WEEK 11 POETRY
M. 10/31. Chapter 19. Cultural and Historical Contexts: the Harlem Renaissance (947-56). Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (956-64).
W. 11/02. Chapter 19. Cultural and Historical Contexts: the Harlem Renaissance (947-56). Essay excerpts on Harlem Renaissance (966-81). Read also W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, Ch. 1. Of Our Spiritual Strivings.
Introduction to The Harlem RenaissanceIn The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois had written not only about the “talented tenth” he expected to move things forward for black people but also about the “doubleness” inherent to the consciousness of black Americans: they belong here and yet don’t really feel at home, thanks to centuries of repression and mistreatment. The Harlem Renaissance, I suppose, is in part the fruit of that double consciousness. In the main it was predicated not on withdrawal and isolationism (as in “separatism”) but rather in the strong belief that black Americans needed to break through to full equality and take the recognition that had always been denied them by white citizens and of course the white power structure in law, politics, and social life. One of the main things about this Renaissance was the need of various artists to avoid simply playing to white expectations and stereotypes; the work they produced had to be their own, not something inflected and warped by what white people wanted. At the same time, they wanted to engage with a broader white audience, which implies some degree of mediation in thinking “black” culture. Then too, there was the basically Arnoldian issue of the extent to which art needs to see itself as a medium for change, as something directly political and broadly social – Matthew Arnold had insisted (and in doing so I’d say he followed the German author Friedrich von Schiller) on a formulation that’s since become known as “the paradox of Anglo-American humanism”: namely, only by not promising to accomplish anything beyond the realm of art, only by stubbornly not making themselves useful to the masses, could artists hope to make a difference at some future date. Jumping into the fray would only cheapen the arts to the level of a political tract or a billboard, Arnold might say if he were around today. Well, the authors of the Harlem Renaissance by no means avoided political or social critique, but at the same time they knew they couldn’t just churn out “works of protest.” Only really good art and sound reflection makes much difference – what they produced was indeed a splendid and diverse body of work both in fiction and non-fiction. I would suggest that a big and remarkable part of American culture is due to the influence and genius of black people; much of it has been wrought in and through suffering, with its basis a long history of vicious abuse at the hands first of white slavemasters and then, in the Jim Crow era, white racists and their supporting institutions.
Why should art forms like blues, jazz, church music, and poetry be so important to such a group of people? Well, in part because, we should realize, that group had no direct outlets for their grievances: if the bad guys control the law, what can you do? Go complain to the jailor and you’ll end up in prison, as the gospel phrase goes. There are certainly strong stirrings towards insistence on full legal and political and social equality before MLK Jr’s Ghandian campaign (called non-violent direct action) in the 1950s – A. Philip Randolph is a good name to mention here, and of course W.E.B. DuBois never for one minute ceased advocating full rights for all Americans. Try reading his book on Reconstruction – it’s a fascinating read, and it amounts to genuine history, not a dismissal or a whitewash as so many southern and white-written studies of Reconstruction have been. None of this is intended to wish away or deprecate the injustices committed against other groups in the USA – it’s just that outright slavery is the rawest deal you can get anywhere, and that happened to black people here for centuries. It doesn’t get any worse than that, and yet they persevered and took an overwhelmingly constructive route towards full recognition as citizens and contributors to American history. The project may not be complete yet, but it’s getting closer.
Bontemps, Cullen and Grimké’s selections remind us of the complexity implied by DuBois’ reading of American history. In the Bontemps poem, a simple agricultural metaphor that traces all the way back to the Bible becomes a focus for hope and frustration alike: a promise of bounty cast to the future, but at the same time a promise that the “fruit” of the harvest will have a bitter taste. Cullen describes it as “curious” that in a world filled with race hate and oppression, God would “make a poet black, and bid him sing!” His “Saturday’s Child” sounds like the blues, while “From the Dark Tower” promises in a quietly apocalyptic vein that “We were not made eternally to weep.” Grimké’s “Tenebris” is brooding in the way that it depicts the black person’s growing bitterness casting a shadow over the white person’s house. As so often, we see the metaphor of a tree to characterize black historical experience and the sentiment drawn therefrom: something deep, rooted, consequential. Billie Holliday, after all, later sang of lynched black men as “strange fruit, hanging from the trees.”
