This week’s choice is another nod to Black History Month: it’s “Harlem” by Langston Hughes.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Langston Hughes (1901—1967)

Poem 301. Harlem

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?

This is a short poem but it is as powerful as Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”. Its overt message asks what happens when something that is deeply desired must be postponed indefinitely. Context, however, is everything, and the context for this is the Harlem Renaissance and the ongoing suppression of black rights in America during the middle part of the 20^th century.

Putting it briefly, the Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of black culture in early 20th century New York. Black people gathered there as they fled the harsh treatment meted out in the South and other states of the USA and from the poverty of life in the Caribbean at the time. Harlem became a potent mix of talent and energy that bred new kinds of music, literature, art and fashion. For a quarter of a century in the Twenties and Thirties, Harlem recreated the identity of African-Americans and brought their creativity to the notice of white Americans who had formerly been conscious only of their status as second-class citizens, compelling their acceptance and challenging the racism and stereotypes that still bedevilled them and which the passage of time has still not totally eradicated. The cultural movement in Harlem was ultimately thwarted by race riots in the mid-1930s and the effects of the Great Depression but its ramifications reach into every part of culture.

Langston Hughes was a key figure in the Renaissance and his poems, plays and fiction examined working-class black people and showed that their aspirations, pleasures and concerns reflected those of the general population, though informed by their particular history and culture. He encouraged African-Americans and black people outside of America to take pride in their culture and creations and reject the stereotypical view of black people as uneducated and uncivilised.

This poem’s subtext queries the American Dream. Does this national set of ideals—democracy, equality and liberty and the freedom to pursue each of them—always hold true or is it a mirage, a will-o-wisp that only guides its followers to ruin?

What happens when people find that their dream is insubstantial and transient, or at least inaccessible to them, whether temporarily or permanently?

Does it desiccate and become an empty husk that remains only a memory, like a faded photograph in an album?

Perhaps it is like a festering sore, the memory becoming bloated with poisonous thoughts that cloud the purity of the original dream.

Maybe it rots like putrefying meat, its memory becoming a stench that nauseates all that scent it or perhaps it’s covered over with sugary platitudes that disguise the dream with a sickly scab of sweet nothings.

Maybe the weight of despair at the frustration of the dream causes it to slump as if depressed by a great hand.

All these responses are rather negative and passive but the final line hints that there is another response: “Or does it explode?”—might the continual postponement of joy result in an explosion as literal as setting off a bomb or a more figurative interpretation in the instigation of a movement that upsets the settled order of things so that the dream pursued can at last be fulfilled.

I like this poem because it makes you think, although it is short.

A Dream Deferred

Poem 301. Harlem

Links