Construction and Fluidity of Identity in Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

 This article is published by the Zamfara International Journal of Humanities.

Kehinde, Oluwabukola
Department of English and Literary Studies
Bayero University,
Kano - Nigeria
kennyapotieri1992@gmail.com
08146176664, 

Jonah, Caleb Monday¹ & Lukden, Rinret Winniefred^2
1,2 Department of English and Literary Studies
Federal University, Wukari
Taraba - Nigeria
¹ calebsjonah@gmail.com, ² rlukden@gmail.com
¹ 08168726875, ² 07039315033 

Abstract

One of the features that has often proliferated -African American Literature is the question of identity; and this is particularly with reference to the experience of blacks who were slaves in America or those descendants of Africans who were taken to America as slaves who are now citizens of America. On this note the question of identity is traditionally realized as a function of the cultural, historical and societal forces that shape the society and this has been the case in a large corpus of texts of African-   American writings. Among other literary writings which have emerged from African-American writers, is the genre of autobiography which is traditionally read as a referent to the “I”, the self in relation to the “Other”. Using some of the tenets of Deconstruction such as violent hierarchy between the self/other, critique of logocentrism, and the play of differánce, this paper offers a close reading of some selected poems of Langston Hughes to explain the fluidity and uncertainty of identity. Identity is fluid because it is not identical with itself but subject to illimitable con-text. Therefore, the ability of the selected poem to be reproduced in different con-text is what gives them identity and, paradoxically, is what put off their identity infinitude. This paper concludes that the question of identity is a matter of an unending interplay between the Self and the Other and vice versa. The struggle with the world enables the individual to discover the whole personality.

Key Words: Identity, Poetry, Self/Other Dichotomy. 

Introduction

The abolition of slavery in America in 1863 opened up a new historical phase in the life of African Americans. In the real sense of the word “abolition”, blacks have been given autonomy to make decision for themselves without any regressive and oppressive power of their former masters. However, the inability of the 1870s’s Reconstruction Law to grant and recognize African Americans as citizens of America posed a great threat on their right to explore their creativity and personality within the socio-political and economic spheres of American society. One of the factors that hindered the progress of blacks after the abolition of slavery is lack of education. The African Americans organized different organisations and movements that posed a significant threat on the racial differences within the American mainstream, the Afro-American League, the Equal Right League, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Color People (NAACP), and the fifties and sixties Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Despite their overlapping endeavours, these movements launched a tone of cynicism to the issue of racial discrimination towards the African Americans in a social, educational, economical, psychological, political, and legal manner, and reaffirm the dignity and beauty of the black race which has been pejoratively downplayed by the white colonialists.

 Booker T. Washington in his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), accentuates that blacks are not fully ready for the autonomy given to them because they lack the necessary skills for white collar jobs. Following the abolition, blacks made two decisions in order to affirm their freedom: they changed their names by removing their slave masters’ names and leave the plantations in the South to seek greener pasture in the north. However, Washington maintains that the migration of blacks to the north has never changed their situation because they encountered a new form of racial discrimination and violence from their hosts in the north. Therefore, most of them return to the plantations as servants to their former masters. So, Washington admonishes blacks to embrace their predicament until they are well equipped with necessary knowledge rather than fighting for equality with the white: “Cast down your bucket where you are”. To achieve his goal, Washington establishes the first black school, Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama in 1891 where blacks were given vocational training. The aim of the school is to “emphasize manual training, sought to exalt the dignity of labor, taught a curriculum of only rudimentary education, and was intended to produce common school teachers who would inculcate habits of industry, thrift, and morality in southern black farmers and their families” (Lawrence Hogue 2003, p. 38). Ironically, the vocational training only creates a platform for whites to exploit blacks. In fact, vocational training, as Kevin K. Gaines puts it, “would produce the class distinctions necessary for the tutelage and uplift of a race of thrifty agricultural toilers who had little use for the organized labor or political activity” (cited in Hogue, 2003, p. 34).

