Brent+Edwards

Langston Hughes and theFutures of DiasporaBrent Hayes Edwards

This essay is an attempt to consider whether the poetics ofdiaspora can provide a point of entry to a critical understanding ofglobalization. This is not to imply that the terms are necessarilycommensurate, much less synonymous: on the contrary, as JamesClifford has reminded us, diasporic practices cannot be reducedto epiphenomena of the nation-state or of global capitalism (244).The term globalization, slippery and contested as it is, might beconsidered first and foremost an attempt to name the present,whereas the term diaspora would seem to name a relation to apast, as a designation for the aftermath of the scattering ofa population (Denning 24). Globalization implies the imposition ofa single mode of exchange everywhereeven if that standardiz-ation is produced by and entails the proliferation of difference andinequitywhereas diaspora foregrounds divergence, the frictionof distance, the irreducibility of the specific conditions thatproduce transnational movement and transnational sensibilities.1

If diaspora can offer a critical lens into the condition of glo-balization, then it must be taken not merely as a comparativesocial or historical phenomenon, not even only as a predicamentshared by many people or peoples who otherwise have little elsein common, but as a positive resource in the necessary rethinkingof models of polity in the current erosion and questioning of themodern nation-state system and ideal (Boyarin and Boyarin 5).On the one hand, this means that diaspora as a framework ofinquiry signals an alternative to the market teleology implicit ineconomic conceptions of globalization.2 On the other hand, aninvocation of diaspora must also remind us, once again, that globa-lization is itself a historical phenomenon stretching back in manyof its key features at least to the sixteenth century.

Brent Hayes Edwards teaches in the Department of English at ColumbiaUniversity. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora and the co-editor of thejournal Social Text.

doi:10.1093/alh/ajm028Advance Access publication July 13, 2007# The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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Given the historical register implicit in the term diaspora, mytitle is meant to be a provocation. To invoke the futures ofdiaspora should first of all raise the question of the continuingviability of the term (at a moment when, by some accounts, theunchecked proliferation of its use may have vitiated any criticalforce it once possessed). But it should also imply a departure froman approach that considers diaspora to be essentially a matter ofthe past, stressing the work of collective memory as foundationalin an uprooted peoples relationship to a homeland.3 It is to askwhether diaspora can be said to involve not only a relation todeprivation and dispossession, but also a particular link to possi-bility and potential.

One of the most disturbing flaws in the scholarship that hasarisen in the past two decades to focus on the dynamics of diasporain a wide variety of new contexts is its failure to engage with therich and complex history of the term in its original milieu, theJewish intellectual tradition in the Hellenistic period. In Jewish dis-course, a vision of futurity is an important component of the con-dition of diaspora, because it comes to be imbued with aneschatological dimension: there arises a dialectical tension betweendispersal and return, loss and restoration, castigation and absolution,exile and redemption.4 In fact, although it is almost always over-looked in recent new diasporas scholarship, this tension is signaledby the deeply significant distinction that emerges in the Jewish intel-lectual tradition between diaspora (the Greek term appropriated as aself-designation by Jewish communities around the Mediterraneanbasin) and galut (the Hebrew term for exile).5 Often, diaspora is usedto indicate a state of dispersal resulting from voluntary migration, aswith the far-flung Jewish communities of the Mediterranean region.In this context, the term is not necessarily laced with a sense of vio-lence, suffering, and punition, in part because Jewish populationsmaintained a robust sense of an original homeland, physically sym-bolized by the Temple in Jerusalem (strikingly, Jewish settlementsaround the Mediterranean Sea were commonly called apoikiai, orcolonies).6 Very differently, the term galut (exile) connotesanguish, forced homelessness, and the sense of things being not asthey should be (Wettstein 2), and is often considered to be theresult of the loss of that geographic center and imagined home withthe destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.7 It is above all ingalut that there inheres an eschatological dimension, in the longingfor return and redemption.8

By sketching this history, I do not mean to suggest that theJewish diaspora should be considered to be a paradigm or idealtype, as some scholars of comparative diasporas would have it.9

Diaspora is first of all a translation, a foreign word adopted in the

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Jewish intellectual discourse of community. As such, it shouldserve as a reminder that there is never a first diaspora: there isnever an originary, single dispersion of a single people, but insteada complex historical overlay of a variety of kinds of populationmovement, narrated and valuated in different ways and to differentends. As the historian Erich Gruen has noted with regard to theHellenistic period, a Greek diaspora, in short, brought the Jewishone in its wake (19). With regard to the study of the movementof peoples under globalization in the contemporary moment, then,this history of usage should compel us away from an understand-ing of the movement of groups as discrete or self-contained, andtoward a focus on the ways that the movements of groups alwaysnecessarily intersect, leading to exchange, assimilation, expropria-tion, coalition, or dissension. This is to say that any study ofdiaspora is also a study of overlapping diasporas.10

Instead, I am dwelling on the Jewish case in order tohighlight its consistent linking of the diasporic condition tofuturityto the prospect of return and redemption. In a morerecent, twentieth-century appropriation of diasporic discourse, ithas sometimes been supposed that Zionismthe modern, national-ist proposition of an indissoluble primacy between a people and ahomelandis the dominant or sole version of a Jewish discourseof diasporic redemption.11 But if anything, as an invasive politicalproject of state-formation, Zionism is the negation of diasporicexperience, and of the eschatological valence of redemptionembedded in galut.12 In what follows, I will attempt to considerthe resonance of this futuristic quality in the discourses of diasporaemergent in the twentieth century, particularly in the interwovenhistories (histoires entrecroisees) (Glissant 28) of the Africandiaspora. It may seem especially counterintuitive to turn to theinterwar period and to the Spanish Civil War in particular, where Iwill track my network of examples, because we are often told thatit is exactly the sort of internationalism at stake in the 1930s thathas been superseded by the globalization of the contemporaryperiod.13 At the risk of being dismissed as anachronistic, however,I will argue that the archives of internationalism can be read for asensibilityor more precisely, a poeticsthat allows diaspora toserve as a critique of the totalizing pretensions of globalization.I will focus, in particular, on the ways that interwar international-ism might be read as a reformulation of diasporic eschatology inthe sense I have outlined, especially through a range of bilingualor multilingual practices in literature.14

It is by now a commonplace to describe Langston Hughes asa writer of the African diaspora. But one could with equal val-idity describe his work as a writerly engagement in the politics of

[T]he archives ofinternationalism can beread for a sensibilityormore precisely, apoeticsthat allowsdiaspora to serve as acritique of the totalizingpretensions ofglobalization.

