Africa/America: Fragmentation and Diaspora in the Work of Langston Hughes

Author(s): Jeff Westover

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 1206-1223
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3300280
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 AFRICA/AMERICA

AFRICA/AMERICA
Fragmentation and Diaspora in the Work of Langston Hughes

by Jeff Westover

The concept of America is multifaceted in the work of Langston Hughes. In one

respect, America's political self-definitions provide the poet with the basis for
challenging the status quo and demanding change from the government that supports
it. As James Presley puts it, "for Hughes the American Dream ... is the raison d'etre
of this nation" (380). When writing from this perspective, Hughes draws on the ideas
behind the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the Bill of
Rights in order to criticize racial injustice in both domestic and international arenas.
Lloyd Brown makes this argument, writing that

the majority culture's dream of a progressive society based on

individual fulfillment and social harmony ... has created its own
inevitable legacy-that is, the Black American Dream of realiz-
ing those dreams and ideals that have been written down for
white folks. (17)

Brown develops this argument in the context of his discussion of "Harlem" and other
"Dream-poems" by Hughes, but it applies to many others as well. In a similar vein,
Donald B. Gibson writes that "Hughes's commitment to the American ideal was deep
. . . and abiding. He held on to it despite his acute awareness of the inequities of
democracy, and he seemed to feel that in time justice would prevail, that the promises
of the dream would be fulfilled. His early poem "I, Too" (The Weary Blues, 1926) is
testimony to his faith" (45). Finally, as Anthony Dawahare argues, in "Let America Be
America Again," "the true 'America' of the future will embody Jeffersonian political
ideals: it will be a nation of, by, and for 'the people,' based on the notion of inalienable
rights, and free from tyranny" (34).
From another perspective that Hughes also sometimes adopts, however, the
United States is a place to be deeply criticized, if not rejected altogether. Hughes
expresses his ambivalent attitudes toward his country through the repeated motifs of
the Middle Passage, slavery, African American culture, and a diasporan "pan-
Africanism." Hughes' work reveals an ongoing conflict between Africa-centered and
African-American ideals. As Adam Lively points out, this conflict reflects the imme-
diate context of the period in which Hughes began to write. "The 1920s," he observes,
"saw the birth of the idea of blacks as the inside outsiders of modern life" (7). In line
with this idea, the poet's reflections on his country and its history are double-tongued,

Callaloo 25.4 (2002) 1207-1223

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Photo courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library; the Langston Hughes Estate, represented by Harold Ober Associates; and photos by
Grif Davis. All rights reserved.

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 CALLALOO

exemplifying the double consciousness W.E.B. Du Bois regarded as constitutive of

African-American experience in general. As Raymond Smith puts it, Hughes "could
affirm with equal assurance his two credos of identity: 'I am a Negro' and 'I, Too, Sing
America.' But while affirming these polar commitments, Hughes was alienated from
both of them. As a black man, he was aware that his race had never been granted full
participation in the American dream" (270). The political inflections of Hughes'
poetic personae, the communal "I" and "we" that he articulates in various ways,
reveal the conflict and injustices of American history. In this essay, I reflect upon the
fact that Hughes' poetic configurations of "I" and "we" sometimes also refer to a
diasporan black community, rather than to the imagined community of the United
States, a fact which indicates the complex nature of his national consciousness.1 In
particular, I suggest that it is from his dual vantage as a U.S. citizen and a member of
the African diaspora that Hughes criticizes the failures of American democracy and
challenges the United States to live up to its founding dream of freedom.
Paul Gilroy's emphasis in The Black Atlantic on the concept of double consciousness
provides the point of departure for my analysis of Hughes' writing. Through his
concept of a continuum of black culture on both sides of the Atlantic, he extends the
idea of double consciousness to the entire African diaspora, arguing that modern
blacks simultaneously live both inside and outside the West. For Gilroy, the promise
of such dual existence lies in its dialectical potential, for along with the alienation
attendant upon the forced displacements of slavery, this habitation in two worlds
gives rise to a valuable new perspective:

What was initially felt to be a curse-the curse of homelessness

or the curse of forced exile-gets repossessed. It becomes af-
firmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged stand-
point from which certain useful and critical perceptions about
the modern world become more likely. (111)

Gilroy's suggestive theorization of black modernity offers a model of double con-

sciousness that points in the different directions of Africa and America at once. In
addition, while he persuasively argues on behalf of the African diaspora as a para-
digm for black cultural analysis, he also acknowledges the fictionality of such a
model, recognizing the conflicts within its widely dispersed communities. This model
is useful for understanding Hughes, whose poetry both evokes the African diaspora
as a cultural ideal and registers the discrepancies between that ideal and the reality
of diasporan disunity. Because Hughes defines the category of the national through
recourse to the ideas of Africa and an African diaspora, I focus on his representations
of Africa in order to show how they inform, and even constitute, his conceptions of the
United States and his place within it. Africa is a necessary term in Hughes' figurations of
the nation, and conversely, the category of the nation mediates his relationship to Africa.
I begin with a discussion of Hughes' "Afro-American Fragment" because its
performance of double consciousness, as redefined by Gilroy, is a useful way to look
at Hughes' meditations on the nation in general. After that I turn to a series of poems
reflecting Hughes' views of U.S. history and its colonial origins. Finally, I return to the

