Charles T. Davis lecture, "The Harlem Renaissance," at the University of Iowa, April 8, 1970
Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of the university of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English, and the Afro-American Studies Program at the university, presents a series of lectures by a Black specialist as material for the University's course, Afro-American literature. The lecture for this week is Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at Pennsylvania Statue University, speaking on the Harlem Renaissance. Here is Professor Davis.
Charles T. Davi...: Good afternoon. It seems to be still the kind of weather in which one needs in order to talk about a renaissance. Today I want to talk about a rather different idea. One which I expect, extends just as far back in history as the idea of rebirth. I'm thinking in this instance of the idea of the ideal land. Of the ideal place, of a territory with all of the marvelously appropriate conditions. What I'm talking about, of course, is the Arcadian tradition, which has been so important in America.
Charles T. Davi...: We've lived with the prospect of Arcadia as we've lived with the prospect of rebirth. Arcadia, of course, was a tradition which has been important to us as long ago, obviously, as the work of the Elizabethans, the work of the writers in the renaissance. Arcadia has been an ideal which has been important to us here in America. One thinks in this connection of Henry David Thoreau's notion of Arcadia. Of how when that terminal chapter... I should say almost terminal chapter. I'm thinking of the chapter [inaudible]. He imagines at Walden that he has achieved inference into Arcadia. That he has achieved the rebirth that he has sought. One finds, obviously, Arcadian references of this kind elsewhere in American literature of out time. One thinks, obviously, of the marvel fawn, and of the Arcadian references that we find there.
Charles T. Davi...: It seems to me that is the tradition that you have to have in mind, in part, when we come to look at the idea of Africa, which we shall explore here today. We begin with a question, and no doubt we will terminate with the same question. That question is put my Countee Cullen in the poem, Heritage, which in some ways will be the basic text for this lecture. "What is Africa to me?," Cullen ask in a poem, Heritage. His immediate response is, of course, not the expected one given the fact that Cullen was the son of Methodist minister, a Phi Beta Capa graduate from New York University, a winner of prizes in national poetry contests, and a thoroughly sophisticated resident of New York City. If we were in 1925, familiar with poems, written some years before by Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, we should have every reason to anticipate a poem with a sharp political orientation and with impressive historical references. That is not what we find in the first stanza of Heritage, which I wish you to listen to now.
Charles T. Davi...: "What is Africa to me? Copper sun or scarlet sea, jungle star or jungle track, strong bronzed men, or regal Black women from whose loins I sprang when the birds of Eden sang? One three centuries removed from the scenes his fathers loved. Spicy grove, cinnamon tree. What is Africa to me?"
Charles T. Davi...: As I said, there's nothing political, obviously, about what I've read. We discover a kind of primitive drumbeat. I think you've heard it. A typical line has four strong stretches with an emphatic susurra between beat three and four. What is Africa to me? Or copper sun or scarlet sea. You've heard it before. Some of you who remember, for example, Hiawatha, will remember hearing that particular kind of musical line. It was used in some ways in Hiawatha for just the same reason. Now, Cullen begins to say here what Africa is. His list of characteristics has nothing to do with history or politics or facts as we normally define them in our own prosaic mundane way. Copper sun, scarlet sea, jungle star, jungle track, birds of Eden, spicy grove, cinnamon tree. Spring more appropriately from lines by Coleridge or conceivably Poe. Then from any documented account of what Africa is.
Charles T. Davi...: It's clear what Cullen is doing. He sketches an ideal land. One nobler, perhaps, truer in an emotional way than the world that we live in. He is disturbed, you shall discover, by his separation from it in time. He tells us here. "One three centuries removed," suggesting, obviously, departure from Africa at some point, perhaps in the 17th century. He's disturbed by his separation from Africa in time, as well as in space. He asserts that he can reestablish connection with the ideal Africa through an act of the imagination. Through, as we shall see very shortly, the machinery of the dream. Now, listen to this next stanza.
