What Is Africa to Me Now?

"Heritage"

By Countee Cullen

(For Harold Jackman)

What is Africa to me:

Copper sun or scarlet sea,

Jungle star or jungle track,

Strong bronzed men, or regal black

Women from whose loins I sprang

When t he birds of Eden sang?

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me?

In 1925, when Countee Cullen wrote his famous poem, "Heritage," he was writing in a strong tradition of early twentieth-century African American artists who were dreaming of Africa. To be more specific, they were dreaming of repairing the rupture in their personal and social history that had been caused by the institution of slavery. One could see back as far as Charleston or Savannah or Baltimore, but what came before had to be largely imagined.

Five years later, in 1930, Langston Hughes wrestled with exactly this same question of what, and where, Africa is in his poem "Afro-American Fragment."

So long

So far away

Is Africa.

Not even memories alive

Save those that history books create,

Save those that songs

Beat back into the blood-

Beat out of blood wit h words sad-sung

In strange un-Negro tongue-

So long,

So far away

Is Africa.

Subdued and time-lost

Are the drums-and yet

Through some vast mist of race

There comes th is song

I do not understand,

This song of atavistic land,

Of bitter yearnings lost

Without a place-

So long,

So far away

Is Africa's

Dark face.

So what was Africa to Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and others? Clearly it was a place they needed to understand-"I do not understand, / This song of atavistic land." It was a place that appeared to be a crucial building block in their identity, and in the first half of the twentieth century Cullen, Hughes, and other artists would expend much creative energy trying to stitch Africa into the quilted narrative of African American lives. Of course, the truth is they knew exactly where Africa was, and they knew something of the many, many different cultures on the continent, but the question of "What is Africa?" was being posed as a gate through which they might pass and thereafter explore the more urgent problem of "What is...