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 CALLALOO

Africa-America nexus by discussing Hughes' late poem about the Middle Passage, "The
Jesus," closing with analyses of "I've Known Rivers" and "Flotsam" in order to show how
Hughes' diasporan consciousness framed his outlooks on his poetry and his country.
In "Afro-American Fragment," Hughes portrays the predicament of the modern
African American as he sees it. In doing so, he evokes portentous ambiguities made
out of simple language that may be interpreted as a uniquely black embodiment of
American modernism. The poem enunciates contradictory views of race and memory
at the same time that it mourns an inconsolable loss:

So long,
So far away
Is Africa.
Not even memories alive
Save those that history books create,
Save those that songs
Beat back into the blood-
Beat out of blood with words sad-sung
In strange un-Negro tongue-
So long,
So far away
Is Africa.

Subdued and time-lost

Are the drums-and yet
Through some vast mist of race
There comes this song
I do not understand
This song of atavistic land,
Of bitter yearnings lost
Without a place-
So long,
So far away
Is Africa's
Dark face. (Collected Poems 129)

The poem's several dashes mark the lacunae in the experience and heritage of the
speaker. They also bridge the blank gaps that trouble him and provide the impetus for
the meditation that drives the entire poem. They represent the terrible, taunting
unknown, the fierce x that bars his transatlantic past and its culture from himself.
Hughes demonstrates his awareness that "Afro-American Fragment" is a lament
for a heritage, identity, and community that are as arbitrated by time and geograph-
ical distance as they are by politics and commerce. He also acknowledges the
historical and culturally mediated nature of identity and genealogy when he laments
that "Not even memories" remain "alive / Save those that history books create" or
"songs / Beat back into the blood." The syntax of the poem reflects the disjunction the

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 CALLALOO

speaker feels between himself, his cultural origins, and his heritage. The pace of the
first sentence, for instance, broken as it is into three cropped lines, beats like the
exhalation of a sigh. The parallel phrasing of the first two lines reinforces the elegiac
tone that the repetition of the refrain further strengthens. The first sentence ("So long,
/ so far away / is Africa."), with its full stop, belongs grammatically to the several
lines that follow, for the first sentence enunciates what the reader will recognize as the
cause of the events that follow; the remaining lines form a strict clause of result. An
elliptical syntax characterizes this section (as much as the rest of the poem), for a
subordinate clause such as "That there are," which would make explicit the connec-
tion between the actual clauses, has been elided and the link between the two units of
thought ("so long" and "so far away" on the one hand, and "Not even memories alive"
on the other) is broken by the period. The laconic oral quality of these lines points to
the fact that the oral history of African cultures has been violently transformed in the
wake of the Middle Passage and slavery.
The anguish of the speaker lies in a realistic appraisal of his historical predicament.
Slavery often deprived its victims of a lived connection to their past, violating the
religious sensibility of the many African cultures in which the spirits of the ancestors play
so important a role. Hughes expresses the devastating effect of this loss by including
the simple word even: "Not even memories alive / Save those that history books create,
/ Save those that songs beat back into the blood." In these lines, the speaker expresses the
fragility of memory and culture. He points out the constructedness of history, for the
"history books create" memories. In other words, the books do not transparently
report memories; instead, they bring them into being. The speaker experiences the history
that is given back to him from books as alien, however, for it has become an abstraction,
not a knowledge that is felt in the body with the rhythms of the breath and blood.
At least not at first. The repetition of the phrase "Save those that" turns the
speaker's despair against itself and wrests it into a new and hopeful rhythm. As James
E. Smethurst writes,

The halting short lines sandwiching longer, heavily alliterated

lines and the irregularly rhyming lines of the first stanza formal-
ly mirror the notion of a link between Africans and African-
Americans that has been disrupted or transformed to the point
that it can no longer be clearly defined and yet remains as an African
deep structure in African-American expressive culture. (98)

The mood changes from despondency in the face of an alienated history to hope and
mournful exultation at the thought of the communal music that the speaker experi-
ences viscerally. In this respect, as Smethurst suggests with his linguistic metaphor of
an "African deep structure," Hughes seems to be making something hopeful and
constructive out of a "diminished thing."
For Hughes, then, the African past can only be glimpsed "Through some vast mist
of race." Despite the speaker's desire for a sense of connection, he understands that
there is no simple way to recover the history lost to him. The language of the final
stanza evinces a displacement, for, as the speaker asserts,

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 CALLALOO

There comes this song

I do not understand
This song of atavistic land,
Of bitter yearnings lost
Without a place-

