Langston Hughes Centennial, 1902-1967: The beat goes on

Graham, Maryemma

LANGSTON HUGHES CENTENNIAL

Langston Hughes' verse continues to resonate and influence

"Hughes left us with a model of the perfect work of art"

-Leopold Senghor

Those of us engaged in this racial struggle in America are like knights on horseback - the Negroes on a white horse and the white folks on a black. Sometimes the race is terrific. But the feel of the wind in your hair as you ride toward democracy is really something!!

- Langston Hughes

At 20 East 127th St. In Harlem, the former home of Langston Hughes, seven poets gather to pay homage - and to film a new documentary by Jamal Joseph, a community activist and youth organizer. They are seated around the dining room table enjoying a meal prepared by Sonia Sanchez and passionately discussing the late poet.

"He made literature and art what it was supposed to be, for the people," says Kevin Powell, editor of Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, a book inspired by Hughes. "Langston Hughes was definitely a political writer and not afraid of being so. He loved being Black and made it possible to be so without shame."

"Langston's reach is like Muhammad Ali's, long, powerful, accurate," adds Harlem poet Willie Perdomo. In February, Henry Holt will publish Visiting Langston, Perdomo's book for young readers. "In Hughes' work, everyone is family, all is love and even in struggle you can find a glass half-full, something to laugh at, someone to cry with. You're never the same after you're done reading or listening to his work."

Jessica Care Moore offers an aggressive nod. "It's important that the hip-hop generation knows Langston because we were birthed from his ideas, humor, stories and his love for expression," says Moore, an Atlanta-based poet and performance artist.

The veterans in this group, Sanchez, Amiri and Amino Baraka, and Abiodun Oyewole - an original member of the legendary Last Poets - were among the stars of the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when artists asserted themselves as revolutionaries and Black nationalist sentiments flooded the airwaves and the streets. The artist's role, Amiri Baraka once proclaimed, was to "aid in the destruction of America as he knew it." The movement driven by the social and political forces hailing "Black Power," thrived for a time before losing ground in the wake of new Black literary superstars of the 1980s. Still its icons, Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni and Haki Madhubuti, can draw crowds.

Baraka had frequent encounters with Hughes in the '60s, and once called him "glib and facile." At dinner, he admitted having little respect for Hughes then, but reiterated his conviction that "Langston is the Jazz Poet! The constant communicator of blues... the singer, the philosopher, the folk and urban lyricist." Baraka's reassessment mirrors the sentiment offered by scholars, traditional poets and word artists, who today consider Hughes' work prophetic in ways that we are only beginning to understand. He had, Baraka says of Hughes, an intuitive understanding of the sources of great art.

The scene in Harlem might be a rehearsal for events surrounding Langston Hughes' centennial in February. Poets and other literary figures, including those at the Harlem dinner last December, will gather in Lawrence, Kan., Hughes' boyhood home, for "Let America Be America Again: An International Symposium on the Art, Life & Legacy of Langston Hughes." The marathon celebration for the beloved poet and acclaimed chronicler of the "low down folks" begins on the eve of his 100th birthday and will feature artists and scholars such as Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Ishmael Reed and Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad. Actor and activist Danny Glover is also scheduled to attend, along with people from four other continents.

There is not a single important development in American poetry that cannot be linked to Langston Hughes. We remember the Jazz Age or the Harlem Renaissance, when Hughes made blues and jazz household words. We recall his sharp turn to the left during the 1930s, when he offered overtly political poems such as "Good Morning Revolution," the short stories in The Ways of White Folks and the long-running theatrical hit, Mulatto. When the beat generation preempted his jazz poetry for Greenwich Village cafes and hippies gathered in the Haight-Asbury communes, Langston was always lurking in the background.

Today, "Hughesmania" abounds. Every revival of A Raisin in the Sun draws us back to that famous line "What Happens to a Dream Deferred?" from his poem "Harlem."

