3

Langston’s Adventures in the Dark

I am here to remind you that the Negro’s position as outcast is his most powerful human driving force, a force which hurls him forward towards a wider horizon that is more universal, more just, towards a horizon for which all honorable men are struggling today.

—Nicolás Guillén

Regardless of their affiliation to the right, left, or center, groups have fallen back on the idea of cultural nationalism, on the over integrated conceptions of culture which present immutable, ethnic differences as an absolute break in the histories and experiences of “black” and “white” people. Against this choice stands another, more difficult option: the theorization of creolisation, metisssage, mestizaje, and hybridity. From the viewpoint of ethnic absolutism, this would be a litany of pollution and impurity.

—Paul Gilroy

In naming the ethics and aesthetics of Langston Hughes’s attempt to paint the complexity of the interracial and intercultural engagements that establish both so-called Western humanism and the many embodied resistances to its most vulgar ideological structures, I would state again that the promise of modern subjectivity was established not only by capitalists in New York, London, or Madrid, nor by their cultured compatriots and apologists in the sheltered enclaves of Cambridge, New Haven, or Salamanca, but also by the multiethnic, multilingual crews—and cargoes—of the ships that attempted the Middle Passage. There can never be an unsoiled articulation of human subjectivity. There can never be an announcement of who we are that does not stumble upon the staccato rhythms of (mis)understanding and (mis)calculation that are perhaps the most consistent legacies of humanist articulations of modernity. It is in this sense that Paul Gilroy’s lovely and strangely compelling phrase, “litany of pollution and impurity,” catches in my imagination as I find myself confronted with the question of whether it is possible to produce innovative work around race, slavery, colonization, and cosmopolitanism while also continuing to privilege “clean” modes of intellectual inquiry. The theorization of creolization and mestizaje, the imagination of the profundity of the Atlantic, is by necessity a dirty affair, one that forces intellectuals to recalibrate their methods and methodologies in order to gain access to those locations that have been excluded (one is wont to say excreted) by the over-integrated conceptions of culture that both Gilroy and Guillén bemoan.

Here I will repeat Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the anthropophorous animal, that being not yet become a subject that supports Man’s various world-making projects; that (non)individual whose negation acts as the central and most cherished, if often least acknowledged, procedure within the systems of mastery that form humanism. It is this only partially articulated subject whose presence I am attempting to acknowledge and illuminate in these pages. In doing so, I have become increasingly frustrated with not so much the limitations as the hostilities that structure the so-called humanities and human sciences. Given the brutality and clumsiness that typify many institutionalized modes of intellectual inquiry, modes encapsulated within ethically frail disciplines, we may have gone as far as we can with traditional considerations of the lives and creations of conventionally established intellectuals, black or otherwise. The project of Black Studies is disabled from the outset precisely to the extent that it is built upon the celebration of a well-groomed transatlantic black cosmopolitanism capable of keeping company with calcified traditions of elite American and European culture. Slaves, soldiers, emigrants, refugees, and migrant laborers, all figures whom I read as Man bearers, are woefully underrepresented in our most cherished intellectual endeavors, largely due to the fact that our disciplines have only a limited ability to recognize the modes of their articulation. As a consequence, the unchecked desire to establish what we might think of as biographical certainty around the most celebrated of modern intellectuals, the will in the cases of Federico García Lorca and Langston Hughes to master and destroy the undisciplined matter of their never quite fully articulated sexualities, their ill-fitting flesh, is itself built upon a determination to establish and celebrate an intellectual/ideological inevitability, the very thing one confronts at the locked gates of some grand institution of higher learning while waiting impatiently for an undergraduate with enough hospitality and temerity to turn the lock.

The personnel with whom we must concern ourselves were often defeated. They existed—and exist—at those locations thought to be outside society. They were benighted. They were dirty and impure. They were never more eloquent than when they were bartering their own flesh, their own human potential. Part of what we have to ask ourselves as progressive critics, then, is whether we are as committed to giving up on heroic intellectual and cultural narratives as we claim to be. To do so involves not simply throwing out old-fashioned concepts of distinction and peculiarity but also jettisoning the very celebratory notions that have fueled so much within our work. These gummy, clumsy sentences are at best improvisational. We do not know where we are going. We have no clear idea of what lies ahead. The focal point of all black intellectuals, all modern intellectuals, all intellectuals, dispersed as we are in the void of diaspora, must ever remain on the possibilities inherent in divination, interpretation, translation, misunderstanding, and misprision. Albert Memmi asks, “Is it certain that this language which stammers today is unable to develop and become rich?”1 More important still, does an eloquence established by capriciousness and bloodlust not grate on the ear?

Mon-nee

In the summer of 1923, a twenty-one-year-old Langston Hughes arrived off the west coast of Africa as part of the multinational crew of the S.S. Malone. He soon found himself at Sekondi, the Gold Coast port town established by the Dutch in 1640 in order to service the ships that carried cloth, jewelry, cooking pots, and guns to the Asante. They then reversed direction, bearing precious minerals, timber, and slaves to Europe and the Americas. Bored and rambunctious, Hughes and his shipmates found that Sekondi continued its traffic in gold, rubber, and timber, even as it had stopped the exportation of slaves. This did not mean, however, that the town had fully given up its traffic in human flesh. Hughes describes a brisk business in prostitution, the majority of whose practitioners were quite young, quite small, sometimes prepubescent girls with “bushy hair” and “henna’d nails,” to whom hungry sailors were directed by African boys claiming that the girls were their sisters, boys who patiently waited for their clients outside the girls’ huts, or slept on floor mats beside the coupling pair if the seaman had the inclination and the money to spend the night.

Though at least two generations of critics, including both Jay Saunders Redding and Arnold Rampersad, claim that Hughes is surprisingly guarded in his two autobiographies, I would counter that his description of the young prostitutes of Sekondi is relentless.2 “In front of one hut three white sailors from a British ship were bargaining with an old woman,” he writes. “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” (Hughes, The Big Sea, 119). You will forgive me for pointing out that the logic of the sailors was impeccable. The value of small African girls in what we cynically call the open market has never been high. And perhaps more to the point, there continues to be some confusion about what is actually being bought and sold. Even Hughes seems to wonder about the claim of the girl’s virginity. In the racialist logics that underwrite so much within modern culture and thought, to place the words “black” and “virgin” against one another would seem at best oxymoronic, at worst ridiculous. What most titillates, however, what piques the interest of Hughes’s readers, is the suggestion that something much more valuable, more discrete, than sex was being sold at Sekondi, something that ultimately could not be either properly measured—or named.

