Letter to My Daughter - Maya Angelou [23]
(Published in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Alfred A. Knopf & Vintage Press)
If African and many African American poets have one theme it most assuredly is “Wouldn’t everyone like to be…Black Like Me?” Black poets revel in their color, plunging pink palmed, black hands deep into blackness and ceremonially painting themselves with the substance of their ancestry.
There is a flourish of pride in works which must stupefy the European reader. How can exaltation be wrenched from degradation? How can ecstasy be pulled out of the imprisonment of brutality? What can society’s rejects find inside themselves to esteem?
Aimé Césaire, speaking of the African, wrote:
Those who invented neither gunpowder nor compass
Those who never knew how to conquer steam or
electricity
Those who explore neither seas nor sky
But those without whom the earth would not be
earth….
My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled
against
The clamor of the day;
My negritude is not a speck of dead water on the
earth’s dead eye,
My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral….
It perforates opaque dejection with its upright
patience.
(Published in Return to My Native Land by Bloodaxe Books)
Césaire was writing in the same spirit as that which inspired the black American poet Melvin B. Tolson. When he wrote:
None in the Land can say
To us black men Today:
You dupe the poor with rags-to-riches tales,
And leave the workers empty dinner pails.
None in the Land can say
To us black men Today:
You send flame gutting tanks,
Like swarms of flies
And pump a hell from dynamiting skies.
You fill machine-gunned towns with rotting dead–
A No Man’s Land where children cry for bread.
(Published in The Negro Caravan by Citadel Press)
Mari Evans gave heart to African Americans in general and women in particular in her poem, “I Am a Black Woman”:
I
am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition still
defying place
and time
and circumstance
assailed
impervious
indestructible
Look
on me and be
renewed
(Published in I Am a Black Woman by William Morrow & Co.)
The negritude poets’ exposition of oppression, in fact, was inspired earlier by the Harlem Renaissance writers. The American black poets heralded their blackness carrying their color like banners into the white literary world. When Langston Hughes’ poem, “I’ve Known Rivers,” became the rallying cry for black Americans to take pride in their color, the reverberations of that attitude reached the Africans in the then French and British colonies.
Sterling A. Brown’s “Strong Men” must have had a salutary effect on the African poets:
They Stole you from Homeland
They brought you in shackles
They sold you
They scourged you
They branded you
They made your women breeders
They swelled your numbers with bastards.
You sang, ‘Keep a inching along like a po inch worm’
You sang, ‘Walk together children…don’t you get weary’
The strong men keep coming on
The strong men get stronger.
(Published in The Negro Caravan by Citadel Press)
That poem, and Claude McKay’s “White Houses” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” were guiding lights to the colonized African poets. The African in the Caribbean and on the African continent had much in common with their black American counterparts. They had the onerous task of writing in the colonial language, poetry which opposed colonialism. That is to say, they had to take the artillery of the foe to diminish the power of the foe. They meant to go farther; they hoped to with eloquence and passion to win the foe to their side.
The hope still lives. It can be heard in Langston Hughes’ poem, “I, too, Sing America.”
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
(Published in The Collected