Midnight dancer of the jazzy hour?
What great forest has hung its perfume Like a sweet veil about your bower?
What jungle tree have you slept under, Night-dark girl of the swaying hips?
What star-white moon has been your mother?
To what clean boy have you offered your lips? (Hughes, 1994)
One of the greatest writers of African American literature, Langston Hughes is now considered as an exceptional figure in the Harlem Renaissance since he was among few writers of the movement who could survive the blow of the Great Depression and sustain his literary career until his death in 1967. Shortly before Langston was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, his father abandoned his mother and went abroad. His mother then left Langston to be brought up by his grandmother and family friends while she was in search of a job. She returned to take care of Langston just when an opportunity permitted her to stay with him.
Being the only child of James and Carrie Hughes and having spent most of his childhood
Iranian EFL Journal 371 without anyone paying much attention to him, Langston never understood what it was like to belong to a happy, closely attached family (Rummel and Wagner, 2005).
Later on, still traumatized by his parents’ marital discord, Hughes always sought in his adult years to compensate for his gloomy and unstable childhood by developing a powerful familial attachment to African American masses. Alienated from the white- dominated racist United Sates which failed to serve him as a definitive homeland, he had to search for an alternative psychological compensation elsewhere. Having come to New York in 1921, Hughes lacked money to support himself even though his works then appeared regularly in Crisis. Consequently, Hughes had to hold a series of menial jobs to support himself, including his employment as a ship steward on a cargo ship. The job induced a new phase of epiphany and growth in his life since it resulted in his first visit to Africa in 1923.
This was a time when the modernists’ fascination with African art and sculpture was reverberating in the air and many African American activists and artists of the day, such as Du Bois, Garvey and Schomburg, had already initiated what had come to be known as Africanism (Washington, 2001).
In his autobiography The Big Sea (1940), Hughes recounts what he experienced in his first direct encounter with Africa. Though he was shown warm reception and hospitality by an African Muslim trader, he was rebuffed in his other contacts with Africans. In one case, Hughes remembered being laughed at by Africans when he had claimed that he was a black man like them: “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 … and they said: ‘You-white man’” (as cited in Westover, 2002, p. 1212). He also recounted the time when his guide informed him that the native people will shortly “make Ju-Ju.” When Hughes asked to be taken to see the ritual practice, the guide turned down his request by saying “Christian man no bother with Ju-Ju… White man never go to see Ju-Ju” (as cited inWestover, 2002, p.
1214).
Nevertheless, despite his exclusion from Africans and their culture, Hughes identified himself and his black American fellows with Africa when he described a scene of prostitution: “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" (as cited in Westover, 2002, p. 1214). As a harrowing allegory of the rape of Africa, this scene comes to stand for the tragedy of the lives of both Africans and Hughes himself.
Iranian EFL Journal 372 This and other incidents of Hughes’ first encounter with Africa reflect both the poet’s desire for and alienation from it as his traditional motherland.
In the early twentieth century and especially in the decade following World War I, many European avant-garde intellectuals, disaffected by the cruelty of Western political system and the inefficacy of religion in restoring order and peace to the chaotic West, opted for the world of art which, according to them, had the potentiality to change the world for the better. Their aesthetics-oriented agenda finally led to a rejection of the mainstream realism and the embracement of non-Western artistic conventions, particularly those of Africa. This fascination with black culture was translated into the American art and literature of the Jazz Age and many rebellious white thinkers and writers of the day went for a new representation of Negro subject matters. In such an atmosphere, African American intellectuals and artists deemed the unprecedented interest of white writers in black culture as an opportunity through which they could launch their literary careers and also activate social and racial reforms. One of these young black aspirants was Langston Hughes who after returning to the United States made acquaintances with Carl Van Vechten, the white novelist, critic and patron who wrote the notorious primitivist novel Nigger Heaven (1926), in an NAACP benefit party, a meeting which marked a turning point in Hughes’ life and literary career (Washington, 2001).
Hughes had read Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk when he was still young. Inspired by the folk art conception of the book, he wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, a poem which attributed black folk character to an African heritage and an ancient reservoir of human wisdom. However, after his visit to Africa and his friendship with Van Vechten, his African poems took a primitivist turn. Besides Van Vechten, it was also Charlotte Osgood Mason (1854-1946), the white wealthy widow and patron, who gave momentum to Hughes’
primitivist literary works. She was the only source of his financial support for some time, giving him a monthly pension to provide him time to concentrate on his primitivist writing.
Believing that Negroes “were America’s great link with the primitive, and that they had something very precious to give the Western world”, she was seriously committed to the promotion of the primitivist mission (Hughes, as cited inWashington, 2001, p. 96).