Charles T. Davi...: "So I lie, who all day long want no sound except the song sung by wild barbaric birds, goading massive jungle herds, juggernauts of flesh that pass, trampling tall defiant grass where young forest lovers lie, plighting troth beneath the sky. So I lie, who always hear, though I cram against my ear both my thumbs, and keep them there., great drums throbbing through the air. So I lie," he says, and Cullen proceeds to construct. One is tempted to say reconstructs, and then one thinks again, and comes to the conclusion that it is really constructs. He reconstructs the sounds, the objects, the rituals of an African world his ear has never heard, and his open eye has never seen.
Charles T. Davi...: Now, the authority for this strange business is, of course, the mythology of the Harlem Renaissance. Cullen advances the theory that his consciousness is a kind of battleground. One force in it is largely portrayed in a negative way. This is the resistance to sounds that threaten to flood the consciousness of the speaker. A resistance based on respect for the customs and the values of a modern Christian Western civilization. These references I want you to note now.
Charles T. Davi...: "So I lie, who always here, though I cram against my ear both my thumbs and keep them there, great drums throbbing through the air. So I lie, who's found of pride, dear distress and joy allied, is my somber flesh and skin with the dark blood damned within, like great pulsing tides of wine that I dear must burst the fine channels of the chaffing neck where they surge and foam and fret."
Charles T. Davi...: We have, in short, an opposition defined there. There is the civilized self. One way of describing the resisting force. Opposed to it is the aboriginal or primitive self. Now, the aboriginal self is the part of the consciousness of these speaker that welcomes the sounds of the jungle. The barbaric birds, the jungle herds, the throbbing drunks. Notice that the emphasis upon sounds first would seem appropriate since the imagination governed by the primitive self is not sufficiently strong as yet to shape objects one has only to think, for example, of a fall, of an obscuring fall, from which slowly objects emerge. One has the sense, I think, of the kind of poetic technique which is being employed here. Experience seems more insubstantial when conveyed by the imagery of sound. The civilized resistance, on the other hand, is presented here by two quite different figures. One plain, one fancy. The plain one, and it hardly could be plainer, consists of the speaker's thumbs, which he crams, perhaps jams... that might be a better word... against his ear. The intention there is that that act would block out or to muffle, a better term certainly, the associations with the jungle. The associations that come from the responses of the primitive self.
Charles T. Davi...: The fancy form of resistance here is the identification of that resistance. With the dark skin of the speaker, the awareness in short of color difference, which functions as a dam first, checking the tide's whine, and then in a complimentary figure as a net containing or moderating the surge of the flood of primitive emotion that almost dissolved, the civilized checks, which I have alluded to already. This is very important for you to understand, I think, at this point to the point. Let me read a little further.
Charles T. Davi...: "Africa? A book one thumbs listlessly, till slumber comes. Unremembered are her bats Circling through the night. Her cats crouching in the river reeds, stalking gentle flesh that feeds by the river brink; no more does the bugle-throated roar cry that monarch claws have leapt from the scabbards where they slept. Silver snakes that once a year doff the lovely coats you wear. Seek no covert in your fear lest a mortal eye should see; what's your nakedness to me? Here no leprous flowers rear fierce corollas in the air; here no bodies sleek and wet, dripping mingled rain and sweat, tread the savage measures of jungle boys and girls in love."
Charles T. Davi...: As the power of the aboriginal self increases, the speaker is able to conjure up objects almost as if his sight was able to see specific objects emerging from the fog, you understand. As that power increases, the objects become clearer. The scenes form a primitive past that is, he amidst at this part of the poem, not remembered, but is nonetheless desired more honorably because it isn't remembered. The details of that primitive past come through now. Bats, cats, snakes, flowers, all become parts of a benign jungle scene. Offering a background for the ritual dance of a lovers. Now, the strength of this primitive force in the consciousness achieves a kind of climax, in the lines which I shall read now.
