Max Pierre

Langston Hughes African American Writer And His Connection With The Black World Especially With Haiti

James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, but he lived with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas until he was thirteen. Afterwards, he went to high school in Ohio were he stayed with his mother. One year after he graduated from high school, he entered Columbia University in the fall of 1921. Langston Hughes is poet, novelist, and playwright. He is the author of children books. Let us see how a connection was made between this writer and black intellectuals with their movements in arts and literature around the world. Consequently, how was this connection especially with Haiti? The history of black literature shows that the négritude movement, started in France with Léopold Sedar Senghor, and two West Indians named Léon G. Damas and Aimé Césaire, is evidence of the link between Hughes and some writers in Europe through close friendships and meetings among African Americans, Africans, and West Indians.

Langston Hughes traveled a lot to Europe, Africa and to the Caribbean. However, the trips he made and the works he had done about Cuba, Haiti also, illustrate the connection. In Paris, Paulette Nadal and Dr. Sajoux both from Haiti, founded a magazine entitled ‘La revue du monde noir' which was associated to a series of meetings together with Jean Price Mars, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Meercer Cook, Léon Damas and others to discuss literature, culture, politics, arts, the black race and its outlook on earth.

Since 1919, there was an African-American movement created by intellectuals, writers, and artists called ‘Harlem Renaissance' which put to light the best arts and literary works realized by African-Americans. That period witnessed the birth and the explosion of jazz, classic blues, literature and culture of the black people in the United States. It was the first African-American movement that way, and it converged with the ‘négritude movement' that will be born later in the 1930's.

Langston Hughes, writer of Harlem Renaissance in a vision of freedom for all black people in the world, traveled tremendously between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. The writer had a special interest: Haiti where in 1931 he spent six month, in the city of Cap-Haitian, near Citadel Laferrière. Langston Hughes trips to Haiti and his friendship with Haitian intellectuals, especially with Jacques Roumain, founder of the Haitian Communist Party, probably introduced him to the leftist ideology. The author published many essays and poems that were critical of the capitalist system. The works he published about Haiti proved his great fondness for this country. He wrote a children book together with Arna Bontemps entitled Popo and Fifina, The children of Haiti, and a play about Haiti's revolution called Emperor of Haiti . Jointly with William Grant Still and another American composer, he put in writing an opera about Haiti entitled Troubled Island . Hughes translated Gouverneurs de la rosée , a novel by Jacques Roumain, and entitled it Masters of the dew .

Langston Hughes writings show some influence by poets such as Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Williams Carlos Williams. Nevertheless, when he through his soul deep down to the roots, he found jazz beats, blues, and Negro Spiritual.

Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote ‘Orphée Noir' (Black Orpheus) as an ientroduction to Léopold Sedar Senghor's Anthologie de la litérature nègre et malgache , believed that one is an intellectual unless he or she takes action against social injustice. Langston Hughes was an intellectual; his poetry reflects social action, blackness, and love. In Paris, the literary salon of Paulette Nadal where the black writers from the world used to convene proved the connection. The writings of Langston Hughes are deeply rooted in the black race. He was working to be a poet who overcomes the theme of race. He is universal while he shares the sufferings of all black people on earth.

The Disoriented Young Man

(for Joanne Hyppolite)

Ninety-nine degrees of heat
he is wearing a cotton winter hat
Blue jeans at his waist
crossed by a tormented belt
way down his buttocks

He flies with no wings
in the streets of Miami
He inhales the smoke
of his future burned out
and whispers his broken present

He enjoys the heat
that makes him hot and hungry
for wild plants and rum
and for soups and ribs and hip-hop
jazz assorted with Negro spiritual

His past is howling after him
like a hungry panther
He listens to hyper cacophony
in the streets of hell
and he flies with insanity

He jumps unseen
to the frantic homeless line
in front of Miami's ethnic clouds
in the stonns of diversity
He opens his arms to admit
a funnel of blue rice
a note of meatballs
with small gray beans

He joins an orchestra of dirty skins
people with hair in jazz-dust
with clothes in rhapsody of smelling water
Towards acquiescence
the homeless will play

The lyrical hunger of a morning Spring
The young man is a living-dead
inhaling the grimy atmosphere
of a troubled way of life

Full With Love

(for Tatianah Jean-Louis)

Full with love
Like the moon up the sky
is full with light
we should be full with love
The moon is
embracing all the earth
thy heart could have been full
wIth love
and beat for all the other hearts
Look at the orchids
caressed by the starlight
they are opening with joy
and will be blown in petals
Spring is full with vegetation
and trees and flowers
are living with laughter
Heart full with sunset
like the sea
is full with fish
full with sea shells
with crabs and water
Full with love
like the moon
is full with bubbles
and with light
lighting all the earth.

I DON'T KNOW YOUR GRAVE
( For my father)

I don't know your body father
but I am living with your blood
I don't know your grave
I feel the bond between us
the link between father and son

Through my mother's womb
when I was a fetus
you used to touch me with tenderness
And till today I carry in my heart
the warmth of your palms

I have flowers between my hands
but I don't know your grave
where these roses belong
I bear your portrait deeply rooted
in the album of my orphanage

Everyday I drop your image in the light
and talk to your inanimate figure
Your soul is here as a light
for you have a son
by whom you will always be
Father I don't know your grave

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Cover Design: Joseph McNair