Negroes Guns African American Life
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Langston Hughes stands as a literary and cultural translation of the political resistance and effort of black consciousness leaders such as Martin Luther King to restore the rights of the black citizenry thence fulfilling the ethos of the American dream, which is celebrated universally each year around February to April. Hughes’ overriding sense of a social and cultural intent tied to his sense of the past, the present and the future of black America commends his life and works as having much to learn from to inspire us to move forward and to inform and guide our steps as we move forward to develop a outstanding future. Hughes is likewise significant since he seems to have conveniently spanned the genres: poetry, drama, novel and criticism leaving an indelible stamp on each. At 21 years of age he had published in all four (4) areas. For he always considered himself an artisan in words who would venture into each single area of literary creativity, because there were readers for whom a story meant more than a poem or a song lyric meant more than a story and Hughes wanted to reach that person and his kind. But original and foremost, he considered himself a poet. He wanted to be a poetical who could address himself to the worries of his persons in poems that could be read with no formal training or broad literary background. In spite of this Hughes wrote and staged dozens of short stories, when it comes to a dozen books for children, a history of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples (NAACP), two volumes of autobiography, opera libretti, song lyrics and so on. Hughes was driven by a sheer selfassurance in his skillfulness and in the power of his craft. Hughes” dedication to Africa was real and concretized in both words and deeds. The fact of his Negro-ness (though light-complexioned) has aroused in him a desire to challenge those from the other side of the color line that reject it: My old man’s a white old man And my old mother’s black My old ma passed away in a fine huge house My crazy passed away in a shack I wonder where I’m gonna die Being neither white nor black? His search for his origins was given impetus when in 1923 Hughes met and heard Marcus Garvey exhort Negroes to go back to Africa to escape the wrath of the white man. Hughes then became one of the poets who thought they felt the beating of the jungle tom-toms in the Negroes’ pulse. Their verse took on a nostalgic mood, and a lot of even imagined that they were infusing the rhythms of African dancing and music into their verse like we could sense in the reading of this poem: ‘Danse Africaine’: The low beating of the tom toms, The slow beating of the tom toms, Low …slow Slow …low - Stirs your blood. Dance! A night-veiled girl Whirls softly into a Circle of light. Whirls softly …slowly, Born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas and Lincoln, Illinois, before going to high school in Cleveland, Ohio in of which places, he was percentage of a little community of blacks to whom he was notwithstanding profoundly attached from early in his life. Though descending from a distinguished family his infancy was disrupted by the separation of his parents not long after his birth. His father then emigrated to Mexico where he hoped to gain the success that had eluded him in America. The color of his skin, he had hoped, would be less of a contemplation in determining his future in Mexico. There, he broke new ground. He gained success in business and lived the rest of his life there as a prosperous attorney and landowner. In contrast, Hughes’ mother lived the transitory life mutual for black mothers often leaving her son in the care of her mother while searching for a job. His maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, whose basi husband had passed away at Harpers Ferry as a fellow member of John Brown’s band, and whose second husband (Hughes’s grandfather) had also been a militant abolitionist. instilled in Hughes a sense of dedication most of all. Hughes lived successively with family friends, then respective relatives in Kansas. Another important family figure was John Mercer Langston, a brother of Hughes’s grandfather who was one of the best-known black Americans of the nineteenth century. Hughes later joined his mother even altho she was now with his new stepfather in Cleveland, Ohio. At the same time, Hughes was struggling with a sense of desolation fostered by parental neglect. He himself recalled being driven early by his loneliness ‘to books, and the terrifi world in books.’ He became disillusioned with his father’s materialistic values and contemptuous faith that blacks, Mexicans and Indians were lazy and ignorant. At Central High School Hughes excelled academically and in sports. He wrote poetry and short fiction for the school’s literary magazine and edited the school year book. He returned to Mexico where he taught English briefly and wrote poems and prose pieces for publication in The Crisis the magazine of the NAACP. Aided by his father, he arrived in New York in 1921 ostensibly to attend Columbia University but in truth it was to see Harlem. One of his greatest poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” had just been published in The Crisis. His talent was without delay spotted though he only lasted one year at Columbia where he did well but never felt comfortable. On campus, he was subjected to bigotry. He was assigned the worst dormitory room because of his color. Classes in English creative writing of recognized artisti value were all he could endure. Instead of attending classes which he found boring he would popular shows, lectures and readings sponsored by the American Socialist Society. It was then that he was initial introduced to the laughter and pain, hunger and heartache of blues music. It was the night life and culture that lured him out of college. Those sweet sad blues songs captured for him the intense pain and yearning that he saw around him, and that he integrated into such poems as “The Weary Blues”. To keep himself going as a poetical and support his mother, Hughes served in turn as: a deliverance boy for a florist; a vegetable farmer and a mess boy on a ship up the Hudson River. As part of a dealer steamer crew he sailed to Africa. He then traveled the same way to Europe, where he jumped Ship in Paris only to spend various months working in a night-club kitchen and then wandering off to Italy. By 1924 his poetry which he had all along been working on showed the powerful influence of the blues and jazz. His poem “The Weary Blues” which best exemplifies this influence helped launch his career when it won initial prize in the poetry division of the 1925 literary contest of Opportunity magazine and also won another literary prize in Crisis. This landmark poem, the introductory of any poetical to make use of that basic blues form is portion of a volume of that same title whose entire collection reflects the frenzied atmosphere of Harlem nightlife. Most of it is selections just as “The Weary Blues” approximate the phrasing and meter of blues music, a genre extrapolated in the early 1920s by rural and urban blacks. In it and such other pieces as “Jazzonia” Hughes evoked the frenzied hedonistic and glittering atmosphere of Harlem’s famous night-clubs. Poetry of social commentary such as “Mother to Son” show how hardened the blacks have to be to face the innumerable hurdles that they have to battle through in life. Hughes’ earliest influences as a mature poetical came interestingly from white poets. We have Walt Whitman the man who through his artistic violations of old conventions of poetry opened the boundaries of poetry to new forms like free verse. There is also the highly populist white German Émigré Carl Sandburg, who as Hughes’ ” guiding star,” was decisive in leading him toward free verse and a radically democratic modernist aesthetic But black poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, a master of both dialect and general verse, and Claude McKay, the black radical socialist an emigre from Jamaica who also wrote accomplished lyric poetry, stood for him as the embodiment of the cosmopolitan and yet racially convinced and devoted black poetical Hughes hoped to be. He was likewise indebted to older black literary figures such as W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson who admired his work and aided him. W.E.B. Dubois’ collection of Pan-Africanist essays Souls of Black Folks has markedly influenced a heap of black writers like Hughes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Such colour-affirmative images and sentiments as that in “people”: The night is beautiful,/So the faces of my humans and in ‘Dream Variations: Night coming tenderly,/ Black like me. endeared his work to a wide range of African Americans, for whom he delighted in writing,. Hughes had always shown his determination to experiment as a poetical and not slavishly follow the tyranny of tight stanzaic forms and precise rhyme. He seemed, like Watt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, to prefer to write verse which captured the realities of American speech rather than “poetic diction”, and with his ear exceptionally attuned to the varieties of black American speech. “Weary Blues” combines these respective parts the mutual speech of frequent people, jazz and blues music and the established forms of poetry adapted to the African American and American subjects. In his adaptation of established poetic forms original to jazz then to blues most times using dialect but in a way radically dissimilar from earlier writers, Hughes was well served by his early experimentation with a loose form of rhyme that ofttimes gave way to an inventively rhythmic free verse: Ma an ma baby Got two mo’ ways, Two mo’ ways to do de buck! Even more radical experimentation with the blues form led to his next collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew. Perhaps his finest single book of verse, including assorted ballads, Fine Clothes was also his least favourably welcomed. Several reviewers in black newsprints and magazines were distressed by Hughes’ fearless and, ‘tasteless’ evocation of elements of lower-class black culture, including it is from time to time raw eroticism, never before treated in severe poetry. Hughes expressing his determination to write with regards to such humans and to experiment with blues and jazz wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Published in the Nation in 1926 ‘We younger artists…intend to express our person dark-skinned selves Without fear or shame. If white humans are pleased we are glad. If they Are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful, And ugly too.’ Hughes indicated his determination to write fearlessly, shamelessly and unrepentantly regarding low-class black life and humans inspite of opposition to that. He likewise exercised much freedom in experimenting with blues as well as jazz. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If coloured persons 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 mountains, free within ourselves. With his espousal of such thoughts defending the freedom of the black writer Hughes became a beacon of light to younger writers who also wished to assert their right to explore and exploit allegedly degraded distinct features of black people. He thence provided the motion with a manifesto by so skillfully arguing the need for both race pride and artistic independence in this his most unforgettable essay, In 1926 Hughes returned to school in the with respect to history black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he continued publishing poetry, short stories and essays in mainstream and black-oriented periodicals In 1927 together with Zora Neal Hurston and other writers he founded Fire a literary diary devoted to African -American culture and purposed at destructing the older forms of black literature. The effort itself was short-lived. It was engulfed in fire along with it is editorial offices. Then a 70 – year old wealthy white patron entered his life. Charlotte Osgood Mason, who started directing almost each aspect of Hughes’ life and art. Her enthusiasti faith in parapsychology, intuition and folk culture was brought into supervising the writing of Hughes’ novel: Not Without Lauqhter in which his boyhood in Kansas is drawn to depict the life of a sensible black child, Sandy, growing up in a representative, middle-class.mid-western African-American home. Hughes’ kinship with Mason came to an explosive end in 1930. Hurt and baffled by Mason’s rejection, Hughes employed cash from a prize to spend various weeks recovering in Haiti. From the intense personal unhappiness and depression into which the break had sunk him. Back in the U.S., Hughes made a sharp turn to the political left. His verses and essays were now being published in New Masses, a diary controlled by the Communist Party. Later that year he begun touring. The renaissance which was long over was substituted for Hughes by a sense of the need for political struggle and for an art that reflected this radical approach. But his career, not similar to others then, effortlessly pulled through the end of that movement. He held on developing his art in keeping with his sense of himself as a exhaustively professional writer. He then published his initial collections, the often times acerbic and even embittered The Ways of White Folks. Hughes’ main concern was now, the theatre. Mulatto, his drama of race-mixing and the South was the longest running play by an African American on Broadway until Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun appeared in the 1960′s. His dramas – comedies and ramas of domestic black American life, largely – were likewise general with black audiences. Using such inventions as theatre-in-the-round and invoking audience participation, Hughes envisioned the work of later avant-garde dramatists like Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. In his drama Hughes combines urban dialogue, folk idioms, and a thematic special importance and significance on the dignity and strength of black Americans. Hughes wrote other plays, including comedies such as Little Ham (1936) and a historical drama, Emperor of Haiti (1936) most of which were only moderate successes. In 1937 he expended various months in Europe, including a long stay in besieged Madrid. In 1938 he returned home to found the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which staged his agitprop drama Don’t You Want to Be Free? employing assorted of his poems, vigorously blended black nationalism, the blues, and socialist exhortation. The same year, a socialist institution published a pamphlet of his radical verse, “A New Song.” With the commence of World War II, Hughes returned to the political centre. The Big Sea, his primary volume of his autobiography work with it is unforgettable portrait of the renaissance and his African voyages written in an episodic, lightly comic style with nearly no mention of his leftist sympathies appeared. In his book of verse Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) he once again sang the blues. On the other hand, this collection, as well as another, his Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943), strongly