I’m working on a thing partly about the third poem in this document - http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/Hughes/alabama.htm. It’s weird to be working on a piece of literature. Lots of revision needed, I’ll make those changes right in this post. Feedback welcome.
Denning identifies Hughes as a widely read author in the cultural wing of the Popular Front (218). Hughes served for a time as vice-president of the League of American Writers, an important Popular Front organization. (Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 23; “Notes on writergate - harassment against League of American Writers” Monthly Review, May, 1995 by Franklin Folsom. Denning refers to the League of American Writers as a Popular Front organization, 223-224; define popular front. See also _Days of Anger, Days of Hope: A Memoir of the League of American Writers_ by Frank Folsom) Hughes’ role in the Popular Front is a topic for another time. I hope it suffices to say that Hughes’ had an agenda in society tied to the Popular Front but also had an agenda within the Popular Front.
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[SPAIN!]
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Read the chapter on the Black Lincolns in Kelley’s Race Rebels
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“Dear Brother at Home,” appeared in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion’s publication, The Volunteer For Liberty in 1938. It was later reprinted in the Communist Party USA’s newspaper The Daily Worker, also in 1938. Hughes’ audience were African Americans and white Americans, fighting in Spain and back in the United States, tied to the Communist Party and beyond the Communist Party. Like several other of Hughes’ poems from the Spanish Civil War, “Dear Brother at Home” takes the form of a letter from an African American antifascist. By this choice, Hughes accomplishes several things at once, in relation to the diverse readership addressed in the poem. Hughes links racism, colonialism, fascism, and the role of African Americans in the struggle against these forces both in Spain and around the world.
The poem’s title and opening line address the reader “Dear Brother.” The term “brother” has several meanings. On the one hand, the term had long been used as a form of address in the American labor movement. (For instance, it’s all over the Minutes of IWW Founding Convention in 1905.) The term may have been a form of address among some African Americans at the time. The term may have also been a small divergence from the customary Communist term “comrade.” Finally, the term references a long history of fraternal understandings of war and soldiering and appeals to the shared masculinity of writer, speaker, and readers.
The poem’s speaker signs his letter “Johnny.” The name might signify closeness and informality, appropriate to the title and the opening line, “Dear Brother at home.” The name may also be a subtle attempt at emphasizing a sense of proximity, on two levels. On the one hand, the name indicates commonality across racial lines between African Americans and white Americans volunteering in Spain. On the other hand, the name suggests commonality between the volunteers in Spain and ordinary American men - Johnny is a sort of everyman name. (According to the United States Social Security Administration’s records, the name John was the most popular male baby name in the United States from 1900 to 1923, the second most popular from 1924 to 1928, and the third most popular from 1929 through 1938. http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/)
The poem’s first stanza sets up the movement between Johnny and the captured Moroccan soldier which characterizes the entire work, from distance and proximity and back again. As the last line of the stanza sates, the Moroccan soldier fights “against the free,” which also identifies the International Brigades as fighting for freedom. Johnny refers to the soldier as a Moor, indicating the boy’s foreignness. The stanza simultaneously expresses a tentative solidarity or recognition between the two people. The soldier is vulnerable, a wounded boy, and is “just as dark as” Johnny.
When Johnny asks the soldier why he is fighting in Spain, Johnny against can’t understand the answer, again indicating distance. The translated answer, however, again moves the soldier closer to Johnny. The soldier was “nabbed” from his home, a condition which may recall the theft of Africans from their homes in the slave trade as well as the disappearances of African Americans in the Jim Crow south.
The soldier continues, saying that he was forced to fight in the fascist army. He expresses both pessimism about the future and nostalgia for home. The soldier concludes with some degree of recognition of the wrongness of the fascist cause and expresses ignorance about “the folks he had to fight.”
Treating the Moroccan soldier in this way allows Hughes to shift the blame from Moroccans to Franco and the fascists. This shift would have been important for Hughes, as someone who maintained a commitment to anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism. Some images in circulation against the Moroccans in the fascist cause were reminiscent of racist images against African Americans. (See Franco’s Black Spain http://www.lqart.org/francosbspn/blackspn.html and this anti-fascist poster’s depiction of Moroccans http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/visfront/nacionales.html) Even if Hughes did not see these images, it would have been obvious that Moroccans fighting under Franco did not aid the struggle for freedom in Africa.
