Cafe: 3 a.m.
Detectives from the vice squad
with weary sadistic eyes
spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
over there?
Where?
Langston Hughes / ΗΠΑ
Detectives from the vice squad
with weary sadistic eyes
spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
over there?
Where?
Langston Hughes / ΗΠΑ
.
************
Sunil Gupta – Isaac Julien: Looking for Langston
Sunil Gupta – Isaac Julien: Looking for Langston
6 σχόλια:
ΛΑΓΚΣΤΟΝ ΧΙΟΥΖ
1902-1967
ΦΟΒΙΣΜΕΝΟΙ
Κλαίουμε
ανάμεσα στους ουρανοξύστες
όπως θρηνούσαν οι πρόγονοί μας
ανάμεσα στα φοινικόδεντρα
της Αφρικής.
Γιατί είμαστε μόνοι,
είναι νύχτα
και φοβόμαστε.
μετάφραση: Λ. Καραπαναγιώτης
ΞΕΝΗ ΠΟΙΗΣΗ ΤΟΥ 20ου ΑΙΩΝΑ
Hughes, Langston (1902-1967)
Langston Hughes, whose literary legacy is enormous and varied, was closeted, but homosexuality was an important influence on his literary imagination, and many of his poems may be read as gay texts.
James Mercer Langston Hughes, born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, began life in poverty and frequently moved from city to city as his parents tried unsuccessfully to escape racism and economic hardship. Hughes's father, an attorney, gave up on the United States and, in 1903, left his family to live and work in Mexico. The young Hughes lived alternately with his maternal grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, and his mother in whatever city she could find work.
Hughes, as a seventh grader, worked cleaning the lobby and toilets of a hotel near his school. These impoverished conditions made indelible impressions on the young boy. He would never forget his place as a poor black in America.
In the early 1920s, Hughes contemplated his place in the world as a poor "Negro" and as a poet. Writing his famous "A Negro Speaks of Rivers," he expressed the silent viewpoint of many black Americans who looked to spiritual growth as they faced racism and economic stagnation.
Hughes attended Columbia University from 1921 to 1922 but left to travel (most often working to pay his passage) extensively in Europe and Africa before deciding to enter Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, where he studied from 1926 to 1929. Even before graduating from college, Hughes had published The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).
From this point on, he wrote in virtually every genre and published nonstop until his death in New York on May 22, 1967. Hughes's literary legacy is enormous and varied. He holds an undisputed and honored place in American letters. Hughes always claimed that he was committed to writing simply about the black experience in a language the masses could understand, learn from, and enjoy. He embraced jazz, spirituals, and the blues in his works and, thus, became the people's poet.
One of the greatest ironies in the life of the people's poet was his own understandable silence regarding the oppression of gays. As a gay man, Hughes lived that secret life silently in the confines of a very narrow, but well-constructed closet--one that still shelters him today.
On June 13, 1991, The Los Angeles Times ran an article entitled "Battle Lines" reporting on the controversy that erupted over the use of his poem "Tell Me" for a poster ushering in Lesbian and Gay History Month. The five-line poem asks a question Hughes posed often in his work: Why must my dreams be deferred?
The poem is a kind of gestalt in which the phrase "Why should it be my" is used three times to emphasize personal anguish over loneliness and the unattainability of dreams. The "it" of the poem can be taken to be racism, poverty, homosexuality, or a host of other reasons that dreams are not achieved.
Thus, the poem is an appropriate expression of outrage against heterosexism. Using Hughes's own words to express this sentiment, however, had the additional power of reclamation: The poster's gay designers boldly claimed Hughes as one of their own.
Hughes's biographers do little to settle definitely the question of the poet's sexuality: Faith Berry holds that Hughes was gay, whereas Arnold Rampersad--though he documents Hughes's admission of a homosexual encounter with a seaman in 1926--asserts that he could not find incontrovertible evidence that the writer was gay.
It should not be surprising to anyone who has tried to recapitulate the lives of literary figures during pre-Stonewall America that finding physical traces of overt homosexuality is rare indeed. The closet, by the turn of the century, had been so firmly erected by heterosexism that the fear of coming out could last a lifetime, especially for public figures.
For Rampersad and others who refuse to read between the lines in order to elucidate the facts of Hughes's life, it is clear that a political agenda is operative. These scholars are unwilling to associate an African-American cultural and literary hero, one of America's most celebrated black writers, with a perceived "abnormality."
Unless this attitude is transcended, a better understanding of Hughes, the man and artist, will be difficult to effect. There is ample evidence in Rampersad's biography to indicate that Hughes was gay, especially his close alliances with such gay men as Alain Locke, Noël Sullivan, Richard Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman. That Hughes managed his closet so closely is testimony to the oppression he endured.
Recently, scholars have started to pay attention to the influence of homosexuality on Hughes's literary imagination. Many of Hughes's poems invite gay readings. Such poems enable scholars to theorize on the poet's use of the male-male gaze as a common feature in his writings.
Focusing on such poems as "Joy," "Desire," "Café: 3 A. M.," "Waterfront Streets," "Young Sailor," "Trumpet Player," "Tell Me," and many poems in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), we can identify homoeroticism and other gay markings.
