SOURCE: An interview in Critical Perspectives on Léon-Gontran Damas, edited by Keith Q. Warner, Three Continents Press, 1988, pp. 23-8.

Warner is a Trinidadian educator and critic. In the following interview, which was conducted in July 1972 and originally published in the journal Manna in 1973, Damas remarks on his career and the Négritude movement.

[Warner]: Do you think that when you started writing you did so mainly out of the urge to be productive from a literary point of view, or rather out of the urge to convey a particular message? If message there was, did you think that poetry was the vehicle to convey it?

[Damas]: There was definitely a message. A cultural one first of all, and a political one. We cannot separate culture from politics. Nobody can do that. All the revolutions on the world succeed chiefly by the message of the poets.

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