Collected Poems
Author: Robert Hayden
Edited by F. Glaysher, Introduction by A. Rampersad
Published by: Liveright
Review by Harryette Mullen and Stephen Yenser,
published in The Antioch Review, Vol. 55, 03-22-1997, pp 160(15)
Theme and variations on Robert Hayden's poetry
4 July 1996
Dear Harryette,
The evening of Independence Day. A crepitation of fireworks in the distant
west. What else to do, as I sit here amid stubbornly sanguine, inevitably
white, and ineradicably blue thoughts of liberte and Crispus Attucks, John
Brown and egalite, fraternite and Harriet Tubman, but drop a line to you
about Robert Hayden? I really do want to ask, now that you have looked at
Rampersad's edition of the Collected Poems, how you feel about Hayden. I
want to hear because, although your background is different from mine, I
feel a certain kinship, and because I know that hitherto, like me, you
have not been intimately acquainted with his poems, and because my own
reactions to this edition have been so vivid? Those reactions
include a strong sense of belated discovery (though I was taught in
college that Hayden somehow belonged to the canon), with its attendant
delight, alloyed only with some little chagrin at the suspicion that
Hayden was canonized precisely because he so decorously did not belong, if
you take my meaning.
One thing if it's not itself many that distinguishes
Hayden's work, as Rampersad suggests, is its heterogeneity. There are
several Haydens, often heard together. There is the modernist Hayden, the
ultra-terse, post-Imagist Hayden, who is influenced by Pound and Williams;
there is the classically literary Hayden, who alludes to the old canon,
from Shakespeare through Keats and Hopkins to Yeats and Spender; there is
the idiomatic Hayden, who grew up on the streets of Detroit; and there is
the musical Hayden, who learned from jazz and blues what Bartok learned
from Hungarian folk dances, or perhaps what Satie learned from ragtime. In
"A Ballad of Remembrance" Hayden contrasts what he calls his "true voice,"
which speaks in tones that are "meditative, ironic, / richly human," with
the off-key voices of New Orleans at Mardi Gras. The latter voices include
that of
the sallow vendeuse of prepared tarnishes and jokes of nacre
and ormolu, what but those gleamings, oldrose graces, manners like scented
gloves? Contrived ghosts rapped to metronome clack of
lavalieres.
In fact, however, this "baroque" mode (to use Hayden's term) is just one
element in his own "richly human" presence, and even after he recalls
coming to himself amid those eldritch voices, he incorporates their lovely
grotesqueries in his concluding dedication to an old friend and academic:
And therefore this is not only a ballad of remembrance for
the down-South arcane city with death in its jaws like gold teeth and
archaic cusswords; not only a token for the troubled generous friends held
in the fists of that schizoid city like flowers, but also, Mark Van Doren,
a poem of remembrance, a gift, a souvenir for you.
There's no question, it seems to me, that he revels in the densities, the
crossroads, sonic and otherwise, of "arcane city ... archaic cusswords"
and "the fists of that schizoid city like flowers" and that the pleasure
he takes is in large part responsible for his "true voice."
It might even be that on occasion he is overly fond of the precious
or the semi-precious term....
Well, I have more speculations, but by now it's after midnight, cloudy and
murky, and I need some orientation. You'll be my polestar.
Yours,
Stephen
7/18/96
Dear Stephen,
Years ago, when I lived for six months in Taos, the proximity of Los
Alamos influenced my dreams. For several weeks, my sleep was disturbed by
nightmares of nuclear Armageddon.
Enclave where new mythologies of power come to birth
where coralled energy and power breed like prized man-eating animals. Like
dragon, hydra, basilisk.
Reading "Zeus Over Redeye," I know I share some of Hayden's fears about
the national fascination with violence and apocalypse. This nation that
began in violence seems to return to it again and again for a sense of
self-definition and catharsis, as if determined that we should end as we
began, with a scourging destruction.
