An essay from my African-American Literature course

Poeticizing Tragedy:

Selected Poets and the Middle Passage

“‘Middle Passage:’ the WORD means blues to me” is the opening line of James A. Emanuel’s poem The Middle Passage Blues. The first horrific steps of the slave-trade were aboard the Middle Passage, the route taken by slave-wranglers to bring Africans to England and the United States. A majority of scholars on the subject estimate that for every one African to make it through the arduous journey across the Atlantic, five or six Africans would die. The Middle Passage forced an estimated sixty million Africans into its belly. Art very often becomes a means to deal with tragedy and history. It should come as no surprise that many African-American poets have composed art to deal with the tragedy of the Middle Passage. Many of these poems differ in terms of poetic techniques. Looking at selected poems by Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, and Phillis Wheatley one will see just how different these poems are. The methods vary between these three poets and their poems, yet all three of these works recapture and/or comment on the horror burdened by millions over the Atlantic Ocean many years ago.

One of the first poetic techniques found in Robert Hayden’s Middle Passage is intertextuality. Hayden includes lines from a Protestant hymn: “Jesus Saviour pilot me / Over life’s Tempestuous Sea” (20-21). Middle Passage adopts multiple perspectives within the narrative. Not one of those perspectives, however, comes from an African slave. Instead, Hayden opts to include narrations from members of a slave crew. John Hatcher, author of From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden, writes, “Hayden’s most adept handling of narrative to achieve poetic effect is his synthesis of voices and points of view” (261). Hayden uses these perspectives to achieve irony: a shipman onboard a vessel transporting slaves appealing to God. The plea continues: “We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord, / safe passage to our vessels bringing / heathen souls unto Thy chastening” (22-24). Immediately, the reader cannot help but feel a sense of hypocrisy on the part of the speaker. The act of an individual who participates in the slave trade, a grotesque endeavor, appealing to any compassionate God for a secure voyage is a delusional. Hatcher continues, “…any indictment of the slavers comes from our own reaction to the powerful irony of the accusations of the slavers themselves…” (139).

This notion was common during the years that the slave trade remained a working function of the American colonies; many found no religious hypocrisy in relationship to their actions and the spiritual teaching of Jesus Christ. Because the modern reader would be confused, horrified, and baffled by the fact that individuals would actually feel Jesus Christ condoned the slave trade, it creates a powerful (and historically accurate) representation of the Middle Passage. Despite the severe physical, emotional, and mental scars inflicted on fellow human beings by the functionality of the slave market, certain practicing “Christians” felt no hesitation or shame in facilitating that slave-market. Hayden employs this irony for the emotional benefit of his poem. This irony helps influence the reader into viewing the multiple narrations in a negative regard. What is interesting is that the vast majority of first-person narrations involve the protagonist, or the “good guy.” It is very unusual, although very effective, for Hayden to cast the first-person perspectives (the slave-shipman) in a negative connotation. This strengthens the reader to feel sympathy for the slaves and resentment for the practitioners of the Middle Passage.

In contrast to Robert Hayden’s rather lengthy poem, Lucille Clifton’s [the bodies broken on] is a shorter work, consisting of only eleven lines. The length of Hayden’s poem allowed him a larger poetic “palate,” if you will. He allowed himself more opportunities to generate thoughts and emotions to his readers by the simple fact of lengthening his poem—the more space one has to write, essentially, the larger amount of ideas one will convey.

Clifton’s poem is the opposite of Hayden’s endeavor. The shorter length of limits her space to generate thoughts and emotions. Therefore, Clifton employs language that achieves a great deal in minimal allocation. One of the first examples of this comes with the mentioning of the Trail of Tears. In 1838, under President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Americans were marched west. Thousands died under the harsh conditions.

The affect that this historical event has in the poem is the conveying of death at the hands of a power (the United States Government) over those who lack power (the Cherokee). Immediately afterwards, Clifton mentions “the bodies melted” (3) in the Middle Passage. The poem’s speaker associates a harsh physical aftermath with the Middle Passage, and the slave trade, very quickly in the poem. The severity of melting bodies pushes the actual repercussions Africans under the slave trade. Although there were deaths, beatings, disease, broken families, no bodies physically melted. Yet, the statement in Clifton’s poem generates powerful imagery, one that brings total human destruction—a statement of the horrific journey of millions of Africans. In addition, Clifton further adds melodramatic imagery when the speaker comments how both the bodies of the Trail of Tears and the Middle Passage are “married to rock and / ocean by now” (5-6). Ultimately, the mountains’ crumbling on white men and the ocean’s pulling white men down “sing for red dust and black clay / good news about the earth” (10-11). Here, Clifton suggests retribution for the actions of past white’s in their treatment of others. What makes this poem so effective is usage of imagery and associations on the part of the reader. In their book Language in Thought and Action, S.I. and Alan R. Hayakawa state this about poetry: “…one has to admire…their [poets] deep awareness of the mechanisms of human perception and conceptualization that has made it possible for them to express so much so effectively in such condensed form” (196). This is precisely how Clifton influences her readers; painting strong imagery that lingers in one’s mind.

