Abraham_Lincoln’S_Dream_–_a_Reality_in_the_New_Millennium_

Abraham Lincoln’s Dream – A Reality in the New Millennium' by S.S. Pankajam, Asst. Professor, Ethiraj College for Women (Eve), Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. The Saga of the African Americans is unique in the history of mankind for the singular cruelty, inhuman beastiality and painful surgical separation from their roots, culture and tradition. The African Americans, originally the natives of the Dark Continent, Africa, were bartered by slave traders as plantation labourers and workers in the New World for goods and other wealth. They underwent the horror of the separation of family members and suffered isolation. The height of humiliation was the deconstruction of self-worth, self-identification and self-respect under centuries of slavery which brought about a new profile to the African American of the 19th and 20th centuries. The paradox of the core ideals of Christianity, namely, universal brotherhood, egalitarianism, compassion and service attitude as against the inhuman practice of slavery fueled by commercial interests, colonialism and imperialism of feelings of social superiority had a severe impact on the average negro individual. Through their association with Western cultures, values and education, the African Americans imbibed in them a generational wisdom of their forefathers’ changed social status in a new homeland and their unique predicament-historical, social, political and economic. African American literature began with the desire to achieve freedom for the African Americans and to define their racial selves. Pauline E. Hopkins argues that nobody is better suited to “faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro than the Negro himself ”. This first ethnic aesthetics posited that it was essential for African Americans to speak for themselves. The historical and thematic evolution of African American literature during the 20th century was conditioned more by the political reassertion, self-respect and pacifism as also the social underpinnings of the African American individual. The 20th century was the start of “ Harlem Renaissance” - one of the most dynamic movements in African American history. It was a period of creativity among African Americans artists, writers, musicians and entertainers. The Harlem Renaissance or “The New Negro Renaissance” as it was then known was primarily a literary and intellectual movement composed of a generation of African American writers born around the turn of the century. The Harlem Renaissance documents the lives and interaction of the first self-conscious African American literary constellation and chronicles the brilliant outpouring of such best known writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude Mckay and Jean Toomer. During this period African American literature began to flower because of a greater exploration of the African American voice as it consciously recognized and mined African American folklore. Langston Hughes, “the Poet Laureate” of Harlem was indisputably the most experimental and versatile writer of the New Negro Renaissance. Hughes, a multi-faceted personality is an astonishing man of letters, poet, novelist, translator, short-story writer essayist, librettist, journalist, dramatist, humorist and world traveller. Hughes conceived himself as an artist in words, who would venture into every single area of literary creativity because there were readers for whom a story meant more than a poem, or a song lyric meant more than a poem or a story. Authoring more than 860 poems, he was never tired of exploring the colour, vibrancy and texture of African American culture and ‘his’ beloved people who created it. He wrote and staged more than a dozen play which gives him a significant place in African-American literature. Hughes had an over-riding sense of social and cultured purpose tied to his sense of the past, the present and the future of African Americans. Speaking of Hughes’s wide range of works, Theodore R. Hudson stated “Dipping his pen in ink, not acid, (Hughes’s) method was to expose rather than excoriate, to reveal rather than revile”. Throughout the course of his literary productions, he had never wavered, never lost sight of his original thematic concern – the African Americans which was of vital interest to the Americans. No writer had better interpreted and portrayed the African Americans life than Hughes, especially in the urban North. Hughes wrote in the urban idiom of Harlem street-slang and in the rural idiom of folklore. He viewed such melodramatic features of the African Americans life as the most vital, true and great hope for an indigenous African Americans literature. African Americans music in the form of spirituals, jazz, blues-reached a new pinnacle of popularity. Dancing provided the perfect complement to African Americans music. Hughes’s output never slackened during the remaining years of his life. A virtual writing machine himself, he became a household word among the broad African Americans audience. Although he began his literary career as a poet he