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memory of crossing the Bering Strait centuries
ago—but more likely, he posits that he is part and
parcel of every man from the Congo or every
woman from Mississippi who has come before him.
In other words, all past African and Africa Amer-
ican history has flowed and emptied into him, just
as a river empties into the sea. He is the repository
of their hopes, their dreams, their struggles, their
pride, and their cultural heritage. Just because these
individuals or even these societies no longer exist,
does not mean that they are dead. They live on
through the poet, through his voice and through his
poetry. Additionally, the poem stands as a provoca-
tive testament to African-American culture-like the
Mississippi, it will continue moving, progressing,
growing.
This notion of growing, of thriving is impor-
tant for Hughes, because he wants his poem to carry
the same invigorating power as rivers themselves.
In his important book Structuralist Poetics,
Jonathan Culler discusses the importance of per-
formative language on ancient and contemporary
cultures. According to Culler, performative lan-
guage is expression that makes things happen, that
is performance itself. A great deal of early Native
American poetry is an excellent example of per-
formative language. For Native Americans, there
was no distinction between poetry, spells, rituals
and songs. All were one singular expression that
animated the world and the gods. Many scholars
have commented on how Whitman’s long lists, his
catalogs, resemble a chant or an incantation, em-
blematic of many Native-American songs. In “The
Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes enacts a similar
mode of communication. The repetition of “I’ve
known rivers” gives the poem an otherworldly feel,
as though it were a sacred text, perhaps biblical.
Indeed, the “I’ve known rivers” refrain, and the
chant-like list in the third stanza recall a psalm or
a Christian litany or a gospel song. In his book The
Weary Blues,the collection in which “The Negro
Speaks of Rivers” appears, Hughes includes a sec-
tion of poems called “The Feet of Jesus,” which
imitate gospel songs and Sunday morning preach-
ing. Thus, his poem not only echoes the incanta-
tory orality of pre-literate African cultures, but it
also mirrors the incantatory orality of contempo-
rary African American worship services, prayers,
and songs. In both instances, and in the poem it-
self, the individual speaker participates in commu-
nal discourse, and mere language is transformed
into something transcendent.
While Hughes’ poem works on a cultural or
spiritual level, it also works on a political level, just
as many of Whitman’s do. Also like Whitman,
Hughes’ poems are deceptively complex. On the
surface, they seem easily accessible, perhaps even
simple. But, in almost every instance, the poems
carry a subtext of anger or resistance or outrage,
yet, Hughes is able to make his vision palatable to
white audiences. In an early review of The Weary
Blues,Alain Locke claims that in this collection,
there is “a mystic identification with the race ex-
perience which is, I think, instinctively deeper and
broader than any of the poets has yet achieved.”
More than any other poem in the book, “The Ne-
gro Speaks of Rivers” embodies Locke’s argument.
In this poem, dedicated to the great African-Amer-
ican writer W. E. B. DuBois, Hughes grounds con-
temporary African-American culture in its regal
culture of African history. Without question, whites
and blacks are the target audience. He wants to re-
mind both black and white readers of the rich and
regal history of African Americans, and he wants
to inform his black audience that his soul and their
souls have been nourished by these experiences.
That they, like each of the major rivers referred to
in the poem will persist and endure, is one of
Hughes’ main themes for the piece.
Through his poetry, particularly Song of Myself,
Whitman turns America into a kind of myth. He says
in his introduction to Song of Myself that America
is itself the greatest poem. Similarly, Hughes ele-
vates the experiences and history of African Amer-
icans to the level of myth. The speaker, a sort of
bard-like figure, constructs a worldview that offers
a spiritual, physical, historical, and personal narra-
tive, a timeless reading of the union of past and pre-
sent realities. Through this poem, Hughes suggests
that African Americans are themselves a great poem,
a masterful epic, more sweeping, more powerful
than the mere two hundred years informing the poem
that is America. Without question, Hughes links the
scope of the epic with the steadiness and vitality of
the river with African American experiences, sug-
gesting, in the final analysis, that all are connected.
Water flows through Africa, through America, and
as Hughes suggests in the first stanza, water courses
through these lands as blood through the veins, link-
ing both physical and spiritual humanity. According
to R. Baxter Miller, Hughes creates a kind of myth
that speaks to the generative force of black persis-
tence: “Whether north or south, east or west, the
rivers signify in concentric half-circles the fertility
as well as the dissemination of life.” Indeed, through-
out the poem, through the anagogic river and
metaphors of flowing and connection, Hughes re-
claims America through its origins in Africa.The Negro Speaks of Rivers