Stranger in His Own Land

Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander (autobiography)

That's Maya Angelou with Langston, not sure when.

Langston may have been related to Henry Clay; in any case, his grandfathers were white Kentuckians.

He might have been gay; he might not have been. His biographer, Arnold Rampersad says not.  I only mention this point of little or no interest because I for one find in his poems an extraordinary balancing of rage and compassion, revulsion and desire.  I don't doubt that his complexity cut through the core of his being, right through to matters of greatest intimacy, His tenderness toward working-class African Americans, his mixture of anger and indifference toward white society--though not toward particular white persons, many of whom were his friends and patrons--create a poetic voice that is unique among Harlem Renaissance poets and American poets generally.

Langston was extraordinarily forthright in his judgments and observations of other people, as likely to laugh at (white) human folly as to weep, able to see irony and absurdity, but not one to write as if the world were full of moral ambiguity.  It wasn't. Isn't.

When Langston and his various companions traveled--in the South, in Cuba, in Haiti, in the USSR--Langston was neither a straightforward recorder of impressions nor a magisterial self reducing the world to fit his preconceptions. Rather he looked as a poet looks, finding the telling detail, taking each person as a unique part of a much broader experience. He then made poems or stories out of what he witnessed, adding to his observations the rich context of a perennial outsider, one who would have belonged to his country had he been permitted to do so.  Poets, I believe, can never belong to any place.  This is probably a false view and easily contradicted, but having just finished I Wonder As I Wander it feels right.

Langston, in my reading, was only marginally interested in communist, though he was hauled before Joseph McCarthy's HUAC and forced to answer ridiculous questions about his politics.  Communism for African-Americans like Hughes was as much an escape from the suffocating bigotry of Jim Crow as it was an economic or social system.  As Langston himself put it, he was an artist first and foremost, little drawn to the nitty-gritty of ideology or political work.  Nonetheless, he was a radical in every sense. Had McCarthy known the half of it, his head might have exploded.

I can hardly believe I have not before now read this autobiography. It's an engrossing volume, a kind of adventure story welded to the sensibility of a born poet. Like Whitman, whom he superficially resembles, Langston had a preternatural ability to locate and describe the significance of every moment.  In his triumphant poetry-reading tour of the Jim Crow South, made in the depths of the Depression, he shakes his head rather than his fist at the arcane social contortions white southerners engaged in to insure their insulation from the likes of Langston Hughes.

One strange anecdote takes place at a train station in Savannah.  Langston enters the Whites Only waiting room to purchase the Sunday New York Times (a newspaper, by the way, that was no friend of the African Americans in the 1930's), but a white policeman forbids his egress from the White Waiting Room through the Whites Only doorway; baffled by the absurdity of not being permitted to use a door (in which he is even then standing), Langston has to laugh at a system so witless and foolish as to enforce rules whose goal was to render an entire population invisible.

I've also been reading E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and marveling yet again at Forster's brilliant portrayal, in understated language, of the impact of racism on both its victims and perpetrators.  Nothing could be more absurd than the parcel of unconsidered generalizations about "Orientals" that burden nearly every white English person in Forster's classic story.  Aside from the remarkable Fielding (who is absurd as well, but at least he has the good sense to know it) no normal human intercourse is possible between a white person and an Indian.  The consequences of this blindness are, of course, tragic.   Indians, Hindu and Muslim, and Sikhs alike are made strangers in their own country by the overweening British.

And we Americans are exactly like them, eager to renounce tolerance and compassion, forever willing to narrow our world with walls.  The gift of fiction and poetry is to allow us to see how blind we have been and to help us to find a way to the door that is marked "human beings." Just that.

George Ovitt (11/30/2019)