had a keen interest in the theatre from an early age. His twenty odd dramatic works written over a forty year period gave substance to his desire for a theatre which would use authentic African Americans folk materials. Hughes deserves much credit for his contributions to the African Americans theatre in America. A critic has rightly observed that Hughes wrote at a time when such a theatre hardly existed. Hughes plays were simple in theme, structure, and plot. They used the idiom of the ordinary African Americans people of the urban North. His strong feeling for the African Americans race both in the past and the present time made inevitable his concern for the African Americans in the South. This concern was strongly reflected in his full-length play Mulatto, for which he chose as his subject the still explosive problem of racial intermixture. The play was developed from his poem Cross which recorded a fierce and serious account of the African Americans predicament. He had been one of the most effective and discriminating of all delineators of the African Americans cultural resources. Mulatto had autobiographical elements, for Hughes was rejected by his own father for whom his hatred was so great that it once made him deathly ill. The play, in turn, was the basis for Hughes libretto of The Barrier, an opera with musical score. Developed from the short story Father and Son, Mulatto was a tragedy of racial conflicts in the deep South. Hughes evinced a life long interest in the theme of rejection – as could be seen in the poems Cross and Mulatto, the short story Father and Son, the play Mulatto and the opera The Barrier. The same theme was told in different genres without redundancy by freshly adapting to its genre. A melodrama, Mulatto was performed on Broadway in 1935. The story was based on the plight of the son of an African Americans housekeeper and a white plantation owner. In Mulatto Hughes interweaved the themes of miscegenation, a father’s rejection of his son and the restrictions of African Americans education. Hughes fused this tragic rejection with America’s failure to validate the African Americans’s existence. As one who had grown up in America’s heartland, Hughes seemed content with his conclusion that African Americans were Americans, not Africans, and consequently, he focussed his attention on the African Americans identity crisis in America. Hughes moved beyond anger and resentment to expose the isolation that was the real tragedy of the mulatto in a racist society. The play reflected an angry confrontation between an illegitimate ‘Mulatto’ youth and his ‘White’ father. It was a study of widely prevalent illicit relationship in the South that was based on the above confrontation. The tragic interplay of love and hate ended in death and insanity. As a play, Mulatto adhered to a tight classical structure, with action and theme taking place within twenty – four hours and in the same setting. Mulatto’s setting differed from Hughes’s usual dramatic landscapes for it was not an African Americans territory but rather a southern plantation house presided over by its white owner, Colonel Thomas Norwood who lived in uneasy relation to his African Americans house keeper, Cora Lewis and their five children. The setting was appropriate in a prophetic sense, for the central conflict in Mulatto was over the African Americans character’s rights to setting, expressed as Robert’s claim was based for Robert being the son of Colonel Norwood and also because Cora was no more a slave but its virtual owner. The house became hers, not only because as housekeeper, she had the keys but because she was his longtime mistress. The hero Robert Lewis, described as a light Mulatto with ivory-yellow skin and proud thin features like his father Colonel Norwood had returned home after having been away at school for several years. Home was a plantation in Georgia. Since he was seven years old, Robert had hated his father for refusing to recognize their relationship of which he himself had been proud. During his summer vacation from college, Robert had strained tension to a breaking point by defying the mores of his father and of the Georgia town in which they lived. Robert refused to do field labour. He drove his father’s Ford which infuriated the latter. The play revolved chiefly around Robert’s anxiety over his mixed parentage, an anxiety exacerbated by Norwood Senior’s refusal to acknowledge him, and his siblings, as his children. Finally, on the schedule day of Robert’s return to college, the tension snapped. Incensed to learn that Robert had defied a white woman, had sped past a white man, and had entered the front door of the house regularly, which was not permitted. Norwood threatened to kill him. Robert instead, killed his father by strangling him. Told by his grief-stricken mother to run for the swamp, he took his father’s gun and left home by the front door. Cora was shocked by the turn of events and lost her mental balance. She became mad and kept mumbling that the dead Colonel was out with the mob pursuing her son-a vision in which a terrifying historical