Afro-American Lit (Cont.)

But literature is a universal phenomenon. To be literature, any piece of work must fit certain well-defined canons by which it is recognizable. The literary arts present particular difficulties because their subject matter is about man, and no matter how radical one becomes one must always return back to universality and to man. Thus I must stick with man and his universality. At once, therefore, I recognize Afro-American literature to be universal in that it abides by the universal laws of literature and finds itself structured within the same general context of universal literature in that there is a classical period, a romantic period, etc. Yet it is particular since it arises out of a context that is both African and American; slavery and multinational corporation; a context that is transformed in historical time.

Afro-American literature has developed as most any other literature within the Western world. In it one can see a classical period in which the works of Phillis Wheatley were most conspicuous. In Williams Wells Brown's Clotel we see the emanation of a Romantic tradition, and in his case he used arguments made by Voltaire and Rousseau to buttress his condemnation of slavery. In Charles Chestnutt's work we see a literature of Realism, and in the work of Richard Wright we see aspects of Naturalism and, later on, attempts at existentialist ideas. In Toni Morrison we find a complex attempt at socio-psychological realism, which attempts to examine in somewhat clinical terms the nature of psychic dispossession, of which Frantz Fanon spoke so eloquently.

There are also certain peculiarities of form which can be ascribed to the specificity of Afro-American culture and which seem to bring out further the richness of Afro-American literature and thereby its enrichment of American literature. I refer to the brilliant essay writing of James Baldwin which seems to have emanated out of the ser-monesque-rapping of the Afro-American religious experience; the peculiar from of the dialect which Dunbar introduced into his works; and the particular integration of the folkloric tradition which Chestnutt used so well in his "Conjure" tales. One finds a very special use of the African elegy in the works of Phyllis Wheatley; especial richness of Arabic poetry in the poems of Claude McKay; use of Jazz rhythms in the work of Langston Hughes: and the particular coolness of Afro-American life-style in the work of Don L. Lee.

The poems of Phyllis Wheatley and the prose of Gustava Vassa first spoke of this affirmation. In their works we observe the contradictory interpretation of the social and political reality of Afro-Americans. On the one hand were the horrors of slavery and the middle passage, while on the other hand were the possibilities of redemption and affirmation of the humanistic ideal of man which the Christian religion promised, and which ob-jectively spoke of the noblest ideals of man. It was, I suspect, the attempt to bring forth a synthesis of these two antagonistic poles that became the modus operandiof the literature.

Clotel was the first Afro-American novel in which what we may call the "American contradiction" was first expressed through a literary character. More importantly, in this novel we saw the grandiloquent gesture vs. the monumental emptiness of America's action. Yet one had to wait until the end of the century to see this question posed in fuller novelistic terms. For it was in his work The Marrow of Tradition that Charles Chestnutt suggested that ingrained racism--that man-hating ideology which lay at the very vital of the national character--was poisoning the nature of national life. He proposed filial recon-ciliation as the essential ingredient for the healing of the American spirit.

Selwyn R. Cudjoe is assistant professor of Afro-American Studies.

The opinion page is a regular feature of The Crimson, presenting the views of members of the Harvard community and others. Opinions presented here do not necessarily represent those of the Crimson staff.