"We, Too, Rise with You": Recovering Langston Hughes's African Turn 1954-1960 in An African Treasury, the Chicago Defender, and Black Orpheus

African American Review, Fall, 2007 by Daniel Won-gu Kim

The transformative impact of Hughes's reconnection with Africa is one that Rampersad largely misses, in spite of his rigorous research, when he writes: "A world not new, but old and neglected, reopened quietly before him in 1954" (236). A neglected world did indeed reopen for Hughes that year, but that world--decolonizing Africa--was neither old nor quiet.

Unfortunately, Rampersad does more than understate the salience of Hughes's African (re)turn. His portrait of Hughes's motivations gives us a writer mainly driven to satisfy unmet personal, emotional needs. Africa becomes a new source of the affirmation for which Hughes constantly yearned as a writer, and it also serves as a refuge in which Hughes licks the wounds he bore from his McCarthy Committee summons and its aftermath: "Thus, in the wake of the Senate hearings and with his apparent eclipse by Wright, Ellison, Brooks, Baldwin, Tolson, and others, he took increasing comfort in his tie to Africa" (237). Rampersad is at his most unhelpful when he discusses the events that triggered Hughes's interest in Africa in 1954: the extensive correspondences that Hughes initiated with a great number of Africans as he assembled An African Treasury. Noting that Hughes found himself "dreaming Nigeria in my sleep," Rampersad speculates at length about the mid-life crisis that lay under Hughes's "true" interest in Africa at this rime: "Nigeria most likely was only a token of a deeper fantasy of self-fulfillment as he approached his mid-fifties.... Peering toward his end, his death, he began to dream more and more of paternity" (238). (9) While these probings of Hughes's psyche valuably advance an understanding of important dimensions of Hughes's life and work, Rampersad's treatment diverts our attention from a crucial political dimension of Hughes's African Treasury correspondences. The phrase "dreaming Nigeria in my sleep" actually comes from a letter of March 2, 1955, that Hughes wrote to one of his closest friends, Arna Bontemps: "Man, I have now almost 50 stories now selected for my African anthology! Been dreaming Nigeria in my sleep. The Nigerians write the most vividly, the South Africans the most poetically. The Liberians not at all--inhibited by being part American, I reckon" (Arna Bontemps 330-31). Rather than a "fantasy of self-fulfillment," what is signaled by "dreaming Nigeria in my sleep" in its original context is the powerful reawakening of political and aesthetic imagination (carried into dreaming) that an artist experiences when deeply immersed in a breakthrough project or phase of work. As Hughes immersed himself in his new connections with black African writers and their work, he was moved not only at a personal level but also in terms of his politics and aesthetics. To understand the scale and political character of this immersion and its impact on Hughes's pan-Africanist and nationalist consciousness, we must recover the context of the African Treasury project.