Imperialism and American Negro Literature

BY WILLIAM HARRISON ¹

I think it essential, before one declares that the cultural development of the African peoples at the present epoch of world history inevitably takes its place among the progressive forces in human history, that one should state one's definition of ‘progressive.’ This procedure is adopted not in the interests of any narrow dogmatism, but in order that we may severally have a clear idea of what we propose to discuss. ‘Progressive,’ in the true use of the term, relates to those forces which politically and socially tend to the extension of democracy throughout the world. It will be found, on examination, that certain irresistible corollaries follow.

Imperialism, the first principle of which is the denial and abrogation of democracy, is thus of necessity retrogressive, and can in no sense be defined now as ‘progressive,’ whilst if we consider various national economies it will be discovered that those societies whose class structures are such as to deprive the vast majority of the people who live under them of effective political power are not ‘progressive.’ Consequently, attempts to extend democracy to wider masses will, on the international level, necessarily assume the form of an unremitting struggle against imperialism for the liberation of the subject peoples in the colonies and semi-colonial nations. Such attempts, undertaken with special emphasis on the structure of society, will have for their single aim the conquest of power for the working class, that class which, as Marx and Lenin showed long ago, is usually without effective political power. To guarantee the probable gains of such a conquest it would be essential, above all, to proceed to economic democracy, which is only another term for Socialism. It is this form of democracy for which the African peoples and all others in the ‘progressive’ movement are ultimately struggling, confident that it can be attained only through the continuance of bourgeois democracy, limited as it is, at this stage of world politics.

It is perhaps imperative to emphasise that political democracy is the indispensable requisite for the African peoples, if they are to take their rightful place as equals amongst the nations of the earth. I am here concerned with the cultural expression of their political and social desires. It would be too great a task for me, to undertake any detailed examination of that cultural expression in all the lands which they inhabit, and in all the forms which such expression can take, in what we traditionally designate as the arts and sciences. I restrict myself, therefore, as a safeguard against the imputation of superficiality, to that section, America, with which I am most familiar, and to that medium, literature, in which I have the greatest degree of competence, both as practitioner and as student.

My choice is singularly happy, for American Negro literature is the cultural expression of the most articulate section of the African peoples. The American Negroes are most articulate because they enjoy a greater degree of political democracy than their less fortunate brethren in the colonial empires of Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal. While they do not have a full measure of civil rights throughout the Republic, they do, in certain areas at least, possess the right of freedom of speech, press, and assembly–a right essential to the welfare of literature anywhere.

By its endeavour to deflect the course of historical tradition, by the burning of the books in May 1934, Fascism has demonstrated clearly its attitude to popular culture. The African peoples did not need this historic lesson to become aware of reactionary obscurantism in the contemporary world, for in Kenya, in the Union of South Africa, in the Southern States of the American Union, they have long been compelled to observe the dictates of autocratic rule in the realm of the spirit. Colonial Fascism has sought to enslave their minds as well as their bodies by several methods, of which the most effective is through educational restrictions which place obstacles in the way of their access to the treasures of the past bequeathed them by even their own ancestors, and to the broad currents of cultural contact with old civilisations such as India's, rich and justly proud of its Asoka, its Mahabharata and Ramayana, its ancient wisdom stored in the Upanishads and the Dhammapada or Bhagavad-Gita, stores of humanism which less troubled ages than ours have rightly esteemed, preserved, and endeavoured to disseminate widely.

Instinctively, owing to their social position in the class society of America, the Negroes would have seen Fascism as their irreconcilable foe, even if Herr Hitler had not published his ineffable views about the Negro race, in Mein Kampf, and if Signor Mussolini, during the course of the invasion of Ethiopia, had not sought to justify his aggressive banditry by references to the ‘inferiority of the black races.’ For these two supposedly responsible Heads of States were re-echoing the sentiments of slave-holders who debated whether the Negro did not belong to a separate species, in order to justify the institution of slavery, and who sought to prove, by carefully selected texts from the Christian scriptures, that the Negro was divinely ordained to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water unto all the other races of men. This historic view has given the American Negroes a singularly clear attitude to Fascism which is the effort of finance-capitalism in decay to postpone the birth of a new social order. Their writers have, therefore, almost without exception, enlisted themselves in the struggle against Fascism. I am conscious of the fact that few of the American Negro writers are known in India even by name, and so I shall mention only two, Claude Mc Kay and Langston Hughes.