Hughes tells us that during the night, as the ship remained anchored off the coast, two girls, petite ladies of the evening, rowed a small boat out to the Malone. One of them was taken by the “bo’sun” to his private cabin. The other was left in the quarters of the crew to quench the desire, the modern wanting that continues to be so very difficult either to acknowledge or articulate.

She lay there naked and held up her hands. The girl said: “Mon-nee!” but nobody had any money.

Thirty men crowded around, mostly in their underwear, sat up on bunks, watched, smoked, yelled, and joked, and waited for their turn. Each time a man would rise, the little African girl on the floor would say: “Mon-nee! Mon-nee!” But nobody had a cent, yet they wouldn’t let her get up. Finally, I couldn’t bear to hear her crying: “Mon-nee!” anymore, so I went to bed. But the festival went on all night. (Hughes, The Big Sea, 108)

What I want to resist in my reading of this passage is reiteration of wholly stale critical procedures. Yes, Hughes describes the sexual abuse, the rape, of a child. Yes, that abuse is facilitated by both misogyny and white supremacy. Yes, the scene is not only homosocial, but decidedly homoerotic, the tension and thrill of the moment maintained not only by the splayed nakedness of the girl, but also by the sailors themselves, their underwear, anticipation, and sweat working together to achieve the tumescence of transnational passion. Still, as I have stated repeatedly, I am unconcerned in these pages with established fact, the so-called known world. Instead, I would suggest that we read the sailors’ actions—and the girl’s for that matter—as a sort of vulgar, if profoundly effective, critical practice.

It would be easy to turn away from the girl’s nakedness, to retreat from the obscenity attaching itself to the child’s flesh in order to find some means by which to seal the ideological tear this image produces. Indeed, there are many humanist practices that allow for the nonconsideration of the black, the female, the colonized, and the enslaved. Within the range of images Hughes gives us—the sexual predation of men, the systematic exploitation of Africans, the easy consumption of children—one finds no method by which to imagine a life for a female child outside the bowels of a ship traveling the Atlantic. She remains on that floor, in that boat, her presence distorted and pathetic, yet the actual ideological structures that support all this remain clean.

Though Hughes never bothers to say so, it is obvious that what haunts this scene is the specter of the Middle Passage. The multiracial crew, the naked African girl were lost together atop the aloofness and depth of the Atlantic, their revelry a type of theater, a ritualized evocation of a never quite palpable certainty. Like the believer who calms his fretfulness through the wearing of crosses or the fingering of beads, what the crew attacks is both much more and much less than a dark-skinned African girl hungry for money. Instead, what they attempt to defeat is the sense of possibility that she represents, that spectacular and elusive virgin animality that might leave both men and cultures forever adrift. They press her down, moor and anchor her just as their predecessors carved their bows into images of half-naked women, wooden breasts providing proof of a life, a culture, a past greater than the ocean’s unnamed mystery.

Humanism’s greatest achievement has been the vicious tethering of flesh to a dream of transcendent Manhood. Our judgment of Hughes ought to turn, therefore, on an assessment of how clearly he notes this fact. I want not simply to deploy well-established liberal critical modes in which the point is to name the unceasing oppression of females and people of color, wring one’s hands a bit, then retreat once more to the real work. Instead, I will make the simple point that the monuments to culture and civilization that dully hang in overpriced museums or sit dusty and unread in underutilized libraries are not, in fact, primary locations for the articulation of human being. On the contrary, we must focus first on those nodal points, those archives, that exist outside—and in contestation of—already calcified precincts of high or traditional culture, thereby allowing for the flexibility and mobility necessary for the constant innovation that is presumably the hallmark of modernity.

I will acknowledge, then, that the image of Langston Hughes as pícaro, as a peripatetic, disinterested traveler willing to leave a young girl alone to confront—and accommodate—her many tortures, marks him not only as an unethical, even vulgar, figure, but perhaps as a sad intellectual as well. Like Lot’s wife, the artist who turns his head away from the rough, the loutish, and the rude risks becoming inert, dull, useless in the face of the many pressing tasks confronting contemporary thinkers. Much of the spirit of Archives of Flesh is drawn from the belief that one must do one’s analyses on the run, make room for unexpected encounters with the marginalized, the restricted, and the repressed in order to recognize that Western humanism is built upon complex and contradictory assemblies in which capitalism and white supremacy are subverted, however haphazardly, by the grubbiest, most benighted examples of animal ingenuity and will.

By way of forgiving Hughes, I celebrate not only his willingness to treat images of tortured and abused “low” women so capably, but also his deft use of farce and slapstick in his explorations of humanism’s grimy underbelly. Returning from his voyage on the Malone, Hughes carried with him a large red monkey named Jocko. Deciding to make the best of the situation, Hughes’s stepfather presented the animal at a local pool hall. Arriving with hair combed and sporting a fetching sweater, Jocko was placed in the middle of one of the tables so that the crowd could examine the beast with pleasure.

Dad put him down on the green pool table, holding him by a long leash. But the noise and the people and the smoke and the shouting were too much for Jocko, surrounded on the table by the crowd. He uttered a yell of fright and began to run frantically back and forth on the pool table as far as his leash would permit. The crowd roared with laughter, and the ring of dark faces closed in on poor Jocko, closer and closer, frightening him so badly that suddenly he could no longer control himself, and without warning his bowels began to move all over the table. (Hughes, The Big Sea, 136–37)

The ape, finding himself molested by an eager crowd of assailants/onlookers/interlocutors, quite logically shits. He expresses, extracts, moves, and articulates. Indeed Jocko’s communications are only a whisper less articulate than those of the young prostitute pressed to the floor in the bowels of the S.S. Malone. Trapped in a situation that cannily replicated the theatrical procedures of the slave auction, the minstrel show, and the human zoos that had gone out of vogue in Europe and the United States scarcely a generation before his American unveiling, Jocko names the substance and quality of the U.S. encounter with Africa and Europe without so much as managing a single articulate twitch from his inelegant tongue.

I have made this detour through the absurd and the rude in order to remind my readers that images of prostitutes and other presumably defiled and defeated women do not simply demonstrate how poorly understood these benighted figures are in narratives of modernity and Western humanism. Nor is the point to remark the fact that the clear distinction between Man and beast is quite seriously troubled when one takes account of the intricacies of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Instead I argue that it is the vulgarity, the ape-like “ugliness” of the prostitute, that allows her to demonstrate with often stunning clarity the many unspoken lived realities of the most absurd aspects of humanist ideology. Or to retreat to the vernacular, Hughes’s female characters literally “talk shit.”