"Afro-American Fragment" gives a name to the intolerable condition of existing

"Without a place," a name that is not only hybrid but fragmented. The drums that the
speaker would hear and respond to through what he imagines to be the mist of race
are "Subdued and time-lost." That last adjective, compounded as it is, profoundly
testifies to the worried homelessness of the poem, for it weds time to space by figuring
time in spatial terms. The tragic pathos of the poem lies in the fact that "Africa's / Dark
face" remains inscrutable.
In "Fragment," the African-American experiences his "Americanness" as a split
within the self-precisely the phenomenon Du Bois called double consciousness.
Homi Bhabha's description of the rift between the two modes of national self-
representation in "DissemiNation"-the pedagogical (or traditional and monolithic)
and the performative (or disruptive and potentially revisionist)-corresponds to the
internal division Du Bois ascribes to the African American. "In the production of the
nation as narration," Bhabha writes, "there is a split between the continuist, accumu-
lative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the
performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence
of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation" (145-6). Du Bois's double
consciousness is one of the effects of the conflict between the performative and the
pedagogical, and since the conflict between these two forces gives rise to the ideology
of the nation, it makes sense to trace Du Bois's double consciousness back to its origins
in this conflict. From this perspective, the African-American population belongs to the
two different but overlapping communities of nation and diaspora. The concepts of
nation and diaspora reflect the social and historical qualities of black life in America.
As a member of that diaspora, the speaker of "Afro-American Fragment" experi-
ences his heritage as nearly mediated out of existence. The Middle Passage and
slavery have alienated him from the land and culture of his origins. The legacy of the
past, that vital connection to the spirits of the ancestors that so many African cultures
revere, has been violated by slavery. In this respect, the poem reflects the speaker's
alienation from Africa. While this alienation must be read in conjunction with
Hughes' willed celebrations of Africa in other lyrics, it also registers an important,
painful truth about Hughes' personal encounter with Africa, one which had ramifi-
cations for his sense both of nation and diaspora.
Hughes traveled to Africa as a young seaman in 1923 and gained some sense of its
colonial domination and of his status as an outsider there. Hughes' story of his
encounter with Africans reflects his awareness of Marcus Garvey and his effort to
"unify the black world, and free and exalt Africa" (Big Sea 102). In other words, he
experienced his first direct contact with Africa within the context of a diasporan
consciousness. In the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes demon-
strates the far from idyllic character of that initial interaction, as well as the discrep-

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 CALLALOO

ancy between, on the one hand, the vision that Garvey championed and, on the other,
the disunity between black Africans and lighter skinned people of African descent:

"Our problems in America are very much like yours," I told

the Africans, "especially in the South. I am a Negro, too."
But they only laughed at me and shook their heads and said:
"You, white man! You, white man!"
It was the only place in the world where I've ever been called a
white man. They looked at my copper-brown skin and straight
black hair-like my grandmother's Indian hair, except a little
curly-and they said: "You-white man." (102-103)

Hughes goes on to point out that one of the Africans, a Kru from Liberia "who had
seen many American Negroes, of various shades and colors, and knew much of
America," explained their response to him:

"Here . . . on the West Coast, there are not many colored

people-people of mixed blood-and those foreign colored men
who are here come mostly as missionaries, to teach us some-
thing, since they think we know nothing. Or they come from the
West Indies, as clerks and administrators in the colonial govern-
ments, to help carry out the white man's laws. So the Africans call
them all white men."
"But I am not white," I said.
"You are not black either," the Kru man said simply. "There is
a man of my color." And he pointed to George, the pantryman,
who protested loudly.
"Don't point at me," George said. "I'm from Lexington, Ken-
tucky, U.S.A. And no African blood, nowhere."
"You black," said the Kru man. (The Big Sea 103)

As Rampersad hints, this and other stories of Hughes' experiences in and offshore
Africa reflect the poet's concomitant desire for and alienation from it as his historic
motherland. "That he would want to be considered black," Rampersad writes, "struck
the Africans as perverse, perhaps even subtle mockery. In vain he protested that he
was not white" (1: 78). Hughes' prose account of these interactions with Africans
plainly shows the lack of unity between Africans and colored peoples of African
descent, but his poems often work against this lack by asserting the reality of a unified
African diaspora. This assertion is Hughes' poetic effort to project an imagined
community that is at once American and not-American. This metaphorical "dual
citizenship" corresponds to Gilroy's redefinition of Du Bois's double consciousness
as a uniquely black perspective on the nature of modernity (111).
As Rampersad observes, the Africans' rejection of Hughes as a fellow black "stirred
[him] to assert the unity of blacks everywhere, as in his little poem 'Brothers': 'We are
related-you and I. / You from the West Indies, / I from Kentucky.' And both were
related to Africa." Rampersad characterizes the contradictions between Hughes'
desire for Africa and his exclusion from it as "anxiety." I am arguing that this anxiety

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 CALLALOO

has both a psychological and sociological dimension to it, and Hughes not only suffers
from this anxiety but also sublimates it in the texts of many of his poems. According
to Rampersad, for example, Hughes' "anxiety over Africa also inspired" "My Peo-
ple," which was first entitled "Poem" (1: 78):

The night is beautiful

So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,

So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.

Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people. (Collected Poems 36)

Rampersad's characterization of Hughes' feelings about Africa as "anxiety" points to

the political and cultural disunity of the African diaspora at the time such poems were
composed. Hughes' relationship to the "we" this poem articulates is a vexed one, for
it includes both yearning and alienation. The repeated invocation of "my people" in
the poem has two contrasting aspects. On the one hand, the repetition attests to the
"anxiety" Rampersad describes, for the poem's insistence on the speaker's member-
ship in the "family of Africa"-understated and gracious though it is-points to a
lingering fear that the people of Africa are not really "his" at all. The poet's desire for
Africa reflects his corresponding alienation from the United States, which fails to
function for him as a definitive homeland. As Kenneth W. Warren puts it, "To be
cognizant of oneself as a diasporan subject is always to be aware of oneself no matter
where one is, as from elsewhere, in the process of making a not quite legitimate appeal
to be considered as if one were from there" (400-1).
On the other hand, Hughes' articulation of "my people" and a sometimes national,
sometimes international "we" in a range of poems (including not only "My People"
but also "Our Land," "Afraid," "Poem to a Dead Soldier," "Fog," "Prelude to Our
Age," "Children's Rhymes," and "A Ballad of Negro History") call that community
into being, performing it into existence by constituting the poet's audience as a
common body. As a speech act, the poem imagines the diaspora as a viable commu-
nity, celebrating it as a realistic as well as desirable goal. It presents an alternatively
imagined community that offers a sense of belonging, heritage, and pride to African
Americans in general. In contrast, in "Afro-American Fragment" Hughes variously
evokes communities of black Americans through the plural pronouns we and us and
through his remarks to a generalized you in such poems as "Black Dancers," "How
Thin a Blanket," "Vagabonds," and possibly "Youth," "Walkers with the Dawn," and
"Being Old."
Hughes' autobiographical accounts of his reception in Africa and of his fellow
seamen's economic deception of native Africans show that his poems praising Africa
as the symbol of black unity were deliberate fictions (The Big Sea 108-109). His
response may be read as a psychological compensation for the alienation from
Africans he must have felt but carefully avoids recording in his autobiography. At the

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 CALLALOO

same time, however, the many poems that praise Africa or that imagine links between
America and Africa may be interpreted in political terms as the expression of a
utopian hope for genuine diasporan unity. A crucial chapter from The Big Sea provides
the context for interpreting a series of poems that feature references to drumming as
both psychic compensation and cultural symbol.
In the chapter of The Big Sea called "Burutu Moon," Hughes tells the story of an
evening he spent on shore with "Tom Pey, one of the Kru men from [his] boat." The
chapter opens with a lush, moonlit scene that represents Burutu as a desirably
paradisal world: "Sometimes life is a ripe fruit too delicious for the taste of man: the
full moon hung low over Burutu and it was night on the Nigerian delta." Hughes links
the inhabitants of the town with the beauty and remoteness of his emblematic moon:
"Dark figures with naked shoulders, a single cloth about their bodies, and bare feet,
passed us often, their footsteps making no sounds on the grassy road, their voices soft
like the moon." He rounds out a paragraph full of such spare sentences with a
repeated reference to the moon: "In the clearing, great mango trees cast purple
shadows across the path. There was no wind. Only the moon" (117-18).
Pey breaks the spell of the moon when he informs Hughes that the villagers will
shortly "make Ju-Ju." When Hughes' reacts with enthusiastic interest, Pey politely
replies that "'Christian man no bother with Ju-Ju. ... Omali dance no good for
Christian man."' When Hughes' presses his case, Pey flatly refuses: "White man never
go see Ju-Ju. Him hurt you! Him too awful! White man never go!" (118). Hughes
offsets his account of this second exclusion by the Africans with a story of the
hospitality shown him by Nagary, an African Muslim trader. Nagary offers his only
chair to Hughes and shows him an array of African riches. Hughes explains that
"Nagary did not ask me to buy any of these things. He seemed satisfied with my
surprise and wonder. He told me of his trips up the river to Wari and down to Lagos.
He gave me a great spray of feathers. When I left, he said, with outstretched hands:
'God be with you"' (18-119). The bittersweet mixture of reception and rebuff in this
account provides an odd but striking analogue to Du Bois's notion of "double
consciousness." It functions as a kind of mirror-image of that concept, for just as black
Americans experience a divided self in the face of white prejudice against them,
Hughes' mixed treatment at the hands of his African hosts suggests that African
prejudice against his light skin induced a feeling of betrayal. The people of his beloved
"Motherland" repudiated him as its authentic descendant. Hughes may have enjoyed
the warm reception of Nagary, but he was emphatically barred from attending the
ceremony of ritual drumming.
Hughes complicates the meaning and emotional impact of the chapter in his
autobiography by following up his account of the visit with Nagary with a portrait of
African prostitutes whom Pey points out to him. Hughes describes a scene involving
one of their customers: "In front of one hut three white sailors from a British ship were
bargaining with an old woman. Behind her, frightened and ashamed, stood a small
girl, said to be a virgin. The price was four pounds. The sailors argued for a cheaper
rate. They hadn't that much money" (119). Hughes' report deftly conveys the personal
tragedy it describes, but together with the later paragraphs in the chapter, it also
comes to function as a painful allegory of the rape of Africa:

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 CALLALOO

We came to the docks where the great ships from the white
man's land rested-an American boat, a Belgian tramp, an En-
glish steamer. Tall, black, sinister ships, high above the water.
"Their men," say the natives, "their white strong men come to
take our palm oil and ivory, our ebony and mahogany, to buy our
women and bribe our chiefs...."
I climbed the rope ladder to the deck of the Malone. Far off, at
the edge of the clearing, over against the forest, I heard the drums
of Omali, the Ju-Ju. Above, the moon was like a gold ripe fruit in
heaven, too sweet for the taste of man.
For a long time I could not sleep. (120)

Hughes' chapter provides a poignant testimony to both his own alienation from the
Africans whose acceptance he sought and to the colonial rape of the continent. He
brilliantly conveys the pain of his exclusion and the devastation wrought by Western
imperialism in his repeated references to the drumming he hears, his carefully
understated report describing the forced prostitution of the frightened young girl,
and the striking image of the "Tall, black, sinister ships, high above the water," all of
which come to a head with his simple closing statement announcing his inability to
sleep. The passage articulates a consciousness that is profoundly troubled by the
various divisions caused by neocolonial conquests.
It is out of such troubled consciousness that Hughes came to compose not only his
poetry about Africa, but the poems that reflect upon the situation of black people in
America. "Hughes could not deny the double nature, the dual-consciousness" writes
Smith, "of being an American as well as a black" (267). Whereas "Afro-American
Fragment" laments the lost memories that might have served to unite its speaker with
the Africa he desires, in "Drums" and in a group of other poems-including, among
others, "Danse Africaine," "Poem" ("All the tom-toms of the jungles beat in my blood"),
"Drum," "Negro Servant," "Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem" ("the beaten
drum / That carried instant history / Across the night"), and "The Jesus"-Hughes
makes the drum his instrument for the recuperative work of memory. The talking
drums of Africa and America speak through Hughes' poems in a voice that is richer
and more complicated than the simple primitivism often associated with modernism.
"Drums" reconstitutes African-American history not only by tracing its origins in
Africa but also by alluding to the beginning of African slavery in the New World, to
the distinctive drumming and dancing of slaves in Congo Square in New Orleans, and
to jazz. Such landmarks reflect Hughes' sense of an African America, a nation of
distinct cultural traditions within the larger political community of the United States:

I dream of the drums

And remember
Nights without stars in Africa.

Remember, remember, remember!

I dream of the drums

And remember

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 CALLALOO

Slave ships, billowing sails,

The Western Ocean,
And the landing at Jamestown.

Remember, remember, remember!

I dream of drums
And recall, like a picture,
Congo Square in New Orleans-
Sunday-the slaves' one day of "freedom"-
The juba-dance in Congo Square.

I dream of the drums

And hear again
Jelly Roll's piano,
Buddy Bolden's trumpet,
Kid Ory's trombone,
St. Cyr's banjo,
They join the drums ...
And I remember.

Jazz!

I dream of the drums

And remember.

Africa!
The ships!
New shore
And drums!

Remember!
I remember!
Remember! (Collected Poems 543-4)

The first three lines of "Drums" echo the Burutu chapter of The Big Sea, but its
repetitions of the word remember function as a powerful antidote to the wound of lost
history in "Afro-American Fragment." The repeated verbs of the fourth line can be
interpreted as continuing the syntax of the initial sentence "I remember" in a parallel
repetition or insistent exultation, but they can also be read as a command on the part
of the speaker. The second option emphasizes the oral context that Hughes' poetry
presumes, for in that reading the speaker is an orator or American griot who counsels
his listeners to remember the histories spoken by the drums of which he dreams.
References to those drums both open and close the poem, and they appear as well on
the New World soil of Congo Square in New Orleans. In addition, this poem pointedly
refers to the image of a ship, but in a way that transfigures the similar reference to the

