In “From Discourse on Colonialism” Cesaire believes that it is healthy for different countries and cultures to make contact; that it is advantageous to “blend different worlds (2).” However, in the context of Colonialism in which the West met the non-West the results were disastrous. From the decimation of the Incan and the Aztecs to the enslavement of the Africans, the West has left a venal legacy of blood-shed and brutality in every place it touched. “The colonists,” Cesaire decries, “may kill in Indochina, torture in Madagascar, imprison in Black Africa, crack down in the West Indies (2).”
While Cesaire does not seem to believe it was inevitable that the contact between the West and the non-West would have to be violent, and tragic, he believed it became so because of the outlook with which the West encountered the non-West. The West came to plunder, and rape, enslave, and conquer instead of to learn or to grow. Later it came to justify these crimes behind an ideology of superiority. Later it began to talk of enlightening and saving the natives and “the dishonest equation of Christianity=civilization, paganism=savagery” began to harden (2). In fact, Cesaire goes so far as to postulate that colonization did not even place civilizations in contact. In other words, the sense of superiority that the colonizers had for the colonized so effectively barred them from knowing the colonized that to say that they “made contact” is not accurate.
It would be a mistake to think that it is only the non-West who is a victim of Western aggression. The West has become a victim of its own aggression. It has become diseased by cruelty and brutality. Cesaire states that, “each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another deadweight, a universal regression takes place. (2)” Cesaire believes that Hitler is the embodiment of the cruelty of colonization. He believes that the West could not have gone along with the killing of millions of its own race if it had not first been hardened by the killing of millions of a foreign race. The horrors of World War Two then is an instance of the monster the West created turning on its master.
I agree with Cesaire’s assessment of colonization, however I’m wary of his romanticization of non-Western cultures. When he says that all non-Western cultures were communal, anti-capitalist, Democratic, and Cooperative he seems to be falling into the trap of every imperialist and colonist that came before him. In other words he is generalizing a myriad of different and complex governments and societies into simple catchphrases. He is accepting the Imperialist’s construction of good versus evil, white versus black, he is merely inverting the Imperialist’s value judgments.
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Indeed after reading Cesaire's text, I was taken back at his description of Europeans and their policy of colonization. While colonization and the physical, mental, and spiritual control and abuse imposed on the colonized people was not right, simply generalizing all European cultures is equally wrong. By dehumanizing and depicting Europeans in such harsh terms, he is hypocritical to his idea of positive contact between cultures. This quote describes Cesaire's weak argument quite well, "At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization-and therefore force-is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased, that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one repudiation to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment (176)." By reversing these ideas of superiority and inferiority as well as stereotypes, Cesaire is building another boundary to the existence of peace between different cultures. Ideally, cultures should be accepted for both their positive and negative aspects, as all cultures are a mix of both.
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