Charles T. Davi...: "So I lie, who find no peace, night or day. No slight release from the unremittant beat made by cruel padded feet walking through my body's street. Up and down they go, and back, treading out a jungle track. So I lie, who never quite safely sleep from rain at night- I can never rest at all when the rain begins to fall; Like a soul gone mad with pain, I must match its weird refrain; Ever must I twist and squirm, writhing like a baited worm, while its primal measures drip through my body, crying, "Strip! Doff this new exuberance. Come and dance the Lover's Dance!" In an old remembered way, rain works on me night and day."
Charles T. Davi...: You see a climax here with the direct appeal to the speaker to participate, strip is the command. Indeed, a command rather commonly heard these days of plays and productions like Old Calcutta. Stripped is the command, and the command is heard whenever rain falls, bringing compulsive and involuntary associations with the imaginary jungle. Now, ultimately, we are lead into something more important than this challenge to participate,
Charles T. Davi...: "Quaint, outlandish heathen gods, Black men fashion out of rods. Clay, and brittle bits of stone in a likeness like their own. My conversion came high-priced; I belong to Jesus Christ, Preacher of humility; Heathen gods are naught to me. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. So I make an idle boast; Jesus of the twice-turned cheek, Lamb of God, although I speak with my mouth thus, in my heart. Do I play a double part? Ever at Thy glowing altar must my heart grow sick and falter. Wishing He I served were Black, thinking then it would not lack precedent of pain to guide it. Let who would or might deride it; Surely then this flesh would know yours had borne a kindred woe. Lord, I fashion dark gods, too. Daring even to give you dark despairing features where crowned with dark rebellious hair, patience wavers just so much as mortal grief compels, while touches quick and hot, of anger, rise to smitten cheek and weary eyes. Lord, forgive me if my need sometimes shapes a human creed."
Charles T. Davi...: Ultimately, this regressive emotional response which I have describe with some care challenges the basic value system of Western Christian society. The speaker cannot forget African religious practices. The disposition there which these practices embody, do fashion God's after men, to make deities conform with the anatomy and the figure of human beings. Ultimately, the poet speaker confesses here to a double allegiance, and it's one that haunts him. On the one hand, he tells us he is technically a Christian. On the other hand, he yields, involuntarily, inevitably, to the pagan impulse, to fashion gods after himself. To make Christ Black. As we approach the end of the poem, the conflict is not resolved. There is not sense that the speaker will give up the inner Africa that he has discovered.
Charles T. Davi...: At the same time, he remains superficially civilized. Though he tell us at the very end, "All day long and all night through, one thing only must I do: Quench my pride and cool my blood, lest I perish in the flood. Lest a hidden ember set timber that I thought was wet, burning like the driest flax, melting like the merest wax, lest the grave restore its dead. Not yet has my heart or head in the least way realized, they and I are civilized."
Charles T. Davi...: Now, let me point out the essential elements of the system that Cullen has constructed here, because this is a system that presents to us the core of the belief in Africa as the ideal land. Africa Cullen maintains, exist not many vials from the shore of America, but in the consciousness of sensitivity grows. The African landscape is ideally reconstructed by the poet is violent, colorful, excessive. In sharp contrast with the sober set of restrictive devices that are the products of Western civilization. Finally, this imagined excursion to Africa challenges our essential religious values, and my implication or extension, our aesthetic values, since it gives us the authority to place the ritual love dance, beside the passion of Christ, and the temerity, ultimately, to make Christ Black.
Charles T. Davi...: Now, this is the beginning in 1925 of a belief in the validity of a Black aesthetic system. Now, you've heard a good deal about this lately. The germ for this, the seed for this, is to be discovered, obviously, in this poem. Heritage by Cullen. Many, many years before Leroy Jones talked about or wrote about or made poems about what he called Black Magic. Here it begins in 1925, this belief in the validity of a Black aesthetic system. One that fashions art as well as the ritual of worship, after what is considered a Black experience, and that a Black experience as defined here is the expression of the aboriginal, rather than the civilized self. If one understands, truly, this poem, one understands, I think, much of the conception of African in the Harlem Renaissance.