Langston Hughes is probably the most obviously modernist of the Harlem Renaissance writers – his forms are often experimental, based on jazz and blues music. “What happens to a dream deferred?” his poem “Harlem” asks – does it get transformed for better or worse, or decay into a putrid once-organic mass, or does it retain its content intact and go off like a bomb? The dream deferred, of course, is equality and fulfillment in America for black people. There are a number of metaphors you’ll run across in African American literature that speak to this deferral: MLK Jr. spoke of what the Founders had promised in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a “blank check” that’s still good, if we can just all cash it together. “The Weary Blues” tells us that the blues don’t make your problems go away, and in fact they run through your head even when you sleep – yet they let you sleep “like a rock.” Well, that’s something – expression of sorrow is necessary even when it doesn’t make the sorry disappear. Expression is just plain necessary, and that’s that. Most “black” art isn’t about evasion or pie in the sky; it comes from and speaks to suffering. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is a fine way to say that people of African descent have been present at the beginning of many civilizations – a black person’s understanding of time, I’ve always thought, has to be somewhat different from that of the average white person: the arc is longer, slower; patient strength is of the essence. What was it that MLK Jr. said? “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” There’s a lot of history behind even Hughes’ simpler poems – in “I, Too,” we may hear something of Lincoln’s rather confused way of talking about the relationship between black and white – in opposing slavery, he said he didn’t know that blacks were his equal but that he was certain they were his brothers: that’s something to build on for future realization, unlike the way the Southern slavemasters and their sympathizers talked. Here in this positive modern poem, Hughes gestures towards the white folk’s shame over not living up to values they themselves profess: justice and equality for all.
The selections by Claude McKay show considerable anguish and despair – the dark-skinned prostitutes who walk the streets of Harlem at night become the subject of the poet’s anguished reflection, centuries of oppression evoked by their weary steps. “If We Must Die” is a call to sacrifice, if it comes to that: there were, indeed, horrible instances of white mob violence against black people in Jim Crow times. “The Tropics in New York” describes the City, so often seen as a mecca for experimentation and liberty, as a harsh and alienating place. “The Harlem Dancer” pays tribute to the dancer’s alienation from the dance and the place of the dance, while “The White House” reminds to speaker to preserve his spirit from “the poison of your deadly hate.”
James Weldon Johnson’s Preface covers the need to avoid falling into the trap of representing black people as creatures of “humor and pathos” – you know, the old stereotypes that white people find touching and sometimes funny: “Mammy” in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is a worthy character and gives the white folk a chuckle, but that isn’t the model for modern black art. “Negro dialect” won’t serve. This isn’t to say that early representations of black people in film, television or radio are to be despised: they were at least a way to get a foot in the door. No looking down on “Amos and Andy” too harshly, I suppose – even though its “black” actors were in fact two white guys. I mean, somebody had to pave the way for Sanford and Son, right? By any means necessary.
Alain Locke in The New Negro (1925) describes the Harlem phenomenon not primarily in terms of the burden of past oppression, heavy as that was, but rather as something more positive: a “new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom…” and a “deliberate flight . . . from medieval America to modern” (966). If this is assimilationism, it isn’t a weak kind that’s called for – one in which a people are swallowed up into a larger whole; rather, “The American mind must reckon with a fundamentally changed Negro” – black people are, in other words, re-creating themselves as they go, reconstituting their identity in a way that isn’t chained to past resentments and suffering. There’s also something of a critique in Locke of black thinkers who, he apparently thinks, cling to the status of victimhood rather than moving beyond it. Locke also does a good job of characterizing black self-development as more international than national, yet at the same time it’s filled with implications for American culture and democracy: if some aren’t fully free, none truly are.
Rudolph Fisher gives a balanced view of white interest in the artistic goings-on in Harlem – I think he’s fully cognizant of white America’s propensity for co-opting everything around. Later on, of course, jazz gets rechristened “swing” when it broadens to white audiences. And in general a commercial society finds a way to co-opt and monetize any sort of cultural phenomenon – even images of radicalism end up on advertising billboards, like the poster of Che Guevara I once saw promoting some radio station at a bus stop in Fashion Island, Newport Beach.
