Pigments

The first volume of poetry by the French Guianese poet Leon Damas, published in 1937. Written in French but breaking deliberately with its formal conventions of verse, meter and metaphor, the collection confronts colonial racism and cultural alienation, and it was banned by the French government as a threat to state security even as it was translated and circulated internationally; alongside work by Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, it is considered a founding text of the Negritude movement.