A book that changed me / Langston Hughes showed me what it meant to be a black writer

 

A book 

that changed

 me 

Langston Hughes showed me what it meant to be a black writer

Gary Younge

This article is more than 7 years old

His 1926 essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain made clear that a black writer must write the best work they can, while refusing to be defined by other people's racial agendas

Gary Younge

Thu 1 August 2013

O

ne of my first columns on these pages didn't make it into the paper. I'd written about the Nato bombing of Bosnia and the comment editor at the time thought I should stick to subjects closer to home. "We have people who can write about Bosnia," he said. "Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this."

The whole point of having a black columnist, he thought, was to write about black issues. I had other ideas. I had no problem writing about race. It's an important subject that deserves scrutiny to which I've given considerable thought and about which I've done a considerable amount of research. I have no problem being regarded as a black writer. It's an adjective not an epithet. In the words of Toni Morrison, when asked if she found it limiting to be described as a black woman writer: "I'm already discredited. I'm already politicised, before I get out of the gate. I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination, it expands it."

But that was not all I wanted to write about or what I imagined the function of a black columnist to be. It wasn't, in short, the only adjective available and I had no interest in being confined by it. The fear of being pigeon-holed is one of the crippling anxieties of any minority. Being seen only as the thing that makes you different through the lens of those with the power to make that difference matter really is limiting. Instead of crafting your own narrative, you get a bit part from central casting in someone else's play.

It was thanks to Langston Hughes's 1926 essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, written for the Nation magazine (full disclosure: I write a column in the Nation), which I read shortly after university, that I was able to centre myself within these apparently conflicting demands. Hughes, an African-American poet and essayist from the Harlem renaissance period of the early 20th century, was every bit the renaissance man. Raised in poverty in Kentucky, he wrote plays, worked as a merchant seaman, covered the Spanish civil war for the black press and toured central Asia after plans for a visit to the Soviet Union to put on a musical collapsed.

He was a young, gay black man who was always going places precisely because he did not know his place. And that fearlessness is applied to The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, which is effectively a manifesto for black writers who feel hemmed in by strictures imposed by the race thinking of both blacks and whites. What he makes clear is that the task of a black writer was no different from that of any other writer – to write the best work they could about whatever they wanted, while resisting the pressure to be defined by the racial agendas of others.

The essay starts with him relating an encounter with "one of the most promising young negro poets" who once told him: "I want to be a poet – not a negro poet." Hughes reflects: "And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself … This is the mountain standing in the way of any true negro art in America – this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mould of American standardisation, and to be as little negro and as much American as possible."

The fact that much of the essay – its language, assumptions and even at times framing – feels dated added to the appeal for me. Having grown up in Stevenage and studied in Edinburgh I had not been around enough black people to know that what I was experiencing was neither unique nor new. Clearly, rereading it now, I got out of it what I wanted and discarded the rest. Though the essay explicitly defines the "mountain" as an "urge towards whiteness" I understood it then and now somewhat differently. Not only to withstand the urge towards whiteness but also to resist any mould that was not of your own making, regardless of who made it. To refuse to wear any old suit that didn't fit just because it was given to you and the donor said it suited you.

That means not being in flight from blackness even when it is a category employed more in disparagement than description but acknowledging it as a condition within the human rainbow that is no more or less valid than any other. "I am ashamed for the black poet who says, 'I want to be a poet, not a negro poet', as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world."

But while acknowledging race as one legitimate category among many, it also meant not fetishising blackness; playing to a gallery whose appreciation was no less clouded by the same limitations, even when conveying different impulses. The last paragraph I read as a rallying cry against pressures from all sides to conform – a compass for choppy racial waters: "We younger negro artists who create, now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," Hughes wrote. "If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If coloured people 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 mountain, free within ourselves."

THE GUARDIAN

Langston Hughes / Renaissance man of the south

Renaissance man of the south

Gary Younge remembers Langston Hughes, America's most popular poet, whose centenary is celebrated in London next week

Gary Younge

Saturday 26 October 2002

In 1920, an envelope postmarked from Kentucky arrived at the offices of the African-American artistic and intellectual magazine Crisis. Inside it was a poem called "The Negro speaks of rivers". When the literary editor, Jessie Fauset, read it, she handed it straight to her editor and mentor, WEB du Bois. "I took the beautiful dignified creation to Dr du Bois," she recalled, "and said 'What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United States who writes like that and is yet unknown to us?' "

The "colored person" in question was Langston Hughes and within a few years of the poem's publication he would be known to all of Black America and to any lovers of prose poetry elsewhere whose appreciation allowed them to venture across the colour line at the time.

