Harlem Renaissance, Cultural

Liberation, and Socialist Politics

Literatures in English: Liberation in Literatures of the Black Atlantic
Dr. Marta Werbanowska
University of Vienna
Spring 2021/22

Lecture 5
04/04/2022
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
(1895)
• Kevin Young and Elizabeth Alexander reading: https://youtu.be/VJzmnz1Td3g
• Alexander on the poem: https://youtu.be/4ezkBoPyCLA
• „The mask” in the texts we’ve read so far and after the Civil War
Paul Laurence Dunbar
(1872-1906) From „When Malindy Sings”

G'way an' quit dat noise, Miss Lucy—

• Double-consciousness
Put dat music book away;
and tricksterism
What's de use to keep on tryin'?
• Liberation after the Civil
Ef you practise twell you're gray,
War?
You cain't sta't no notes a-flyin'
• Poetic elevation of Black
Lak de ones dat rants and rings
folk/vernacular
F'om de kitchen to de big woods
When Malindy sings.
From „Sympathy” You ain't got de nachel o'gans
Fu' to make de soun' come right,
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, You ain't got de tu'ns an' twistin's
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— Fu' to make it sweet an' light.
Tell you one thing now, Miss Lucy,
When he beats his bars and he would be free; An' I 'm tellin' you fu' true,
It is not a carol of joy or glee, When hit comes to raal right singin',
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core, 'T ain't no easy thing to do.
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
https://poets.org/poem/when-malindy-sings
I know why the caged bird sings!
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46459/sympathy-56d22658afbc0
 The Harlem Renaissance and Cultural Liberation
• African American artistic and intellectual movement in 1920s/30s
• Great Migration – mass movement of Black Southerners to the North -> cultural shift, folk culture meets the city,
new art forms emerge (e.g. blues, jazz, dances such as the Charleston or swing)
• Black art becomes popular, also among white audiences; emergence of Black popular culture
• Emergence of the „New Negro” as new identity: Celebration of Black cultural heritage (Southern and African roots),
racial pride, „spiritual coming of age” of Black Americans (Alain Locke)
• Tension: speaking „for the race” and/or as individual (Hughes, „The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”)
More pictures from the Harlem Renaissance era at: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/gabrielsanchez/harlem-renaissance-history-photography-black-history-month

James Van Der Zee’s photographs

 Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
• Fiction writer, anthropologist
(studied Black American and
Caribbean cultures), folklorist,
filmmaker
• Born and raised in an all-Black
town in Florida
• Their Eyes Were Watching
God (1937), Tell My Horse
(1938), Dust Tracks on a Road
(1942), Barracoon (2018)
• Key figure of Harlem
Renaissance
 „How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928)
• What is her understanding of Blackness and/as identity? Is it consistent throughout the essay, or changing and even
contradictory?

• I remember the very day that I became colored... I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl.
• Blackness as becoming one of many, losing sense of individuality, of self, of belonging

• At certain times I have no race, I am me... The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine
with its string of beads.
• Race as de-individualizing – but not gender?

• I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

• Blackness as relational, socially-constructed - only makes sense as a category in negation of whiteness

• In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number... I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I
whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle
way... I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know.
• Blackness as „African,” „primitive,” „primal” – and dangerous

• The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to
eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of
getting.
• Blackness as a threat to whiteness? She denies the significance of slavery („Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation
was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.”) but also admits white America is haunted

• Is Hurston „wearing the mask”?

 „How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928)
• Signifyin(g): Af Am rhetorical practice of (a) double-speak (indirection, connotation), (b) refering to
other texts/ideas known within the (Black) tradition
• Double-speak:
• But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other
bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and
worthless.
• [White people] liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave
me generously of their small silver for doing these things.
• (Black) identity as collage, not reducible to one thing, Gilroy’s postmodern performance
• The essay as a „bag” and a performance (of Blackness, of Zora), too

• Reference to DuBois’s double-consciousness: „How does it feel to be a problem?” and „two

unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body”
• But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes... I do
not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty
deal and whose feelings are all but about it... No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster
knife.
• No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is quite exciting
to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

• Blackness as possibility, new beginning, celebration of life, futurity, self-acceptance/love

• Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any
deny themselves the pleasure of my company?
 Una Marson (1905-1965)
• Jamaican writer, activist for workers’ rights,
women’s rights, and anti-racism
• Founder of The League of Coloured Peoples
(England)
• First Black woman to work at the BBC: Caribbean
Voices (promoting Caribbean literature)
• The Moth and The Star (1937)
• Poems exploring Black identity, womanhood,
experience of migration and racism in England,
beauty standards, Jamaican culture and
spirituality
• How does it feel to be „colored” woman in
England?
• Like for Hurston (and Gilroy), Blackness/Black
womanhood is a complex social identity in Marson’s
poem – from troubled to celebratory
„Little Black Girl” carrying the „Black Burden”
• Signifies on Rudyard Kipling’s „The White
Man’s Burden” (1899) („search your
manhood” by civilizing the „new-caught,
sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child”)
• What is the „Black burden”?
• What burdens does the Black girl carry in
„the great city / Of London”?
• Hypervisibility, exoticization, loneliness,
cultural alienation, missing homeland,
existential doubts (What are you seeking?)
• How are England and Jamaica, white and
Black people, contrasted? Which one does
the speaker seem to privilege?
• Hurston’s „sobbing school of Negrohood” or
„sharpening her oyster knife”?
• „Feeling most colored against sharp white
background”
• Can one get rid of the burden?
• Anger in „N****r”: „What made me keep my
fingers / from choking the words in their
throats?”
• „As though you are proud / To be brown” –
liberatory celebration of Blackness
 Celebrating Black womanhood / beauty
„Kinky hair blues”
• What is the cause of the blues?
• DuBois’s double-consciousness, „the
veil” between one’s own self-image
and the world
• How does the form reflect the
content?
• Language – vernacular
• Blues form (AAB, worried lines) and
signifyin’ (individual love story as a
commentary on social issue)
„Black Is Fancy”
• How does double-consciousness
work in this poem?
• What causes the speaker to start
„liberating” her consciousness?
• What does the poem suggest about
the importance of representation?
 Hughes and McKay: Two Harlem
Renaissance Poets

Langston Hughes Claude McKay

(1901-1967) (1890-1948)
 Langston Hughes: celebrating Black culture and heritage
• The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1920, first
published in The Crisis) I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
• What is the significance of these particular I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
rivers?
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
• Black history and achievement as not
inferior to European; African roots of I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went
modern civilization
• Also „I, Too” („They’ll see how beautiful I am down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all
/ And be ashamed”) golden in the sunset.
• Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) –
book-length jazz poem about 24 hours in Good morning, daddy!
Harlem Ain’t you heard
• African American modernism: The boogie-woogie rumble
montage/collage of vignettes, fragmented Of a dream deferred?
images; poetic diction employs the language What happens to a dream deferred?
and rhythms/techniques of jazz, blues, Listen closely:
bebop, swing
Does it dry up You’ll hear their feet
• What is the „dream deferred”? Whose Beating out and beating out a—
dream, of what, why deferred? like a raisin in the sun?
• Signifyin on spirituals – songs with double- ... You think
meaning
Or does it explode? It’s a happy beat?
 Claude McKay’s two lands: Jamaica and America
• „My Native Land, My Home” (1912),
published in Jamaica
• How is Jamaica described?
• Land of nourishment, heal all disease, „fertile
soil grow all o’ t’ings”
• Any liberatory political message?
Jamaica is de nigger’s place,
No mind whe’ some declare;
Although dem call we “no-land race,”
I know we home is here.
You hab all t’ings fe mek life bles’,
But buccra ‘poil de whole
Wid gove’mint an all de res’,
Fe worry naygur soul.
• Anticolonial and critical of colonial British rule;
Black/Jamaican nationalist, claiming right to
land and nation
• „Nation language”: Jamaican patois
• „America” in Harlem Shadows (1922)
• Sharp contrast with Jamaica – how is America
described?
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
• Land of paradox, at once aggressive and lethal and life-
giving
• What is America’s „hate” that steals the „breath of
life”? And what is the strength-giving „vigor” in his
blood?
• Classical form of the sonnet. How do you interpret the
volta (last couplet)?
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
 America Never Was America To Me...
• Danez Smith’s reading: I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
https://youtu.be/b6Im4b3kdf
c I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
• Who is the speaker?
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I
What are their main
seek—
axes of identity-
And finding only the same old stupid plan
formation (race, gender,
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
class, nationality...)?
O, let America be America again—
• How is America not I am the young man, full of strength and hope, The land that never has been yet—
America? What is the Tangled in that ancient endless chain And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
discrepancy between Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's,
the American Dream Negro's, ME—
and reality? The free? Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
• How can „America be
Who said the free? Not me? Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
America again” – what
Surely not me? The millions on relief today? Must bring back our mighty dream again.
is the path to freedom?
The millions shot down when we strike?
Does it take integration,
The millions who have nothing for our pay? Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
separation,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
transformation,
We, the people, must redeem
revolution,
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
reclamation?
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
 Hughes, McKay, and Black Leftism Listen, Revolution,
We're buddies, see —
• Worker/Black Just forced to go on through fear, Together, We can take everything:
solidarity as For every day I must eat Factories, arsenals, houses, ships,
liberation of And find ugly clothes to wear, Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
consciousness And bad shoes to hurt my feet Bus lines, telegraphs, radios,
• Critique of (Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
racial But a slave should never grow tired, (Hughes)
capitalism: anti- Whom the masters have kindly hired.
Black violence If we must die, O let us nobly die,
and capitalist But oh! for the woods, the flowers So that our precious blood may not be shed
exploitation are Of natural, sweet perfume... In vain; then even the monsters we defy
related Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
• Marxist politics For a man-machine toil-tired
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
and Black pride May crave beauty too—though he’s hired.
(McKay) Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
• Calls for action (McKay)
and resistance I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
• Sometimes And I see that my own hands can make „If We Must Die” (1919)
falling into The world that's in my mind. • Context: Russian
naive USSR Then let us hurry, comrades, Revolution, Red Summer
propaganda The road to find. (racial terrorism across US
(Hughes) cities)