The
primary goal of any literature is to stimulate, inspire, educate and empower an
audience by using writing techniques that employ a masterful and careful
manipulation that will motivate the reader to challenge their conventional mode
of thinking. This, in my opinion, was
the entire goal of not only the Harlem Renaissance but also the goals of
Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.
Let us begin this conversation with
the philosophies of the Harlem Renaissance. It was during the early 1900s, that
the flourishing African-American middle class activated a new political agenda
that encouraged racial equality. The epicenter of this movement was in New
York, where three of the largest civil rights groups established their
headquarters.
Black historian, sociologist, and Harvard
scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois was at the forefront of the civil rights movement at
this time.
“By 1905 Du Bois, in partnership
with a group of prominent African-American political activists and civil rights
workers, met in New York to discuss the challenges
facing the black community and by 1909, the group founded the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to promote civil rights…” (Biography.com)
W.E.
B Du Bois felt like many other African American artist that through the
abstract thinking required by the reader of literature that the reader grows as
in individual and discovers something innovative about their existence in
society and it is through tis that the African American artist could and would
further their foothold in gaining equality.
Additionally the Harlem Renaissance campaigners understood that it was
the expression and exposure of the ideas, phrases and artwork would be vital to
identifying not only a successful writer in an arena that appreciates social change
but also creates that social change.
It is within this framework that
African American artist worked, produced and published work that they believed
would not only promote themselves as artist but also promote the race.
“Characterizing
the Harlem Renaissance was an apparent racial pride that came to be exemplified in the idea
of the New Negro, who through intellect and production
of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to
promote progressive politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of
art and literature would serve to "uplift" the race” (Smith).
There was no single connecting form that
surprisingly characterized the art that emerged out of the Harlem Renaissance.
Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural elements and styles which
would include the traditional form and new experimental forms in literature
such as modernism. This duality meant that numerous African-American artists
came into conflict with conservatives in the black intelligentsia, who took
issue with certain depictions of black life.
If the reinvention of the Negro
meant an ability to assimilate while decidedly retaining something called a
racial self-consciousness then Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes fit the bill
perfectly and could be encapsulated in Hughes’ poem “Bound No’th Blues” that could be applied to the Harlem Renaissance
itself.
“Bound No’th Blues”
Goin’ down the road,
Lawd,
Goin’ down the road.
Down the road, Lawd,
Way, way down the road.
Got to find somebody
To help me carry this
load.
Road’s in front o’ me,
Nothin’ to do but walk.
Road’s in front of me,
Walk…an’ walk…an’ walk.
I’d like to meet a good
friend
To come along an’ talk.
Hates to be lonely,
Lawd, I hates to be sad.
Says I hates to be
lonely,
Hates to be lonely an’
sad,
But ever friend you
finds seems
Like they try to do you
bad.
Road, road, road, O!
Road, road…road…road,
road!
Road, road, road, O!
On the no’thern road.
These Mississippi towns
ain’t
Fit fer a hoppin’ toad (Poem Hunter.com).
Countee Cullen was born on May 30,
1903 (Wikipedia). Countee was something of a mysterious figure
as it has been problematic for scholars to place exactly where he was born,
with whom he spent the very earliest years of his childhood and where he spent
them. James Weldon Johnson would write of Cullen in The Book of American Negro Poetry “There is not much to say about
these earlier years of Cullen—unless he himself should say it” (Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life
& Career). Cullen himself would reveal a disposition
that was not exactly secretive but private, less a question of modesty than a
tendency toward being encrypted and insightful and in the course of his
lifetime never said anything more illuminating.
Cullen was a rather shy black man
who more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was being
touted and bred to become a major crossover literary figure as he was a black
man, in a time and place where it was rare to have a considerable academic
training who in all effect could “write white” verse-ballads, sonnets,
quatrains much in the manner of his literary idol Keats and other British
Romantics. With the publication of “The Ballad of the Brown Girl” Cullen
would have encompassing themes that would remain noticeable for the remainder
of his career.
“The Ballad of the Brown Girl”
‘I
am as brown as brown can be,
My
eyes as black as a sloe;
I
am as brisk as a nightingale,
And as wilde as any doe.
