Hughes: 'Must Negroes always write about Negroes?'

Yet Do I Marvel

by Countee Cullen

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning,
kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors
Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured
Tantalus Is baited by the fickle fruit,
declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Admittedly, I always read Cullen's poem with an inference of confused pride over God's ordaining. Seemed to me that he wrote confidently - though questioningly - about his poetry and his blackness. I guess Langston Hughes interpreted Cullen differently. Perhaps with good reason.

I appreciate Hughes' essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" for its encouraging message about being true to one's self. 'Don't try to become what you are not,' he sees to say. And I like this - it's comforting. Especially for young writers who might feel inadequate; Hughes seems to say that one possesses all one needs to write. One need only embrace one's existing identity, not attempt to fashion a new one.

However, Hughes himself begs a question I've wondered myself: "Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes?" (1316). Or, for that matter, must all poetry written by blacks be termed "black poetry" or music be termed "black music"? Does Hughes advocate group identity over individual identity?

Even if a modern black poet doesn't subscribe to the "white is best" mentality, does he necessarily produce "black poetry"? What if his poetry is about something other than being black? What if it's about nature or women on a bus? Will literary critics forever analyze his poetic topics through an assumed black lens?

And, if so, how does a poet escape those assumptions? For surely - and I don't believe Hughes would argue against this (maybe he would?) - a writer's identity amounts to more than his/her whiteness or blackness. If it's self-honesty that makes a promising writer, than he/she has many other facets of him/herself to be honest about. Race is only one component of self. Hughes, however, (perhaps without meaning to), seems to imply that race is whole self, the summation of self.

Or maybe, in the era in which Hughes wrote, race was the most important aspect of self. And it was the most important because adherence to it solidified a community, a support system, protection against prejudiced forces. Perhaps, in Hughes' context, a black writer needed to identify himself by his blackness in order to maintain that much-needed support of the black community. Hughes seems most concerned with preserving what he calls "Negro life in America" (1316), and all of his writing works toward that end. It may be, however, that other writers - Cullen, perhaps - had moved past group identity and adopted a more individualistic (more 'white American'?), unique self identity.