Was/is the Negro really in vogue? : Langston Hughes and the Discourse of Identity
Abstract
The discourse of identity has been instrumental in converging Langston Hughes’s interest in his poems while he attempted to be an earnest soldier who dedicated his life to the construction of a Black aesthetics that would change the contours of American social and cultural scene. The advent of Harlem renaissance transformed the way the lives of the blacks were conceived within the age old structure of the civilization while aiding the evolving perception of black consciousness. In this context, this paper would examine the way Langston Hughes explores this consciousness through his poems contributing to a larger body of work that necessitates the construction of a distinct identity for him and his people.
Key-words: Identity, Black consciousness, Black aesthetics, Harlem, Space.
Being a loner in his youthful days, having a shadowy childhood, Langston Hughes had seen the world enough to know the essence of life and chose books to be his only solace while making the very act of writing, a path for the redemption of his soul. Here, we are considering the case of a man who seemed to be a rather short person, physically, by the standards of his clan, always wearing a pleasant smile, a smile that is merely a veil. A bit of soul searching and deeper investigation would reveal a man with a complex past who is incessantly trying to negotiate his own identity and would go on to establish himself as one of the foremost advocates of the Black consciousness.
Spending his childhood with his maternal grandmother, a woman who had a strong sense of pride in being a Negro, it was not unusual to find Langston imbibing those values from her and orienting himself to an individualized nature of not enduring racial discrimination and Langston would go on to make a strong case for it in the larger literary and cultural sphere. From his time under the tutelage of his grandmother, Langston internalized certain traits of her personality, one being the dream to see a world for the Negroes sans discrimination. His unpleasant confrontations in high-school and his first-hand experience of discrimination at Columbia University did well to strengthen his purpose every time he took a pen in his hand. This had not only brought him closer to the fellow black men and women around him, but also helped him situate himself in the larger context of the black consciousness, and made him a soldier of the Negro movement, which would also be called the Harlem Renaissance in days to come.
However, building a discourse around his own identity was not something that bothered him as a young man. Bearing a lineage of a hybrid ancestry, apparently calling into question his own identity, Langston Hughes declares in his autobiography, The Big Sea, “You see, unfortunately, I am not black” (36). This statement is sure to baffle any reader and scholar of his works but a closer observation would lead us to identify the problematic nature of his own identity. Later, not surprisingly, in his poem “Negro”, he writes:
I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of Africa.” (Collected Poems 24).
These lines does good to situate him in a space that would soon become his forte, and help him reinvent his own identity, albeit with a sense of pride. His solidarity with the black community and identifying himself with them can never be questioned. He did enjoy the warmth of the brotherhood and cherished a shared sense of belonging. Coming from the author of “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, which is regarded, at times, as the manifesto of Black Aesthetics, “Yo Quisiera ser negro. Bien negro. ¡Negro de verdad!” which translates into “I want to be black, really black, truly black!” was not strange at all while also reasserting the integrity of his own belief (Scott 48). Quite clearly, his desire to be identified as one of them is obvious from this statement, while it also provided the readers a peek into his psyche. Oscillating between these two statement, comes the instrumentation of Harlem in the entire body of literature produced by him, not only as a geographical space but also a psychological construct, in reconstructing the discourse of the identity of Langston Hughes.
With the beginning of mass migration after the war, the closely-knit cosmopolitan ghetto, Harlem, found itself at the center of activities, witnessing a sudden flair of black occupation and bustling with entrepreneurial and intellectual ventures. The reason for this sudden growth could be termed as a two-fold phenomenon, a psychological affect as well as a socio-economic prospect. The north was looked upon by the emancipated slaves, after the abolition of slavery in America, as a space that had put up a fight for their liberation. The black slaves, now free, were ready to sacrifice the sense of familiarity with the southern part of America and migrate towards the north. Thus, in doing so, they also could shed the traumatic past that had darker stories to tell. The south had seen days of exploitation, torture and horrible outcomes. The south, an integral part of their pat, was a constant reminder of mutilated identity in the pre-war era. The north, therefore, was a space that was romanticized to the extent of considering it a shelter that harboured brighter days and inflicted a mythical aura to it. The north gradually became synonymous with a new beginning, a new life in a new world. It was not only a geographical space of importance for them, but also had a psychologically soothing effect with multiple prospects for a better life. The very act of migrating to the north was, for them, a journey towards better days, days that would be full of happiness and respect. The migrating slaves, therefore, considered this geographical mobility as an act that initiated the construction of their identities.