‘My
love has sent me a love-letter,
Not
far from yonder town,
That
he could not fancy me,
Because I was so brown.
‘I sent him his letter back again,
For
his love I valu’d not,
Whether
that he could fancy me
Or whether he could not” (Hare).
In time society would come to know
that he had a complete understanding of himself as a poet; and it is in this
vein that only two other Black American authors before Cullen could be taken so
genuinely considered and proficient: Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Cullen believed that traditional verse forms could not be bettered by more
modern paradigms. He went further by
believing that a writer had “to become conversant with and part of a received
literary tradition simply because such a tradition has the virtue of longevity
and universal sanction” (Daniel).
Cullen’s first collection of poetry,
“Color”, was published in 1925 (Wikipedia) and brought him
national fame. “Color” would receive universal critical acclaim and fellow Harlem
Renaissance writer Alain Locke would say:
“A genius! Posterity
will laugh at us if we do not proclaim him now.
“Color” transcends all of the limiting qualifications that might
be brought forward if it were
merely a work of talent” (Modern American Poetry: About
Countee Cullen's Life & Career).
The volume would contain only two
pieces which could be considered racial, but the remaining pieces were love
poems and other traditional subjects with the overarching theme, as the title
implies, was race. It was the themes of
racial subjects that captured the attention of critics; the result in this case
was exactly what the Harlem Renaissance writers wanted. Cullen was “praised for portraying the
experience of African Americans in the vocabulary and poetic forms of the
classical tradition but with personal intimacy” (Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life & Career). “Color” would establish Cullen as a
writer with an acute spiritual vision with sublimity as one of many Cullen’s
strong points as the reader would be
“brusquely catapulted into the all-too-realistic world of … overt
racism” (Daniel).
“Color” has the principles of romanticism, whose characteristics are noticeably
absent fro the blues-based folk rhythms of Langston Hughes simply because
Cullen looked beyond his own rich heritage for authorial standards.
With the publication of “Copper Sun” in 1927 and his involvement
in “Caroling Dusk” he was regarded as
the leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance who according to Gerald
Early was “… embod(ying) many of the hopes, aspirations, and maturing
expressive possibilities of his people” (Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life & Career). Cullen felt that:
“To make a black poet,
and bid him sing was a curious thing that G-d had done curious, indeed, that the voice of the black poet had to be assimilated to be harmonized
with the bearers of an alien literary tradition” (Daniel).
However difficulties, to an extreme,
arose when Cullen stated that he wanted to be known nearly as poet and not
“Negro poet”. This issue can be seen as
departing the goals of the Harlem Renaissance as “Negro Artist” and working to
not only better self but community in the process thus beginning the process of
the “white society” in acceptance and equality. The trouble was compounded when Langston
Hughes along with others interpreted Cullen’s statement to mean that he was
wanting to deny his race; however if one
were to do a close reading of his poetry they would find that was
unfounded. Countee Cullen himself would
respond to these allegations by simply saying:
“If I am going to be a
poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET…
what has hindered the development of artists amongst us. Their one note has been the concern with their race…none of
us can get away from it. I cannot at times. You will see it in my verse. The consciousness of this is too poignant at times. I cannot escape it…. what I mean is this: I
shall not write of Negro subjects
for the purpose of propaganda. That is
not what a poet is concerned with… when the
emotion rising…that I am a Negro is strong, I express it”(Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life
& Career).
Cullen would met Nina Yolande Du
Bois, the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual; and
Cullen married Yolande Du Bois in April 1928, it was the social event of the
decade, but the marriage did not fare well, and he divorced in 1930. It is
rumored that Cullen was a homosexual, and his relationship with Harold Jackman,
"the handsomest man in Harlem”, was a significant factor in the divorce.
The young, dashing Jackman was a school teacher and, thanks to his noted
beauty, a prominent figure among Harlem's gay elite. I bring this up because some scholars have
noted that his homosexuality is central to his work, although most African
American scholars try to ignore or suppress it (Norton).
