What Role Does Freedom Play In The Poems You Read In This Unit?

1. What role does freedom play in the poems you read in this unit? Write about at least three of the poems, describing how the poet uses imagery to depict freedom, the lack of it, or the desire for it.

Answer:
Type your answer here.
They left the land of their slave past and moved toward the promise of freedom in the north, but the people of the “Great Migration” met with the cruel reality that their struggles were not over, that although a war had been fought and won, emancipation was only the beginning for African Americans and their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-the American Dream. There’s a phrase from a song, “pouring water on a drowning man,” and that’s surely how it must have felt to journey north after
the Civil War and find that their wages did not equal those of whites, or that African American’s were steered away from neighborhoods with modern conveniences like adequate sewerage and better housing with adequate ventilation, and these problems were not the worst. Yet, in spite of the de facto repression African Americans suffered in the north or continued to suffer de jure under Jim Crow in the south, there did come a certain freedom of voice and the Harlem Renaissance was the flowering of that voice in the arts and letters of talented men and women who had a great story to tell, who needed to give words to feelings long held in check, not just for themselves but for all African Americans. While some expressions were of joy and discovery or philosophical questions of continuing concern to all mankind, many more were of a deep pain, a deep anger, frustration, and protest at the continued inequity and lack of freedom the “emancipated” yet faced, that day had still to come, when they, too, could simply stand tall like a tree in the sun, equals among equals or “sit at the table, when company comes.” (Langston Hughes, “I,too”) Thus, freedom, was the goal to which every expression strove.
Freedom or the lack of freedom was the seed, the energy, and underlying theme that drove the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, like that of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. These two poets use such deceptively and, yet, deeply effective imagery, reaching out to the reader to move him or her to a well of distilled truth. The language is direct, the images strong, and the essential, clear. Langston Hughes, in his poems, “I, Too”, and “Dream Variations”, as well as Countee Cullen’s “Any Human to Another” speak so eloquently and with such dignity and strength, that one is at once struck by a truth that seems new again and urgent even if one believed to have known that truth before and this is achieved through the use of imagism. Through imagism, these two poets exemplify how this literary device aims at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. It was the dream deferred of which they “sang,” freedom, each one’s nature-given-manna for which they strained,
each cry, or prayer in fervent dignified resolution or angry defiance and hunger for restitution was not simple ink or chaste meditation, but penned in blood, blotted with the fabric of a part humanity denied a unifying aspiration.

In “I, Too”,Langston Hughes is not speaking simply for himself, he’s speaking for all African Americans.
“I am the dark brother.” (Line 2) He is symbolizing black and white America as brothers and he is stating that the black brother, the black sheep of the family is nonetheless part of the family. “I, too, sing America.” (Line 1) As the black sheep, he is not allowed to take part at the table, parenthetically, “of freedom”. The “darker brother” isn’t esteemed enough as having the intelligence and depth to appreciate the fineness of freedom; as if the white brother has the moral authority to judge his black brother lacking, or the moral high-ground to claim superiority and deny African Americans what is by nature belonging to all according to the defining American “creed”-that “all men are created equal...” While African Americans may, for a time, feel weakened by such mistaken belief or even believe it themselves and pale for the lack of freedom’s nourishment, they are not, however, waiting passively. “…I laugh, and eat well (in the “kitchen” or the scullery room to freedom), and grow strong.” (Lines 5-7) The black brother takes his time in the “kitchen” to learn, to stretch out and grow and gain a better understanding of his rightful place in the world, to gain confidence. One day it won’t be a matter of permission, no one is going to simply let him sit at the “table”; he will have the confidence and strength to take a seat of his own. Having that strength, no one will
dare ask him to do otherwise, because then, his confidence will reveal how fitting it is that he is at that table, therefore completing the American dream for all Americans. In “Dream Variations”, Hughes describes his freedom in the form of the natural world, where everything is equal. He imagines a world where he could freely twirl about in the “…White day”. “To fling my arms wide in some place in the sun, to whirl and to dance till the white day is done.” (Lines 1-4). When night comes, he is just as in his own place maybe more than in the day. “Beneath a tall tree while night comes on gently, dark like me ̶ that is my dream!” (Lines 6-9).

