Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 1, Number 1. May 2018. ISSN: 2581-7094
Why does the Negro speak of Rivers?
--- Zinia Mitra
Abstract:
Langston Hughes’s signature poem “A Negro
Speaks of Rivers” is a deceptively simple poem that speaks of a collective memory
representative of mankind and also representative of the Negroes. The
word “black” was rapidly replaced by the world “Negro as the black power
movement began to take shape with the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes’s poetry falls into three distinctive
areas: the conventional themes of a young romantic poet who dwells on isolation
and despair which grows out of his
personal struggle, poems of non-racial intelligence, and finally the
area where he excels most, the needs of
the black people. Langston Hughes
narrates the life of the blacks from the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance
through the Depression into the modern civil-rights era of America. Langston
employed Negro dialects, words and rhythms of their music in his writings. Given his complex ancestry, with white
paternal great-grandfathers and black grandmothers, the paper tries
to appreciate Hughes’s attraction and identification with the culture of the
black and attempts a close reading of the poem under reference to understand
why the Negro in the poem speaks of rivers.
Key words: Negro,
African American, Langston Hughes, Harlem Renaissance.
River is a recurring trope across cultures.
There are symbolic and metaphorical presences of rivers in paintings, art,
music, fiction, folklore, poetry. “A
Negro speaks of Rivers” is a poem by James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) who was hailed as the Poet Laureate of Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes’s poems are seldom long. This
particular one under reference is not a very long one and I am tempted to quote
the poem for the lovers of poetry:
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
(Hughes,36)
Glinting
in the last rays of sunset, the train slows as it approaches East St. Louis,
Missouri. As the staccato, tapping sounds of the train wheels change to a
steadier beat, a young man sitting at the window of the train watches the small
dramas of town life in 1920 unfold before him: a chocolate-colored man, hands
in pockets, trudges home at the end of a long day’s work in a factory; children
in brightly colored clothes shout excitedly as they play a ball game in a
rutted street; two women sit on the stoop of their apartment building, talking
quietly. Soon the train is at the edge of the city and begins to climb onto a
river bridge. As the young man stares out the window at the choppy waters of
the huge Mississippi River, he thinks about how the flow of his own life links
him to the people he has just been watching. He pulls an envelope from his
pocket and picks up his pen, and on the envelope he begins writing a poem that
he calls “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”.
(Rummel:1)
Jack Rummel begins his book on Langston Hughes a
little dramatically perhaps but we can only marvel at the chiselled craft that
Hughes had produced when he was only eighteen, a high school graduate at the
crossroads of his life.
The
speaker in the poem represents the universal
man, his activities and settlements around the rivers speak of human civilisation as it developed around
Euphrates in Middle East, Congo in
Africa, Nile in Egypt (there is slavery in the building
of the pyramids) and river
Missisipi in North America. The title of
the poem says that he is a Negro. The
word “black” was rapidly replaced by the world “Negro” as the black power
movement began to take shape with the Harlem Renaissance. Those familiar with Bhupen Harazika’s
songs will remember the song “Ami ek jaajbar” [I am a traveller] where the
singer has journeyed from Ganga to Missippi to Volga , the poem will also
remind us of Boney M’s “By the Rivers of
Babylon” (when the wicked carried us away in captivity requiring of us a song
...) Here the speaker does not recount his memory in a disaporic note of
despair or hope nor is he a traveller in the sense of tourist or explorer in
the present planet earth. He claims to have known the rivers since a long time.
The length of time is stretched back to the ancient world and the poet has
known rivers “older than the flow of human blood in human veins”. He is an
ancient soul and his soul is deep like the rivers. The poem speaks of the depth
of not any particular river and the plurality emphasises not only their physical
depth but also their ancientness. The rivers’ flow is older than the flow of
blood in human veins. This puts the rivers in an imperative arrangement above
the humans who have appeared much later on the timeline of the earth. But the
speaker has known them. This puts the speaker then on the timeline much before
his contemporaneous physical existence. The one voice in the poem represents
collective consciousness. He has known “ancient” and “dusky” rivers. Dusky
strikes us as not a very naive word here. It is greyish, dark. This could mean
the actual colour of the rivers and also their ancient existence in the dark
abyss of time and associate the colour of the speaker himself. It takes us to
the epithet “muddy” (line 9). But there is another colour in the poem beside
the muddy and greyness of the rivers. It is the colour of the sunset that turns
the river bed golden. It refers to another time, a definite historical time
when Abe Lincoln had gone down to New Orleans. This is no casual reference.