Claude McKay (1889-), who is the author of Home to Harlem, Banjo, Banana Bottom, and other novels, as well as such volumes of verse as Spring in New Hampshire and Harlem Blues, was one of the pioneers in the so-called ‘Negro renascence’ from 1920 to 1930, a post-war cultural resurgence of the Negro people; the centre was Harlem, the Negro quarter of New York, which contains about 250,000 inhabitants, and is in fact the largest concentration of Negroes anywhere in the world. As one of the moving spirits in this literary movement, McKay was perhaps the writer with the greatest amount of social consciousness, as his recent autobiography, A long way from Home (1937), indicates. Of peasant origin, he was born in Jamaica, British West Indies, in 1889, and was educated in the United States, where he migrated after giving up a job in the constabulary force of his native island. It is interesting to note that I. A. Richards of Magdalene College, Cambridge, later to become celebrated as the author of The Principles of Literary Criticism and of Practical Criticism, wrote the Introduction to the English edition of Spring in New Hampshire (1920). When McKay came to England, after spending some time in New York, he became a friend of Frank Harris, concerning whom he recounts many stories in the autobiography; and he met Bernard Shaw, who asked him why he had chosen to be a poet when he might have done better as a boxer! The War and the Russian Revolution found McKay helping to edit Dreadnought, with Miss E. Sylvia Pankhurst, the erstwhile Suffragette; this radical publication was eventually suppressed. Caught up, as it were, by the prevailing waves of enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution and the general feeling that the overthrow of Tsarism meant the birth of a new freedom in one-sixth of the globe, McKay journeyed to Moscow, where he was enthusiastically hailed by the leaders of the Bolshevik Party and by the masses of the Russian people, liberated from the long tyranny and oppression of Tsarism.

McKay's enthusiasm was relatively short-lived. He never became more than a sympathiser with Commuuism, and of late he has been very outspoken in his criticism of it. Coming under the influence of Trotsky and Radek whilst he was in Moscow and always a close associate of Max Eastman, with whom he worked on The Liberator and The Masses, two radical magazines, McKay's evolution is not strange. At present he is an ardent racialist, and has severed connections with even the Trotskyists. His work manifests signs of his gradual withdrawal from contact with the masses; it was precisely at its most vigourous whilst his enthusiasm for the world movements of liberation lasted. Of this his poem "If We Must Die," evoked by the race-riots in America after the War, is perhaps the most familiar, if not the best, example:

IF WE MUST DIE

If we must die-let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die-oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honour us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the well, dying, but–fighting .

His recent poetry has revealed his withdrawal to the ivory tower. He no longer writes exhortations to action, poetry full of social content, like some of the poems of Shelley; he writes now the evasive sort of poetry in which the poet uses the importance of his own personal reactions to a love affair or an autumnal day as an escape from the attempt to record his reactions to the significant social activities of his time. That way lies sterility, of course, and that is the way which McKay seems to have chosen, though some of his public acts, such as joining the League of American Writers, which is the American affiliate of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture, may be taken as evidence of his opposition to Fascism. But he is not strongly anti-Fascist.

It was my good fortune over a year ago to hear Andre Malraux make an eloquent plea for humanism when it seemed as if that word would convey little in a world rapidly becoming bereft of human values, as the slaughter of women and children by machine-guns and poison-gas in Ethiopia and the aerial bombardment at Guernica, Barcelona, Madrid, and Canton would prove. I thought then that no serious man of letters could support Fascism, and no serious man of letters has, for Dr. Goebbels, Wotan's Mickey Mouse, cannot be regarded as other than a member of the lumpen-intelligentsia, who has become widely read only by imprisoning all his more competent competitors in concentration camps and by forcing into exile writers like Ernst Toller and Thomas Mann. My thought is nearly an axiom, for it is doubtful whether Miguel de Unamuno really capitulated to Franco, and I hope to live to see his reputation rehabilitated. Certainly no Negro man of letters in America has preached Fascism to his people. Some are at once anti-Fascist and anti-Communist, which is a possible intermediate stage, though if these had to choose, I may venture to suggest that their choice would be E. M. Forster's.

Langston Hughes (1902-) has chosen to be a vigourous proponent of anti-Fascism. As the author of Fine Clothes to the Jews (1927) and The Weary Blues (1929), volumes of poetry, he also took an active part in the Negro renascence of the twenties. He has a greater diversity of talent than McKay. He is a novelist, having published Not Without Laughter (1934). He is also a playwright, having published a dramatic skit entitled Scottsboro Limited, based on the infamous Scottsboro case and he has staged many plays, the chief of which is Mulatto, based on the story "Father and Son" in his volume of short stories entitled The Ways of White Folks (1934). Technically, as a poet, Hughes is original; he has created a personal rhythm, which is the hall-mark of genius in a poet. His rhythm gains strength from its echoes of the folk music of the Negro people composed, during the days of slavery, as work-songs or ‘Spirituals.’ "Water Boy" is an example of a secular song, a work-song, full of revolutionary content somewhat concealed by symbolism, and "Joshua, Fit the Battle of Jericho" is a religious song, as is "Nobody Knows the Trouble I See," all of which are full of revolutionary content which the slave-master would not detect and which the slaves would sense.

