  One important point made by Sartre was that Négritude was first and foremost a black poetic appropriation of the French language. Unlike other nationalisms, he explained, which reclaimed the tongue of the people against the imperialist imposition of the language by which they were governed, black people had to use the language of domination imposed by French colonialism as cement for their shared Négritude and as “miraculous  weapons”[3] against that same domination. In so doing they radically transformed it, manifesting through their poetry that there was nothing natural and unquestionable in the way in which the language would identify Being with Good, Beautiful, Right and White. The simple song of a black poet chanting in French the beauty of the naked blackness of the woman he loved, Sartre wrote, would then appear to the ears of French people a fundamental violence against their linguistic and indeed ontological self assurance; in spite of the fact that the poem was not even meant for them, or rather because of that. In the poetry of Négritude they would be struck by the discovery of their own language as unfamiliar and hitherto unheard of, especially when that poetry makes the best of surrealist writing as it “smashes [the words] together, breaks their customary associations, and couples them by force” (Sartre 1976, 26). But then again one knows that such an unsettling of language and indeed its “auto destruction” is the “profound aim of French poetry … from Mallarmé to the Surrealists” (1976, 25). Therefore, Sartre concludes, Négritude has achieved that goal: the poets of Négritude have taken to its end what surrealist writers had been calling for.