Langston Hughes was a writer in the time of great racial segregation in America. He was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright and columnist who spoke for Negros. He was well-known due to his great variety of works, which were full of compassion and passion for African American’s rights. He not only spoke for black people, but also spoke with them. He traveled around the world to Europe and Africa. He was the first African American writer that made a living from writing. He is famous and inspiring even until now.
One of the most famous stories by Langston Hughes is “Salvation,” which is in his autobiography, The Big Sea. By telling the story “Salvation,” Langston Hughes expressed his true feeling of God. When his aunt took him to a big revival, it was a chance for him to see God and to be saved by God. In two sentences, he mocked about this incident and gave out his real expression: “I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved”. Revival, also known as a “Spiritual Awakening”, is an activity in church to renew the faith of people in God. In this story, the thirteen-year-old boy believed that he “could see and hear and feel God in his soul,” as his elders always told him. He was sitting there, in the middle of a hot, crowded church to wait for a light, for something happening inside him. Unfortunately, nothing happened. All the other kids, “who have not been brought to Jesus”, already got up from the mourner’s bench and went to the platform. There was a last kid, named Wesley, with him. Tired of sitting there, Wesley finally decided to get up to the platform, even though he hadn’t seen God. The preacher kept moaning, shouting and singing a rhythmical sermon to call him. His aunt knelt at his knees and cried. A great amount of old people knelt, prayed, and sang around him. He started to wonder why God hasn’t struck Wesley dead, for lying in temple. He felt ashamed of himself for making all these troubles, so he decided to lie too. He got up and went to the platform to be saved by God. The whole room was broken down as he rose. In the evening, he cried and couldn’t stop, for the Jesus had not come and saved him that day. Since then, he didn’t believe there was a Jesus anymore (Hughes).
Langston Hughes was born in 1902 and he was a mix race of African American, White American and Native American. His parents split up when he was two years old. He spent most of his childhood with his grandmother in Kansas. His grandmother was one of the first women to attend Oberlin College. She was well-educated, and always believed in equal rights regardless of race. She taught him black American traditions, and gave him a sense of racial pride. She reminded him that his ancestors had fought against slavery, and always believed in man’s freedom. Even though his family was poor, he was aware of his distinguished background and it had a profound effect upon his sense of identity (Walker and Rampersad). In his autobiography, Hughes said that he was lonely and unhappy during that time in Kansas. That's why he “began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books” (Hughes). When he was twelve years old, his grandma passed away, and he had to live with a friend of the family while his mom traveled to look for job.
When he finally moved in with his mother and step-father, he attended a mostly white high school in Lincoln, Illinois. Even though there were a lot of nice teachers, there was one that always picked on him. He felt isolated, rejected and insecure from that time of his life. That was a time of overwhelming racism and segregation. Colored people couldn’t vote, drink from the water fountain, or stay in certain hotel. All the alienation he felt at this time was reflected in his works later. During the time in Illinois, his mother encouraged him to explore the library, reading books, writing poems and watching plays. He fell in love with them. From those first loves, he built up a basic knowledge for his career in the future. The white student body assumed black people like him had rhythm and chose him as Class Poet (Hughes). This started him down the poetry writing path. In 1916, he moved to Cleveland and attended a high school there. “He wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays” (PoemHunter.com).
After graduating from high school in Cleveland, Langston Hughes moved to Mexico to be with his father. His father had left him early in his life, to run to Mexico, seeking to escape the fractious racism in the United States. Hughes had a difficult relationship with his father. Aside from having been separated for a long period of time, his father did not support his desire to be a writer. He only agreed to help Langston get into college for an engineering career. They also conflicted about their point of view: "I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much” (PoemHunter.com). He attended Columbia University and studied engineering, as his father wished. He left school two years later, because of the racial violence that he faced in college. He worked several jobs before he left the U.S to travel to West Africa and Europe. He had traveled and seen the world with the eyes of a black man and an artist, exploring the meaning of life. In 1926, he published an essay in the very prestigious Nationmagazine. “The Negro Artist on the Racial Mountain” stands as a kind of manifesto for the Harlem Renaissance (Walker and Rampersad).
