11

The Rising Glory of Africa

Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

Given the depth and cultural ramifications of Melvin B. Tolson’s poetry, it is still too little known. His neglect has so dominated discussion, in fact, that substantive criticism has been slow to emerge from the chatter.1 Here, I approach his work as a white reader, American by birth but Canadian by choice, with an avowed predilection for American high modernism. Tolson seems to me not only the pre-eminent African American poet of the Jim Crow era by virtue of both his poetic achievement and his understanding of race and its relationship to American nationhood. He is to me the pre-eminent American poet since Hart Crane – race notwithstanding – who continued, in the face of every reason for doing otherwise, to sustain a hopeful view of American democracy. His Republic of Liberia holds up a black mirror for America to see itself, and the reflection shows not the expected grimace of a Simon Legree but an image – however much shaped by wishful thinking – of an African republic that fulfills the promise of American democratic exceptionalism. In 1953, however, neither wishful thinking nor exceptionalism were what black readers wanted, on the eve of the Supreme Court decision that ended legalized segregation and triggered the Civil Rights era. Nor have they been realized, as they appear to be in Tolson’s poem, either in Africa or in America. The myth of American exceptionalism has meanwhile come under intense hostile scrutiny. Nevertheless, the need for a positive, idealistic national goal of some kind, like Hart Crane’s “Atlantis,” is the mandate of this kind of poem, and Tolson’s Liberian Futurafrique fulfills that mandate courageously.

Some African American critics have faulted Tolson’s embrace of the white poet’s modernism as a kind of assimilationist Uncle-Tomism. This attitude strikes me as self-defeating. Most black writers in the twentieth century have helped themselves unabashedly to the modernist ethos without muting their racial voices. Nor do I see an obligation to construct Tolson’s modernism as ironic, as does Dan McCall, who portrays a Tolson “running wild in the white castle of learning … [saying] I am a Negro and have made my meals on what I hooked from your white kitchens and now that I have made my way into your study – see here – I make off with your library.”2 The library of modernism is public, not private, and it is not segregated by race.

Tolson’s career is neatly segmented. A latecomer to poetry, he spent his early years scraping together an education with the help of two allblack universities and a good deal of self-teaching. He continued this learning process as a teacher, first at Wylie College in Texas and then, from 1947 on, at Langston University in Oklahoma. Neither institution was close to any major centre of culture, either geographically or intellectually; but in both places Tolson became a legendary teacher, challenging, inspiring, and flamboyant by turns.³ He also developed powerful skills as a public speaker, oratorical skills that inform the performative qualities of his verse, which in Libretto and elsewhere adopts a resounding public voice. He was also active politically, absorbing Marxist theory through his reading while making practical efforts to organize local sharecroppers, both black and white, at great personal risk.⁴ His commitment to public service even included four terms as mayor in Langston, Oklahoma, at significant cost to his writing. Earlier at Wylie College, the personal energy he gave to coaching the debate team led to a series of startling underdog victories in which the Wylie Forensic Team defeated teams from larger white universities, captured the Texas state championship, and then went on to defeat the national champions from the University of Southern California in April 1935 (Farnsworth, Tolson, 50–4). This extraordinary coup in debate became the subject of a major Hollywood film, The Great Debaters (2008), starring Denzel Washington as the young Tolson.

Tolson’s early career was a time of prose poured into his columns for the Washington Tribune from 1937 to 1944, now collected as Caviar and Cabbage. While Tolson produced these essays, while teaching, studying, coaching, and leading secretive labour activities, he also put together his first volume of poetry. It failed to reach publication in the 1930s, only appearing posthumously as A Gallery of Harlem Portraits (1979). The imprint of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology is clearly visible. Tolson was discouraged by this failure, but he continued to hone his craft.5 In 1940, a competition induced him to enter his poem “Dark Symphony,” which won the prize from the prestigious Atlantic Monthly and encouraged him to produce enough material for another volume, Rendezvous with America (1942). “Dark Symphony” itself is divided into “movements” in the manner of Southern symphonic poems since Lanier. The volume as a whole still aligns with the tradition of populist modernism deriving from Whitman, filtered through Sandburg, Lindsay, and Benét, intertwined with poets of the Harlem Renaissance, primarily Langston Hughes (Farnsworth, Tolson, 36–8). Tolson had by then all but completed a master’s thesis on the Harlem Renaissance writers for Columbia University.⁶ Unlike the free verse Harlem Portraits, much of Rendezvous is cast in metrical forms, including some virtuoso displays: “A Song for Myself,” for example, is a prosodic tour de force in rhyming iambic monometer, a humble undoing of Whitman’s massive ego. This volume marks Tolson’s belated poetic debut at the age of forty-four.

In 1947, Tolson was approached by the government of Liberia, led by the progressive president William Tubman, and invited to be the African nation’s poet laureate and write its centenary poem. How this unprecedented invitation came to be is not clear,⁷ but Tolson’s imagination was ignited and he set to work. He wrote the first draft of his Libretto for the Republic of Liberia in less than a year. Tolson had already been studying Eliot and Pound, as well as Crane and Tate, plus Dylan Thomas, not to mention Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He submitted his poem for magazine publication, but it was rejected by both Poetry and Atlantic Monthly (Farnsworth, Tolson, 138). Tolson then, whether courageous or foolhardy, sent his African poem to Tate, of all people, hoping to win critical approval.

Tolson’s embrace of poetic modernism and his choice of the Southern white supremacist Tate as his poetic sponsor did Tolson’s reputation more harm than good, at least in the short term. Joy Flasch writes that Tate at first refused, saying “he was not interested in the propaganda of a negro poet.”⁸ Farnsworth questions this story (Tolson, 139), which remains anecdotal, and he draws a convincing picture of the professional relationship between the two (138–51). Tolson’s decision to approach Tate was influenced by an earlier exchange, in which Tate had rejected a Tolson submission with a show of courtesy that may or may not have been sincere (138).⁹ Tolson was aware that he was breaking down many barriers with his new poem.

