The forerunner of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the negritude movement, the American WEB Du Bois has dedicated his life to the fight against racism and to the defense of black culture. Her monumental work, which consists of sociological and historical essays, but also of fictions and autobiographical narratives close to prose poetry, strikes the astonishing modernity in the analyzes of the balance of power between races in the United States that she gives to Read. On the occasion of the publication in French of an autobiographical work by Du Bois, the literary chronicle from this Saturday draws the portrait of this great African-American intellectual.
“What is life, if not men and women who seek happiness, ignore the evil that reigns in the world and are content with what life offers them in abundance: the sun, the rivers, the trees, the flowers and their inexhaustible love. We want to solve the mystery of the universe and understand how the laws that govern our lives so beautifully Who are we really? What are we thinking about? What motivates us to act? May we follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before us centuries ago and be inspired by their achievements today to move forward. “Then William Du Bois or Du Boyce, as the author of these words wanted to be called, spoke. This man was in the first half of the 20th century one of the great intellectual figures of black America, of America itself.
Who was Du Bois really? He was a writer, political thinker, sociologist, anti-racist activist, founder of the NAACP, a powerful American association for the promotion of color and, last but not least, the inventor of pan-Africanism. He was educated at Harvard University, where he was the first African American to receive a doctorate (1895). Author of about fifty books, including essays, novels, autobiographical narratives, manifestos, and articles, Du Bois has profoundly influenced the struggle for civil rights in the United States.
Black dignity
Thinking of black dignity, Du Bois was, according to Africanists, the real father of negritude. His works, most notably his opus Souls of the Black People published in 1903, which condemned the scandalous situation facing blacks in the United States, were Senghor and his friends’ bed books in the Latin Quarter of the 1930s. on the pages of The Crisis, the NAACP’s body, it appears that black students in Paris first heard of the Negro Renaissance, a social and cultural movement that manifested awareness of the American black about his identity. This movement also reflected the desire of African Americans to take control of their history, from which they had been expelled, from slave ideology and the dominant culture. It was both a political and a spiritual quest.
This search had begun in the 19th century with the first writers and activists from the black cause, but as the talent of thinker and author of Du Bois knew how to give an unusual shape and strength that transformed the “black problem” into one. identity requirements dynamic, which has since become the model for black diasporas around the world.
Métis, born in 1868, to a black mother and a French Huguenot father, hence his French-sounding name, Du Bois, grew up in the village of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the United States. He was born three years after the end of the American Civil War, which ended slavery on the North American continent. In the 1990s, he died in 1963 in Accra, Ghana, a country where he had acquired citizenship. He must have been in exile there in the last years of his life because of his communist sympathies, rather cut off, as one might imagine, in America during the Cold War. The author also complained about the irritations he was subjected to throughout his life in his country: “In my own country for almost a century I was nothing but a Negro”.
Du Bois died on the eve of March in Washington led on August 28, 1963 by Martin Luther King, where the black priest held his famous I have a dream speech. In July 1964, less than a year after Du Boi’s death, America adopted its first major gender equality law. These temporal landmarks give an impression of the conditions in which this man lived, militarized and wrote, and impressed himself in the black and pan-African world of his stature as an intellectual and activist.
“Twilight of Dawn”
Nothing better testifies to the great intellectual quality of this extraordinary thinker than his reading of the balance of power between races in American society. They are astonishingly modern, as we can see when we search through his book “Pombr de l’Aube”, which has just been translated into French.
It is a collection of autobiographical essays, but which immediately sits at the confluence of several genres: testimony, travelogue, analysis and reflection with racism as a central theme, as suggested by the subtitle of the work: “Autobiography of a concept of race”. The author here decodes the concept of racism by basing himself on the events that marked his own journey in segregationist America, as the translator of the work Jean Pavans explains: “he wanted to mix an essay on the concept of race with his own experience, taking he said he was the partial illustration of a racial situation that is the foundation of America. Finally, it is one of the foundations of America. “
Racism and the search for equality are the main themes in most of Du Bois’ works. The latter approaches the issue of “racial prejudice” as a social and historical construction and reformulates what was then called the “black problem” as, above all, a “white problem”, the product of a “bundle of realities, forces and tendencies” , which he wrote on the pages of “Dawn of Dawn”.
This thought of modernity, based on empirical research methods, especially in the university monographs that Du Bois published when he was still a researcher, explains why American universities have rediscovered his sociological work for a few years, such as Les Blacks of Philadelphia, published in 1899 and considered a classic of the genre. These works were reduced during the author’s lifetime, no doubt because he was black.
However, Dawn’s interest, which made racism the reading grid for the author’s intellectual and sentimental itinerary, is not only documentary, it is also literary. As in The Black People’s Souls, Du Bois expresses himself here as a theorist, historian and storyteller, drawing his essays with metaphors, stories and poetic prose, as in this nostalgic passage from a trip to Liberia: “Can I ever forget the night when I first set foot on African soil? I belong to the sixth generation of the ancestors who leave this country. It was full moon and the waters of the Atlantic Ocean were flat as a lake. During the slow afternoon as the sun enveloped the scarlet veils with the misty cloud to the west, I had looked into Africa in the distance. Grand Cape Mount, this mighty promontory with its two curves, the northern guard post in the Kingdom of Liberia, took shape in the fog at half past three, darkened and became clear … ”
This colorful, sharp and poetic narrative is characteristic of William Du Boi’s prose, divided between scientific discourse and literary flashes. How, then, can one be surprised that its author is considered the essential forerunner of the great black American literature?
Dawn, by WEB Du Bois. Translated from the English by Jean Pavans. Vendemiaire, 420 pages, 22 euros.
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