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Title
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Bit in the mouth, death in the soul: remembering the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas
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Author
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Abstract
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| Sixty years after the famous Conférence des écrivains et artistes noirs at the Sorbonne, and sixty years after Black-Label, the third collection of poetry by French Guianese Leon-Gontran Damas, the words nègre and nigger remain offensive words all too much used in postcolonial Europe today. Even after the short-lived Obamamania, Damass poetry remains actual as it expresses the censorship endured by the lyrical voice who cannot speak out loud against those violent verbal, physical, and thus psychological assaults. Consequently, his mors dans la bouche, or bit in the mouth is incorporated in his less well-known work which testifies to the mort dans lâme. The latter is the constant feeling of depression and blues lurking on the Black or coloured citizen of France and the West Indies. Standing in the shadow of the cofounders, and quite neglected by the leading Martinicans of the post-Négritude era, Damas nevertheless understood the urgency of transcontinental and transcultural solidarities in this battle and wrote against the dichotomies of race, class, and gender. Damas (b. 1912) and James (b. 1901) knew each other for over forty years. Damas read Jamess novel, Minty Alley (published in 1936) before they met in Paris when James was doing the research for The Black Jacobins (published in 1938), his landmark history of Tousssaint LOuverture and the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Damas helped James with translations and discovering documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale. On one occasion, Damas brought James to the home of Robert Desnos. Both lived in Washington, DC, in the 1970s when Damas was at Howard University and James taught at Federal City College/University of the District of Columbia. |
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Language
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French
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Source (journal)
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The cLR James journal. - Virginia
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Publication
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Virginia
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Philosophy Documentation Center
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2018
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ISSN
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2325-856X
[Online]
2167-4256
[Print]
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DOI
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10.5840/CLRJAMES2018241/261
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Volume/pages
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24
:1-2
(2018)
, p. 255-270
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Full text (Publisher's DOI)
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Full text (open access)
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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