Langston Hughes: The "Voice" of Black Nostalgia and Futurity. By Krystal Marsh

     In The Muse is Music, Meta DuEwa Jones is just as interested in Hughes’ status as an elusive figure in American poetry as she is with his poetry itself, and she uses jazz as the framework through which we can see and hear him and his poetry anew. Jones points out that hearing Hughes through the “weary blues” will “undermine the idea of Hughes as primarily a folk poet and the insistence on his racialized authenticity” (36). Though Jones does not specifically go here, I think her scholarship also challenges criticisms made by writers like James Baldwin, who wrote a scathing review of Hughes’ poetry in the late 1950’s. Baldwin writes, “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them.” He continues to say that black speech is, “ a kind of emotional shorthand -- or sleight of hand” that brings black communities together and “Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics: what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art, where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming.”

     What Jones gives us in this book is a way into Hughes’ that showcases his own unique understanding of black “hieroglyphics,” particularly through the incorporation of jazz prosody into his text (through syncopated rhythm and jive language) and his own identity as a jazz performer. In other words, his text can be seen -- among many things -- as a script, a dramatic literary voice that has the potential to become a musical literalized voice on a stage. In this figuration, in Hughes’ poetry hieroglyphics transform into jazz, highlighting the synaesthetic experience Jones is emphasizing throughout her chapter on Hughes’ work. For Jones, Hughes’ vocality and musicality is vital to the evolution of his poetry as text, and invoke the racial, gendered, and sexual identifications Baldwin thinks is largely missing in Hughes’ “hieroglyphics.”   

     I found her phrase “rituals of recital” particularly useful when considering how Hughes’ performs his poetry. More specifically, I am interested in discussing the “unnaturalness” that seems inherent to “rituals of recital” and Langston Hughes’ own stiff, measured, and controlled (I don’t mean this pejoratively) cadence/performances when next to the improvisational, swirling, and responding jazz band that accompanies him. I’m reminded of the quote from Al Young than Jones includes in her Introduction in which he says, “One woman told me, ‘I just love it when you read your own poetry; I don’t like it when you jazz it up and all that because you do things that seem unnatural.’”. Here, Jones and Young are interested in the differences between a performance versus a reading, but I can’t help but think of Brooks and afro-alienation, and how Hughes’ controlled performances could be understood as quotational and gestural as opposed to consuming and signifying. 

     The inclusion of jazz further complicates his readings/performances. In my listening to Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods For Jazz, it seems as if jazz responds to text more than Hughes’ performance, acting as “quotation,” response, and punctuation all together (in other words, it is the syntax of his performance and through performance, his text). As Jones points out, these jazz poetry performances can read as everything from “wrestling match” to “collaboration,” but notes that Hughes’ text very rarely changes, even if his cadence and rhythm does. Jones is excited by the idea of performance as a remarkable act of revision and reimagination (and how those acts can help us reimagine race and gender), however, the inevitably of Hughes’ words may indicate that it was the one thing he didn’t think performance could further “jazz.” In fact, I think the concreteness of text further confirms the ritual of his recitations. Jones writes, “Hughes deflects the racialist pigeonholing by describing less ‘a sense of rhythm’ and more a sense of ritual -- a process for the ceremonial aspects of creating and reciting poetry” (44). With that being said, jazz is the thing that creates a new poem on record, which makes Langston Hughes an even more fluid and flexible figure ripe with variety and interpretative possibility. The collaborative jazz performance, then, create a public composition in which Hughes’ musical -- and not just literary -- voice is vital. In this, Hughes showcases how poems and performance both create and exert their own critical and theoretical frameworks. 

     To bring this further, Hughes’ jazz performances demonstrate the ways in which the voice is the hinge to how poetry comes to signify race and gender. In just the text of his poetry alone, his usual collective and ungrounded “I” foreground his elusive identity and makes him an easy target on which to displace and project our own figurations of race and gender. In these jazz performances, though, it is jazz that creates a new poem on record, which allows Langston Hughes the man to remain an “embodied memory” while his poetry can live on through “constant states of again-ness” and “re-presentation” through performances: in and outside of the archives that contain them (The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor). 

     This brings me to Jones’ methodology and the archive. Jones’ writes that the circulation of black poetics through archival performances functions discursively, which “creates an unofficial ‘archive of feeling’ for succeeding generations through which to be memorized, cited, and performed” (5). She showcases this work in how her book is organized, beginning with Hughes and ending with spoken-word poetry: the structure of the book itself proving that black poetics works on a continuum as opposed to marked “renaissances.” That word is particularly striking, as someone who works in another field named primarily for its artistic “renaissance.” As an early modernist, the label “renaissance” makes broad and arbitrary assumptions regarding the quality of work that came before it, but here, marking a black literary movement as a “renaissance” seems to do something much more troublesome. That is, the word “renaissance” could potentially obfuscate the archive of black music and literature, and makes deep moves of signification that potentially eradicates, erases, or recontextualizes all which came before it. Jones’ book seems to want to undo some of this by allowing us to reimagine jazz and Hughes both separate from and apart of the “renaissance” that usually defines their work. As Jones writes, if archival gaps can signify, they can also testify, and in this book she is accounting for both the “anticipatory nostalgia” and black futurity that black music and literature constantly grapple with.

     Jones’ methodology asks us to be mindful of both nostalgia and futurity, particularly as it pertains to how we understand broad cultural understandings of blackness and, more specifically, black aesthetics. Throughout her book, she is constantly questioning, answering, and revising what the “black” in “black poetics” actually means, and her ultra-discursive methodology makes it difficult to signify “black” as any one thing and, instead, showcases the “formal records of remembrance” as integral to the continuum of black art and aesthetics (173). 

     In thinking about our conversations about “feeling” and “analytics” in our close-reading, Jones here, I think, demonstrates what a marriage between the two actually looks like. She is approaching the archive affectively, but is doing is to mark a new understanding of the continuum and richness of black literary activity. In my activity tomorrow, I want to think about Jones’ big ideas regarding nostalgia, furity, quotation, and feeling by looking at clips from the film Looking for Langston and a performance of “Song for a Dark Girl” by Audra McDonald as a way for us to be mindful of how the be both spectators in the archive while also being spectators of feeling.

Things to listen to / watch:

Harlem in Vogue full album: https://fingertipsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/harlem-in-vogue-the-poetry-and-jazz-of-langston-hughes

Looking For Langston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cplJ1WvMDyE
“Song For A Dark Girl:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1YSMY97Pbw