One of the most brilliant poets of Harlem Renaissance, mainly underestimated during his lifetime was Langston Hughes. On the large scale his poetry is an outward movement towards people, namely black people. The bulk of his poetry speaks of black people for black people from black people as unique entities interrelated by their collective unconsciousness.
Concerning the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” important is the fact that he does not construct a black man’s identity via binary opposition with the white man’s one but derives it from its very origins in historical terms: anthropology claims that Africa is an ancestral home to present day humanity, with all the findings of Australopithecus, or the Southern man, that dawned in the south-eastern Africa and later spread onto the neighboring continent. The logic of primacy and even superiority to certain extent applies in this case, because that was a precursor of today’s human being and this fact is not be ignored or questioned.
Basically, that could be one of the interpretations of the poem. Hughes speaks of rivers – water canals that unite the world. Compared to the continent the sea and water body in general remained relatively unchanged compared to the dry land, which underwent so many different kinds of transformation that it is difficult to enlist all of them. Hughes mentions the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile and the Mississippi. The first three are thought to be places where life was to be conceived, and according to the author’s logic with the flow of the rivers spread throughout the world. The Euphrates reflects the time period when the persona was young, when the dawns were young; the Congo is the time when a boy becomes the man who has to plant a tree, raise a child and build a house, which is a hut situated near the river’s bank; the Nile brings the man to his prosperous victory over the world of nature, he constructs a pyramid which changes the focalization of the persona: he looks at the world from an up above now, just like God, he is capable of doing anything and conquering time and space. Yet there is a historical lacuna, the slave period which has been purposefully omitted from the smooth historical presentation of black people’s movement from Africa to the world. The grieving period of slavery is not to leave its mark in the consciousness of a black man, not is it to stay in the minds of the rest of the world, for the climactic moment of the poem states that Abe Lincoln goes “down to New Orleans” which makes Mississippi glow “golden in the sunset”. To achieve the effect of gloriousness Hughes uses gradation to aggravate the situation but only positively – from the small origin to big deeds and finally restoring the true order of the things. The tone is elevated, as if it was striving to take the reader up above and make him see the world as on the palm of the …