In Martinique, under the repressive rule of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and René Ménil founded the cultural and literary journal 'Tropiques'. To bypass strict colonial censorship, the editors masked their radical anti-colonial politics behind dense essays on botany, Afro-Caribbean folklore, and surrealist poetry. They used the absolute freedom of surrealist dream-logic as a psychological weapon to dismantle the forced cultural assimilation of the French empire.

By linking Surrealism with the Negritude movement, Césaire proved that liberating the subconscious was deeply tied to political liberation from colonial trauma. His poetry utilized explosive, dreamlike imagery to reclaim an un-colonized African and Caribbean identity, radically altering the landscape of twentieth-century francophone verse.