Volume 10 209
The idea of civilization is important to both
Cullen and Hughes. In the Harlem Renaissance,
whites celebrated the supposedly “primitive” (that
is, natural, basic, and uncivilized) qualities of black
culture because they were seen as rejuvenating a de-
pleted, over-civilized Western culture. This put
black artists in an awkward position, for they needed
to prove themselves as artists capable of mastering
the “sophisticated” European styles associated with
civilization, but they at once wanted to draw on and
bring value to their own cultural influences and tra-
ditions. Hughes’ poem claims civilization from its
most ancient as the birthright of the African Amer-
ican. He claims for blacks a proud legacy that dwarfs
any achievements of the United States’ one-hundred-
fifty-year history, and even those of Europe. “I
bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. /
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to
sleep. / I looked on the Nile and raised the pyramids
above it.” In contrast, Cullen is torn by a familiar—
and racist—dichotomy between (white/Western)
civilization and (black/African) nature. There is a
fascinating tension in his poem between its formal
meter and rhyme scheme—which demonstrate the
author’s “civilized” discipline and respect for Euro-
pean literary tradition—and the powerful imagery of
an imaged Africa, which speaks to the “wildness” in
his soul: “So I lie, who all day long / Want no sound
except the song / Sung by wild barbaric birds / Goad-
ing massive jungle herds, / Juggernauts of flesh that
pass / Trampling tall defiant grass / Where young
forest lovers lie, / Plighting troth beneath the sky.”
Hughes denies any such tension between civilization
and nature. The river, a symbol of nature, has a dig-
nity that makes small even the collective efforts of
human civilization; it is “older than the flow of hu-
man blood in human veins.” But the river is at once
part of human history and civilization, carrying the
speaker from ancient times to a chapter in Ameri-
can history that was, at the time Hughes wrote, still
within individual memory. His form reflects this
confidence and harmony. The poem uses repetition
of phrases and structures in a manner similar to a
song. Rather than adapting a European style to his
own devices as does Cullen, Hughes draws on an
oral culture that is both ancient African and con-
temporary African American. In doing so, he rede-
fines what it means to be civilized to include the cul-
tural traditions of Africa.
Closely associated with the question of the
African-American’s claim to civilization is the is-
sue of the his relationship to a collective past. The
relevance of history to African Americans was one
of the issues debated among participants in the
Harlem Renaissance. Some promoted the image of
the New Negro, one that left behind the ignorance
and humiliation of slavery and reinvented himself.
The idea of a new man, one who leaves his history
behind, is part of an American tradition dating from
the Pilgrims and encompassing the many immi-
grant groups who came to the United States to start
anew. In the case of African Americans, the his-
tory left behind is the ignoble past of slavery,
wherein blacks were treated as animals in an ulti-
mate stripping away of claims to civilization and
selfhood. Cullen speaks from the position of the
New Negro, asking, “What is last year’s snow to
me? / Last year’s anything? The tree / Budding
yearly must forget / How its past arose or set.” The
irony of the title “Heritage” is that it debates
whether heritage really exists for African Ameri-
cans and questions the extent to which it is a source
of power.
The image of the New Negro was at odds, how-
ever, with the re-valuation of indigenous African
and African-American art forms that also charac-
terized the Harlem Renaissance. Once whites took
an interest in jazz and African sculpture, they
earned new cache as Culture. Though Hughes, like
Cullen, studied British poetry, its influence is little
in evidence in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” or
much of his other poetry. He both reclaims and re-
defines history for African Americans by turning
away from European traditions and derogatory de-
finitions of Africanness, instead valuing oral forms
such as the blues. Admitting to none of the conflict
over heritage that Cullen expresses, Hughes looks
grandly upon a past that transcends the moment of
slavery, referring to its horrors only as they came
to an end, “when Abe Lincoln went down to New
Orleans.”
Both poets use water imagery to express the
African-American’s relationship to the past.
Hughes speaks of rivers, and Cullen describes the
primal beat of rain falling to evoke a primitive
African self lurking within. Hughes’ river flows
strongly forward,carrying hope for the future, “its
muddy bosom turn[ing] all gold in the sunset,” but
the sound of rain agitates Cullen, as it threatens to
pull him backwardinto an obscure, imagined time
before history: “From the unremittant beat / made
by cruel padded feet / Walking through my body’s
street./ Up and down they go, and back / Treading
out a jungle track. // ... In an old remembered way
/ Rain works on me night and day.” Hughes proudly
claims Africans as a historical people—a radical
assertion in light of the predominant view of them
as primitive and “timeless” propagated by Euro-The Negro Speaks of Rivers