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capitalist globalization. For example, in his 1938 speech to theInternational Writers Association for the Defense of Culture inParis, Hughes argued, because our world is . . . today, so relatedand inter-related, a creative writer has no right to neglect to under-stand clearly the social and economic forces that control ourworld (Writers 199). He had spent a number of months inSpain during the previous year, working as a newspaper correspon-dent for the Baltimore Afro-American and the Cleveland Call andPost.15 He spent most of his time in Madrid and Valencia with theInternational Brigades, whose crucial role in the defense of therepublican government during the Spanish Civil War has beenwell documented. About 35,000 volunteers from more than 50countries and colonies joined in the fight against Francos invadingfascist forces. This number included 3,300 Americans, of whichsome 100 were African Americans.16

Hughes was struck by the implications of the Brigades as anintegrated fighting force that brought African Americans intocontact with what he called wide-awake Negroes from variousparts of the world including South Americans, Caribbeans, andAfricans (Negroes 156).17 His writings about the black volun-teers do not attempt to force them into a common project, butinstead emphasize the extraordinary variety of their paths to theanti-fascist struggle. Over and over again, he emphasizes individ-ual faces, individual stories: the brownskin boy from the CanaryIslands in a red shirt and a blue beret (322) whom Hughes andthe Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen meet on the train across theborder; the Puerto Rican from Harlem who recognizes Hughes at acafe in Barcelona; the ebony-dark young man, a Guinean,Hughes speaks to on the beach in Valencia (329); the crowd ofseveral Spanish-speaking Negroes and a colored Portuguese at anightclub (323); the Cuban boxer Raul Rojas just back from thefront lines at Belchite (378); a French Algerian Negro namedFrazal (383); the Cuban musician El Negro Aquilino, playingjazz in besieged Madrid; and dozens and dozens of named AfricanAmericans (352). Who were they? Hughes asked rhetorically.I put their names in my notebooks. Yet their names cannot tell uswho they really were, nor could any additional pages I might writeabout them (384). But, for Hughes, the very fact of such disparateengagement in a voluntary struggle was a clear sign of the arrivalof peoples of African descent on the stage of world politics: here,history turned another page (384).

Hughes was enticed not because the Brigades seemed to posethe African diaspora in a romantic, masculine context of interna-tionalist anti-fascism, but precisely because the Spanish Civil Warundercut any such identification. For there were men of color

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fighting on both sides (327). Francos coup began in July 1936,not in Spain itself but in the Spanish protectorate in North Africa,and his forces were commonly referred to as the Army of Africa,which included both Foreign Legionnaires and tens of thousands ofMoroccan soldiers.18 The first modern airlift of troops involvedthese Africanos, delivered by Nazi planes across the Mediterraneanregion to Seville at the end of that summer.19 Hughes came towrite about the complicated dynamics of race, color, and colonial-ism in the war, and aimed at portraying black Loyalist soldiers andMoorish fascist soldiers as ironic adversaries who were nonethe-less members of a single colored diaspora:

Why had I come to Spain? To write for the colored press.I knew that Spain once belonged to the Moors, a coloredpeople ranging from light dark to dark white. Now the Moorshave come again to Spain with the fascist armies as cannonfodder for Franco. But, on the loyalist side there are manycolored people of various nationalities in the InternationalBrigades. I want to write about both Moors and coloredpeople. (Hughes Finds Moors 161)

This is to say that Hughes wanted to explore the tensions of inter-actions in the European metropole between transnationally mobileAfrican Americans and what one might call the subjects of thenew new diasporas: colonial Africans and Asians conscriptedinto European conflicts. He especially wanted to consider the wayswar propaganda and nationalist discourses on both sides werebeing racialized, in a heated African invasion that had raised thespecter of the Arab domination of Spain centuries earlier.20

Hughes hoped to assemble a book, to be called Negroes in Spain,from the columns he was writing in the fall of 1937 for theAfro-American and for the Volunteer for Liberty, the organ of theInternational Brigades.21

Biographer Arnold Rampersad has argued that Hughess artseemed to decline in his most radical years (339), and goes so faras to characterize the poems he wrote during his stay in Spain asproletarian doggerel (351). But I want to return to one of thepoems Hughes wrote in 1937. Rather than either applauding theworks revolutionary commitment or decrying its insufficient artis-try, I read it to take seriously the poets contention, in the speechin Paris he gave the following year, that the best ways ofword-weaving, of course, are those that combine music, meaningand clarity in a pattern of social force (Writers 19899).

In November 1937, Hughes published an epistolary balladcalled Letter from Spain (subtitled Addressed to Alabama) in

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the Volunteer for Liberty.22 It opens with a heading and date:Lincoln Battalion,/International Brigades,/November Something,1937 (156). A specific setting and time, although the openness ofthe date would seem to imply a metonymic reach, the aim of thepoem to stand in for a broader set of circumstances. Later, Hugheswould explain that he wrote the poem to try to express the feelingsof some of the Negro fighting men with regard to the irony of thecolonial Moors fighting for Franco (I Wonder 353), and the poemis framed as the address of a black soldier writing home. It opens:

Dear Brother at home:

We captured a wounded Moor today.He was just as dark as me.I said, Boy, what you been doin hereFightin against the free?