[Going to bed now. Back to this later.]
Next iteration.
“Dear Brother at Home”
Lincoln Batallion,
International Brigades,
Somewhere in Spain, 1937
Dear Brother at home:
We captured a wounded Moor today.
He was just as dark as me.
I said, Boy, what you doin’ here,
Fightin’ against the free?
He answered in a language I couldn’t understand.
But somebody told me he was sayin’
They grabbed him in his land
And made him join the Fascist army
And come across to Spain.
And he said he had a feelin’
He’d never get back home again.
He said he had a feelin’
This whole thing wasn’t right.
He said he didn’t know
These folks he had to fight.
And as he lay there dyin’
In a village we had taken,
I looked across to Africa
And I seen foundations shakin’ -
For if a free Spain wins this war,
The colonies, too, are free -
Then something wonderful can happen
To them Moors as dark as me.
I said, Fellow, listen,
I guess that’s why old England
And I reckon Italy, too,
Is afraid to let Republic Spain
Be good to me and you -
Because they got slaves in Africa
And they don’t want ‘em free.
Listen Moorish prisoner -
Here, shake hands with me!
I knelt down beside him
And I took his hand,
But the wounded Moor was dyin’
So he didn’t understand.
(Hughes, I Wonder As I Wander, 353-354.)
In 1936 General Francisco Franco led a military uprising against the Spanish government, ostensibly in reaction against progressive social reforms. A coalition of right wing elements in Spain supported Franco, as did the fascist governments in Italy and Germany. The Soviet Union aided the Spanish Republic. Other governments around the world declared their neutrality in the Spanish conflict. In 1939 Franco’s forces triumphed, shortly before the beginning of the Second World War. (Thurston 196-197; Kelley 21-24.)
In the spring of 1937 Langston Hughes traveled to Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War for several African American newspapers. Faith Berry describes the 1930s as the decade in which he produced “his most outspoken poetry and prose,” but argues that Hughes expressed similar political values in his work at least as early as 1925. Hughes’ travel and his political views were linked. In his 1956 autobiography I Wonder As I Wander, he wrote that it was during his 1930 summer trip to Haiti that he “first realized how class lines may cut across color lines within a race, and how dark peoples of the same nationality may scorn those below them.” He wrote scathingly that “the upper-class Haitians (…) seemed a delightful and cultured group. No doubt, many of the French slave owners were delightful and cultured, too – but the slaves could not enjoy their culture.” (I Wonder As I Wander, 28.)
Hughes described his decision to go to Spain in deceptive terms. In a chapter titled “Writing For a Living” Hughes portrays his trip to Spain as a matter of self-interest. The newspapers’ offered “four to six months abroad at what seemed a good rate of pay” at a time when he was not making much money from his writing. Hughes also expressed a long time dream of going to Spain. (315.)
Throughout I Wonder As I Wander Hughes wrote about wanting to make a living as a writer, thus downplaying the political decisions and values present throughout so much of his work. (See for example p3 and 56.) Financial interest does not really explain Hughes’ decisions throughout the 1930s, however, including his trips to the Soviet Unions and Spain. These decisions cost Hughes a number of lucrative publishing and patronage opportunities and ultimately placed him before a Congressional Committee during the Red Scare. (Berry, 143-145.) Perhaps Hughes deliberately minimized his political commitments and portrayed his actions in economic terms as a way to avoid further scrutiny for his political views.
Hughes may have also been motivated by humility. He referred to himself repeatedly as a tourist in Spain. He voiced criticisms of people who came to Spain saying they wanted to help but who merely got in the way. Hughes described these people as treating as a sort of radical vacation spot when they could do more to fight fascism by doing work in their home countries. 357-358. By describing his motives in less than ennobling terms Hughes avoided inflating his own importance. In any case, despite his self-representation Hughes’ motivations for going to Spain were not primarily economic or narrowly self-interested.
