[Marxism] Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ZNet Commentary
Reviewing Scott's Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes 
September 05, 2007
By Seth Sandronsky 

[Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes By Jonathan Scott (
Columbia , University of Missouri Press, 2006), 272 pp. Hardcover,
$39.95.]

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was a great American poet. But he did not
stop there. Jonathan Scott's new Socialist Joy in the Writing of
Langston Hughes helps us to take pleasure in his originality and
productivity.

"I've been obsessed by the relation between the individual and the
collective," writes Scott, a Detroit native who teaches English in
Jerusalem. To this end, he illuminates Hughes' patterns of poetry and
prose as organic ingredients of social actions in the United States
and abroad at that time in history. Our repressive era lacks a
similar writer or politics.

Scott's book has four parts. Part one looks at Hughes and his work on
African-American culture that sees society from a unique point of
view informed by a daily struggle for justice. This vision, Scott
writes, also is open to unity with others who labor for a living.

For instance, in the body of literature that Hughes produced, the
blues constituted a culture that was more than art by, of and for
blacks. Rather, the blues were a canvas for the lives of oppressed
working people of all hues, voicing a socialist joy of potential
human liberation.

"I'm so tired of waiting, aren't you," wrote Hughes as a
20-something, "for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife and cut the world in two and see what worms are
eating at the rind."

Hughes' essays and poems placed daughters and sons of former slaves
within a mass of wage earners bridled by the time clock and the
workplace. Both restricted their full abilities. Readers here and
abroad responded to Hughes' emancipatory writing, but mainstream
critics were cold to his literary flair. In part two, Nicolás
Guillén, the Cuban national poet, had a different reaction. He and
Hughes met in 1930. Their union helped Guillén create new forms of
popular poetry for Cubans who were struggling to free themselves from
Western colonialism.

In part three, Scott turns to Hughes' journalism from the 1940s to
the 1960s, "his most popular literary innovation since his blues
poems of the 1920s and 1930s." In the Chicago Defender, a black-owned
paper, Hughes penned "Here to Yonder," a column with a main character
named Jesse B. Simple. He spoke with Hughes and other blacks about
current events, including class conflict among and between them,
while rejecting their shared second-rate citizenship. Readers loved
this column, a community talking book. In it, Hughes seeded a
transformative dialogue about the living and working conditions of
regular women and men. As a columnist, Hughes urged social equality
"through the popular language of the African-American laborer," Scott
notes. This message was loud and clear in the Civil Rights movement.

In part four, we read about Hughes, a pioneering author of children's
literature. This, like his journalistic efforts, attracted new
readers. The First Book of Rhythms flowed from his time as a writing
teacher for Chicago students in the eighth grade. Hughes emphasized
their use of drawing to describe movement, a process which has
animated the natural world from the days of the ancient Greeks and
Egyptians.

"Hughes' method is an ingenious way of getting students to think in
terms of the rhythms of prose writing; of lyrical flow; of word
sequences, transitions, cadences and caesuras," Scott writes.

"Already there is the room to start and stop as suits the writer, but
in a disciplined, rhythmized way." The connections between listening,
seeing and writing blossomed in Hughes's able hands. Parents and
classroom teachers of middle and high-school students, take note!

Currently, Hughes has a larger stature outside the United States than
inside of it. Here, he is largely a writer studied during Black
History Month and otherwise ignored. That is a shame and a trend to
end. Scott's book may be a move in that direction.

Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento . He can be reached
at: ssandronsky@xxxxxxxxxx


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