Charles T. Davi...: The problem is not disposed of so simply. It would be nice if I could terminate my lecture here, but I cannot. African, of course, existed before Countee Cullen. Now, Africa before Cullen's poem meant something simpler and something more objective. One wonders how it is that Cullen arrives at this highly emotional, highly personal notions of what Africa is. Possibly, and I think, perhaps, I could use an adverb stronger than possibly, the disciplined abstraction, and the intensity of African objects moved Cullen to probe his own psyche to discover analogous conventions in the ritual dance and in the Black Christ that stand for his deepest emotions. That is a process, you understand, that might be suggested by the African objects that he might have seen. While I'm talking about beautiful objects of art from Africa, you have some in your own museums, and you understand, of course, that one of the requirements for passing this course is walking across the Iowa river. Symbolic, is it not?
Charles T. Davi...: Walking across the river to that museum, to view those marvelous masks from Mali, the Ivory Coast, from Guinea, and from elsewhere in West Africa. To return. Clearly, when Hughes, much earlier, in thinking of Africa... Clearly, Hughes, in talking of Africa, did not have in mind anything like this. In a poem, which I know all of you know, because some of you no doubt recited it when you were in high school, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, we have the conventional notion, do we not, Of Africa? This is a poem of Hughes' youth heard, perhaps, too often these days. Hughes says here, "I've known rivers. I've known rivers ancient of the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathe in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turned all golden in the sunset."
Charles T. Davi...: Though the reference is obviously to the Nile and to the Congo, or the ones that seem to me, to be the ones that engage us here. Now, they, the inspiration obviously for this assertion, these references to the Congo and to the Nile, see more academic than anything else. If that inspiration had to be identified, I should identify it with the one to whom this poem is directed. We have, in parentheses, under the title the title of the poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, two W.E.B. Du Bois , To Whom the Poem is Dedicated. The references here are quite clearly designed to suggest an ancient history for Negroes. One that is involved with the very early cradles of civilization in the river valleys.
Charles T. Davi...: I wish now to look at another poem. This one written by Claude McKay. His sonnet published in 1922 in Harlem Shadows. You will discover in this poem, that McKay goes further. Offers a more specific documentation of the form of an African contribution to ancient history. Let me read it to you.
Charles T. Davi...: "The sun sought thy dim bed and brought forth light. The sciences were suckling at thy breast. When all the world was young, in pregnant night thy slaves toiled at thy monumental best. Thou ancient treasure land, though modern prize, now peoples marvel at the pyramids. The years roll on, thy sphinx of riddle eyes watches the mad world with immobile lids. The Hebrews humble them at Pharaoh's name, cradle of power. Yet all things were in vain. Honor and glory, arrogance and fame, they went. The darkness swallowed thee again. Thou art the harlot, now thy time is done, of all the mighty nations of the sun."
Charles T. Davi...: You see the documentation here, somewhat more specific than it is in Hughes' poem. There are illusions here to the beginnings of science, and to the construction of the pyramids and the sphinx. These, we see, are important less for themselves, than for the fact that they represent symbols of power held by Africans. The conclusion of the poem deplores the low state of Africa now. Originally connected with the first evidences of knowledge, of light from in Africa is now a term for darkness. Formerly the master of slaves, the overload of an entire race, Africa is the tool, the instrument, the harlot of all peoples who lived elsewhere. Now, the poem is a reasonably accurate, though, of course, highly dramatized rendered of history. What was explicit in Hughes' poem, is implied in McKay's. That is the identification with Africa is intended to supply an amount of dignity to a Black speaker who acquires a noble tradition. One equal to that of other races.
