Harlem
By Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream
deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the
sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like
rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar
over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
A poem can succinctly
emote a theme in a few words, whereas prose often employs complex
exposition and development. “Harlem” by Langston Hughes delivers
a powerful message through a series of brief, sensual images. The
language in the poem is frank and down-to-earth as it enables the
reader to see and smell the frustration of American blacks as they
seek the elusive “American Dream.”
This short poem is one of
Hughes’s most famous works; it is likely the most common Langston
Hughes poem taught in American schools. Hughes wrote "Harlem"
in 1951, long before the famous “dream” proposed by Martin
Luther King Jr. Hughes titled this poem “Harlem” after the New
York neighborhood that became the center of the Harlem Renaissance, a
major creative explosion in music, literature, and art that occurred
during the 1910s and 1920s.
Critic Arthur P. Davis
writes, "When Hughes depicts the hopes, the aspirations, the
frustrations, and the deep-seated discontent of the New York ghetto,
he is expressing the feelings of Negroes in black ghettos throughout
America."
The poet who wrote about
deferred dreams was the same writer who wrote …
“If the government
can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered,
or a fish to be a fish without getting hooked, or a buffalo to be a
buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be a place in this
American country where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim
Crowed.”
From 1619 to 1951 to 2020
– that “dream” has remained deferred over the past 400 years.
With the recent protests over the brutal police murder of George
Perry Floyd Jr., an explosion of understanding has rocked America.
Perhaps Floyd's death signifies a new beginning in the attainment of
racial equality and justice.
"What
white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was
necessary for them to have a (n word) in the first place. Because I
am not a (n word). I'm a man. If I'm not the (n word) here, and if
you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to
find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether
or not it is able to ask that question."
-- James
Baldwin
The American Dream – is
it just a myth, a metaphor, or a reality? Through language people
have created this supernatural environment, a symbol with a national
ethos in which freedom includes the opportunity for spiritual
fulfillment, material prosperity and success, and an upward mobility
achieved through hard work and effort.
The dream feeds the
aspiration of an American democracy with indigenous meaning,
practice, and process. If it exists in reality, it is not a static
system but rather a dynamic and ongoing work with an unfailing
cultural compass that tells Americans who they are and how they
should lead their lives.
Hughes's “festering
sore” remains a predominate image of the original sin perpetrated
by white Americans: slavery is at the core of this chronic, and often
deadly, disease of racism. Black dreams must be made whole, for
blacks are Americans, and to deny black Americans the dream is to
extinguish the soul of this nation. The United States without its
soul is a dead and meaningless wasteland of hypocrisy, a foolish
experiment in democracy.
“I say
to you today, my friends, though, even though we face the
difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a
dream deeply rooted in
the
American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up,
live out
the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident,
that all
men are created equal."
– Martin
Luther King, Jr. (August 28, 1963)
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