Prostitutes stand not at the periphery of modern society, but at its dead center. They personify the complex interplay between bright fantasies of solidly established tradition and the dark, sullen acceptance of human ignorance. I mean to offer the figure of the prostitute as the marker of a complex process by which dominant conceptions of human value are continually established through spectacular displays of violence and repression. The policing of so-called profligate, abnormal sexual exchange has as much to do with the denial of the most vulgar aspects of the ritualized defeat of human animality as with any real concern to name and relieve misery. The buying and selling of women and girls is not a demonstration of that which exceeds humanist discourse, but instead one of the clearest articulations of the methods by which the unscripted potential of the flesh can be noted, confronted, corralled, and exploited.

As a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, Hughes tells of the mandatory blackouts in Madrid as fascist rebels, greatly aided by the Germans and Italians, bombed the city, using any visible light to direct their shells. Undeterred, the madrileña prostitutes, their houses deprived of electricity, would take to the streets around the Puerta del Sol, particularly the block behind Madrid’s only skyscraper, the Telefónica. There, in the dark, they plied their trade to hundreds of waiting soldiers, many of them members of the international brigades that had come to defend the liberty, if not always the chastity, of Republican Spain.

The darkness up and down the street would be pinpointed by the tiny flames of dozens and dozens of matches being lighted by soldiers to peer into the faces of the prostitutes walking in the dark. The black-out canyon of the street danced with little flames of hope, burning briefly, then flung to the ground as some young soldier, lighting a match at the sound of a seductive voice, found himself peering into a broken-down witch’s face.3

What I would point to here is not the rather open and untidy secret of the centuries-long and quite often officially sanctioned relationship between soldiers and prostitutes. Moreover, I hope that it is obvious that I am unlikely to blush when faced with the fact that sex is frequently the currency of international travel and tourism. I am struck, however, by how careful Hughes is in his framing of this scene. The continual reference to light and dark, the tiny flames that inhabit but never fill the “black-out” canyon, even the occasional explosion of an artillery shell, giving “a sudden burst of light, enough for a soldier to see a woman clearly, and perhaps pick out a partner for his needs,” repeats the desperate yet barely acknowledged struggle of modern subjects with the most basic, most obvious truths of history and humanity. I am stunned that Hughes is able to move so effortlessly in his two autobiographies from images of African girls being raped aboard ships to prostitutes plying their trade in unlit gloom. Both images detail the invisibility of the social and cultural interaction that mark so much within humanism. Taking full advantage of the dark and dirty images displayed in his texts, Hughes points simultaneously toward the violent articulation of Manhood and the repression of anthropophorous animality while suggesting a process existing in the dark at/in which the conventions of domination and aggression might be held in abeyance.

If I might be allowed to venture so far as to announce the tragedy of this scene, I would suggest that what defeats the promise of shared humanity is, in fact, the light. The bombs and matches hide much more than they reveal. They turn the simplest of our sins and pleasures, the animal coupling of women with men, toward an ideological complexity that has proven repeatedly to be deadly, more than capable of extinguishing both light and dark. Marx warns us that “the social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past.”4 I would add here that one of the more profoundly enervating of these superstitions is our irrational fear of the dark, a fear established, I would argue, on the assumption of both unknown dangers and pleasures. As with these scenes of prostitutes at Sekondi and Madrid, the continual struggle to transcend and transform the Man bearer seems compelled by a will to destroy awareness of human animality while never fully losing contact with it. We search in the dark for those not yet tamed aspects of our humanity, those rare moments in which the rigors of Manhood, the harshness of the blazing light, might be ever so slightly relaxed.

Hughes punctuates the previous passage by telling us that the young women of Madrid breathlessly gave themselves to their lovers in anticipation of the city’s imminent defeat by Franco’s forces, only to be counted as whores when the promised fall did not come. He also relates the rumor that the rebels’ shock troops, “dark” North African Muslims, “Moors,” who stand so solidly in the Spanish “national” imagination, had been promised their pick of the Castilian women should the city be defeated. “IMAGINE,” said the madrileños, “that rebel Franco bringing Mohammedans to Spain to fight Christians! The Crusaders would turn over in their graves” (Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 349). What seems obvious here is that it is quite difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate disgust from desire. Should an off-white hand reach toward the raven-haired beauty of his beloved, he would find himself touching the very embodiment of delinquency and defeat. And even more importantly, had the benighted Spaniards—radicals, liberals, and conservatives alike—allowed themselves to relinquish hold on their desperate fantasies of European belonging, that ever-elusive promise of whiteness, in order to reconcile with the African, the Mohammedan, the dark, Spain might have been spared the killing, the poverty, the shame, and retribution that continue to grip both it and the continent to which it so tenuously clings. What it seems that Republican Spaniards did, however, was hedge their bets. They decided to mask their own cynicism, their own implication in the relentless violence of an always unstable Manhood against an ill-defined human animality. Women are raped and sold as cattle there by the Mohammedans. Here we do nothing more than create remarkably beautiful lamentations of the fact.

Come now, all you who are singers,

And sing me the song of Spain.

Sing it simply that I might understand.

What is the song of Spain?

Flamenco is the song of Spain:

Gypsies, guitars, dancing

Death and love and heartbreak

To a heel tap and a swirl of fingers

On three strings.

Flamenco is the song of Spain.

I do not understand.

Toros are the song of Spain:

The bellowing bull, the red cape,

A sword thrust, a horn tip,

The torn suit of satin and gold,

Blood on the sand

Is the song of Spain.

I do not understand.

Pintura is the song of Spain:

Goya, Velasquez, Murillo,

Splash of color on canvass,

Whirl of cherub-faces.

La Maja Desnuda’s

The song of Spain.

What’s that?

Don Quixote! España!

Aquel rincón de la Mancha de

Cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme . . . .

That’s the song of Spain.

You wouldn’t kid me, would you?

A bombing plane’s

The song of Spain.

Bullets like rain’s

The song of Spain

Poison gas is Spain

A knife in the back

And its terror and pain is Spain.

Toros, flamenco, paintings, books—

Not Spain.

The people are Spain:

The people beneath that bombing plane

With its wings of gold for which I pay—

I, a worker, letting my labor pile

Up millions for bombs to kill a child—

I bought those bombs for Spain!

Workers made those bombs for a Fascist Spain!

