Final blog

I feel that studying the Harlem Renaissance in the 21^st century is extremely relevant and important. Even though most of the themes of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with race, many of the issues are relevant to people in the 21^st century. Almost all of the poems, essays, and especially the novels that we read in this class are relatable in some way to us today. The Harlem Renaissance focused on themes including passing, exploring African roots, and trying to find identities.

Passing was a common theme in much of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Even though this was a concept that dealt with African Americans who were so light skinned that they could pass as white, it is also a concept that dealt with the repercussions of changing one’s identity. I think that we have all tried to pass as something that we are not at some point in our lives. Just as in Larsen’s novel, Passing we have had to deal with the consequences of our decisions and we have had to make difficult choices from this, much like the characters in Passing.

Another theme in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was the need to explore one’s own identity. Much of this literature focused on African American characters who sought to find their identities amongst the discrimination that they faced. Ultimately, the characters were able to appreciate and understand their own identities. Probably the best example that we had in the literature that we read in class was the character of Janie in Larsen’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie needed to explore the relationships in her life and find her strength in order to find her own “voice”. This is a theme in which most people today can relate. It is important for people to find their own confidence in who they are and what they stand for. We can all learn from the ways in which African Americans were able to find themselves despite the great odds that they faced.

Much of the writing of the Harlem Renaissance focused on trying to preserve the African heritage of African Americans. Claude McKay and Jean Toomer were very interested in exploring the roots of African Americans in order to better understand the position that African Americans were in at that time. Most people today can relate to the idea of valuing and preserving their own roots. It is very easy for people today to become wrapped up in the busyness of their own lives. We can learn from this theme from the Harlem Renaissance by understanding the need for and the importance of understanding where you come from. It seems to be too easy to forget sometimes.

I think that we can all admire and learn from the determination of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Many of these writers had to overcome hardships including racial and gender discrimination as well as financial barriers. I think that it shows a lot of courage by the way that Black writers broke out of the stereotypes imposed upon them by white society and the demands that were placed upon them to write for white audiences. Despite these odds, African American writers were able to produce high quality literature. Today, we are able to look back at this period in our history and appreciate African Americans’ willingness to take risks to represent their race accurately and creatively. They worked hard to gain the opportunities to express themselves freely. I think that everyone can recognize and learn from the ways in which African Americans bettered their lives and ultimately the lives of all African Americans today.

End of Their Eyes Were Watching God

The ending to this novel was very dramatic and fast-paced. Hurston crammed a lot of action into a few chapters. I was very shocked by the ending. I never expected this novel to go from Janie exploring her own identify and the relationships to having the characters battling a natural disaster. I thought it was very interesting how Tea Cake and Janie chose to stay in town with the hurricane approaching. Most of the town as well as the local Native Americans were leaving and warning them to get out of town. Some of their friends even offered them a ride to leave. Tea Cake wanted to stay and make more money by working in the bean fields. I don’t understand why staying was so important to him when Janie had enough money to support them during the hurricane. It was strange because all he seemed to be gaining was a few extra days of work. He didn’t want to believe that they were in any real danger until they were knee deep in water.

I think that this hurricane really showed the extent that Tea Cake and Janie would go to be with each other and to keep each other safe. I think that Tea Cake especially took care of Janie during the hurricane. He carried her when she became exhausted from running and he fought with a mad dog to save her from being bitten or drowning. I really think that Janie owes her life to Tea Cake. He essentially gave up his own life to save her. This is why it was so ironic that Janie was the one that had to kill Tea Cake for her own safety. It was just so unfortunate the way that things ended.

When Tea Cake became sick and needed medicine, I thought for sure that they were going to get it in time. Janie had barely touched her money that she got when Joe died and sold the store. I thought that Janie was going to be able to use that money to buy the medicine to save Tea Cake.

When the doctor told Janie that she should put Tea Cake in a hospital so that he doesn’t get violent, I got the feeling that Tea Cake would eventually try to hurt her from his illness. This seemed like major foreshadowing about what was to come. I think that it was Janie’s strength and confidence in herself that allowed her to stay rational and calm throughout Tea Cake’s illness. Janie was able to figure out that Tea Cake had a pistol and she took the initiative to make sure that it would shoot blanks for the first two shots. This didn’t mean that Janie loved Tea Cake any less because she took measures to protect herself. I saw this as one of the most courageous and self assured acts that Janie did throughout the novel.