For Tate’s part, if my speculations about the influence of Jacques Maritain and his conversion to Catholicism in 1950 are correct (see 242–3), he may have seen an opportunity to evince a new-found racial tolerance. Besides, by July 1950, when Tate’s preface appeared in Poetry (along with the TI section of the poem), he had published his most successful volume Winter Sea (1944) and two collected editions of his own work. His younger protégées, John Berryman and Robert Lowell, were building their own reputations, the latter noted for the densely gnarled language of his early volumes. Tate had also become a central figure in the front-page scandal surrounding the first Bollingen Award, given by the Library of Congress to Pound for his Pisan Cantos (1948). Horrors of the Holocaust filled the news, and Tate was put to the severest imaginable test defending his vote for Pound as a vote for form over content (to put it in journalistic terms). Then, when another white poet was wanted to introduce Tolson’s third and final volume Harlem Gallery (1965), the choice fell to Karl Shapiro, who – Jewish and militantly populist – had cast one of the two votes against Pound. Shapiro bitterly attacked Tate and Eliot and the rest of the committee for their decision, and Tolson then became, willy-nilly, a pawn in the noisy skirmish of poetics.10

Libretto itself is too long for most anthologies or course syllabi, and difficult to excerpt. Furthermore, its African subject is (seemingly) remote, its allusions obscure, and its language tortuous – despite footnotes Tolson added for publication. The poem of more than seven hundred lines has to be swallowed whole or not at all: “Drink deep, or taste not the Liberian spring,” as Tolson quipped (Farnsworth, Tolson, 171). Despite critical praise, the physical book itself was not easily accessible. White readers in 1953, despite Tate’s praise, were still condescending or dismissive about any effort to break the colour barrier in the high arts – not just in poetry but in music, opera, visual arts, theatre, and film.

Tolson himself had no reservations about Tate’s introduction: “I see the Preface as our literary Emancipation Proclamation,” he wrote to Tate.¹¹ Black readers, however, read Libretto with its suspicious introduction in more complex ways, and its reception remains an informative object lesson in the complex problems of self-definition facing black writers in America. Much of the criticism focused on its erudition and inaccessibility to black readers. Margaret Walker had already complained of the “almost esoteric nature” of Rendezvous with America (Farnsworth, Tolson, 95). When J. Stanford Redding condemned the professorial footnotes, Tolson responded acidly that Redding had not reviewed the poem but his own prejudices against modern poetry. “Away with the simple Negro!” he exclaimed. “This is a book to be chewed and digested. If Negro scholars don’t get busy on it, white scholars will” (166–7). Tolson was charged with betraying his people and writing for white critics. He was compared to other black writers who minimized their race, like Countee Cullen and Robert Hayden. Only one black critic, Lorenzo D. Turner writing in Poetry, was wholly positive.12 This debate was given another twist when Karl Shapiro, in his introduction to Harlem Gallery, praised Tolson for “writing Negro.” So it may have seemed to white readers, but to black readers he was not Negro enough (274–5). I am forcefully reminded of the famous exchange between Ralph Ellison and his leftist admirer Irving Howe, whose views on black writing were doctrinaire: “We must express ‘black’ anger and ‘clenched militancy,’” Ellison replied, “and between writing well and being ideologically militant, we must choose militancy. Well, it all sounds quite familiar and I fear the social order which it forecasts more than I do that of Mississippi.”

This issue is all the more intense in that Tolson’s vision in Libretto is both racial and trans-racial. Tolson had had his fill of white racism in the American South, but he also had experience of many friendly and supportive whites. He knew that his own origins included Irish and Native American ancestry as well as African: “my roots are in Africa, Europe and America,” he said, characteristically framing his race in “encompassing rather than antagonistic terms” (Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 110). He well understood that in America “black” is a sociological, not a racial, category (Tolson, “Poet’s Odyssey,” 184). He embraced his black identity, nor could he escape the fate of being pigeonholed by white critics, who reduced his work, in Cary Nelson’s words, to “a matter of black self-interest rather than a national concern” (Repression and Recovery, 166). His thinking was, however, as Farnsworth suggests (Tolson, 41), aligned most closely with the earlier generation of black leaders who emerged at the NAACP conference of 1933 in Amenia, New York, during the depths of the Great Depression. They wished to move beyond the “race men” of the previous generation like DuBois and James Weldon Johnson, who had “overlooked the obvious relationships between the Negro’s problems and the larger issues confronting the nation”: “the welfare of white and black labor is inseparable.” The wage-slavery defence of slavery is correct insofar as it elevates the issue from that of race to that of labour and compensation. Tolson’s trans-racialism is clear in the title poem of Rendezvous with America, in which he addresses “kikes,” “dagos,” “chinks,” and “bohunks,” as well as “niggers,” in a sweeping Whitmanic roundup of stigmatized minorities. It is clear, too, in his poem “Esperanto,” in which divisions are divisions of language, as they are in Libretto: “Yellow and Black and White, / We mouth a Babel tongue.”

Libretto was thus the victim of exceptionally bad timing. Brown v. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court in the following year, and the interminable (and yet unfinished) dismantling of racial segregation slowly began. Liberia seemed far removed from the streets of Birmingham and Detroit to blacks and whites alike, and the period when Tolson’s poem might have made its impact was preoccupied with violence closer to home. Prominent blacks like Paul Robeson were harassed by the American government, engaged in its queasy Cold War with the communist idea. In 1958, Langston Hughes issued his Selected Poems – by which he became known to several generations of readers – self-castrated of his most radical work (Nelson, Repression and Recovery, 197–8). Just before Tolson’s death in 1966, the new Black Arts movement began to agitate for a racially centred aesthetic created by and for blacks only.13 His Liberia seemed less a mirror to America than a pedantic evasion. Tolson – who wrote privately in 1961, “I guess I’m the only Marxist poet Here and Now” (Farnsworth, Tolson, 145) – was fortunately not prominent enough to attract the attention of HUAC, but he was already seen by younger black readers as the product of an older generation.

