Aimé Césaire and a brave Irish priest

Aimé Césaire

This Wednesday, 26 June will be the centenary of the birth of Aimé Césaire - the great poet, playwright and politician, who did so much to advance the dignity and culture of the black diaspora.

The Martinican Césaire, however, was a trenchant critic of what he considered to be the Church's collusion in slavery and colonialism.

In his excoriating book Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire writes: 'In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously - and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.

'Pursuing my analysis, I find that hypocrisy is of recent date; that neither Cortez discovering Mexico from the top of the great teocalli, nor Pizzaro before Cuzco (much less Marco Polo before Cambaluc), claims that he is the harbinger of a superior order; that they kill; that they plunder; that they have helmets, lances, cupidities; that the slavering apologists came later; that the chief culprit in this domain is Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity=civilization, paganism=savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the yellow peoples, and the blacks.'

So it is striking to discover the deep regard in which he is held by the Irish missionary priest Fr Pádraig Ó Máille.

With sweet timing, Fr Ó Máille, 82, is soon to publish his Gaelic-language translation of Césaire's celebrated poem: Notebook of a Return to my Native Land [Cahier d'un retour au pays natal], described by André Breton as the 'greatest lyrical monument of our time'.

The poem describes the black colonial experience 'of a people so strangely talkative yet mute'.

Fr Ó Máille says: 'I couldn't believe the poem when I first came across it. The parallels with the Irish experience of colonialism and a mystifying ideology are remarkable.'

He adds: 'When I was ordained almost 60 years ago, I belonged to a "race of angels"; my feet were not on the ground as far as the Irish people were concerned. There was a damaging unreality about the priestly self-image imposed on us by tradition: an experience of domination and a loss of true identity.'

Fr Ó Máille, of the St Patrick's Kiltegan Mission, spent many years in Africa, notably Nigeria and Malawi, where he taught at university and first discovered Césaire. It was in Malawi that he witnessed what he describes as draconian practices, eventually being expelled from the country in 1992 as an 'undesirable alien'. He recounts his experiences in his book Living Dangerously: A Memoir of Political Change in Malawi (alternatively signed as by Patrick O'Malley) and it is clear that he was a stout defender of democracy and the rule of law. Fr Ó Máille is planning to attend the Césaire Celebration at the French Institute this coming Monday 24th June. You are warmly invited to join him. For further details, see Dr Crispin's piece in the New Internationalist: http://newint.org/blog/2013/06/19/aime-cesaire-centenary/

Philip Crispin is Lecturer in Drama, at the University of Hull

For more information email: p.crispin@hull.ac.uk