DuBois has little but scorn for the latest production by Claude McKay – the intellectual finds it to be exactly the sort of “unrestrained” representation of black people as racy primitives that thrill-seeking white folk love to hear: pandering, in other words.
Zora Neale Hurston provides a reflection on the “sentiment” involved in being black – when does one feel one’s color, the power of definition closing in? But she also deals with what she finds to be genuine racial/cultural differences: she experiences music differently than her white friend, for instance. Her sentence, “But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propoed against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red, and yellow” is a strange but effective way to conjure a sense of racial identity. It’s a jumble put there by others, and some of it is worthwhile, I think she’s saying, but in the end all the paper bags contain pretty much the same jumble of things.
Langston Hughes gives a balanced, not overly sentimental or lionizing portrait of major intellectuals and artists from the Harlem Renaissance era. He finds genuine genius and perhaps a hint of opportunism in said figures.
JESUS, THOREAU, GANDHI, KING: AGAPE, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, SATYAGRAHA AND NONVIOLENT DIRECT ACTION
The basis of Martin Luther King, JR’s philosophy is Christian. King began his career as a Baptist minister in Montgomery, Alabama, even though events in that city quickly swept him into the historic crusade for civil rights in America and worldwide liberation from colonial domination. I’ll discuss the main Christian influence first, though it might be said that King’s philosophy comes just as much from the black church’s tradition of resistance dating back at least to the nineteenth century. The relevant Christian concept comes from the New Testament—agape, or love. The term agape does not refer to erotic love (sexuality); it refers to a much broader kind of affection. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy points out that the word at first referred to early Christian fellowship gatherings. The word (whose Latin equivalent is caritas, charity) now refers to "brotherly or selfless love" (18).
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy adds that agape is "unselfish love for all persons" (12). In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus makes the following statement that illustrates this definition and brings out its implications for those who must act in a wicked world:
6:27 . . . Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
6:28 Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.
6:29 And unto him that smiteth [strikes] thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also.
6:31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.
6:32 For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them.
6:36 Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.
To a narrow mind, such words would mean something like "pray for those who mistreat you so you will go to heaven and they will go to hell." But I think that Jesus means something more in line with the notion of agape mentioned above: all human beings are endowed with a soul, and so their potential for spiritual regeneration must be acknowledged. That is why he says, "pray for them which despitefully use you."
King’s philosophy of "direct nonviolent action" is in accord with agape in that both concepts aim to dramatize the gravity of the wrong done and the necessity for the wrongdoer to reflect upon the possibility of redemptive action. If I merely strike you back when you strike me without cause, the idea goes, neither of us grows from the experience--you do not see that you are wrong, and I become as hateful as you. But if I dramatize the wrongness of your action by "turning the other cheek," I force you to confront that wrongness and challenge you to respond to it. Needless to say, countless people have died waiting for their oppressors to offer such responses, but Jesus remains firm in his belief in the power of confrontation joined with love. Notice that he does not say, "If your enemy strikes you, flee in terror"; you cannot turn the other cheek if you’re in full flight. He speaks of nonviolent confrontation, not cowardice. What King wants to do, then, is to put Jesus’ strategy to work in segregationist Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia, as well as, later, in northern states. And he wants to put it to work in an organized, concerted way: the mass demonstration comprised in acts of direct nonviolent confrontation with representatives of state-sanctioned oppression. Recall those film clips of protestors being attacked by police dogs and walloped by club-wielding cracker (i.e. white trash) policemen. That is what happens when you engage in nonviolent action, King would say. You yourself don’t engage in violence; instead, you bring to the surface the hatred that racists inwardly harbor. What comes to the surface will be captured by the modern camera and sent out for the world to see, sent out to do its work on all consciences intact enough to be affected by injustice. The segregationists called this behavior "outside agitation" and "communism." They would say that, but King knew that Jesus was just such an outside agitator and revolutionary. And as for obedience to harsh laws, Jesus, it is often said, transformed the Law of Moses by willingly suffering for having challenged it--somewhat as the participant in a modern civil disobedience movement does.