Finally, Liberia itself is a subject that bristles with problems and paradoxes. Superficially, it served as a poster image for African promise, the sole independent democratic nation (then) on the continent. The nation was founded in 1820 by American slaves wishing to return to their African homeland – or at least that is the polite version. As Tolson well knew, the purpose of the American Colonization Society was to reduce the free black population in America by shipping them back where they came from. Individuals who made that first intrepid voyage on “the black Mayflower” did so involuntarily and in terrible conditions. Half of them died within the first year. Most, if not all, had their roots in other parts of Africa. And the survivors who formed the beginnings of the new nation promptly organized a hierarchical society with themselves in positions of power and the indigenous natives at the bottom – a situation that persisted a century later when Tolson wrote his poem. Finally, in the first decades of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey made Liberia the focus of his vision of yet another back-to-Africa movement, a plan opposed not only by W.E.B. DuBois in the United States but also by the Liberian government. The very concept of Liberia was embedded in these and other controversies.14 Tolson, though anti-colonialist in all his politics, chose not to highlight the colonialist implications of these events.

Tolson, however, defended his decision on the basis of genre: he was writing a poem to celebrate the nation’s centennial. He thought of it, as his correspondence with Tate and Tate’s introduction both make clear, as a pseudopindaric panegyric celebrating Liberia, and his footnotes suggest that he prepared poetically by immersing himself in Dryden. There was much to celebrate. Liberia during the war, though not engaged in combat, had played an important role in support of the Allies, supplying nearly all the rubber and providing airports for use in the North African campaign. In 1943, William Tubman became president (i.e., president for life), and he, over the next quarter century, did “more to bring his country and its political class into the modern world than all his predecessors combined” (Ciment, Another America, 188). Tubman, like many African leaders, enjoyed a lavish personal life – a palace and a yacht. His “presidency” was fully authoritarian, increasingly so as years went by. Yet he “understood that Liberia’s prosperity lay with the new, U.S. led, postwar free trade order” (198). He astutely capitalized on an “open door” policy, allowing foreign investment and trade in Liberia’s rubber plantations and iron ore deposits. Little Liberia “boasted the second-highest economic growth rate of any nation in the world” (202). Liberia was a founding member of the United Nations. Internally, Tubman made sincere efforts to create “a new era in settler-native relations,” to better conditions for women, and his Unification Act of 1964 “finally put an end to the second-class citizenship of 98 percent of Liberia’s population” (203–5). He built schools and sent young Liberians to be educated abroad. Tolson was proud that, when he began to write, “there were only two independent black countries in Africa. Now there are thirty-three” (“A Poet’s Odyssey,” 192). Tubman himself could not foresee that this progressive nation would crumple so quickly after his death in 1971. In 1953, Tolson could praise postwar Liberia without embarrassment and lay out a positive vision of its future glory.¹⁵

Libretto, however, had greater ambitions. Farnsworth cites an undated note from Tolson’s journal that reveals his principal models: “‘The Bridge’ is a way out of the pessimism of ‘The Waste Land’; the ‘Libretto’ is a vista out of the mysticism of ‘The Four Quartets’” (Tolson, 171). Nearby, Tolson wrote, “I believe Crane lacked a perspective of himself against the backdrop of history.”

Tolson often claimed similarities (not immediately obvious) between his poem and Crane’s Bridge, and Tate, too, affirmed that “Mr. Tolson is in a direct succession from Crane.” Both aligned themselves in respectful opposition to T.S. Eliot. To begin at the end, Tolson’s “vista” from Eliot’s “mysticism” in Four Quartets points to his more pragmatic version of a Marxist-inflected Christianity rooted in social justice.16 Where Eliot withdrew into the self-abnegation of the “negative path,” Tolson chose to see Liberia as a premonition of a Christian-Marxist egalitarian government. In TI, he equates “Marx the exalter” with “Christ the Leveller” (361–3).¹⁷ As Farnsworth makes clear (Tolson, 74, and elsewhere), Tolson the Methodist preacher’s son consistently viewed Marxist ideals through the lens of a radical Christianity far removed from Stalinism. He desired “a synthesis of socialist and Christian ideals, rather than their mutual exclusion” (Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 119). Tolson’s resistance to Eliot’s “mysticism” is not a secular resistance to Christianity, but to its neglect of social application.

The earlier relationship is even more instructive. Tolson recognized that Crane conceived The Bridge as a rejection of the “pessimism” of “The Waste Land.”¹⁸ He apparently recognized as well the flimsiness of Crane’s historical knowledge and determined to better him. Crane’s optimism was based in large part on his faith in material technology – the cars, trains, ships, and airplanes celebrated in his poem. Tolson admires this aspect of Crane – as Tate, one recalls, emphatically did not – and he replicates it in the imagery of Libretto. Tate may be congratulated for seeing past his own deeply held antipathies and praising this Marxist poem at all, but his introduction has left the critical legacy of devaluing the climactic “Futurafrique” passage at the end: “The movement breaks down into Whitmanesque prose-paragraphs into which Mr. Tolson evidently felt that he could toss all the loose ends of history, objurgation, and prophecy which the set theme seemed to require of him as an official poet” (Tate, Introduction to Libretto, n.p.). As in his objections to The Bridge, Tate is here guilty, I think, of conflating his political and aesthetic views.

If Crane is the model for Tolson’s dense metaphorical language, his genre, and his technological faith, however, Pound gave him courage to indulge in free-ranging and recondite allusiveness. The Cantos – read with none of the conveniences available nowadays – set the standard, and Pound’s camaraderie with black American soldiers in the Pisan Cantos possibly appealed to him, if his fascist loyalties did not. The Pisans also introduce Pound’s first engagement with the anthropologist Leo Frobenius and his legendary city of Wagadu (present-day Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso) – both mentioned in Libretto.19 These derivations from Crane and Pound mark Libretto as not only an occasional ode but an ambitious modernist “long poem.” The subject of Liberia is, after the first third of the poem, remarkably backgrounded. “Africa,” the larger subject, is really metonymic for the black race, both African and American. Tolson’s modernist long poem is nominally Liberian but emphatically American.