Charles T. Davi...: We wonder, at least, we should wonder about the reason for an interest in Africa at this time. By this time, I mean at the turn of the decade now. I mean in the years from about 1918 to 1922 or 23. I'm very specific about this, and I must be, because this is a time before we feel the impact of African primitive art that so deeply stirred County Cullen, and resulted, obviously, in subjective definition of Africa. This is not the subjective, but rather, an objective definition indeed of Africa. We wonder, and it seems to me legitimate for us to do so, about the reason for an interest in Africa at this time, prior to the discovery of African primitive art by Black intellectuals and artists.
Charles T. Davi...: The answer is, of course, the war. Specifically, the conclusion of World War 1. Now, many American Negroes followed with some care the negotiations being transacted at the Peace Congress at Versailles. Thanks, largely, to the interest in that Peace Congress of W.E.B. Du Bois . They were disturbed that Black Africa had no representation there. It was Du Bois who publicized the embarrassing situation in the pages of The Crisis Magazine. Du Bois , in recalling the time, wrote in the first of his two autobiographies. This one was entitled Dusk of Dawn, published some 20 years later, in 1940. Du Bois wrote these lines. "Already, I, and a number of Negroes in the Unites States, have been talking of the advisability and necessity in having the American Negro, and the Negroes of the world, represented in some way before the Peace Congress. The problems of Africa were going to be discussed. The question of the color bar was coming up, but there was no provision, so far as we could see, to allow the Negro to speak for himself."
Charles T. Davi...: Now in order to supply that voice and to force the Western nations to listen to it, Du Bois organized a series of pan-African congresses, and this, despite the opposition that came from England, and opposition that came from American too. The first was held in February 1919, at the Grand Hotel in Paris, and the idea slowly took shape that a world organization of Black men was necessarily to oppose a united front to European aggression. Now, Du Bois told American Negroes that they must act to prevent injustice at Versailles, in that many of them had to overcome what mounted to a traditional repugnance toward anything African, based, Du Bois thought, on the association with the much hated and long discredit colonization schemes of the 19th century. Du Bois , in fact, organized five pan-African congresses.
Charles T. Davi...: The first one in 1919. Then regularly every other year. In 1921. In 1923. In 1925. He organized other pan-African congresses for this particular reason. What I'm suggesting to you is that it's this interest of Du Bois that forms a background for the rhetoric of McKay. I am suggesting that it is no accident that Langston Hughes dedicated his poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, to W.E.B. Du Bois . I'm suggesting that the form of the rhetoric that we find in McKay's poem on Africa, follows the kind of prose argument that we find in Du Bois during these years.
Charles T. Davi...: This is an element important in the background for the emergence of a quite different interest in Africa. A quiet different definition of Africa that we find presented in color a few years later. Though early in McKay, we find no use of Africa in the way that Cullen used it in Heritage. We find another kind of poem that's extraordinarily interesting to us. McKay, some of you may know, came from the West Indies. A Jamaican. We find in his work a number of poems that recall his childhood in Jamaica. I want to refer to one of these poems now, and then subsequently to make some generalizations based on the poem that I read. This poem is called Flame-Heart.
Charles T. Davi...: "So much have I forgotten in ten years, so much in ten brief years I have forgot. What time the purple apple's come to juice, at what month brings the shy forget me not. I have forgot the special startling season of the pimento's flowering and fruiting. What time of year the ground dubs brown the fields and fill the noon day with the curious fluting. I have forgotten much but still remember the poinsettia's red, blood red, in warm December. I still regal the honey fever grass, but cannot recollect the high days when we rooted them out of the penguin path to stop the mad bee's in the rabbit pen. I often try to think in what sweet month the languid painted ladies used to dapple the yellow bye road mazing from the main, sweet with the golden threads of the rose-apple. I have forgotten, strange, but quite remember the poinsettias red, blood-red in warm December.
