International Justice And Legal Rhetoric In David DIOP’s Poetry

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Jacques Bellezit, University of Strasbourg (France)

ABSTRACT

David Mandessi DIOP (9 July 1927 – 29 August 1960) was a French Senegalese poet deeply involved in the “Negritude” cultural and political movement.

Being under several angles an “enfant terrible” (terrible child) of this anti- colonial French literary movement, DIOP published in 1956 his only poetry book (Coups de Pilon, i.e. “pestle blows”).

In this book, he convokes an international legal rhetoric that we will present before examining its relevance for contemporary international society.

David Mandessi DIOP (9 July 1927 – 29 August 1960) was a Senegalese poet deeply involved in the “Negritude” cultural and political movement.

“Negritude” (i.e. “Negroness”) was founded by several French Black writers and intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire (former member of the “Académie Française”) Leopold Sedar Senghor (First President of the Republic of Senegal), Léon-Gontan Damas or the Nardal sisters around the 1930’s.1

Even if these theoreticians have their approach to the movement, this latter is based on common conceptions such as the affirmation of equality between Blacks and White as well as the existence of a specific “negro”, pan-African culture, transcending divisions imposed by the Europeans – and chiefly the French presence in Africa, French Guiana or French Western Indies.

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