Negro Writing in America:

...It is a curious fact that, with the glaring exceptions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Impending Crisis, An American Dilemma and Native Son, no work by or about Negroes published prior to the 1940s was ever widely read and discussed because it was controversial...

...I once wrote, and I believe it still, “as much to the cognitive as to the conative and effective side of man’s being...

...In either case, they have worked in one of three patterns, each of which has an established contra-mythology of its own: the folk pattern, the race pattern, and in what I must in embarrassing truth call the opuscule pattern...

...The second proposition is that American Negro literature has little to do with “pure literature” [if, indeed, there is such a thing) ; has little to do, that is, with esthetics either as philosophy or practice...

...to “Zounds...

...There is in this literature, however, an esthetic yeast that causes the best of it to rise above the emotional and imaginative level of the propagandistic and the pragmatic...

...Even a casual look into a dozen standard anthologies and volumes of American literary criticism proves enlightening...

...By reason of their frustration, such writers as I have named have done one of two things—sought a complete identification with white America, sometimes even to the extent of denying their Negroness...

...An American In India and his latest, The Lonesome Road...

...But Africa has hundreds of dialects, and there is no lingua franca, and one can guess at the size of the obstacle to be overcome...

...Certainly there is no question at all of an Afro-American culture as against an Anglo-American culture...

...The third proposition asserts that, in consequence of the first two...

...Some American Negro writers have succumbed to these diseases...

...preoccupation with man’s doom rather than with man’s destiny...

...the literature of Negro America will keep, at least for another generation, its present direction, and that this direction is and should be quite different from that in which the literature of Negro Africa moves...

...others have been weakened to the point of silence...

...Art is itself an intuitive revelation of the multiform life of man...

...While, in spite of Marcus Garvey and the Back-to-Africa movement, he has given no serious thought to the second, his efforts as social man and as literary artist have been continually directed toward validating his claim to the American heritage...

...No ancient tradition that is kept viable by practice, by language, by institutions, dogmas and dreams, as in the case of the Jewish people, has sustained the American Negro and pushed him toward an ingenuous identification with Negroes native to other parts of the world...

...When he complains rather petulantly that the liberation and rise of the American Negro has not been accompanied by a “rebirth of the culture of the American Negro,” the proper answer to his complaint is that what has never been born cannot have a rebirth...

...In the first, they have supported the stereotype of the Negro as a whimsical, simple, humorous creature, all of whose problems and cares can be solved by the emotional equivalent of a stick of peppermint candy...

...The African Negro writer has history to work with and to teach in myth and legend and old wives tale...

...or they have tried, unsuccessfully, to scorn such identification...

...For all we can perceive in American evaluations of American literature, there is no such thing as an esthetic consciously discerned and consciously practiced...

...The African Negro writer must lead, and one day perhaps—sooner than now seems likely—non-African Negro writers and artists, their group identity finally established, will follow...

...Among his works are No Day of Triumph, Stranger and Alone...

...American Negro literature appeals...

...To support one is to support the others...

...Though one grants, as I think one must, the validity of the first proposition, it should not be thought that SAUNDERS REDDING, currently Johnson Professor of Literature at Hampton Institute, has written many books on Negroes in America...

...For it seems to me that the new African Negro literature has both a challenge and an opportunity that were never presented to American Negro literature...

...They Came in Chains...

...H. Wright Cruse, in his essay in Presence Africaine for January 1958, was not only wrong but wrong-headed...

...analysis rather than synthesis...

...And this outlook prevails, for Americans are provincial...

...The way I have chosen to do this is by suggesting that while the divisions of American literature are more or less arbitrary and imposed, the divisions of American Negro literature are intrinsic and necessary to comprehension...

...No one who makes more than a cursory examination of that art can deny that the sanctions which support it are to a noticeable degree pathogenic, producing illnesses that can be mortal to the artist—self-adjuration and self-hatred...

...negation rather than affirmation...

...but also now Hindi is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of India...

...In American Negro writers, the American outlook prevails...

...If he has been cut off from his American inheritance as a consequence of prejudice against him, he did ruthlessly cut himself off from his African tradition as a matter of practicality...

...It presents a problem quite different, I think, from that which faces the emerging new literature of India and China...

...Claude McKay, Langston Hughes...

...Spring Book Issue Negro Writing in America By Saunders Redding THE ONLY WAY to begin this essay is with a statement of three propositions, which have so close and logical and dependent a relationship that no one of them could quite stand alone...

...The first of these is that American Negro literature, so called, is American literature in fact, and that American Negro literature cannot be lopped off from the main body of American literary expression without doing grave harm to both as complementary instruments of historical and social diagnosis and as the joint and articulated corpus of American experience...

...He has his sacred identity...

...The divisions that the critics, historians and anthologists make correspond to segments of time, e.g., ‘“The Colonial Period,” “American Literature from 1840-1865: The Civil War Period...

...there is no distinction between American Negro literature and American literature...

...Nevertheless, a subtle distinction between the two remains...

...that art is never in the exclusive employ of a set of social and political moralities, as non-African Negroes have tried to employ it...

...He has a genuine folk culture identified with nature with reference to natural laws, time, climate and geography, and characterized by primary and even primal relationships and institutions—kith and kin in an ethnic unity, primary occupations—a folk culture that reflects an ethos, a unity of moral order...

...And so long as these sanctions maintain their potency, Negro American literature will continue in a direction quite different from the direction it is ardently hoped Negro African literature will take...

...It is a literature that combines, often in precarious imbalance, the ought and the is, the dream and the reality, the condemnation and the acquittal...