Secondly, north was associated with entrepreneurship, which also proved to be a major factor in convincing the liberated slaves to desert the south which had a crumbling slave economy run by the bourgeois with waning profitability. With very little economic prospect in the south, moving towards the north was looked upon as a lucrative option, apparently offering a life of stability and integrity. This gradual demographic shift that occurred with the migration came to be termed as “The Great Migration” which radically changed the existing setup and gave rise to a new order, a new socio-economic and cultural possibility for them. The face of the economy began changing drastically as the nature of the American population changed during migration. However, throughout this phase of migration, there prevailed a dominant undertone of a dream, a dream that this new population looked to fulfill, adream of a new life in a new world. Hughes describes the struggles of the migrating African-Americans in his poem “Good Morning”:
I've seen them come dark
Wondering
wide-eyed
dreaming. (Collected Poems 428)
These lines explicitly suggest the existence of a certain dream while he concluded the poem by hurling a question, “What happens/ to a dream deferred…?”(428).
The popular cultural and literary movement initiated by the African-American intellectual group came to see Harlem as a center of significance, and sowed the early seeds of a movement that later came to be known as the “Harlem Renaissance”, also called New Negro Movement. Alain Locke writes: “[W]e shall look at Harlem . . . as the way mark of a momentous folk movement; then as the center of a gripping struggle for an industrial and urban foothold” (630). Harlem as a motif served these writers a space to launch a movement breathing the stories of resilience and recreation that will define their Negro identity and bring them the degree of respect and dignity they deserved and desperately yearned for. It was a confident statement on the part of the African-American authors who devoted their attention in rebuilding their history which had been suppressed during the long days of slavery. Reconstruction of their forgotten history, some of which survived only in fragments, was indeed a crucial move towards the creation of a separate identity for the blacks. A revival of their culture had become an absolute necessity, a culture, which was until then, living in its dormant form, were now being resurrected and polished through a Renaissance which was different from its European counterpart. Renaissance was no longer a concept exclusive to the European, and had been subverted by the erstwhile slaves, now liberated, as an act of resistance. Harlem had now become a face of resistance, producing treatise of liberation of the black soul and professing a space bound by the practice of equality. Harlem laid bare the paradigm of a new form of rootedness that necessarily ascribed a new identity to the inhabitants. A new identity promised a new way of life, while basking in a sense of belonging. Unsure of their roots, the birthplace of their ancestors, now the African-Americans rejoiced in the prospect occupying a piece of land where they would be buried after their death. This space would essentially be theirs, and they would belong to that land thereafter, thus recreating a new identity for them. Harlem had become a world within a world for them, an African-American “city within a city”, in the larger geographical location of New York (Johnson 301). It had become a space that was supposed to define the cultural sensibility, not only of the African-Americans, but also of America as a nation, heralding the birth of a new America. Harlem, thus, stands out to be a metaphorical space for liberation of the African-Americans, promising them a new kind of identity.
Therefore, it was no wonder that a twenty one year old young man in Langston Hughes would find himself attracted towards the disseminating source of renewed understanding of Black aesthetics. Thoroughly fascinated by the mythical location of Harlem, quite naturally, the place features in his writings significantly. He writes about the experience of his first visit to the place in his autobiography:
I came out onto the platform with two heavy bags and looked around. It was still early morning and people were going to work. Hundreds of colored people! I wanted to shake hands with them, speak to them. I hadn’t seen any colored people for so long—that is, any Negro colored people. (The Big Sea 81)
Completely in awe of the space he had longed for a visit, Harlem which would also be a place of his residence for a considerable number of years in his life. Arguably, this was also the phase in his life that came out to be productive enough to launch Hughes into the broader literary and cultural scene in America and abroad. This was to be a space close to the other exponents of Harlem Renaissance as they congregated with a chosen vocation to pour their heart and soul in the re-construction of their identity. When Langston Hughes’s personal case is taken into account, Harlem introduced him to Jessie Fauset and Countee Cullen, with whom he would share a life-long friendship. The importance of Harlem also lies in the fact that, although, not all the major participants of the Harlem Renaissance actually resided in Harlem, it was a space that conjured their acquaintance and brought them together under the rubrics of a mass literary movement.