Edward Brunner writes that no poet in the 1950s “manipulated the conventions of the symphonic epic of high modernism as boldly, as shrewdly, and as exhaustively” as Tolson. But then he seems to take his praise away: Libretto, he says, appears “strangely old fashioned – about twenty-five years out of date.” Brunner’s 1950s, however, are an era of disengaged New Critical lyrics invested “in not wanting to consider” an alternative historical narrative.²⁰ With hindsight, of course, this is just half the story. In 1953, when Libretto was finally published, Pound was far from finishing his lifework and even farther from being accepted as canonical, or even sane. Williams published the first part of Paterson in 1946 and the fourth in 1951. Zukofsky was writing, but invisibly. Across the Atlantic, David Jones’s Anathémata appeared in 1952. The first bits of Charles Olson’s Maximus appeared in 1953, but H.D.’s Helen in Egypt not until 1961. Work by Ginsberg, Duncan, Berryman, Dorn, Snyder, and others all appeared after 1953. It was if anything an abundant period for the modernist long poem. But Brunner is correct: most lay in the future, and all outside the prevailing canon of acceptability.

Brunner goes on to say that few works besides Libretto “captured so fervently … the sense that a truly new beginning might be possible out of the ruins of Europe” (Cold War Poetry, 144). Tolson, writing a socially engaged poetry from the beginning of his career, responds directly to W.E.B. DuBois’s despair on the first page of his 1947 study of Africa: having long believed that Europe and North America represented “the best civilization which the world had ever known” with the promise of going on “from triumph to triumph until the perfect accomplishment was reached,” he wrote, “our present nervous breakdown, nameless fear, and often despair, comes from the sudden facing of this faith with calamity.” Tolson’s Libretto grandly rejects these fears and erects his Edward Bellamy-like Futurafrique upon the ruins of white colonialist power. The Afro-centric viewpoint of the poem enabled Tolson to focus, as Brunner observes, “not only on historical matters but on the question of what fails to get recorded in history” (152).21

Tolson, furthermore, sensitive to the architectonics of The Bridge, was capable of seeing the simple past-present-future template of the progress poem through Crane’s baroque laminations of metaphor. The first six sections of Libretto, named for the ascending scale DORE-MI-FA-SOL-LA, suggest a rising progress in the historical past, Liberian intertwined with American. TI, depicting the bewildering complexity of present issues, acts as leading tone to the inevitable tonic DO, where Tolson as prophet envisions millennial hope for a global Congress of rational nations building a future upon scientific and material progress.²² His global Congress is an uncanny refiguration of Joel Barlow’s at the end of The Columbiad. Tolson, in Keith D. Leonard’s words, “casts his poetic persona in the role of the American Jeremiah, a prophet called to identify how citizens of the United States are not living up to their ideals” (Fettered Genius, 219). These three segments of Libretto are roughly equal in length at two hundredplus lines each, but differently subdivided. Tolson’s poem, then, has roots in three major poetic genres: the pseudopindaric occasional ode, the modernist long poem, and the progress poem.

To begin, the past is given six short parts: four spotlighted moments of Liberian history and two of general comment. The topos of praise is continuous, but Tolson keeps darker realities present as well. The opening DO section uses the call-and-response format of oral cultures combined with highly troped and allusive language: Liberia is not this but that. While the ingenious metaphor of Liberian sparrow overtopping American eagle, with its Aesopian praise of the underdog, has received considerable comment, the unflattering alternatives have not, but they are recorded with full apophatic force: Liberia is called a sideshow freak, a corpse of the “dark continent,” an illiterate black man’s X. We are assured it is not – while the text places each negative on record. Even the positive points are questionable:

You are

Libertas flayed and naked by the road

To Jericho, for a people’s five score years

Of bones for manna, for balm an alien goad! (29–32)

The goddess Libertas, who always manages to make an appearance in progress poems, has been for the duration of this centennial victim of an “alien goad” in need of a Good Samaritan.

FA, the other generalizing section, is equally complex, blending symboliste imagery with simple allegory. Tolson has already identified Europe as “an empty python” (86), so we recognize the full-fed python in FA as Europe, with all its predatory colonialism; the eagle as America, with its hypocritical reverse-colonialism; and the Blakean tiger as Liberia itself, with its pent up energies and its power to choose good or evil. The threefold refrain, “in the interlude of peace,” points to python, eagle, and tiger, archetypal evils, well fed for the moment, tributes to the benign governance of President Tubman; but it suggests too that the more usual state of affairs is war (like the war recently ended). In keeping with Blake, Tolson’s imagery is full of moral ambiguity, the three creatures representing both predation and power. The “Bola boa” is identified with the serpent in the Garden of Eden (“mosaic” is a pun on Moses, traditional author of Genesis), instrument of humankind’s fall, but also the felix culpa of later theology. The eagle is a “pouched assassin” associated with piracy (“corsair”) and abducted slaves. But it has seized “the blood / red feathers of a cock” (132–3). The reference is obscure but, if I am correct, the red cock crowing in the new dawn was a motif of 1930s communist movements, the new dawn bringing in the new Marxist order.23 Tolson, presenting it as the bloodied prey of the American eagle, hints that President Tubman’s reforms were fully compliant with Western capitalist interests in the region. They had no whit of Marxist inflection (like those of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo only a few years later, summarily cut down by the CIA). But the Typhoon-Tyger (assuming that this third creature is Liberia itself) is endowed with Blakean energy via orthography and metonymy, flexing muscles of self-interest.

Four historical tableaux in the first part of the poem begin with RE, a sketch of the pre-Liberian Songhai Empire refracted through the lens of the “Good Gray Bard in Timbuktu.” Tolson (note to line 80) acknowledges only one source, W.E.B. DuBois’s The World and Africa (1947). DuBois’s account of Songhai is very brief (210–12), but both writers exhibit a successful African empire and an autonomous civilization with sustainable political and economic power and an educated class supported by universities: “Solomon in all his glory had no Oxford, / Alfred the Great no University of Sankoré” (79–80). DuBois declared the Songhai Empire the “greatest development of civilization in Africa, after Egypt,”24 and both he and Tolson take pains to parallel European developments. Tolson does not refer directly to the Songhai “Empire,” only “an imperial quilt of tribes.” It is a utopian artefact of nationhood that reached its zenith under Askia the Great, just lawgiver and contemporary of England’s Queen Elizabeth I:

Black Askia’s fetish was his people’s health;

The world his world, he gave the Bengal light

Of Books the Inn of Court in Songhai: Beba mzigo!

