Advanced, Repressed, and Popular: Langston Hughes During the Cold War1

College Literature, Spring 2006 by Scott, Jonathan

As far as learning the skills of coordination, it would be appropriate here to make a link between Hughes and Bontemps' collage method in Poetry of the Negro and Book of Rhythms, not only because the rhythm writing workshops took place the same year they completed their landmark anthology, but because the workshop exercises themselves often produced, spontaneously, a collage aesthetic. The basis of the literary collage is repetitions and the use of "multistrip" patterns. As Robert Farris Thompson has it in his brilliant study of West African aesthetics, Flash of the Spirit, one of the signal features of multistrip composition is a strategy "for recovering in a special West African way spontaneity in design, without which there can neither vividness or strength in aesthetic structure" (1984, 211). In fact, the different patterns illustrated throughout Book of Rhythms follow closely the logic of West African textile making-the "rhythmized textiles" documented by Thompson (207). Moreover, a look at the illustrations gives a good indication of how Hughes proceeded in the writing workshops.

Created by the graphic artist Matt Wawiorka, the illustrations doubtless try to match the kinds of writing produced by Hughes and his students in the experimental laboratory. There are two good examples of rhythmized writing and drawing in the book that follow directly from Hughes's initial guidelines: the first a multistrip illustration consisting of a row of bowls and a row of plates, which curls up the right side of chapter fourteen, "Rhythms in Daily Life"; and the second a multistrip pattern that tries to capture the rhythms that moisture makes when it forms snowflakes, hail, rain, and icicles. The second illustration is in the fourth chapter, "Sources of Rhythm." Here, Hughes prefaced his remarks on the sources of rhythm by saying, in Hughesian fashion, that when it comes to rhythmical design, no race-to paraphrase Aimé Césaire-has a monopoly on beauty, strength, and intelligence, that there is room for everybody's rhythm at the rendezvous of victory. The opening page of chapter four reads as follows:

Artists have used animals, trees, men, waves, flowers, and many other objects in nature for rhythms. In France 25,000 years ago the cave men made animal drawings on the walls of their caves.

Later the flag lily, fleur-de-lis, became a rhythmical design that is the national symbol of France.

African artists a thousand years ago made beautiful masks with rhythmical lines.

In the sixteenth century a Spanish artist named El Greco sometimes made a man look like this. (Hughes 1954,11)

A sketch of a tall and thin man accompanies the text, as does a drawing of the fleur-de-lis. Two pages later is the drawing of rain, snow, hail, and icicles. Thompson has suggested that one of the main variables in the making of West African rhythmized textiles "is a vibrant propensity for off-beat phrasing in the unfolding of overall design" (1984, 209). That is, major accents of one strip are staggered in relation to those of an adjoining strip, which does not become clear or purposeful until the whole of the composition is taken into account.