The rhythm of the Negro folk-songs has been utilised by Hughes to good effect, and he has not scrupled to make use also of the rhythms of the Negro clergymen. This latter case is highly significant. During the days of slavery, the Negroes were not permitted to learn how to read, and even those who learned were generally confined to reading the Bible in the Authorised Version of 1611; hence the clergy were the social leaders, since the masters felt their doctrines would be useful in suppressing the militancy of the slaves and diverting their natural tendency to revolt into the harmless channels of a belief in a supernatural hereafter where they would be at last free from earthly toil. The clergy, practically illiterate, except for a few, appropriated the rhythms of that ‘noblest monument of English prose’ with that faithfulness with which the illiterate always copy models. To this day, in certain Negro congregations in the evangelical churches, there are preachers who preach in the old way, as the late James Weldon Johnson, another figure in American Negro literature, whom I have had to ignore despite his importance, attempted to illustrate in his poems, God's Trombones (1927).

Hughes has taken the folk-rhythms, and they have become, in his poetry, the authentic voice of the Negro people in their struggle for civil rights in America. It was with great pleasure that my colleagues and I printed his poem "August 19^th" in the August (1938) number of International African Opinion, which is the monthly organ of the International African Service Bureau. I may quote a colleague who likened Hughes to the Scottish poet Burns. The analogy is apt, I think. Hughes is just as class-conscious as the earlier poet; this is shown by his "Ballad of Lenin":

Comrade Lenin of Russia,
High in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.
I am Ivan the peasant,
Boots all muddy with soil.
I fought with you, Comrade Lenin,
Now I have finished my toil.
Comrade Lenin of Russia,
Alive in a marble tomb,
More over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.
I am Chico, the Negro,
Cutting cane in the sun.
I lived for you, Comrade Lenin,
Now my work is done.
Comrade Lenin of Russia
Honoured in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.
I am Chang of the foundries
On strike in the streets of Shanghai.
For the sake of the Revolution
I fight, I starve, I die.
Comrade Lenin of Russia
Rises in the marble tomb:
On guard with the fighters forever-
The world in our room!

He has never hesitated to raise his voice in the interests of the oppressed, whether in Haiti or in Korea, in Spain or in Ethiopia, and he has been unwavering in his loyalty to the common people in their endeavour the world over, at this present epoch, to secure their just share of those democratic rights and privileges which will allow them access to the reservoir of culture which is the common property of mankind. Hence Hughes has been a most relentless enemy of Fascism, which denies culture to the masses and suppresses it, lest it prevent them from submitting to its desire to make them military robots, in order that finance-capitalism in decay may take on a temporary lease of life.

1 William Harrison, the Negro writer, is of West Indian ancestry, his grand-uncle, on his mother's side, being the late Hon. and Rev. George Lewis Young, a Member of the Legislative Council in Jamaica for many years. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, U. S. A., Harrison was educated at America's oldest secondary school, the Public Latin School in Boston, where he won many prizes and served as managing editor of the school magazine in the Last Form, having graduated in 1928. In the autumn of 1928 he entered Harvard University, where he took his Bachelor of Arts with honours in 1932 and his Master of Arts in 1934. While at Harvard, he held several scholarships and obtained the Bowdoin, Ruskin, and Dante Prizes, securing also in 1931 a medal from the French Government for a prize essay on Franco-American culture in connection with the Overseas Colonial Exposition.

While in school and college, he began a career of journalism by writing editorials for the Boston Chronicle, a Negro weekly newspaper, of which he was assistant editor from 1928-1930, when he resigned to become a part-time clerk and messenger in the office of the Dean of Harvard College, a position which he held from 1930 to 1936. In the summer of 1935 he was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for research in Europe, and he travelled then in Great Britain, Belgium, and Germany, returning to America in October. He was the author of a pamphlet entitled Italian Atrocities in Libya, written for the Imperial Legation of Ethiopia, widely distributed in the English version in English-speaking countries and in Arabic in the Near East. Admitted as a non-Collegiate research student in candidacy for the Ph. D. degree at the University of Cambridge, in 1936, Harrison's active participation in Negro political organisations in America such as American Aid to Ethiopia, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the National Negro Congress, and the Jamaican Associates, kept him from returning to England before the autumn of 1937, when he was awarded a Charles M. Cox Scholarship.

He has contributed essays and reviews to such periodicals as the New Frontier, Harvard Advocate, Harvard Crimson, Harvard Journal, Westminster Magazine (U. S. A.); Criterion; Plebs; Socialist Vanguard (London); Aryan Path (Bombay). He is acting chief British correspondent for the Associated Negro Press, and secretary to the editorial committee, International African Opinion, International African Service Bureau. He is a past president of the Saturday Evening Quill Club (Boston) and a former executive secretary of the New England Writers' Conference.