The law of empathy set the market price,

Scaled the word and deed: the gravel-blind saw

Deserts give up the ghost to green pastures.

Tolson’s quilt of allusion stitches together Askia’s African justice with England’s contemporary tradition of common law and Muslim learning from India, and shows all at work in the marketplace, where blind justice is “scaled” – that is, uses true scales, calibrated with musical precision – while the desert gives up the ghost to “green pastures.” The phrase “green pastures” in the last line has Judaeo-Christian resonance.²⁵ It is a place of racial harmony, home to both white scholar El-Akit and black humanist Bagayogo (83–4). But the fourfold refrain of the Good Gray Bard also traces the destruction of Songhai at the hands of both European and Asian, both Christian and Muslim foes:

And the locust Portuguese raped the maiden crops,

And the sirocco Spaniard razed the city-states;

And the leopard Saracen bolted his scimitar into

The jugular vein of Timbuktu; Dieu seul est grand!

Tolson’s “Good Gray Bard” brings to mind the quasi-oral American Whitman, but curiously, Tolson’s note deflects attention to the poet laureate of the British Empire, Tennyson. Both references are operative. Libretto toys with three Tennyson works – his 1839 student poem “Timbuctoo,” his utopian “Locksley Hall,” plus the imperialistic “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (see footnote 54).²⁶ Tolson presents Tennyson as the voice of British colonialism in a dispassionate modernist way, lacking postcolonial outrage and thus likely to disappoint some readers. Tolson’s main interest, I think, is to portray the poet’s purpose as the articulation, even the creation, of a nationalist vision. The same holds true of Tolson’s citations of Whitman’s “Passage to India,” and even Kipling, condemned in one place as the stinkbug who tries to peddle perfume in his “White Man’s Burden” (see above, 213–14).27 Libretto lines up these Western poets with the oral poets and griots of African tradition (line 168): Tolson’s ideal poetic voice is embedded in its culture, fully engaged, centripetal and Bakhtinian.

Tolson’s historical narrative is sketchy, and his notes are coy about sources,²⁸ but he concentrates on American entanglements. DO notes Liberia’s “mimic flag” (43) and slips in a tacit tribute to Ben Franklin, with his “lightning rod,” “rope,” and “key” (14–15). If Liberia is “a moment in the conscience of mankind” (56), that conscience is American and much in need of balm.²⁹ MI, SOL, and LA focus on the American conception of the African state and two of the original Americos – Elijah Johnson and Jehudi Ashmun. MI is the most circumstantial, dealing with the American founders amid the antebellum conflict of “Yankee capital” versus “the feudal glory of the South” (102): Tolson thus frames the conflict as broadly socio-economic (encompassing both Marxist interpretation and Southern lost cause apologetics), but the individuals raise the specific moral-political disputation into view. Frederick Douglass overwhelms the Copperheads, while abolitionists like Robert Finley, Bishop Meade, and Dr Charles Torrey (whose death occasioned Emerson’s great ode),³⁰ are pitted against – but also work cooperatively with – slave-holders like Bushrod Washington, son of the first president, and Francis Scott Key, lawyer and patriotic hymnist.³¹ Henry Clay, the pro-slavery apologist, desperately tries to hold America together. Liberia is born out of bitter divisions over slavery and race, and offers the mother nation both “a balm for conscience” (115) and a potential solution to its self-inflicted “dilemma” (144). Tolson omits detailing the wretched fate of those first “Black Pilgrim Fathers,” with their retracing of the Middle Passage in reverse, and jumps instead to the outcome of their venture more than one hundred years later, when Liberia played a crucial role combatting the Nazi incursion into North Africa. He ensures that the reader’s first view of Liberia in the poem is synoptic and positive.

Elijah Johnson in SOL brings his more successful pilgrim company to the African Promised Land two years later, in 1822. Tolson’s reference to “the horned American Dilemma” (143–4), together with his footnote, raise the controversy over Gunnar Myrdal’s massive and influential study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Myrdal’s work is sometimes depicted as though it were hostile to African American aspirations, but it was not: Myrdal provided documentary support for the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education, and it was greeted positively on the whole by black intellectuals, including W.E.B. DuBois, whose review hailed it as a “monumental and unrivalled study” (Review, 124). Others, however – including Ralph Ellison, DuBois’s protégé Herbert Aptheker, and Tolson’s colleague Oliver Cromwell Cox – mounted penetrating attacks. Ellison, the mildest of these, faulted Myrdal for leaving progress up to the moral reform of white Americans rather than demanding a systemic revolution that would create “a democracy in which the Negro will be free to define himself” (Shadow and Act, 304). Aptheker waged an uncompromising Marxism: the issue is “a material one, not a ‘moral’ one.” There is no dilemma for believers in “democracy and full rights for all people” (Negro People, 66). Cox, however, began from a fully nuanced critique of Myrdal’s argumentation and ended by producing a classic work in the field of sociology, Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948). Like Tolson, Cox thinks beyond the “Negro problem” to larger principles of social structure.32 In Tolson’s poem, all of this controversy lies compact in Myrdal’s word “dilemma” (and a meagre footnote), with the vexatious insinuation that African Americans somehow present a “dilemma” by their very existence.

The first half dozen tercets in SOL emphasize the reversed Middle Passage motif, but the focus soon shifts to issues of language. Johnson “flenses midnight” in the “whale’s belly.” Puzzled by this striking vocabulary, I tried to see Jonah in the picture; but no, Tolson seems to have picked up this precise word and its entire context from “The Monkey-Rope” chapter of Moby Dick. There Melville describes the Aboriginal Queequeg deep in the bowels of the submerged whale as its flesh is stripped, or “flensed,” kept from drowning only by a “monkey rope” held by the white Ishmael. Melville toys with this picture, white man and black like an Italian organ-boy and his monkey, but he sees past the racial insult to a deeper bond between the two, “so that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honour demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother … I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.” Melville’s allegory is consonant with Tolson’s picture of both the relation of Liberia to America and of the mutual interdependency of black and white peoples.