On the contrary, W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk also moves the motion for a black university education where blacks can have access to knowledge that transcends beyond the emphasis on vocational training of the Tuskegee Institute. In his 1906 colloquium address at the Hampton Institute, an extension of Tuskegee Institute, he remarked that the Tuskegee Institute is an epitome of “education heresy” and its emphasis on vocational training is nothing but a “false distinction” between vocational education and higher education (cited in Hogue, p. 39). In a similar manner, Du Bois calls for a radical black movement that addresses the plight of blacks in their daily interaction with their counterpart. Despite Washington’s and Du Bois’ arguments, on the contrary, the former’s accommodationist philosophy together with the latter’s black empowerment philosophy has created counter-narratives, tensions, contradictions among African American writers and African critics. Some good examples that come to mind are Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

The first philosophical and literary movement that addresses the racial problem in the twentieth century American society was the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement. The Harlem Renaissance is an intellectual movement of the 1920s that attempts to assess black identity within the American society “without fear and shame”: “I am a Negro—and beautiful” (Hughes 2001, p. 1316). It labels a group of philosophers and writers whose works exemplify the ideology of the movement as a challenge to western hegemonic construction of black race. Thus, it is a period in which African Americans recollected the oral folklore peculiar to the black community. In essence, the folk art shows the extent to which blacks are creative especially in music which will serve as a, to borrow a leaf from Langston Hughes (2001), “revolt against weariness in a white world” (p. 1316). By implication, the over-reliance on black arts implies that the evaluation of African American literature must not lose sight of the historical antecedents that shape the narratives of blacks. On this view, critics must pay keen attention in their reading and interpretation to contend with issues of slavery, racism, lynching, mob violence, and poverty that haunt blacks’ right from slavery period to the twentieth century American society; and, to add, to the twenty-first century.

Most 21st century writers situate their narratives within the context of slavery and how it has continued to shape the identity of blacks. Among the twentieth-first century writers are Percival Everett, Tyler Perry, Robert Eisele, Jeffery Porro, Allison Schroeder, Theodore Melfi, and a host of others. The aspiration of this paper is not to rehearse how the historical contexts have given rise to the production of the primary texts, but rather to offer an analytical discourse within the analytical framework of Deconstruction in its relation to autobiographical texts (poetry). Hogue (2003) argues that the autobiographical tradition is “one of the staples of the canon of African American literature, that chronicles yet another African American success and achievements, and therefore, reinforces the status quo” (p. X). The ontological reading of autobiographical text (prose and poetry) as a life narrative which gives a systematic and unified account of the life, experience, and personality of an individual who stands behind the text. As a distinct sub-genre of writing, autobiographical writing draws its material from “real” life experience rather than from the sheer pleasure of imagination. That is, the reader delves into the historical, cultural, and social facts that give shape to the unique experience of the author, and not the fictional and fabricated world of the author. This conventional reading of life writing seeks to interpret and grasp the text from the intention and psychological disposition of the author. For this model of reading, the text can only be classified as life narrative if only, as Roy Pascal (2015) argues, it depicts “the seriousness of the author, the seriousness of his personality and his intention in writing” (p. 60). On this note, the author and the narrator or poetic speaker are inevitable, the intention and “meaning” of the text are inseparable because the “identity between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist” are intertwined and inevitable (Philippe Lejeune 1989, p. 193).

 

Conceptual Framework: Identity

The question of identity has received attention from theories about race, gender, and sexuality in the field of literary studies as exemplified in the writings of Eve Sedgwick, Simone de Beauvoir, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Julia Kristeva and Jonathan Culler. Fundamental to their writings is to problematize what is given and what is constructed in relation to identity. Thus, "literary works" Culler writes, "characteristically represent individuals, so struggles about identity are struggles against or comply with social norms and expectations" (283). In theoretical writings, critics argue that social identity tends to focus on group identity: what is it to be a woman? To be Black? To be a man? These questions have created a tension between literary texts and theoretical discourse. Arguably, the text does not create identity; rather it is the critics theorists who take up the task to discover what the text instantiates. This calls to mind Judith Butler famous phrase: "literature is better to think with, in that its language provides powerful resources for a critique of constructions that has been used to sustain and thus of the institutional arrangements it has helped to subtend" (cited in Culler 2000, p.286).