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"Tall, black, sinister ships" Hughes identifies in "Burutu." In that chapter, the
imposing ships rise menacingly "high above the water," whereas in the poem,
although the ships are indeed slavers, they are placed in a larger historical context that
accurately links African Americans to the heritage mourned in "Afro-American
Fragment." "Drums" commemorates the culture that enabled slaves and their descen-
dants to cope with slavery and its legacy; the poem celebrates the exuberance and
beauty of black Atlantic culture in order to overcome the fragmentation and anxiety
evinced in "Fragment."
Although Hughes' "American Heartbreak" (1951) is similar to "Drums" in that its
subject is African-American history, the poem conveys its speaker's complex relation-
ship to the nation he writes about in a way that corresponds to the mixture of longing
and lament in "Afro-American Fragment." The correspondence is by no means exact,
however, for "American Heartbreak" combines the historical meditation of "Afro-
American Fragment" with critical satire. Whereas the speaker of "Afro-American
Fragment" looks to Africa for a sense of identity, the speaker of "American Heart-
break" recognizes his central, troubling position in American culture. "American
Heartbreak" exemplifies the double-consciousness that, according to Gilroy, charac-
terizes not only black Americans, but those of African descent on both sides of the
Atlantic. In the language of the playfully ironic "Consider Me" (1952), blackness
registers itself in the world as a divisive presence-through-absence:

Forgive me
What I lack,
Black,
Caught in a crack
That splits the world in two
From China
By way of Arkansas
To Lenox Avenue. (Collected Poems 386)

The position of black Americans is such that they are simultaneously "in" American
society yet not "of" it because of their distinctive cultural heritage. For this reason, as
I have indicated, Gilroy argues that the double perspective of black experience reveals
certain contradictions in Western traditions and cultural practices.
From this perspective, Hughes' brief poem "American Heartbreak" offers an
important insight into the moral and political meanings of Jamestown, the first
successful English colony in North America:

I am the American heartbreak-

Rock on which Freedom
Stumps its toe-
The great mistake
That Jamestown
Made long ago. (Collected Poems 385)

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Like "Afro-American Fragment," this poem is fragmentary, for it, too, is punctuated
by Dickinsonian dashes that simultaneously divide and unite the constituent ele-
ments of its syntax. "American Heartbreak" transfigures the more northerly Ply-
mouth "Rock"-and the prevailing American mythology of the Pilgrim's landing
associated with it-from a comforting foundation into an obstacle on which freedom
stubs, or "stumps," its toe. Hughes makes it clear that the rock of slavery is the dirty
open secret of American democracy, for the poem never names the "mistake" to which
it alludes. The absence of the word slavery in the text of the poem itself suggests that
the speaker assumes-and knows he can assume-that his audience will supply his
missing term, the presence of its absence. This aspect of the poem's construction
projects a particular audience, for it is in an American context that the meaning of
"mistake" must emerge. Through its use of the signifiers "mistake" and "Jamestown,"
the poem constitutes its audience in a particular way, for while Hughes addresses a
specifically American audience, he does so from an explicitly black perspective. To
put it in the vocabulary of Bhabha's "DissemiNation," Hughes' poem "performs" the
story of his nation in a revisionist way.

The powerful late poem "The Jesus" (1960), about an actual slave ship of that name,
functions in a similar way. In "The Jesus," Hughes returns to the theme of Africa as
a place of origins, so the poem may be fruitfully compared with "Afro-American
Fragment." While both poems undertake an imagination of Africa and its meaning for
African Americans, for example, "The Jesus" refers to Africa in order to link it to
American shores by way of the Middle Passage. The journey of "The Jesus" records
the African-American history that the speaker of "Afro-American Fragment" yearns
to discover, but of course it does so in an ironic way that powerfully expresses the
costs of accounting for such history.
In a note that he appends to the poem, Hughes explains that The Jesus was a "ship
lent to Sir John Hawkins by Queen Elizabeth as support to his business venture in the
slave traffic off Cape Verde in the latter half of the sixteenth century." Hughes
narrates the advent of the slaver in a muscular, often alliterative verse:

Until the crumpets and the christians,

Altars of grass bled paths
From Congo to Cape, shifting sacrificially
Through river beds, shifting
From saberthroat to sand
Voodoo rain drummed juju
Away and spring came,
Came with Galilee
Upon its back to chop
The naked bone of mumbo
Dangling like a dice
Swung from a mirror,
Captain of the stumps of Sir John
Lumped cargoes for Cuba

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 CALLALOO

Among feathered kings rolling

Their skins in flax, moulded
To shaftsteel and psalm.
Through helms of smoke
Balloon dreams of grabber kings
Mooned at groaning girls
Bred on black sheets of seahull.
Was the deacon of pits blessing
The mumble of crumbs or
Trying to suck at his knuckles?
In this tambourine of limbs
Where crisscross droves of blackbirds croak
The Jesus weptwashed and slumped
Toward the mines of sugar cane. (Collected Poems 468-69)