Abraham Lincoln is the man who abolished slavery in 1863 (and by 13th amendment). In 1828 a teenage
Abraham Lincoln had guided a flatboat down the Mississippi River to New
Orleans. The adventure was his first visit to New Orleans that had exposed him
to the nation’s largest slave market. This was a sunlight for the Negros. It
was the time when river Mississippi sang. It was the time when the muddy bosom
of the river had turned golden. Langston Hughes, an important voice of Harlem
Renaissance had consciously taken up
pen against racial discrimination.
There is another movement in the poem. The
movement from Africa to America. The pathway is water. Hughes’s paternal great-grandmothers had
travelled this waterway into slavery. Mary Patterson Langston who had raised
Langston after his parents separated, had instilled in him an enduring sense of
racial pride.
Hughes had a bitter lesson of the disparaging racial discrimination early in his
life. His father had left them and United Stated to escape racial
discrimination and find a better life in Mexico. Although an older Langston had
turned to him for money he finally did not allow his pragmatic father influence
him or chalk his future out. Langston had left his degree unfinished to respond
to his innermost call. He became a poet. He returned to Harlem to
work as a labourer on a vegetable farm and did all kinds of add jobs to be able
to realise his dreams and in the process transcended the barriers of racialism
and became an important voice of Harlem Renaissance.
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us
Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the
importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows, except us, that all
Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet.
(NewYorkTimes:1967)
Hughes had sent three of his poems to
The Brownies’ Book which was then a
newly established magazine for black children, whose offices were located in
New York City. To his great content Jessie Fauset, the editor of the magazine,
agreed to publish one of his poems. Du Bois, an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, writer and editor was one of the co-founders of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Crisis
was the official journal of NAACP that had published important essays. The
Crisis accepted Hughes’s “The Negro
Speaks of Rivers” in January 1921 . Du
Bois headed a small but growing group of black artists and intellectuals based
in Harlem. The black men and women residing in Harlem , New York, were then in the process of creating a revolution
in music and art that came to be known
as the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes was resolute to become a member of
this intellectual group in Harlem.
Following
the civil war a large number of African Americans had migrated to Northern
urban areas with Harlem as their prime destination. African American poets
thinkers, writers and painters increasingly felt that the time had come for the
African Americans to claim their rightful place, give expression to their
racial consciousness, and contribute to culture of America in significant ways.
Harlem art juxtaposed colours in an expressionist meaningful way. Many of their
art represented African Americans dancing, dining or engaged in such activities. Pauler C. Hayden, Archibald
J. Motley, William Henry Johnson attempted to portray African Americans as
refined people engaged in refined social
activities in order to break the
stereotype. The paintings often emphasised on the continent of Africa as the
root of African American culture. Mural painter
Aaron Douglas portrayed matters of history and memory. Tribal scenes
were often presented in glorified images.
Langston
Hughes’s early poems focused on how it felt and what it meant to be black.
Several members of his family, particularly his grandmother, had a history of
championing black rights. Langston identified with the black culture’s feeling
of alienation although his
paternal great-grandfathers had been white slave owners in Kentucky.
While reading Langston Hughes we are also faced
with the disquieting question: who is black? Hughes had a complex ancestry with
black grandmothers and both his paternal great-grandfathers white slave owners
in Kentucky. F. James Davis’s Who is
Black: One Nation’s Definition gives us a historical view of how from
colonial times the legal precedent and social custom have defined blackness
along the lines of the “one drop rule”. ( Davis :168)
My old man's a white old man
And my old mother's black.