This volume of Robert Hayden's collected poems offered me some unexpected
pleasures and surprises. There is pleasure in the variety of Hayden's
poetry, as well as in the opportunity to observe how the poems work
through recurring preoccupations. When I first sampled his work, as a
student, it seemed most useful to me for expanding the possibilities of
what and how an African American poet might write.
He wrote, among other things, about black life, and even his poems devoted
to black subjects are marked by a distinctive poetic idiom that is not
strictly bound to African American oral tradition. It is, like the poetry
of Gwendolyn Brooks, a purposefully literary language, owing much, as
Arnold Rampersad suggests, to the King James Bible and the canon of
British literature, as well as to American modernist poetry. Trying to
remember my earlier response to his work, I think that I found it more
temperate and virtuous than risky or showy, despite the occasional ornate
or arcane word. Hayden was nowhere as fanciful as, say, Wallace Stevens,
whose work attracted me in my student days, even though I was disappointed
by the casually racist attitude I found there.
For me, Hayden had always seemed restrained, contained. He seemed to me a
poet who shied away from extremes. I felt that his deliberation prohibited
the kind of exuberant expression I was seeking in poetry. But, as you
point out and Rampersad's introduction indicates, there are several
different Haydens, and this collected volume edited by Frederick Glaysher
allows us a retrospective view of those poems of Hayden's that are less
likely to be included in anthologies of African American poets, or
anthologies of American poets in which Hayden is included as a
representative black poet.
This anthologized Hayden is the poet who wrote "Middle Passage," "A Letter
from Phillis Wheatley," "Crispus Attucks," "Frederick Douglass,"
"Runagate, Runagate," "The Ballad of Nat Turner," and "El-Hajj Malik
El-Shabazz" for Malcolm X, as well as "Those Winter Sundays," a stern poem
of familial love and duty, "of love's austere and lonely offices" set
against "the chronic angers of that house" in which Hayden grew up in the
care of foster parents. "Those Winter Sundays" demonstrates Hayden's
self-restraint, scrupulous judgment, and sense of balance qualities
that he also brings to his poems dealing with black culture and historical
subjects. His poems about those figures who have become familiar to us,
through our now routine acknowledgment of black history, are never merely
celebratory. In each the poet holds himself accountable to complex human
truths often shrouded in legend, as Hayden considers, along with each
historical character, our persistent need to make mythic heroes and
heroines of exemplary figures, as well as those, like Crispus Attucks, who
are history's chance victims.
Robert Hayden was certainly not alone among his contemporaries in pushing
the boundaries of what was acceptable thematic and aesthetic territory for
a black poet to explore. Melvin Tolson seems bolder than Hayden in his
poetic ambition to rank among the modernists. Jean Toomer, before he
became a mystic, was more robustly earthy, and more innovative in
technique; he was born nineteen years earlier than Hayden. Bob Kaufman,
only twelve years younger than Hayden, seems far more contemporary in
spirit.
In "Full Moon," Hayden expresses disillusionment that the moon has lost
its enchantment, no longer "a goddess to whom we pray" but reduced to "the
white hope of communications men .... a mooted goal and tomorrow perhaps /
an arms base." In contrast, Kaufman's response to the space race was
flippantly antiromantic: "i shall refuse to go to the moon, / unless i'm
inoculated, against / the dangers of indiscriminate love."
That, for Hayden, the moon stripped of its romantic haze and mythic
significance is imagined as a "white hope" might suggest a possible
association of hubristic reliance on technology with the white supremacy
that has in part fueled the exploratory expeditions of the West. On the
other hand, in "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home," Hayden adapts an archetypal
western myth of technological hubris, making Daedalus a flying African
whose desire conjures imaginary wings to take him home to the
motherland.
In words he attributes to a slave trader (in "Middle Passage"), "I write,
as one / would turn to exorcism," Hayden perhaps identifies one motivation
for his own incantations. Rather than desiring to be "released from the
hoodoo of this dance," as Hayden feels rescued (from its lure?) and free
to claim his "true voice" upon the arrival of that utterly civilized poet
and critic, Mark Van Doren, many younger black poets (Ishmael Reed and
Ntozake Shange come immediately to mind) claimed their own voices as they
threw themselves into that spirited dance of Africa's diaspora.
