The First Book

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Leon Damas's Pigments, published in Paris in 1937, was the first published book of poetry associated with the Negritude movement, appearing two years before Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Written in short, direct, often angry lines, Pigments confronted French colonialism and racism more bluntly than the more allusive styles Senghor and Cesaire were developing at the same time, and Damas is frequently described as bringing a harder edged, more explicitly political register to the movement's shared project.