A full century after his birth, the breadth of his appeal and the durability of his work is now beyond doubt. Earlier this year, Hughes, who died in 1967, was voted America's most popular poet in an online poll by the Academy of American Poets, ahead of the likes of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. Now, contrary to the exhortations of Public Enemy's rap anthem "Fight the Power" - "I'm black and I'm proud / I'm ready, I'm hyped and I'm amped / Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamp" - the US postal service has issued a 34 cent stamp bearing his face.

Any doubt about the enduring and universal qualities of his work are easily dispelled by just one verse of "Let America be America again", which is as pertinent today as it was in 1938:

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Given the huge array of talent that emerged from the Harlem renaissance, the rush of artistic, musical and literary energy that emanated from upper Manhattan after the first world war and was all but decimated by the Wall Street crash, it is shocking that only Hughes, and to a lesser extent his onetime friend, the novelist Zora Neale Hurston, appears to have made it beyond the confines of race, place and time. Other writers, such as Claude McKay, Rudolph Fisher and Jean Toomer are feted in literary circles and known to African-American readers, but have never enjoyed the mainstream acclaim they deserve.

But Hughes was, in every sense of the word, a Renaissance man. As well as writing poetry, plays and essays throughout his life, he worked on ships and in laundries, covered the Spanish civil war for the Afro-American newspaper in Baltimore and toured central Asia after plans to stage a musical in Moscow foundered.

He was born in Missouri to a frustrated father, who abandoned the family and America in favour of personal ambition and Mexico, which in turn frustrated and impoverished his mother. While she travelled the country looking for work, Hughes was raised by his grandmother - a highly politicised woman whose first husband had been killed at the abolitionist insurrection in Harper's Ferry, where John Brown, along with 21 other men - 16 of them white - had attempted to establish a base in the Blue Ridge Mountains from which they would assist runaway slaves and launch attacks on slaveholders. The uprising was crushed by the local militia and the rebels killed.

Hughes spent his boyhood in Kansas and adolescence in Ohio, a lonely, sensitive child, who recalled being driven "to books, and the wonderful world in books", counting among his main influences Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg. It was this teenager who posted his poem to Crisis. So by the time he arrived in Harlem, after a short stint in Mexico with his father and dropping out of Columbia University, he was already well known.

Both his personal story and the intellectual conclusions he had drawn from it embodied the mindset of the "New Negro" - the urban, urbane, self-confident, black northern relatives to their downtrodden, culturally deprived cousins in the rural south - of which the Harlem renaissance was the cultural expression.

In 1926, Hughes published a manifesto, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", that still resonates: "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual, dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. If colored people 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 the top of the mountain, free within ourselves."

Hughes was true to his word, his work unashamedly informed by the black American experience - his ashes were spread under Harlem's Schomburg library - but never defined by it. In his autobiography he described his work as "poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street - gay songs, because you had to be gay or die; sad songs, because you couldn't help being sad sometimes. But gay or sad, you kept on living and you kept on going."

Eager to frame his poetry in a manner that would lend it popular appeal, he was bold in his efforts to manipulate the genre. He once urged a publisher to bill him as "the original jazz poet". "Jazz gives poetry a much wider following and poetry brings jazz the greater respectability that people seem to think it needs," he said in 1958. "I don't think it needs it but most people seem to."

But while this made his work popular it also brought down stern criticism from the "talented tenth" of the black American intelligentsia (Hurston branded them Negrotarians) who felt he was vulgarising his artistic talents. Moreover, in the era of new criticism, Hughes's straightforward style did not sit well with literary scholars keen to abstract his work from its context. Even James Baldwin trashed his book of selected poems in 1959.

Hughes's work suffered during and shortly after his trip to the Soviet Union in 1932, when overt polemicism gave a shrill and occasionally hysterical tone to his work. It was a lapse in artistic judgment that would have political consequences. In 1953, he was forced to testify before the Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee. There, he named no names, insisted he had never been a member of the Communist party and effectively denounced some of his own work. It was a humiliating experience.

He started his testimony: "Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moonlight, sunsets and snow must lead a very quiet life - seldom does their poetry get them into difficulties." But that was not Hughes's style. Not that he did not write about those things, but when he did, the sun set or the moon shone in a world where black people, rarely depicted before with the full complement of human emotions, were the ones showing love and giving roses.

His strength, as a writer and a human being, was to understand that his talent was the starting point for his engagement with the world at large. "Words have been used too much to make people doubt and fear," he said. "Words must now be used to make people believe and do. Writers who have the power to use words in terms of belief and action are responsible to that power not to make people believe in the wrong things."

From Selected poems:

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore -
and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat
Or crust and sugar over- Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it just explode?

THE GUARDIAN