A book that changed me / Langston Hughes showed me what it meant to be a black writer

 

A book 

that changed

 me 

Langston Hughes showed me what it meant to be a black writer

Gary Younge

This article is more than 7 years old

His 1926 essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain made clear that a black writer must write the best work they can, while refusing to be defined by other people's racial agendas

Gary Younge

Thu 1 August 2013

O

ne of my first columns on these pages didn't make it into the paper. I'd written about the Nato bombing of Bosnia and the comment editor at the time thought I should stick to subjects closer to home. "We have people who can write about Bosnia," he said. "Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this."

The whole point of having a black columnist, he thought, was to write about black issues. I had other ideas. I had no problem writing about race. It's an important subject that deserves scrutiny to which I've given considerable thought and about which I've done a considerable amount of research. I have no problem being regarded as a black writer. It's an adjective not an epithet. In the words of Toni Morrison, when asked if she found it limiting to be described as a black woman writer: "I'm already discredited. I'm already politicised, before I get out of the gate. I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination, it expands it."

But that was not all I wanted to write about or what I imagined the function of a black columnist to be. It wasn't, in short, the only adjective available and I had no interest in being confined by it. The fear of being pigeon-holed is one of the crippling anxieties of any minority. Being seen only as the thing that makes you different through the lens of those with the power to make that difference matter really is limiting. Instead of crafting your own narrative, you get a bit part from central casting in someone else's play.

It was thanks to Langston Hughes's 1926 essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, written for the Nation magazine (full disclosure: I write a column in the Nation), which I read shortly after university, that I was able to centre myself within these apparently conflicting demands. Hughes, an African-American poet and essayist from the Harlem renaissance period of the early 20th century, was every bit the renaissance man. Raised in poverty in Kentucky, he wrote plays, worked as a merchant seaman, covered the Spanish civil war for the black press and toured central Asia after plans for a visit to the Soviet Union to put on a musical collapsed.

He was a young, gay black man who was always going places precisely because he did not know his place. And that fearlessness is applied to The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, which is effectively a manifesto for black writers who feel hemmed in by strictures imposed by the race thinking of both blacks and whites. What he makes clear is that the task of a black writer was no different from that of any other writer – to write the best work they could about whatever they wanted, while resisting the pressure to be defined by the racial agendas of others.

The essay starts with him relating an encounter with "one of the most promising young negro poets" who once told him: "I want to be a poet – not a negro poet." Hughes reflects: "And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself … This is the mountain standing in the way of any true negro art in America – this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mould of American standardisation, and to be as little negro and as much American as possible."

The fact that much of the essay – its language, assumptions and even at times framing – feels dated added to the appeal for me. Having grown up in Stevenage and studied in Edinburgh I had not been around enough black people to know that what I was experiencing was neither unique nor new. Clearly, rereading it now, I got out of it what I wanted and discarded the rest. Though the essay explicitly defines the "mountain" as an "urge towards whiteness" I understood it then and now somewhat differently. Not only to withstand the urge towards whiteness but also to resist any mould that was not of your own making, regardless of who made it. To refuse to wear any old suit that didn't fit just because it was given to you and the donor said it suited you.

That means not being in flight from blackness even when it is a category employed more in disparagement than description but acknowledging it as a condition within the human rainbow that is no more or less valid than any other. "I am ashamed for the black poet who says, 'I want to be a poet, not a negro poet', as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world."

But while acknowledging race as one legitimate category among many, it also meant not fetishising blackness; playing to a gallery whose appreciation was no less clouded by the same limitations, even when conveying different impulses. The last paragraph I read as a rallying cry against pressures from all sides to conform – a compass for choppy racial waters: "We younger negro artists who create, now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," Hughes wrote. "If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If coloured people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves."