He answered something in a languageI couldnt understand.But somebody told me he was sayinThey nabbed him in his land

And made him join the fascist armyAnd come across to Spain.And he said he had a feelinHed never get back home again. (156)

Historian Robin Kelley, quoting only the first stanza, comments brus-quely that Of course, the problem was much more complicated(This 147). But the poem attempts to suggest that complication.First, although a link is posited between the African American andthe North African, it is articulated through comparison rather thanidentity (He was just as dark as me). The initial rhetoric of recog-nition in the encounter is tempered by incommensurabilityfirst ofall, due to linguistic difference: He answered something in alanguage/I couldnt understand. If this encounter marks a diasporicinstance, it implies that a diaspora is necessarily translated andmediated (although the interpreter here goes unidentified: somebodytold me he was sayin).23

In the subsequent stanzas, the letter writer reads the Moorsconfusion and homesickness to be auspicious, the burgeoning ofan anti-colonial consciousness. The poem continues:

He said he had a feelinThis whole thing wasnt right.

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He said he didnt knowThe folks he had to fight.

And as he lay there dyingIn a village we had taken,I looked across to Africaand seed foundations shakin.

Cause if a free Spain wins this war,The colonies, too, are freeThen something wonderfulll happenTo them Moors as dark as me.

I said, I guess thats why old EnglandAnd I reckon Italy, too,Is afraid to let a workers SpainBe too good to me and you

Cause they got slaves in AfricaAnd they dont want em to be free. (15657)

In the drab surroundings of a military triage tent, the soldiers pre-diction of foundations shakin in the colonies seems a bit bright-eyed, even grandiose. This is the moment in the poem that edgesclosest to a black internationalism, one capable of imaginingMorocco linked to sub-Saharan Africa beginning to reject theimpositions of European colonization. Of course, the poem figuresthis articulation of the diaspora in the way that the letter writermis-writes seed in the place of the English simple past sawin other words, it is the vernacular mistake that inserts the spore,the principle of unification, into his gaze across the Mediterranean.Cary Nelson has noted in this regard that this use of dialect is notsimply an appeal to a popular audience in the US; it also makesthe political point that the common sense possessed byoppressed people gives them an appropriate experiential basis forunderstanding international politics (202).24

But it is crucial to recognize that this interpretation, triumphantas it would seem, cannot be communicated to the Moorish soldier,as he lay there dying. The poem concludes on a note of radicaldifference, with even the simplest communicative gesture fallingflat. Stirred by his reverie, the African American speaks again:

Listen, Moorish prisoner, hell!Here, shake hands with me!

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I knelt down there beside him,

And I took his handBut the wounded Moor was dyinAnd he didnt understand.

Salud,Johnny (157)

The extended hand, that is, signals the African-American soldiersattempt to translate his epiphany into a gesturea handshakeemerging out of the vision of those colonial foundations shakin.It is not quite as grand as an offer of alliance politics, as Nelsonwould have it, but it is certainly an attempt to exchange mutualrecognition and respect in the context of the differential exploita-tion of peoples of African descent (202).

The most striking word in the poem is the closing salutationbefore the signature: Salud. The Spanish word is not commonlyused as a greeting (like salut in French), but was adopted as a habit-ual, even ritual, salutation during the war among the republicanforcesas Hughes pointed out elsewhere, it was the word withwhich the loyalists greet one another, and in this sense carriednearly as much weight as another well-known catch phrase of theperiod, No pasaran (They shall not pass) (Pittsburgh 189).25

If one reads it as salvation, Salud serves to index a watch-word from the violent ideological struggles in Spain over thevalences of Catholicism. Whereas the loyalists hailed each otherwith Salud, Francos nationalists were just as keen to claim aChristian heritageeven as they took the country with a largelyNorth African, Muslim army.26 Addressed to Alabama, Salud hereis a reminder that the vernacular idiom must be understood to be aplace of crucial ideological work, the site of interminabletranslations among these valences (Rafael xv).

The other meaning of Salud is health (both as a conceptand as a salutation or toast: to your health). And, in this light,we must also hear in the term the African Americans attempt totranslate his encounter with the Moor in the simplest sense of theword translation: the miming of the responsibility to the trace ofthe other in the self (Spivak, Politics 179). To sign off wishinghealth to his Brother at home is also, subtly, to point at whatcannot be helped in the encounter, what cannot be changed: thatthe North African is dying. It takes a term for what cannot bepassed over in the hospital handshakesalubrity, salvation, andsolidarityand sends it back home. The poem forges and sealsa multiplicity of languages into a single idiom, and thus

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commemorates the singularity of the encounter (Derrida,Shibboleth 325). Letter from Spain thus strives to instantiatediasporic responsibility in the strong sense: neither by condemningnor absolving, but by attempting to attend toand embrace, andcarry homethe alterity of the other. Of course, it is crucial toadd that the letter does not sign off with, say, Arabic (i.e. bisahtak,to your health, or simply sahha, health), which would simplyfix that alterity as an essence. Diasporic responsibility can only besignaled here at a distance, in the specific instance of encounter,through the specific interface of communication: the war in Spainand the particular Spanish idiom it engenders.

But this is to assume that Salud is written in Spanishthatone can know in the final analysis [en dernie`re instance] how todetermine rigorously the unity and identity of a language, thedecidable form of its limits (Derrida, Des Tours 173, 217). Theword is not cushioned or contextualized (except by its position asthe closing salutation in a letter), nor indeed is it italicized toindicate that it is a foreign word.27 I am suggesting, in otherwords, that the singular idiom of Salud is grafted into the letterin a manner not just to carry over and commemorate that singularinstance in Spain, but also and thereby to transform the contoursof English, and of brotherhood at home.