attacked racial segregation. In poetry, he revived his interest in a heap of of his old themes and forms, as in Shakespeare in Harlem (1942).the South and West, taking poetry to the people. He read his poems in churches and in schools. He then sailed from New York for the Soviet Union. He was amidst a band of young African-Americans invited to take percentage in a film when it comes to American race relations. This filmmaking venture, altho unsuccessful, proved instrumental to heightening his short story writing. For whilst in Moscow he was struck by the matchings amid D. H. Lawrence’s reputation in a title story from his collection The Lovely Lady and Mrs Osgood Mason. Overwhelmed by the power of Lawrence’s stories, Hughes begun writing short fiction of his. On his return to the U. S.. by 1933 he had sold three stories and had started out compiling his basi collection. Perhaps his finest literary accomplishment for the duration of the war came in writing a on a weekly basis column in the Chicago Defender from 1942 to 1952. the spotlight of which was an offbeat Harlem reputation called Jesse B. Semple, or Simple, and his exchanges with a staid narrator in a neighborhood bar, where Simple commented on a assortment of matters but primarily in regards to race and racism. Simple became Hughes’s most celebrated and beloved fictional creation. and one of the freshest, most arousing and attention holding and enduring Negro characters in American fiction Jesse B Simple, is a Harlem Everyman, whose comic manner hardly obscured numerous of the severe themes raised by Hughes in relating Simple’s exploits in the quintessential “wise-fool’ whose experience and uneducated perceptivenesses capture the foilings of being black in America.. His honorable and unproblemati eye sees through the shallowness, hypocrisy and phoniness of white and black Americans alike. From his stool at Paddy’s Bar, in a delightful brand of English, Simple remarks both wisely and hilariously on galore things but primarily on race and women. His bebop-shaped poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1991) projects a altering Harlem, fertile with humanity but in decline. In it, the drasti deteriorated state of Harlem in the 1950s is contrasted to the Harlem of the 20s. The a lively interest of night-club life and the vitality of cultural renaissance has now gone. An urban ghetto plagued by poverty and crime has taken it is place. A alter in rhythm parallels the change in tone. The smooth patterns and tame melancholy of blues music are substituted by the abrupt, fragmented structure of post-war jazz and bebop. Hughes was alert to what was happening in the African-American world and what was coming. This is why this volume of verse reflected so much the new and comparatively new be-bop jazz rhythms that emphasized dissonance They thence reflected the new pressures that were straining the black communities in the cities of the North. Hughes’ living much of his life in basements and attics brought much realism and humanity to his writing peculiarly his short stories. He thence remained close to his tremendous public as he kept moving figuratively through the basements of the world where his life is thickest and where mutual humans struggle to make their way. At the same time, writing in attics, he rose to the long perspective that enabled him to radiate a humanizing, beautifying, but still truthful light on what he saw. Hughes’ short stories reflect his entire intention as a writer. For his art was aimed at interpreting “the beauty of his own people,” which he felt they were taught either not to see or not to take pride in. In all his stories, his humanity, his faithful and artistic demonstrations of both racial and national truth – his successful mediation amongst the beauties and the terrors of life around him all shine out. Certain themes, technical excellencies or social perceptivenesses loom out. “Slave in the Block” for example, a simple but bright tale reveals the lack of respect and even humane communication, amid Negroes and those patronizing and cosmetic whites. Hughes likewise took time to write for children fabricating the successful Popo and Fifina (1932), a tale set in Haiti with Arna Bontemps. He at last published a dozen children’s books, on subjects such as jazz, Africa, and the West Indies. Proud of his versatility, he also wrote a commissioned history of the NAACP and the text of a much praised pictorial history of black America The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), where he explicated photographs of Harlem by Roy DeCarava, which was judged masterful by reviewers, and confirmed Hughes’s reputation for an unrivaled command of the subtle differences in meaning or opinion or attitude of black urban culture. Hughes’s suffered continuous harassment regarding his ties to the Left. In vain he protested he had never been a Communist having severed all such links. In 1953 he was subjected to public humiliation at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy, when he was forced to appear in Washington, D.C., and testify