 Negritude was motivated by the project Aime Césaire called “disalienation”: to overcome the denigration of Africa and the forced assimilation into the culture of the colonizer (Táíwò 1999). Yet to be clear, disalienation for Césaire did not require a denial of métissage. His own writings were influenced by the French poetry and literature he had imbibed as a student, but Césaire insisted that his project was to “create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage” (Césaire 1955 [1972, 67]). In the colonial context of Martinique, the use of French did not need to stop but what was most important was to develop “a new means of expression” that would be “Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character” (ibid.). Negritude aimed to allow the expression of a full range of memory, affect, orientation, and sensibilities across the domain of many diverse ethnic, religious, and language communities from which the slaves were kidnapped.