Nevertheless, this domineering patron, who demanded to read everything her beneficiaries wrote before getting published, envisioned progress for African American Americans only in cultural exoticism. That was why she only supported African American writers who employed the primitivist vogue and was totally opposed to encouraging black political consciousness, since she believed that “the expression of political thought should be left to white people” (Faith Berry, as cited inWashington, 2001, p. 104).
Iranian EFL Journal 373 Under such patronage and impressed by white writers’ attraction to the alleged African, primitive lifestyle of Negroes in America, Hughes’ leaning toward the primitivist discourse was inevitable, a mood that was best captured in his first volume of poetry The Weary Blues (1926). The volume was published with the help of Carl Van Vechten who sent the first manuscript to Alfred Knopf, the publisher, and even chose the title himself (Huggins, 1971). The volume included many primitivist poems such as “Nude Young Dancer”,
“DanseAfricane”, “Jazzonia”, “Black Dancer in the Little Savoy”, “The Cat and the Saxophone”, “Lenox Avenue: Midnight”, “Young Singer” and “Midnight Nan at Leroy’s”.
The Harlem of The Weary Blues is a new world of escape and release, an exhilarating never-land which only calls for carpe diem and nothing more; in this joyous city, there is no daytime and no waking up and going to work; it is entirely a sundown city in which jazz cabaret, frankly sexual dancing, prohibited alcohol and wild hilarity function as means of escape from the oppression and racism of white American society; as a result, daylight is deemed as a great enemy in The Weary Blues since it is hard to deceive oneself in the honest light of dawn. All the above-mentioned qualities interwoven into the fabric of his first volume of poetry were given an African background which underscored either the white- mooned pulchritude of jungle nights or the pulse-stirring beatings of the tom-tom (Davis, 1952). What seems greatly interesting is that the Africa of Hughes’ autobiographical account in which he was rejected and excluded was totally different from the idyllic Africa of his first volume of poetry. Arnold Rampersad notes this contradiction between Hughes’ craving for Africa and his exclusion from it and calls it “anxiety”, a feeling which Hughes had to sublimate in many of his poems. Being alienated and subalternized in the unjust and oppressive United States, Hughes insisted on his membership in the African race in his 1920s poems like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, “My People”, “Our Land”and “Afraid”, an insistence which referred to a chronic fear that the people of Africa were not actually his at all. In fact, these poems endeavored to present a sense of belonging, heritage and self-esteem to all African Americans (Westover, 2002).
3. Conclusion
Hughes’ poems revealed an ongoing conflict between African and Afro-American values and ideals, which resulted in a double-consciousness reflective of the overlapping communities of nation and diaspora. In effect, the concept of America is bifaceted in the works of Langston Hughes. Though he sometimes found the United States a place to be severely reprimanded,
Iranian EFL Journal 374 his commitment to American values was profound and enduring. Drawing upon the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution and the Bill of Rights in his writings in order to censure the discriminatory status quo, he tried to make Harlem a part of the American Dream and build what he believed to be “the true America” (Westover, 2002).
Though he placed most of his 1920s poems within an international frame and repeatedly referred to motifs of the Middle Passage, slavery, black American culture and a diasporan Pan-Africanism, he didn’t assimilate the African concept of racial identity; instead, he came to understand African via a black internationalist lens that was unquestionably American and so articulated the power and meaning of the black cultural expression in the framework of Americanism. This dual citizenship is manifested in Hughes’ poetic attempts to project a constructed community that is at the same time American and not-American.
Though 1920s Hughes asserted an unabashed pride in the alleged primitive characteristics of his race and the atavistic bequest of the African motherland, his portrait of Negro life and its African background was thoroughly consistent with the popular white- dominated iconography of the time, a vogue that finally marketed all things Negro to the white America. Trapped by the juggernaut of the primitivist fad, Hughes was oblivious to the fact that “efforts to resist domination can readily re-enforce it, if such resistance is cast in the code of the dominator” (Brown, 1993, p. 658) and that writing about a culture and its values using techniques and methods contrived in another culture could backfire. Inattentive to the sociological implications of his primitivist poetry, he perpetuated the old demeaning stereotypes of Negroes’ spontaneity and sexual freedom which had long for long been looked down upon but then came into vogue as the saving grace of the Western wasteland. By emphasizing on an intrinsic disparity between civilized whites and exotic blacks, Hughes and his fellow primitivist writers of the Harlem Renaissance were published and made money, butat the same time demoted the American Negroes to the status of an irrevocable, even if enviable, Other who was not American and could not expect to be considered a rightful one.