Will I make them again, and yet again?5

Hughes runs through many of the most precious images of Spain and the Spanish people: flamenco, Gypsies, guitars, the bellowing bull, the red cape, Goya, Velázquez, Murillo, Don Quixote are all represented. Yet the very breathlessness of his verse belies the idea of a clearly discernible “song of Spain.” The contrapuntal pacing, the give and take between the ever-persistent questioner and his increasingly hesitant interlocutor, leads one to imagine a certain skepticism regarding Spain’s reality. (“What’s that?” “I do not understand.”) There is what one might call a conceptual flat-footedness on display in the poem, an inability to register the piece’s romantic imagery. Finally we are left with the certainty that the officially sanctioned markers of Spanish culture, “Toros, flamenco, paintings, books,” are, in fact, “not Spain.” Instead, Hughes turns toward the people, resolving the ideological conflict that I take the poem to represent in favor of the lived reality of modern individuals.

If you have followed my arguments thus far, you will understand that those bombs bursting above Spanish heads are themselves not only part of a desperate attempt to disrupt and delay the inevitable dispersal and rejection of even the most cherished aspects of so-called traditional cultures, but also precise examples of the central modes of modern cultural articulation. The effect for Hughes’s readers is that they have their attention abruptly turned from monumental examples of Spanish culture and toward the vigorous attack and violation of “animalized” humanity that forms such an essential, if so rigorously ignored, part of Western humanism. Fascism has never been solely a collection of ideologies or stunningly efficient procedures of violence, but instead the unacknowledged inter-articulation of profound brutishness with the most carefully and delicately packaged objects of national culture and patrimony.

It is telling that Hughes returns repeatedly to the image of bombs bursting overhead in his attempt to examine the discursive and ideological structures that gird both modern forms of exploitation and the never fully articulate resistance to that exploitation. Bombing imagery appears in “Air Raid: Barcelona,” “Moonlight in Valencia: Civil War,” “Madrid,” “Shall the Good Go Down?,” and “Stalingrad: 1942.” More interesting still, Hughes’s use of this trope is not restricted to those several poems that treat conflicts in Spain and Europe more generally. In “August 19th . . . A Poem for Clarence Norris,” an elegy for one of the black teenagers convicted of rape and sentenced to be electrocuted in the infamous Scottsboro case, Hughes describes the dreadfulness of the exploding bomb in order to relate the horrific miscarriages of justice that Norris and many other African Americans suffered to the global oppression of working and poor people.6 “Stop all the leeches / That use their power to strangle / Hope, / That make of the law a lyncher’s / Rope, / That drop their bombs on China / And Spain, / That have no pity for hunger or / Pain.”7

Following Hughes, one imagines that the first and still most potent word established in the “Atlantic vocabulary” was “mon-nee,” that our cultural practices have been produced between the very teeth of capitalist exploitation. It seems to me, then, that the time has come for us to stretch the central conceits of Black Studies to their very limits. It is true that our enslaved ancestors formed new modes of relation and belief from out of the detritus of their lost traditions. What remains largely unspoken, however, is the simple fact that modern forms of European culture were also established by the history of contact, conquest, colonization, and travel to which we attach many names, most notoriously “the Middle Passage.” Or, to push my readers beyond the boundaries of polite irritation, the celebrated objects of Goya, Velázquez, Murillo, Cervantes, Picasso, and Lorca are themselves examples of slave culture, cleverly wrought articulations of complex procedures by which the repression and exploitation of humanity are at once ritualized and ignored. Turning again to this work’s main conceptual conceits, we would be well advised to locate our criticism not within disciplinary structures that work to name and celebrate Man’s many splendors, nor at sites of official—and expected—dissent, but instead at those locations, those archives, where the obvious repression of the anthropophorous animal, the flesh, is most apparent. Thus the slave, the sailor, the black, and the prostitute are key figures in the disloyal and discontented critical project that I have launched, because their modes of unheralded articulation get as close as anything to unveiling the complexity of Western humanism’s many obscurantist discursive structures.

Before leaving this matter, I would like to return to the point that I made in both the introduction and the first chapter about the fact that the African American interest in the plight of Republican Spain pivoted on the assumption that the fight against fascist aggression there was but a continuation of the fight against fascist aggression on the African continent, particularly the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini’s forces in 1935. I would state again that part of why I find the connection between Africans, Americans, and Spaniards so compelling has to do with the reality that the transatlantic discursive and intellectual interchange between modern Spaniards and African Americans represents at its core an attempt to restructure received notions of geographic and cultural distinction. As I demonstrate throughout this book, progressive Spaniards and African Americans have been central to the efforts to disrupt the sophistry underwriting the idea of a white Europe and a black Africa. I would add that intellectuals like Hughes and Lorca struggled to resist the lie that there is some clear distinction between the most vicious aspects of slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy and a sort of preciously maintained official culture. A strike for or against the Spanish people was for Hughes and the community of intellectuals whom I take him to represent never simply a local event. As we have seen, their attempts to assist Spain were indistinct from their efforts to redeem Ethiopia.

In “Too Much of Race,” Hughes tells us, “Those who have already practiced bombing the little villages of Ethiopia now bomb Guernica and Madrid. The same Fascists who forced Italian peasants to fight in Africa now force African Moors to fight in Europe. They do not care about color when they can use you for profits or for war.”8 The point, of course, is to name the fact that the structures of global capitalism—of which slavery and colonialism are but the most obvious—are maintained, at least in part, by a sort of discursive sleight of hand by which the practitioners of economic and military aggression easily recognize their similarity, while those whom they exploit often come to fetishize what they take to be inherent and insurmountable differences of race, religion, and ethnicity. Thus, though I have some sympathy for Arnold Rampersad’s suggestion that Hughes’s several treatments of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia could be seen to vacillate equally between racialist or “Africanist” modes and more genuinely internationalist forms, I nonetheless continue to believe that Hughes never accepted the notion of (black) African primitivism or provincialism. Instead, I read Hughes generically, arguing that his fretful stance in relation to Ethiopia is itself evidence of his struggle to advance a universalist (post)humanist critique in which Africans and Africanity are central.

The little fox is still.

The dogs of war have made their kill.

Addis Ababa

Across the headlines all year long.

Ethiopia—

Tragi-song for the news reels.

Haile

With his slaves, his dusky wiles,

His second-hand planes like a child’s.

But he has not gas—so he cannot last.

Poor little joker with no poison gas!