In "The Jesus," Hughes registers the historicity of the slave-trade by referring to an

individual ship involved in the trade in order to specify the imperialist motives
informing black slavery. "The Jesus" squarely positions the practice of slavery in the
midst of European culture by pointing up the contradictions in the Christianity it
professes and the brutal commerce it actually practices. The Jesus of Hughes' ship is
not the biblical healer and prophet, but a trope for European conquest. The Jesus is a
vanguard ship in the army of imperial Christendom, not a vehicle of Christ-like
compassion.
Hughes' reference to a mirror in "The Jesus" might suggest his sense of the poem
as a mimetic "reflection" of social reality in the modern West. In documenting slave
history, the poem holds a mirror up to the imagined community of its national and
diasporan readers, forcing its readers to confront an institution that formed one of the
very bases of modern economic exchange in the West. The poem also reflects the
discrepancy between the Enlightenment ideals of reason and freedom and the de-
graded social practice of slavery. In an important sense, "The Jesus" mirrors the flaws
at the heart of the nation that defined itself as the model of democracy in the modern
world.
Hughes' poem offers a harrowing recapitulation of slavery and the Middle Passage
in a series of lines dense with internal echoes and rhymes. The alliteration and
compound nouns ("saberthroat," "shaftsteel," "seahull") recall Anglo-Saxon verse,
as if to suggest the hybridity of cultural forms and of the African-American writer's
position, even as the speaker of the poem seeks to indict the crime of English and
American slaving. The African vocabulary ("juju," "mumbo," "voodoo") further
accentuates the hybridity of the poem's diction, but it also makes the poem resonate
with the threat and terror associated with the fetishes and spirits it signifies. Hughes
contrasts the religious contexts of "juju," "mumbo," "voodoo," and African "Altars of
grass" with the "Christian" mission of the European slaver (who comes bearing
"Galilee" on his back), the "deacon of pits" who ambiguously wrings his hands or
uses them to bless the "mumble of crumbs" below, and the "psalm" to which the
newly captured slaves will be "moulded" over time. This contrast between African

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 CALLALOO

religions and Christianity portrays the looting of Africa as both commercial and
cultural in nature, for in their effort to subjugate their victims, Europeans attempted
to cut off their cultural traditions. The opposing religious vocabularies emphasizes
the ways in which modern slavery wounded Africa in psychic as well as commercial
terms. (In this respect, "The Jesus" provides an important point of comparison with
Phyllis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America" and Hughes' earlier
poem, "Goodbye Christ.")
Moreover, the reference to "stumps" in the line "Captain of the stumps of Sir John"
seems to reinforce the trope of slavery as a wounding, for the word apparently figures
the lumber out of which the ship is made as ominously dead wood. The spirits of the
trees from which the slaver has been made are as dead as the conscience of the crew
that controls it. The poem represents Sir John's commercial enterprise as so many
stumps-of timber torn from the earth and of human bodies torn from their environ-
ment. Not only is Sir John's moral insight stumped, or stunted, by his trading in
slaves, but his enterprise also turns slaves into human stumps. The redemptive blood
of the ship's namesake displaces the blood that flows from African altars, figuring
slavery as a massive dismemberment of the body of Africa. Hughes' slave ship is a
menacing saber at the throat of the African continent.
In other words, "stumps" refer to fragments, to literal dead ends. This reference to
dismemberment recalls "Afro-American Fragment," but the same word Hughes
features in "The Jesus" also appears as a verb in "American Heartbreak." In "Amer-
ican Heartbreak," Hughes uses the word "stumps" rather than "stubs" ("I am the
American heartbreak- / Rock on which Freedom / Stumps its toe-"), as if to suggest
both that "American Freedom" is "stumped" (or baffled) and fragmented (or ren-
dered an incomplete stump.) And along with all of these meanings, of course, the
word functions as a virtual synonym for "stubs," so that the full stride of American
Freedom is broken against the unyielding rock of slavery. "American Heartbreak"
makes clear that the legacy of slavery poisons the freedom of the whole nation, not just
that of blacks. It undercuts the upper-case pretension of the familiar ideology
whereby "Freedom" becomes a peculiarly "American" possession. Hughes' brief
lyric insists that American Freedom is not fully coherent, nor has it ever been, even
from its political origins in the colonies and the early republic. Through its allusion
to slavery, the poem underscores one of the major conflicts of American culture and
its history, that between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of racial oppression.
In "The Jesus," Hughes counters the discrepancy between rhetoric and reality with
another image of an African drum. In a way that echoes a number of other poems by
Hughes that I have discussed, "The Jesus" features ritual drumming as well as the
image of a ship. Like such poems, "The Jesus" expresses Hughes' effort to participate
in the ritual drumming that he was prohibited from witnessing in Africa. In Hughes'
account of this prohibition in The Big Sea, Tom Pey explicitly links the drumming
Hughes hears later to the fetish or demon figure "Ju-Ju"; Hughes' reference to "juju"
in "The Jesus" appears to echo that moment in the autobiography. Hughes' poetic
enactment of ritual drumming revisits the moment he describes in The Big Sea and
makes a place for himself at that ritualistic site. "The Jesus" links the African-
American to his African heritage by retelling the story of enslavement in the con-

