5/21/10 Third Thread: The Two-ness of African-American Poetry

You Think YOU Have Trouble with Tradition? Wheatley, Dunbar, Hughes

Moving today to our third thread--this one entitled "The Twoness of African-American Poetry." We'll start with a poem by Phillis Wheatley, 18th century poet born into slavery; go on to one or two by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, late nineteenth century poet who was the first to use black vernacular in his poetry and who is generally regarded as the best black poet before the Harlem Renaissance; return to Langston Hughes, one of the premiere voices of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's, and move from there to two or three contemporary African-American poets, depending on how many we can squeeze in.

Two key points about the Afro-American poetic tradition:

• the stakes were high: Have to remember that in Wheatley's day, and for a long time after, African-Americans were considered by many whites to be less than human, and a vital poetic tradition could be considered proof to both blacks and whites of the essential humanity of blacks. Even when the terms weren't put that starkly, the existence of a poetic tradition was considered evidence of human worth. Thus W.H.A. Moore, 1890, in"A Void in Our Literature," called for a black poet to give "an indication of the character of the Afro-American's development on those lines which determine the capacity of a people." In the same essay, he wrote: "The Afro-American has not given to English literature a great poet. No one of his kind has, up to this day, lent influence to the literature of his time, save Phillis Wheatley. It is not to be expected that he would. And yet every fragment, every whispering of his benighted muse is scanned with eager and curious interest in the hope that here may be found the gathered breathings of a true singer."
• Second, there is a doubleness at the heart of the African-American tradition. W.E.B. DuBois called it a "two-ness": "It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this two-ness--an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
  This doubleness takes two forms within the poetry.
  • doubleness of content. If you want to make a mark in Anglo- American literature, what do you write about?
    1. the human condition: e.g. Frances Harper, 1859: "If our talents are to be recognized, we must write less of issues that are particular and more of feelings that are general. We are blessed with hearts and brains that compass more than ourselves in our present plight. . . . We must look to the future which, God willing, will be better than the present of the past, and delve into the heart of the world."
    2. African-American experience specifically: E.g. Thomas Hamilton, The Anglo-African magazine, 1859: "[Black people], in order to assert their rank as men among men, must speak for themselves; no outside tongue, however gifted with eloquence, can tell their story."
       This is not only a protest against having one's story told by others, but also a political imperative to have the story told.
       Similarly, H.T. Kealing wrote in 1898 that the literature of a people is "the product of the national peculiarities and race idiosyncrasies that no alien could duplicate." Kealing called upon black writers not to imitate whites but to reach "down to the original and unexplored depths of his own being where lies unused the material that is to provide him a place among the great writers."
  • doubleness of voice. What language do you use in poetry?
    • Poetry as it was recognized in the latter half of the 19th C was almost exclusively white; moreover, black vernacular was treated as a mark of mental inferiority--of "not speaking good English." Therefore there was a strong imperative to use formal poetic diction.
    • On the other hand, how do you express the condition of a people while utterly ignoring that people's language?
      Hence the dialect experiments of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Until Dunbar came along, there had been no poetry written in dialect. Was quite startling at the time, and Dunbar had many imitators. Within a few decades, however, dialect came to be regarded as a literary trap. James Weldon Johnson expressed the need to "break away from, not Negro dialect itself, but the limitations of Negro dialect imposed by the fixing effects of long convention." In particular, problem was that dialect was "an instrument with but two stops: humor and pathos."
      To anticipate our discussion of Hughes: one of the central concerns of the Harlem Renaissance, for these reasons, was the creation of a voice that was not limited in its range but that was distinctively black.

Phillis Wheatley: Born around 1753, a kidnapped African slave child, she was sold to wealthy Bostonian Susanna Wheatley. Family members taught her English, Latin, and the Bible; started writing in around 1765. Had enough poems by the time she was twenty to publish a volume, but could get no subscribers in America. She was published in London in 1773.

"On Being Brought From Africa to America" (1.420-421)

• "may be refined, and join th' angelic train." Who's she arguing against? What would an African-American art look like if it were based upon this understanding of race? Price of humanity is "refinement"--by implication, repudiation of African and African-American cultures.

