SOURCE: "Beyond Négritude: The Love Poems," Critical Perspectives on Léon-Gontran Damas, edited by Keith Q. Warner, Three Continents Press, 1988, pp. 119-45.

Hodge is a Trinidadian educator, novelist, and critic. The following excerpt was drawn from her unpublished thesis, "The Writings of Léon Damas and Their Connection with the Négritude Movement in Literature," completed in 1967 at the University of London. Below, she examines the themes and tone of Damas's poetry, focusing on his work in Graffiti, Black-Label, and Névralgies, and remarks on the similarities between Damas and the French poet Jacques Prévert.

[Graffiti] at first disconcerts because it is all but racially anonymous—the burning preoccupations of Pigments are totally absent. A few years later in Black-Label, which had been in preparation all the while, the theme of race returns, but much of the work is strongly personal. His latest work, Névralgies...