The Christian foundation of King’s philosophy is firm, but more recent ideas add to the strength of that foundation. We must, then, examine Thoreau’s notion of civil disobedience and, more important still, Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha. I’ll comment on Thoreau first, then move briefly to Gandhi, and finally come back to finish my remarks on King. Thoreau is now among America’s most celebrated writers, though he did not attract so much notice during his lifetime. He belonged to the group of authors known as the Concord Transcendentalists. These writers (among them Emerson, Whitman, and Hawthorne) were diverse in their thinking, but they generally shared Emerson’s belief that individual intuition could lead to a grasp of transcendental truth. Emerson believed that by contemplating oneself and the world of nature, a person could arrive at a truth beyond the ordinary world of the senses and physical things. Something of a pantheist, Emerson also located the divine within each human being, not outside as a potentially hostile, punishing force. Most important to Thoreau’s argument in favor of civil disobedience is the Transcendentalist notion that the individual and his or her conscience are of the highest importance.
Some memorable quotations from "Resistance to Civil Government" (or "Civil Disobedience") will show the tenor of Thoreau’s thinking about the capacity of the individual to confront and transform an unjust, overbearing government. Summing up his case, Thoreau argues that "There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly." Of course, the State of Thoreau’s day is too busy waging unjust wars against Mexico and reaping the economic benefits of southern slave labor to recognize any such power in the ordinary citizen. What, then, is a conscientious person to do when the tax-gatherer comes around each year, asking for money that will surely be used to wage Mexican Wars and oppress black southerners?
The issue comes down to hard analysis of two cornerstones of American democracy: obedience to the laws of the land, and willingness to respect the will of the alleged majority. Thoreau undermines both. As for the first, he says that "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." As for the voting many, says Thoreau, "A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men." When the tax-gatherer knocks on the door, then, the citizen must politely but firmly refuse to pay; one just person’s individual conscience has more right to judge the matter than the thousands of voters bent on doing the most expedient and profitable thing.
But isn’t that folly, we may ask? The power of the State and the majority is massive, and the individual is small and weak. How can one oppose such power any more than one would challenge a hurricane or an earthquake or an avalanche? Thoreau’s answer is admirable: "just in proportion as I regard [the State, the majority] . . . as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men . . . I see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves." If those appeals fail, well then, argues Thoreau, "Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
Thoreau’s own act of resistance was not exactly the first shot of a bloody rebellion—all he did was refuse to pay an annual poll tax, and most of his neighbors probably considered him a harmless eccentric. And it’s true that Thoreau, a white citizen in a northern town, did not have to confront bullets, police dogs, billy clubs, or water cannon spray. The Klan didn’t come looking for him with twenty feet of well-oiled rope, either. He is only asserting, at base, that the individual of conscience is bound to obey something like a citizen’s Hippocratic Oath: "at least do no harm." Still, readers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, JR did not treat Thoreau’s essay as the effusion of an inconsequential crank; it contains the seeds of full-scale civil confrontation and massive political effect. It may be so that only one in a thousand people are willing to do more than mouth opposition to State tyranny, but the power of individual conscience, of moral absolutism, is not to be underestimated: "Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine." The disturbing force Thoreau attributes to the individual conscience is enormous, and his advice to any right-thinking minority of people is that "A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose." Modern theorists may disagree with Thoreau’s contention that "the state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses," but the practical Gandhi and King found Thoreau’s faith in conscience inspiring and valuable.
While Thoreau was not one to lead the masses, Mohandas K. Gandhi knew how to turn the many into a nonviolent army composed of everything from "foot soldiers" who simply withheld their cooperation from the Raj (the name for British India) to highly disciplined "lieutenants" who put their bodies and lives on the line for the cause of Indian freedom. That nonviolent army was powerful enough to do what even Napoleon couldn’t: thoroughly defeat the British. Gandhi’s main weapon consisted in the deployment of the force or concept that he called "Satyagraha." Of this term, Gandhi has the following to say:
Passive Resistance . . . has been conceived as a weapon of the weak and does not exclude the use of physical force or violence for the purpose of gaining one’s end, whereas [Satyagraha] . . . has been conceived as a weapon of the strongest and excludes the use of violence. . . .
