About

Paulette Nardal (October 12, 1896-October 12, 1896) was a writer, journalist, and one of the founders of the Negritude movement.

Biography by Jaedyn Griddine

Photo of Paulette Nardal. Photo Credit: FLAMME/*Archives Territoriales de Martinique*.

The story begins in 1896 in Martinique, where Paulette Nardal was the first-born to an accomplished, large family. Her mother Louise was an accomplished pianist and her father Paul a scholarship student who studied in France. Her and her six sisters lived comfortably, raised conservatively with a thirst for knowledge. Paulette followed in her father’s footsteps, traveling to Paris and becoming the first Black student at the illustrious La Sorbonne in 1920; several of her sisters would later study there, too. Paulette also adopted an interest in the arts as her mother did, participating in the jazz and dance club for Black students, Le Bal Nègre [The Black Ball], during her studies.

Paulette is most known for her extensive body of written work on Black consciousness. She started young, writing a dissertation on Harriet Beecher Stowe during her college years, then moving on to write short stories and essays, even a tourist guide, for various French publications, but some of her most notable works come from her days at Le Salon de Clamart. She opened this salon with her sisters Jane and Andrée in 1929; it became a hub for creativity and intellectual discussions on race consciousness. The three Nardal sisters then founded the renowned yet short-lived journal La Revue du Monde Noir [The Review of the Black World], where Paulette published a few works, most notably L’Éveil de la Conscience de Race [The Awakening of Race Consciousness]. Paulette’s writing during this period can best be characterized as influential, almost prophetic, as many of her ideas in La Revue inspired the authors of Légitime Défense, a manifesto which spearheaded the Négritude movement in Martinique.

Paulette is even remembered as a founder of the Négritude movement because her pieces on Black consciousness inspired Les Trois Pères [the three founding fathers Césare, Senghor and Damas], who came up with the term Négritude three years after the curation of La Revue. She also discussed gender in her works, making her a very early intersectional writer, and certainly a unique voice in the male-dominated Négritude movement. Négritude came about during the interwar period, which was characterized by a lack of people within the African Diaspora embracing their Blackness, and a favoring by Black male writers of what Paulette viewed as white colonist culture. She was an outspoken critic of how the movement overlooked Black women and afforded male privilege to the Black male writers in the form of large-scale success. Despite being a contributor to L’Étudiant Noir [The Black Student], a publication founded by Les Trois Pères in 1935, Paulette did not receive nearly as much recognition for her visionary work.

Paulette was diligent in highlighting the Black female experience throughout her life’s work. Her 1929 short story, En Éxil [In Exile], showed Black womanhood as delicate, sensitive and emotional, a very uncommon portrayal at the time. Her and her sisters’ works during interwar Paris were relentless in their defense of Black female scholarship and intersectionality. She even created the feminist journal La Femme dans la Cité [The Woman in the City] during this time. Around the time of her return to Martinique in 1948, however, she branched out into other political movements until the end of her life: she supported Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign during the American Civil Rights Movement, was nominated as delegate to the United Nations’ Division of Non-Self Governing Territories in 1946, supported France’s resistance efforts against Germany during World War II, and founded Le Rassemblement Féminin, an organization dedicated to increasing women’s participation in the 1945 elections in Martinique. She was honored Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1976, once again following in her father’s footsteps. There is currently a years-long effort to induct her into the Pantheon, a monument which memorializes France’s greatest men and women; if successful, she would be the second Black woman to be inducted in over 200 years, after Josephine Baker.

Sources:

Recommended reading:

IN SEARCH OF SEVEN SISTERS: A Biography of the Nardal Sisters of Martinique by Emily Musil Church

Paulette Nardal

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