Of course, we read the richness of this specific poeticinstance above all in a layering of readings (that is, we read thebrother at home reading the soldiers reading of the encounterwith the Moor, in which they each attempt and fail to read theothers attempts at communication). Whether interlingual or not, thiseffect still involves a procedure that has something to do with trans-lation. Although translation necessarily involves domestication, itdoes not necessarily thereby reify the lexicon of the home or targetlanguage: on the contrary, it can also decenter or redirect thatlexicon (Venuti 82). As Maurice Blanchot puts it, translation istransformational because the translator comes to possess the homeor target language sur un mode privatif et riche cependant de cetteprivation quil lui faut combler par les ressources dune autrelangue, elle-meme rendue autre en loeuvre unique ou` elle se ras-semble momentanement (in a mode that is privative and yet richwith this privation, which the translator must fill using the resourcesof another tongue, itself rendered other in the unique work where itis momentarily gathered) (72).

Critics who disparage this poem as maudlin have not givensufficient attention to the ethical subtlety of Salud in its last lines(Rampersad 351). But the charge also bespeaks a dissatisfactionwith the poems ballad form: Letter from Spain is maudlin, thatis, due to its recourse to a cloying meter and rhyme scheme that

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would seem to simplify and sentimentalize the encounter it records.But there may be a different reason that the poem risks its particularmusic. While he was in Spain, Hughes was not only writing his ownpoetry but also translating. During the months in the fall of 1937when he wrote Letter from Spain, he was working on a version ofFederico Garca Lorcas Gypsy Ballads (1928).28 We might hear inHughess adoption of the ballad form in the Letter an attempt toadopt the mode of the 1928 book by Garca Lorca, who was one ofthe best-known casualties of the Civil Warand thus anotherattempt to translate, on yet another register. The formal choice sim-ultaneously reminds us of Hughess contention that word-weavinginvolves not just clarity and social force, but also a certain prac-tice of music (Writers 19899).

It is important to recognize the discontinuity even at thisapparent level of correspondence. The original title of GarcaLorcas book is Primer romancero gitano (First Collection ofGypsy Ballads), and the poems in the book, vivid and powerfulportraits of Andalusia, are adaptations of the classic Spanish formof the romance, an octosyllabic verse in which the even-numberedlines rhyme with the same assonance. Although sometimes referredto in English as a ballad or Spanish ballad, this form differsmarkedly from the sing-song of the alternating quatrameter and tri-meter lines of the ballad stanza in English employed by Hughes inLetter from Spain.29 The similarities are associative and contex-tual rather than formal: both romances and ballads are vernacularmodes linked with oral recitation, with music, and with narrative.There is also something of a parallel in mood. Sterling Brown,perhaps the most accomplished African-American practitioner ofthe folk ballad, writes that as appropriated in black culture, it isgeared to tell a story with economy, without sentimentality, andoften with a pronounced sense of the tragic (221). Garca Lorcalikewise connects the romance with storytelling and with a particu-lar kind of suffering: regarding The Gypsy Ballads, he writes thatthe poems are infused with

anguish [pena], dark and big as the summer sky, whichpercolates through the bone marrow and the sap of trees andhas nothing to do with melancholy, nostalgia, or any otheraffliction or disease of the soul, being more heavenly thanearthly. Andalusian anguish, which is the struggle of theloving intelligence with the incomprehensible mystery thatsurrounds it. (qtd in Maurer xxxviii)

He liked to say that he considered anguish [pena] to be theprotagonist of the book, and called one character (Soledad

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Montoya in the Romance de la pena negra [Ballad of the BlackAnguish]) the personification of anguish with no solution (qtdin Gibson 136). Both romances and ballads, then, deal with hurt,not so much physical injury as spiritual deprivation and ill-fatedlove; both involve a poetics of irredeemable loss.

A number of critics have commented on Garca Lorcasfondness for what Christopher Maurer terms stylization, thedeliberate reference to other art forms or to the work of otherartists (with a poem titled a song [cancion] or a theory[teora], for instance), in an allusion so persistent that it inscribesthe work within another, secondary allusive system (Maurer xli).In other words, if Hughess epistolary poems allude to GarcaLorca, they allude to writing that is already itself allusive, alreadyitself pointing elsewherein this case, to the folk culture ofAndalusia, the region of southern Spain associated both withgypsy culture and flamenco, and with the Moorish occupation ofthe country during the middle ages. So this poetics of an encounterof African others during the Spanish Civil War makes reference toa prior poetics of otherness within Spain itself, a literature of therecurrent mystery of alterity in which, as one critic puts it,what we think we recognize is often undercut by what we cannotdecipher (Morris 313). One might term this allusion a species oftranslation on a formal level. What Hughes finds in Garca Lorcais a poetics that continually strives to figure absolute otherness,using abrupt shifts in register, tone, and image to force the readerinto a confrontation with alterity.30

Interestingly, if in Garca Lorcas writing even the guitarweeps for distant/things [llora por cosas/lejanas] (Guitar100101), one of the recurrent figures for that distance turns out tobe the New World, and specifically the black cultures of theAmericas. In one letter, he refers cryptically to his Poema del cantejondo (Poem of the Deep Song), a series of poems that take up themodes of flamenco singing, as an American puzzle (qtd in Morris183). In his most famous essay, the extraordinary 1933 Play andTheory of the Duende, Garca Lorca compares the flamencosinging style of Pastora Pavon, known as La Nina de los Peines(the Girl of the Combs), with the ecstasy of Afro-Cuban ritual:

As though crazy, torn like a medieval mourner, La Nina delos Peines leaped to her feet, tossed off a big glass ofburning liquor, and began to sing with a scorched throat:without voice, without breath or color, but with duende. Shewas able to kill all the scaffolding of the song [matar todo elandamiaje de la cancion] and leave way for a furious, enslav-ing duende, friend of sand winds, who made the listeners rip