Harlem as a literary space did Hughes immense good in reshaping his prospect in literary world. He never shied away from acknowledging that his sensibility was also moulded to a great extent when he “spent a lot of his time during his first year in New York at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library” (Rummel 25). It is this sensibility that was matured in the heat of the Harlem brotherhood that features largely in the emotional manifestations that could be found in Hughes’s poems. For Langston Hughes, Harlem had profusely seeped into his veins and will continue to remain at the crux of his literary endeavours throughout his life. It might not be absolutely unjust to say that the place and the author brought the best out of each other.
Geographical space had always intrigued Hughes and its manifestations are strewn all over the corpus of his writings. James de Jongh in his essay, “The Poet Speaks of Places” writes, “Hughes imagery of place was employed also to articulate the faith that, at least in some places, the promise of America was still available to the blacks” (69). This promise of America had always remained central to the development of the Black consciousness and the entire literary ad cultural movement operated by the black authors and artists were directed in the quest of realizing this dream. The concept of place was also indispensable in the understanding of the black aesthetics and the final realization of this dream of America. In this context, Harlem as a space assumes a multiple significance in the life of Langston Hughes, both private and public. Jongh’s statement hints at the great American dream that Hughes juggled with in his poem “Harlem”, which begins with the rhetorical question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” (Collected Poems 426). Hughes writes this poem to resolve the curiosity jutted by him in his earlier poem “Good Morning”. He compares the skin colour of the African-Americans with the resins left to dry in the sun, in an attempt to bring back the past tortures that the slaves had to endure under their masters. The metaphorical images of festering sore, smell of rotten meat crust, sugar and syrupy sweets speaks volumes about the struggles of the slaves before liberation, while also obliquely pointing out the subtleties of the immense strength of the black power and the resistance displayed thereby. Singing of the undying spirit of the black souls, it does echoes the physical strength embodied by the black slaves that helped them survive the gruesome torture. It also hints at the possibility of exploding like a bomb which would metaphorically gobble up the entire prevalent scheme of things and throw the existing power structure into disarray. This sudden disruption of the age old power structure would thereby send shock waves through the veins of the civilization, shaking them to the core, and a new power structure would evolve to replace the old, a structure that would strive on the principles of equality.
William Hogan in his essay “Roots, Routes, and Langston Hughes’s Hybrid Sense of Place” writes, by reimagining the connections between African American culture and place:
The landscapes Hughes imagines, whether they are nourishing rivers that connect and strengthen communities of color or mountain tops that black artists must ascend in order to be heard, work to unite the African American community. (184)
True to Hogan’s claim, rivers feature significantly in the poems by Langston Hughes. The flow of river, epitomizing the flow of life, suggests the existence of a life force nourishes the civilization. Similarly, the images of the mountains are exploited with equal frequency to represent the physical pain and determination required on the part of the black artists to get themselves heard. Langston Hughes’ dependence on the geographical spaces is even more profoundly expressed in his poem “The Negro Speaks of River”:
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (Collected Poems 23)
The contextual importance of this poem lies in the fact that it was written by him while he just crossed the Mississippi river and was about of take in in the spectacle of Harlem. Hogan writes:
By creating poetic landscapes that emphasize fluid connections and dynamic continuities among peoples of color, Hughes grounds his ideas about black communities in the physical world, lending them substance and legitimacy. (Hogan 184)
He marks the contours of a metaphorical journey beginning with Euphrates, moving through Congo and Nile and reaching its twilight at Mississippi. All these rivers had cradled ancient civilization, and by mentioning the dusky nature of the rivers, Langston Hughes hints at the old history and culture of the black African-Americans which had been suppressed and exploited. But now, since the rivers are flowing in his veins like blood, and he has known the ancient dusky rivers, there is a sense of pride in the prospect of resurrection of their history and culture, while he writes, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” (28).
