Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by Houston A. Baker Jr.;

Author:Houston A. Baker, Jr.; [Baker, Houston A., Jr.,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1987-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Score of “Let Us Cheer the Weary Traveller” as it appears in The of Black Folk.

Again, I am compelled to leave a mctonymic gap, a space filled by sound alone. For DuBois introduces, after his “thus,” the score and words—Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, gene me!—of an ancient African spiritual repository. Expository words thus fissure into resonant sound.

Music, in its venerability, is held to be “far more ancient than the words.” Hence, the spirituals stand as counter and deforming forms in relation not only to minstrel nonsense (they predate and give the sounding lie to such idiocy) but also to Western verbal arrangements. Each chapter of Souls is prefaced by a fragment of the score—the actual sounding music—of a spiritual as well as by a written passage from the work of a Western poet. The Western letter—Prospero’s parole—always appears first. One can veritably hear this written letter erased by the spiritual langue of Caliban’s singing. The singing is neither an exotic nor a passive absorption of an intruder’s dubious linguistic arrangements. Rather, it is a type of phaneric cultural display coequal with the narrative voice that sounds toward the conclusion of Souls:

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years. [Pp. 386–87]

Not only do we catch the incantational sounds of gorilla display, but we also hear (returning not harsh nor grating) syllables of the putatively “deformed”—sounds of those who in Aimé Césaire’s phrase are held to “have invented nothing.”48 These sounds bespeak nativity: “This land,” the narrator soundingly proclaims, “is mine by right of my having been always already here.”

Thus the sounding figurations of Caliban are discovered as script(ural) revenue of New World writing. James Baldwin once asserted during a dramatic cultural performance of his own, “He who would enter the twenty-first century, must come by way of me.”49 Similarly, DuBois’s Souls implies that any conceivable global modernism in an age where “the color line” is preeminent must be articulated through Caliban’s expressive traditions—traditions that sing a joyful song on the far side of an acknowledgment of the fictional character of “self” and “other.”

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