And my old mother's black.
...
I wonder where I'm going to die,
Being neither white nor black?
I wonder where I'm going to die,
Being neither white nor black?
(Hughes: 36)
The modern America (1914-1939) cannot be
characterised by any singular movement in literature like the English Romantic
movement or the Neo-classical movement. It was a period which saw varying
experiments in style and writing. Magic realism, for instance was an art
movement of early 1920s.The first anthology of Imagist poets, Des Imagistes was already published by
1914. There were important voices like Robert Frost, Ezra
Pound, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, T.S.
Eliot, Wallace Stevens.
Harlem
was the largest and most influential black community in the United States in
the 1920s. It had become the cultural and artistic centre of black intellectual
life. Langston’s poems were widely published alongside his contemporaries, who contributed important literature of their own; Zora Neale Hurston, (Jonah's Gourd Vine,
1934), Wallace Thurman, (Harlem: A
Melodrama of Negro Life, 1929) Claude McKay, (Home to Harlem, 1928) Countee Cullen The
Black Christ and Other Poems (1929),
Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925), Jean Toomer(Cane, 1923), Richard Bruce Nugent,
(Sahdji: An African Ballet 1920). Langston Hughes’s poetry covered three
distinctive areas: the conventional themes of a young romantic poet dwelling on isolation and despair which grew out of his personal struggle to overcome the effects of
his parent’s desertion (cf : “The calm / Cool face of the river / Asked me for
a kiss”) ,the second theme around an aggressive socialist , non-racial
intelligence, (cf : Good morning Revolution/ You are the best friend /I ever
had) the third , where he excelled most , and that which was the closest to his heart for the longest
time was a reaction to the needs of the black people. Langston Hughes narrated the life of the blacks from the
beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance through the Depression into the modern civil-rights
era of America. Langston employed Negro dialects, words
and rhythms of their music in his writings. He was especially drawn to the
sombre, lonesome reverberation of the blues which assumed a special appeal for
him. (cf : When Susanna Jones wears red/her face is like an ancient cameo/
Turned brown by the ages./ Come with a blast of trumpets, Jesus!) Hughes wrote poems, novels, short
stories, two autobiographies—The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as
I Wander (1956) —plays, musicals, operas, translations, radio and
television scripts, and magazine articles.
Countee
Cullen and Langston Hughes approached their poetry in different ways. Cullen
was interested in poetry that demanded exact syllable counts and certain sounds
to complete a rhyme scheme (cf: What is Africa to me:/Copper sun or scarlet
sea). Hughes, on the other hand, preferred to write in free verse. Hughes wrote
about black people, black music, and experiences of the black through his
preferred black American speech and speech rhythm. Cullen had read out some of them in the public
readings held at the Harlem branch of public library. But Hughes was not
satisfied. He still struggled with his poetry. He wanted something more; he
required a breakthrough and that breakthrough did come one night in March 1923.
During the days of Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the uniquely black music
styles of jazz and blues had grown in popularity. In one of the Harlem blues club, Hughes
composed “The Weary Blues.” The poem was a perfect expression of Hughes’s desire.
It had captured blues music and black speech.
What Hughes had achieved in this poem was incredible. It was a brilliant
coup of rhythm and cadence, black speech and blues music. In “The Weary Blues,” he took the sound of
street music and street talk and transformed them into a powerful and evocative
voice.
He
did a lazy sway....
He
did a lazy sway....
To
the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
(Hughes:23)
On
his way to Africa, the country he had always aspired to visit, the mother
country of the African Americans, he is known to have thrown into water all the
books he had carried, an experience he later likened to the throwing of a
million bricks out of his heart. He had retained only Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Hughes, 3) He travelled to Africa as a
crew member of West Hesseltine. When Hughes crossed the equator for the
first time, he had to shave his head according to a prevalent custom. The
tragedies of European colonialism were present in small quarters everywhere.