Central to human existence, as social and political beings, is an attempt to define the self or to have an authentic, proper self-recognition of who they are. To do this effectively, individual creates language that privileges the “self” at the expense of the “other”. Fredric Jameson, in The Prison-House of Language, maintains that

 

the binary opposition is ... at the outset a heuristic principle, that instrument of analysis on which the mythological hermeneutic is founded. We would ourselves be tempted to describe it as a technique for stimulating perception, when faced with a mass of apparently homogenous data to which the mind and the eyes are numb: a way of forcing ourselves to perceive difference and identity in a whole new language the very sounds of which we cannot yet distinguish from each other. It is a decoding or deciphering device, or alternately a technique of language learning. (cited in Henry Louis Gates 1987, p. 88)

However, there is no “authentic” self-identical consciousness by mere isolation of the self from the Others. Self-identity does not occur by or predetermined by random doubt but by the “infinitely twisted and crafty play” of the self within unsaturated context. This is why, as Roland Barthes (1986) argues, an identity, just like a discourse or a text, is a textual fabric that “is held in language: it exists only when caught up in a discourse… the Text is experienced in an activity, in a production. It follows that the text cannot stop; its constitutive moment is traversal” (pp. 57-58). On this note, Hall, maintains that identity like a discourse is “a ‘production’ which is never complete always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (cited in Smith and Watson 2010, p. 34). For Barthes and Hall, the identity of the narrator cannot be apprehended directly from the extraneous factors that might take discourse “out of context” (Derrida 1988, p. ¹³⁶) or seek identity from the intentional structure of poetic form.

Self-recognition or identity, therefore, can only be derived through an infinite play of difference between the Self and the Others. That is, the ability of the self to be understood, recognized and confirmed within different contexts is what gives and (paradoxically) thwarts, put off its identity. Michael Cooke, in his essay titled "Modern Black Autobiography in the Tradition", gives comments on the black self-affirmation within the autobiographical tradition:

the self is the source of the system of which it is a part, creates what it discovers, and although (as Coleridge realized) it is nothing unto itself, it is the possibility of everything for itself. Autobiography is the coordination of the self as content—everything available in memory, perception, understanding, imagination, desire—and the self as shaped, formed in terms of a perspective and pattern of interpretation. (Cited in Gates 1987: 95)

One cannot think of identity as something intimately personal or self-defined; it has to be played out within the context that it emerges from. On this note, Donald Winnicott (2005) argues that:

It is playing and only in playing that individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. [Bound up with this is the fact that only in playing is communication possible].” (54-66)

This self-recognition undermines any form of objective self-representation/understanding. Thus, the presence of the “Other” offers a sense of self-recognition and at the same time reveals what the self “lacks” in its relation with that which it attempts to resist; the self finds in the Others the very qualities that constitute its own identity.

The selected poems could be read as an autobiographical text that revolves around the search of identity by the poetic speakers. Although the texts encapsulate all the essential features of an autobiography such as the use of first person narrator, the first person narrative point of view, the use of personal pronoun (“I”), the reading of the poems distorts, complicates the genre of life narrative, and reconciles our conventional reading and understanding of life narrative. In this light, this paper reads some selected poems of Langston Hughes to explore and underscore the fluidity that surrounds the concept of identity. This stems from the fact that Afro-American discourse is fraught with the question of identity in terms of how writers have engaged with other deep-seated issues in their literary works. Thus, this paper offers a close reading of selected poems of Langston Hughes (“Migration”, “Cross”, “Mulatto” and “The Negro Speaks of River” drawn from four separate collections) to discover the construction of identity within the binary opposition between the “Self” and the “Other”.

Langston Hughes: Authorial and Textual Background

Langston Hughes (1 February 1902 – 22 May 1967) was an American activist, poet, novelist, and playwright who is credited to be the major influence in the popularization of jazz poetry. His paternal great grandmothers were enslaved Africans on American soil and the dialectics of African American life are core preoccupations in his literary creations. Hughes was a major figure during the Harlem Renaissance – the cultural and intellectual movement by African-Americans to re-conceptualize the identity of the “Negro” which is free from white stereotypes, which contributed immensely to the civil rights movements across America in the early 1940s (Kumari, 2020). Some of the poem collections of Hughes include The Crises (1923), Fine Clothes to the Jew (1925), The Weary Blues (1926) Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932), Shakespeare in Harlem (1932), Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943), Lament for Dark People and Other Poems (1944).

This present study critically examines poems from the collections The Weary Blues (“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Cross”) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (“Mulatto”) and The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (“Migration). Written during the hey days of the Harlem Renaissance, The Weary Blues is a poem collection which centers around themes of inequality, resilience, communal identity, and hope for the black race amidst white oppression and discrimination. In Fine Clothes to the Jew, Hughes details the desires, needs, and sensibilities of the black race particularly the black working class but was often criticized for its pervasive, profane and containing degenerate elements. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes focuses on a selection of poems that captures the preoccupations of Hughes with several aspects of African American life.

