My Presentation at UTD Raw Symposium

On April 18, 2009 , at the inauguration of the”Raw [Research, Art, Writing] Symposium” of the School of Arts & Humanities (UT at Dallas ), I will be given a paper presentation on the issues of race, culture, and identity.  Below is a 2 page draft of what I will be discussed : 

Mourning Poets: The Poetics of Lament-and-Alienation in the Works of Langston Hughes and the Negritude Poets

By the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat down and wept,

When we remembered Zion

Upon the willows in the midst

of it

We hung our harps.

For there our captors demanded

of us songs,

and our tormentors mirth,

sayings,

“Sing us one of the songs of Zion” (Ps. 137).                        

 

Exile is marked by a profound sense of despair, displacement and alienation and subsequently turns into an incessant quest for return and (self and collective) emancipation. The parallels between the ancient Israelites and modern African Diaspora are striking.  Just as the Jews were subjected to slavery and colonial rule, African Diaspora was enslaved and suffered under colonialism. Just as the ancient Israelites were captured and expelled from their homeland, the African Diaspora was forcibly removed from continental Africa.  As the Jews in Babylon anticipated a return to Zion, African Diasporas continued to long for their promise land (Blun, 4).   And finally in the exilic state the ancient Israelites were wondering: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land”?[1] The Black Africans, however, did not sing or seek to chant a divine musical, rather they wept and mourned. Their song was/is a poetic of absence and homelessness, lament and alienation, forgetfulness and remembrance, nativistic and diasporic. In other words, they exhibit a discourse of double-consciousness.

Langston Hughes and the Negritude architects (Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor and Leon Damas) narrated a story of tears and moaned for something beyond the geographical space, the imaginary. They lamented for a heritage, identity, and community that are severed by (extended) time of separation and geographical distance. These poets framed a diasporic consciousness resulting in aesthetic production and affirm a link between them and the [re-]imagined home, be it Africa. Their collective crisis and feelings toward continental Africa are manifest in terms of “anxiety” and “alienation.”  The alternative is but to reimagine, recreate and protest.  For these poets, Africa is more than a geographical expression, as Chinua Achebe suggested, but also a “metaphysical landscape” that rises above national boundary.

This paper will explore the theme of lament-and-alienation in the respective poetry of Langston Hughes and the Negritudes intellectuals. I have selected four poems from the contribution of each noted writer. More particularly I will expound on Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Dama’s “La Complainte du Negre” (The Negro’s Complaint), Senghor’s “Nuit de Sine,” and some excerpts in Cesaire’s “Cahier d’un retour au pays Natal” (Return to the native Land).  The project seeks to answer the question: what does living in a foreign land mean for these writers? The thesis suggests that the theme of “lament-and -alienation” best describes the afrocentric voice of Langston Hughes and the Negritude intellectuals. Second, I propose that alienation is expressed in a triple dimension:  (1) geographical alienation both from their native land and their ancestral land, (2) cultural alienation as a result of cultural assimilation, and (3) alienation from the Parisian urban environment, in the case of Cesaire, Senghor and Damar. Third, I contend that the poets’ counterdiscourses praise alienation because it provides a mental compensation in the realm of their own existence, continual survival, and recreates a new self identity in the process. Finally, I argue the representation of a dynamic Africa provides a form of spiritual homecoming for these mourning poets.

 

 

 

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[1]  Psalm 137, New American Standard Bible.