His decision to go to Spain is not particularly surprising, as Hughes had long been both a writer on the left and a world traveler. (Berry xii; I Wonder As I Wander. While not surprising, Hughes’ decision was still quite a risk. He had a will drawn up and made other legal and financial arrangements to make sure his mother would be cared for should he die during the trip. I Wonder As I Wander, 315. While in Spain Hughes suffered a gunshot wound which while relatively minor, highlights the risky nature of his trip. 361.) Spain was a celebrated cause among communists and others on the left around the world. Leftists sought to aid Spain in a variety of ways including raising funds, trying to call public attention to the Spanish situation, visiting Spain, and in some cases volunteering to fight in Spain as part of the Communist Party funded International Brigades. (On cultural producers and Spain in particular, see for example Voices Against Tyranny. On African Americans and Spain, see for example African Americans and the Spanish Civil War. To the best of my knowledge little scholarly work has been done specifically on African American intellectuals and artists in relation to the Spanish Civil War. The work that has been done largely focuses on individual figures rather than an era or milieu.)
Hughes’ poem “Dear Brother at Home” appeared in 1938 in The Volunteer For Liberty, the publication of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the American unit of the International Brigades. (The poem was also reproduced in the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker in 1938 along with two other poems and illustrations which linked the Spanish cause and the African American freedom struggle. The page from The Daily Worker is reproduced online at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/Hughes/alabama.htm. There are very minor differences between The Daily Worker version and the version in I Wonder.) Like several other of Hughes’ poems from the Spanish Civil War, this one took the form of a letter from an African American antifascist. The poem’s title and opening line addressed the reader as “Dear Brother.”
The term “brother” has several meanings. On the one hand, the term had long been used as a form of address in the American labor movement. (For instance, the term appears as a form of address throughout the minutes of the Founding Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905.) The term may have been a form of address among some African Americans at the time. The term also indicates a small divergence from the customary Communist term “comrade.” Finally, the term references a long history of fraternal understandings of war and soldiering and appeals to the shared masculinity of writer, speaker, and readers.
All of these meanings were at play in regard to Hughes’ mixed audience, which included African Americans and white Americans, people fighting in Spain and back in the United States, and people inside and outside the Communist Party. (While Hughes was not himself a member of the Communist Party, his work appeared regularly in CP affiliated publications and the CP helped him enter Spain. Thurston, 200.)
Hughes named the protagonist of his poems Johnny. The name – Johnny, not Johnathan or John – might have signified closeness and informality, appropriate to the greeting in the title and the opening line, “Dear Brother at home.” The name may also have been a subtle attempt at emphasizing a sense of proximity, on two levels. On the one hand, the name indicated commonality across racial lines between African Americans and white Americans volunteering in Spain. On the other hand, the name suggests commonality between the volunteers in Spain and ordinary American men. Johnny was a sort of American everyman name. (According to the United States Social Security Administration’s records, the name John was the most popular male baby name in the United States from 1900 to 1923, the second most popular from 1924 to 1928, and the third from 1929 through 1938. See http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/)
A movement between Johnny and the captured Moroccan soldier characterized the entire work, from distance to proximity and back again. The Moroccan soldier fought “against the free,” which also identified the International Brigades as fighting for freedom against Franco’s illegal uprising. Johnny referred to the soldier as a Moor, indicating the boy’s foreignness. The stanza simultaneously expressed a tentative solidarity or recognition between the two people. The soldier was vulnerable, a wounded boy, and was “just as dark as” Johnny. (Hughes wrote movingly of his encounter with a Moroccan child conscript in a Spanish hospital. Berry, 104. I Wander, 350.)
When Johnny asked the soldier why he fought in Spain, Johnny couldn’t understand the answer, again indicating distance. The translated answer, however, closed some of the distanced between the Moroccan and Johnny. The soldier was “grabbed” from his home, recalling the theft of Africans from their homes in the slave trade as well as the disappearances of African Americans in the Jim Crow south.
The Moroccan continues, saying that he was forced to fight in the fascist army. He expressed pessimism about the future, nostalgia for home, and ignorance about “the folks he had to fight” in Spain. The soldier concluded with recognition of the wrongness of the fascist cause. After the Moroccan soldier stopped speaking, Johnny “looked across to Africa” and realized that victory against Franco and the fascists would mean not only “a free Spain” but freedom for the colonies as well. A victory for Spain would allow “something wonderful” for the “Moors as dark as me.”