While Rampersad seems to affirm that Robert Hayden achieved the goal of
transcending his racial identity, Hayden is more complexly multiple than
is suggested by a simple dichotomy of the "black" poet versus the
"transracial" poet. (Of course, it is curious that white poets are not
routinely judged by their ability to transcend their race.) I want to
think about this more in my next letter; but for now, I' m looking forward
to your second round.
Still mulling it over,
Harryette
21.viii.96
Dear Harryette,
I was just thinking about an eccentric project of mine, a kind of
commonplace book interspersed with glosses and meanderings and
minicritiques, and was suddenly diverted back to Hayden by way of a little
meditation on enantiosemes. Sorry to be precious myself, but I don't know
a word except Barthes's (his coinage?) for the phenomenon I have in mind:
single words that mean or imply contrary things. I'm thinking of words
like "raveling," "pall," and "wan." (As in that last case, the opposition
can develop over time.) The instance that turned me back to Hayden might
not even be a true enantioseme, since although its cloven meanings are
both homophonic and homographic, they seem to derive from different
sources. As soon as I type it, you'll know the word I mean: cleave. A
husband should "cleave to his wife," the Bible tells us, as the marriage
ceremony instructs us that no one should put asunder the union of bride
and groom; but then the Bible also tells us that "our bones are scattered
at the grave's mouth, as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the
earth," and in this last case the meaning of "to cleave" is precisely "to
put asunder." That the latter usage is in the (King James) Old Testament,
so-called, whereas the former is in the (KJ) New Testament, might give us
pause if not much further insight and might even suggest
that those two biblical halves "cleave together"....
In any event, "cleave" with its two meanings has called to mind one of my
favorite Hayden poems which nonetheless seems to me representative.
I'll quote it entire. Note especially line 11:
O DAEDALUS, FLY AWAY HOME
(For Maia and Julie)
Drifting night in the Georgia pines, coonskin drum and jubilee banjo.
Pretty Malinda, dance with me.
Night is juba, night is conjo. Pretty Malinda, dance with me.
Night is an African juju man weaving a wish and a weariness together to
make two wings.
O fly away home fly away
Do you remember Africa?
O cleave the air fly away home
My gran, he flew back to Africa, just spread his arms and flew away
home.
Drifting night in the windy pines; night is a laughing, night is a
longing, Pretty Malinda, come to me.
Night is a mourning juju man weaving a wish and a weariness together to
make two wings.
O fly away home fly away
I remember your saying in your last letter that you thought Jean Toomer
might be "more robustly earthy, and more innovative in technique than
Hayden." While that might well be, the poem I've just quoted seems to me
to have qualities, sensuous and especially innovative, that I also admire
in Toomer's poems. I'm thinking especially of Toomer' s "Song of the Son,"
"November Cotton Flower," and "Tell Me," and some of the sound poems, in
which he combines elements of an African American heritage with elements
of a European legacy. In Hayden's "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home," those two
influences are incipient in the title, one on either side of the comma.
There's first the classical reference to the Athenian architect and
inventor and then the allusion to the folk song ("Ladybug, ladybug, fly
away home, / Your home is on fire, and your children will burn"). This
poem's title, in sum, looks to me like a real cleaving, in both senses at
once.
The "two wings" appear in Hayden's third stanza: "Night is an African juju
man / weaving a wish and a weariness together / to make two wings." The
twinning adumbrated sonically by "juju," which refers us to West African
magic, works itself out in "a wish and a weariness," contraries bound
together by the alliteration on w itself carried on in "weavings"
and in "wings" a letter that patently looks like wings. And who
would have both wish and weariness if not the African American, a forced
exile (like Daedalus on Crete), who must devise an ingenious means of
liberation? The African American descendant of slaves, then, is our
contemporary artificer, working not with feathers and wax but with
"coonskin drums and jubilee banjo." (If jubilee comes from a Hebrew root
meaning "to conduct," which is to say "to lead together," whereas banjo
evolves from an African American pronunciation of bandore, many spirituals
have the same diverse parentage.)