Cullen’s attitude in regard to his
homosexuality was mixed as his attitudes of his blackness: simultaneously
confirmatory and disapproving, triumphant and troubled; however scholars and
researchers have stated that Countee’s adoptive father, Rev. Fredrick Cullen,
was “a puritanical Christian patriarch and Countee was never remotely that in
is life” (Norton). While on the other hand, it has been implied,
through research, that Rev. Fredrick Cullen was seen also something of an
effeminate man; as he was dressed in girl’s clothing by his poverty stricken
mother well beyond the acceptable boyhood age for such transvestism (Norton).
Cullen, hypothetically wrote his
poems for his lovers and dedicated poems to his closest gay friends: Alain
Locke, Harold Jackman, Carl Van Vechten and Leland Pettit. Cullen is reported to have been “closeted”
but was well known in the gay underground (Norton)
even though surely his “frankness” about his sexuality posed even greater
problems and dangers if fully exposed.
This closeted-ness worked to protect Cullen from further discrimination
while also holding a firm grip on his creative imagination. However, with all of that said, it is rather
difficult to decipher, the creative influence of gayness on Cullen’s literary
imagination can be seen through coded references to homosexuality in much of
his poetry.
Cullen would develop a multifarious
poetry that would incorporate racial themes as well as his complex integration
of male-male relationships that although veiled are significant. These poems would include: “Tableau”, “The Shroud of Color”, “Fruit
if the Flower”, “For a Poet and “Spring
Reminiscence” as well as “Uncle Jim”,
“Colors” and “More than a Fool’s Song”.
“Fruit of the Flower”
My father is a quiet man
With sober, steady ways;
For simile, a folded
fan;
His nights are like his
days.
My mother's life is
puritan,
No hint of cavalier,
A pool so calm you're
sure it can
Have little depth to
fear.
And yet my father's eyes
can boast
How full his life has
been;
There haunts them yet
the languid ghost
Of some still sacred
sin.
And though my mother
chants of God,
And of the mystic river,
I've seen a bit of
checkered sod
Set all her flesh
aquiver.
Why should he deem it
pure mischance
A son of his is fain
To do a naked tribal
dance
Each time he hears the
rain?
Why should she think it
devil's art
That all my songs should
be
Of love and lovers,
broken heart,
And wild sweet agony?
Who plants a seed begets
a bud,
Extract of that same
root;
Why marvel at the hectic
blood
That flushes this wild
fruit? (Poem Hunter.com)
Langston Hughes was born James
Mercer Langston Hughes on February 1, 1902 and by 1921 had published his first
poem (Biography.com). Langston’s parents divorced shortly after he
was born while his mother and he would settle in the Cleveland area where he
would begin to write poetry He would say later in life that his influences for
writing were Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman who was introduced to in high
school. It was during this time that he
discovered his love of books. From this early period in his life, Hughes would
cite as influences on his poetry the American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and
Carl Sandburg. Hughes spent a brief period of time with his father in Mexico in
1919. “The relationship between him and his father was troubled, causing Hughes
a degree of dissatisfaction that led him to contemplate suicide at least once” (BronzeBuckaroo).
By 1924 he would live in Paris for a
brief period of time continuing to write his poetry. Langston would say in
regard to art that “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly,
but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose” ( Academy of American Poets). Unlike certain
writers of the post-World War I era who became acknowledged as the “Lost
Generation”, writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hughes
instead spent time in Paris during the early 1920s becoming part of the black
expatriate community (BronzeBuckaroo).
Langston’s poem “The Weary Blues”, written in 1926 was
published with the help and support of Carl Van Vechten and was among the very first to use jazz rhythms
and dialect to represent the life of urban blacks (Biography.com).
“The Weary Blues”
Droning a drowsy
syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth
to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the
other night
By the pale dull pallor
of an old gas light
He
did a lazy sway. . . .
He
did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those
Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on
each ivory key
He made that poor piano
moan with melody.
O
Blues!
Swaying to and fro on
his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy
tune like a musical fool.
Sweet
Blues!
Coming from a black
man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice
with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing,
that old piano moan—
“Ain’t
got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t
got nobody but ma self.
I’s
gwine to quit ma frownin’
And
put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump,
went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords
then he sang some more—
“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’
And
I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night
he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and
so did the moon.
