Short review on 1920s north american Negro poetry

8/10/2019 Short review on 1920s north american Negro poetry

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Racism in North America: the dream still deferred.

Laura Rodríguez

The United States is and has always been a country with great diversity. In fact, every

nation, if we think about it, is a cultural mixture, in one way or another. We have been

proved, especially us who have seen the World War II, either in person or in history books,

that there isn’t such thing as a pure human. Yet we seem to ignore that, and we insist on

dividing with national, racial, sexual and many other kinds of classifications what is

originally meant to be one single thing: mankind.

Paradoxically, the average North American citizen seems to feel threatened by what’s

different, probably because he is so centered and entrenched on himself that he fears what

exceeds him. The world of someone too used to the constant necessity of predicting the

behavior of economy and market can be drastically unsettled by the things he can’t control.

That includes, of course, other people. This could be one of many possible explanations ofthe individualism that nowadays affects most of the capitalist nations. Another one could be

that man is only repeating what he has done from the beginning: stablishing a number of

characteristics, those of his own race or people, maybe also a language and a religion, and

naming them to turn them into what he believes is natural. Therefore American, Icelandic,

Colombian, Aztec and Celtic would mean the exact same thing: human. The biggest

problem about this is that everyone that does not fit into this constructed “human” standard

is immediately dehumanized, degraded to beast or to animal. This forms the mentality of a

killer, this makes for a person harming another person possible, this justifies wars.

One of the best known examples of this human propensity to rejecting the Others is racism.

In the 1920s in North America not only the infamous Ku Klux Klan was reborn, but there

were also created the segregation laws. The natural response of the black community, after

having been animalized and treated as inferiors, would have been to try to emancipate

themselves from that view that was inflicted on them, from the naturalization of the White

Anglo-Saxon Protestant as the normal man, by making their own voice be heard as human,

and no longer as an animal howl. Surprisingly, what happened was the opposite: they

started adopting white manners, even white thoughts.

However, not every black person reacted the same way. Rather, some of them actually

reacted. Langston Hughes, for example, wrote against this in The Negro Artist and the

Racial Mountain. In this text he invites the young Negro artists to embrace their roots and

their own race without being ashamed of it. But seen from the perspective of fear, the

reaction he rebukes is completely logical. Man is an animal who always tries to fit in. His

impulse for survival is often more powerful than his pride of being who he is.



Nevertheless, dividing the black community into those who tried to imitate white people

and those who didn’t is over simplifying things. Although there were courageous ones, like

Hughes himself, that were not afraid to talk openly about racism and the issues of colored

people, not all of them shared this temerity. What they all did have in common was

weariness. They all had memory, as Hughes says in Harlem, they remembered. They knew

that even before racism, KKK and segregation, there was slavery. The oppression had not

only been horrible and strong; it had also been there for generations. They were tired, and

they almost permanently felt like they couldn’t resist anymore.

“I got the Weary Blues / And I can’t be satisfied. / Got the weary Blues / And can’t be

satisfied – / I ain’t happy no mo’ / I wish that I had died” Hughes makes a Negro sing in

his poem Weary Blues. His song is evidently not vital, nor empowering. The entire poem is

motivated by the feeling of someone who wants to quit, to leave a world where he has

nobody but himself. But there’s more to this weariness than just the tiredness that comes

after a day of hard work. When it’s wrong to be who you are, when you are rejected forsomething that defines you, that you were born with and cannot refuse to be, something

such as race, life loses purpose and sense, and a man who lives a meaningless life is no

different from a man that is dead. Hughes conveys this idea in the end of this very poem:

the blues singer sleeps “like a rock or a man that ’s dead ”. He truly is dead, though,

because his art, the language in which his spirit speaks and shows, in which he proves he

has a human (not animal) voice, is not known, it’s ignored. That’s why in this poem, being

there so many types of jazz, this particular Negro sings a blues. White people didn’t like

blues as much as they liked ragtime or hot, mainly because it communicated something

radically different from how they felt America, from how they lived the 1920s United

States. Blues showed a purely black experience of weariness and nostalgia of the freedomthey had lost back in Africa. Hughes lets us know in The Negro Artist … that if white

people ignored something or disapproved it, black middle-class and high class people

would do exactly the same, for that human need of being socially accepted that Hughes so

emphatically rejects.

So not only white folks ignore the singer, his own people too. The blues singer of this poem

is alone to himself, and all he’s got in the world is that blue feeling and his tune, that won’t

be heard by anybody. He’s lonely, sad, tired and unheard, and, for Hughes, this means he is

dead.

Then, what is life? we readers may wonder, and where is it? Hughes himself can give an

answer to this question in his poem Esthete in Harlem. “…for years, I had been seeking /

Life in places gentler- speaking” say the fourth and fifth verses. What lays beneath these

words is the feeling that life, kind of like it is seen in some poems written by T.S Eliot, it’s

not just given. Life is something more than breath and heartbeat. Life has to be sought.

Then, again, what is it? Well, we know it is not mere survival.



Before finding that “nigger place”, the first voice in the poem is someone comparable to

Eliot’s hollow men. Yes, he exists, yet he does not live. Life would be spiritual existence,

sensible existence, accompanied by the power to express that reality without being

repressed or ashamed. It is important to remember that the blues singer in Weary Blues is

not emotionally or spiritually empty, he’s just ignored, unheard, theref ore his voice is

repressed, forcibly forgotten. So being dead is not the lack of a spiritual depth, but not

being able to show that spirit in an open way. What is truly important here is that life has to

be looked for. Before stepping on that Harlem Street, the person who speaks in the poem is

dead in life and looking for his spirituality, for his true self, which is also, as Hughes may

think, looking for the identity of his whole race.

In Harlem the need of seeking life is presented, but only in I, Too that life is fully exposed.

In this poem we’re actually able to realize that the quest Hughes purposes is by all means

returning to life the sense it had lost. The poem restores the hope in the possibility ofexisting without masks, without fear. It encourages the Negro reader to work for that

dream, to reach it. “Tomorrow”, it says, “I’ll be at the table / when company comes. /

Nobody’ll dare / Say to me / “Eat in the kitchen” / Then”.

What Hughes is telling us is that life is not here, that it doesn’t happen now, but that it can

be reached. The freedom to express a spiritual existence implies dignity, because it comes

with the acknowledgement (in this case by the white people or the so called WASPs) of the

being of the Other, the realization of the humanity of who is different and external to their

mistakenly naturalized self . “Tomorrow” that freedom will come, “T hen”. The dream ofachieving life is always deferred, always delayed. What he wonders when he asks “What

happens to a dream deferred?” is what will become of the hope of black people if the

dream takes too long to be fulfilled . “ Does it dry up?” he asks, “or fester like a sore”.

We, who have seen the future, who have seen the sixties and heard Mart in Luther King’s I

have a dream, can answer Hughes: no. The hope of black people does not end. But we,

nearly a hundred years after the Harlem Renaissance, have a long way to go if we want to

reach that life of dignity and respect. We don’t seem to understand yet that difference is not

that different, that they’re others to us just as much as we’re others to them. So far, thedream is still deferred.

Short review on 1920s north american Negro poetry

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