Teacher / Poet #30

Notes on "As I Grew Older" by Langston Hughes

“As I Grew Older” by  Langston Hughes

It was a long time ago.
I have almost forgotten my dream.
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun,—
My dream.

And then the wall rose,
Rose slowly,
Slowly,
Between me and my dream.
Rose slowly, slowly,
Dimming,
Hiding,
The light of my dream.
Rose until it touched the sky,—
The wall.

Shadow.
I am black.

I lie down in the shadow.
No longer the light of my dream before me,
Above me.
Only the thick wall.
Only the shadow.

My hands!
My dark hands!
Break through the wall!
Find my dream!
Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams
Of sun!

---

Sun. Shadow. Wall. Dream. Hands.

Saying, singing, writing a poem–doing these human acts puts you in contact with humans from a very long time ago. There is something primal–basic, you might even say–about poetry. Langston Hughes understood that in his bones, wrote and sang that truth from his first book, The Weary Blues, from which this poem is taken.

Sun. Shadow. Wall. Dream. Hands.

These are words that a human being 1000 years ago could have understood, and (I hope) one that a human being 1000 years from now could still read and understand. And they are repeated again and again in this short poem. It is these essential ingredients that help us see the position of an oppressed person looking to make his way in the world, and not for himself only, but for those who would come after him.

Langston Hughes was 25 years old when published this poem, the same year he published “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which he wrote in response to a fellow Black poet who said, “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet.” Hughes took this poet’s saying to mean a running from or a refusal to depict Black life and Blackness in art, and he opposed it. 

The first sentence of Hughes’ essay responds directly to that poet’s words, but then expands the scope of the argument to a sense that I wonder if even Hughes understood. It continues to ramify to this day. 

“And I was sorry the young man said that,” Hughes wrote. “For no great poet has even been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America–this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”

No great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. I read this line recently in Terrance Hayes’ study of the poet Etheridge Knight, To Float in the Space Between. Hayes, as the reader of this Substack surely notes, is interested in tradition and influence, the passing down as well as the making way–from one artist to the other.

How moving it is to recognize what Hughes and Hayes recognized–that this life-giving process of art-making involves a fearless look at the world and one’s place in that world. There’s a quality of nakedness–but not in the exhibitionist sense–in that line of Hughes, as all as to all of “As I Grew Older.”  I want to dwell with and imitate that vulnerable truth-telling in my own teaching and art-making. (And sometimes teaching is artmaking. Maybe always, if we’re aware enough.) 

A final thought to conclude this essay, on the idea of influence. 

Way back in my early twenties, in my graduate program for English literature, I was assigned to read and report to my classmates on a book by the literary critic, Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom’s thesis, so far as I can remember it, was that a writer’s finding of their true voice as an artist involved agonistically wrestling with and against a particular voice from the past, emerging as one’s self only after a kind of violent (literary) combat with this forebear. So Percy Shelley becomes the real Percy Shelley only after engaging deeply and then overthrowing William Wordsworth, etc. etc.

Bloom is no doubt a brilliant reader of literature, and I’m sure I’ve just oversimplified his thesis. Acknowledging that, I still think from the vantage point of where I stand today about 20 years later, his argument is way too individualistic. What’s striking about Langston Hughes, in relationship to those he influenced, and those who influenced him, is the reciprocal generosity apparent in those relationships. 

I think especially of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, or the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who in the next generation, took up the challenge Hughes offered in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” and created life-giving work, authentically and unapologetically Black life-giving work, that I would guess even Hughes himself could not have imagined when published that essay and the poetry collection, The Weary Blues way back in 1926.

For teacher / writers like me, this generative and generous quality of influence is important to consider. Rather than agonistically sweating out the question of clearing space for your own voice, perhaps a more fruitful question is: what can I do in my writing and teaching to open doors for those who will come after me? 

–

Text to Text Connections and Notes

-Clearly I’ve only gestured at the work of Gwendolyn Brooks and Lorraine Hansberry, both of whom are the subject of books upon books. For the teacher in the classroom though, it could be helpful to put their work, poetry and drama, into conversation with Hughes’ essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” or with some of Hughes’ poetry. 

-I’ve contrasted agonistic theories of influence (a la Harold Bloom) with a more generative / generous model, and as I do so, I recognize this opposition in itself could be a kind of false binary. (Perhaps there’s a bit of both as any artist tries to make their way.) What are stories of influence that move and engage you, either in literature or other arts or disciplines?