Karenge ya Marenge by Countee Cullen—National Poetry Month 2023

Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. 

Countee Cullen, leading light of the Harlem Renaissance was orphaned at 16 and was adopted into the home of Harlem’s most important clergyman, the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church.  He took the name of his foster father and enjoyed being at the epicenter of Harlem life.  He was sent to prestigious White schools where he excelled as a scholar and was quickly recognized as a poet.  In 1923 he graduated from New York University and was accepted to graduate school at Harvard.  He had already published several poems in important magazines and was lauded by white critics as a voice for his race.  That year he published The Ballad of a Black Girl, the first important collection of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance.  It was widely hailed in his own community as well as praised by the literary establishment.  Cullen secured his place in Harlem when he married, to public jubilation, W.E.B. Du Bois’s daughter, uniting the two most influential families in the community. 

Cullen believed that no authentic Black poetic voice had ever been able to establish itself.  He consciously modeled his work on the English Romantics of a hundred years earlier, especially John Keats.  He rejected modernism and literary trends like imagism and free verse.  When his subsequent collections drifted away from the depiction of Black life, he fell out of favor with Black readers and ended his long career co-writing plays, including the musical St. Louis Woman which made Pearl Bailey a star when it finally premiered on Broadway in 1947, months after Cullen’s death.

Karenge ya Marenge reflected the radicalism and global views of his father-in-law.

Karenge ya Marenge

Wherein are words sublime or noble?

What Invests one speech with haloed

eminence, Makes it the sesame for all doors

shut, Yet in its like sees but impertinence?

Is it the hue? Is it the cast of eye, The curve of lip or Asiatic breath, Which mark a lesser place for Gandhi’s cry Than “Give me liberty or give me

death!”

Is Indian speech so quaint, so weak, so rude,

So like its land enslaved, denied, and crude, That men who claim they fight for liberty Can hear this battle-shout impassively, Yet to their arms with high resolve have sprung At those same words cried in the English tongue?

 

—Countee  Cullen

Countee Cullen, Karenge ya Marenge from My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen.