In 1957, two poets in two countries far apart from each other resigned from their communist parties without knowing each other. One of them was Aime Cesaire, the other Cegerxwin. Aime Cesaire was a French citizen. His grandparents were brought as slaves from Africa four hundred years ago and worked as slaves on the plantations of the island of Martinique. Cegerxwin was born into a poor family in a devastated country. He was a shepherd to earn bread, he was a theologian who studied with the zakat given by the people; to find a way out of his country’s situation, he made a revolution, and because of these worries, he felt pain in his heart.
In their time, two issues came to the fore: the proletariat and colonialism. According to the socialists, the working class should fight oppression and exploitation in the European metropolises and save humanity. At that time, however, the oppressed peoples rebelled against colonialism. Capitalism did not have the same effect in the metropolis and the colonized country.
European capital was earned and accumulated not only through the labor of the working class in the metropolises, but also through the plundering of the labor and property of the colonizedpeoples. As Cesaire wrote: “There was no skyscraper I did not work to build. They were not only “thirsty and hungry”, but also “homeless and lonely”.
He therefore described the liberation of his people and the creation of a new humanism as two main goals. The world they lived in and the written history made no mention of their pain and suffering, nor of their people’s revolution and struggle. They wanted their people, with their name and color, to have a legitimate place in the world, in humanity. But this was no easy task. Their people and their land had become the property of the exploiters and everything were legitimized in the name of development and civilization.
Aime Cesaire wrote his book Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal [Notebook of a Return to Native Land] in 1939. Cesaire spent his childhood in Martinique, one of the islands of the Antilles. The Antilles were also the home of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution. This was the first revolution in the world that was instigated by slaves and put an end to slavery, but historians had not mentioned this revolution. Cesaire wanted both to re-establish the place of blacks in history and to link himself to Toussaint L’Ouverture and the revolutions of his time to the Haitian Revolution. This is what Cigerxwîn did in Serafnamena Manzum, Şehnameya Şehîdan and Kîne Em where he associated himself with the pioneers and leaders of Kurdish history.
For both, there were no contradictions in the struggle against capitalism and colonialism. The two go hand in hand. And there was also no contradiction between working for their nations and for humanity. On the contrary, the struggle of the oppressed peoples was part of building humanism for all. With this idea, they entered politics in the ranks of the communist parties. They worked with them for ten years.
At the end of 1956, Cesaire sent a letter of resignation to the General Secretary of the French Communist Party (FCP), Maurice Thorez. Aime Cesaire put forward these ideas and issues:
Why did the FCP not give place to the experiences and aspirations of Africans and blacks in theory and practice? They did not have to adhere to socialism defined according to the French experience”… We are equal, the French communists should not confuse this with alliance and obedience… You can see that the arrogance and haughtiness of the colonial era are at work in their minds. Because I defended the rights and struggles of black people, I was accused of racism. But that is not true. Black people are part of humanity and they have rights. Marx is good, but he should be supplemented by the experiences of black people and the “unknown geographies”.
In his book Jinenigeriya Min [My Biography], Cegerxwîn goes into the reasons why he left the Syrian Communist Party ‘and says:
According to the party members, nationalism and humanism were opposites. But have the communists of Russia and Greater China have denied the struggle of their nations in the name of communism, so that I should deny the struggle of my own people?Should we wait for Guevara to come and save us, or should we wait for the Soviet Union? Only through our own struggle and the support and solidarity of our comrades can we liberate ourselves. Are you telling other nations who are fighting for their independence to stop fighting and come to save other nations? They tell us, if you want to fight for the Kurds, go to Kurdistan. Where should we go? Does Kurdistan exist? Should we go to Mars?
Both poets wanted to incorporate the experience of the struggle of their oppressed people into the movement to build a new humanity. But this did not happen.
The question now is this: What is the experience of the Kurdish people at this moment?
Bibliography
Cegerxwin, My Biography, Apec, 1995.
Yusuf Kaynak Biography of Cegerxwin and His Works, Do, 2010.
Aime Cesaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez” tr. Faxriya Adsay, Zarema, no. 14, 2021.Aime Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Wesleyan College Press, 2013.
Ibrahim Ibrahim, Reflections on Kurdish History in Cegerxwin’s Poems, 2018
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