The Play of Self/Other and the Fluidity of Identity

The poem “Migration”, as the title implies, deals with a “little dark boy” who migrated from the Southern part of the country to the Northern part in search for education. However, we could pay some brief attention to the poetic form and structure of the poem. The poem consists of a 3-stanza quatrain structure (of 4 lines each) with the last two lines of the third quatrain serving as a “turn” which concludes the poem. The poem has very minimal rhyme, typical of English or Shakespearean sonnet in which there is an intricate rhyme scheme (ABAB). There are end rhymes in stanza 1, 2 (lines 6 and 8), and 3 (lines 10 and 12). The poetic speaker is a first person narrator who refers to himself in the form of personal pronoun “I”. The “I” could be identified as a narrating “I” that takes the reader through the course of the narrative in which the narrator “calls forth only that part of the experiential history linked to the story he is telling” (Smith and Watson 2010, p. 59).The narrating “I” in the poem speaks in multiple voices: as a product of miscegenation of “white” and “black” parents, an advocate of hybridization of the two cultures, a concerned individual challenging and subtly exposing the discrepancy in the socio-economic opportunities between white and black, a cultural orphan who could not pin down identity within the context of his genealogy but has to bear the “cross” of double identity. This narrating “I” in the poem is also depicted to have attended a school in the northern region of America.

The “Northern school” in the poem is structured base on racial difference. This stereotyping on racial difference is what hinders the little black boy “to play/ With the white children”. The “school” which is expected to offer a conducive atmosphere for a revolutionary change of mind towards political, social, racial related issues in the society ends up being a site for the promotion of discrimination and humiliation. Initially, the “white children” thought the little boy is white and were “nice to him”. Upon discovering his identity, as contrary to their own, they scorn him by calling him a “‘nigger’”. Not only is he perceived as other in his relation with the white children but also “Hate” by “colored children”. For the colored children, the little boy is more of the black race than to fit into the class of colored people:

He is a little dark boy

With a round black face

And a white embroidered collar (Lines 11-13)

The colored children in the school perceive the boy as an outsider who is trying to be an insider. The colored children are victims of racial misrepresentation. They see themselves as second-class citizens; that is to say, they are below white people but higher than black people.

                The encounter of the little dark boy and the white children, by implication the colored children, puts self-identity in an irresolvable significant crisis. At the school, the Northern white and colored children are presented with a distorted image of “a round black face/And a white embroidered collar” (Lines 12-13) which eventually lead to “taunt” and “hate”. White and colored form a hierarchical opposition in which the two warring forces of signification mirror each other. On this theory, the identity of the white children cannot very well be separated from that of the colored children. Therefore, within the binary opposition what is obtainable is not only an oppositional relationship between the two signifying terms but also a strange multiplicity of identity. Arguably, Northern white children need the little Southern colored child “to play” with them for their identity to become “genuine”. On the other hand, the Northern colored children need the little Southern colored child to construct their identity who at “first” resemble them either as white or as colored but who is also indisputable different. If the little Southern colored boy did not “come” to the “Northern school”, we would not be able to recognize the Northern white and colored children for who they are. That is, the Northern children come to awareness of themselves through the presence and identity of the Southern boy. Paradoxically, the “little Sothern colored child” is treated as a negative, marginal, supplementary version of the Northern white children, which turns out to be the condition of possibility for the privilege terms; the marginal is therefore as important as the so-called privilege ones. Here, identity is derived out of difference. The two warring forces of signification are deeply implicated in each other. The speaker argues that the cultural and social interaction of the “Little frightened child” could offer a vivid depiction of the fate of colored children in the future.

The worse legacy and major aftermath of slavery has been the problem of racism and other colored related issues. Although, there is no specific and identifiable setting in the poem, by implication what is obtainable is a tense atmosphere of a fragmented society with “white” and “black” people being divided at the color line. It is obvious from the poem that racism controls the atmosphere of the society in which the relationship between white and black is structured as one of master-servant relationship. Thus, there is concubinage between white masters and black slaves that result in the birth of Mulatto children. It is against this backdrop that the speaker gives the origin of his life in relation to that of his “white old man” and his “black old mother”.