Thus his people may learn

How Il Duce makes butter from an empty churn

To butter the bread

(If bread there be)

Of civilization’s misery.9

The strange, uncivilized thing about this poem, “Broadcast on Ethiopia,” is that Hughes seems altogether unwilling to allow a heroic conception of Ethiopia. It is precisely not a tragic, benighted location, perfect in its simplicity and refinement, with an emperor of whom all children of the African diaspora might rightly be proud. Instead, nearly forty years before Selassie’s overthrow in 1974, Hughes created a decidedly unflattering picture of the presumably beloved leader. He is drawn as an ineffective personage, one with slaves and “dusky wiles,” whose war and statecraft seem at once vain and childish. Instead, as I maintain throughout this chapter, Hughes places his hope on the innately adaptive qualities of “the anthropophorous,” Ethiopian and Italian alike. They stretch beyond both the limitations of their natal communities and the rigid discursive structures separating Man from human. In the process they do not necessarily conquer misery, but at the very least they come to understand the tricks, discursive and otherwise, that maintain men like Il Duce and Ras Tafari in their undeserved positions of power.

Hughes made these same ethical and aesthetic protocols brilliantly clear when he related the details of his rupture with his erstwhile patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. Mason, like many of her generation, was self-conscious about what she took to be the excesses of modern society, excesses that presumably worked to produce a certain spiritual and cultural rootlessness among contemporary Americans and Europeans. She decided, therefore, to commit her considerable wealth to supporting and developing primitive and aboriginal art forms, chiefly those produced by Plains Indians and African Americans, including a number of the most famous personnel of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, especially Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke. “She wanted me to be primitive and know and feel the intuitions of the primitive,” Hughes writes.

But, unfortunately, I did not feel the rhythms of the primitive surging through me, and so I could not live and write as though I did. I was only an American Negro—who had loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa—but I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem. And I was not what she wanted me to be. So, in the end it all came back very near to the old impasse of white and Negro again, white and Negro—as do most relationships in America. (Hughes, The Big Sea, 325)

At the risk of overreaching myself, I will argue that the structure of the relationship that Mason wanted from Hughes was exactly the structure of the relationships that British and American sailors wanted with adolescent prostitutes on the coast of West Africa. What Mason desired, like many before and after her, was that the African American creative intellectual deny that his creations were, in fact, produced through work—not inspiration, not soul, not some bestial essence, but work. She insists upon a particularly American class of aesthetic solipsism. The (black) laborer’s struggle, perseverance, and exhaustion can never be seen for what they are, but instead only as inspiration, spirit, and soul. Viewed in this light, even a black individual with Hughes’s remarkable talents can be seen as a resource, one whose suffering exists primarily as the evocation of universal forms of knowing that might be discerned and fretted over but never properly challenged.

Recognizing this fact might hopefully help you to understand why I have been so concerned in this chapter to make plain the laboring of prostitutes. Much of the drudgery of the trade is that, as with captive Africans forced to dance and sing onboard ships, one must toil without ever seeming to do so. The same can be said of all manner of African and American laborers. As Frantz Fanon reminds us, the colonizer desires that the slave be “full of enthusiasm,” never remarking in his or her comportment awareness of any exploitation.10 One of Hughes’s great mistakes, then, was that he forgot to take heed of the truism among colonized and exploited persons that revealing one’s awareness of the basic structures of domination, bringing into the light evidence of abuse and resistance to abuse, evidence of things unseen, can be a dangerous and even deadly gambit.

I cannot write here about that last half-hour in the big bright drawing-room high above Park Avenue. That beautiful room, that had been so full of light and help and understanding for me, suddenly became like a trap closing in, faster and faster, the room darker and darker, until the light went out with a sudden crash in the dark. (Hughes, The Big Sea, 325)

Hughes’s mistake in his relationship with Mason was not so much that he inadvertently forced her to return him to the hold with the rest of the captives, but instead that he forgot that the light and beauty of that room above Park Avenue were designed specifically to divert attention from the reality that he was, in fact, in custody. He had come to inhabit just a bit too fully the naïve primitivism that Mason required of him, never daring to see that once he began to question the exploitation that underwrote Mason’s patronage, she would be forced to return him to the pens.

There is ample evidence to support the assumption that Mason began to tire of Hughes when she started to suspect that he was capable of producing not only evocations of folk consciousness but also rather caustic and piercing critiques of the very modern class pyramid on top of which she so ostentatiously perched. In December 1931, at the height of the Depression, Hughes published his bitterly sarcastic “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria.”

black mob from Harlem. Drop in at the Waldorf this

afternoon for tea. Stay to dinner. Give Park Avenue a

lot of darkie color—free for nothing! Ask the Junior

Leaguers to sing a spiritual for you. They probably

know ’em better than you do—and their lips won’t be

so chapped with cold after they step out of their closed

cars in the undercover driveways.

Hallelujah! Undercover driveways!

Ma soul’s a witness for de Waldorf-Astoria!

(A thousand nigger section-hands keep the roadbeds smooth,

so investments in railroads pay ladies with diamond

necklaces staring at Sert murals.)

Thank God A-mighty!

(And a million niggers bend their backs on rubber planta-

tions, for rich behinds to ride on thick tires to the

Theatre Guild tonight.)

Ma soul’s a witness!

(And here we stand, shivering in the cold, in Harlem.)

Glory be to God—

De Waldorf-Astoria’s open!11

Naïvely, and perhaps lulled into recklessness by the midwinter light cascading over the Manhattan skyline, Hughes presented this angry, relentlessly dark poem to his patron in order to solicit her opinion. Her response, as she sat framed by windows overlooking Park Avenue amidst a richly tasteful riot of furniture and art, was to tell her protégé that the work was more propaganda than poetry. Soon thereafter, reiterating her disappointment at the gloomy turn in her talented young charge’s practice, she excused Hughes, a last check in hand, from her stable of favorites.

The rejection by Mason was to prove a decisive moment in Hughes’s development as an intellectual. It was only then that he was forced to acknowledge fully the true relationship of art and culture to society. He was compelled to act upon the belief that art ought not to represent an escape from the realities of class and race exploitation, but, on the contrary, should attempt to make plain the discursive and ideological contradictions that this exploitation produces. Hughes articulates new modes of cultural analysis, new archives, for his various audiences. He tells us that after he was driven from Mason’s presence, “poetry became bread; prose, shelter and raiment.” Literature became not that which was goodness and light but instead “a big sea full of many fish” (Hughes, The Big Sea, 335). As a still developing and increasingly radical intellectual, Hughes began to understand that his experiments with literature rightly and necessarily continued the very muddling and risk taking that had been enacted by both enslaved Africans and their captors as they made the journey between the presumably old world and the supposedly new.