Charles T. Davi...: What weeks, what months, what time o’ the mild year we cheated school to have our fling at tops? What days our wine-thrilled bodies pulsed with joy. Feasted upon Blackberries in the copse? Oh, some I know! I have embalmed the days, even the sacred moments, when we played, all innocent of passion. uncorrupt, at noon and evening in the flame heart’s shade. We were so happy. Happy, I remember, beneath the poinsettia's red in warm December."
Charles T. Davi...: I want you to notice certain very interesting correspondences. The images from this poem are images, obviously, of the West Indies, remembered by Claude McKay. These are images that have something in common with the images used by Cullen to define Africa. They have the same kind of tropical excess. They have the same sort of lushness. The same sense of association with one's youth. Beneath this there is implied, obviously, here, as well obviously, in the poem by Cullen, an opposition to the main thrust of Western civilization. They share this as well. What I am about to suggest and do not have time to illustrate adequately today is between 1922 of 23 or so, and the time that Cullen wrote his poem, Heritage, and Hughes and others wrote poems thoroughly indoctrinated by renaissance mythology. There occurred a coalescence of two quite different kinds of materials. One that comes from this, these warm reminiscences of the kind that we have in McKay, of a West Indian childhood, and one that comes indeed from a documentation which has nothing to do with direct experience at all. A documentation of the kind that Cullen employs.
Charles T. Davi...: This kind of coalescence, one can see in yet another poet. Let me go on to use now neither Cullen, nor McKay, but Hughes. Here, you will discover, that there are no sharply differentiated differences between references to an ideal tropical land that is identifiably African or identifiably West Indian. Listen to this poem. Perhaps it is known to some of you. Nude Young Dancer.
Charles T. Davi...: "What jungle tree have you slept under, midnight dancer of the jazzy hour? What great forest has hung its perfume like a sweet veil about your bower? What jungle tree have you slept under, night-dark girl of the swaying hips? What star-white moon has been your mother? To what clean boy have you offered your lips?" The details, almost, of Cullen's poem suggesting, obviously, the discovery on the part of Hughes an experience which is immediate. An experience, no doubt, in Harlem, that he connects with an opposition to the main thrust of Western civilization which I have indicated before. Here we see the renaissance mythology, obviously at work. Or we can find it, obviously, in other poems by Hughes. This one called A Harlem Nightclub.
Charles T. Davi...: "Sleek Black boys in a cabaret. Jazz band, jazz band, play, play, play! Tomorrow. Who knows? Dance today! White girls' eyes call gay Black boys. Black boys' lips grin jungle joys. Dark brown girls in blond men's arms. Jazz band, jazz band, sing Eve's charms!" Notice the emphasis here upon an earlier ideal past that's recollected that is, on the one hand, associated with the jungle. On the other hand, associated with that original paradise, that original Eden, the one inhabited by Eve. Once again here, in a poem entitle To Night, To Midnight Nan at Leroy's. One stanza from this. Let me give the first one, and then the one I wish to read.
Charles T. Davi...: "Strut and wiggle shameless gal. Wouldn't no good fellow be your pal. Hear dat music. Jungle night. Hear dat music. And the moon was white. Sing your blues song, pretty baby. You want lovin' and you don't mean maybe. Jungle lover. Night Black boy. Two against the moon and the moon was joy. Strut and wiggle, shameless Nan. Wouldn't no good fellow be your man."
Charles T. Davi...: I read the whole poem because I got caught in it. You see, an interesting coalescence of a rhythm that comes from popular music, a jazz rhythm that Hughes employs impeccably with great skills. A mythology, however, a set of ideas, that comes from the Harlem renaissance of a kind that you've seen being introduced by Cullen earlier.