                The poem titled “Cross” symbolically depicts the plight of Mulatto children in a society structured around the hierarchical opposition between “white” and “black” as portrayed in the life of the speaker of the poem. In the first two lines of the first stanza of, the speaker offers the contradictions that shapes his identity as derived from his genealogy; from his “white old man” and his “black old mother”, and by implication he is a product of miscegenation in the form of a play within the context of his parents’ identity. In other words, the narrator might be classified as a “true mulatto” of pure white and pure black parents. Of equal importance to note is the distance and intimacy the speaker affirms in his relationship with his parents: “My old man’s a white old man/ And my old mother’s black” (Lines 1-2). Whereas the speaker refers to his father as “My old man”, he acknowledges his mother as “my old mother”. The speaker’s attitude towards his father shows his inability to identify with the white race. This suggests that his “white old man” the “dead” man (absent), and his “black old mother” the living feminine or life (present). In other words, the “white old man” is the master of the speaker’s mother, and the speaker itself. The speaker’s intimacy with his mother demonstrates his acceptance of the black race probably because, as Fredrick Douglas puts it in his autobiography, “the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers” (Cited in Gates 1987, p. 91).

                Despite his intimacy with the black race, on the contrary, the speaker cannot thin out one identity at the expense of the other. This is best illustrated from lines 3-8 where the speaker asserts his inability to escape the double-fold identity derives from his father and mother. For the speaker he can never pin down his identity at a particular spot. As for him, he is between the two forces of signification that have shaped his identity. The speaker’s tone in these lines suggests that these two contradictory identities have fallen to him not as an accident but as a chance to the extent that his identity takes after both of his “white old man” and his “black old woman”. One of the consequences of the speaker’s double identity is that it explains who he is and how he derives his identity: as double and neutral. The speaker cannot “curse” or lash criticism because he is stuck in between the two conflicting forces that shape identity. At this point, the speaker could be said to sit on the fence, and by implication this middle of the fence position makes him a riddle or a play that move forward and sideway between the two cultures, classes, races, and belong to neither of the two in concrete terms. It should be emphasized that the identity of the Poetic speaker can be perceived and fathomed through the ear attuned to the image of the “white old man” and the “black old mother”. He sees himself as a certain white masculine and a certain black feminine. On this note, the speaker achieves a resolution of the identity crises, adopting a syncretic approach where he pleads for the integration of the white and black to determine humanity and the production of society:

If ever I cursed my white old man

I take my curses back.

If ever I cursed my black old mother

And wished she were in hell,

I’m sorry for that evil wish

And now I wish her well.             (Lines 4-9)

The third quatrain projects the main thrust of the idea that the poetic persona is articulating in relation to the name or identity of his parents. In the first two lines of the quatrain, he offers a detailed and insightful account of what it takes to belong to the white race and the black race. The speaker depicts that there is a huge socio-economic gap between the white and the black in the society. To achieve this effect, the speaker contrasts the living condition of his father who represents the white supremacy, and his mother that symbolizes the black slaves.  His father lives all his life and died in a mansion; “a fine big house”, his mother lived and died in a ramshackle building; “a shack”. The metaphorical expression, “a fine big house”, punctuates the luxurious and comfort life that white people enjoy in the society. The “shack” offers an impression of how black slaves are housed like animals in unventilated rooms with little or no ray of light to illuminates them. There is a double meaning that the image of the “shack” seems to connote. First, it reveals the resentment experienced by blacks as being kept in stuffy, congested, and dark house of meaningless architectural design that is cabin and hut like. On the other hand, the “shack” image implies the flimsiness of the building (its ineffectiveness in protection), and also depicting the level of impoverishment that its inhabitant are undergoing. Thus, the discrepancy that the metaphors illustrate further suggests a society afflicted in term of racism with the black people perceived as “Other” in their daily interaction with the whites. In addition, the word “died” suggests the assumption of logocentricism which is assigned to the white and the black identity in the society. Thus, to be “died” is to stop living. The meaning of “died” could be transferred to the fixed identity and class structure between the speaker’s “white old man” and his “old black mother” and also implying their inability to challenge the racial stereotype that stands as a barrier between them. This is important to the poem because one of the major links between the white old man and the black old woman is that both are victims of “death” irrespective of the racial and class difference.