If my own reading of Langston Hughes has been celebratory or hagiographic, it is because I am intrigued by the many ways he risked, and perhaps courted, the mistrust of readers and patrons alike. Of necessity we have had to learn the syntax of glossolalia, the art of speaking in tongues. At the same time, however, I do not want my comments to be understood as simply a celebration of the ambiguous or the uncertain. Though I claim no particular allegiance to Africa, Europe, or America, I nonetheless boldly announce the ascendancy of those of us who have been outcast, displaced, shunned, and exiled. I claim, in fact, that Hughes’s much-heralded embrace of Hispanic culture was motivated not only by a sort of black wanderlust, but also a deeper acknowledgment of the necessity of breaking and syncopating the rhythms of humanist discourse.

In the days of the broken cubes of Picasso

And in the days of the broken songs of young men

A little too drunk to sing

And the young women

A little too unsure of love to love—

I met on the boulevards of Paris

An African from Senegal.

God

Knows why the French

Amuse themselves bringing to Paris

Negroes from Senegal.

It’s the old game of the boss and the bossed,

Boss and the bossed,

amused

and

amusing,

worked and working,

Behind the cubes of black and white,

black and white,

black and white

But since it is the old game

For fun

They give him the three old prostitutes of

France—

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—

And all three of ’em sick

In spite of the tax to the government

And the doctors

And the Marseillaise

Of course, the young African from Senegal

Carries back from Paris

A little more disease

To spread among the black girls in the palm huts.

disease—

From light to darkness

disease—

From the boss to the bossed

disease—

From the game of black and white

disease

From the city of the broken cubes of Picasso

d

i

s

e

a

s

e.12

It is difficult for me to understand why this sophisticated and self-consciously modernistic poem of Hughes’s, “Cubes,” has received so little attention by his many critics, biographers, and translators. Apart from Seth Moglen’s excellent 2002 treatment of the work, there has been scant critical attention paid to it.13 This is though the text possesses many of the elements for which Hughes is rightly famous: travel, concern for the poor and working classes, sensitivity to both Latin and African cultures, and most importantly for our efforts here, fascination with the play of light and dark. Hughes deploys not only his signature free verse style, but also an extremely evocative graphic representation of movement between and across cultures. The separation of the word “disease” into its composite parts, those seven (lucky?) letters, demonstrates an author not simply attempting to relate the dispersal of pestilence, but also and importantly to reach, however awkwardly, toward a new language that might help him to name what must have been infinitely apparent as he encountered his black African doppelgänger on one of the lovely boulevards in the City of Light.14 What the two undoubtedly knew but could not easily speak was the old game of “boss and the bossed, amused and amusing, worked and working.” They looked into the manufactured faces of slavers and colonizers alike and found them lacking. For this crime, legions of women and men have fallen under gun and whip, knife and prod. Many others have found their most cherished labors reviled, or worse yet, ignored.

It seems, then, that there were but few avenues open for this radical man of letters. He had to turn toward the vulgarities that one might utter in the dark, toward the whispered, muted forms of discourse that might allow a brown-skinned poet to recognize and plainly name even the much-celebrated Western maidens Liberty, Equality, Fraternity as little more than diseased prostitutes. This, however, was no easy gambit, for as is evident in “Cubes” itself, one of the most durable tenets of white supremacy is that the black, the aboriginal, the Arab, the Asian, is already the very marker of vulgarity, the sign of cultural and ideological infection. Worse yet, all too often these agents of illness and disorder seem to lack even the good sense to keep quiet about these well-known, if not easily or properly spoken, facts. As with Hughes, the most inelegant among them seem ever ready to proclaim in their clumsy, thick-lipped manner the most inconvenient of truths. They continue to resist magnanimously proffered integration into the precincts of respectability, to lurk about the dusky edges even as their erstwhile masters invite them to play in the light.

Struck Deep in Spanish Earth

I assume that my readers are fully aware of the controversy that attended Arnold Rampersad’s publication in 1986 and 1988 of his two-volume biography of Langston Hughes, in which he claimed that there was no evidence in the archive to support the widely shared belief that Hughes was homosexual. I hope, moreover, that the resonance of this controversy with the equally fraught matter of how to address Federico García Lorca’s sexuality is apparent. The debates surrounding Rampersad’s claims were still circulating as late as 2002, when the second editions of his two biographies were released.15 I might add that on the several occasions in which I have presented excerpts from this chapter, I have been asked, no matter the purported content of my presentation, whether I possess some knowledge that might satisfy a choking desire to know “was he” or “wasn’t he.” In the face of all this, I have begun to suspect that we remain far too comforted by the assumption that no matter the complexity of the questions that we confront in our cultural studies, these might ultimately be resolved through reference to biography. We have been sold the idea that one might truly know a man through the detritus that he leaves in his wake. Here I will remind you of the arguments I made in the first chapter regarding the highly politicized nature of our archival practices. The point of all that collecting and cataloging is never just the revelation of some undisputed truth, but also the need to support commonsensical conceptions of culture, politics, and identity. In the case of Hughes, we might assume that we have gotten hold of him, taken his measure, once we have properly consumed the whispers and rumors that always precede his many arrivals. I hope that it is obvious, moreover, that this tendency to assume intimate knowledge of Hughes translates the regimentation, or leveling, of the modern homosexual against which García Lorca so vigorously struggled in his short, brilliant career. What most irritates me, however, about the procedures that I am attempting to describe is that they so precisely replicate the structures of repression, denial, and counter-articulation that I have argued stand at the center of humanist aesthetic processes and that are in such desperate need of reformation.

“If I see Mr. Hughes I’ll recognize him right away, because I have his characteristics. He is a forty or forty-five year old, fairly thick, almost white skinned man, with a little English moustache decorating fine, ‘bitter’ lips.”16 With these words, Nicolás Guillén, the famed Afro-Cuban poet and one of Hughes’s closest allies in the Hispanic world, initiated not only his introduction of Hughes to the Cuban public but also a rather wry critique of the forms of studied expectation and gossip that accompany the transnational intellectual on his journeys.

