[NYTr] Bk Rvw: "Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes"

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sent by Ed Pearl

ZNet Commentary - Sep 5, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-09/01sandronsky.cfm


Review of Jonathan Scott's 
"Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes"
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006
272 pp. Hardcover, $39.95

By Seth Sandronsky

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 at yahoo.com ]