Source
of book: I own this
This
is my second official choice for Black History Month this year.
Here
is the list of Black History Month selections since I started this blog, and
also some related books:
2016:
Go
Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin
And
Black Boy
(American Hunger) by Richard Wright
Other
notable books by African American or African authors:
Poems by Phillis Wheatley
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
I Greet The Dawn (Poems) by Paul Laurence
Dunbar
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh by
Daina Ramey Berry
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn
Ward
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
The Honor Code by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
White Rage by Carol Anderson
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William
Kamkwamba and Brian Mealer
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
Books
on Black History by other authors:
The Slaves’ War by Andrew Ward
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by
Phillip Hoose
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Vol.1
by M. T. Anderson
Devil In The Grove by Gilbert King
Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith
***
I
have a particular love for the Harlem Renaissance. The flowering of art, music,
literature, and culture in 1920s New York was a magical time that left us with
so many immortal masterworks.
It
was not a coincidence that the 1920s also saw the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan,
the rise of white nativism, and vicious anti-immigrant sentiment. For every
advance of people of color, there is a vicious whitelash.
Picture from the cover of my book.
Countee
Cullen tends to be the forgotten poet of the Harlem Renaissance, mostly because
he was eclipsed by Langston Hughes in popularity. One factor in this was public
taste, which switched from older formal poetry to a free verse modernism.
Hughes was the new, while Cullen represented the old. It is a shame, in my
opinion, because Cullen was a skilled and evocative poet, and his mastery of an
older art form should not be held against him.
Color
was Cullen’s first collection, published in 1925. It is divided into four
sections. The first, also entitled “Color,” contains poems with racial themes
and characters. The second is a collection of epitaphs. Third is a handful of
poems about love, while the fourth is a miscellany. In addition, a longer
poetic introduction, “To You Who Read My Book,” expresses the author’s desire
that his words survive the ravages of time.
After
the introduction, the collection opens with what has to be Cullen’s best known
poem, a sonnet that asks a question that haunted Cullen throughout his life.
Yet Do I Marvel
I doubt not God is
good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to
quibble could tell why
The little buried mole
continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors
Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason
tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the
fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute
caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a
never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways
are, and immune
To catechism by a mind
too strewn
With petty cares to
slightly understand
What awful brain
compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at
this curious thing:
To make a poet black,
and bid him sing!
The
form is interesting, neither strictly Petrarchan nor English. The first two
quatrains are rhymed like an English sonnet, but they clearly form the first
half of the poem - there is no third quatrain. The final six lines very much
fit the pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet.
I
love how Cullen saves the central idea of the poem to the very last line. We
are teased with three examples: the blind mole who never sees the light,
Tantalus who can never grasp the food he craves, and Sisyphus who must
endlessly engage in futile labor. And then the twist of the knife: the black
poet who must sing. Fortunately, Cullen was a bit wide of the mark: his words,
and those of other African American poets, would prove to be anything but
futile and pointless. Indeed, despite prejudice and the violence of the KKK,
over the next century, the world would literally be singing the songs and the
poems of black poets and musicians.
Many
of the poems in the first section directly address the intersection of race and
class in society, and the casual disdain which African Americans experience.
Cullen uses his art to insist on the full humanity of those looked on with
contempt. I found this one particularly interesting.
Black Magdalens
These have no Christ
to spit and stoop
To write upon the
sand,
Inviting him that has
not sinned
To raise the first
rude hand.
And if He came they
could not buy
Rich ointment for His
feet;
The body's sale scarce
yields enough
To let the body eat.
The chaste clean
ladies pass them by
And draw their skirts
aside,
But Magdalens have a
ready laugh;
They wrap their wounds
in pride.
They fare full ill
since Christ forsook
The cross to mount a
throne,
And Virtue still is
stooping down
To cast the first hard
stone.
Cullen
touches a raw nerve here. There is a long history here in the United States of
attributing hyper-sexuality to African Americans, as a defensive mechanism
against acknowledgement of the equally long history of white men raping black
women. It continues today, with a never-ending parade of culture war asshats
claiming that if black people would simply stop fucking so much, they would be
equal. Sigh. “Virtue” still is picking up the stones.
Later
in the collection is a longer poem about Judas Iscariot, which takes a look at
the story from a different perspective: what if Judas was truly doing what he
believed Christ asked him to do? Wasn’t he too an instrument of the Ineffable
Divine Plan?
Another
poem with a religious theme is this one, which draws on the tradition that
Simon of Cyrene was black. (Cyrene was in North Africa, which had a large
Jewish population. It is at least possible that Simon was a dark-skinned
convert to Judaism, hence the tradition.)
Simon the
Cyrenian Speaks
He never spoke a word
to me,
And yet He called my
name;
He never gave a sign
to me,
And yet I knew and
came.
At first I said,
"I will not bear
His cross upon my
back;
He only seeks to place
it there
Because my skin is
black."
But He was dying for a
dream,
And He was very meek,
And in His eyes there
shone a gleam
Men journey far to
seek.
It was Himself my pity
bought;
I did for Christ alone
What all of Rome could
not have wrought
With bruise of lash or
stone.
This
next one was written after reading Batouala, a novel by French Guyanese
author René Maran. It is another sonnet (which may be why I like it), but on
the theme of love.
The Dance of
Love
All night we danced
upon our windy hill,
Your dress a cloud of
tangled midnight hair,
And love was much too
much for me to wear
My leaves; the killer
roared above his kill,
But you danced on, and
when some star would spill
Its red and white upon
you whirling there,
I sensed a hidden
beauty in the air;
Though you danced on,
my heart and I stood still.
But suddenly a bit of
morning crept
Along your trembling
sides of ebony;
I saw the tears your
tired limbs had wept,
And how your breasts
heaved high, how languidly
Your dark arms moved;
I drew you close to me;
We flung ourselves
upon our hill and slept.
Most
of the poems are short, but there are a couple of longer ones, most notably
“The Shroud of Color,” a musing conversation with god over the problem of being
black in a time of prejudice. Filled with biblical allusions, striking
metaphors, and beautiful language, it is worth a read.
The
epitaphs are fun. (I confess to enjoying epitaphs, particularly by skilled
poets. For example, Edgar Lee Masters and John Donne.) Here are my favorites:
For a Cynic
Birth is a crime
All men commit;
Life gives them time
To atone for it;
Death ends the rhyme
As the price for it.
For a Lady I
Know
She even thinks that
up in heaven
Her class lies late
and snores,
While poor black
cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial
chores.
For a Virgin
For forty years I
shunned the lust
Inherent in my clay;
Death only was so
amorous
I let him have his
way.
For an
Unsuccessful Sinner
I boasted my sins were
sure to sink me
Out of all sound and
sight of glory;
And the most I’ve won
for all my pains
Is a century of
purgatory.
For Myself
What’s in this grave
is worth your tear;
There’s more than the
eye can see;
Folly and Pride and
Love lie here
Buried alive with me.
I
love the rapier wit in these. I’ll end with this one, with its unusual tercet
form.
The Wise
Dead men are the
wisest, for they know
How far the roots of
flowers go,
How long a seed must
rot to grow.
Dead men alone bear
frost and rain
On throbless heart and
heatless brain,
And feel no stir of
joy or pain.
Dead men alone are
satiate;
They sleep and dream
and have no weight,
To curb their rest, of
love or hate.
Strange, men should
flee their company,
Or think me strange
who long to be
Wrapped in their cool
immunity.
My
exploration of Countee Cullen before this was limited to the few works I found
in anthologies. I was therefore thrilled when I found a hardback collected
poems at a library sale. I am looking forward to reading the rest in the
future.
