Heritage_of_Africans

Heritage of the Africans The Harlem Renaissance, that era principally occurring during the 1920s, produced several significant writers whose works are now essential to the American literature. Living during these years of economic crisis and war, many black writers found common cause with nationalist and internationalist ideologies and movements that spoke to their own desires for social equality. The triumph of postwar nationalism is encoded in many ways, from overt calls for a black nation, to the trope of national awakening, to the recuperation of folk traditions and an immemorial past. Characteristic of ethnic-nationalist discourses, a number of black American postwar tests assert the existence of an innate racial quality in those of African ancestry and represent the New Negro as the culmination of a long historical process of coming to consciousness of a special destiny. There were some problems of translation in which the result of twin exaggerations regarding African that were pervasive both in the New Negro movement and in American society at large. Not only civilized creation but also the ethical and emotional appeals were included, “Heritage”, written by Countee Cullen and “Africa for the Africans”, excerpt from the Negro World by Marcus Garvey were the call for African Americans, who need to explore their own heritage with the desire to dwell in their new faith of liberty. On the one hand, Africa was the exotic continent, a land awash in a primitive culture that some elite artists and white philanthropists opposed to the desiccated exhaustion of western modernity. On the other hand, that same primal culture was to many African Americans a nark of shame, supposedly both anterior and inferior to European traditions. For many writers of the movement, these mixed attitudes resulted in a conflicted sense of African formed out of the simultaneous disavowal of white exotic Africa and affirmations for a sense of connection to African history, politics, and culture. An example of this conflicted predicament resounds in Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage,” with its evocation of the parts of the black American plays and the respect to an African heritage he rejects consciously and aesthetically, but never completely nor without acknowledging the significance of that heritage. As “great drums” beat and “dark blood dammed within” is ready to burst, he disclaims Africa and asserts unconcern for the past or “Last year’s anything'” Africa, therefore, is associated with an image assembled by whites of the sensual and exotic image, which must be rejected or at minimum renegotiated to be of use to the more conventional poet Cullen aspires to be. Appealing more to the sensibilities of the black urban masses, Marcus Garvey redirected the growing hold that western visions of Africa imparted to blacks by spreading a triumphant message. Nevertheless, Garvey was considered by many to be a prophet and an Afrocentric political philosophy that continued to shape the ancestral imaginary of African Americans from the Harlem movement to the present day. After all, though his methods were often bombastic his message seemed to encompass those voiced from various political and social quarters of African American: that all people of African ancestry, no matter how disconnected across the globe, have a common origin, which could and perhaps should unite them to pursue a collective self-governance that would compete with colonial western powers as equals. No one placed a literal interpretation on Garvey’s crusading speeches that called for a return to the African homeland; few blacks understood his message as a summons to actual emigration. But his African mystique acted on all of them as an extraordinary stimulus to their racial pride. With his spectacular orchestration of this one fundamental idea, he convinced them of the greatness of the land of their ancestors, conjuring up a vision of the glorious past that had preceded slavery, whose shameful inner stain he exhorted them to expunge instantly. Cullen was a psychically tormented young man during the period when Garvey ruled over Harlem. No one sensed more acutely than he, the need to vanquish his feelings of shame at his origins and his color. And, in truth, his poetry most strikingly echoes the less relational aspects of Garvey’s ideology, the proclamation of the natural nobility of Africa and the Africans and of blacks’ superiority over whites. In 1927, Cullen made a centrally important declaration: “chief problem has been that of reconciling a Christian upbringing with a pagan inclination. His life so far has not convinced him that the problem is insoluble” (Cullen, Caroling Dusk). This “Pagan inclination,” as he calls it, is actually a composite of remarkably heterogeneous elements, which his poetic imagination chose to assemble around the symbol of Africa. In other words, every antagonism on every conceivable plane undergoes a transmutation that finally equates it with the basic antagonism, black and white. So powerful, indeed, are the emotions enlisted by the racial conflict that its terminology imposes itself on every other conflict. Thus, to the hostile white God who was responsible for letting the poet be born under the evil star of color, the embattled poet opposes the pagan gods of the African homeland. If “Heritage” did not strike so excellently qualified an observer as Sterling Brown as being altogether convincing, the reason is that neither had grasped the essentially symbolic nature, and the entirely inner and personal meaning, of Cullen’s Africa. Cullen’s paganism, like