Written specially for the Colloquium

at DAKAR

L. H.
copy

BLACK WRITERS IN A TROUBLED WORLD

by
Langston Hughes

The consensus among many Negroes is that American society is falling to pieces, going to the dogs, stewing in its own iniquity and bogged down in the gutters of Saigon. The work of the most dynamic of the younger Negro writers confirms this. Certainly, in some ways, their books are about as near the gutter as - in their opinion - America seems to be.

Negroes in general are seldom incline to do anything halfway. What they do, when they do it, is usually done whole hog and with gusto. A few years ago, the United States Supreme Court let down the bars to literary censorship in America and <u>Lady Chatterly's Lover</u> could be published unexpurgated. There-after, Henry Miller's <u>Tropic</u> of Capricorn and William Burrough's <u>Naked Lunch</u>, as well as Jean Genat was without hinderance <u>publicly</u> offered for sale on American bookstalls. <u>Le Roi Jones</u> must then have said in effect, "Why not I ?" and proceeded to out-do and out-sex in four letter words any known white writer up to that date.

.../....

- 2 -

In the Jones play, *the Toilet*, every other word is a word that in times past would have made ordinary citizens blush and which even today makes ladies stuff their fingers in their ears. Younger Negro writers like Le Roi Jones, Charles Wright in *The Wig* and the poets of the Village excuse obscenities by saying that America is obscene, and that the only way to show this obscenity is by calling a spade a spade, especially a *white* spade. James Baldwin sends down the " fire next time " on white America, and Le Roi Jones says to whites in print and in speeches, " *Drop dead!* "

In the old days of slavery, no doubt Negroes used to talk *quite* badly about whites" down at the big gate" -- but never in the Big House. Nowadays, Negroes talk about whites badly *right in the middle of the whites'* own parlors, lecture halls and libraries. They" tell them off" in profane and no uncertain terms. But the funny thing is that many whites seem to love it -- or did -- until the Black Arts Theatre in Harlem, operated by Mr. Jones, began to bar whites from entering, -- even those ultra liberals who had donated money to the theatre and had most highly acclaimed Le Roi as a writer. But finally, the whites began to get mad, really mad. Now white critics are united in proclaiming the decline and fall of Le Roi Jones. He has goaded them into howling and growling. But this, Jones has done deliberately, I gather, in the belief that by giving America the shock treatment, something might happen to so shake America up that life between the Atlantic and the Pacific might change -- for triumphant blacks, at least, if not for the country itself which is, according to their theory, *beyond salvation*. The most talented of the young Negro writers have become America's prophets of doom, black ravens cawing over carrion.

.../....

- 3 -

Slightly older Negro writers now in their literary prime
like Ralph Ellison (**Invisible Man**), John Killens (**And Then We Heard
The Thunder**), Julian Mayfield (**The Grand Parade**), Paule Marshall
(**Brown Stones, Brown Girl**), and Alston Anderson (**All God's Chil-
dren**), all call attention to America's racial defects, but having deve-
loped as novelists before Baldwin's **Another Country** popularized the
word **merde** (more ugly in English than it is in French) -- and precee-
ding Le Roi Jones' The System of **Dante's Hell** by at least a decade --
content themselves certainly with dire pictures of their country's
dilemma but without finger-painting in excrement on America's lily
white canvass. The much older writers of color dating from the Negro
Renaissance days of the Twenties -- those writers who preceeded, and
up to, Richard Wright, like Arna Bontemps (**Black Thunder**), Anne
Petry (**The Street**) and myself (**The Simple books**, for example), as
well as Richard Wright in **Native Son**, never dreamed of revealing the
Negro people to themselves in terms of mother fuckers; or of shocking
white readers with bad language rather than with bad facts.

The Negro writer in the United States has always had --
has been **forced** to have in spite of himself -- two audiences, one
black, one white. And, as long has been America's dilemma, seldom
"the twain shall meet." The fence between the two audiences is the
color bar, which in reality stretches around the world. Writers who
feel they **must** straddle this fence, **perforce** acquire a split personality.
Writers who do not care whether they straddle the fence of color or
not, are usually the best writers, attempting at least to let their art
leap the barriers of color, poverty or whatever other roadblocks to
artistic truth there may be. Unfortunately, some writers get artistic
truth and financial success mixed up, get critical acclaim and personal

-4-

integrity confused. Such are the dilemmas which the double audience creates. Which set of readers to please -- the white, the black, or both at once?

