Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem
by Faith Berry
Reviewed by Garth Tate
During the 1920's, African American writers enjoyed a rare and relatively receptive national and international audience. This emerging generation of Black writers, which included Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, was to be the first to reflect the folk culture of African Americans in strong, realistic terms. Perhaps the most prolific and certainly one of the most important writers of this "New Negro" movement in literature was Langston Hughes, the subject of a biography by scholar Faith Berry.
"Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem" is a book even non-literary types will take to. Much of the credit for this success goes to Berry's writing style which is intimate without being exploitative, insulting or manipulative. Tracing the influences, relationships and forces that affected Hughes' growth and productivity as a person and as a writer, Berry draws a portrait of a man who is complex, talented and willing to stretch the limits of his social and artistic environments. With all of his outspokenness and radicalism, however, he was still "the very private man, who could be the public figure and still keep a distance."
We travel with him to Uzbekistan, China and Mexico, share the dynamics of his relationships with patrons and colleagues such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Ernest Hemingway. His work in performance poetry provides modern avant-garde poets a model from which they can draw inspiration and tradition. Hughes, as one of the major protagonists in the drama of the emerging New Negro, embodies the new confidence, complexity and commitment of twentieth century Blacks in our effort to define ourselves beyond an Euro-American aesthetic.
As shown in the book, Hughes was an intellectual, a poet of an advanced racial and social consciousness who, like other Black writers of the era, captured and integrated the realities and demands of Africa America in his work. Unlike most other Black writers of that era, however, Hughes communicated in the verbal and musical language of Africa America. Many, such as Countee Cullen, continued to use the literary framework and language of 19th century Anglo-American romanticism. It is precisely due to his daring and vision, that Hughes' work in literature has had a profound effect not only on American literature, but also on the literatures of the Caribbean, Central and South America, and even Africa.
In conjuring images and touching the essence of Black reality in poems like "Dream Variations", "Lament for Colored Peoples," and "I, Too, Sing America," the Hughes style and vision had an impact on the later Negritude Movement in Pan-African literature. Leon Damas of French Guiana and Leopold Senghor of Senegal saw in Hughes' work the racial pride and class consciousness needed by Blacks the world over. They in-turn influenced a generation of Third World writers.
The English language is indebted to Hughes who also provided translations from French, Spanish and Russian of the works of Frederico Garcia Lorca, Rene Maran, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak, among others. The background of how, why and where he picked up and developed his skills in scholarship, linguistics and poetry make for interesting reading.
Writing in a 1926 issue of "The Nation," Langston Hughes warned the nation and the world that the artist of the New Negro movement was to be taken seriously. "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. "
Berry's book is beautiful.