Charles T. Davi...: Now, so strong and so pervasive are these ideas that when W.E.B. Du Bois , who as I have indicated, was largely responsible for the historical ideas, the historical approach to Africa earlier, when W.E.B. Du Bois writes about African in his autobiography written in 1940, though he is responsible for the more historical approach to Africa, he recollects it with overtones and echoes of renaissance mythology. When Du Bois writes here in Dusk of Dawn, he turns to a recollection of his introduction to Africa when he says What is Africa to Me? This sociologist, this historian... "What is Africa to Me? Once I should have answered the question simply. I should have said father land, or perhaps, better, motherland, because I was born in the century when the walls of race were clear and straight, when the world consisted of mutually exclusive races, and even though the edges might be blurred, that was no question of exact definition and understanding of the meaning of the word. Once," he said. But now, not entirely, or not completely.
Charles T. Davi...: I want you to listen to Du Bois ' recollection of his first visit to Africa which occurred in 1923. When shall I forget the night Du Bois said, "I first set foot on African soil. I am the 6th generation in descent from forefathers who left this land. The moon was at the full and the waters of the Atlantic lay like a lake.' This could be a poem by Hughes, a Cullen, you understand. No doubt, it's possible that this was [inaudible]. I'm struck by the amazing correspondence of fiction and fact here. The moon was at the full, and the waters of the Atlantic lay like a lake. All the long slow afternoon as the sun robed herself in her Western scarlet, with veils of misty cloud. I had seen Africa afar, Cape Mount, that mighty headland with its twin curves, northern sentinel of the realm of Liberia, gathered itself out of the cloud at the half past three, and then darkened and grew clear. On beyond flowed the dark low undulating land, quaint with palm and breaking see. The world grew Black, Africa faded away, the stars stood forth, curiously twisted, Orion in the zenith, the little bear asleep, and the southern cross rising behind the horizon. Then afar ahead, a lone light shone, straight that the ship's fore, twinkling lights appeared below, around, and rising shadows. 'Monrovia,' said the captain."
Charles T. Davi...: I want to allow time now for questions of various kinds. I realize that these questions have accumulated during my lectures. This is my third lecture. I'm very eager for a response from you. There's no point in my putting my question, "What is Iowa to me?," as I put the question, "What is Africa to me?," unless I get some response from you, because you obviously are as important to me in Iowa as the Iowa river itself, as the University, as the museum, as the Iowa House. Yes.
Speaker 1: In the writings, [inaudible] are they very much aware of this earlier work? [inaudible]. Would you say that they're well read, well versed?
Charles T. Davi...: The question is are the writers writing, do they aware of this earlier of this earlier tradition. Aware of the many correspondences that exist between their work and the work that we find in the tradition of the renaissance? The answer is no. They are not aware of it. This is partly a fact which is due to the consciousness of our time. That consciousness is one, again, conditioned by the fact of rebirth. Youth today, and many writers today, think that there's no point in examining history. That the only history of any value is recent history. There is an emphasis on discovery. The kind of individual direct experiential discovery of the sort that one finds, say, in some of the poems that you and I both are thinking of now. There's not interest in tradition in this way.
Charles T. Davi...: My last lecture, and since I've received so many responses of this kind, we'll deal perhaps more with the recent writing. A writing of the 60s, and then the writing of the renaissance, because I'm very eager to point out the continuities, the connections that link the writing of the 60s and the writing of the 1920s. I'm eager to do so because I think the writers of the 60s have something... and the 60s and the 70s, and of course, I'm including obviously the 70s in this... have much to learn from this earlier tradition. They have not, in general, learned the lessons that this earlier tradition brings. Yes.
Speaker 1: [inaudible] never heard of the Harlem Renaissance until I started taking this course. I was wondering what [inaudible] did [inaudible] have upon the nation in the 20s? You talk about people going up to Harlem and listening to music and so forth, but did the English professors in the universities [inaudible]?
Charles T. Davi...: That's a long and interesting and complicated question that leads in many directions. The question is how much influence did the Harlem Renaissance have in its own time. Did English professors know that it was a phenomenon of importance? Sometimes I think English professors are the last people to know what phenomena of importance are. The answer, I think, is that it was a very important part of the 1920s. A part that we find alluded to over and over again in the work of people like Fitzgerald, and to some extent, of course in Hemingway and others. To that extent, it's a part of that whole world that has never perhaps adequately documented.
Charles T. Davi...: The second part of your question, it seems to be more important. The part that refers to English professors. Thought there was a great consciousness on the part of the participants of the people in the renaissance, that what they were doing was making something unique and distinctive. There, at that time, I suspect the general thought was that it perhaps was not too much unique and distinctive as something which conceivably was eccentric. Something which marked the coming of age of the Negro race in America. It's only that we have the perspective of time that we are able to evaluate it, I think, properly. To see its relationship with the rest of the 1920s, and at the same time see that it has a certain unique quality of its own. This peculiar definition of Africa about which I have talked about today. Or the peculiar form of the rediscovery and the redefinition of the South about which I talked yesterday. Or the special form given to the city about which I shall talk tomorrow.
Charles T. Davi...: In a sense, I've covered past, present, and future, in these references. It seems to me that we are just learning to understand the new significance of the renaissance in that way. Yes.
Speaker 1: As you pointed out the Black writers before the Harlem renaissance were looking towards Africa as a creative force. Were Black writers in Africa looking to America at all in an attempt to enhance [inaudible]?
Charles T. Davi...: That is a fascinating question, and let me repeat it again before I explain about it further. The question is this. We see something of the importance of these writers within our own perspective. What effect did the Harlem Renaissance and the mythology of the Harlem Renaissance have upon African writers. The answer to this question is very complicated indeed because it had a very profound effect upon African writers. A somewhat delayed effect upon African writers. That influence was not felt so much in the 1920s. Though I want to point out to you that many of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance spent a lot of time in Europe. In Europe they met writers from African countries. Writers from French West Africa in Paris. Writers from British West Africa in London. There was an exchange of ideas, of course. It is in the 1930s at the time that the Harlem renaissance died here in America that we begin to see in the work of these African writers the influence of the renaissance. The conception of negritude, the conception that was born in Paris and largely associated, obviously, with the writers of French West Africa, used as its basis, ideas that came from the Negro renaissance.
Charles T. Davi...: Now, there were certain works that were very important to these African writers. I think especially a one novel by McKay. A novel which is entitled Banjo that became a matter of great importance to these French West African Writers. I know this because I talked to experts of French West African writing. They have encountered again and again references to Banjo. It is in the conception of negritude, and in the development of ideas associated with that, that we find this. When Richard Wright went to Paris in 1947, he found with the renaissance, of course, safely dead in America, and dead indeed for a decade, he found in the [foreign language] African, he found a group in Africa deeply interested in the kind of contribution that can be made by an African culture that had been heavily influenced by renaissance ideas. Negritude owed something to renaissance mythology, and it lives indeed to return something to the development of ideas of American Black writers functioning in the 1950s and in the 1960s.
Charles T. Davi...: It's a little, obviously, like the kind of continuity of ideas that we find ourselves involved with, with Poe and the French. Edgar Allan Poe in some ways had no immediate tradition coming out of him, but he had a direct and immediate and powerful influence on Charles Baudelaire and other symbolist poets. Mallarmé, Valéry, specifically. When, Elliott, of course, and learning the craft of writing poetry, went to school to get the French education which marks the difference, of course, between 19th century poet and the modern poet, he goes to school obviously, learning from [Laforgue] and [Corbière] and Baudelaire and Mallarmé. All of these people who had originally trained and educated by Poe. Though Poe may be held in a very low way by us in America here, he is in part responsible, obviously, for what modern American poetry is. That same kind of thing occurred, obviously, in the idea that went into the general conception of Negritude.
Speaker 1: That was Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University with today's lecture. This series of programs is presented by the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American studies program at the university. As material for the course, Afro-American literature. Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30 p.m., April 8th, 1970, from Shambaugh Auditorium, and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting services of the University of Iowa.