"I Dream a World" and "Let America Be America Again" both find their place in numerous exhibits and books.

In the African American community, hardly a Mother's Day goes by without a recitation of "Mother to Son," Hughes's moving tribute to his own mother and grandmother. One is as likely to see a Hughes poem on the op/ed page of the New York Times as on the back of a church bulletin. And a recently published anthology of early African American writing, edited by novelist John Edgar Wideman, invokes the spirit of Hughes with its title My Soul Has Grown Deep, a line from Hughes' most famous poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."

Hughes has a special significance for children. Not only did he write a host of books for young readers, but he remains a favorite "recitation" poet.

Tony Medina has written Love to Langston (Lee and Low), an imaginative rendering of Hughes' life. This "verse biography" allows Hughes to speak through Medina, who says, "Langston's was the first brown face I had ever seen looking out at me from the cover of a book - a face that reminded me of my face and the faces of my family."

Medina is one of many who believe that Hughes provides children with a unique opportunity to understand their communities and confirm who they are. "When I was young, Langston was painting my world with words, both plainspoken and lyrically sweet and sassy," he says.

Writer Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie finds Hughes' "simple elegance" important for her own poetry. "His legacy inspires us to see writing as a form of resistance and an act of love," says the New York poet.

Mississippi-based poet Charlie Braxton agrees.

"Hughes made the collective voices of working-class African Americans sound so eloquent in his work. ...It is a tradition I gladly follow."

If Hughes' literary practice had pointed the way, it was left to those who came later to explain a complex sensibility that had escaped critics, with the notable exception of Sterling Brown.

Award-winning poet Elizabeth Alexander regards Hughes as "our first guide to thinking about a poetics that literally incorporates the blues and jazz into poetry as form as well as subject matter." According to Alexander, writing in a Hughes tradition occurs when you "try to hear and feel the blues as a constant undercurrent." While most poets see the obvious in Hughes, Alexander's focus on poetics takes us in a different direction.

"He was a master of economy," she says. "His best lyrics, such as `Dream Variations,' hit their mark without an extra ounce of fat - a kind of lushness in economy."

When another generation of Black critics and writers sought a new way to talk about their critical explorations and expositions, they coined a new phrase, "the Black aesthetic," a defining feature of the Black Arts Movement. With the decline of that movement, however, we are still struggling to understand and articulate the practical aspects of a process that sustains a rich oral tradition. Just how is it that diverse elements of African American culture transform from their southern folk roots, merge with the fast-paced life of the city, reshape what is heard and/or seen in print, and give the spoken word, either alone or with music, the upper hand?

The answer is not so clear. Still, each generation seems to find its way in this world of expression, setting its own pace and priorities, finding its own voice. Washington Post book critic and writer Jabari Asim notes that the "post-integration generation" is one with many voices, multifaceted and "without a strong manifesto." He quickly adds, however, that "the absence of a prevailing sense of urgency should not lead one to deem the new generation of poets as apolitical or apathetic."

For some, he says, Hughes is only one of many elements in a "multicultural fluency." The work of Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa are other examples. The rise of Reaganism, attacks against affirmative action and police violence are part of the landscape for today's Black writer.

"Black writers have always had to face the issue of whether their work was primarily political or aesthetic," says Kalamu Ya Salaam, a poet and founder of the New Orleans-based Nommo Literary Society.

For those who follow as direct descendants of Langston Hughes, there is a "new Black aesthetic" or a new "Black consciousness," though its parameters are as yet unclear. Specific ideological roots/routes may be less identifiable, but the ultimate value of the spoken word - in various forms - remains strong.

During Hughes' time, only one issue of a journal/anthology was published as the signature of the generation, Fire. During the '70s, Black Fire recalled the first one. At least 10 Black anthologies appeared in the '90s, not counting those anthologies issued from major publishing houses such as Norton and HarperCollins.

