Leon Damas

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.

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

In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, French censors banned Pigments from circulation in France's African colonies. The ban did not prevent the book's ideas from circulating among students and writers in Paris, where Damas continued to move in the same circles as Senghor and Cesaire, and Pigments retained its status as Negritude's first published collection even after Damas's later career moved toward teaching, radio broadcasting for the overseas service of Radio France and UNESCO, and eventually a seat in the French National Assembly representing French Guiana.