...When Negro works have had wide acceptance it is because they did no violence to the prevailing state of the contemporary American mind...

...It is the African Negro writer’s challenge to communicate those traditions to the non-African Negroes...

...The so-called “folk culture” of Negro Americans—their music, their dance, the accents of their vernacular—is much, much closer to the folk culture of white Americans than, say, the folk culture of the Brittany Coast is to the folk culture of Provence and the rest of France...

...In India they do have Sanskrit (though few use it), the ancient, classical language in which Indian culture and history are unified and preserved...

...In China there is Pekingese...

...Unblinded by the analytical methods that too often conspire against the art of the West, the African Negro artist has the absorptive and synthesizing eye, and he knows what I have tried to show and what the American Negro writer has never had the opportunity to learn—that synthesis is the way of art...

...But this problem quite aside, the African Negro writer, particularly if he is unspoiled by too much Westernization, has an opportunity unparalleled, except in the case of the Jewish people...

...to destroy one is to destroy all three...

...and if he has refused to accept the first deprivation, he has willingly accepted the second without even realizing that it is a self-deprivation...

...Like American Negro literature, the body of work called American literature also appeals to the cognitive...

...The very state of being disinherited, and of being segregated and discriminated against, has produced in him a reaction the opposite of Zionism...

...slavish imitation...

...Until he begins to teach and his non-African dark brothers begin to learn, the unity of Negro culture is a dream, and may be a dream in any case...

...New World Divines,” “The Muckrakers,” “The Literary Comedians...

...One of the most palpable elements in American life is the expression of the impulse “to wish for and to believe in” and to pursue a single identity, a oneness of thinking and doing...

...I recognize what may be one great obstacle to the fulfillment of this opportunity—the obstacle of language...

...That millions of American whites would cut American Negroes off from this common heritage, and that as a result of this American Negroes should feel homeless in America, does not mean that in any real sense the American Negro seeks for or even desires another heritage and another home...

...There never has been any such separation...

...The African Negro writer has his hallowed “community of cultural totems...

...Values and value judgments, ideas and ways of thinking about these ideas, customs, costumes and manners, images and symbols—all these and more, both abstract and concrete, are the same for Negro Americans and for whites...

...In the third, they have drawn portraits of Negro Americans, whose lineaments differ not at all from the classic features of heroes and heroines made popular by Hall Caine, Rafael Sabatini and Ethel M. Dell, in dramatic situations that run the gamut from “A-aah...

...Though Richard Wright has lived in France for a decade and declares his affinity with the French temper and the Parisian spirit, the special conscience and consciousness of his native environment and the American totems beat like tides through Black Power, Pagan Spain and White Man, Listen!, though the first book is about African nationalism, the second about the alliance of fascism and Catholicism in Spain, and the third a metaphysical discourse on the “emotional reactions”—I quote from the author’s introduction—”of a billion and half non-white people” to Western oppression...

...In the second, they have created the image of the American Negro as the apotheosis of the anti-social...

...These, then, have been and are still the sanctions of the American Negro’s literary art...

...What is pertinent is that the divisions of American literature are almost never esthetic and philosophical, as they generally are in critical anthologies of European literature...

...The American Negro people are not a people in Cruse’s sense of the word...

...This identity of values, this homogeneousness of culture heritage has resulted in a temper, an outlook, an orientation to life—call it what you will—that is the same for both...

...The distinction between American Negro literature and American literature is only the distinction between bough and branch, and this distinction is so slight that to be seen at all it must be pointed out...

...It is not so clear a distinction as Richard Wright makes it out to be when, in his book White Man, Listen!, he speaks of “the fact of [the American Negro’s] separation from the culture of his native land...

...And when he goes further not only to link but to equate the American Negro’s struggle for full citizenship with the African Negro’s struggle for political independence as the ultimate goal of race nationalism, one can only stand appalled by Cruse’s total blindness to the truth...

...American culture was started, to quote Daniel J. Boorstin, “with some semblance of wholeness and homogeneity” and “without that deep bifurcation . . . which was the starting point of the Continental cultures of Western Europe...

...History confirms this...

...To teach these things to Negroes in other parts of the world is the challenge and the opportunity of the African Negro writer...

...Neither the thought nor the experience of the American community has been separated into the two streams of “high culture” and “popular culture...

...Finally, the African Negro artist has the habit of seeing things as forms and configurations, and he seems to know instinctively that the process of breaking these down is fatal to the truth of the whole...

...to grant one is to grant all...

...The things to which American Negro literature conforms are, patently, the changing states of the American mind...

...It becomes clear when, in considering American Negro literature, we substitute for the word “divisions” the word “patterns” and use it to mean—as it does in its simplest sense—things to which something conforms...

...One could make a long list of victims...

...Countee Cullen, Frank Yerby and James Baldwin represent the meaning of this...

...or in intellectual, social and or emotional orientation in such designations, e.g., “The Brahmins...

...So long as the social climate in America remains what it is and changes as slowly as it does, these sanctions will maintain their potency, even though writers like Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley and James Baldwin use their considerable literary gifts to break through them...

...It is not particularly pertinent that seldom do two of these doughty classifiers use the same divisions...

...No one of them, no matter where he sojurns, nor for what length of time, has ever escaped the environment that nurtured him...

...He has traditions—and they are his own traditions, tribal perhaps, but epochal and still preserved, still viable in spite of the cultural conflagrations that have destroyed the artifacts of history the traditions represent...

...Part of the meaning—perhaps the greater part of the meaning—of this is that all those factors which come together to create the fluid complex loosely called environment have produced in American Negroes the same special consciousness and conscience, the same ethics that they have produced in white Americans...