Hughes’ here forged a link between the anti-fascist struggle and the need for an end to colonialism. The point was less that Spain was a battle for Africa, but more a matter of shifting blame from Moroccans to Franco and the fascists. This shift would have been important for Hughes, as someone who maintained a commitment to anti-fascism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism. Some images in circulation against the Moroccans in the fascist cause were reminiscent of racist images against African Americans. (See Franco’s Black Spain http://www.lqart.org/francosbspn/blackspn.html and this anti-fascist poster’s depiction of Moroccans http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/visfront/nacionales.html. See Kelley 32-33 for a discussion of Spanish attitudes toward Moroccans.) Even if Hughes did not see these images, it would have been obvious that Moroccans fighting under Franco did not aid the struggle for freedom in Africa.
Hughes’ poem then took another step in linking anti-fascism with anti-colonialism, and anti-colonialism with African Americans’ struggles. Johnny speculated on why Italy supported Franco and England (and by extension, other countries) failed to aid Spain. All of these countries wanted to hold onto their African colonies. All of these countries had “slaves in Africa” that they did not want freed. Johnny, the African American International Brigade volunteer as American everyman, identified colonialism with fascism as well as the failure of ostensibly free democratic but still imperialist states. He also identified colonialism with slavery, thus linking African Americans’ history of exploitation and oppression with global anti-colonial struggle. Johnny and the Moroccan now stood closer together, metaphorically speaking, than ever before. They shared a common skin color, common experience as soldier, and a common history on the receiving end of racism and colonialism.
Having tied all these struggles together and created so much common ground with the captured soldier, Johnny sought to express this solidarity in the form of a handshake. At this climactic moment, Hughes interrupted the closeness between the two men. The Moroccan soldier was dying of his injuries and didn’t understand Johnny’s point. Hughes’ somber ending to the poem underscores that while the political analysis was correct – fascism, colonialism, and racism intersected and reinforced each other – there would be no simple solution in the form of African Americans winning over Moroccan troops with speeches and handshakes. The Moroccan soldier, conscripted and colonized, still fought against freedom and did not understand Johnny’s cause. The International Brigades and the Republican forces would need to fight the Moroccans for as long as the “Moors” continued to serve under Franco.
The poem accomplished another effect via its language or idiom. Johnny did not speak like an educated middle class person. Johnny used grammatically incorrect expressions. Johnny “reckon[ed].” He asked “what you doin’,” said that he “seen foundations shakin’,” and felt affinity with “them Moors.”
In I Wonder As I Wander Hughes described the reactions of some International Brigade volunteers after he read them some of his Letters From Spain. The volunteers worried that Hughes might perpetuate stereotypes against African Americans due to Johnny’s grammar. They protested that the African American volunteers didn’t generally speak like Johnny.
Hughes answered that he knew this, but that he aimed to indicated that African Americans “and plenty of whites, as well” who “did not speak as if they were college men” still made a contribution to the Spanish cause. In the poem as in his journalism and his autobiographical work, Hughes took pains to stress the role of African Americans and Africans descended people from around the world in defending Spain. “[E]ven the least privileged of Americans, the Southern Negroes, were represented in the International Brigades” fighting for Spanish freedom.
For Hughes “Negroes from states like Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi [who] had attended very poor schools at best” faced a condition similar to the lack of opportunity faced by Moroccans. Not only did many African Americans make a contribution to Spain, but people like Johnny who were not college educated intellectuals – which many African Americans, Moroccans, and colonial people were not – were capable of understanding the Spanish and global situation. Despite the poem’s somber ending, then, it still expressed a quiet optimism, a hope that African descended people’s would understand and act to change their situations at home and around the world.
Comment by Nate — October 20, 2008 @ 9:40 am
that’s great -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:JohnnyMarchingHomeBroadside1863.png
a picture of Zoave volunteers, in “moorish” dress (the original zoave were berbers from algeria), in the US civil war, from the broadside of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”. The tune comes from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_I_Hardly_Knew_Ye
Johnny, the canon fodder soldier, conscript, Irish fighting for the British East India Company. Perhaps by naming his speaker Johnny, Hughes was also indicating the liberation of the archetypal colonised conscript, the soldier transformed from imperial pawn to self determined revolutionary, that would/could result in a chain of liberations…
Comment by chabert — October 21, 2008 @ 11:32 am
Another Hughes fact - he was president of the Communist founded League of Struggle for Negro Rights. “League of Struggle for Negro Rights” by Gary Entz, p305 in Organizing Black America By Nina Mjagkij (ed).
Comment by Nate — November 15, 2008 @ 2:10 pm