Afro-American Fragment, 1930, Langston Hughes

Afro-American Fragment, 1930, Langston Hughes 

with some references to Aspects of Negro Life in an African Setting , 1934, Aaron Douglas

        Afro-American Fragment is poem by Langtson Hughes that he wrote in 1930 at a time when discrimination and even segregation in the south still prevailed.  He was part of the Harlem Renaissance Movement and as such, reflected on the African-American identity.

        The poem deals with African-Americans’ uprootedness and the loss of their past culture.

        The poem is made of two stanzas containing each 12 short lines.  It starts with the lines “ So long / so far away / Is Africa”, which are repeated 3 times in the poem although there is an addition in the last instance (“is Africa’s dark face”) and so sound like a chorus . This gives the poem a musical quality. It could actually be compared to a song.

Besides all along the poem there are many anaphoras, assonances and alliterations (anaphoras and repetitions  : “ so” , “save”,  “those”,“beat”, alliterations with “s”,“z”, “b”( lines 5-6) .  If we focus on the  first three lines,  the sounds echo the meaning of the lines as the vowel sounds are very long  (“so”, “long”, far”). Although the sentences are very short, we can hear the drawl of the voice and the sentences stretching out and expressing the spatial distance (“away”) as well as the temporal one  (“long”). We clearly hear the nostalgic or rather melancholy tone .

The first stanza focuses on the sense of loss and on the lack of memories. There are many negative words “not even”, “sad-sung”, “un-Negro”. The poet  underlines the fact that the only memories African-Americans have are those found in history books that are mostly written by white people from a white perspective.  African Americans have no first-hand memories and rely on others’ accounts. The “songs”, whether they be work songs, negro spirituals, blues and jazz songs, are another access to African-American past culture. The word “beating” probably refers to the musical term rather than the verb meaning “hitting”, although implicitly it reminds the reader of the long oppression African-Americans had to undergo. Interestingly, the songs” “beat back” the memories into the “blood”, which means that present songs bring back the past and a collective memory into African-Americans’ blood and life. Music is the link between past and present.  It has no borders and can overcome the distance between Africa and America. However the  present African-American music is not quite the same as the one of their African ancestors. This is why the next line is “Beat out of blood with words sad-sung /In strange un-Negro song”. The African-Americans have lost their original tongues and as a result, the words used are “strange” and “sad-sung”. The word “strange” suggests that the English language is weird, unpleasant, inadequate and foreign or unknown (as it was for the slaves who arrived from Africa). The adjective “sad-sung” reveals the loss and sense of nostalgia/melancholia.

Nevertheless  the word “save” that is used instead of “except for” and “apart from” indicates that for the poet both  the books and the songs are a way to salvage the past, to keep it alive in some way.

All the same the first stanza ends with the melancholy refrain.

The next stanza stresses the distance both in time and in space that separates the present African-American from his ancestor’s homeland and culture, “ this song of atavistic land”. The music referred  to is that of  African drums and therefore is “subdued and time-lost through some vast mist of race”.  “The vast mist of race” could refer to the ancestors that African-Americans do not know and that are like ghosts or to the fact that Africans were sent as slaves all over the Americas  as well as in Europe, so that their race spread over the world  like a mist and became rather blurred, all the more so as the African race mixed with other races, so that the sense of belonging to one particular community and culture became confused. The last words of the poem are particularly negative. Although the poet said in the previous stanzas that the songs  with strange and sad-sung words still beat memories back into blood, he admits that “he do[es] not understand / This song of atavistic land” . In the next lines  he goes as far as to say  the song is “lost”.  The line “ without a place” seems to be a conclusion on how he feels – neither African nor American. This is confirmed by the words  added to the refrain: “Africa’s dark face”. Of course, it refers to the Africans’ skin colour but also to the fact the face of Africa, its nature, its identity is still a question mark for the poet who feels confused and lost.

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