The passage goes on to introduce the concept of “cosmic deepitalki,” which Tolson glosses as “a secret language no white man understands” (footnote 163),33 and the phenomenon of gibbering tomtoms and Aboriginal griots, wise men or “living encyclopedias” (footnote 168).³⁴ Tolson’s Johnson re-enters the experience of oral culture, language and the culture embedded in it forming a material link between the quick and the dead, what “a man owes man to man” (169). The presence of the dead, of the cultural past, remaining alive in language is emphasized by the line “He hears the skulls plowed under cry.” Tolson’s note cites a poem by William Sharp (writing under his own name), “The Last Aboriginal,” but nothing like the phrase appears there – only a melancholy portrait of some future last Australian Aboriginal left alive. (Sharp’s poem was doubtless motivated by the grim predictions of racist social Darwinism.) The extended geographic compass suggests that Tolson is interested in oral cultures at large, not Liberian or African cultures exclusively.

The last fifty lines of this section are filled with proverbs that Tolson culled from a gigantic tome, Racial Proverbs: A Selection of the World’s Proverbs Arranged Linguistically, edited by Selwyn Gurney Champion. Neither Champion nor his Africanist contributor offers any conceptual understanding of this material, but though the passage in Libretto seems much too long, Tolson’s purposes are clear. As Michelle Toumayants notes, Tolson at one of his last readings devoted nearly ten minutes to reading and explicating these proverbs, “roughly fifty percent of the time he discussed the poem in its entirety” (“Poetic Proverbs,” 7). First, Tolson is combatting the notion articulated by French writer Eugène Guernier (1882–1973) that “l’Afrique n’a pas d’histoire.” Proverbs may be ahistorical; but, to Tolson, they preserve the verbal wisdom of the anonymous dead, so they are evidence of a living history. Second, they are wisdom of the folk, and thus counter the critics’ complaints about Tolson’s obscurity. Third, proverbs are poetry – self-contained, condensed packets of wisdom, pointed by trope, rhetorical balance, and auditory linkage – the poetry griots were expected to devise for their people. Last, they are specifically modernist poetry. “The Africans have their own avant garde in oral literature,” Tolson brags in note 168: they can be “esoteric,” capable of puzzling their listeners with “more than the seven ambiguities.” To finish, Tolson rounds off the section with Christian references – a saying of Jesus, which fits the proverbial matrix exactly, and an allusion to Yahweh’s Covenant with Noah, which Brunner’s notes underscore as a Cold War reference and a hope for future peace.35

In LA, Tolson turns to Johnson’s friend, the white religious idealist Jehudi Ashmun, whose exploits first crossed Tolson’s consciousness as a student at Lincoln University, which had been founded as the Ashmun Institute. Framed with images of geologic time, Ashmun, “a white man spined with dreams” (240), declares

“My Negro kinsmen,

America is my mother,

Liberia is my wife,

And Africa is my brother.” (251–4)

The circumstance of Ashmun’s white race makes a convenient bridge to the long and difficult TI section, which moves the poem into present time, where Tolson’s transracial position asserts itself most forcefully. To Brunner, the poem argues that “no one ethnic group has a particular claim on being oppressed or on oppressing others” (footnote to TI) – a formulation that Brunner feels obliged to label “controversial.” The vision of the poem extends far beyond Liberia (which is never even mentioned in TI), beyond the America of Jim Crow, to encompass all divisions of race, social class, and nationhood worldwide. Tolson in a surprise move disengages his view of present-day Liberia to focus on the postwar wreckage of Western civilization. There is no praise for President Tubman’s progressive administration, nor for the benefits of Firestone and the rubber industry, nor for any other narrow concern. Tolson’s present is keenly aware of the catastrophes of the recent war and growing Cold War conflicts but wraps them in the history of human destruction and victimization.

The language of TI is notoriously dense, but the basic theme is simple and the external structure lucid. A diagram is useful. There are thirteen stanzas in all.36 The first eight are governed by apostrophe, “O Calendar of the Century.” The prevailing trope is congeries, the Whitmanic catalogue, piling up exempla in a great heap; if Tolson’s expression is too obscure in one, the next is apt to suffice. In the tradition of postcolonial “Afro-pessimism” (Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 114), the wreckage is nearly overwhelming; but beginning at stanza 9 is a fourfold anaphora, “The Höhere of [blank’s] children / is beyond …” German Höhere is an adjective meaning “higher” or “greater” used here as a noun.³⁷ These stanzas mark a positive turn within TI. The final stanza forms a discursive conclusion. All but two stanzas are punctuated with “Selah,” an exclamation from the Psalms notoriously uncertain in meaning. (It is most often taken as an instruction for music or ritual activity.)

255	O Calendar of the Century ….	Selah
261	“Ecce homo!” ….	Selah
272	O Africa, Mother of Science ….	Selah
297	Elders of Agâ’s House ….	Selah
322	Between pavilions ….	Selah
347	Like some gray ghoul ….	Selah
365	O Age of Tartuffe ….	Selah
378	O East … O West ….	Selah
403	The Höhere of Gaea’s children / is beyond ….
413	The Höhere of God’s stepchildren / is beyond ….
424	The Höhere of X’s children / is beyond ….	Selah
439	The Höhere of one’s pores En Masse ….	Selah
462	Between Yesterday’s wars / now hot now cold ….	Selah

Tolson’s first three stanzas focus on Africa, but the republic given birth (256) is not just Liberia celebrating its centenary but the ideal republic of his imagination. It has a Capitol (263), which may be Rome, the “weeping widow Europe” (267), or Washington, or Monrovia. The “Great White World” is reduced to the status of mere “boy” (270). Tolson’s footnote cites a line from Coriolanus in which “boy” is an insult, but it is of course a common American racial slur: the Shakespearian usage renders it transracial. The apostrophe to Africa as “Mother of Science” carries a note of odic praise, with reminders of geologic antiquity in Gondwanaland (277) and the site of fossil human origins. Throughout the poem, languages carry their own burden of significance apart from their content: thus “lachen mit yastchekes” (274) is Yiddish, summoning the recent holocaust as well as the translation in the footnote, “laughing with needles being stuck in you; ghetto laughter.” It enters the grand catalogue of human suffering in the poem. Likewise, Africa may have been elbowed into social retardation, but the Old English elbolga identifies the colonialist culprit. If this section begins by focusing on Africa, it ends with a metonymic litany of cultural confluence, appropriation and assimilation: “Jordan flows into the Tiber, / the Yangtze into the Thames, / the Ganges into the Mississippi, the Niger / into the Seine” (287–90).