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 CALLALOO

densed form of the lyric. Hughes' poetic account of slavery upholds the oral tradition
of the African griot, even though it does so in the form of a written text. Although "The
Jesus" provides no simple antidote to the loss conveyed in "Afro-American Frag-
ment," it does offer the image of a specific slave ship as an example of the history that
both links and divides diasporan blacks from mainland Africans. In that regard, the
ironic, "weptwashed" history of "The Jesus" answers to the sense of fragmentation
expressed in the earlier poem without pretending to overcome it with some simplistic
formula. It also testifies to the cosmopolitan and contradictory character of African-
American history and citizenship by orienting its readers in two directions at once-
"back" to an Africa of origins and "ahead" to the hybrid and heterogeneous societies
of the modern world.
Like "The Jesus," Hughes' early "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" powerfully counter-
acts the alienation and disunity of "Afro-American Fragment," but it does so by
imaginatively realizing an ideal diasporan unity (rather than a national one) through
the emergence of its annunciatory "I." The poem is an example of Hughes' successful
evocation, or "performance," of the African diaspora, for its Whitmanian speaker
maps a truly global geography of rivers in the confident epistemology of its opening
sentence. In this regard, it (like "The Jesus") offers an important counterforce to the
speaker's isolation in "Afro-American Fragment":

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 know rivers.

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (Collected Poems 23)

The poem insists on the historical reality of the African diaspora, for the memory it
conveys is geological, "older than the flow of human blood in human veins." But as
a speech-act, the printed transcript of an oral chant, the poem calls into being a
diasporan consciousness. "Through his naming of Africa's major rivers," writes
Richard K. Barksdale, Hughes "establishes a link with the American black man's
romantic motherland" (17). Like the performance of an African griot, which the
poem's structure echoes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" testifies to a past fraught with

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 CALLALOO

meaning for its community of New World hearers. As Fahamisha Brown suggests, an
implicit history underlies the poem's succession of rivers:

Hughes enumerates rivers associated with African American

heritage and history to evoke a mystical sense of the eternal
presence of the speaking "I." From the beginnings of recorded
history, "the Euphrates"; through the greatness of empire and
civilization, "the Nile" and its "pyramids"; through slavery and
freedom, "the Mississippi"-the voice proclaims its presence
and knowledge. (68)

The poem evokes the African and African-American past by a sort of imaginative fiat
at the same time that it challenges its projected audience to conceive of itself as a
cohesive community despite its disparate geography. The speaker announces his
knowledge for the benefit of his listeners, telling the story of a common past in order
to cultivate a united consciousness in the present. Like the Whitmanian speaker of
"Sun Song" ("Dark ones of Africa, / I bring you my songs / To sing on the Georgia
roads"), the "I" that the poem projects is both an exuberant individual and an
embodiment of the community whom he addresses ("I contain multitudes"). The act
of enunciation serves as the occasion for building diasporan unity. The poem attempts
to transcend the boundaries of the national by imagining its audience as a global
community.

I close with a discussion of a short lyric that was, as the editors of Hughes' Collected
Poems point out, "published posthumously in Crisis (June-July 1968) ... to mark the
anniversary of Hughes' death." "Flotsam," they note, "is the last of seven poems
which Hughes submitted to the magazine before he died" (Collected Poems 683):

On the shoals of Nowhere,

Cast up-my boat,
Bow all broken,
No longer afloat.

On the shoals of Nowhere,

Wasted-my song-
Yet taken by the sea wind
And blown along. (Collected Poems 562)

Hughes' submission of this poem late in his life and its posthumous publication give
it a special place in his career. Like Whitman's bequest of his body in "Song of Myself"
"to the dirt to grow from the grass I love," Hughes bequeaths his poems to the wind.
More importantly, perhaps, "Flotsam" gives voice to the same experience of dispos-
session and placelessness enunciated in "Afro-American Fragment," but it does so in
a different, potentially more hopeful way.

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 CALLALOO

If, for example, the "sea wind" disseminates the song that the poet thought was
"Wasted," it scatters the seeds of his words to the four corners of the globe, where they
may take root and grow. It is true that the speaker feels that he has gotten "Nowhere"; he
is disoriented and at a loss, and his references to waste reaffirm his anguish. At the same
time, however, he begins to build a new future out of humble materials. The closing vision
of the poem turns wreckage into tentative redemption, transforming the flotsam of
loss into the elements of a song that the wind takes up, embellishes, and conveys to
the disparate shores of the African diaspora. The mercurial changes of the sea wind
make the song's dissemination a matter of chance, but they also suggest the possibility
that the song may be borne by a wind imagined as a new Mercury, the messenger god
bringing the living tones of the poet's songs to the shores of his distant brothers.

NOTES

Thanks to Robert Kern, Guy Rotella, Suzanne Matson, and an anonymous reader for their advice
concerning the revision of this essay.

1. "Imagined community" is Benedict Anderson's term.

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Brown, Lloyd. "The American Dream and the Legacy of Revolution in the Poetry of Langston
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