It is perhaps striking that, despite the popularity and acclaim of Césaire and his work in the aftermath of his death in April 2008, Patrick Chamoiseau should choose to emphasise the sense of solitude surrounding the father of Caribbean letters. Chamoiseau developed the quotation from Texaco reproduced above when participating in a round table discussion on ‘Portraits d'Aimé Césaire’ in Oxford in May 2008 by commenting that one of his lasting images of Césaire was that of the poet walking alone. Indeed, although his death was greeted by an outpouring of adulation in the press and the academic community more broadly, many of his critics over the years, like those of Senghor, have commented on this persistent sense of alienation in the poet's life and in his work. Toumson and Henry-Valmore's biographical study opens with the comment that, despite his intense friendships with like-minded thinkers such as Senghor and Damas, Césaire seemed to prefer solitude and was difficult to get to know. Similarly, Jacqueline Leiner reads Césaire's poetry as a ‘cri de solitude’, and goes on to explore the link between this isolation and the poet's campaign of contestation. Certainly, many of the images of misery and degradation in Martinique that fill the early pages of the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal stress isolation and the failure of community. The ravaged Martinican society is tense and withdrawn, stagnant as a result of the dispossession and mutual alienation of its members. Even the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture is remembered not in action but imprisoned alone in the Jura: ‘c'est un homme seul emprisonné de blanc / c'est un homme seul qui défie les cris blancs de la mort blanche’. And later, the heroes of Césaire's four tragedies are all isolated figures, grappling alone, and for the most part irresolutely, with the question of how to establish, preserve, and live out human freedom as colonialism reaches its demise.

If we juxtapose these comments and images with a look at Césaire's career, it is not difficult to see why critics dwell on this sense of solitude.