Hurston Blog 2

After reading Hurston’s article, I can really see many of the elements of African American expression in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Tea Cake seems to exemplify Hurston’s idea of the dramatic, fast-talking African American. Tea Cake is always coming up with some kind of antic to gain attention. He pretends to play the guitar or he dances around energetically to make Janie laugh. There was also one part in the novel that seemed to really represent these characteristics of African American expression. Beginning on page 67, Daisy walks into town when some of the men were hanging around. Two of the men started to have a competition over Daisy’s attention, making dramatic comments about how they would buy her a passenger train or a steamship just to be able to marry her. The men put on quite a spectacle in the middle of town trying to see who could talk the biggest game in the most dramatic fashion in hopes to win over Daisy. Since this occurred in the middle of town it also went along with Hurston’s idea that there is no privacy with African Americans. The men were certainly not shy about proclaiming how much they liked Daisy to the rest of the town.

Throughout the novel, I really started to dislike Joe. He was always so mean to Janie and he expected her to just take it. As a woman, I was just waiting for the day when Janie was going to give it right back to him. Janie has too much fight in her to just let Joe tell her what to do all the time. Janie wasn’t meant for a life of being a trophy wife. I actually wasn’t surprised when Joe became ill and finally died. He treated Janie so horribly that she was bound to stand up to him eventually. Unfortunately, Janie did it so harshly that it cut Joe deeper than she had wanted it to. I always thought that Janie was meant to find another guy besides Joe anyways.

I was really glad when Janie found Tea Cake. From the very beginning he seemed like a genuine guy. I was really nervous when Tea Cake left Janie by herself after they got married. I didn’t know whether to believe that Tea Cake was coming back or to believe that he was lying to Janie the whole time. I still wasn’t happy even when Tea Cake came back to Janie. He had been out gambling and having fun without her. That doesn’t seem like a thing that a husband should be doing. I think that Tea Cake’s gambling addiction could become a real problem. I can’t believe that Janie was so willing to allow Tea Cake to just take her money and spend it. Janie didn’t seem the least bit upset when Tea Cake came home after being gone all night and day with all of her money spent.

Hurston Blog

As I begin reading Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, I am finding it difficult to follow the story at times because the African American dialect used throughout the novel is confusing and hard to understand. However, there is a very real and authentic quality about Hurston’s writing. The African American dialect makes me feel as if I am in the south and I can really hear these characters talking. In the first few pages of the novel when the townswomen were all talking about Janie as she walked into town, I felt as though I could actually see and hear the women gossiping and chatting amongst themselves. Hurston’s writing has a unique quality in the way that it can bring out imagery for the reader.

As the novel continued, I saw a real connection between this novel and Johnson’s, The Biography of an Ex-Coloured Man. When Janie discovered that she was African American after she saw a picture of herself and her white friends it was reminiscent of how the narrator realized that he was African American after he was told in school in front of his peers. For each of these characters, it seemed to be a significant moment when they discovered their identity as an African American.

So far in this novel, Janie’s life has been a whirlwind. She goes from being a poor girl living with her grandmother to being a mayor’s wife. It all seemed to have happened very quickly, even too quickly for Janie herself to understand. I wasn’t surprised when Janie left her first husband because she didn’t love him but what I am surprised about is that she hasn’t found love with her second husband, Joe. It seems to me that Janie did not think through her relationship with Joe. She just took off with him without knowing anything about him. I thought that she would find love and happiness with Joe but instead Janie is expressing feelings of being “far away from things and lonely” (46). I don’t think that being a mayor’s wife is quite what Janie expected when she ran off with him. Now Janie has suddenly found herself in the upper class of African American society. This is a stark contrast from her life before and I don’t think that she is comfortable with this new role. Janie is used to the lifestyle that her grandmother raised her in as a servant. This new lifestyle will certainly be an adjustment for her. I’m very interested in seeing how Janie reacts to this new situation.

Hughes Poems

It was very interesting in class when we analyzed some of Hughes’ poetry after listening to jazz and blues music. This activity showed the importance of jazz during this time and the influence of jazz on writing and the lives of African Americans. In my opinion, Hughes possessed great talent to be able to incorporate the music of the time into his poetry. As we read and discussed two of Hughes’ poems, Jazzonia and The Weary Blues which were obviously influenced by music, it was amazing to see how Hughes incorporated this into his writing.