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their clothes with almost the same rhythm as do the blacks ofthe Antilles when, in the lucum ritual, they huddle in heapsbefore the statue of Santa Barbara [que haca que los oyentesse rasgaran los trajes, casi con el mismo ritmo con que selos rompen los negros antillanos del rito lucum apelotona-dos ante la imagen de Santa Barbara]. (Play 53, trans-lation modified)31

Langston Hughes also saw Pavon perform while he was in Spain,and tellingly he also draws a connection between flamenco andNew World black expression, now to the blues:

Shortly, without any introduction or fanfare, she herself satup very straight in her chair and, after a series of quaveringlittle cries, began to half-speak, half-sing a soleato moan,intone and cry in a Gypsy Spanish I did not understand, akind of raw heartbreak rising to a crescendo that made halfthe audience cry aloud with her after the rise and fall of eachphrase. . . . This plain old woman could make the hair rise onyour head, could do to your insides what the moan of anair-raid siren did, could rip your soul-case with her voice. Iwent to hear La Nina many times. I found the strange, highwild crying of her flamenco in some ways much like theprimitive Negro blues of the deep South. The words andmusic were filled with heartbreak, yet vibrant with resistanceto defeat, and hard with the will to savor life in spite of itsvicissitudes. (I Wonder 33233)32

Again, as in Letter from Spain, these connections are positednot at the level of identity (that is, a direct musical filiationbetween flamenco and blues) but at the level of a formal parallel:both musics privilege the point where the voice pushes beyonditself, scorching or ripping its technical qualities to findanother register of expression, a register Nathaniel Mackey hastermed an eloquence of another order, a broken, problematic,self-problematizing eloquence (195).

In Garca Lorcas romances, that breaking or doubleness ispursued through a writing that attempts to meld the transport oflyric into the traditional narrative of the folk form.33 In HughessLetter from Spain, as a sort of translation of that formal effect inGarca Lorca, it is sought not only through the incongruitybetween the epistolary and the musical, but also in the shiftbetween English and Spanish, between the intimacy of blacksouthern vernacular and the peculiarity of that grafted idiom,Salud. Garca Lorca argues in Play and Theory of the Duende

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that the duendeas the term in flamenco for that haunting forceor bedeviling muse that grants inspiration at the moment ofcollapseenjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of the well[los bordes del pozo], and that in that struggle, the duendewounds. In the healing of that wound, which never closes, hecontinues, lies the strangeness [lo insolito], the invented qualityof a mans work (58, translation modified).34 It is through theopen wound that the duende draws near the sites where formsfuse together into a yearning [se funden en un anhelo] superior totheir visible expression (59).35 In Letter from Spain, one mightsuggest that the foreign language functions to open a wound inthis exact sense, in the interest of indexing that greater longing.

If Letter from Spain seems all too schematic, even dog-matic, in its scrupulous instancing of an ethics of diaspora throughan emblematic face-to-face encounter, one should recall thatHughes employs a bilingual poetics to very different ends in someof his other Spanish Civil War poems. I will briefly consider oneother in particular, titled Moonlight in Valencia: Civil War:

Moonlight in Valencia:The moon meant planes.The planes meant death.And not heroic death.Like death on a poster:An officer in a pretty uniformOr a nurse in a clean white dressBut death with steel in your brain,Powder burns on your face,Blood spilling from your entrails,And you didnt laughBecause there was no laughter in it.You didnt cry PROPAGANDA either.The propaganda was too muchFor everybody concerned.It hurt you to your guts.It was realAs anything you ever sawIn the movies:Moonlight. . . .Me caigo en la ostia!Bombers overValencia. (306)

The poem encapsulates an insufficiency of response, the inade-quacy of language to speak to the experience of death in war.

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With its use of simple sentences and its address to a second personyou, the poem attempts to project the reader into the imaginationof a death in which one is disallowed the solace or pretension ofany secondary significance (whether heroism, humor, or propa-ganda) that would transcend or alleviate the banality of physicalsuffering. The poem eschews enjambment with the exception ofits conclusion, where a simple sentence (It was real) is distendedfrom a stark declaration into a more ambiguous comparison: Itwas real/As anything you ever saw/In the movies. The realism ofthe moment breaks or exceeds our expectations of the real to thedegree that it is only comparable to the extreme artifice of cinema.

Moonlight in Valencia recalls Letter from Spain in itsrecourse to Spanish as a means of marking the singularity ofidiom and historical context. The wound in form effected by thelinguistic shift is, here, the only way to index that singularity. Onemight go so far as to claim that in Hughess work, formal disconti-nuity and disjuncture are the paradigmatic indexical effect (recallfor instance that in the passage from Hughess autobiographyquoted earlier, if Pastora Pavons voice is remarkable in its inten-sity, part of that power is its ability not just to penetrate the soul-case but also to reference the penetrating environment of war: shesings with the moan of an air-raid siren).

At the same time, the two poems strive to instance that effectat starkly different registers. Rather than the staging of diasporicincommensurability through imbedded reading practices in Letterfrom Spain in Moonlight in Valencia we are left with a hostof questions that seem simpler, if more perplexing: just who isspeaking here? How does one come to terms with this poetics ofdirect address, which seems at once to tug the reader into thesingularity of that past scene (It hurt you to your guts) and to dis-tance the reader irrevocably outside its blunt artifice (as precisely ayou that could not have experienced this death)? In coming toterms with these questions, of course, one is forced to wonderabout the interjected Spanish: is it the same speaker, exclaiming inanother language to mark a mortal woundinga yearningtowards alterity, in other words, that registers the sole and singularidiom of that experience of moonlight in Valencia? Or is it anothervoice, one never tied down to a speaking subject: an invasive,other voice, overriding, possessing the speakers voice and break-ing its tongue, finding inspirationthe tone of that singularmomentin that breaking, in a tearing of the simple-sentenceEnglish address that is something like a parallel to the formaltearing of duende in flamenco? Or, quite differently, is it insteadthe you who speaks here, who transgresses the space of addresswith the exclamation of your singular, untransferable suffering?

