The African American experience can only be remotely comparable to the South African apartheid experience. Langston Hughes wrote his poems in response to this. His poems are about the experiences of a black person in America and as an African American. This is the feeling I get when reading his poems.
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" reaffirms African pride and a connection to Africa. It was dedicated to William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Bois. The concepts of negritude come out best in lines like, “I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.” (Hughes pg 8) The first line is indicative of a free man in his natural habitat and the next line is connected to pyramids being built by slaves. The poem skillfully shows the history of the African from civilizations birth to the American experience. It is a crude anthropological explanation of how Africans got to America from man’s birth in East Africa.
Hi poems show the hard ships and constant pain faced by Africans in America, “Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.” (Hughes pg 12) Begins and ends the poem, “Mother to Son.” Yet the stair case of the speaker has splinters and tacks. This is a contrast to crystal staircase of whites. In Theme for English B imagine a student, “I am the only colored student in my class.” (Hughes pg. 22 l. 8-10) “As one gets older one gets into relationships for the African American in a, “Song for a Dark Girl,” “Way Down South in Dixie They hung my black young lover To a cross roads tree.” (Hughes pg 13 l. 1-4)
In “Note on Commercial Theatre,” Hughes criticizes the African historical perspective and cultural narrative. African art and cultural expression could not find audience without a dependence on White patronage. It was difficult for African art during the Harlem Renaissance to be published outside Harlem without white publishing houses. "But someday somebody’ll Stand up and talk about me, And write about me-Black and beautiful-And sing about me, And put on plays about me!” (Irvin pg 89) there was also the problem of black culture being absorbed by whites and his insistence of having a unique black identity.
The writer also consistently not only looks at this separation as bad but dangerous. In the poem "Mulatto" is very touching to me because it shows us that people of mixed race are just that mixed. The phrase, “ You ain't white” is what some would Say of our president. But the truth is he is both. He is me and he is you for he represents all of us.
In conclusion Hughes poems talk about their experiences in white America. Throughout he shows that African Americans are also Americans. ‘I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes. But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.' (Irvin p.g 97) We are all American and that is what is important.
References:
Hughes Langston (1959) Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage Books. Press
Huggins, Nathan Irvin.( 1971) Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press.