Paul Laurence Dunbar: Born 1872 to former slaves. As noted before, was the first to use dialect in poetry. Not without some controversy: some accused him of perpetuating negative stereotypes. According to James Weldon Johnson, Dunbar was saddened by the fact that the public seemed to want only dialect poems.

"When Malindy Sings" (2.642-644)

• What's being praised here, of which Malindy's singing is a representation?
• How is the language of the poem an important part of the poem?
  

"We Wear the Mask" (2.646-647)

• What is the mask?
• If the mask is the one that lies and not the person beneath it, who is the mask lying to?

Langston Hughes: one of the leading figures in Harlem Renaissance, at the time also called the New Negro Renaissance. Beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance are hard to trace, but most settle on a date around 1920 (dates range from 1914 to 1924); generally thought to have ended with the beginning of the depression.

Several cultural forces underlay the Harlem Renaissance:

• influx into the North of Southern blacks fleeing rising tide of violence by KKK
• influx of blacks into urban labor force on account of the war
• black troops fighting in WWI exposed to European (especially French) culture, also much more accepted as human beings than at home
• increasing numbers of educated blacks
• rise of black culture in non-literary arenas: Shuffle Along, all black musical comedy which was very successful in 1921, widely cited; singers such as Roland Hayes, first black operatic singer to win international (and then national) fame; dancers such as Josephine Baker; but especially, jazz: Jelly Roll Morton, Ella Fitzgerald, etc.
• rise of black political movements. NAACP founded 1910, which in founded Crisis magazine; Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, and his back to Africa movement

All of this led to a decade or so of intense productivity among black writers and artists, centered in Harlem. Besides Hughes, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Jesse Faucet, Gwendolyn Bennet, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and others.

"The Weary Blues" (2.1090-1091)

• Where does the poem line up in this debate over voice that I was talking about?
  • speaker's voice is not dialect; standard written English, informal poetic diction.
  • bluesman's voice is dialect
• At the beginning of the poem, who is speaking? Black or white? Educated or not? Member of the audience, an omniscient speaker? Does he identify with the blues singer, or is he somewhat distant?
• How is the speaker different at the end? What's the point of "following the blues singer," as it were?

BREAK

After the Harlem Renaissance

So far, we've focused on the "twoness" in African-American poetry: if you are a black poet, do you write about black experience or about universal human experience? do you write in black dialect, with all its limitations, or in so-called standard English, which tends to leave you "writing white"?

These issues continue into the contemporary era, but with some significant differences. First, what was true of American poetry in general after the modernist era was true of African-American poetry after the Harlem Renaissance: it could no longer said that there was no distinguished tradition of poetry by African-Americans. There was less to prove and therefore more room to move. Second, the black middle class was larger, especially after WWII; there was a wider audience of educated blacks, which again meant there were more opportunities for poets; the split between "white English" and "black dialect" was not nearly as stark.

For a few decades after the Harlem Renaissance, then, the body of African-American verse increased without a massive shift. Much of it is innovative in its use of language, but it is fairly unapologetic about borrowing formally from Euro-American poetry. It is often racially conscious, and gets increasingly so as the years pass, but as a rule it is integrationist in its leanings rather than radical or separationist.

During the Civil Rights Movement, however, and even more as the Black Nationalist movement gained prominence, black poets became more radicalized, and increasingly saw poetry as a part of a larger political struggle. This led, around 1965, to the Black Arts Movement.

• The writers of the Black Arts movement emphasized the separateness and distinctiveness of the Afro-American literature, calling for a rejection of mainstream artistic practices in favor of those that "reflect the special character and imperatives of black experience" (Hoyt Fuller, "Towards a Black Aesthetic").
• It was not just confined to poetry: also theater, painting, music, and general cultural theory.
• Aligned with Black Power movement, and seen as part of it. For these writers, art was part of the "triple front" of struggle--economic, political, and cultural." Art plays a central role in political struggle, for these writers; as Baraka says "You must have the cultural revolution, i.e. you must get the mind before you move another futha."
• Many of the BAM poets took heat at the time for being sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and reverse racist; movement ended by around 1975. Very influential, however; ideas persist, many major authors were prompted to write by the movement. Gwendolyn Brooks, whom no one to my knowledge has accused of being sexist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic, and who had a well-established career long before the BAM, claimed that the BAM was the real beginning of her artistic life.