702 Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

In the notes to Hughess Collected Poems, the Spanish phraseMe caigo en la ostia! is glossed with a translation in to English: Ifeel it in my bones!36 This is clearly incorrect (the word forbones is huesos). In fact, the line is an extremely vulgarexclamation that takes liberties with the rhetoric of Catholicism.Me caigo en la ostia! means literally I fall into the host, theeucharistic bread in the Catholic communion ceremony (ostia hereis misspelled or rendered phonetically; the word is normallywritten hostia). To an English-language reader who has looked upthe words, this might come across as an appropriateeven passio-natephrase to invoke at the moment of mortal suffering. In fact,although, the phrase is a phonetic elision of a common oath that ismuch more obscene: Me cago en la hostia!, or literally I shit onthe host. (This tempering is not unfamiliar in English: it is akin tosaying Shoot! instead of Shit! or more precisely, Gosh darnit! in the place of God damn it!). That is, as an interjection, theelided curse bespeaks the altogether mundane obscenity of deathin war. Moreover, as a defamation of the Eucharist in particular,it marks an impatience with any discourse of salvation (salud),whether bodily or spiritual. In their formal strategies, then,Moonlight in Valencia and Letter from Spain strive differentlyto invect a discourse of the transcendental.

The poetics of diaspora is above all the task of instancingsuch a yearning of the particular, taking the measure of itsdistances. To read a diaspora means to strive to move betweenthese levels, to activate the interval between them. One mightsuggest that in this poetics, such an invectiona speaking againstthe grain of Christian salvation in particularis the way that thediscourse of the African diaspora translates the eschatologicalcontent carried by the term galut in the Jewish tradition, and refi-gures it into what may be the only form (elsewhere, otherwise,against the grain) of an ethics that eschews grounding in aprior transcendental. I do not mean that this effect somehow cap-tures the exact force bound up in galut. On the contrary, in trans-lating the eschatological quality of diaspora, the poems transformthe meaning of redemption, in a manner that may be instructivefor an understanding of diaspora as a critical lens into the con-dition of globalization. In Letter from Spain, as I have pointedout, the exchange between the African American and the NorthAfrican fails to result in any sort of internationalist collaborationmuch less salud in the sense of salvation. The closing salutationSalud is, more simply, a sign of the speakers accommodation tothe idiom of the encounter, sent home. It does not indicate somesort of redemption of that home (African-American) audience,of course, but it does use the trace of the encounter in Spain to

American Literary History 703

announce a potential internationalist solidarity shared amongAfrican Americans. And, in this sense, Hughess poem attempts toproduce the same effect as his speeches and articles about Spainin the African-American press, which call for solidarity and inter-nationalist consciousness.

There is another level of transformation implicit in Hughessdiscourse of diaspora. If it is not exactly a matter of redemption,neither is it exactly a matter of return. Although it necessitatestransnational mobility and involves a negotiation of African heri-tage, diaspora here involves an encounter among similars37

(just as dark as me, as the poem puts it) in a place that ishome to neitherin other words, in what Edouard Glissantwould call a shared elsewhere.38 In July 1937, on his way toSpain, Hughes gave a brief speech at the Second InternationalWriters Congress in Paris that is one of his most memorablepublic interventions. He told an audience including luminariessuch as Malcolm Cowley, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolas Guillen,Louis Aragon, Andre Malraux, Mikhail Koltsov, Stephen Spender,W.H. Auden, and Pablo Neruda that he came before them as arepresentative of the Negro peoples of America, and the poorpeoples of Americabecause I am both a Negro and poor. Weare the people, Hughes proclaimed, who have long known inactual practice the meaning of the word Fascismfor theAmerican attitude towards us has always been one of economicand social discrimination (Too Much 221).39 Hughesdenounced the spread of fascism on a world scale, and thenspoke of the significance of the crowd gathered before himwhich some might have dismissed as only a meeting of writers.Why was there such intense, worldwide political persecution ofwriters and activists? he asked, naming the Indian Raj Anand, theHaitian Jacques Roumain, and the African-American AngeloHerndon, among others. It was because the reactionary andfascist forces of the world were fully aware that such writers andactivists

represent the great longing that is in the hearts of the darkerpeoples of the world to reach out their hands in friendship andbrotherhood to all the white races of the earth. The Fascistsknow that we long to be rid of hatred and terror and oppres-sion, to be rid of conquering and being conquered, to be ridof all the ugliness of poverty and imperialism that eat awaythe heart of life today. We represent the end of race. (223)

In its adoption of the description the darker peoples of the world(a phrase most often associated with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois),

704 Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

the passage offers something like a discourse of racial diaspora.Yet, it closes with a seeming conundrum, which it is precisely thecoalition among people of colorwhat today would be termedthe global Souththat represents the end of race. It is temptingto hear end in both senses of the word: that is, if it means theabolition or overcoming of racial logic (and the persecutionrace enables), it also seems to mean the goal or aim of that verysame logicfor it is precisely through race consciousness (thealliance of the darker peoples of the world) that it is possible toimagine a future of universal friendship and brotherhood.Clearly, this discourse of diaspora is inflected by its momentabove all in its complex negotiation with the discourse of inter-national communismand yet it is a stance that still resonatestoday, in the current conjuncture of neo-imperialism, in whichaccumulation by dispossession continues to be justified by blatantracism.40 Again, this is neither redemption nor return, but it is apolitical stance that finds in diaspora the ground of a critique ofglobalization. It is a critique without guarantees, however. Like thepoem, it represents its end in a gesture: a longing to reach outhands to shake.