In fact: when Mr. Hughes appeared we were met by a small, thin twenty-seven year old youth of light brown trigueño color who did not have an English moustache, nor one in the style of any other nation. He just seemed a Cuban mulatito, one of those inconsequential mulattoes pursuing some course of study at the National University who spend their lives organizing small, intimate parties at two pesos per ticket. However, behind this lives one of the spirits most sincerely interested in the things of the black race and a very personable poet without any other concern than to observe his people, to translate it, to come to know and to love it. (Guillén, “Conversación con Langston Hughes,” 172–75, translation mine)

The stress here is on translation, or more precisely on the assumptions that one must conquer—or at the very least massage—in the course of translation. The “black” poet whom Guillén eagerly awaited in Havana had to be reconciled with the racial codes of his host nation. Hughes was one of the most celebrated, most regularly translated American poets in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world. But as Vera Kutzinski has quite convincingly argued, the very fact that Hughes is often taken to have a simple or innocent conception of the intricacies of African, American, and Atlantic aesthetic and iterative practices has allowed him to be translated in ways that might properly be described as flattened in an effort to create him as a useable and consumable product. In his most translated poem, “I, Too,” first published in Survey Graphic in 1925, Hughes boldly articulates the realities of racism and white supremacy as they existed—and exist—in the United States:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And I eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

When one reads the 1926 translation by José Antonio Fernández de Castro, a prominent and politically progressive editor of Cuba’s El Diario, one finds that the work has undergone rather profound changes in order to address a different set of social and racial mores in early twentieth-century Cuba. The first stanza reads:

Yo también, honro a América

Soy el hermano negro

Me mandan a comer a la cocina

Cuando vienen visitas

Pero me río,

Como bien

Y así me fortalezco.

Without belaboring the point, one is struck by Kutzinski’s rather insightful observation that part of what takes place in de Castro’s translation is that he makes the work more instead of less “racial.”17 That is to say, de Castro renders the speaker of the poem “black” (negro) instead of “dark,” gesturing toward the fact that in Cuba, also a white supremacist and color-conscious country, but one with nothing like the strict division of “black” and “white” persons that existed in the United States, the notion of sending someone from a formal meal simply because he had, as Americans might say, suffered a touch of the tar brush would have seemed a bit preposterous.

More generically, I would stress the fact that what both Guillén and de Castro negotiate as they present Hughes in the pages of El Diario are the very racialist ideological structures that undergird the articulation of Western humanism. In order to enter into public discourse, in order to be recognized, one must negotiate the knotty questions surrounding one’s flesh and how it might be properly narrated, packaged, and readied for use in the maintenance of humanism’s operative assumptions. In the Atlantic world in which Hughes traveled, this meant that the body’s specificities were “neutralized” through reference to shockingly clumsy racial protocols. Writing to his friend and patron Noel Sullivan during a 1934 trip to Mexico to attend to his recently deceased father’s estate, Hughes reported that he had been detained at the Mexican border because his entrance permit did not state that he was colored. After a weekend of waiting and the payment of a seventy-five-dollar bond, the papers were finally marked “mestizo,” and Hughes was allowed to continue his journey.18 The indecisiveness of the flesh had been conquered. Approach the fortified frontiers of Europe or America wearing a dark-skinned, kinky-haired body, and one provokes an uncanny stress. The question of whether or not the thing toeing its way toward the gate is wild or tame must always be broached, if never exactly settled.

I would point out yet again that one of the things that Hughes was continually forced to confront in his career was the assumption on the part of “foreign” and domestic audiences alike that they knew—or at least should know—his characteristics. Like the prostitute whose face must first be examined in the weak light of a recently struck match, Hughes’s suspect flesh had always to be checked for defect. Note the foreign journalist’s card issued to Hughes by the Spanish Ministry of State on July 30, 1937, upon his arrival in the country to report on the civil war (see figure 3.1). Featuring a handsome photo of a thirty-five-year-old Hughes, it reads:

What is so thrilling about this particular piece of ephemera in the Hughes archive is how powerfully the images and the language resonate with the efforts of African Americans, particularly African American men, to be recognized as modern subjects (New Negroes) following the close of slavery. As with black soldiers eagerly participating in the Spanish-American War, the document reminds us that the only proper relation of the (primitive) subject to the state is one of regimentation. To be a man, one must be known as a man. The official language utilized in Hughes’s press card does nothing to obscure the ideological/ontological transformation that awaits Hughes on the borders of Republican Spain. He approaches the country as a figure (figura) in need of inscription onto one of the official registries of state power, the Registro de Periodistas Extranjeros (Registry of Foreign Journalists). Moreover, the card suggests no particular interest in Hughes’s personal data, ignoring his age, weight, date of birth, and country of origin, but putting great emphasis on the several journals that supported his transfer to—and transformation within—Spain. Like the African American soldiers fighting as part of the international brigades, Hughes’s status in the country is indistinguishable from the documentation that surrounds him. That the card is marked “provisional” needs no comment.

Figure 3.1. Langston Hughes’s Spanish press card, dated July 30, 1937. Langston Hughes Papers, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

I make these points because they help us focus on the will to represent human subjectivity that has roots deep in practices of enslavement whereby African subjectivity was reduced to marks in ledgers, practices that have been continued in state-sponsored identification/articulation protocols whose disciplinary features become extremely—and violently—apparent when “wild” anthropophorous subjects find themselves incapable of fitting within rigid norms. Those of us who are interested in the work of Langston Hughes are much less bothered by the fact that he might have been homosexual than by the equally vexing reality that his considerable archive remains so sloppily ineloquent on the topic. Hughes’s actual biography, a biography that demonstrates remarkable flexibility and willingness to recalibrate his personality, indeed literally to translate himself, tends not to support the calcified protocols and long-established conventions available to us for the assessment of modern individuals.

Tellingly, the basic strategies with which we narrate the life of Langston Hughes are taken largely from Carl Van Vechten’s introduction to Hughes’s first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926). Even as Hughes’s work was translated into the Spanish language and his personage was introduced into Spanish contexts, there remained a certain “Van Vechtian” formality in the ways that the young poet might be approached. One of the first extensive treatments of Hughes in the Spanish language came in the March 1930 issue of Revista de la Habana. It reads in part:

L.H. had lived in more than twelve locales in both his mother country and abroad, including Mexico City, Kansas, Buffalo, Colorado, Topeka, Cleveland, Chicago, etc. After graduating from high school he worked as a messenger and a farm laborer. He returned to Mexico. He was then a student at Columbia University. He fled from the university. Enlisting as a sailor, living like the men of the rivers and the seas, on the Hudson, the Atlantic, in the Canary Islands, on the western coast of Africa. Suggestive names captivated his ear and were always engraved on his spirit: Dakar, Burutu, Azores, the Afortunadas, the Bay of Luanda, Calabar, Lagos, the Belgian Congo. . . . He returns to New York and to the sea again: Holland, Paris, arriving with seven dollars in his pocket where his first desire was to leisurely visit the Louvre and the theater of the Opera. . . . Door man in a night club of Montmartre. Second cook in a restaurant frequented by tourists. . . . In Venice his money and passport were stolen from him. He became absolutely destitute. In Genoa: obligatory fights with the “black shirts.” Wine, figs, and pasta. He enlists again as a sailor. Naples from a distance. Sicily, the islands of Lipari. And Spain. “Divine Spain.” Valencia and again New York. The year 1924. In a public dance he meets the same night that he arrives his great introducer to the world: Van Vechten.19