The importance of Harlem is also magnified as it initiated a process of reverse-colonization. The new settlers arrived at the periphery of Harlem to discover a space that they desired, which had been deserted by the whites. A space that was owned and inhabited by the whites at one point of time is now being colonized by the African-Americans. This created a sense of pride and self-gratification, which garners a new perspective to the existence of their life and ensures a rewriting of history. Talking about the process of reverse colonization is bound to remind us invariably of the celebrated poem by Louise Bennet, “Colonization in Reverse”:
Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in Reverse
Be the hundred, be de tousan
Fro country and from town,
By de ship-load, be the plane load
Jamaica is Englan boun.
Dem pour out a Jamaica,
Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan.
This poem talks about a phase where the African-American blacks are seen migrating to the European countries that once ruled them. While doing so, they are populating the country of the masters and obliquely hints at sharing a life that belonged to the masters. Occupying their space, the blacks are, thus, initiating the process of reverse colonization. A close reading of this particular poem would not only give us a very humourous account of the reverse colonization, but would also give us glimpse of the use of the language in a manner peculiar to the colloquial form spoken by the African-Americans. This re-appropriation of language is something that we also find in Langston Hughes. The way he use English and the innovative graphical structuring of the poem also calls for a resistance, a revolt against the standard established codes. This reminds us the way the literary forms had been reshuffled and modified by the artists and authors of Harlem renaissance. “Jazzing it up” as Langston Hughes would call it, he played a big hand in the implementation of Jazz as a form of performativity art which is known for its rhythm and vigour. We are reminded of Calypsos, a form of performance which redefines resistance in the context of the African-Americans by the virtue of its native rhythm and tempo, as well as the way language has been presented in them.
About the centrality of Harlem and its growing popularity Langston Hughes wrote a sarcastic piece, “When the negro was in vogue”, (Weebly) where Harlem negroes are shown attracting white crowd by their curious activities. This gave an account of the life inside Harlem, description of the events and incidents taking place inside Harlem Club, a social space for the Harlemites, and how the whites would traverse the limits and venture into the neighbourhood to watch the African-Americans in action. But the question that arises is one of the continuity of Harlem in the discourse of the black culture. Langston Hughes gladly accepted that the 1920s were indeed the most productive and generous years for Harlem. However, with the turn of the decade, the black artists were no longer in vogue, more so in the perception of the white subscribers of the black culture. Lawrence Jackson writes: “The Harlem lava had cooled into a bedrock symbol of black literature. But black writers publishing in the 1940s saw mainly a plate on which to crack, with violence, their identity.”(p.250) However, since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a new upsurge in the scholarship of the literature of the Harlem, and here we are, writing a essay on Langston Hughes’ poems within the academic space of a third-world country.
By way of conclusion, we are reminded of Langston Hughes, telling the story of his life like a stoic sage, and whispering the hopes of achieving light at the end of the path, in his poem “The Negro Mother”:
Children, I come back today
To tell you a story of the long dark way
That I had to climb, that I had to know
In order that the race might live and grow.
Look at my face—dark as the night—
Yet shining like the sun with love's true light. (Collected Poems, p.151)
These lines brilliantly equivocate Langston’s own life and his quest to reestablish his own identity, and through that, the identity if the fellow members of his community. Indeed, Langston had been the harbinger of the light in the dark ways he writes about in “The Negro Mother” and the entire body of his works could be considered a fine example of an attempt to tell the story of the “long dark way”, i.e. the horrible and painful past of the blacks before liberation. Retelling if the past is bound to have traumatic implications on his soul and the community, Langston knew, but this retelling was essential to bridge a lack solidarity that would announce the clarion call to fetch a new dawn. In “The Negro Mother”, Hughes talks about climbing, scaling heights, reminding us of the plenty of times he had used the mountain images to produce a geographical sense which would make the world pay heed to the words of a Negro. This climb was always a difficult one and metaphorically represents the difficulties the African-Americans face in their venture to construct their own identity. However, at the same time, it also boasts the immense physical and psychological strength, courage and determination displayed by the members of the black community that had been instrumental in the success of their difficult enterprise. Therefore, drawing from the understanding of his poems, it might not be entirely utopic to say that Lagston Hughes lived and worked for establishing the identity of the blacks through his works.
Works Cited
Supromit Maiti, Research Scholar, Department of English, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal Contact details: supromit.maiti1993@gmail.com