Notes

1. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (2003), 72, andespecially Stuart Hall, The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for theRepresentation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (1991): 2829, in which Hallreminds us that, in Marx, capitalism advances not simply through homogenizationbut on contradictory terrain. The phrase the friction of distance comes fromDavid Harvey, The New Imperialism (2003), 94, where he argues that in capitalistaccumulation, a space economy emerges as an attempt to minimize the effectsof geographical distance on global exchange.

2. On the teleology of the market as the master narrative of globalization, seeMichel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the ModernWorld (2003), 48.

3. For other versions of this argument, see Khachig Tololyan, RethinkingDiaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment, Diaspora 5 (1996): 13;William Safran, Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,Diaspora 1 (1991): 83; Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora and Homeland, Diasporas andExiles: Varities of Jewish Identity, ed. Howard Wettstein (2002), 18.

4. See for instance Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Exile and Expulsion in JewishHistory, in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 13911648, ed.Benjamin Gampel (1997), 5; Walter Brueggemann, A Shattered Transcendence?Exile and Restoration, Biblical Theology: Problems and Perspectives. In Honor

American Literary History 705

of J. Christiaan Beker, ed. Steven J. Kraftchick, Charles D. Myers, Jr, and BenC. Ollenburger (1995).

5. Diaspora is a Greek word used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation ofthe Hebrew Torah completed around 250 BCE). Much new diasporas scholarshiptends to assume that diaspora translates a range of Old Testament Hebrew wordsrelating both to scattering and to exile. However, as scholars of the Hellenisticperiod have long pointed out, the Greek word never translates the importantHebrew words for exile (such as galut and golah). In fact, the concordances tothe Septuagint indicate that diaspora mainly translates derivations of the Hebrewroot pvtz (disperse), in passages that describe processes of scattering, separ-ation, branching off, departure, banishment, or winnowing.For one influential instance of this error in new diaspora scholarship, see

Tololyans otherwise brilliant Rethinking Diaspora(s), 11. For reminders ofthe distinction between diaspora and galut in Jewish discourse, see W. D. Davies,The Territorial Dimension of Judaism (1982), 117, n. 1; Gruen, 39, n. 20. Andsee the relevant entries regarding instances of the Greek diaspeirein and diasporain the Septuagint in Edwin Hatch and Henry A. Redpath, A Concordance to theSeptuagint and Other Greek Versions of the Old Testament (Including theApocryphal Books) (1998), which lists the Hebrew terms translated by those Greekwords. For a summary of this issue, see my entry for Diaspora in Keywords ofAmerican Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (2007).

6. See Gruen, 2627; James M. Scott, Exile and the Self-Understanding ofDiaspora Jews in the Greco-Roman Period, Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, andChristian Conceptions, ed. James M. Scott (1997), 18993; Yerushalmi, 7.

7. As Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson explains, Only the loss of a political-ethniccenter and the feeling of uprootedness turns Diaspora (Dispersion) into galut(Exile) (275).

8. There is an enormous literature on the term galut; some of the indispensablestarting points include Yitzhak Baer, Galut (1947); Arnold M. Eisen, Galut: ModernJewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming (1986); Diaspora: Exile andthe Contempoary Jewish Condition, ed. Etan Levine (1986); Jacob Neusner,Self-fulfilling Prophecy: Exile and Return in the History of Judaism (1990).

9. See Safran, 83.

10. Earl Lewis, To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into aHistory of Overlapping Diasporas, American Historical Review 100 (1995): 78687; I also discussed this approach in my The Shadow of Shadows, Positions 11(2003): 1149.

11. For example, in African-American intellectual work, one might point to thewritings of W.E.B. Du Bois as he edged toward the founding of the Pan-Africanmovement in 1919. In one article, he wrote that the African movement means tous what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of raceeffort and the recognition of a racial fount. . . . [T]he ebullition of action andfeeling that results in an amelioration of the lot of Africa tends to ameliorate thecondition of colored peoples throughout the world. Du Bois, Africa,Colonialism, and Zionism, The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. EricSundquist (1998), 63940.

706 Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

12. For other versions of this argument, see Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin,Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (2002), 1213;Eliezar Don-Yehiya, The Negation of Galut in Religious Zionism, ModernJudaism 12 (1992): 12955; and Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (2005).

13. See for instance Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds(2004), 17; and Peter Waterman, Internationalism Is Dead! Long Live GlobalSolidarity? Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order, ed. Jeremy Brecher,John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler (1993).

14. My interest here is in some ways consonant with Walter D. Mignolos callfor an attention to what he terms bilanguaging in his Local Histories/GlobalDesigns: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000): Thecelebration of bi or plural languaging is precisely the celebration of the crack inthe global process between local histories and global designs, between mundiali-zation and globalization, from languages to social movements, and a critique ofthe idea that civilization is linked to the purity of colonial and national mono-languaging (250). My example may also seem to be reminiscent of the recentwork of Doris Sommer, as in Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education(2004). But Sommer tends to argue for the use of bilingualism in a nationalcontext: she suggests that in a multicultural society, bilingual instances (especiallyjokes) can serve as a useful approach to the training of citizen-subjects in ethicalresponses to strangeness (74).

15. See Michael Thurston, Bombed in Spain: Langston Hughes, the BlackPress, and the Spanish Civil War, The Black Press: New Literary and HistoricalEssays, ed. Todd Vogel (2001), 14058.

