It is necessary to consider this schizoid view in detail. The opposite of love is hate. While the black may love, they also have a dark side of hate close by. This is why he accentuates the love of blackness and asserted it so strongly, particularly at a time when it was not politically correct to do so. He is particularly pained by the fact that black men are not loving black women (or light skinned, if not white women). No wonder this type of mother is saying "don't be like niggers." While she loves her son, she hates herself and her people and this self-loathing does not help her son's impressions at all.
In "Sweet Brown Harlem Girl," David Jarraway remarks that in this and his other Harlem poems Hughes is looking at this love theme as part of a variety of dream postponements. Due to the general disappointment and the stifling nature of black life in America (even in Harlem), love as in anything else in the black experience is usually postponed to a later more appropriate time (Jarraway 69). Extending upon Hughes' radical assertion that black is beautiful, love takes a back seat to respect for his identity and his ethnicity. He is willing to wait for love because he wants it on equal terms. The love he sees is unpatronizing, uncompromising, beautiful and proud. This is the vision of love he has for the black woman.
This type of theme is further explored in "Love Song for Linda." In this poem, Hughes has obviously climbed the "racial mountain" on his own terms as a black poet. The terms of climb are spelled out in the poem itself when he remarks "Love is a high mountain, stark in a windy sky…Do not climb too high (Hughes "Love Song for Linda")." Unlike the mother he pities in his Nation article, he wants Linda to be proud of and to love her blackness. For Hughes, there is no love to be found when one starts with self-hatred....
Langston Hughes Poetry A Reflection of the American Dream in Langston Hughes's Poetry The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic, literary, and cultural movement that emerged in New York, specifically Harlem, shortly after World War I and into the 1930s. One of the most prominent poets to arise from the cultural movement was Langston Hughes. Hughes's poetry explores the generational differences that have emerged and how though it may seem that there have
When he explains that the "muddy bosom" of the river (or, of the life of the black culture) turns "all golden in the sunset," that is a sweet transition for a culture, and nothing less than mystical, magical and wonderful. Turning mud to gold is the miracle of survival through all the chaos, carnage, and brutal injustices done to black people over the centuries. In "Mother to Son" the poet
Langston Hughes' "Democracy" A number of ideas are expressed -- and buried -- in Langston Hughes' 1949 poem "Democracy." The poem is composed in open form and appears to take its cues from the musical jazz movement of the time period. Its lines are short, often punctuated by abbreviated verses and sudden rhymes that indicate a sense of urgency and immediacy, while vibrating with a strong and insistent timbre and tone.
As a participant in the American history, the author feels that he was among those deceived by the empty promises of democracy and equality: "Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream / in the Old World while still a serf of kings, / Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, / That even yet its mighty daring sings / in every brick and stone,
Langston Hughes felt that African-Americans should be able to live in freedom in the 20th Century. He saw African-Americans as a vibrant race, full of live, compassion, and love. He didn't approve of complacent people. Because Hughes was at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, he naturally felt that African-Americans should speak up and demand what they want. He felt that African-Americans should be proud of their heritage -- they
Dream Variations by Langston Hughes Langston Hughes, born in 1902, in Joplin Missouri, in the middle of a segregated country that allowed its African-American population to develop up to a certain level, never above the lowest of the white classes, even in the happiest of cases. He wrote his poetry like a man who was proud to express his African-American descent and was the first to introduce the music rhythms of
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