SOURCE: "Léon Damas," in A Celebration of Black and African Writing, edited by Bruce King and Kolawole Ogungbesan, Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1975, pp. 60-73.

Jones is an English-born Jamaican educator and critic. In the following essay, she provides an overview of Damas's career and works.

Léon Damas has received less attention than Senghor and Césaire. Out of a less abundant literary output, a few protest poems from Pigments (1937) are too often all that he is known by. Since his brief parliamentary career which ended in 1951, he has avoided the controversies of active politics and remained an exile whose main commitment is to the cause of international black consciousness. However, the complex personality of Damas cannot be reduced to the simplified image of Négritude's poet of hate, and there is much to celebrate both in his writing and in a teaching and publishing career devoted...