Chapter 4a: Reinventing Blackness in the Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1928
It would be beyond our scope here to give a thorough account of the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance here. It’s a vast topic, and many books have been written on the subject. (One place to get a general overview might be our own timeline of events here.)
In poetry, the period saw the rapid spread of free verse form and exciting experiments with style and voice. Here, we’ll focus on two highly innovative themes, one being the transformative aesthetics around the concept of Blackness that emerged, and the other being the direct engagement with desire and eroticism in poetry by Black women.
When we refer to a “transformative aesthetics” around Blackness, we are in essence talking about challenging a kind of cultural racism that took it as a default that European norms of beauty and culture were superior to all other forms. If White writers could take it for granted that “fairness” or “whiteness” – and certain facial features, and certain textures of hair – were associated with being beautiful, Black writers in the Harlem Renaissance challenged those norms and began to assert and claim a distinctive aesthetics of Black Beauty. In the 1960s this would come to be encapsulated in the slogan “Black is Beautiful”; what writers like Helene Johnson and Gwendolyn B. Bennett were doing in the 1920s anticipated that powerful slogan more than forty years earlier.
Here is a poem by Gwendolyn B. Bennett that might be an instance of what we have been calling transformative aesthetics:
Gwendolyn B. Bennett, To a Dark Girl (1927)
I love you for your brownness
And the rounded darkness of your breast.
I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice
And shadows where your wayward eye-lids rest.
Something of old forgotten queens
Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk
And something of the shackled slave
Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.
Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow's mate,
Keep all you have of queenliness,
Forgetting that you once were slave,
And let your full lips laugh at Fate!
At the time this was published, Eurocentric concepts and imagery around physical beauty were deeply entrenched – so even to assert that brown skin or black skin might be beautiful might have been seen as surprising, even transgressive. But this is a norm that a Black feminist poet like Gwendolyn B. Bennett – who was only 24 years old when the poem was published – was aiming to challenge as she asserts: “I love you for your brownness.” The poem isn’t entirely utopian, however, as she also suggests that the cultural legacy of slavery continues to haunt the subject of the poem in the present (“And something of the shackled slave / Sobs in the rhythm of your talk”).
Here is another poet by Gwendolyn B. Bennett from, from just a few years earlier:
Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Heritage” (1923)
I want to see the slim palm-trees,
Pulling at the clouds
With little pointed fingers. . . .
I want to see lithe negro girls,
Etched dark against the sky
While sunset lingers.
I want to hear the silent sands,
Singing to the moon
Before the Sphinx-still face. . . .
I want to hear the chanting
Around a heathen fire
Of a strange black race.
I want to breathe the Lotus flow'r,
Sighing to the stars
With tendrils drinking at the Nile. . . .
I want to feel the surging
Of my sad people's soul
Hidden by a minstrel-smile.
Perhaps the most powerful moment in this poem is the ambivalence reflected in the final stanza. In some ways that ambivalence is an echo of the same duality seen in “To a Dark Girl” – there is a joy, beauty, and creativity in Black culture that is hinted at throughout this poem, and encapsulated in the phrase “the surging / Of my sad people’s soul.” But there is also a precarity and a sense of confusion and disorientation. The final phrase, “Hidden by a minstrel-smile” suggests that all of this creativity and culture may be undermined by the way it's received (specifically by a white audience).
A final example from Gwendolyn B. Bennett along these lines is her 1924 poem, “To Usward!”
Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “To Usward!” (1924)
Dedicated to all Negro Youth known and unknown who have a song to sing, a story to tell or a vision for the sons of earth. Especially dedicated to Jessie Fauset upon the event of her novel, "There is Confusion."
Let us be still
As ginger jars are still
Upon a Chinese shelf.
And let us be contained
By entities of Self. . . .
Not still with lethargy and sloth,
But quiet with the pushing of our growth.
Not self-contained with smug identity
But conscious of the strength in entity.
If any have a song to sing
That's different from the rest,
Oh let them sing
Before the urgency of Youth's behest!