The last two lines of the third quatrain serve as a self-ironizing turn where the speaker’s own language seems to dismantle and undo the argument in lines 3-8. Whereas the speaker affirms and opts for a syncretistic option of the marriage of the two racial identities in the first and second quatrains, in the last two lines of the final quatrain the speaker cast a doubt on the plausibility of discovering himself from the riddle of the opposing races. The speaker’s rhetorical question articulates the uncertainty and obscurity that revolves around his failure to pin down his identity at a particular spot:

I wonder where I’m going to die,

Being neither white nor black?       (Lines 11-12)

On the other hand, the rash outpouring of rhetorical question coupled with the uncertainty in the tone (“wonder”) captures the fate and dilemma that Mulattoes encounter in life. The rhetorical question, therefore, encapsulates the burden and identity which the speaker must bear in the society. The poem could be argued to offer a chronological rendition of the various identities or various station of the “cross” which the speaker will or might undergo. Thus, the speaker’s predicament is akin to that of Jesus’ trial in that both are victims of fate; the fate is not an accidental but a chance. In the same way, Jesus bears the “cross” without complain so also must the speaker accepts the dual or double identity.

                The question of the fluidity of identity is further illuminated in the poem “Mulatto”. Being an issue that the black American has faced overtime, the poem makes a distinct representation of opposing identities – that of the white and that of the black. This is seen in how the poem takes the form of two speakers of different identity orientation. The black identity is revealed in the opening lines of the poem thus: “I am your son, white man!” (Line 1); in response to that statement by the black poetic personae, the white speaker retorts: “You are my son!/Like Hell!” and also “Git on back there in the night,/You ain’t white (Lines 4-5).” This opens up the black/white dichotomy that often permeates discourses in black American studies. Due to such binary the white speaker, in the poem refuses to acknowledge the black speaker as his son. This is consequent upon the fact that the black speaker’s mother is black and as such cannot and should not be regarded as white despite being a fusion of the two identities. The lines below, which are portrayed against the backdrop of an engagement with the elements of nature, reveal the white speaker’s disgust of the black speaker’s mother:

 

What’s the body of your mother?

Silver moonlight everywhere.

What’s the body of your mother?

Sharp pine scent in the evening air.    (Lines 19-22)

By placing the rhetorical inquiry about the black speaker’s mother with the time of night, the white speaker associates the color of the black speaker’s mother with the darkness that night brings. Therefore, black is thus associated with the darkness of the night and as such should not be associated with the “light” of the white. In the light of this, the white speaker regards the body of the mother of the black speaker as merely a “toy” which is an instrument of pleasure. This is reinforced in the lines below: 

What’s a body but a toy?
Juicy bodies
Of nigger wenches
Blue black
Against black fences.
O, you little bastard boy  (Lines 11-16)

There is also a subtle reference of the black speaker’s mother to being a prostitute and this accentuates the white speaker’s claim of the black speaker being a “bastard”. However, the question of identity becomes fluid when the white speaker in fact celebrates the “other” which appears to have been denigrated as a product of “black wenches”, a thing of darkness and a body of toy without a personality. First there is clear remark that the black boy and his mother are more attuned to the natural environment compared to the white. Nature, as an entity without the creative input of man is that which predates the existence of man and would outlive the life of all humans, becomes more important than the “whiteness” which the white speaker tries to painstakingly venerate. This is clear when the white speaker likens the intercourse between himself and the black speaker’s mother to that of the reproductive, regenerative and life-giving nature of the natural world:

The Southern night is full of stars,
Great big yellow stars.

O, sweet as earth,
Dusk dark bodies
Give sweet birth

To little yellow bastard boys.       (Lines 32-37)

The above lines reveal that the white speaker directly compares the black speaker to the elements of nature. Thus, the idea of denying the black speaker being called his son stems from the fact that he (the white father) cannot be as “yellow” as the black speaker. Indeed, the black boy is not white and also not his son because he (the black speaker) has assumed a different identity which the white father is in awe of. In any case, the fact that the black speaker is a product of a “sweet” act with “dark dusk bodies” makes the black speaker a better breed than the white man. The white speaker here, could be read, as only acknowledging the one dimensional nature of his “whiteness” in the face of the ungraspable, unlimited, multidimensional nature of the black. This is as a result of the association of terms “dark”, “night”, “dusk” with which the blacks in the poem are described. This shows that the white can hardly arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the black. In essence the remark of the white speaker: “You are my son! Like hell” is a vituperation of limitedness and not a rejection of paternal responsibility. This is in realization of the different identity that the black speaker comes to have. In essence, the idea of identity is only a matter of conception which comes with endless connotations. That the black speaker in the poem, who initially appears to be an object of scorn, denigration and mockery turns out to be a subject of awe, ungraspability and the culminating end of pleasure reveals that the question of identity is a matter of conception as a result of being portrayed in the mix of language. While the white speaker set out to push the black identity of the black speaker into oblivion, he appears to have accorded the black speaker a new identity which then takes primacy over the identity of the white speaker.