The singer stopped
playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues
echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or
a man that’s dead (Harold Ober Associates Incorporated).
Langston’s subject matter was
astonishingly wide-ranging and resonant, with is work about music, politics,
America, love, the blues and dreams, about ordinary people leading ordinary
lives and about a “world that few could rightly call beautiful, but was worth
loving and changing” ( Academy of American Poets). Langston characteristically has be known for
his use of image, repetition and his virtually mesmerizing tempo and rhyme to
join political and social content to the structures of poetry. It would be this
aesthetic that created a modernist feel with hints of religious devotion to the
very power of repetition and the “musicality in the blues, that gave rise to Hughes’s voice” ( Academy of American Poets) which was uniquely
his own. Hughes' life and work were
enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s alongside
those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay,
Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas.
The primary conflict between the
artists of the Harlem Renaissance was the representations of the
"low-life", that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower
social-economic layers and the apparent divisions and prejudices based on skin
color within the black community. Hughes wrote what would be considered the
manifesto for himself and his contemporaries published in 1926, The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain:
“The
younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark- skinned
selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it
doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom
cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their
displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong
as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves”
(BronzeBuckaroo).
Hughes was unapologetically black at
a time when blackness was no longer fashionable, and, he didn’t go much beyond
the themes of black is beautiful as he explored the black human condition in an
assortment of depths. His foremost concern was the uplift of his people who he
judged himself the acceptable appreciator of and whose potencies, resiliency, bravery,
and wittiness he wanted to record as part of the general American experience.
Thus, his poetry and fiction centered generally on insightful views of the
working class lives of blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of
struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African
American identity and its diverse culture.
In visual media, Hughes has been the
topic of two theatrical plays by African American playwrights whose subject
matter involved in part or whole the fact that he was gay, “Hannibal of the Alps” by Michael
Dinwiddie and “Paper Armor” by Eisa
Davis (BronzeBuckaroo). In the 1989 film, “Looking for Langston” by British
filmmaker Isaac Julien, Hughes is recovered as a black gay icon from where
there is an unswerving effort to disregard or at least restrain his
homosexuality because he is such a towering figure in African American
literature; his iconic status among the African American community is believed
to be based on his heterosexuality.
The question for the 21st
century reader of Hughes’s work is how to read his poems without reducing his
works to merely politics or denying the political density. Hughes himself saw the political and the
poetic as undividable and went on record by saying:
It has been a distinguished fact
that the formal devices, rhetoric, anaphora and rhyme as well as the innovative
and captivating incorporation of the Blues come from a cultural tradition that
had never had a voice in poetry. As we his readers we are pulled into his work
because of its symbolic and ancestral reflections as well as the mere sounds
that reverberate the musical quality of words that would drive him into the
cultural fountain of African American music and can clearly be seen in “Po’ Boy Blues”.
“Po' Boy Blues”
When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like
gold.
Since I come up North de
Whole damn world's
turned cold.
I was a good boy,
Never done no wrong.
Yes, I was a good boy,
Never done no wrong,
But this world is weary
An' de road is hard an'
long.
I fell in love with
A gal I thought was
kind.
Fell in love with
A gal I thought was
kind.
She made me lose ma
money
An' almost lose ma mind.
Weary, weary,
Weary early in de morn.
Weary, weary,
Early, early in de morn.
I's so weary
I wish I'd never been
born ( Academy of American Poets).
One of the greatest ironies in the
life of Langston Hughes, The People’s Poet, was his plausible silence regarding
the oppression of gays. As a gay man, Hughes
lived that secret life, much like Cullen, silently in the confines of a very
constricted but well-constructed closet; one that still in many regards
shelters him today.
One of Langston Hughes poem called
"Tell Me," he talks his
sorrow. For instances in "Tell Me"
he wrote:
"Final
Curve"
Good
evening, daddy
I know you’ve heard
The
boogie-woogie rumble
Of
a dream deferred
"Boogie:
1 a.m."
Why
should it be my loneliness,
Why
should it be my song,
Why
should it be my dream
deferred
overlong?
( Tangient LLC.)”
