Tropiques

Aimé Césaire wrote in the first issue of Tropiques that he had formed the magazine in reaction to the problems of the time and the lack of art coming out of Martinique and other parts of the Caribbean.^[2] Césaire would go on to be the leading contributor to the magazine, and each issue included at least one of his pieces.^[3] He set the focus on the need to create a distinct Martinican culture with the first words of the introduction for the journal's first issue:

"Sterile and silent land. It is of ours that I am speaking."^[4][3]

The first issue was published in Fort-de-France, Martinique's capital, in April 1941, with contributions by Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Charles Péguy, and Georgette Anderson. It cost 12 francs for a single issue, or 40 francs for a yearlong subscription.

The magazine included poetry, fiction, essays, and commentary from a range of authors in Martinique at the time.^[2] Ménil and the Césaires would write and solicit pieces after their jobs as schoolteachers at the famed Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France.^[5]

Césaire used his leadership position in the magazine to advance the philosophy of Negritude. Césaire has been cited by scholars such as Arnold James as one of the most influential theorists of the movement, and he started writing about it in earnest in the years shortly before and during Tropiques.^[6] He wrote that black people, in Africa and the African diaspora, should reject the norms that influenced them to try to follow French and other European intellectual traditions.

Scholars have argued that there was not a distinct and significant black Martinican literary tradition before Tropiques.^[6] Frantz Fanon said that Césaire's ideas, especially leaving Europe to create a uniquely African or diasporic African intellectual tradition, had a profound influence on his own later writings.^[7][2] Like Fanon, Césaire's experiences during the war led him to the belief that French colonialism was associated with many of the same dehumanizing evils as the autocratic regimes spreading across Europe.^[8]

After the Free French took over Martinique from the Vichy, Césaire continued to write against European colonialism.^[6] According to Janis L. Pallister, although Césaire wrote against the systems of colonialism that the French had on the island before and during the war, he opposed independence for the French territories in the Caribbean, and he was elected to France's National Assembly after the war ended.^[8] Part of the Negritude philosophy of the magazine involved a commitment to leftist thought, even though Césaire would personally leave the French Communist Party a little more than a decade later over worries that it was not committed to a distinct Martinican or Antillean culture.^[8]

Many of the major contributors to Tropiques were proponents of surrealist writing, and the magazine was the most prominent example of the movement in the Caribbean at the time.^[2] The various writers in Tropiques were influenced by surrealism in different ways: whereas Aimé Césaire mostly used it as a poetic device, René Ménil and others adopted its larger philosophical positions in their political writing.^[2]

Ménil, who had been exposed to and endorsed surrealism during the early 1930s as a student in Paris, combined a surrealist attitude with Négritude in many of his pieces, including his writing about the need for art in Martinique that comes from distinctly Martinican experiences and traditions.^[6] Ménil wrote that he could avoid reality and establishment theories while using his imagination, as a poet to find a new mode of thought that was still based in the world around him.^[9] Surrealism allowed for such "primitivism," the promotion of art that drew primarily from uniquely African or Caribbean influences, instead of European styles.^[5][4] In this sense, to allow "Martinique to refocus" and "to lead Martinicans to reflect" on their close environment,^[10] Césaire offers Henri Stehlé, Director of the Botanical Garden of Fort-de-France, to write two articles for Tropiques concerning the Martinican flora, and the stories and legends related to the common names of plants used by people (Tropiques N° 2 of 1941 and N° 10 of 1944).^[11] According to Ursula Heise, these articles and "the Caesarean invocations to the Antillean ecology operates as indices of a racial and cultural authenticity which is distinguished from European identity...."^[11]

André Breton, one of the fathers of surrealism in Europe, was living in Martinique during the war, and he was in contact with the writers of Tropiques after he saw the first issue in a store.^[6] Surrealists in Europe supported Tropiques, in part because Breton heard of Césaire and his magazine in Martinique.^[5] The fact that the magazine was written outside of Europe gave it more authenticity in Breton's eyes. Breton's visit to Martinique had a large influence on the surrealism present in many of the magazine's later issues—the philosophy of Tropiques was primarily about Negritude and uplifting Martinican culture, and surrealism served as a useful poetic device and theoretical lens for developing these ideas.^[6]