Léopold Sedar Senghor

Leopold Sedar Senghor was a Senegalese politician, cultural theorist and poet who served as the first president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980.

Quotes

• No, you didn’t die for free. You are witnesses of the immortal Africa, you are witnesses of the new world that will be tomorrow.

• No one has the right to erase my culture, because a community without culture is a people without human beings.

• To think and act by ourselves and for ourselves, as Negroes, to access modernity without trampling on our authenticity.

• Racists are people with the wrong anger.

• You have only to listen to God’s trombones, to your heart, beating to the rhythm of blood, your blood.

• We do not inherit the land from our parents, we borrow it from our children.

• I say there is no armed peace, no peace under oppression. No brotherhood without equality. I wanted all men to be brothers.”

• Who can sing to you but your brother in arms, your brother in blood. You Senegalese Tirailleurs, my black brothers with warm hands, lying under ice and death?

• Deep in the well of my memory, I touch your face where I draw the water that refreshes my long regret.

• I sing of your passing beauty, a form I fix in the Eternal, before jealous fate reduces you to ashes to nourish the roots of life.

• To dance is to discover and recreate, especially when the dance is a dance of love. It is, in any case, the best mode of knowledge.

• The poem is only complete if it becomes song, word and music at the same time.

• I dreamed of a world of sunshine in the brotherhood of all others.

• Every clump of grass hides an enemy.

• I will tear the Banania smile off every wall in France.

• Unlike the classical European, the Negro-African does not distinguish himself from the object, he does not hold it at a distance, he does not look at it, he does not analyse it. He touches it, he feels it, he smells it.

Poems

TO THE SENEGALESE RIFLEMEN WHO DIED FOR FRANCE

Here is the Sun Which tightens the breasts of the virgins Who makes the old men smile on the green benches Who would awaken the dead under a maternal earth. I hear the sound of cannon is it from Irun? They put flowers on tombs and warm the Unknown Soldier. You my dark brothers, no one appoints you. Five hundred thousand of your children are promised glory of the future deaths, they thank them in advance, future dark dead. Die Schwarze Schande! Listen to me, Senegalese Riflemen, in the solitude of black earth and death In your solitude without eyes without ears, more than I in my dark skin at the depths of the Province, Without even the warmth of your comrades lying close to you, as in the trenches in the village palavers long ago, Listen to me, black skin Riflemen, well without ears and eyes in your threefold chamber at night. We have not borrowed mourners, nor tears from your former wives. They only remember your fury and prefer the stench of the living. The mourners’ laments come too clear, Too quickly drying up the cheeks of your wives, as in the Fouta streams in the dry season, The warmest tears too clear and too quickly drunk from the corners of the forgetful lips.

We bring you, listen to us, we who epilate your names in the months of your death, We, in these days of fear without memory, we bring you the friendship of your comrades Ah! May I, one day, in a voice glowing like embers,may I sing The friendship of the comrades fervent as bowels and delicate as entrails, strong as tendons. Listen to us, Dead in the deep water plains of the northern and the eastern fields. Receive this red soil, under a summer sun this redden soil blood of the white hosts Receive the salute of your black comrades, Senegalese Riflemen DEATH FOR THE REPUBLIC! __Tours, 1938

TO THE NEGRO-AMERICAN SOLDIERS

Your iron horses, who drink but do not eat. And it is no longer the nobility of elephants, it is the barbaric weight of the prehistoric monsters of the world.

Under your closed face, I did not recognize you. I only touched the warmth of your brown hand, I called myself “Afrika! And I found once again the lost laughter, I hailed the ancient voices and the roar of Congo waterfalls. Brothers, I do not know whether you bombed the cathedrals, the pride of Europe, If you are the lightning of God’s hand that burned Sodom and Gomorrah. No, you are the messengers of his mercy, the Spring after Winter. To those who had forgotten how to laugh-only smile obliquely Who knew nothing but the savory flavor of tears and the vexing stench of blood You bring the Season of Peace and hope to end of the delay. And their night is filled with milky sweetness, the blue fields of the sky are covered with flowers, silence sings soothingly.

You bring them the sun. The air beats with whispers liquids and crystalline chirping and beating silky wings The aerial cities are tepid with nests. Through the streets joy streamed, the boys play with their dreams Men dance before of their machines and surprised themselves singing. Schoolgirls’s eyelids are rose petals, and fruits ripen in the virgins’ breasts And the women’s hips—Oh, sweetness grow generously heavy. Black brothers, warriors whose mouths are flowers that sing —Oh! the delight to live after Winter—I salute you like messengers of peace.

DESPAIR FOR A FREE VOLUNTEER

I don’t understand a thing, said the sergeant, a Senegalese—and a volunteer! He has been there for fifteen days, turning round, ruminating the new Great Farce And on the newest affront-his sweating forehead! –to his sacrifice paid in false currency. He did not even ask for fifty centimeter one cent Only his posthumous identity as a man. He was given the bondage garments he imagined the candid martyr’s robe O naive! naively naive! and the plumed helmet and boots for his free and domesticated feet.

He leans over to the gaping courtyard and four rows windows below him He leans out, and the apocalyptic plain is lined up with trenches, where the dead men rot like sterile seeds He leans over the high burial mounds of solitude. And beyond it, the Sudanese plain has dried out the Wind form the east and the Nordic masters of Time And the beautiful shining black roads bordered by the sands, nothing but sands taxes, taxes chores whips. And the only dew is spit from their inextinguishable thirst to remember the green Atlantic meadows For the engineers’ dams have not alleviated the thirst of sou ls in polytechnic villages. He gets rid of his collar-tie hides the sweat of the shirt, of a discreet jacket. He leans over a second plain saturated with plumed helmets and blood, on a second plain altered by love like a friendly rain And it is until the parallel fusion, the so fatal succession of the plains and complaints silently. On tiptoe he leans over, rises himself to pierce his despair on the horizon. He doesn’t see that the dead and the high dead disguised the fields there that turn green in the shade Gold and constellated of stars, as if sprinkled by blood From their feet and well-nourished fat corpses. Can he see the lost paradise behind the horizon of fabled time? He leans over. Attracted by the open space and this vast land emptied of hope, as bare trees after the bombardment. Nothing but this stench, that empty boiling rising to his head. Sweet dizziness of death, oh! empty of everything hope, of hollow suffering. A slow balance rocks the body what a dancer’s grace in the elastic air! —and The sudden fall, sweet dizziness! O frail, very frail child, such a faithful traitor to your genius!

External links

• Media related to Léopold Sedar Senghor on Wikimedia Commons