From the solitary confinement of his prison cell
Malcolm evolves into a militant racist with an
almost noble hatred. Only late in his abruptly
ended life does he find the revelation of spiritual
unity—his ‘‘final metamorphosis,’’ as Hayden
calls it. This outsider finds a spiritual home in
the company of true believers of Islam, as ‘‘He
fell upon his face before / Allah the raceless in
whose blazing Oneness all / were one.’’
Hayden’s own conversion and his allegiance
to the Baha’i Faith no doubt influenced him
favorably toward the spiritual progression he dis-
cerned in Malcolm’s life, and he said on more
than one occasion that he felt Malcolm would
have come to a faith similar to the Baha’i belief
in the unity and brotherhood of all mankind. In
that sense, Hayden’s final view of this controver-
sial outsider is one of admiration, where the pos-
itive elements in the man’s life outweigh the
negative....
The life of the poet is a lonely calling based on
solitary achievement; Hayden’s career provides
articulate testimony to that fact. But that outsider
status also provides a unique vantage point from
which to view, judge, and document the trium-
phant and tragic aspects of the society from which
the artist has sprung. Paradoxically, the Outsider
seems uniquely qualified not only to judge but to
articulate that judgement with special sensitivity.
Robert Hayden more than once presumed to
do just that to or for his native land. Perhaps the
most successful and prominent example is still his
‘‘American Journal.’’ written originally to com-
memorate the bicentennial of the United States as
anation(Collected Poems). Here the poet adopts
a guise as far ‘‘outside’’ as one can imagine. His
persona is literally an alien, an extraterrestrial
from another galaxy, sent to live among, study,
and scientifically assess the human species, specif-
ically those of ‘‘American stripe.’’ Hayden phrases
his observations as entries in a journal kept by the
investigator (hence the title/premise of the poem).
Without belaboring the detail, the ‘‘drama’’ of
this journal involves the alien’s inability to retain
his objectivity, his uncertainty about how to cap-
ture in scientific analysis the essence of American
‘‘humanhood.’’ His increasing fondness for his
subject and its subjects becomes for him an emo-
tional problem: how can he complete his mission
and satisfy his superiors if he cannot reduce his
observations to clinical statistics? In the final anal-
ysis of even the most casual reader, Hayden’s
‘‘alien’’ is the poet himself, drafting a love-hurt
letter to and about his ‘‘native land.’’ The poet,
the outsider who infiltrates his own society, con-
cludes indirectly that the essence of America is
that ambivalence, that attraction-repulsion of the
best and worst that we are as a people.
From a man who considered himself an out-
sider in more ways than this brief essay suggests,
we can learn more about those from whom he felt
alienated and about those with whom he shares
that sense of alienation, because finally and ironi-
cally, most readers from time to time probably
belong to one or the other or both of these cate-
gories. Whatever emotional price it cost him to
live the role of the outsider, that payment has
afforded his readers an insider’s view of them-
selves and their culture. Robert Hayden paid his
dues to art; and we can share his legacy if we are
willing to deal in the same currency.
Source:Fred M. Fetrow, ‘‘Minority Reporting and Psy-
chic Distancing in the Poetry of Robert Hayden,’’ inCLA
Journal,Vol.33,No.2,December1989,pp.117–29.Edward Hirsch
In the following review of Hayden’sCollected
Poems, Hirsch identifies freedom as Hayden’s
‘‘poetic touchstone.’’
In ‘‘American Journal,’’ the last poem in [Col-
lected Poems] Robert Hayden—who once said
that ‘‘nothing human is foreign to me’’—wryly
assumes the voice of an extraterrestrial observer
reporting on a ‘‘baffling/multi people,’’ a country
of charming and enlightened savages, ‘‘brash
newcomers lately sprang up in our galaxy.’’ The
engaged yet alienated observer was a fitting per-
sona for a man who always identified with the
figure of the outsider and who often referred to
himself as an ‘‘alien at home.’’...
[It is] revealing that Hayden’s alien stand-in
observes and contemplates not the entire earth but
only the portion of it called America, a place
which is, as he says, ‘‘as much a problem in meta-
physics as/it is a nation.’’ For Hayden, America
represented ‘‘a kind of microcosm,’’ a heterogene-
ous new world working out an emblematic des-
tiny. He was repelled by our ‘‘strangering’’ racial
distinctions but intensely attracted to our ideal of
freedom and, like his alien ethnographer, he spent
much of his intellectual energy trying to penetrate
and name some American ‘‘essence’’ or ‘‘quid-
dity.’’ However internationalist he was in outlook,
his life’s work makes clear that he was an Amer-
ican poet, deeply engaged by the topography of
American myth in his efforts to illuminate theRunagate Runagate