3.13 Envisioning Africa in Harlem Renaissance Poetry

Harlem Renaissance writers, artists and scholars explored both their connections to Africa and their distance from it. They were responding to the legacies of Atlantic slavery, which cut them off from their ancestors' homelands, and of European colonialism, which was then ruling most of Africa.

Some poets used vivid images of Africa's people and landscapes to counter stereotypes of the continent as 'primitive' or without history (1.1, 1.4). Others explored, through personal reflection, how Africa fit into their identity as Black Americans. Some poems did both, and some readers today note that even admiring poems sometimes relied on romantic, exotic images of Africa that weren't based on real knowledge of it.

Gwendolyn Bennett was a poet, artist and columnist for Opportunity, a leading magazine of the movement. In her 'Heritage', the speaker expresses a longing to see and hear an Africa she knows only from far away, its landscapes, songs and ancient past, and to feel connected to the soul of her people. The poem treats African heritage as beautiful and as part of who the speaker is, even though she can reach it only through imagination.

Countee Cullen was one of the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance. His 'Heritage' is longer and more conflicted. The speaker keeps asking what Africa can mean to someone whose family has been in America for three centuries. He is drawn to images of Africa, but feels separated from it, and he struggles between his Christian faith and imagined African gods.

The poem shows double consciousness (3.7) at work: the speaker feels pulled between an American, Christian identity and an African heritage he can't fully reach.

Langston Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' (1921) takes a different approach. Its speaker connects Black history to ancient rivers, the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile and the Mississippi, claiming a heritage as old as civilization itself. Like Bennett's poem, it treats Africa as a source of pride and deep roots; unlike Cullen's, it shows little doubt about that connection.