Shooting down the Colonizers

            Aimé Césaire had a goal that he was going to bring light to the ugliness and double standards of the colonizers. He did. As a politician and renown writer of his place and time, he accomplished just that. He understood that battles were fought based on execution of certain tactics and techniques. Césaire used many ways of combating at his opponents, but only a few need to be dug into for truly seeing how successful and well of a job he did.

One of the most breathtaking, hard-hitting techniques he used was showing Europe the Hitler that they had harbored within in themselves for so long without even realizing it. He went into detail about the methods and justification that Hitler used and paralleled them to the methods and ideologies that the colonizers utilized with their victims, better known as the colonized. Césaire discussed how the Christian bourgeoisie were themselves inhabited by Hitler and Hitlerism, but made clear they were blind to it until they became the ones exploited and victimized. It’s this principal and hypocritical idea here that made the Europeans face their own monster. They were fine employing these methods and exercising these horrors on the “the coolies India and the niggers of Africa,” but these devices were a discomforting and disgusting plague in their minds when applied to their own kind.  This concept that Césaire chooses to discuss is very effective in its goal to get the readers to see the evil and contradictory side of this colonizing Europe. No one says it better than he does when he gives the definition of colonization. “Colonization: bridgehead in a campaign to civilize barbarism, from which there may emerge at any moment the negation of civilization.” These examples howl truth, and put in place the true positon that the colonizers can find themselves standing in. It is not one of divine duty or just paternalism, it’s the foothold or rather a plot of hypocrisy quicksand that they continually sink into. Césaire does not try to pull the colonizers out with this discourse, he just lets the rest of the world into the jungle so they can really see what’s going on.

Next in the arsenal is a clean and neat counter attack of spear throwing reversals. In this discourse, I would go far enough to say Césaire perfectly uses the words the colonizers used to describe themselves. Not only does he do this effectively, he has support behind the words. The colonizers called the Africans things out of hollow understanding and sickening arrogance, but Césaire uses the ripest thing he can use, their confessed ideologies and physical actions toward the Africans. A laundry list could be created from the repulsive things the Europeans did to and said of the Africans. He could convince the reader that the colonizers truly were morally diseased, because all he did was use the same words that they used against themselves. If you look at a lexicon of words that the colonizers used and the words that Césaire used, then remove the names from the top of the columns; that person would see how some of the words are identical or fall into some of the same categories. A couple of words that can be found within the list are words like degraded, fiendish, savage nation, corruption, abominable, monsters, torturers, barbarous, dehumanized, tyrants, deprived, cruel, arrogant, and venomous. It really makes you wonder who said what about who, and this is why the word war was especially successful: by choosing the specific words he did, he further demonstrated how contradictory of a nature the European colonizers possessed.

If these techniques have not already done enough grave injury to the personality of colonizers, this technique is sure to give reason to reconsider that. This next one he uses is giving voice to the personality of the colonizers. He takes things said by the philosophers and respected writers of the age on all the things they had to say about the “superior” people vs. the “inferior” people, racism, and all their other arrogant vomit and neatly handed back to them on a plate which they now have to consume in front of everyone. Now, there is no doubt that the barbaric nature, if not already imagined will come to life. Césaire tapped into the psyche of his opponents, he grabbed their tongues and turned them into knives that have in turn come to wreak havoc on their own immoral selves. The Europeans could not do this on the Africans part to illustrate and give bone to a view of arrogance because the Africans were never that tenacious or consumed enough in themselves to say those kind of things the Europeans upon initial contact. If they have, it is unheard of which totally counts for something. The way that Césaire exposes their folly makes the Europeans seem like they sat in a boardroom to purposely cook up a plate with the goal of increasing their self-esteem by praising themselves and degrading others. In a literal sense, disregarding cooking utensils and a board room, that is exactly what they did. They used their pens, paper, and tongues to soil the reputation of the Africans and other people groups while elevating their mode of superiority to new and shared heights. There are a couple of well-known figures who said some pretty dirty things. For Example, Fauget said, “The yellow man, the black man, is not our cousin at all…If Europe becomes yellow, there will certainly be a regression, a new period of darkness and confusion, that is, another middle ages.” Renan said this, “Reduce this noble race to working in ergastulum like Negroes and Chinese, they rebel…But the life at which our workers rebel would make a Chinese or a fellah happy, as they are not military creatures in the least. Let each one do what he is made for, and all will be well.” They say all of these things, yet believe in their righteous and nobility. It is totally contradictory and totally barbaric. The reader will clearly see this as they follow all the points that the colonizers make and that Césaire emphasizes, but exposes the hypocrisy within it.

These effective methods helped Césaire to execute his attempt almost flawlessly. There were some points where his attacks were stronger than others, but without a doubt, I believe that Césaire did an amazing job showing how the colonizers became so consumed in themselves that they in return became decivlized. All the dirt was spread upon the ideas of the Europeans for all to see and for all to evaluate. The truth was always there, Césaire simply wrote about it and turned the tables so the oppressed, colonized, and proletariat wouldn’t continue to live brushing the dirt of oppression off their shoulders while standing in it. They can now fully understand the situation with a hint of a solution to combatting the oppressive nature of living under another nation, group of people, or individual like they been doing for so long. Just the fact that Césaire was able to gather all this evidence and material to blast at the ideology of the colonizer and European was incredibly impressive. It proves that along with all the literary, scholarly, and military colonel prestige of Europe, there was a lot of dirt and a lot of contradictory regress. Discourse on Colonialism as a whole is a puzzle pieced perfectly together which most people probably felt incompetent to try and put together, or either feared the backlash that would come from it. Fortunately, Césaire was strong enough and had enough belief in negritude, humanizing, giving strength back into the hands of the proletariat to do something about it.