What we'll do: look at two poems from before the BAM, and two after.

Robert Hayden: b. 1913, published first book of poems in 1940; thus one generation after Harlem Renaissance. Influenced by both black and white writers: studied under W.H. Auden, influenced by Hart Crane, Carl Sandburg, and other white poets, but he was also very much influenced by black writers such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer.

"Middle Passage" (2.1242-1247)

• start with structure: what is each stanza in part 1? who speaks?
  • names of slave ships
  • 2 stanzas in speaker's own voice
  • poeticized ship's log
  • more ships names
  • back to speaker
  • parody of Tempest : "Full fathom five thy father lies;/ Of his bones are coral made;/Those are pearls that were his eyes;/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange." By the way, have we seen allusions to The Tempest before?
  • two stanzas of a hymn
  • more of the log
• And so on. where have we seen this kind of fragmentation before? Using modernist techniques... why?
• Who DOESN'T speak? Why? What is the effect of having the slavers indict themselves, as it were? What does "Middle Passage" mean, anyway, and whose POV does it reflect? (Europe-Africa, Africa-America, America-Europe).
  • why these ship names?
  • why the hymn?
• testimony against Cinquez, 1246-1247. Why not Cinquez, or Adams? (Amistad was a slave ship taken over by slaves;eventually landed in America--but in New England, not one of the slave states. After several trials and countertrials, they were defended before the Supreme Court by John Quincy Adams; eventually they were set free and returned to Africa.)
  • lots of ironies here. what are they, and how can we sort them out?
• In the short segments where the speaker speaks in his own voice, what does he say? `

Gwendolyn Brooks: Brooks' career can be divided into two parts, with 1967 serving as the dividing line. By that date, she was a successful and established poet: first book, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945 to considerable critical acclaim; she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for second book, Annie Allen. Many of her poems could be said to be portraits of "ordinary aspects of black life," to quote Langston Hughes, who was an important friend and mentor to Brooks. They were intended for both black and white audiences, and received considerable support from both.

In 1967, she attended the Second Black Writers Conference at Fisk University. Strong activist currents in the conference; Brooks was impressed with the writings of younger black poets such as Amiri Baraka. After this period, Brooks became much more activist herself. Her poems had always had a political content, but she said that "until 1967, my own Blackness did not confront me with shrill spelling of itself." Thereafter, she became much more iinterested in writing poetry for black audiences; very supportive of younger poets. Withdrew from her New York publisher, and began publishing with black-owned presses, including one of her own. Style changed too; from lyrical, alliterative, often rhymed verse, often in traditional forms such as the sonnet, to freer, more oral forms and language. Another way to put this: she had joined the Black Arts movement.

"kitchenette building" (2.1362)

• what does the poem say about dreams?
• is she critical of those she is talking about? sympathetic? both?

"To the Diaspora" (2.1365)

• the African diaspora refers of course to people of African descent who moved to other places throughout the world, many by means of the slave trade, some by emigration. So why does she way to the people she is speaking to that they set out FOR Africa?
• what is the sun that comes, and why do her auditors not believe her?

Amiri Baraka: Baraka was a crucial figure in the BAM, but like many others didn't start out that way; in the first major phase of his writing, he was aligned with the Beat poets; married to a white Jewish woman, co-editor of Jugen, a Beat journal.

• in the mid-60's, however, became increasingly radicalized; after the assassination of Malcom X in particular, cut ties with Beats, became a founding member of the Black Arts Movement, especially via the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. To emphasize what a central figure he was, I have had you read some of his later, more hard-edged poems rather than the earlier ones in the anthology.

"A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand"

• Let's assume that this poem is about a transition in Baraka's own artistic principles--from what came before the BAM to the BAM itself. What prior self or selves is he repudiating?
• Who will "have to understand"?

"Black Art"

• what kind of poetry is Baraka calling for?
  • fuck poems/ and they are useful
  • live/words of the hip world
  • poems like fists, poems that kill--who?
  • no love poems
  • sons of warriors are poems
• what kind of politics is the poem calling for at the end?