officially in regards to his politics. Hughes refused that he had ever been a communist but conceded that a great deal of of his radical verse had been ill-advised. Hughes’s career scarcely suffered from this. Within a short time McCarthy himself was discredited. Hughes now wrote at length in I Wonder as I Wander (1956), his much-admired second volume of autobiography. when it comes to his years in the Soviet Union. He became prosperous, even though he always had to work hard for his measure of prosperity. In the 1950s he turned to the musical stage for success, as he sought to repeat his major success of the 1940s, when Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice had chosen him as the lyricist for their Street Scene (1947). This production was hailed as a breakthrough in the development of American opera; for Hughes, the apparently endless cycle of poverty into which he had been locked came to an end. He purchased a home in Harlem. By the end of his life Hughes was closely universally recognized as the most representative writer in the history of African American creative writing of recognized artisti value and also as probably the most initial of all black American poets. He therefore became the widely acknowledged “Poet Laureate” of the Negro Race! According to Arnold Rampersad, an authority on Hughes: Much of his work celebrated the beauty and dignity and Humanity of black Americans. Unlike other writers Hughes basked in the glow of the plainly high regard of his essential audience, African Americans. His poetry, with it is firstborn jazz and blues influence and it is powerful democratic commitment, is almost surely the most influential written by any person of African dissent in this century. Certain of his poems; “Mother to Son” are virtual anthems of black American life and aspiration. His plays alone… could secure him a place in AfroAmerican literary history. His reputation Simple is the most unforgettable single figure to emerge from black journalism. ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ is timeless, “it seems as a statement of ceaseless dilemma facing the young black artist, caught amidst the contending forces of black and white culture’ Liberated by the examples of Carl Sandburg’s free verse Hughes’ poetry has always purposed for utter directness and simplicity. In this regard, is the notion that he almost never revised his work seeming like romantic poets who believe and demonstrate that poetry is a ‘spontaneous overflow of emotions”. Like Walt Whitman, Hughes’s outstanding poetic forefather in America’s poetry…, Hughes did believe in the poetry of Emotion, in the power of ideas and sensations that went beyond matters of technical crafts. Hughes never wanted to be a writer who cautiously sculpted rhyme and stanzas and in so doing lost the aroused heart of what he had set out to say. His poems imbued with the distinctive diction and cadences of Negro idioms in simple stanza patterns and rigorous rhyme systems derived from blues songs enabled him to capture the ambience of the setting as well as the rhythms of jazz music. He wrote largely in two modes/directions: (i) lyrics regarding black life using rhythms and refrains from jazz and blues. (ii) Poems of racial protest exploring the boundaries amongst black and white America. therefore contributing to the strengthening of black cognizance and racial pride than even the Harlem Renaissance’s bequest for it is most militant decades. While never militantly repudiating co-operation with the white community, the poems which protest versus white racism are boldly direct. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” the simple direct and free verse makes clear that Africa’s dusky rivers run concurrently with the poet’s soul as he draws spiritual strength as well as person identity from the collective experience of his ancestors. The poem is according to Rampersad “reminding us that the syncopated beat which the captive Africans brought with them “that found it is initial expression here in “the hand clapping, feet stamping, drum-beating rhythms of the humane heart (4 – 5), is as ‘ancient as the world.” But what Hughes is better known for is his treatment of the future prospects or potentials of African-American experiences and identities. Like Walt Whitman, he developed a persona that speaks for more than himself. His voice in “I too” for instance absorbs the depiction of a whole race into his central cognizance as he laments: I, too, sing America I am the darker brother. I, too, am America. The “darker brother” celebrating America is sure of a better future when he will no longer be shunted apart by “company”. The poem is characteristic of Hughes’s faith in the racial knowingness of African Americans, a cognizance that reflects their integrity and beauty while simultaneously demanding respect and acceptance from others as specially when: Nobody ‘/I dare Say to me, Eat in the kitchen. This dogged resistance and the optimisti feeling that all is going to turn out well in facing adversity is what Hughes’ life centred on.thus enabling him to survive and achieve