While the white speaker appears to have accorded the black speaker a new identity, the subject (the black speaker) to whom this identity is associated with appears to be unaware of it. This is evident in the final lines of the poem thus:

A nigger joy. I am your son, white man!
A little yellow
Bastard boy.            (Lines 43-46)

The above shows that the black speaker recognizes himself as a product of failure. While the black speaker affirms his comparison to the elements of nature (the yellow stars), he still calls himself the son of a white man, thus relegating himself below which the identify rung that he has been placed by his “white man”. The question of identity thus remains a fluid mix of “self” and “other”.

The above poems reveal a parallel recollection of the dichotomy of the self/other conception of identity; in contrast, a critical reading of the poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, opens up the possibility of a single aspect of the dichotomy – self, is also shrouded in instability owing to the play of language. Among others, the concept of subjectivity comes to the fore in an autobiographical as evident in the veneration of the “I” and “We” referents. In the poem, the “I” referent is replete as the poetic speaker assumes an epicenter, through whose eyes and thoughts, the existence of rivers would be comprehended. This is recollected in the line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” (Line 3 and 12). In the poem, which is made up of a total of eleven lines, “I” appears eight (8) times while reference to the “I”, in terms of the use of the words “my” and “me” appears four (4) times. In addition, the poetic speaker flushes himself with the rivers and this is reflected in the lines below:

… I’ve seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers               (Lines 9-12)

The above indicates that the speaker seems to portray that the rivers are “dusky” and also “muddy” all of which is symbolic of the skin complexion of the black poetic speaker. Therefore, the speaker flushes his being into that of the rivers and if nature is the totality of entities that predate and would outlive the human component of existence, the speaker suggests that his identity is that which is primal among other forms of identities as it is from his identity that other identities springs from since it is the “muddy bosom that turn all golden”. Thus, the speaker assumes a logocentric hubris of all identities. It could therefore be argued that once an identity is not emphasized by being “dusky” and “dark”, such a conception of identity is faulted.

However, while attempting to carve out a distinct identity, the poetic speaker of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” opens up only a fleeing, unstable and ungraspable identity. Suffice to quote some lines of the poem:

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers (Lines 2-4)

A critical reading of the above reveals that despite the speaker’s attempt to unify with the river, it is clear that the speaker’s conception of the river is temporal and limited. The speaker argues that the rivers are “ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in the human veins”. If this were to be the case, then the speaker cannot realize his identity based on that which had existed before existence had begun. In addition, the speaker further affirms the limitedness of his identity with the words “My soul has grown deep like the rivers”. This shows that the body of the speaker can hardly be sustained as an identity marker which explains the speaker’s concession that his “soul has grown deep”. Therefore, there is a shift of the materiality of identity from the body to the soul. If this is the case, then the speaker lacks a conceivable identity in the physical world thereby leading to a collapse of the self and logocentricism that the speaker of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” set out to venerate. 

Conclusion

On the whole, the preceding analysis demonstrates that the reader must take into account the speakers’ double origin at every point one claims to identify any utterance signed by them. The self-identical consciousness that the speaker yearn for is not determined, limited by any claim to gender, status, skin color, scientific, cultural truths. It demonstrates that identity cannot be derived outside the play of differance and supplementarity. Therefore, the identity of the narrator is not fixed but rather implicated in the unending dialogue, discourse, and play between the two “warring forces” of signification. The narrator comes to the consciousness of who he is through the discourse that drives from multiple and contradictory genealogical origin and voices, and the multiple identities that emerge from those origin and voices as constructed in the language of the poem. What gives identity to the narrator is neither his signature nor the fixed and predetermined form and structure, nor the historical and cultural experience that gives shape to the poem, but the free play of language within the context of the two contradictory process of signification. The alliance that the speaker suggests in turning his identity into a play links the logic of the “white old man”, “a fine big house”, to that of the “black old woman”, “a shack”. It is in playing that the speaker discovers the self and, paradoxically, put off the very identity of the self.

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