Twenty years before Frantz Fanon had organized the concept of “the colonized personality” into psychoanalytic theory, Pigments, a book of poems published in 1937 by Leon Damas, revealed the anguish of what has come to be known by that term.
Ellen Conroy Kennedy, “Leon Damas: Pigments and the Colonized Personality,” Black World/Negro Digest (January 1972)
Race, ethnie, pays, peu importe le mot, puisque dans les Antilles-Guyane, tout cela se confond. Mais qu’on se le dise, c’est de cela qu’il s’agit quand on parle de poésie de la négritude. Et c’est vrai que Damas a été un poète de la négritude, sans doute le premier d’entre eux.
Aimé Césaire, Hommage à Damas, (31 août 1978)
It may be
they dare to
treat me white
though everything within me
wants only to be black
as negro as my Africa
the Africa they ransacked
Léon-Gontran Damas, excerpted from “Whitewash” (for Christiane and Alioune Diope). First published in Pigments, translated and reprinted in Black World/Negro Digest (January 1972)
[The papers of Damas are held by the New York Public Library. The Académie Guyane hosts a digital archive of poems by Damas. Île en île has a Damas bibliography.]
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Léon-Gontran Damas: 28 March 1912 – 22 January 1978: http://t.co/YkHSMtfQ #negritude #guyane #archives
Léon-Gontran Damas: 28 March 1912 – 22 January 1978: http://t.co/YkHSMtfQ #negritude #archives #guyane
Léon-Gontran Damas: 28 March 1912 – 22 January 1978: http://t.co/bB42ZChl via @public_archive #negritude #archives #guyane
Léon-Gontran Damas, 28 March 1912 – 22 January 1978: http://t.co/YkHOeTeW #guyane #negritude
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Léon-Gontran Damas, 28 March 1912 – 22 January 1978: http://t.co/53fqGKR7 #negritude #guyane
Negritude.A name u NEVER hear“@public_archive: Léon-Gontran Damas, 28 March 1912 – 22 January 1978: http://t.co/VYoNqfqH #negritude #guyane”
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