So maybe it comes to seem that there's no end to duplicity, to "wish and
weariness," to "laughing" and "longing" to cleaving, in a word (or
is it two?). In Hayden's poem, Africa is Daedalus's Athens, the biblical
Eden, the blissful place from which we have all been ostracized and can
only (and cannot but) recall. What can we do? Well, for one thing, we can
write airs, cleaved, cleft, or cloven, that call up slave songs on the one
hand and Sapphic stanzas on the other but basta! So rarely do I
catch a train of thought these days that I'm reluctant to get off one once
I've done so. Everything human is mixogamous. (Which is probably why
Terence could say [as Cicero quotes him] "Homo sum: humani nil a me
alienum puto": "I'm a person: nothing human is alien to me.") It probably
follows from my premise that no writer can be, in Rampersad's term,
"transracial." To be "transracial" would be to have arrived at some
quintessentially human (or even superhuman, since humans are "racial")
point of view, n'est-ce pas? But on my tentative premise no
point of view can be quintessential.
What do you think?
Yours,
Stephen
8/7/96
Dear Stephen,
I tried, in my last letter, to follow a thread into the labyrinth of
Hayden's poetry, from his sense of history as violence and myth, to his
view of nuclear and space technologies as expressions of humankind's
linked urges of aspiration, exploration, and destruction. His several
poems occasioned by our search for intelligent life in the universe
divine, humanoid, or utterly alien life form alert the reader to
the poet's sense of himself as alien, if not quite
extraterrestrial.
In the collected poems one finds recurrent references to those whose
difference, whether by choice or by circumstance, makes them, like the
Gypsies of "Elegies for Paradise Valley" who are "like us" African
Americans, "pornographers of gaudy otherness: / aliens among the alien."
The presence of the alien pervades his work, as does the related persona
of the freak. These figures of stigmatized deviation reveal the poet's
capacity for empathy, as well as difficult aspects of Hayden's identity as
an African American, as an artist, and as a thoughtfully religious man
struggling to reconcile his sexuality with his spirituality.
It is the spiritual journey, and its relation to the intense, violent life
of Malcolm X, that most interests Hayden in "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz," as
indicated by the title, referring to Malcolm's move toward traditional
Islam in his pilgrimage to Mecca.
He fell upon his face before Allah the raceless in whose
blazing Oneness all were one. He rose renewed renamed, became much more
than there was time for him to be.
The poem suggests striking resemblances, as well as marked differences,
between the poet and his subject. With Malcolm X, Hayden shared a
midwestern background, a disrupted family history, an altered identity,
conversion to a "raceless" religion, and a preoccupation with violence.
Hayden, who received a college education Malcolm might have envied, lived
an outwardly more peaceful life, and the two men chose divergent paths to
personal transformation. Malcolm's final conversion connected him to the
ancient sources and global diversity of Islam, but it in no way diminished
his race consciousness as an African American. While Malcolm X made his
individual metamorphosis a public model for a redefinition of the meaning
of blackness, Hayden worked for most of his life in relative obscurity,
and as he became more visible through his poetry, moved further from an
identification of his writing with his race.
Hayden's identity was formed at a time when blackness and African American
culture were more severely stigmatized than they are today, and his work
is marked by residual attitudes of the nineteenth century that black
Americans strove to eradicate, at least from our own psyches, in the
decades of the 1960s and '70s. If the mantras of racial self-esteem were
unconvincing to Hayden, it was perhaps because his ambivalence about race
was more complicated than a psychosocially comprehensible internalized
racism. Certainly, given the history that formed him, it was a significant
resistance that motivated Hayden (like Toomer) to insist on the priority
of his identity as an American, particularly if it was self-evident to a
scholar of the literature that "he so decorously did not belong" to the
canon of American poetry, as you put it in your opening letter.
