Wachanga Ndirangu discusses the origins and cultural backdrop of black literature in America.
Issue date: 2/12/04 Section: VIEWS

African-American literature is unique in that it has roots in a debilitating and traumatic experience.

To transform the shipment of people as slaves from one continent to another into a high order of self-expression was indeed a wondrous achievement.

Initial writings were protesting the denial of the personal right to self. This was a literature of necessity; of condemning the ignobility of the slave system, a literature of defense of the writer's community and his people's right to life: a functional literature.

The slave narrative emerged as an original genre whose concrete textual variation kept insisting that desperate men would commit crime, outraged men would seek revenge, that neither persons nor property would be safe where justice was denied, poverty was enforced and ignorance prevailed; where society was an organized conspiracy to oppress, to rob, and to degrade part of its members.

This revelation was clearly spelled out by Frederick Douglas, the leading black abolitionist.

The monumentality of these narratives rests in their portrayal of characters who summoned courage to examine the psychological limbo they had been consigned to.

Their dignity is manifested in their formidable efforts to triumph over the evil perpetrated against them, to refuse to be defined as slaves, to rise back to the level of humanity. This marks the hallmark of human regeneration

This resistance was countered by writings from the racists and constitutes the plantation literature.

It masks the rottenness, the wretchedness of life in the plantation. It attempted to depict the slave plantation as a nice place. Its superficiality managed to convince only the oppressors themselves and no one else.

The literature of the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement marked a new level of self-awareness and self-assertiveness. Tobacco and sugar cane plantations, backyards, even kitchens, had formed a fecund ground for the creation of a folk tradition, out of which the Langston Hugheses and Amiri Barakas emerged.

As a realization that the written word was integral in the whole process of emancipation grew, so did the power of that word. The word became emancipation.

This emancipation is no longer a dream. That era when doubts about the mental endowment of black people; the period of insurmountable antagonism between the whites and the blacks, the epoch when men and women were skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair and debasement; the time of impenetrable darkness, were gone.

I, too, Sing America and The Negro Speaks of Rivers have gradually gone out of tune. More expansive forms of utterances, which express a far wide range of human experience, have replaced the poetry of resistance, idealization of and idolization.

Modern writers, however, are not oblivious of their past and heritage. This heritage is best expressed in the African-American speech dictionary, unmistakable in its originality and authenticity.

The profundity of this literature is a testimony to the fact that African-Americans have lived a history, have created a culture, have written a literature that the whole world is compelled to recognize and respect.

Wachanga Ndirangu is a journalism graduate student from Nairobi, Kenya. He can be contacted at nimzeewachanga29@yahoo.com.