The best writers are those who possess enough self-integrity to wish first and foremost to please themselves, _only_ themselves, and nobody else. But this, when one is young and one's thinking is unclear -- and one's ability to analyse this world about one is uncertain -- is not easy. To some extent, African writers must have a similar problem: -- not in terms of race and color, but I would think in terms of folk life in contrast to urban thinking, regional tongues against European, tribalism or educated-ism, the basic roots or the new young branches. These things should _not_ be problems -- but I imagine they _might_ be. Then there is the reading and publishing world outside of Africa. The very fact that all the major publishers of African writers are in Paris or London or New York, and the ultimate editors are white, is not unlike a similiar problem that has long faced American Negro writers. Until the recent formation of the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago (owners of _Ebony_ and _Jet_), all the major publishers in the United States where Negro writers might get published were white. All the major literary magazines are white. All the major critics and settlers of literary styles are white. No wonder one of our most prolific and popularly gifted writers, Frank Yerby (who once wrote deeply moving short stories of Negro life), went "white". For a long time now Yerby has published only highly successful "white" romances that sell year after year to Hollywood.

An even more gifted colored writer in the Twenties, Jean Toomer, author of a single highly acclaimed book, _Cane_, filled with the sadness and beauty of life in the black South, went "white" too,

.../....

- 5 -

and never wrote anything else worthwhile. Just this year, a talented Negro writer refused to grant permission for the use of a story in an anthology of Negro short stories, because the writer did not wish to "be typed as a Negro writer," but in complexion this author could by no stretch of the imagination be called white. So one of the dilemmas of the black writer in America is how to keep from being white-ized. That some of the younger writers are going to the other extreme and insisting on being **blacker than black** is to be understood. And that, in their angry frustration, they resort to the use of the dirtiest words in the language, is to be understood, too.

Now, the subject of the Colloquium: What is the function and significance of African Negro art in the life of the people and for the people? This is where **négritude** comes into play. **Négritude**, as I have garnered from Senegal's distinguished poet, Leopold Sedar Senghor, has its roots deep in the beauty of the black people -- in what the younger writers and musicians in America call "soul" which I would define in this way: **Soul** is a synthesis of the essence of Negro folk art redistilled -- particularly the old music and its flavor, the ancient basic beat out of Africa, the folk rhymes and Ashanti stories -- expressed in contemporary ways so difinitely and emotionally colored with the old, that it gives a distinctly "Negro" flavor to today's music, painting or writing -- or even to merely personal attitudes and daily conversation. **Soul** is contemporary Harlem's **négritude**, revealing to the Negro people and the world the beauty within themselves.
I once tried to say this in a poem:

> I've known rivers:
> I've known rivers ancient as the world
> and older than the flow
> of human blood in human veins.

.../....

- 6 -

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates
when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo
and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile
and raised the Pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississipi
when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans
and I've seen its muddy bosom
turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
ancient dusky rivers.

If one may ascribe a prime function to any creative
writing, it is I think, to affirm life, to yeah-say the excitement of li-
ving in relation to the vast rhythms of the universe of which we are a
part, to untie the riddles of the gutter in order to closer tie the knot
between man and God. As to Negro writing and writers, one of our
aims, it seems to me, should be to gather the strengths of our people
in Africa and the Americas into a tapestry of words as strong as the
bronzes of Benin, the memories of Songhay and Mele, the war cry of
Chaka, the beat of the blues, and the Uhuru of African freedom and
give it to the world with pride and love and the kind of humanity and
affection that Senghor put into his poem: To the American Negro

.../....

- 7 -

Troops when he said :

You bring the springtime of peace
and hope at the end of hope ....
Down flowing streets of joy, boys play with dreams.
Men dance in front of machines,
and, astonished, burst out singing.
The eyelashes of students
are sprinkled with rose petals.
Fruit ripens in the breast of virgins.
And the hips of women -- oh, how sweet! --
handsomely grow heavy.
Ch Black Brothers,
warriors whose mouths are singing flowers --
Delight of living when winter is over --
You I salute as messengers of peace!

That is Senghor. To this I affirm, how mighty it would
be if the black writers of our troubled world became our messengers
of peace. How wonderful it would be if:

Les hommes dansent devant leurs machines
et se surprennent à chanter.

Les paupières des écolières sont pétales de rose,
les fruits murissent à la poitrine des vierges,
Et les hanches des femmes - oh, douceur, -
généreusement s'alourdissent.

Frères Noirs, guerriers dont la bouche
est fleur qui chante --

Oh ! délice de vivre après l'hiver --
Je vous salue comme des messagers de paix.