Stanzas 4, 5, and 6 develop this theme with shifts of focus. Stanza 4 attaches the victimization within cultures to class divisions:

All cultures crawl

walk hard

fall,

flout

under classes under

Lout,

enmesh in ethos, in masôreth, the poet’s flesh,

intone the Mass of the class as the requiem of the mass. (304–11)

Significantly, Tolson attaches this cultural elitism to elitism in poetics as well: “Let Brahmin pens kill / Everyman the Goat” (316–17). Stanza 5 attacks the military state, whether “by crossbow, harquebus, cannon, or Pegasus bomb” (325). While conscious of the ideological conflicts of the recent war, Tolson does not forget how intermeshed they are with historic class conflicts: “Before hammer and sickle or swastika, two / worlds existed: the Many, the Few. / They sat at Delos’, at Vienna’s, at Yalta’s, ado” (341–3). Stanza 5 abstracts the failures of all ideologies to the root cause in human greed, “old Profit, the bald rake paseq, wipes the bar, / polishes the goblet vanity, / leers at the tigress Avarice” (348–50), as they careen apocalyptically to some disastrous end, where “Marx, the exalter, would not know his East” nor “Christ, the Leveler, His West” (361–3). The references to East and West may arise from the journalistic shorthand for communist versus capitalist, but they take us back to Kipling as well, whose “Ballad of East and West” was described by DuBois in The World and Africa as the “epitaph” of European civilization, the “uncounted cost of property, life, and youth” come to an end with “the use of atomic energy” (14–5).

Stanzas 7 and 8 sum up in general terms. It is an “Age of Tartuffe” (365), of moral hypocrisy, and Tolson appeals to Rochester’s sweeping “Satire against Mankind” with its ridicule of the human pretense to reason, and in the next stanza to Albert Camus. Camus’s essay “The Artist as Witness of Freedom” justifies the function of the artist in a world devastated by war. The artist, he argues, can say “in all peace of mind that he is no man’s mortal enemy” (534). The essay recalls M. Desfourneau (sic), official executioner for the French government, who threatened to go on strike. The government has since, says Camus, “substituted the rubber stamp for the axe” (535).

The four stanzas that depict “the Höhere of Gaea’s children” turn the argument suddenly – and not unproblematically – to the positive. Tolson heaps up another congeries of human failures that “the Höhere,” the higher part of humanity, must transcend. The list in stanza 9 is a set of miscellaneous metonymies: rejected are Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les sens” – which may stand for a denial of empirical understanding, or rational understanding, or (as Brunner suggests) artistic understanding detached from social engagement.38 Rejected are gold, the “seeking of cows” (i.e., theft), apartheid, Sisyphus’s despond (existential futility, with another glance at Camus), and so on. Stanza 10 focuses more narrowly on modernist negations to be left behind – “das Diktat der Menschenverachtung, / la muerte sobre el esqueleto de la nada.” Stanza 11 seems to focus on positives turned negative – the “maggot democracy” of government, the “filets d’Arachné” of overly subtle art (425–6). “The Orizaba with its Bridge of Sighs” refers to both the failed ideals of the Treaty of Versailles and the “failure” of Hart Crane,³⁹ who leapt to his death from the same ship fourteen years later. Stanza 12 reiterates the egalitarian vision of all the world’s peoples “En Masse” (439) – the phrase inevitably evoking Whitman’s all-encompassing worldview. East and West, once seen by Kipling as eternally divided, are in fact as necessary to each other’s existence as conjoined twins:

O East, O West,

On tenotomy bent,

Chang’s tissue is

Eng’s ligament!

Selah!

One difficulty in these stanzas goes back to the exact meaning of Tolson’s “Höhere.” I glossed it with deliberate ambiguity as “the higher part of humanity.” If Tolson is referring to the higher human faculties of reason and compassion, he may be on safe ground. But his word could also refer to some kind of elite – an upper class, a meritocracy of the intelligent, or even a cadre of efficient government overseers. These options would violate principles affirmed elsewhere in Tolson’s writings – but they are troublesome and not ruled out in these passages.40

The final DO begins with sixty-six lines of recapitulation, eleven six-line stanzas in rough accentual hexameter, the densest and knottiest writing in the poem. They act as a dissonant appoggiatura resolved in the final triumphant tonic triad. The focus shifts back to Africa – with its allusion to the Frobenius-Fox African Genesis (491) and its “O Africa” apostrophe (496) – but remains preoccupied with discovering hope in the postwar wreckage. Since the chief difficulty is detecting the argument amid the welter of detail, I venture a reductive stanza-by-stanza paraphrase: (1) Tolson begins with images of drought (as seccas), disgust, and female infertility if not necrophilia – “the old she-fox,” “hole in a privy,” the “taschunt [vagina] a corpse’s,” “mummy truths.” (2) He reviews the futility of previous Western efforts – the aria of a son-of-a-bitch (“old sookin-sin”), fame that “didn’t outlast a night,” ten British pounds to feed the poor. (3) He notes the universal rule of money and (4) the peril of pure chicanery. (5) He notes the failure of wise leaders – Lincoln, Whitman – to destroy injustice, colonialism, with enlightenment. (6) He notes the efforts of “naïfs” to discover a universal language in music, or in mathematics, or in Esperanto or Volapuk. (7) He affirms evidence of the equality of persons – human pretenses to majesty dwarfed by the biological bond of the “solo espasmo sexual” or the moral bond of the golden rule – all destroyed in war over “a few acres of snow.” (8) He lists the small things that lead to graver consequences – “pin-pricks precede blitzkriegs,” “a cromwell’s pike” dishonors a skull, and (9) the end of seeming greatness in death and oblivion. He ends (10) with images of ultimate destruction – hurricane winds, “the walls come tumblin’ down,” the “seven trumpets” of Apocalypse, and (11) a desolation where “no mourners go crying,” civilization nothing but a “mountain of rodinsmashedstatues.”⁴¹