cycle was seen clearly and in which the sequence of the Oedipal story became fearfully confused. Father sought to kill his son while mother prepared a place for him in her bed, displacing the father and inviting the son to seek his final rest. Amidst screams and bullets, Robert returned home. He shot at his pursuers and went upstairs. He had one bullet left in his gun. Robert died in Cora’s bed, in his father’s house, thus truly displacing the Colonel and laying claim to his inheritance. The play ended with Robert’s suicide, conveyed by the sound of a single pistol shot. The curtain fell after one last gesture of abuse towards Cora – a slap across the face by Talbot, the overseer of the plantation whose physical presence nevertheless commanded the final tableau. The play’s ultimate impact arose from Cora’s clear vision and the self knowledge implicit in Cora’s and Robert’s final actions. The blind mob that pursued Robert at last invaded the house the Colonel kept so private. Because the members of the mob refused to acknowledge the familial relations that existed there, they could not understand Robert’s patricide, the crime that struck at the root of all social bonding. By making inheritance Mulatto’s central conflict and by depicting the interracial family, Hughes challenged the assumed marginality of “tragic mulattoes” which usually determined their unhappy fate. Norwood hated Robert because the latter insisted that his father acknowledged him as his son and also publicly proclaimed their relationship. Robert hated Norwood for denying him the recognition of his parenthood and for the implications his father’s denial had for his mother. In their final confrontation, this conflict emerged in a dialogue between Colonel Norwood and Robert. NORWOOD: You’re Cora’s boy….nigger women don’t know the fathers. ROBERT: You’re talking about my mother. (M, 23) Although the events resulted in the death or dispossession of all the African American characters, the interpretation of those events fell increasingly to Cora. Spoken in acute distress, her rambling soliloquies were disjointed accounts of how she came to live with young Norwood and of the harsh and tender moments of their shared lives. Hughes’s drafts of Mulatto revealed that he only gradually discovered the dramatic possibilities and significance of giving the play over to Cora, of locating the meaning of Robert’s fate in his mother’s experience of it, and of explaining it in Cora’s voice. It was likely, that his final centering of Mulatto’s vision in the figure of Cora was a result of his meditations on the heritage of African American women as well as of his developing sense of voice. Awareness of being an African American was the most powerful and the most fertile single inspiration for the African Americans in America. It was ironic that blackness, so long regarded as a handicap historically, socially, culturally, economically and politically, should also be a strength. Consciousness of blackness had brought a distinction and beauty in the lives of several African-Americans in this new Millennium. In the new millennium, the whole universe had tuned in to watch the first – ever African American take the oath of office to the world’s most powerful job. Barack Hussein Obama himself was conscious that from the grandest capitals in the globe to the smallest village in Kenya where his father was born, he was the cynosure of all eyes. This was not just the usual transition of power but an event that had the capability of transforming not only America but the whole world. As he took the oath from the west steps of the Capitol, his left hand placed on the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln on a similar occasion more than a century ago, the words had the resonance of an invocation. The most evocative part of the inaugural speech was, in an unintended way perhaps, an explanation of the fairy tale journey of Barack Hussein Obama (born to a Kenyan father from the Luo tribe who was “black as pitch” and a Kansas mother who was “white as milk”, brought up in Hawaii and Jakarta, educated at Columbia and Harvard, enlightened by his estranged spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright Jr., and hardened by the political machine of Chicago) itself : “We are shaped by every language and culture drawn from every end of this earth ; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that darker chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall some day pass ; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve ; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself ; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace”. Works Cited Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes : Before and Beyond Harlem. USA ; Lawrence Hill and Company, 1983. Chengappa, Raj. Barack Obama. India Today. 2 Feb 2009. Five Plays by Langston Hughes. Ed. Webster Smalley. Bloomington ; Indiana UP, 1968. Hughes, Langston : Introduction A New Song. By Michael Gold. New York; International Workers Order, 1938. ---------“ On Being Black”. Chicago Defender 8 July 1944, nall. ed. : 12