16. The black volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigades came to Spain at thebeginning of 1937 for a variety of reasons, some as committed Communists,some out of a frustration at the lack of an international response to Italys inva-sion of Ethiopia the year before, in a fascinating dynamics of detour: as onesoldier put it famously, This aint Ethiopia, but itll do. See the collection ofmaterials from the Lincoln Brigades Archives at Brandeis University in AfricanAmericans in the Spanish Civil War, ed. Danny Duncan Collum (1992), as wellas Robin D.G. Kelley, This Aint Ethiopia, But Itll Do: African Americansand the Spanish Civil War, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the BlackWorking Class (1994), 124, 136; and Arnold Rampersad, The Life of LangstonHughes, Vol. 1: 19021941: I Too, Sing America (1986), 347.

17. See also Kelley, This Aint Ethiopia, 139.

18. As Hughes described it later, The Moorish troops were colonial conscripts,or men from the Moroccan villages enticed into the army by offers of whatseemed to them very good pay. Francos personal bodyguard consisted ofMoorish soldiers, tall picturesque fellows in flowing robes and winding turbans(I Wonder 350). Other contemporary coverage includes Thyra Edwards, Moorsin the Spanish War, Opportunity 16 (1938): 8485.

19. See Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (2001), 91, 357.

20. The Moorslos Moroshad always been villains in Spanish fairy stories:they now became the focus of terror throughout south-west Spain (Thomas 360).

American Literary History 707

21. Rampersad, 339. Although Negroes in Spain was never published, Hughesdrew on many of these newspaper articles for his second autobiography,I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956).

22. Cary Nelson reproduces the full-page illustrated reprint of this poem (alongwith two of Hughess other epistolary ballads from the period) that was publishedin the Daily Worker in Jan 1938; see Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recoveringthe Poetry of the American Left (2003), 2045.

23. Leopold Sedar Senghor suggests that the African diaspora is structured indecalage in his Problematique de la Negritude, Liberte III: Negritude etcivilisation de luniversel (1977), 274. I have elaborated the implications ofSenghors term in The Uses of Diaspora, Social Text 66 (2001): 646.

24. This broader argument has been elaborated most fully by Robin Kelley inHammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (1990),especially Chap. 5, Negroes Ain BlackBut Red!: Black Communists and theCulture of Opposition, 92116.

25. On its adoption into the vernacular during this period, see for exampleThomas, 447, 465; and Salud!: Poems, Stories and Sketches of Spain byAmerican Writers, ed. Alan Calmer (1938).

26. This situation led to a number of moments of absurd rhetorical contradic-tion. For example, at the Feast of the Assumption in Seville on 15 Aug 1936, thereligious invective of one monarchist poet named Jose Mara Peman was forcefulenough to obscure his view of the Moroccan soldiers in Francos Army of Africa,which was at that very moment battling its way toward Madrid. Twenty centu-ries of Christian civilization are at our backs, he intoned, even describing thewar being fought with North African troops as a new war of independence, anew Reconquista, a new expulsion of the Moors! (qtd in Thomas 403).

27. Regarding literary strategies of cushioning and contextualization (aimingat mediating the readers experience of a foreign word with a definition or contex-tual information in English), see Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest:Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (1991), 15764.

28. The volume would eventually be published as Federico Garca Lorca, GypsyBallads, trans. Langston Hughes, Beloit Poetry Journal 2 (1951). See Rampersad,386. A more recent bilingual edition is available in Federico GarcaLorca, Collected Poems, ed. Christopher Maurer (2002), 545613. In his autobio-graphy, Hughes says that he was aided by Rafael Alberti and Manuel Altolaguirrefor his translation. See I Wonder, 386.

29. See Dorothy Clotelle Clarke, Romance, and Albert B. Friedman, Ballad,in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (1974),71213, 6264.

30. To a certain extent, my argument here regarding what I have termed trans-lation on a formal level is in consonance with William Scotts insightful reading ofLetter from Spain in his recent essay on Hughes and Nicolas Guillen (5256). Inelucidating the function of translation in the correspondence between the twopoets work, Scott suggests that Hughes and Guillen both practice a poetics of

708 Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

nonrepresentational translation in which black music is used to signal inlanguage the presence of this lived experience of suffering that appears to resistbeing contained by representational language itself (44). Scott, however, does notconsider the ways that this kind of formal translation in Hughes is continually linkedto linguistic translation, as shifts in language within a particular poem are used toperform or enact this resistance to containment. (As I have argued elsewhere, onemight suggest the same thing with regard to Guillen; see my Pebbles ofConsonance: A Reply to Critics, Small Axe 17 [2005]: 146). Scott does not take upHughess own work as a translator, nor does he consider the function of Salud inLetter from Spain or Hughess bilingual poetics more broadly.

31. The original is Garca Lorca, Juego y teoria del duende, Conferenciasvol. 2 (1984), 97. On this passage, also see Nathaniel Mackey, Cante Moro, inSound States, Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. AdalaideMorris (1997), 196.

32. These are not the only such comparisons. In a 1954 review of a flamencorecording, Ralph Ellison comments that the nasal, harsh, anguished tones heardon these sides are not the results of ineptitude or primitivism; like the dirtytone of the jazz instrumentalist, they are the result of an esthetic which rejectsthe beautiful sound sought by classical Western music (99).

33. See C. Brian Morris, Son of Andalusia: The Lyrical Landscapes of FedericoGarca Lorca (1997), 321; and Ian Gibson, Federico Garca Lorca: A Life(1989), 136.

34. Juego y teoria del duende, 104.

35. Juego y teoria del duende, 105.

36. See Rampersads note, 652.

37. I am thinking of the French word semblable, so powerfully employed inBaudelaire, for which there is no English equivalent.

38. Glissant invokes the notion of an Ailleurs partage (in rather more dismis-sive terms than I am here) in Le discours antillais, 36.

39. This speech was also printed in the Volunteer for Liberty (Aug 1937).

40. The phrase accumulation by dispossession is taken from Harvey; see thechapter of that title in The New Imperialism, 13782.

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