William Meredith's book-jacket blurb is somewhat misleading in its
insistence that Hayden "would not relinquish the title of American writer
for any narrower identity," as is Arnold Rampersad's explanation of
Hayden's desire to be counted as an "American" rather than a "black" or
"African American" poet. No doubt, they accurately represent Hayden's
preference; but why does neither question that the title of American
should be considered more inclusive, given that more people of African
descent inhabit the earth than "Americans" (if that term designates U.S.
citizens), and "African American nationalism" has always been linked to a
pan-African awareness of the global black diaspora.
Notwithstanding the critic's complicity in constructing the reputation of
a "transracial" artist, or the poet's conversion to the supposedly
color-blind Bahá'í religion, Hayden does not so much transcend race, as he
employs racial identity as a metaphor for the opacity of the self. Race is
one of myriad differences that might make a human being appear alien to
another, one of the assorted labels that could cause an individual to feel
estranged from others, as well as from himself.
Hayden's poetry offers an array of possible responses to alienation, from
that of the tattooed man, "Born alien, / homeless everywhere" to the
poet's reveling in his alien status as a kind of freedom, in "Kodachromes
of the Island": "Alien, at home, as always / everywhere I roamed." Like
the extraterrestrial visitor of "[American Journal]," Hayden "passed for
an american," but claimed an identity more universal, as a denizen of the
cosmos.
Astrally yours,
Harryette
P.S. I'd already written this letter when I heard on the news that
scientists have found evidence of a Martian life form. Small galaxy, isn't
it?
Labor Day 1996
Dear Harryette,
Without knowing what the other one was up to, each of us mused on Hayden's
literary relationship to Toomer, both of us called into question the
notion that Hayden is a "transracial" poet, and both of us got drawn into
the metaphors of labyrinth and flight. In fact, I was so struck by what I
took to be a chord that we had struck that I almost called you. But a
telephone call might spoil the nature of this old- fashioned exchange, and
I fended off the impulse. Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks to me as though we
dovetail when I venture that Hayden is not really "transracial," although
his Eden (in "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home") is "the blissful place from
which we have all been ostracized," and when you argue that "Hayden does
not so much transcend race as employ identity as a metaphor for the
opacity of the self." If my ostracized self is one with your self rendered
opaque, I'm delighted as I rarely am by agreement.
What I want to turn to for a moment is your quotation from the so-called
scholar, to the effect that Hayden was canonized these several decades ago
"because he so decorously did not belong." Since it's not quite clear to
me how you read my sentence, or even how I wrote it, I want to clarify it
here, to wit: my suspicion is that Hayden' s name was carved into the
(old) "canon" when it was because his poetry was handsomely indebted to
what have since been called mainstream Eurocentric traditions at the same
time that it was markedly affected by his African American heritage. In
his preface to Hayden's Collected Prose (1982), Frederick Glaysher begins
by noting, "Hayden is now generally recognized as the most outstanding
craftsman of Afro-American poetry." In this dubious respect (as who should
say "she is the most outstanding technician among Chicana poets") Hayden
seems to me different from, say, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Bob Kaufman,
and the later Gwendolyn Brooks, who are less inclined to play by
conservative cultural rules, even though Hayden was himself enlarging the
playing field and changing its proportions. I should add that any
alteration of rules in medias res strikes me as eminently "American"
though that impression might itself be chauvinistic of me. But I think I
take "American" to mean something less sharply defined than some of the
influential anthologists of the 1950s took it to mean. I've just been
reading David W. Stowe's essay "Uncolored People" in the new Lingua
Franca, and I'm glad to be reminded by it of Albert Murray's belief that
American culture is, "regardless of all the hysterical protestations of
those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto." I think that's
what I believe. (I understand my term "mixogamous," in my last letter, to
be closely related to Murray's "mulatto.")
Among Hayden's poems that you mention in connection with alienation is his
later "The Tattooed Man." As you say, it is a poem about a man who was
"Born alien, / homeless everywhere," whose subsequent epidermal
enhancements only confirmed that he is indeed a "grotesque outsider" who
does not "belong." The literary antecedent that springs to my mind is
Djuna Barnes's tour de force in
Nightwood in describing Nikka, "the
nigger who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris, " who is
elaborately "tattooed from head to heel with all the ameublement of
depravity." Did Hayden know Barnes's novel? Surely he did as I
suspect Elizabeth Alexander would have known both when she wrote "The
Venus Hottentot" but in any case, his "Tattooed Man" shares with
Nikka a paradoxical inclusivity.