And when one adds the films (Poetic Justice, Love Jones, Slam and Higher Learning), the CD market (which includes The Voice of Langston Hughes, a Smithsonian Folkways collection of Hughes reading his work), and various forms of electronic distribution, Black literature is more alive today than ever before.

The truest of Hughes' literary descendents understand that most of all, Hughes celebrated the human condition, and was probably most impressed that ordinary Black people could still look at themselves without hating what their complicated history had made of them. Life, Hughes contended in "Life is Fine," might be bittersweet, but was still fine:

So since I'm still here livin'

I guess I will live on.

I could've died for love

But for livin' I was born

Though you may hear me holler

And you may see me cry

I'll be dogged, sweet baby,

If you gonna see me die.

He did, on the other hand, decry the way in which Black culture found itself conveniently exploited. One of his most memorable poems exposed that exploitation and called on Black people to protect and respect their culture. The poem "Note on Commercial Theatre" employs Hughes' ironic voice in a kind of lyrical meditation:

You've taken my blues and gone

You sing `em on Broadway

And you sing `em in Hollywood Bowl,

And you mixed `em up with symphonies

And you fixed `em

So they don't sound like me.

Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.

You also took my spirituals and gone.

You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones

And all kinds of Swing Mikados

An in everything but what's about me

But someday somebody'll

Stand up and talk about me,

And write about me

Black and Beautiful

And sing about me,

And put on plays about me!

I reckon it'll be

Me myself!

Yes. it'll be me.

Hughes took his task seriously. His "me - Black and Beautiful" asserted itself in multiple forms: journalism, plays, poetry, music, fiction and political writing. His canon is the largest of any African American poet: 16 books of poetry, two novels, two autobiographies, seven collections of short stories, five nonfiction works, nine children's books and more than 30 plays.

This extraordinary canon includes his extensive work as an edifor and translator, cultural historian, folklorist and humorist. When the University of Missouri Press completes the publication of the 17 volumes of his complete works, it will be the largest single collection in print of any African American literary figure.

There is a remarkable consistency about the literary criticism regarding Hughes' work, but not in the usual sense. The reasons given for dismissing Hughes 50 years ago have become the very reasons for unqualified praise today. What seems clear is that in his disdain for things middle class he kept a certain distance, maintaining himself as a people's poet.

"He gave America a fluent, variant idiom; as a poet, he doesn't let you rest because you don't know where it's going," says Robert Pinsky, former U.S. poet laureate. The vernacular idiom was Hughes's poetic home; he taught us how to recognize it, how to make it art. It is for this reason that today's writers and critics think of Hughes as the most "American" of poets.

American, yes, but Hughes also opened up a different kind of dialogue about what it means to be part of a world community. Hughes' vision was international, embracing Africa and the Spanish-speaking and French-speaking worlds. His translations of writers he had grown to admire - Frederico Garcia Lorca, Nicolas Guillen, Jacques Roumain and Leopold Senghor - helped bring their poetry to American readers.

For contemporary cultural criticism, Hughes' most significant contribution remains his persistent incorporation of vernacular forms. Race-conscious critics committed to full inclusion of African Americans into the larger society repudiated him for exposing the more unpleasant side of Black life. But Hughes' innovations took race as a point of departure in presenting a message open to all.

Hughes created a distinct "art of resistance" for working people by giving them a literature of their own. What was hidden, Hughes spoke aloud; what was embarrassing, Hughes signified upon. He translated the raw stuff of life into readable, speakable texts without losing the rhythms of the source. In his Simple sketches, Hughes brought the most shameful aspects of humanity to task, without regard for race, color or creed. Simply put, Hughes turned ordinary language into poetry for the people.

Langston Hughes was entertaining, remembers Alice Walker recalling, in her book The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, the last time she saw Hughes in New York. "He'd given everything, been history... [always] telling wonderful stories."

Maryemma Graham is a professor of English at the University of Kansas where she directs the Langston Hughes Poetry Project.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Jan/Feb 2002
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