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A Harlem Renaissance classic: seven inspirational poems inspired by the powerful rhetorical traditions of African-American sermons and spirituals.
O black slave singers, gone, forgot, unfamed,
You-you alone, of all the long, long line
Of those who've sung untaught, unknown, unnamed,
Have stretched out upward, seeking the divine.
"O Black and Unknown Bards" (1922)
Ethical questions are likely to haunt any poet today who uses a mask to represent a culture. By mask, I mean a voice that, in the pretense of the poem, belongs to someone or something other than the poet. The mask itself is not the problem. Persona poetry is an entire genre founded on masking. However, when a poem implies its mask captures characteristics that are typical of a broad demographic, that poem is almost certainly going to be read as insensitive. Or worse. A hundred years ago, many believed that, no matter how arbitrarily they may have been categorized (or by whom), groups of people did share essential characteristics that could be more or less accurately depicted. The more popular the depiction, the more accurate it was perceived to be. Bias hardened into truth. If you were, like James Weldon Johnson, a poet who belonged to a community that was routinely summed up with negative stereotypes, you might, like him, choose to fight fire with fire, and create positive types to counter the negative ones. The literary ethics of today would not apply.
Readers today will have to make complex adjustments to account for the historical differences and the social logic that shaped Johnson's journey in writing God's Trombones. When we have made such adjustments, that is, after traveling through what scholar Michelle Wright calls "epiphenomenal time," which is a kind of historical thick description that puts meat on.
O black slave singers, gone, forgot, unfamed,
You-you alone, of all the long, long line
Of those who've sung untaught, unknown, unnamed,
Have stretched out upward, seeking the divine.
"O Black and Unknown Bards" (1922)
Ethical questions are likely to haunt any poet today who uses a mask to represent a culture. By mask, I mean a voice that, in the pretense of the poem, belongs to someone or something other than the poet. The mask itself is not the problem. Persona poetry is an entire genre founded on masking. However, when a poem implies its mask captures characteristics that are typical of a broad demographic, that poem is almost certainly going to be read as insensitive. Or worse. A hundred years ago, many believed that, no matter how arbitrarily they may have been categorized (or by whom), groups of people did share essential characteristics that could be more or less accurately depicted. The more popular the depiction, the more accurate it was perceived to be. Bias hardened into truth. If you were, like James Weldon Johnson, a poet who belonged to a community that was routinely summed up with negative stereotypes, you might, like him, choose to fight fire with fire, and create positive types to counter the negative ones. The literary ethics of today would not apply.
Readers today will have to make complex adjustments to account for the historical differences and the social logic that shaped Johnson's journey in writing God's Trombones. When we have made such adjustments, that is, after traveling through what scholar Michelle Wright calls "epiphenomenal time," which is a kind of historical thick description that puts meat on.