Claude McKay’s, is almost devoid of positive content, since it is above all a withdrawal from God. But whereas McKay’s estrangement is motivated by a kind of rationalist skepticism concerning the Christian revelation, Cullen’s has a predominantly emotional base, namely, his resentment at the Creator’s having shown as inadequate degree of solicitude for him and his fellows. In Cullen’s attitude there is an embryonic rebelliousness, directed against God rather than against white America, the one being the equivalent, in the poet’s mind, of the other. In this atmosphere of revolt, everything traditionally opposed to Christian spirituality is posited as a value and given a black exponent. It need scarcely be pointed out that such a table of values is primarily subjective in nature and that it mirrors various allurements felt by the poet, with their source lying either in his imagination or in his flesh. Musing on Africa, Cullen was happy to find in his distant forebears a nobility that gave the lie to the inferiority that was his in America: “…regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang…” Furthermore, in his inner development, the primary of race is scarcely noticeable after an early extroverted phase, during which his behavior tended to seek an adjustment to the surrounding environment. This reaction to racial tensions is an instinctive phenomenon, on a par with the attitude of most of his racial brothers. There is no point in looking elsewhere for any deeper reason that would explain the success of Color (1925) from the moment of his publication when he sang of the burden of color and of its nobility, “…I… whose found of price, Dear distress, and joy allied, Is my somber flesh and skin, With the dark blood dammed within Like great pulsing tides…” And above all when he nostalgically evoked the memory of the African homeland, black American had no difficulty in recognizing its own states in those of the poet. In addition, “Heritage,” at least throughout the first part, undeniably gives pride of place to the body. Thus the African forest, where “leprous flowers rear fierce corollas in the air,” is traversed by huge bands of wild animals; bats and other barbaric flying things haunt its nights; in the shadow serpents lurk, and at the water’s edge the big cats await their prey. Yet the primeval terror in which they plunge the immensity of Africa is ever softened by the sighs of the lovers and by the pledges of love they murmur in the grasslands: “…tall defiant grass Where young forest lovers lie Plighting troth beneath the sky…” The poet is haunted by the insistent rhythm of the drums which, across the jungle, call youths and girls to blend their bodies agleam with sweat in the frantic love dance: “…I…always hear, though I cram against my ear” According to the poem, Cullen thirsts for the Christian ideal of perfection and self-transcendence, and no one could have suffered more than he did from the sense of guilt that awareness of his sinfulness aroused in him. But since he found himself on hostile terms with Christ on the spiritual plane because of his sin, and on the racial temping to unite the two terms on either side of the barrier – to promote the urges of the flesh to the rank of a positive value, indeed, of a black value that had been consecrated by the American gods who thus came to challenge the place held in his soul by the white Christ: “Quaint, outlandish heathen gods Black en fashion out of rods, Clay, and brittle bits of stone, …. Lamb of God, although I speak With my mouth this, in my heart Do I play a double part.” Those indeed are the terms of the antinomy, each with its retinue of overtones, reverberating and echoing through every level of consciousness. But how emerge from the antinomy, especially without sacrificing anything: either the black race, or white culture; the raptures of sin, or the friendship of Christ; Africa or America' Interestingly, while Garvey believes that Mother Africa always had an inherent worth and beauty in the world, he was not averse to giving her a makeover to render her more attractive to her modern sons “accidentally” living in Harlem. At the first U.N.I.A. Convention in 1920, Garvey clarifies his “Back to Africa” program, starting that he does not intend for black Americans to leave for Africa yet, but only after it has ben urbanized. Ironically, then, Garvey transforms Africa into an imagine of urban America, which eradicates the pure “Africa” cultural differences he otherwise attempts to defend, and suggests that he was perhaps responsive to some od his critics who said that Africa would be estranging to black Americans. Nevertheless, the desire for an African “mother” and home constitute the origin and end of Garvey’s black nationalism. In the conclusion, both Marcus Garvey and Countee Cullen proved that the new pride in things black and things African fathered a drive on the part of the Negro press a substitute the term black men for colored men and African American for American Negroes. Gradually, Negroes learned to refer to their African ancestry and heavy pigmentation less self-consciously. Countee Cullen stands outside of himself to reflect on separation from his native Africa. He feels his heritage call to him in the night, in the rain, and from within his converted soul. He faces a personal struggle as he attempts to balance the need to explore his heritage with the desire to dwell in his new faith. He concludes in victory, being an intelligent, civilized creation. Work Cited Page Cullen, Countee. Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993. Print. Cullen, Countee. Heritage. Print.