Its root meaning is holding on to truth, hence truth-force. I have also called it Love-force or Soul-force. In the application of Satyagraha I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. . . . And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one’s self.
But on the political field the struggle on behalf of the people mostly consists in opposing error in the shape of unjust laws. When you have failed to bring the error home to the lawgiver by way of petitions and the like, the only remedy open to you . . . is to compel him by physical force to yield to you or by suffering in your own person by inviting the penalty for the breach of the law. Hence Satyagraha largely appears to the public as Civil Disobedience or Civil Resistance. (Mohandas K. Gandhi: Non-Violent Resistance, New York: Schocken, 1961, 6-7.)
Satyagraha as a practice is varied, extending, as I say above, from direct nonviolent confrontation that breaks an unjust law and invites the penalty thereof to less demanding acts of non-cooperation—withholding taxes and boycotting the oppressors’ courts, schools, merchants, and those social and political functions from which resisters may safely withdraw without inhumaneness. (Gandhi would not, for example, advocate refusing anyone medical attention or basic food supplies—that would be cruelty, a kind of violence.) You can see that Satyagraha is not merely an abstract concept. Instead, it is such a dynamic combination of love and power that British imperialism’s controlling institutions found it advisable to grant India and Pakistan their autonomy. Gandhi died in 1948, and Pakistan and India fought an awful war in 1971, but his nonviolent nationalism certainly helped to gain for India its freedom from Britain.
As a divinity student at Crozer College in Georgia, King had studied Gandhi, and he came to see the usefulness of this modern prophet of nonviolence in the African American struggle for civil and, more generally, human rights. Like Gandhi, King places great faith in the power of love in motion, as his borrowing of the term "soul-force" indicates. Human conscience, King argues, has no "color," and therefore it should be possible to appeal to that faculty even in "Alabama, with its vicious racists" or in "Mississippi, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification [i.e. with states’ rights slogans]." The appeal, of course, King attempts to make by the same basic, structured means that Gandhi employed: direct challenges by a disciplined minority of volunteers and less confrontational, yet still effective, non-cooperation on the part of the African American majority. If the appeal should fail to reach the stony consciences of George Wallace and less prominent racists, well, there’s a whole world of television viewers to receive that appeal, and, as Jesus says in the parable of the sower, some seed may land in good earth, and yield fruit. (Matthew 13:08).
There’s a final, and sad, chapter to add to King’s role as an American moral leader. The last few years of King’s life were too often filled with depression—a feeling that surely came over him not only because he had, like so many leaders, to confront fierce egotism and infighting within the Civil Rights Movement as a whole and even within his own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but also external harassment by FBI thugs and proponents of the war in Vietnam that he outspokenly opposed. Add to these worries the at times overwhelming sense of despair at the complex challenge presented by northern states that oppressed African Americans not so much by outright brutality as by malignant neglect, political machination, and economic injustice. It’s no wonder, then, that King was an unhappy, if still determined, man by the time of his assassination. He had already begun to advocate a more international movement that would link up, as Malcolm X and he himself had long suggested, with the then-current worldwide struggle on the part of Asians, Latinos, and Africans for freedom from colonial rule. And he had also moved closer to promoting a non-Marxist version of democratic socialism--a society in which goods would be distributed not solely on the basis of a supposedly "free" market but instead with a view to elemental human spiritual and material needs. More and more, he appears to have come to think that appeals to conscience alone were not enough and that in urban areas like Chicago, "Southern"-style protests and aims would not generate enough movement to transform America. If America wouldn’t respond to such tactics, perhaps it needed to be brought to a virtual economic and political standstill before it would change its ways. King seems to have become more and more radical in his tactics and goals in his last few years, though it’s vital to realize that he did not in any way advocate racial violence. Before King had much time to do develop his newest positions, a bullet put an end to his participation in what he must have seen as an ever-changing dialectic of black protest, progress, and opposition by white power.