He was referring to the racism and
discrimination that he and his fellow black people faced through. Then he talks
about "dream deferred." So what does dream deferred mean? It means
when your dreams are postpone or putt off. Most of Langston Hughes poems talk
about the dream deferred and that is why it is often repeated. The poem is gestalt in which the phrase “Why
should it be my” is used three times to highlight the personal anguish over
loneliness and the sheer unattainability of dreams. The “it” of the poem can be seen as racism,
poverty, homosexuality or a host of other causes that make the dream
unachievable.
Some academics and biographers today
recognize that Hughes was a homosexual and incorporated homosexual codes in
many of his poems, similar in manner to Walt Whitman and most patently in the
short story “Blessed Assurance” which
deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and queerness (BronzeBuckaroo).
With tunnel vision,
Hughes framed Delmar's story within the structure of the black church, and many of us will recognize his special
relationship with the choir director
as they sneak off alone to the Village, when the choir visits New York. While
the father obsesses over what he considers his son's obvious effeminacy, things come to a
head when the director, a Dr. Manley Jaxon, writes and dedicates an original anthem to Delmar based
on the story of Ruth in the Bible. Those
of us with a queer eye
for the bible know that some theologians now consider the story of
Ruth and Naomi to be one of a few same-sex relationships remotely possible in the scriptures. Those of us with a working knowledge of black
same-gender history
will also recognize the peculiar spelling of the doctor's last name as that of Frankie Jaxon, a
transgendered musician (Jarrell)”
Like Cullen, Hughes had close
alliances with such gay men as Alain Locke, Noel Sullivan, Richard Bruce
Nugent, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Wallace Thurman.
It is my hope that someday that both
Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen’s literary legacy can be used as the cornerstone
in which we can rebuild their reputation as the gay poet laureate and the
inaugurator’s of the black gay male
poetic tradition. As this kind of dialogue continues as the reading public is
made aware that sexuality has great consequences for artist creativity, and the
closet is deconstructed, surely Hughes and Cullen’s as well as others will take
their place just not as race and folk poet, but as one whose multifaceted
achievement includes battling oppression through their veiled “homosexual expressivity”.
Then we will be able to understand that they were not silent about their
gayness after all.
Works Cited
Academy of American Poets. Poets. org: From the
Academy of American Poets. 1997. 17 February 2013 <http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/323>.
Tangient LLC. Analysis of Langston Hughes.
2013. 23 February 2013
<http://trcs.wikispaces.com/Analysis+of+Langston+Hughs+Poems>.
Biography.com. Bio Classroom. n.d. 22 February
2013 <http://www.biography.com/tv/classroom/harlem-renaissance>.
—. The Biography Channel Website. 2013. 17
February 2013
<http://www.biography.com/print/profile/langston-hughes-9346313>.
BronzeBuckaroo. The Life of Langston Hughes .
2 June 2007. 23 February 2013 <http://www.lifeoflangstonhughes.blogspot.com>.
Daniel, Walter C. Georgetown College: Countee
Cullen. n.d. 17 February 2013
<http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/cullen.html>.
Hare, John Bruno. Internet Scared Text Archive.
2010. 22 February 2013 <http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch295.htm>.
Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. Poetry
Foundation. 1987. 23 February 2013
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176785>.
Jarrell, Corey. Corey @ I'll Keep You Posted.
22 May 2009. 23 February 2013 <http://illkeepyouposted.typepad.com/ill_keep_you_posted/2009/05/forty-two-years-ago-on-this-date-langston-hughes-made-his-transition-fromthe-peoples-poetto-eternal-literary-icon-in-this-a.html>.
Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life
& Career. February 2000. 22
February 2013
<http://www.english.illonois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cullen/life.htm>.
Norton, Rictor. Gay History and Literature.
1998. 17 February 2013 <http:// rictornorton.co.uk/cullen.htm>.
Poem Hunter.com. Poem Hunter.com. 27 March
2010. 23 February 2013
<http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bound-no-th-blues/>.
Smith, Dr. Brenda. "Senior Seminar Class
Notes." Canton, Ohio, 1- 22 February 2013.
Wikipedia. Wikipedia: Countee Cullen. 21
February 2013. 22 February 2013 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countee_Cullen>.
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