Religion was always an important part in Hughes’s life, as well as many other black people’s lives. Faith for God among the African American community was a way for them to cope with the violent racial repression at that time. Hughes’s family wasn’t an exception. He had been raised to believe in Jesus and love the Holy Ghost. However, since the incident of Salvation, he started to question religion and lost faith. That was a defining moment, a turning point in his life that shaped his point of view about religion. He was not afraid of speaking out his opinions on this issue in a lot of his works. Even though he still admired and recognized the place of religion in the black community, he himself was not a believer. He was also very angry about religion hypocrisy. He pointed out that some people used religion as a tool to control others. His writings make audiences think “why would the character make religion into something that would benefit them financially instead of spiritually?” (Langston Hughes vs. Religions)
It’s difficult to see the reality of being isolated and aliened in his personal life, as well as in his society. Langston Hughes used words as his weapon against the great racial intolerance, injustice, and inequality at that time. He wrote most often when he was unhappy. His words came out of his unhappiness and represented his view of life. When he was sad, he went inside himself, to triumph over that sadness. His voice was that of African Americans. “He had a tremendous sense of devotion to the word, a sense of duty as an artist, obligation to his craft and obligation to his audience” (Walker and Rampersad). He worked hard to show the black community how beautiful they are naturally, and they don’t have to wear the mask that society prefers. He made it possible for black Americans to dream the American dream.
One of his most famous poems is “A Dream deferred”:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston was trying to speak for African America in particular, but not for them alone. This poem is about a general dream that is delayed. It could be the American dream, that African Americans could not have a chance to achieve. It could be the dream of a society of justice, compassion and freedom for black people. It could be any abandoned dream. What will happen to this dream? “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” The raisin in the sun is such a successful image of how people dry out of hopes and dreams. It's like a grape that withers and shrivels in the sun until it becomes a raisin. “Or fester like a sore-- And then run?” With such a poetic pain, Langston Hughes leads the audience to the bitterness and suffering of African Americans. Their wound of injustice and inequality will be never healed or fulfilled. It festers under their skin. “Does it stink like rotten meat?” Not only can you picture the rotten meat in your head, but also smell and taste the stink and offensive feelings of a dream abandoned. “Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?” Whether the dream deferred looks and sounds good or not, it’s still rotten. In a different visualization, but it's a same result. He’s eloquently describing the pain of having a dream deferred. “Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.” Eventually, a dream deferred will become too heavy to pick up and carry forward. “Or does it explode?” Does deferring dream make you a ticking-time bomb? Will life blow up in your face? Through the entire poem, we can see, taste and smell the hopeless feeling of a dream deferred. His poem is really straight forward and not much hidden idea. It’s saggy, negative, and dissolutive. The beauty of this poem is just from its simplicity. It’s clear, pellucid and honest. His poem makes it all one regardless of our race, sex or religion; the pain of a dream deferred belongs to each of us. The black and white America may share nothing in common but yes, a same pain.
After all, Langston Hughes was an influential writer himself. His work captures one of the most violent, yet passionate times of America. He left a great variety of work behind, which is really influential and inspires. It still affects the nowadays youth, who can be proud and grateful of being an African American with strength and pride of Africa a long time ago. His contribution literature is invaluable to American literature.
Works Cited
"Biography of Langston Hughes." PoemHunter.com. N.p.. Web. 27 Jun 2013. <http://www.poemhunter.com/langston-hughes/biography/>.
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Big Sea. Autobiography, Volume 13. 1st. 13. Columbia, Missouri: Library of Congress Cataloging, 2002. Web. <http://books.google.com/books?id=SsgPcfpjhBcC&pg=PA36>.
"Introduction to the Choas ." Langston Hughes vs. Religion . N.p., 03 Jun 2012. Web. 27 Jun. 2013. <http://langston-hughes.blogspot.com/>.
Walker , Alice , and Arnold Rampersad . Personal Interview. N.d. Web <http://www.fmgondemand.com/play/XF7ALH >.
No comments:
Post a Comment