Barnes's paragraphs, too long for quotation entire at this juncture,
adumbrate Hayden's tattooed man, with his "jungle arms, / their prized
chimeras" and "birds-of-paradise / perched on [his] thighs." Barnes' s
Nikka seems to me a version of Othello, partly because "it [his penis] at
a stretch ... spelled Desdemona" and partly because he brings together
other contraries: for example, "over his belly was an angel from Chartres;
on each buttock, half public, half private, a quotation from the book of
magic, a confirmation of the Jansenist theory, I'm sorry to say and here
it is." Hayden's performer seems at first also to represent simply the
other, the abject, the "grotesque outsider whose / unnaturalness / assures
them they / are natural, they indeed / belong." In the penultimate verse
paragraph, the tattooed man worries that his own corporal artworks "repel
the union of/your [the paying customer's] flesh with mine." In fact,
however, his tattoos proclaim such a union. They include tattoos of
"gryphons," creatures half-lion and half-eagle, and there is one of "naked
Adam / embracing naked Eve," and what is evidently the largest tattoo
pictures "the Black Widow / peering from the web / she spun, belly to
groin." What manner of creature could escape this generative web? The
poem's conclusion seems at first blush to insist on the speaker's
singularity and the audience's alterity, but at every step it undercuts
itself, beginning with the doubling, "I yearn I yearn," which iterates the
poem's opening lines, "I gaze at you / longing longing," and thus
reinforces those lines' latent identification by mirroring the I and the
you. The crux of the matter here is in Hayden's lines "I do not want / you
other than you are. / And I I cannot / (will not?) change." Which
is to say, first, "I want you to be other, as you are," and, second, "I
must/will be other to you." The implied vows are symmetrical. And then
when the poem ends with the Yahweh-like, seemingly monolithic assertion,
"I am I," the reader cannot but feel that the I is such precisely because
of the splitting manifest in the formulation: "I - I." The self, that is,
is in expanded form the self-that-longs-because- incomplete.
But I've overstayed my welcome and will put on hold all related gossamer
projections.
Yours in Shangri-L.A.,
Stephen
9/19/96
Dear Stephen,
Your richly elaborated reading of "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home" suggested to
me another manifestation of the double consciousness signaled by the
contradictory dual signification of the predicate "cleave." Looking at the
poem again, following your explication, I noticed that, if the title and
dedication are counted as lines, the poem divides into halves hinged by
the provocative question, "Do you remember Africa?" Like Countee Cullen's
"What is Africa to me?" this line poses the vexed question of the African
American's divided identity. Here it highlights a generational difference
and a crucial break separating captive Africans with a memory of "home"
from their offspring born into American slavery. The latter remember
Africa only indirectly, through the memory of their ancestors.
The legends of flying Africans always involved those with a recent memory
of a home elsewhere, to which they walked, swam, or flew over the ocean,
trusting in traditional African spiritual beliefs that the souls of the
dead return to their birthplace. The speaker in the poem has reconciled
himself to his alienation, and only the memory of the grandfather's faith
suggests the possibility of some alternative existence. The African
American's determination to build a life and create a culture in the "New
World" is a commitment his legendary flying ancestor refused to make. The
grandfather who flies away versus the grandchild who remains, together
figure the internal struggle that DuBois termed "double
consciousness."
