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.
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