As this kind of scholarship continues, as the reading public is made more aware that sexuality has great consequences for artistic creativity, and as the homosexual closet is deconstructed, surely then Hughes will take his place in literary history not just as a race and folk poet, but as one whose complex achievement includes battling oppression through his veiled homosexual expressivity. Then we will see that Hughes was not silent about his gayness after all.
Alden Reimonenq
Heroic "hussies" and "brilliant queers": genderracial resistance in the works of Langston Hughes
by Anne Borden
African American Review , Fall, 1994
Hughes and Homosexuality
Hughes's unapologetic discussion of such topics as homosexuality, teenage pregnancy, and prostitution--which earned him the title of "the poet lowrate of Harlem" in the Chicago Whip and "The Sewer Dweller" in the Amsterdam News (Rampersad 140)--promotes dialogue on taboo genderracial issues. Hughes demonstrates polyrhythmic consciousness by placing opposing views together in dialogue. Commonly, there is no clear "right" or "wrong" character; rather, the reader is invited to view the conflict through numerous perspectives simultaneously.
In discussing the genderracial concerns of gay Blacks, for example, Hughes explores racial realities and gender constructs in the Black community which contribute to homophobia. In "Blessed Assurance," Hughes invokes an ironic sympathy with a father who worries that his son is "turning into a queer," while bringing to light contradictions in the father's wishes that his son were more "masculine." The father, John, worries that homosexuality will compound the young man's oppression as a Negro:
He was a brilliant queer, on the Honor Role in high school, and likely to be graduated in the spring at the head of the class. But the boy was colored. Since colored parents always like to put their best foot forward, John was more disturbed about his son's transition than if they had been white. Negroes had enough crosses to bear. (Something 227)
The text is sympathetic to John's concerns, while discussing a personal, gendered concern: John doesn't want his boy to look like a "sissy" in front of John's friends. It is significant that Hughes uses the term queer to define Delly, particularly when he continues, "If only Delly were not such a sweet boy--no juvenile delinquency, no stealing cars, no smoking reefers ever. He did chores without complaint. He washed dishes too easily ..." (228).
John's concern that his son's homosexuality will further impede the boy's survival intertwines with his gender-located embarrassment and personal privileging of heterosexually ascribed styles of masculinity. The ironic twist of Delly's academic and personal success suggests that in breaking from traditional styles of masculinity--sexually and socially--Delly avoids certain traps which defer dreams for young boys trying to fit into "proper" gender roles. By examining the contradictions of John's wishes for his son, Hughes contributes to dialogue on homosexuality as a springpoint for genderracial reform. Thus, "Blessed Assurance" works to move homosexuality out of the realm of the dangerous and deviant in our minds, and creates dialogue on its possible uses in promoting positive social change.
Similarly, "Cafe: 3 A.M." resists stereotypes of gay identity. Reprinted in several gay and lesbian anthologies, the poem discusses police violence against homosexuals:
Detectives from the vice squad
With weary sadistic eyes
Spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
Over there?
Where? (Selected 243)
"Cafe" advocates greater understanding of gays and lesbians and, on second glance, also explores the label deviant in the context of multiple consciousness. One might interpret Hughes's "Degenerates" as the police themselves, huddled off in a corner, waiting to strike, scoping out their victims on the basis of appearance. Yet we reconcile ourselves--"somebody / made them that way"--wanting to understand the intricate gut machinery of the Other, to get to the roots of homophobic violence, or to get to the root of gaiety if we are straight. The last stanza further deepens this double reading of the poem, adding a poly-rhythmic feel to the identity of a cafe dweller. By asking whether she is a "Lesbian" or a "police lady," Hughes invokes the ironic sentiment that, of course, she could be both; and he questions what this identity would mean to her, to her co-workers, to the gay community.
Unlikely Heroines: Hughes and Female Sexuality
In "Cafe," Hughes set forth the complex rhythm of multiple consciousnesses and oppressions to illuminate our moral dilemmas. Several of Hughes's works comment on moral judgments against women in many facets of female sexuality, addressing the ways in which women are judged by their sexual behavior. Sexuality is a necessary battleground for those who are marginalized and abused because of their sex or gender; as African American gay poet Essex Hemphill notes, the errogenous zones are far from "demilitarized" (73) in a sexist society. For many women, sexuality becomes a means of expression, and often it is the form of our expression which is taken most seriously.
Hughes's "Ballad of the Girl Whose Name Is Mud" evokes the voice of a whispering gossip who disapproves of a girl who dated "a nogood man." The last stanza gives voice to the experience of the "hussy" herself, through gossip:
... The hussy's telling everybody--
Just as though it was no sin--
That if she had a chance
She'd do it agin'! (Selected 149)
The "hussy" rejects gender constructs, which tell her she should be remorseful; instead, she shocks those around her by stating that "she'd do it agin'!" This type of resistance, grounded solidly in the societal notion that women express themselves primarily through their sexuality, portrays female sexual identity much as Black male identity is portrayed in "Scottsboro," as a political act. Similar sentiments recur in "S-sss-ss-sh!," which discusses unmarried, probably teenage, pregnancy. Hughes contrasts the natural imagery of birth with disapproval by family and neighbors:
The baby came one morning
Almost with the sun.
