Professor Jane Hiddleston publishes Aimé Césaire: Inventor of Souls
Professor Jane Hiddleston, Fellow in French at Exeter College, has focused her research on ‘the great francophone anti-racist thinkers’ for the last several years. In 2022, she published Frantz Fanon: Literature and Invention, which was later shortlisted for the R. Gapper Prize. Now, she has released an ‘intellectual biography’ on Aimé Césaire, ‘arguably the greatest Caribbean literary writer in history’, titled Aimé Césaire: Inventor of Souls.
‘At the end of daybreak…’ is the opening line of Césaire’s masterwork, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. The phrase is repeated twenty-five times through the epic poem, and speaks to its position as the work that, according to Bonnie Thomas, ‘laid the foundations for a new literary style, in which Caribbean writers came to reject the alienating gaze of the Other in favour of their own Caribbean interpretation of reality’. Professor Hiddleston explores this idea in her book, arguing that Césaire marks the beginning of a ‘dynamic and continuous process of self-creation’ known by scholars as ‘négritude’.
In her work ‘Poetic Destitution’, Césaire’s wife, Suzanne, wrote that ‘Martinician poetry will be cannibal or it will not be’. Professor Hiddleston interprets this statement by writing that it should ‘nourish itself from within its own culture’, rather than with corruption by outside stereotypes. As a figure deeply immersed in Martinican political life, Césaire’s life testifies to his commitment to his native culture. He was the Mayor of Fort-de-France and Deputy at the French National Assembly, allowing him to call for his country’s liberation, which remains a French région today. Nevertheless, Césaire proved that liberation was possible, and that ‘the much-needed revolt against oppression and subjugation can—and should—come from within the establishment, as well as without’.
Echoing the bright imagery of the ‘end of daybreak’, reviewers of Inventor of Souls have described it as ‘an erudite illumination’, and ‘eminently readable’. Professor Hiddleston ‘effortlessly’ guides the reader through Césaire’s intellectual life through six chapters, each highlighting various forms of Césaire’s thoughts and theories. Shifting through metaphors of identification that focus on ‘awakening’ and the ‘command’ harnessed by words and story, the penultimate chapter is titled: ‘one does not invent a tree, one plants it’. After the break of dawn, Professor Hiddleston highlights Césaire’s literary seed and the national literature that it inspired.
Aimé Césaire: Inventor of Souls was published in January 2025 by Polity Books.