Of course, anyone who had read Van Vechten’s earlier introduction would have recognized that this essay, penned again by José Fernández de Castro, owed much to the earlier efforts of Hughes’s friend and patron. Moreover, Hughes himself would later rehearse many of these details in his two autobiographies. Even more importantly, however, one begins to see that Hughes, even and especially as he detoured toward Havana and the Spanish language, had to negotiate the fact that his celebrity was supported by a well-established, even traditional edifice of words and images. In his efforts to (re)produce himself, to come to voice, he seemingly had become the very embodiment of the picaresque character who has fascinated generations of readers ever since the introduction of Cervantes’s Quixote. At the same time, however, if Hughes wanted to do something more with his art than simply reiterate commonsense notions of the artist as adventurer or outsider, he had to create counterstrategies, a corrosive vocabulary that might allow him to find a voice strong enough to rise above the cacophony of fantasies and projections in which he found himself immersed.

I sense now that the moment has arrived for me to beg your forbearance. In order to continue the somewhat experimental and hopefully dialogical conceits of this book, I must admit that I am in trouble here, confused, stuck, and just a bit frightened. Thus far I have written a largely celebratory assessment of Hughes, gladly discovering along the way that treating him as an internationalist and a Hispanophile helps to deliver him from the trash heap of surprisingly dull, infinitely respectable writers to whom brown-skinned children of my generation were directed as they prepared their much-anticipated Easter Sunday orations. But there is another Hughes who lurks about these pages, one whom I find myself avoiding like some friend or lover with whom things have gone inexplicably sour. There is the Hughes of the Jesse B. Semple stories, which I still find decidedly simple. There is Hughes the hack, writing librettos and poetry at a breakneck pace in order to pay the mortgage on his Harlem brownstone. And more difficult still, there is the Hughes who seemed to cower and capitulate as he was summoned before the U.S. Senate during the height of the anticommunist hysteria for which the United States has yet to atone; the Hughes who thereafter studiously avoided being linked to radical individuals and organizations, including the great W. E. B. Du Bois, lest he find himself incapable of making a living. Finally, there is my self-conjured image of Hughes as a man who freed himself from the primitivism of Charlotte Osgood Mason only to “submit” to the equally stifling, if perhaps somewhat more discreet, primitivism established and policed by editors and “publics” on both sides of the Atlantic.

I was led to this bit of dismal self-awareness by the pointed questioning directed at me when I presented an earlier version of the previous chapter in an infinitely comfortable room on a sprawling campus in the state where I was born. The most rigorous of my questioners, a woman of sharp intellect and ready laughter, noted that at the end of that chapter I seemed to retreat from my generally positive assessment of Federico García Lorca. She heard a certain irritation in my tone as I remarked Lorca’s “inability” to understand fully the masking practices of the African Americans whom he encountered during his trip to the United States in 1929. I wonder now what she would make of my tortured admission that, quiet as it’s kept, I sometimes also find Hughes irritating.

In my own defense—and Hughes’s, for that matter—I would counter that though I clearly understand Hughes as a progressive writer, one whose experiments with politics and aesthetics I readily celebrate, I nonetheless remain cognizant of the fact that both art and politics are created in relation to real and imagined publics. Thus, my efforts in this chapter and throughout Archives of Flesh are designed to complicate our understanding of the discursive universes to which we belong. Most specifically, I have attempted to remain ever cognizant that captive Africans, starved and sweating in the dark of the Middle Passage, self-consciously, forcefully, and irremediably shaped the discursive landscapes that modern-day intellectuals inhabit. I have claimed repeatedly that the denial of this fact has been maintained not only through laughably simple procedures of logic, but also through the most sophisticated forms of violence evident in the formal practices of Western humanism. That we do not have the benefit of a full knowledge of the languages that our enslaved forebears created in order to imagine a world that might include you and me does not in any way suggest that these languages do not, in fact, have a profound impact on our everyday discursive practices.

If the critical and cultural work of progressive intellectuals is to have any real weight, it will necessarily have to court processes of defamiliarization that might allow us to imagine and mimic the much more difficult and serious work of chained Africans, establishing and asserting new forms of identity, society, and culture in the heat and stink of slavery’s pit. It is key that we begin to treat the sense of being out of place that many of us confront as not simply some horror to be bemoaned, but instead as one of the structuring—and generative—realities underwriting the most potentially productive of our efforts. “I am here to remind you that the Negro’s position as outcast is his most powerful human driving force, a force which hurls him forward towards a wider horizon that is more universal, more just, towards a horizon for which all honorable men are struggling today.” We must not only accept but also provoke the irritation that I have just admitted having. We must remain ever wary of triumphant, celebratory, and therapeutic modes of criticism if we are to remain truly committed to moving beyond the horizon, past the littoral.

Predictably enough, we remain befuddled and uncertain. What we have gained from Hughes, however, is a renewed sense of the stakes involved in our attempts to direct the course of our travels. He has taught us the trick of how one might admit to one’s genius and yet survive long enough to teach others something of the strangely (un)certain rhythms of an artistic and intellectual practice still in the process of naming itself. Moreover, he has boldly entreated us to allow our clumsy tongues to taste the sweetness and uncertainty of “strange” languages and “foreign” cultures. He dared to weep for whites trapped beneath the beautifully iridescent bombs of a trembling Spain. He touched Africa with his right hand and Europe with his left and declared himself at home in the world. He reminded us that our sufferings—and our joys—are not ours alone, but the planet’s. More bravely still, he whispered to us an impossible promise: within the veil of our dark ignorance, our black history, we will find the unnamed land, the unknown victory for which we have produced so many misunderstood songs.

Proud banner of death,

I see them waving

There against the sky

Struck deep in Spanish earth

Where your dark bodies lie

Inert and helpless—

So they think

Who do not know

That from your death

New life will grow.

For there are those who cannot see

The mighty roots of liberty

Push upward in the dark

To burst in flame—

A million stars—

And one your name:

Man

Who fell in Spanish earth:

Human seed

For freedom’s birth.20