Lament for Dark Peoples by Langston Hughes

Lament for Dark Peoples by Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes is widely known for his simple and open poems with messages that are not coated in so many artistic and figurative language and imagery. During the 1920s as many poets turned inward and wrote covertly, Langston chose to go outward and speak extrovertly about his subject. He is a poet who is preoccupied with the reclaiming of the pride of the dark skinned people and asserting their identities in the fast changing world and the apparent segregation that was manifest in the early 1920s. In most of his poem he identified the recognition of the origin of the dark skinned people, Africa, as being the distant past that should have remained and the dark skinned people would not have had trouble as they were in the foreign land.

This poem under study is not an exemption to the subject matter that Langston dealt with repeatedly. The persona here feels caged in a foreign land with foreign ideologies in the name of civilization. The persona is angry for having been taken out of his ancestral land, Africa, where he has all the nice things like beautiful forests and the silver moon and later to be abandoned in a foreign cage. The poet also expresses the involuntary relocation of the dark skinned people from their land by the white man. Indeed the opening line, "I was a red man one time," indicates that the relocation from the beloved land to the cage of civilization was not just a physical one only but there was the reshaping of personality, attitude, psyche and the inner self which changed the way the dark skinned man looked at himself. That is the reason why the persona can only now lament that at one time, he was red man, but that is no more as it was wiped out. He has been uprooted not only from his physical land, the forests and moon but also from his personality as a red man.

Langston gives the readers a romanticized past in the poem by creating a stark contrast between the former land and the current land. He uses binary and juxtaposition to highlight the romanced Africa. The poet refers to Africa as having had beautiful forests, beautiful jungles and trees that the dark skinned people loved before the white man came. On the other hand, he describes the civilization that the dark skinned people have been subjected to as a cage, a circus and a place where the uprooted person from Africa herds with many. It is worth noting here that herding creates a picture of discomfort, crowding (if not overcrowding), and congestion as they are manipulated and misused as the animals usually are in the circuses. The contrast created here highlights the romanticizing of Africa and the ideals of Africa as the only solutions to the caged body and mentality that the dark skinned have been subjected to. In a way, he prompts the caged dark skinned people to rise up and drive the white man mentality that cages them and reassert their pride as Africans.