The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Langston Hughes

May 12, 2024

My autocorrect frequently corrects “writing” to “worrying”. This persists even after I’ve taught the algorithm to be less inquisitive, and better informed. It’s definitely not a message from the universe, I thought, until yesterday, when my phone autocorrected “reading” to “raging”. Now this is a bit more serious, and somewhat disconcerting in its philosophical and political implications. The whole thing got me thinking, and, in truth, the rightful mistake autocorrect should be making is converting “thinking” to “writing”.

Thinking about writing, and writing about writing, is an important activity for writers. We each have to find our own Ars Poeticas. I often find that the defining distinction between the artist and the critic is the capacity for reflexivity. The best critics, of course, stake their lives on their opinions. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. This is hardly the case for most commentators writing today. Talk is cheap, opinion even more so.

But each time an artist creates a work of art, they carve out a piece of their flesh, and lay it out for others to see. This metaphor doesn’t sit too comfortably with me. I have used it, however, because it conveys the real discomfort I have with this autocorrect business. I speak, of course, of that romantic trope which will have you believe that art cannot flower without suffering; no pain no gain - autocorrect is right, essentially, there is no writing without worrying. (Can you see Imitaz Ali standing on the margins of this page, livid with stylized neon fury and an entourage of his manboys? He’s got Ranbir Kapoor gesticulating wildly at the front, singing ‘aithe rakh’, ‘Main bhi hoon nature’ etc.).

The better homology, one that I have made previously in this newsletter, lies in the aesthetic construction of melancholy, over the ‘flat’ affect of happy. But what about ‘reading’, as ‘raging’? This hits deeper. I find myself writing in rage more often nowadays. even poetry. But reading? Hmm.

I see creative reading as a threshold to creative writing. But what about creative reading as creative feeling. A dear friend, once wrote to me after reading a set of published poems “for the first time, I get why your poems are so intense. I realise that unlike you I never feel so strongly..”. This was spontaneous, and it is not a #humblebrag. I hate that I feel things deeply. Don’t you? Don’t you want to be less affected? But I have held those words, over the years. They gave me insight into my own praxis. I realised that I know no other way. I have understood that poetry has little to do with language. Language is literally the last frontier. In fact, I am not a big fan of craft workshops.

I have learnt to view poetry as an exercise in rooting experience with the articulation of feeling. The poetic image allows the body to occupy space. The poem is a moving presence - identity congeals in words. This is its original purpose. The body remembers. The gift of poetry renders that remembrance intelligible. This is what makes each poem unique; each phrase, or stanza, another shifting plate in the continent of the self. The poem allows for character to emerge, and voice, as a side effect. I have felt this, the poem says, before rhetorically asking - You see?

Writing - Feeling - Identity. This is a potent triad is it not? There is a fourth element which catapults this art into the horizon of the sublime. Time. Let me tell you a small story, to illustrate the argument.

A couple of days ago, it was my Ustad’s Barsi. He used to love teaching a bandish whose first line was “Tero Bal Prataap…”. The composition was a hagiography. He would tell the story of how Tansen had composed it to manaao Akbar, after his son had made some grave error, or committed a crime, causing the king to imprison him. Tansen composed this melody in gurjari todi - a straightforward paean, with cliched images and metaphors (You are the sun, the moon, god incarnate etc.) - hoping to flatter the king into releasing his son. I loved this composition. The fast sool taal was an adrenalin rush. I enjoyed sprinting through the scale, lighting fires like some mad king on horseback plundering the countryside of the raag.

One day, as we practiced, I asked him about Tansen, and his claim. I asked him whether this was the very same gurjari todi that Tansen sang. How do you know? I asked him. I was young and precocious. He looked at me long and heard. This was not the first time I had questioned the certainty with which he used metaphor in pedagogy, and in performance. Beta yehi hain parampara, he said (‘This is tradition’ - a better definition of ‘parampara’, though, is one following the other) .

The fourth element is time. It is history that separates poetry from everyday writing. It is mythology that is the cornerstone of the poetic imagination. Time is the glue that connects self with the other.

Now. The poem.

I share with you today, a poem by Langston Hughes. I have been revisiting Hughes lately. His oeuvre is breathtaking. Reading him this time, the musicality of his writing came home to me. I like his passionate adherence to my favourite poetic maxim: not one word more, not one word less. I want to share with you today his most famous, most heavily anthologised poem. LA Review of Books claims he was seventeen when he wrote it:

“AS LANGSTON HUGHES TELLS IT, he wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (now one of his most famous and widely anthologized poems) when he was just 17. Having recently graduated from high school, he was on a train heading to Mexico City, where he would spend just over a year with his father, a man he barely knew. In his narration of this poem’s scene of composition — you can listen to it here — Hughes says that he was crossing the Mississippi just outside of St. Louis when inspiration struck…”

The introduction in the Knopf edition to his collected poems claims he was 19.

In Hughes's predominantly white but cosmopolitan high school in Cleveland, Ohio, he published his first poems and searched for his authentic voice. Before his graduation in 1920 he had clearly fallen under the spell of the most original of American poets, Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass had revolutionized American verse in the nineteenth century. He also learned much from Carl Sandburg, himself one of Whitman's most fervent disciples, whose Jazz Fantasies (1919) pointed Hughes in the direction of his own music-inflected verse. Thereafter, Langston Hughes understood that he could have a place in the long tradition of American writing despite the most repressive features of racism. This tradition emphasized the realities of American life and the realities of the American language, as well as the idealism out of which sprang the most radical American democratic beliefs. In 1921, at the age of nineteen, when his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was printed in Du Bois's Crisis magazine, his first appearance in a national publication, Hughes showed that he at last had found his own poetic voice.

‘Voice’ - that ephemeral, exotic construction. I do not know whether Hughes found his “voice” in that first published poem. But beginnings are special. The debut poem or poetry collection, the first publication, the speech that launched a career, or a movement, the raw energy of youth, the fearlessness of the rebel soul - these are magical (‘first touch’). The first published poem speaks of a formative period - the moment of discovery, when the world recognises a soul that it can nominate as spokesperson.

Jessie Fauset, the poet and literary editor of The Crisis (1921) writes about the discovery of Hughes and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in the 1926 edition of the magazine (easily available online):

Then one day came “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. I took the beautiful, dignified creation to Dr. Du Bois and said, “What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United States who writes like that and yet is unknown to us?"

Hughes was a Cleveland High school graduate at the time. The poem came to him when he was crossing the Mississippi river to Mexico to meet his father. He wrote it in a matter of few minutes on the back of an envelope. This much is lore. But the poem itself is exquisite, and is, for me one of the shining examples of the form. Nothing embodies better the journey from feeling to identity to history… and then to mythology. I share first a snapshot of the poem as it was published in the June 1921 edition of The Crisis Magazine (available here).