Léon-Gontran Damas

Léon-Gontran Damas is considered one of the three leaders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature. Influenced by the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the aim of the Négritude poets was to debunk the myth of European cultural superiority. In 1937, Damas lit the Francophone world on fire when he published Pigments, a collection of poems that became a rallying cry for the colonized and oppressed. The following poems are excerpted from Graffiti, a collection published in 1952, which continues Damas' discussion of the reprecussions of colonization on a more intimate level.