The following transitional twenty lines sum up the destructive panorama of the poem using the conventional “ubi sunt” topos of mutability – “Where is the glory of the mestizo Pharaoh?” Included in Tolson’s litany is an equation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf with the work of ninth-century Muslim scholar Al-Jahiz, which argued “the superiority of the black race over the white” (footnote 567): neither extreme is acceptable. (Let it be recorded, however, that Al-Jahiz never advocated genocide.) But this section also turns emphatically to “Tomorrow” and the crucial final section of DO,42 its hymn to “Futurafrique.”

This section, which Tate disparaged even while admitting it is written with “great energy,” reads with relative ease, with the clarity of enlightenment after the opacity that went before. There are twenty-six verse paragraphs, each an impossibly long-breathed single sentence: seven are marked with the phrase “The Futurafrique,” four with “The United Nations Limited,” three with “The Bula Matadi,” and three with “Le Premier des Noirs,” all summed up in nine marked “The Parliament of African Peoples.” The first four markers turn out to be the futuristic names of an automobile, a train, a ship, and an airplane. Geographically, the vision begins in Liberia, with references to place names, then widens to Africa as a whole, then encompasses the globe, with emphasis on American places. This hope placed in the United Nations (recently established in 1945) and W.E.B. DuBois’s future African Parliament maintains the radical prophecy of a world congress under American leadership depicted a century and a half earlier by Joel Barlow in the last book of The Columbiad. It is a millennial future of reason, cultural cooperation, and peace.⁴³

Tolson’s language is no less allusive than before, but it is now wry and playful rather than intense. “Futurafrique” as the name of a car is funny and perhaps even mocks President Tubman’s weakness for lavish living. But as Tolson endows Monrovia with a non-existent automobile factory and a subway, he also sees an unlikely monument to Parsifal-Feirefiz – commemorating an episode in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s saga in which the Aryan grail seeker recognizes a black man as his brother. He equates a Tubman University, blooming with co-eds (a nod to women’s education), with truth-giving Mount Sinai. Medical advances are remembered in the footnotes to “70A” and “Swynnerton,” and even the ultra-hygienic “soapy” Waldorf-Astorias. The future will be “atom-fuelled.” Leaving behind “the bygone habitat of / mumbo-jumbo” (629–30), Africa will take its place beside the other continents, “the sunflower magnificence of the / Oriens,” “the snowlily” white Europa (612–15), the Auster and the Americus.

Subsequent paragraphs expand upon these themes. The train, the United Nations Limited, “volts over” the yesterday of empire builders of all races, the Zulu Chaka, the Pharaoh Cheops, the British colonialists Stanley and Livingstone, the racially persecuted Seretse Khama.44 The “diesel-engined” Bula Matadi carries a cargo from Tel Aviv (in newly founded Israel), from Hiroshima (risen from the nuclear ashes), and even from the deep South of Picayune, Mississippi. Le Premier des Noirs – named after the black Haitian leader Toussaint L’Ouverture who claimed equality with the white Napoleon – flies over Monrovia’s “glass skyscrapers on / pavonine Cape Mesurado” and the now “iron cur-/tainless Kremlin” (using the phrase just put into currency by Churchill in 1946).

The Parliament of African Peoples is, of course, intercontinental as well, with an emphatic American accent. Tolson reminds us of Bunker Hill, of Lincoln University’s Ashmun Institute (renamed “Ashmun International House”); he alludes to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and to Poetry magazine’s populist motto (paraphrased from Whitman) “To have great poets there must be great audiences too” (721–2); he affirms President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (739). He decries the current red-baiting (“cicerones of the / witch hunt under the aegis of / Flag and Cross”) and upholds Marx (“unto each / according as any one has need”) (745–6). Communist and capitalist peacefully co-exist in the Cameroon People’s Republic and the United States of Outer Ubangi (753–5). He supplants the self-abasing elements of religion, both Christian (“the zymotic zombie / cult of God’s wounds”) and Muslim (“the fetid fetish Zu’lkadah”) with the optimistic “Kiowa anthem” translated “All is Well” (724–9). The closing lines wrap up Tolson’s Libretto with a flourish of echoes.

Tolson’s unlikely vision in this poem, an optimistic American patriotism that rejects the deeply ingrained binary of race, is a moral and cultural as well as artistic achievement. If it is trans-racial, it is also wishfully post-racial, a nation where a spectrum of complexions is merely ornamental, a future Afmerica that fulfills Joel Barlow’s prediction of a place where darker races will evolve to “a fairer tint” while whites gain “a ruddier hue and deeper shade” (Columbiad 2.120ff). It has taken half a century for Tolson’s few readers to grasp. Timothy Dejong puts it in affective terms: Tolson’s poem offers an “unfashionable hope,” he writes – hope that is not only “out of fashion” but “unable to be fashioned” (“Affect and Diaspora,” 124), underscoring the wishful thinking of his millennial fantasy. Libretto offers “an optimism that persists despite Tolson’s refusal to overlook or mitigate the past injustices borne by and in Liberia (and by extension, the African continent)” (111). And by extension in the American nation. His is not “the false ‘to be or not to be a Negro’” choice imposed on him by so many critics, both white and black. In Keith D. Leonard’s formulation: “Tolson’s art makes his complex formalism simultaneously an extension of an unacknowledged African past, a revision of the known Western past, and a prophecy of a quasi-socialist revolution, a unification of presumed opposites that produces the biggest, baddest African American self in African American poetry” (Fettered Genius 203).