African-American Literature Essay
The Harlem “Dream Deferred:”Frustration and History Represented in the Weaving of Theme and Form
In 1925, Alain Leroy Locke, the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, said, “Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.” When humans begin a process of rebirth, so does their environment. This is what took place during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s. Yet, the hopeful bastion of African-American creativity and hope was doomed by financial disaster. By looking at the historical foundations of Harlem and its Renaissance, and then examining a poem by one of its instrumental figures, Langston Hughes, we can trace the emphatic hope and tragic loss of a unique period in American history. Hughes’ poetry, years after the death of the Renaissance, flows through image and structure dichotomies, mirroring the sadness and frustration of Hughes and his generation.
There was exuberance in the city of New York during the zenith of the Harlem Renaissance in 1926. A major population shift after Reconstruction involved, approximately, five million African-American migrants. These migrants ventured to northern states where a burgeoning process of industrialization was taking place, increasing chances of employment and financial well-being. In addition, another notable lure of the American north was the diminished presence of racism (the creation of the Klu Klux Klan took place during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War).
However, despite the containment of racist ideology, the floundering economy and environmental factors of the American South after the war played the biggest role. In his seminal book on the subject When Harlem Was in Vogue, David Levering Lewis writes, “The real reason for the mass migration was economic. The deadly blows to the South’s economy from natural disasters during 1915 and 1916—drought and rain and the boll weevil—launched the evacuation” (21).
So, the migration began. New York City had been a major metropolis of American society and industry, and the section of the city known as Harlem became a vital center of a re-birth of artistic culture and ideas: a community of writers, poets, artists, and dancers, amongst many others, interjected creativity originally quelled by slavery and social slighting. Now, in a community whose artistic ability fed off the participants, African-American culture was changing. Lewis continues: “[the population]…shared in equal measure what might be called Harlem nationalism—the emotional certainty that the very dynamism of the ‘World’s Greatest Negro Metropolis’ was somehow a guarantee of ultimate racial victory” (169-170). This new social optimism was not limited to a select number of the burgeoning populous, but to everyone.
To a remarkable degree that collective optimism touched everyone—the humble cleaning woman, the illiterate janitor, and even the criminal element. Nowhere else in America were ordinary people as aware of the doings of their artists and actors, composers and musicians, painters and poets, sculptors and singers, and its literary and academic writers than the Harlem of the mid- and late twenties (Lewis 170).
However, the Stock Market crash of 1929 blanketed the country in financial destitution. No creative movement could sustain its strength in such impoverishing conditions, especially in already poor sections of the country, like Harlem. The light of the Harlem Renaissance had been effectively extinguished. It is here, in lost hope, that we find Langston Hughes’ poem, Harlem.
When reading “Harlem,” one immediately senses a frustrated disillusionment of the speaker’s current condition. Hughes published the poem in his anthology Montage of a Dream Deferred in 1951, over twenty years after the end of the Harlem Renaissance, a period still very much on his mind. In his essay “Langston Hughes: Cool Poet,” Arthur P. Davis describes the collection; “Actually one long poem of seventy-five pages, this work employs a ‘jam session’ technique that allows the poet to make use of a host of varied, blending and contrasting vignettes to paint a full picture of Harlem’s frustration” (22).
The poem begins with the posing of the question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” (1). Hughes refers to the feelings of disenfranchisement, even disempowerment, to the ideals asserted with the Harlem Renaissance. Where has this “dream,” the Harlem Renaissance, gone?
Hughes supplies the reader with imagery that resembles the withering-away of 1920’s Harlem: a raisin drying in the sun (2-3), the festering of a sore (4), a stench of rotten meat (6), the crusting of sugar (7), the sagging of a heavy load (9-10), and the final image of an explosion (11).
The imagery is very appropriate for the theme that Hughes attempts to create. In addition to the images that Hughes kindles for his audience, he incorporates rhyme that provides a dichotomy to the decaying visualizations.
Beginning with the second line, the poem adopts a rhyme scheme of abcbdedfgf. What is odd about this use of rhyme, considering the subject matter of the poem, is that it has an air of playfulness, lightheartedness. This is a polar opposite of the speaker’s lamentations about the foregone Harlem Renaissance. In their book Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, David Mason and John Frederick Nims write on phonetics in poetry that, “…People find [rhyme] fun. Poetry has been seen as the supreme example of the play spirit in human beings…the use of rhyme has been seen as a subconscious recollection of the fun of childhood” (181).
Rhymes do have a sense of childlike appeal and conjuration. If so, why would Hughes use end rhymes, especially in shorter sentences that exacerbate playfulness, when dealing with the vanishing of the Harlem Renaissance? The amalgam of both rhyme playfulness and subject somberness creates a dichotomy and tension against form and tone that mirrors the environment of 1951 Harlem. In another of his essays on the subject, “The Harlem of Langston Hughes’ Poetry,” Arthur P. Davis writes, “Perhaps the dominant over-all impression that one gets from Montage of a Dream Deferred [again, the anthology where Hughes published "Harlem"] is that of a vague unrest. Tense and moody, the inhabitants of this 1951 Harlem seem to be seeking feverishly and forlornly for some simple yet apparently unattainable satisfaction in life…” (142). Hughes very adeptly uses this dichotomy to underscore the frustration experienced by those who had seen the Harlem Renaissance, and the ideals it represented, disappear and not return. Davis continues:
…this theme of Harlem’s dream deferred marches relentlessly throughout ["Harlem"]. Hughes knows that Harlem is neither a gay nor healthy but basically a tragic and frustrated city, and he beats that message home. Because of the fugue-like structure of the poem, it is impossible for the reader to miss the theme or forget it (142).
Immense hope and creativity once filled the streets of Harlem. An influx of slighted people, with new, but unclear freedoms, reinvigorated this area of New York in the 1920’s. This part of the city represented more than just a new home; it represented a life unclaimed. Its subsequent crumbling through the fate of the Stock Market crash crippled the movement, the people. Langston Hughes writes of the sadness and frustration of what was, but now no longer is, in "Harlem." His dream deferred floats amongst dichotomy, and counterintuitive poetic relationships that bring into the mind of his readers what was in the hearts of his contemporaries. It could be argued that the “dream deferred” would float unfulfilled until Martin Luther King Jr. spoke under the gaze of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, speaking to the world the great dream of the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes.
Works Cited
Davis, Arthur P. “Langston Hughes: Cool Poet.” Langston Hughes Black Genius: A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Therman B. O’Daniel. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1971.
Hughes, Langston. “Harlem.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: WW Norton & Co., 2004.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Penguin Books, 1979.
Mason, David and John Frederick Nims. Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
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