in spite of the obstacles facing him. as Rampersad affirms:. ‘Toughness was a major characteristic of Hughes’ life. For his life was hard. He surely knew poverty and humiliation at the hands of humans with far more power and cash than he had and little respect for writers, particularly poets. Through all his poverty and hurt, Hughes kept on a steady keel. He was a gentleman, a soft man in numerous ways, who was sympathetic and affectionate, but was tough to the core. Hughes’s poetry reveals his hearty appetite for all humanity, his insistence on justice for all, and his faith in the transcendent possiblenesses of joy and hope that make room as he aspires in ‘I too’, for every one at America’s table. This deep love for all humanity is echoed in one of his poems: ‘My People” numerous lines of which were earlier referred to: The night is beautiful, so the faces of my people, the stars are beautiful, so the eyes of my people Beautiful, also, is the sun Beautiful also, are the souls of my people Arnold Rampersad’s last word on Hughes’s humanity, is anchored on three necessary attributes: his tenderness; generosity and his sense of humour. Hughes was likewise tender. He was a man who lovse other people and was beloved. It was very hard to find any person who had known him who would say a harsh thing with regards to him. People who knew him could do not forget little that wasn’t pleasant of him. Evidently, he radiated joy and humanity and this was how he was remembered after his death. He loved the company of people. He necessitated to have humans around him. He necessitated them perhaps to counter the necessary loneliness instilled in his soul from early in his life and out of which he made his literary art. Hughes was a man of outstanding generosity. He was generous to the young and the poor, the needy; he was generous even to his rivals. He was generous to a fault, giving to those who did not always is worthy of his kindness. But he was prepared to peril ingratitude in order to aid younger artists in queer and young people in general. Hughes was a man of laughter, though his laughter closely always came in the presence of tears or the threat of the surge of tears. The titles of his original novel Not Without Laughter and a collection of stories Laughing to Keep from Crying. indicate this. This was basically how he believed life must be faced – with the psychological result of perception learning and reasoning of it is inescapable loneliness and pain but with an awareness, too, of the therapy of laughter by which we assert the humane in the face of circumstances. We will have to reach out to people, and one must not only have an astounding tolerance of life’s sufferings but will have to also exuberantly finish the happy aspect of life. His sense of humour is again credited by a writer from Africa who was like Hughes likewise faced with fighting racial discrimination and deprivation, Ezekiel Mphahlele. Here is a man with a boundless zest for life… He has an irrepressible sense of humour, and to meet him is to come face to face with the essence of humane goodness. In spite of his literary success, he has earned himself the respect of young Negro writers, who never find him unwilling to aid them along. And yet he is not condescending. Unlike most Negroes who become widely known and esteemed or prosperous and move to high-class residential areas, he has continued to live in Harlem, which is in sense a Negro ghetto, in a house which he purchased with cash earned as lyricist for the Broadway musical Street Scene. In explaining and illustrating the Negro condition in America as was his stated vocation, Hughes captured their joys, and the veiled weariness of their lives, the monotony of their jobs, and the veiled weariness of their songs. He accomplished this in poems noteworthy not only for their directness and simplicity but for their economy, lucidity and wit. Whether he was writing poems of racial protest like “Harlem” and “Ballad of the Landlord” or poems of racial affirmation like’ Mother to Son’ and ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’ Hughes was capable to find language and forms to express not only the pain of urban life but also it is magnificent vitality. Further Reading: Gates, Henry, Louis and Mc Kay Nellie, Y. (Gen. Ed) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, N.W. Norton & Co; New York & London 1997 Hughes, Langston, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” 1926. Rpt in Nathan Huggins ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance Oxford University Press, New York, 1976 Mphahlele, Ezekiel, “Langston Hughes,” in Introduction to African Literature (ed) Ulli Beier, Longman, London 1967 Rampersad, Arnold, The life of Langston Hughes Vol. 1 & 11 Oxford University Press, N. York, 1986 Trotman, James, (ed), Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art and His Continuing Influence Garland Publishing Inc. N. York & London 1995 Black Literature Criticism The Oxford Companion to African American Literature., Oxford University Press,.1997 |
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