Colonized black people the world over have long had to express themselves in the tongue of the colonizer. In the case of the French language, the influence stretched from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, with its obvious center situated in Africa. The present volume, which is the fruit of over a decade's dedicated effort, gathers together, in English translation, twenty-seven poets, associated with that cultural and intellectual movement which since the close of World War II has come to be known as "negritude". The term "negritude" was coined by Aimé Césaire in his long poem "Notes on a Return to the Native Land", which was published in France in 1944....While the present volume, for historical and cultural reasons, has a special significance, it also is, and should be taken as, an anthology of poetry. (Book jacket).