THE GUARDIAN

Andrew Motion / A book that changed me

Seamus Heaney by Antonio Olmos

Andrew Motion

A book 

that changed

 me 

Door into the Dark opened the portals to a different future

‘I have only to see Door into the Dark sitting on my bookshelves to remember the feeling that a locked-up door in my life had suddenly swung open,’ says Andrew Motion

How the ‘slap and squelch’ of Seamus Heaney’s poems propelled me into verse

Andrew Motion

Sun 17 Aug 2014

W

hen I was a child, there were two books of poetry in the whirligig at home: a collected Tennyson that had once been given to my great-grandmother by my great-grandfather, and a Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke which my mother had won as a school prize. Nobody read them. Nobody read anything much. They preferred the life outdoors. Then I began doing English A-level, and was taught for the first time by Peter Way, who walked straight into my head and turned the lights on. Within a few weeks my old life seemed to have fallen away (though not the subjects it contained), and all I wanted to do was to write and read poems.

My parents were bemused, but Mr Way was pleased and began lending me books of his own: Wordsworth, Hardy, Edward Thomas, Larkin. One day, standing by his desk to return whatever it was I’d borrowed that week, I noticed at his elbow a copy of Door into the Dark by someone I’d never heard of before – Seamus Heaney. Noticed because I wasn’t sure how you pronounced “Seamus”, because the title was so alluring, and because the lettering on the jacket was very beautiful.

“What’s that, sir?”

“It’s just come out.” (This would have been the winter of 1969.) “It’s his second book.”

I wanted to borrow it, but I couldn’t; Mr Way was still reading it. So next weekend I biked into Oxford and bought a copy in Blackwell’s. I already owned a few Penguin poetry collections (Robert Graves, e e cummings, Baudelaire: I had no plan to my reading, I was just gobbling at random), but this was the first book of proper contemporary poetry. It felt like a significant moment. And …

In later life we can still sometimes sense the top of our head ripping open when we find a new book to love. But not much compares to the sheer amazement, delight, shock, recognition we felt at such moments in the earlier part of our lives. Today I have only to see that same copy of Door into the Dark sitting on my bookshelves to remember the feeling that a locked-up door in my life had suddenly swung open, and a different future was possible.

And, paradoxically, all the more so because as well as feeling absolutely surprising, the book was full of things I recognised – even though the rural East Anglia of my childhood was a far cry from rural County Derry, and my stage in life was very different from Heaney’s. When I read about the “Green froth that lathered each end / Of the shining bit”, I saw the horses in the stable yard at home; when I came to the “billhook / Whose head was hand-forged and heavy”, I was clearing undergrowth with my dad; when I swam through A Lough Neagh Sequence, I was back fishing again in the rivers and loughs I’d known in my childhood.

In other words, the book made me feel adventurous and rooted at the same time. Of course I missed important things – including and especially a lot of the politics and religion, which I picked up later in poems like In Gallarus Oratory and Requiem for the Croppies. But I’d heard the principal melody of things, or so I felt, and it’s not an exaggeration to say I fell in love with it.

Since then, I’ve read better books of poems, including better books by Heaney, but no other collection has touched me like this one. The squelch and slap of the writing; the beautiful interplay of vowels and consonants (which carried Heaney’s voice into my ear long before I ever heard him speak); the connections between past and present (always cleverly done, but with no smartassery); the narrative anecdotes (in The Wife’s Tale, for instance), as gripping as a short story; the warmth of the heart at work.

Inevitably, I suppose, I wanted to contact the man who had made me feel like this – just to thank him. So I wrote him a fan letter. I shudder now to think what it must have said, and even at the time it didn’t seem strange that I never had an answer. But I was undaunted.

Early in the spring of the following year, I noticed that Heaney and Ted Hughes (whom I had also got pretty keen on) were due to read some poems by Wordsworth (ditto) at an event at the Poetry Society in London – I think it must have been to celebrate the bicentenary of Wordsworth’s birth.

Off I went to listen, and found myself in an audience about 25-strong. Imagine. At the end I took up my copy of Door into the Dark for Heaney to sign. I must have told him about the unanswered missive, because in black biro on the title page he wrote “Seamus Heaney to Andrew Motion – instead of a letter – with thanks 7th April 1970.” I carried it home like a trophy. Actually no, not at all like a trophy – or only when I showed it to Mr Way. Like treasure.

THE GUARDIAN