It is very obvious from Langston Hughes’ essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, that he was a proponent of writing about racial representation. Hughes harshly criticized Countee Cullen for wanting to be seen as simply a poet and not as an African American poet, as well as for writing about universal themes. When reading The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, I consciously looked for themes of racial representation in his work. Almost all of Hughes’ poems dealt with the African American heritage, as well as relevant issues in African Americans’ lives. The poems, Danse Africaine and Dream Variations directly reference Africa and the significance of African roots. The poem, The South, characterizes African American life in the south. Hughes also offers poems of racial uplift for example, America and I, Too. These poems looked to offer African Americans a sense of hope and inspiration to persevere through the adversity they faced in the United States during this time.

Hughes’ writing is much different from Countee Cullen’s poetry. Besides the obvious differences between their writing of Cullen’s universal themes and Hughes’ racial representation, Cullen’s poems were often wordy and difficult to interpret whereas Hughes’ poetry is mostly straightforward and much more literal. At times I have difficulty moving beyond the literal meaning of Hughes’ poems to finding a more interpretive meaning. However, I have found Hughes’ writing to be very genuine, easily relatable, and representative of the race. I can see why Langston Hughes was one of the most influential writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Cullen Poems

The one poem of Cullen’s that really stuck out to me was “Incident”. This poem is a straight-forward, realistic account of many incidences that occurred in the lives of African Americans during this time. For the eight year old in this poem, it may have been the first time that he was called that racist term. I would assume that for every African American who has been referred to by this name that it was a traumatic, memorable experience. This poem was a simplistic piece of writing but it captured the essence of racism through one moment. I thought that this poem was one of Cullen’s most captivating pieces of writing. He wrote one line about the racism that this young child experienced that was especially memorable stating, “Of all the things that happened there that’s all that I remember” (9).

Another very interesting poem of Cullen’s is “The Litany of the Dark People”. This poem coincided with many of the themes in Cullen’s writing that we have been discussing in class. “The Litany of the Dark People” used religion to represent the struggles of African Americans. This poem appealed to me because I thought that stylistically and structurally this poem worked very well. I liked that it was set up sequentially because each stanza represented a different phase in the African Americans’ lives. The poem began by referencing slavery and how it is an experience of the past. Cullen used a very descriptive line to reference slavery in the first stanza that I thought was particularly relevant stating, “our flesh that was a battle-ground shows now the morning-break” (53). Cullen continues the poem by portraying the African Americans as strong and unyielding. In this stanza they are determined not to allow all of the hardships that they have faced to keep them from their goals. One line that was particularly powerful in which Cullen states, “Yet no assault the old gods make upon our agony shall swerve our footstep from the wake of Thine toward Calvary” (53). Then in the third stanza of this poem, Cullen sees hope for the African Americans’ future or at least for their final destinations. I saw Cullen’s message for this poem as one of inspiration to African Americans to hold on for brighter days.

Negro Youth Speaks

Alain Locke’s essay, Negro Youth Speaks is very representative of the Harlem Renaissance. It discusses the younger generation who Locke refers to as the “voice of the New Negro” (47). It is through this younger generation that African Americans have broken into true artistic levels, competing with their white counterparts. At this time, art became a very important segment of society for African Americans to showcase their talents and accomplishments. Locke feels that this new generation has “stopped speaking for the Negro” and now “they speak as Negroes” (48). It is this New Negro that has changed society and the way that African American art is evaluated. I liked that Locke pointed out that the African American artists of the Harlem Renaissance had a new way of thinking and a new outlook about their lives. Locke stated that African American artists had a “new aesthetic and a new philosophy” (49). I think that this new attitude gave rise to the Harlem Renaissance and characterized this time period in African American history.

This New Negro no longer has the obligation to represent the race. Instead they are free to express themselves as individuals through their art. There are fewer restrictions on the African American because they are not as held back by the prejudice and oppression of the earlier generations. Locke’s essay has a very positive tone. I think when this essay was published it provided African Americans with hope and motivation to break free from the restrictions of the past and strive to accomplish great things. Locke was sending a message that this new generation is finally going to be able to make the contributions that they have always been capable of doing.