuring a culture is a long and exacting task, and in the present colonial situation, more exactly in this transitional moment in which we are living, creative cultural activity is preparing here and now this indispensible restructuring; this is what legitimizes such activity.

As the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, I said that if there is one thing that characterizes the colonial situation, it is cultural anarchy. Colonization has replaced primitive cultural unity with cultural heterogeneity and cultural anarchy. In reality, the colonial order is expressed by cultural disorder. In the present colonial situation, the writer and the artist are preparing good decolonization by doing their part right now to help bring order to the cultural chaos.

Look at the Negro novel. Look at Negro poetry. The materials may be disparate, heterogeneous, but they have been melted down, transcended, dominated, and restructured. For, ultimately, what is art if not structure?

That, it seems to me, is the first contribution of black writers and artists to the liberation of their people.

Secondly, one must go all the way and strip colonization of its aura. Colonization, as I said, is not order but disorder. But neither is it unity, the conquest of the world, the annexation into the world of territories that have been isolated for too long. The opposite is true. Imperialism separates, imperialism divides—or to take up a word which Senghor made famous—imperialism balkanizes. And it separates and divides not only in space but also in time.

And this balkanization also has significance in time. For imperialism divides history. Before and after are established with reference to colonization. Everything prior to colonization is prehistory. And history only begins with colonization. Henceforth, and because of the colonizer, the historical “continuum” is broken, with its deplorable cultural consequences: African science, philosophy, history – this all becomes folklore. In other words, literature, philosophy, and sciences are degraded, just as art itself becomes primitive art. And all of this culminates in the entirely European opposition between tradition and evolution.

We must realize very clearly that when Sekou Toure, the leader of a free country, proudly affirms: “I am the descendent of Samory,” it is not a matter of a puerile genealogical vanity. It means: “I bind Samory unto myself.” By doing this, he does a great thing: he re-establishes history, he puts things back in their proper place. He is saying: Colonization is not history, but merely accident; and he restores the historical “continuum.” He reaffirms the historical continuity that was broken by the colonial intrusion.

We need look no further for our duty as writers and artists. It is to restore the double continuity that has been broken by colonialism: continuity with the world and with ourselves.

Because we are forces for truth, we are the ones who will reintroduce our peoples into the world and who will reaffirm that solidarity, the idea of which colonialism tried to obscure or destroy. Because we are and because, beyond the colonial lie, we want to be men of truth, we are soldiers of unity and brotherhood at the same time.

Tradition? Evolution? The entire opposition becomes futile in and through artistic expression, for art is a truth that fuses and blends analytically disparate elements in a single impulse.

In conditions like ours, the greatest ambition of our literature should be directed toward becoming a sacred literature, and our art, a sacred art. By raising the particular situation of our peoples to universal proportions, by linking them to history, by lifting them onto a plane which is precisely that of becoming (the negation of stagnation), artistic creation, through its strength, must mobilize virgin emotional forces. This is why unsuspected psychic resources rise up at its summons and help to restore the body social, whose aptitude for resistance and vocation for enterprise have been undermined by the colonial shock.

It seems that everything I have just said adequately establishes the legitimacy of our activity as writers and artists, at the same time that these considerations define our responsibilities.

Our legitimacy resides in our whole-hearted participation in our peoples’ struggle for freedom.

Our responsibility resides in the fact that the use which our people make of their reconquered liberty will largely depend upon us. And this is the basis of our duty as men, which is deeper than any of our particular duties. For, in the end, there is one question which no man of culture can avoid, whatever his country or race. That question is: “What sort of a world are you building for us?”

Let it be known that by articulating our effort in the colonized peoples’ effort for freedom, by fighting for the dignity of our peoples, for their truth, and their recognition, we are by definition fighting for the entire world, to free it from tyranny, hate, and fanaticism.

Above and beyond the present-day struggles, bounded as they are by circumstances, this is what we want: a world rejuvenated and balanced. Without this, nothing will have any meaning. Nothing: not even today’s struggle, not even tomorrow’s victory. Then and only then will we have conquered and our final victory will mark the coming of a new era. We will have contributed meaning to the most misused and yet most glorious of words: we will have helped found universal humanism.

From Presence Africaine, Feb-March 1959.