[4] He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988.

'Although in his Cahier he evoked his childhood as poverty-stricken and squalid, his family was part of the island's small, black middle class.

'[5] His family moved to the capital of Martinique, Fort-de-France, in order for Césaire to attend the only secondary school on the island, Lycée Victor Schœlcher.

In Paris, he passed the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure in 1935 and created the literary review L'Étudiant noir (The Black Student) with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas.

[a] Manifestos by these three students in its third number (May–June 1935)[8] initiated the Négritude movement later substantial in both pan-Africanist theory and the actual decolonization of the French Empire in Africa.

In 1934 Césaire was invited to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by his friend Petar Guberina where in Šibenik he started writing his poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, which was one of the first expressions of the concept of Négritude.

In this sense, according to Ursula Heise, the publications of the French botanist Henri Stehlé in Tropiques in the early 1940s, concerning the Martinican flora,[11] and "the invocations of Césaire to the Antillean ecology operate as indices of a racial and cultural authenticity which is distinguished from European identity...".

[12] During an interview granted in 1978, Césaire explains that his aim for including these articles in Tropiques was "to allow Martinique to refocus" and "to lead Martinicans to reflect" on their close environment.

[17] The book mixes poetry and prose to express Césaire's thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a colonial setting.

The honor of making the funeral oration was left to his longtime friend Pierre Aliker, who had served for many years as deputy mayor under Césaire.

Most notably, his relation to Frantz Fanon, famed author of Black Skin, White Masks, as mentor and inspiration is tangible.

Fanon's personal testimony in Black Skin, White Masks explains the "liberating effect of Césaire’s word and action" that he felt in traversing the changing colonial landscape.

Césaire's text intertwines slavery, imperialism, capitalism, republicanism, and modernism, stating that they were linked together and influenced one another in undeniable ways.

The text also continuously references Nazism, blaming the barbarism of colonialism and how whitewashed and accepted the tradition, for Hitler's rise to power.

Particularly, Césaire argues that Nazism was not an exception or singular event in European history; rather, the natural progression of a civilization that justified colonization without "perceiving the dangers involved in proceeding towards savagery.

Decolonization offered an alternative to the dual negatives of capitalism and communism, employing pluralism as a way to usher in a new, more tolerant Europe.

[citation needed] Césaire originally wrote his text in French in 1950, but later worked with Joan Pinkham to translate it to English.