The neighbors--
And its grandma--
Were outdone!
But mother and child
Thought it fun. (Selected 134)
In simultaneously enacting several views of the birth, "Sh-sss-ss-sh!" promotes dialogue on gender issues in a polyrhythmic way. It interrogates our notions of female shame in an age when unmarried pregnancy held greater stigma than it does today.
As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have suggested in their analysis of women writers, Hughes lends a subversive quality to his "mad women." Imagery of nakedness is heavy in Hughes's discussion of women's identity struggles, suggesting an awareness of women's sexuality as a site of resistance. The sharp and mysterious "Strange Hurt," describes a female who seeks out storms from shelter, "fiery sunshine" from shade. Hughes concludes:
In months of snowy winter
When cozy houses hold,
She'd break down doors
To wander naked
In the cold. (Selected 84)
In "March Moon," Hughes uses irony to break down constructions of female sexuality, while connecting it with broad issues of power and inequality. The social construction of female shame is addressed through an ironic examination of the bright bare moon:
The moon is naked.
The wind has undressed the moon.
The wind has blown all the cloud-gar-
ments
Off the body of the moon
And now she's naked.
Stark naked.
But why don't you blush,
O shameless moon?
Don't you know
It isn't nice to be naked? (Selected 60)
As a poem about women, "March Moon" unveils the construction of female shame which represses female expression--sexually, spiritually, and intellectually. "March Moon" exposes the fallacy of "niceness" that clenches our desires, prefiguring Audre Lorde's comment that," as women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational thought. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world.... The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful" (53).
Κι εγώ Αμερική τραγουδώ
Είμαι ο μελαψότερος αδερφός.
Με στέλνουν για φαγητό στην κουζίνα
όταν έρχεται η παρέα,
μα εγώ γελώ
και τρώω καλά
και ανδρώνομαι.
Αύριο,
στο τραπέζι θα κάθομαι εγώ
όταν θα ‘ρθει η παρέα.
Κανείς δεν θα τολμήσει
να μου πει
«Φάε στην κουζίνα εσύ»,
τότε.
Άλλωστε,
θα διαπιστώσουν πόσο ωραίος είμαι
και θα ντραπούνε.
Είμαι, κι εγώ, Αμερική.
Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Alfred Knopf, 2002)
Looking for Langston
Looking for Langston is the first feature film by British filmmaker Isaac Julien. Today it exists under the auspices of the British Film Institute as part of its national Black World initiative celebrating black creativity in film. Produced in 1989, the film is presented in black and white combining authentic archival newsreel footage of Harlem in the 1920s with scripted scenes to produce a non-linear impressionistic story line celebrating black gay identity and desire during the artistic and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York. The film is relatively short, running about 42 minutes. Opening the film is a voice over of the original radio broadcast made in tribute to Langston Hughes upon his death in 1967 as the funeral scene of Hughes is recreated and reinterpreted. Interspersed among such images as shifting time periods that seamlessly flow from past to present, black men dancing together within a revisionist version of the Cotton Club, or, a speakeasy, and dream sequences are brief narrative extracts from the poetic works of Hughes alongside those of Richard Bruce Nugent, James Baldwin, and Essex Hemphill. Also shown are the controversial images of black men by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
The film is not a biography of Langston Hughes. It is a memoriam to Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance as reconstructed from a black gay perspective.[1]Moreover, it reports to be a meditation on the black gay experience within a historical context built around the homophobia, oppression, and denial faced by men of African descent within black communities alongside “allusions and political commentary on white racism.”[2]Hughes is presented as an icon and cultural metaphor for black gay men who were confronted with being ostracized if they did not conform to black bourgeoisie standards whose overriding goal concerned fuller social integration. Contested are the ways the black male and his sexuality have been represented in the modern Western world and how existing notions of race and gender figure within American and African American culture.[3] Throughout this process, the identity of Hughes as a black gay man is reclaimed and no longer denied, a process paralleled in the ever growing academic studies of Langston Hughes today.[4][5] Moreover, adding to the historic and cinematic importance of the film in gay cinema, Looking for Langston was and continues to be one of very few films showing intra-racial affection between black gay men as revealed in the love story between the two leading black protagonists, Ben Ellison as Langston Hughes and Matthew Baidoo as Beauty.[6][7]
Upon the initial first release of Looking for Langston in the United States in 1990, the estate of Langston Hughes attempted to have the film censored because of copyright violations. That is, permission allegedly had not been obtained by the filmmakers permitting them to use the poetry of Hughes in the film. During subsequent screenings of Looking for Langston, the sound was repeatedly turned down when the work of Hughes was read. Despite allegations of censorship from critics at the time of the U.S. premier of the film, the estate had allowed many of Hughes’ poems to appear in gay anthologies in the print media and continues to do so till this day.
Awards
Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the 1989 Berlin International Film Festival.
en.wikipedia.org
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