For some of us have songs to sing
Of jungle heat and fires,
And some of us are solemn grown
With pitiful desires,
And there are those who feel the pull
Of seas beneath the skies,
And some there be who want to croon
Of Negro lullabies.
We claim no part with racial dearth;
We want to sing the songs of birth!
And so we stand like ginger jars
Like ginger jars bound round
With dust and age;
Like jars of ginger we are sealed
By nature's heritage.
But let us break the seal of years
With pungent thrusts of song,
For there is joy in long-dried tears
For whetted passions of a throng!
“To Usward” was inspired by a particular event – the publication of Jessie Fauset’s novel There is Confusion in 1924. The publication of that novel by a prominent New York publisher was a big event, and inspired a celebratory dinner at the Harlem Civic Club that was attended by hundreds of people. (Later, that dinner would be seen as the dinner that in effect kicked off the peak period of the Harlem Renaissance)
Gwendolyn Bennett’s poem is partly a celebration of the creativity of young writers like Fauset (and by extension, perhaps, herself), though if one reads carefully one sees that her aim is not to put forward a single, “correct” Black aesthetic or style. Rather, there is an openness to different kinds of voices and styles. The key lines might be these: “We claim no part with racial dearth;/ We want to sing the songs of birth!” This really sums up the heart of the message of Bennett’s celebratory poem – there is a newly emergent Black cultural consciousness she wants to recognize and enjoy.
One of Gwendolyn Bennett’s approximate peers in the New York poetry scene was Helene Johnson (born in 1906 – four years younger than Bennett). While still a college student, Johnson wrote and published the following poem, which stands out for its notable sophistication and rich imagery:
Helene Johnson, “Fulfillment” (1926)
To climb a hill that hungers for the sky,
To dig my hands wrist deep in pregnant earth,
To watch a young bird, veering, learn to fly,
To give a still, stark poem shining birth.
To hear the rain drool, dimpling, down the drain
And splash with a wet giggle in the street,
To ramble in the twilight after supper,
And to count the pretty faces that you meet.
To ride to town on trolleys, crowded, teeming
With joy and hurry and laughter and push and sweat —
Squeezed next a patent-leathered Negro dreaming
Of a wrinkled river and a minnow net.
To buy a paper from a breathless boy,
And read of kings and queens in foreign lands,
Hyperbole of romance and adventure,
All for a penny the color of my hand.
To lean against a strong tree's bosom, sentient
And hushed before the silent prayer it breathes,
To melt the still snow with my seething body
And kiss the warm earth tremulous underneath.
Ah, life, to let your stabbing beauty pierce me
And wound me like we did the studded Christ,
To grapple with you, loving you too fiercely,
And to die bleeding — consummate with Life.
On the surface, this poem by Helene Johnson does not appear to be a ‘racial’ poem in quite the same way as the Bennett poems cited above. Race is only directly mentioned once in the third stanza; for much of the poem the speaker appears to be expressing a kind of joy in being alive and connected to a joyous natural beauty. Some of the most memorable lines in the poem are along those lines (“Ah, life, let your stabbing beauty pierce me”). However, in the third stanza there is a reference to a Black migrant to the city: “Squeezed next a patent-leathered Negro dreaming / Of a wrinkled river and a minnow net.” Patent-leather shoes were popular in the 1920s because they were shiny and easy to keep clean – the image suggests a contrast between the urbanity and sophistication of the person being described and their inner life, focused on an experience of the natural world that has been left behind.
If one reads carefully, one sees the close alignment between this “patent-leathered Negro dreaming” and the speaker herself: she too longs for an embodied experience of the natural world, even as she is thrilled by city life (“To ride to town on trolleys, crowded, teeming / With joy and hurry and laughter and push and sweat”).
Another poem by Helene Johnson that explores some of these same themes might be "Bottled" (note the contrast between the "shiny" aesthetics of the fashionabe Black man on the street and the idea of an inner life that is much more organic and natural).
Further Reading:
Poems dealing with Black Beauty (Transformative Aesthetics Around Race)
Poems dealing with Race and Black Identity