His
experience in Africa was however like that of Alex Haley’s :
...the
seventy odd other villagers gathered closely around me...they were all staring
at me .the eyes just raked me. Their foreheads were furrowed with their very
intensity of staring. A kind of visceral surging or a churning sensation
started up deep inside me ;...many a times in my life I had been among crowd of
people but never where everyone was jet black.
(Haley: 677).
“The Africans looked at me and would not
believe I was Negro,” Hughes says , “They looked at my copper-brown skin and
straight black hair and they said: ‘You—white man.’ ”
(Hughes:103)
In 1924 with barely enough money to live on, stranded in Genoa, Italy, his passport and wallet stolen, Hughes kept trying to get a job on a
ship bound for America, but with no success. Racial prejudice was working here too. He was
depressed. It was in such a mood that he wrote: “I, Too, Sing America,” which
was later published in The Weary Blues and
was widely anthologized. "I, Too Sing America" is a
response to Walt Whitman's 1860 poem, "I Hear America Singing." Whitman's celebrates American patriotism with
a catalogue of different professions like mechanics, carpenter, mason, boatman,
shoemaker ,woodcutter, ploughboy, all of
whom sing about their happiness at being American. Hughes’s poem is a rejoinder that black Americans too are a
part of the American culture.
I,
too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
...
I,
too, am America.
(Hughes:46)
The “I” here is from the perspective of African- American who could be a slave,
a free man, or even a domestic servant.
Hughes’s work
influenced foreign black writers like Jacques Roumain, (Gouverneurs de la
Rosee, 1944), Nicolas Guillen (Motivos de Son 1930) , Leopold Sedar Senghor, (Nocturnes (1961),and Aime
Cesaire who was one of the founders of the negritude movement in Francophone literature who wrote Une
Tempete,(1996) in a response to Shakespeare's play The Tempest,
and Discours sur le colonialisme (1955).
In
the Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture: The
Negro Patriot of Hayti : Comprising an Account of the Struggle for Liberty in the Island, and a
Sketch of Its History to the Present Period, we read of pathetic accounts of the resistance of negroes, of how they
preferred to die with liberty on their lips rather than be captured and taken
as slaves. The seas and rivers, John
Relly Beard describes, were stained with negro blood, so much that the
inhabitants refused to eat fish lest they feed on blood of their own race.
There are many such accounts in history and literature where Negroes are known
to have jumped off ships to commit suicide rather than be slaves or were killed
for rebellion or died due to disease on the way to America. They were thrown in
the waters. (cf: Roots, The Book of Negroes, Jubilee)
The
rivers have a history of their own not all of which is revealed to mankind, for
written history can be erased, altered and
rewritten. The rivers have a language of their own. “Nature is a language” Emerson said in Nature, “and every new fact one learns
is a new word... ” (Richardson:155) Is that why the Negro in the poem
speaks of rivers?
Works Cited
Beard, J. R. Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Negro Patriot of Hayti : Comprising an Account of the Struggle for
Liberty in the Island, and a Sketch of Its History to the Present Period. London:
Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853.
Davis, F. James. Who is
Black: One Nation’s Definition. The Pennsylvania State University
Press,1980.
Haley, Alex. Roots. London: Vintage Books, 1976.
Hughes, Langston . “Cross”. Collected Poems. Ed. Arnold Rampersad,
Columbia and London : University of Missouri Press,2001.
---. “I too”. Collected Poems. Ed. Arnold Rampersad, Columbia and London: University
of Missouri Press, 2001.
---. The Big Sea : An Autobiography, Ed. Arnold Rampersad . New
York: Hill and Wang, 1940 .
---.“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. Collected Poems. Ed. Arnold Rampersad,
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
---.“The Weary Blues”. Collected Poems. Ed.Arnold Rampersad,
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,2001.
“Langston
Hughes, Writer, 65, Dead”, The New York Times, May 23, 1967.
Richardson, Robert D. Jr. The
Mind on Fire. London: University of
California Press.1995.
Rummel, Jack,
ed. Langston Hughes Poet, New York: Chelsea House, 2005.