Regarded as the first African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley offers her readers insight into the Middle Passage, and slavery. Born in the African continent and raised in the American colonies. One of her poems, On Being Brought from African to America, uses language and form to describe her thoughts on the slave trade. On the surface, her poem can appear to be contrived and dogmatic, akin to a brainwashed work of art. However, subtle nuances within the poem paint an entirely different picture than initial readings yield.

As Lucille Clifton’s poem, Wheatley’s work is similarly short (only eight lines). The first lines of the poem play into the common societal beliefs of her time: “‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land; / Taught my benighted soul to understand / That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too” (1-3). The first impressions readers gain is that Wheatley’s poem is the byproduct of colonial ideals toward Africans. However, Wheatley hides, or “masks,” her true feelings by putting on airs. The last few lines highlight this: “Some view our sable race with scornful eye; / “Their colour is a diabolic die.” / Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” (4-8). By using a quotation to represent her society’s belief toward Africans (“Their colour is a diabolic die”), Wheatley now detaches herself from the more apparent tone of slave-trade “testimonial” and initiates her own commentary. For modern readers, this tactic in subtlety may seem confusing and unnecessary. What readers need to keep in mind is that Wheatley was not afforded protections that others were (there were no First Amendment rights for African-Americans). She would have to deal with the repercussions of openly criticizing the Middle Passage and colonial slavery. Therefore, she used poetic tact and cunningness to create a safe barrier between her own thoughts and those that were easily discerned in the poem—“masking.”

Note the italics in the second-to-last line. She highlights Christians, Negroes and also Cain (the evil son of Adam and Eve). Also, be mindful of her comma usage. First readings may yield a statement made toward Christians (i.e. Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain…”). However, there is a comma placed after Negroes: “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain” (7). Using Wheatley’s grammar, one sees that the statement the speaker is making to both Christians and Negroes. Combined with both social identifiers italicized (suggesting a uniformity or together-ness), the reader discovers that Wheatley is comparing both Christians and Negroes as being black as Cain. The significance of the Cain reference is that many who read the Genesis account in the Hebrew Bible thought the mark sustained by Cain for murdering his brother, Abel, was to be interpreted as the “mark” of black skin. In Black Imagination and the Middle Passage the authors write, “…the dominant culture uniformly saw blackness as a stigma, the mark of Cain to be “refin’d” away, if not materially, at least spiritually…” (283). Her contemporary white readers (the vast majority of her readers would have been white colonials) would have inferred the “black as Cain” reference as one pertaining only to Africans, as commonly believed. Yet, Wheatley’s reference pertains to both Africans and Colonials. As such, her message can also be reread to infer that both Africans and Colonials “may be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” (8). If an African slave, especially a young woman, openly suggested that white Christian colonials also shared the mark of Cain, she would have faced numerous reprisals, death being one of the many possibilities. By nature, artistic “masking” is subtle and difficult to extrapolate. Perhaps, Wheatley felt that her African contemporaries needed to be “refin’d.” However, the text can also suggest that Wheatley was not at a loss to comment on white-superiority/black-inferiority notions of her time. There is substantial logic for Wheatley to have incorporated a “masking” technique in light of the legal stranglehold held against the African-American contemporaries of her time, making her “true” intent difficult to separate from her masked rhetoric.

Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, and Phillis Wheatley use varying techniques in their poems that describe the Middle Passage. Hayden incorporated the Christian religion to build a poem around irony. Clifton used minimal syntax, focusing more on strong lexical associations and Wheatley “masked” her true thoughts, blanketing them in prose that is more ambiguous. These poetic measures differ, but they both focus on, bringing into higher awareness, the immense tragedy that followed the ships of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. By reading and understanding the art that describes such tragedy, we may better understand it. Doing so will give cadence to the memories lost over that broad sea.

Works Cited

Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis and Nellie Y. McKay, ed. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Hatcher, John. From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden. Oxford: George Ronald, 1984.

Hayakawa, S.I. and Alan R. Hayakawa. Language in Thoughts and Action. New York: Harcourt, 1990.