“Nègre de person” published by Gallimard is a very beautiful novel by Roland Brival. The Martinican author imagines Léon Gontran Damas in New York, the Guyanese poet, writer, one of the fathers of negritude, in the midst of the fight against segregation and for the civil rights of African-Americans.
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Roland Brival
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Roland Brival chose to direct Léon Gontran Damas in New York in the 1930s. A key period: black Americans are fighting against segregation, for their civil rights and the reconquest of racial pride.
Léon Gontran Damas arrives from Paris, where with Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, he militates against assimilationism and criticizes colonialism. They just created the magazine the Black Student. But all these are just words.
In the reality of segregation
Léon Gontran Damascus
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Damascus left France on a whim, Aimé Césaire returned to Martinique, the Guyanese is bored and decides to go to the United States. In love with justice, engaged in a movement of awareness, Négritude, he wants to meet African-American organizations. He is obviously housed in Harlem, in the middle of Manhattan. As soon as he arrived, taking the bus, he was shocked, the front seats were reserved for whites.
In France, this does not exist, racism can only be read in looks. There he is in the cruel reality of segregation. Blacks live in reserved neighborhoods, hold modest jobs. Tensions, riots emerge. It is a merciless struggle.
Negro renaissance
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The activist writer arrives in Harlem. Harlem in the interwar period, a cultural hotspot for African Americans but also expatriates. The neighborhood is bubbling, energetic. Artists and intellectuals from the diaspora come together, mingle and form the Negro renaissance, a movement of international resonance.
It is the place of all revolutions, of all hopes, of all excesses. Damascus meets a new world, its vision widens. These impressions, Damascus tells Cesaire in a long letter.
The carried away reader
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Damascus contacts the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the famous NAACP, and other organizations. He met the poet Langston Hughes, a major figure in the African-American cultural movement, the jazz singer Billy Holiday, who introduced him to the closed circles of black American intellectuals. He immersed himself in their cultures, jazz in particular upset him. The reader is carried with him.
A living, abundant novel
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The author immerses us in the dream life of Damascus in New York, and it takes. The style is fluid and realistic and sensitively recreates the atmosphere of Harlem. The hero is familiar, endearing, and the relationship with Aimé Cesaire and Senghor becomes clearer.
Damascus goes into politics, falls in love, writes poems, lives the night to the jazz rhythm of Eroll Garner and Charly Parker. An initiatory journey. His consciousness evolves, feeds, he proclaims himself mixed race, open intermingling poems and reflections. Nostalgic, he evokes his uprooting, his Guyanese childhood. A living and abundant novel.
“Le Nègre de personne” by Roland Brival published by Gallimard
The bookseller’s favorite: “Idea to delay the end of the world” by Ailton Krenak published by Dehors
The indigenous peoples of South America experienced a form of the end of the world in the sixteenth century after the invasion of their lands by Europeans. In this little book, Ailton Krenak, a leading figure in the indigenous struggles of Brazil, wonders how this legacy could not provide an informed look to face the consequences of the new climate regime of the Anthropocene. rather the indigenous peoples, through their ancestral strategies of resistance, which could indicate a path likely to delay the advance of “the desert and the devastation” engendered by technocapitalist overdevelopment.
“Idea to delay the end of the world” by Ailton Krenak published by Dehors
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