This poem is very deceptive in that there are varying levels of meaning packed into a spare use of words. “White day,” represents the full light, before all people, but in particular, before the eyes of the white world and values, into and by which African Americans felt they must somehow, “fit” and measure themselves in terms of beauty, voice, and so many other aspects of life. “To whirl and to dance” is not simply a matter of physical locomotion but the act of expression unique to one’s self, and perhaps, as in this case, the act of using one’s own voice, but, it is an expansion, an extending of limbs after so long being constrained and repressed to fit into another’s expectations, to be personally free.
This personal freedom extends to the act of embracing oneself, loving and owning one’s innate characteristics and loving and accepting oneself and in this case rejecting the image the white world had given people of color, characterizing them as somehow embodying the fierce and violent part of nature, ignoring the nurturing and gentle part, as if they were not whole even as animals! Hughes reveals this lie for the little minded crime it really was and is, and he does so without lowering the discourse to the level of that lie. The poet makes his statement without casting aspersion or blame. Hughes simply asserts, he (and all African Americans) is whole just as nature, both night and day, yin and yang, and he yearns for and looks forward with joy to the realization of this dream of full self-expression and acceptance. And finally, on a basic level, at night, the time of rest, he looks forward to sleep and release of care after his day’s work is done, free from the worry of persecution or concern for creature needs after a day of employing his energies in his preferred labor and expression-“Night coming tenderly, Black like me.” This too, is the realization of his American Dream. In “Any Human to Another”, Countee Cullen, addresses freedom from a different perspective, from the outside in, not as an African American, but as a human. Thus to understand what it is to be truly human is to understand and accept that each is unique, even though delineated by race or culture. Cullen approaches the difficulties of being African American in a white paradigm by not ignoring the differences, but by representing those as “little tents” each to one’s “little own.” Freedom comes with understanding our human nature which we all share. With varying stanza forms, he visually and orally structures the reader’s experience to “see” mankind’s diversity, while connecting all with the theme of “shared” sorrow and pain which affects us at a level deeper than culture, skin, or physical characteristics in a way evoking Shakespeare's Shylock - “…if you prick us, do we not bleed?” The Merchant of Venice). “The ills I sorrow at not me alone like an arrow, pierce the marrow, through the fat and past the bone.” (Lines 1-6). Empathy, though once removed, brings the knowledge of pain in such a deep way as to surpass even bone marrow and to such a degree that the poet’s suggestion leaves the pages and can convey to “any human” not simply meaning, but feeling. That is possible, firstly, because, Cullen explains, “Your grief and mine must intertwine like sea and river.” (Lines 7-9). This is the imagery of interconnection. Rivers flow into seas, water evaporates and returns to earth as rain, etc., and in this way, though together as humans and yet retaining our uniqueness (lines 11-12), humans share a common experience, we share the human condition. What is this condition? Few may know happiness as Cullen states in (lines 13-17)-“Joy may be shy...Friendly to a few”, but we all know pain, no matter who we are or whether we are honest or deceitful [true or false]. Therefor, to hear of another’s pain is to know it. We cannot deny it. Thus “must”, in stanza 2 is not an enjoinder but a declaration. Further, Cullen asserts that no man [people] is [are] an island and neither should he believe himself to be - “Let no man be so proud and confident, to think he is allowed a little tent pitched in a meadow of sun [happiness] and shadow [suffering] all his little own...” (Lines 13-19) because we share meanings and basic human feeling.

Finally, Cullen explains that this shared feeling, empathy, is both a “blade” striking us down, and a “crown” that ennobles us. Cullen speaks from the larger framework of humankind to that of being a particular people or culture unto our “little selve(s)” and implies that our denial of the obvious, of each other is what prevents us all from being fully human, and thus fully free.

Perhaps coming from both directions, we can finally find freedom in one another.