During the 1920’ African American writers began to make significant contributions to American literature, especially during the Harlem Renaissance. Discuss three poems or short stories from this literary movement.
‘The Weary Blues’ – Langston Hughes
Cane – Jean Toomer
The Harlem Renaissance is the term given to the blossoming of the creative arts amongst African Americans, centered on Harlem in the 1920s, and embodying the cultural awakening and recognition of African American writing, painting and sculpture, in the same decade that saw jazz and blues reach a wider audience. Terms like the Harlem Renaissance can be useful to signal a historic movement, but the terms can be dangerous if they mask real differences between writers. The introduction to The Norton Anthology of American Literature makes clear that within the broad group of writers included in the term the Harlem Renaissance there were
...arguments between those who wanted to claim membership in the culture at large and those who wanted to stake out a separate artistic domain; between those who wanted to celebrate rural African American lifeways and those committed to urban intellectuality; between those who wanted to join the American mainstream and those who, disgusted by American race prejudice, aligned themselves with worldwide revolutionary movements; between those who celebrated a “primitive” African heritage and those who rejected the idea as a degrading stereotype. (Baym, 1075)
In the texts I have chosen to discuss we will see these arguments in practice. There is also the question of modernism and to what extent it was embraced by writers of the Harlem Renaissance. By discussing the chosen works, we will see that these three authors chose radically different ways to articulate the experience of being African American.
‘Yet Do I Marvel’ by Countee Cullen is a perfect Shakespearean sonnet. This is a European poetic mode that is over four hundred years old. Cullen seems clearly to want to demonstrate his ability to use traditional poetic forms to articulate his experience. But there is more to the poem than that: references to Tantalus and Sisyphus are allusions to European myth; there is vocabulary that is erudite and complex – “caprice,” “inscrutable”, and “catechism” – and which might act as barriers to understanding by anyone with a limited vocabulary or without knowledge of European myth. Cullen also inverts the normal word order for the sake of the rhyme in line 9 – a practice which now sounds archaic. The poem is a reflection on the ways of God: why God made the mole blind, why God made human beings (“flesh that mirrors him”) mortal. The final couplet is the most curious: “Yet I do marvel at this curious thing:/
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” (13 – 14) On one hand, this is significant because it is claiming that Cullen’s talent is God-given, which implies that it is a good and enriching thing. However, it seems slightly patronizing to me – why should it be a “curious thing” that a poet might be black? Cullen is not frightened of drawing attention to his color; he is clearly proud to be African American, but he seems to feel the need to acknowledge that it is unusual for a poet to be black. According to Baker (47), “Cullen was celebrated by black people because he demonstrated authentic, poetical achievement to appreciative whites.” To accuse Cullen of a lack of authenticity is, Baker argues, to miss the point: “His guiding mode was not the realistic but the romantic, and he believed the poet was in tune with higher spiritual forms than a social tactician.” (53)
“Ain’t got nobody in this world.
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on de shelf.” (19 – 22)
Here in contrast to Cullen’s erudite vocabulary and classical allusions, we have phonetic spelling to imitate speech and non-standard forms like “ain’t” which give the poem authenticity. Here, to use the words of the Norton introduction quoted above, Hughes does not seem to want to “enter the American mainstream”, but to create a distinctively African American tradition. The subject matter of the poem assists his goal: it is a celebration of the blues; it is a poetic blues poem about a singer singing the blues. Miller’s comment (51) about Hughes whole work applies especially well to this particular poem: “Any elitist assessment of Langston Hughes must fail. Open to the range of human emotion, they express misanthropy, egoism, or cynicism. In the display of the solo self, they reveal a concern for the choral one as well. Here the individual talent speaks within the cultural and racial tradition.” Here where Miller speaks of the “choral one”, he implies that Hughes is trying to articulate a universal experience of all African Americans. Hughes’s own lines in the poem use repetition and a variation in line length which is reminiscent of popular song:
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues! (13 – 16)
Throughout the poem Hughes uses simple words – just as a popular song would – and one can imagine this poem being set to music very easily.
The extract from Cane gives us a taste of what the whole work is like. The introduction to the Norton Anthology has this to say about modernism:
... a key formal characteristic of the modernist work, whether a painting, a sculpture, or a musical composition, is its construction out of fragments. The long work is an assemblage of fragments, the short work a carefully realized fragment. Compared with earlier writing, modernist literature is notable for what it omits – the explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, and distancing that provide continuity, perspective and security in traditional literature. (Baym, 1078)
This description can be applied almost exactly to Cane – which is a series of impressionistic fragments, part prose, part poetry; part omniscient narrator, part first person narrative. As a work of literature it deliberately breaks boundaries – it is not a conventional novel, and it is not a collection of short stories. This breaking of boundaries is important because Toomer is reacting to centuries of miscegenation (itself a breaking of boundaries): indeed, Lamothe (56) calls slavery and the segregated society of the South “an ideology of enforced fragmentation and difference.” Toomer responds to this enforced fragmentation with his own fictive fragmentation in Cane: his form is a perfect mirror for the experiences of his characters.
In conclusion, it can be seen that on the evidence of these texts, Cullen chose to work in traditional European poetic forms; Hughes attempted to create an African American aesthetic which was distinct from the mainstream; and Toomer fully embraced the innovations of modernism.
Works Cited
Baker, Houston A. Afro-American Poets: Revisions of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Aesthetic. 1996. University of Wisconsin Press. Print.
Baym, Nina (Ed.). The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Volume D. Sixth edition. 2003. New York: W W Norton. Print.
Lamothe, Daphne. ‘Cane: Jean Toomer’s Gothic Black Modernism.’ 54 – 71 in Anolik, Ruth Ruth Bienstock & Howard, Douglas L. The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. 2004. New York: McFarland. Print.
Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. 2006. University Press of Kentucky. Print.
Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1975. New York: Liverwright. Print.