All of us who are Americans of African descent know this place as home,
while at the same time knowing that our claim to belonging here continues
to be contested. The ancestor cutting his losses and cutting loose for
Africa, cleaving the air, and the descendant cleaving to his earthly
existence as dearly as he clings to the consolations of myth and music,
dramatically represent DuBois's concept of double consciousness, as two
halves of the "one dark body" whose dogged strength is the only thing that
prevents its being torn asunder. Double consciousness describes the
psychic constitution of African Americans who are at home neither in
Africa, where we are foreigners, nor in the U.S., which declined to
assimilate us in its melting pot. We who cleave to a home that was never
fully ours, regardless of our labor, faith, and blood, are divided from
ourselves by our compulsory awareness of how others see us. We are
reminded every day that we are aliens here, and so we keep alive in
ourselves the memory of the Middle Passage and the ancestors'
flight.
For Hayden, a further aspect of double consciousness seems also reflected
in the poet's attempt to reconcile the presumption of Western literacy
with the presumption of African American orality or, put in
somewhat different terms, the presumption of the master's literacy and the
slave's illiteracy. Traces of the strain of these interlocking
presumptions are apparent in the body of Hayden's poetry.
Particularly useful for this discussion would be a comparison of "Middle
Passage" with "The Dream." With its references to the written documents of
slave traders, to passages excerpted or paraphrased from the letters,
journals, and ships' logs of those who bought and sold Africans, to
transcribed records of court testimony from the disgraced captains and
wretched crews of ships embarked on disastrous voyages, and even with its
parody of a song from Shakespeare's
The Tempest, "Middle Passage"
eloquently illustrates the problem of representing or reconstructing the
history of the subjugated from the writings of the dominant
culture.
In "Middle Passage," the Africans themselves are wordless, if not silent
their speech unintelligible to their captors. What is reported is
their "moaning" and "shrieking," their "crazy laughter" and their singing.
Even Cinquez, the leader of a successful slave mutiny aboard the Amistad,
and the only captive African here mentioned by name as an individual
historical subject, is merely "that surly brute" in the eye-witness
account of the slave trader. Hayden takes quite a different approach in
"The Dream (1863)," a Civil War narrative from the point of view of two
black Americans, an illiterate slave in the South and a soldier from the
North, literate in African American vernacular, who has joined the Union
army to defeat the Confederacy. Here again we find "laughing crying
singing" black folks, but also the free indirect discourse of Sinda, a
slave disappointed with the brusque white Yankees: "Marse Lincum's soldier
boys ... were not the hosts the dream had promised her." Her narrative
alternates with passages from a letter written by Cal, a black soldier who
might be related to Sinda, sending news of the war home to kin in the
North. Cal, who has "listed" in the army to make sure that "old Jeff Davis
muss be ketch an hung to a sour apple tree," fulfills Sinda's dream that
she might one day greet an army of black soldiers fighting for
freedom.
Together these poems suggest some of the difficulties and creative
strategies of the poet seeking to forge a literary language of disparate
cultural materials. Hayden's orchestration of folk speech and song with
the written language of slaveholders, slaves, fugitives, and free people
of color had been enabled by other African American writers who had
reclaimed black vernacular from its debased use and abuse in American
popular culture. Hayden's work might be seen in relation to a history of
arguments and experiments of black poets, from Dunbar to James Weldon
Johnson, from Cullen to Hughes and Sterling Brown, from Toomer and Tolson
to Kaufman and Baraka. As Henry Louis Gates argues persuasively in Figures
in Black, African American poets had to reconcile a western poetic
tradition built on a foundation of classical texts, with a maligned
African American tradition of orality that had been forcibly uprooted from
its ancient sources in Africa.
White American writers and entertainers had heard the fresh invention of
African American speech, which they stole and warped in order to ridicule
the speakers. With the exploitation of black dialect by others, most of
whom created works demeaning black people, African American writers felt
that they had lost a possible avenue of expression. In addition to their
alienation from a literary tradition that excluded African Americans,
black writers also had reason to feel estranged from the African American
vernacular. Only by reclaiming and remaking it as a literary language with
attention to its particular expressive potential, and also by claiming and
"mastering" the language of the dominant literary tradition, were black
poets able to overcome the presumed stigma of black English as well as the
presumed alienating effects of western literacy.
So this is it, the end of our summer correspondence. I have certainly
enjoyed it, and found your comments always stimulating as well as
eloquent.
Your pen pal,
Harryette