References
Allen, E. Jr. (2002). Du Boisian double consciousness: The unsustainable argument.The Massachusetts Review,43 (2), 217-253.
Brown, R. H. (1993). Cultural representation and ideological domination.Social Forces, 71 (3), 657-676.
Iranian EFL Journal 375 Corbould, C. (2009). Becoming African Americans: Black public life in Harlem, 1919–1939.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Davis, A. P. (1952). The Harlem of Langston Hughes' poetry.Phylon, 13 (4), 276-283.
Dawahare, A. (2003). Nationalism, Marxism, and African American literature between the wars. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (2007). The souls of black folk. B. H. Edwards, (Ed.). New York, NY:
Oxford UP.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso.
Huggins, N. I. (1971). Harlem Renaissance. New York, NY: Oxford UP.
Hughes, L. (1994). Nude young dancer.In A. Rampersad & D.Rossel(Eds.), The collected poems of Langston Hughes (p. 61). New York, NY: Vintage Classics.
Iheduru, O. (2006). Social values, democracy, and the problem of African American identity.Journal of Black Studies,37 (2), 209-230.
Mocombe, P. C. (2009). The soul-less souls of black folk. Lanham, MD: UP of America.
Rawls, A. W. (2000). ’Race’ as an interaction order phenomenon: W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’ thesis revisited.Sociological Theory,18 (2), 241-274.
Rummel, J., & Wagner, H. L. (2005). Langston Hughes. New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers.
Schiele, J. H. (2005). Cultural oppression and the high-risk status of African Americans.
Journal of Black Studies,35 (6), 802-826.
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Westover, Jeff. (2002). Africa/America: Fragmentation and diaspora in the work of Langston Hughes.Callaloo, 25 (4), 1206-1223.
Iranian EFL Journal 376 Title
Conrad’s Darkness: A Cultural Study
Author
Moslem Zolfagharkhani (Ph.D.)
Hakim Sabzevari University, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Department of English Language and Literature
Biodata
Moslem Zolfagharkhani is an Assistant Professor of English language and literature at Hakim Sabzevari University, Iran. He was a member of Joseph Conrad Society of UK for some years. He is the chairperson at present and teaches both B.A. and M.A. courses at different universities of Khorasan Razavi State. Being a Conrad scholar, his main research interests include Literary Criticism, Literary Translation, and Discourse Analysis.
Abstract
This paper aims at revealing some cultural aspects of Joseph Conrad's most controversial fiction Heart of Darkness. To do this, different assumptions are presented, such as racism, civilization, capitalization, and so on, while referring to others' critical evaluations and/or attacks on the fiction. Marlow of both 'Youth' and Heart of Darkness is in search of some truths in life, and to find it he comes across various situations where one should decide how to do and how to behave. Then it is shown that culture survives and remains even though individuals who form it may die or disappear.
Keywords: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 'Youth', Culture, Colonialism
1. Introduction
It is a truth that Conrad's journey to the Africa killed his yearnings for the sea and made him a novelist. This African expedition not only affected him physically for the rest of his life but also caused Conrad to attain his philosophy of life and of man. Heart of Darkness (1902) (Hereafter called HOD in references) appeared as serials in Blackwood's Magazine between February and April, 1899. In his note to 'Youth', the author reveals: "More ambitious in its
Iranian EFL Journal 377 scope and longer in the telling, Heart of Darkness is quite as authentic in fundaments as Youth" ('Youth', p. 4).
In a letter to Mr. Blackwood, Conrad who is in the midst of creating his Heart of Darkness writes: "It is a narrative after the manner of Youth told by the same man dealing with his experiences on a river in Central Africa. The idea in it is not as obvious as in Youth"
(Kimbrough, 2002, p. 201).
Conrad's 'Youth' grows into maturity only in Heart of Darkness which is the eleventh story written by the author. The story is narrated by Marlow who speaks of his experiences during his first and only journey into the African continent. Hence, Heart of Darkness is an adventure tale of a journey into the blackest part of the Belgian Congo. This narrative describes the natives' attacks, the river and the jungle, together with the white people who are there to invade the jungles and collect ivory. Such a journey becomes a symbolic one also. In fact, Marlow steps into a blackness central to the heart of the man so that he reveals the deep passion, anxiety, and lust of the man. Marlow is an observer who is not involved centrally. It is Marlow who survives and tells the story. Those like Kurtz who are aware of the darkness and its deep effects cannot resist their own inner dark soul. They give up and are swallowed up by the evil of their own passion and lust. Therefore, the darkness of the African continent which is real and original helps them to look inside themselves to realize what they hope and what they are.