For the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” we reached out to a range of esteemed authors to write short essays that respond to Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.”
For more from the special folio, “On Langston Hughes’s ‘Let America Be America Again,’” you can purchase the issue here.
When we arrived in Nueva York, fleeing the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, I fell in love with poetry. Perhaps the musicality of rhymed, rhythmic language recalled my mother tongue. As I learned more English, I became an avid reader and began to dream of becoming a writer like the poets in my anthologies.
It was the early 1960s; the civil rights movement was just getting under way. On TV, dark-skin Americanos, who looked just like Dominicans, were being hosed down, attacked by dogs, excluded from lunch counters and opportunities, denied entry on the shelves of American literature. At school, none of the poems we studied were written by people like me. So although my teachers encouraged my writing, I was not convinced the American dream was possible for me.
But then, in one of our anthologies, I discovered a poem by Langston Hughes, “I, too, sing America.” As “the darker brother,” he had been sent to the kitchen of minor writers, not allowed a seat at the big table of Literature. But he vowed he would grow strong and someday he’d be at that table. He, too, would sing America. The fact that his poem was in our textbook along with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson proved that Mr. Hughes was right. His words planted a seed of hope in me that my American dream could come true too.
Fast forward sixty years, disheartened by the erosion of so many of our civil rights, increasing gun violence, violence against communities of color, staggering economic inequalities, inequalities in access to health care and voting booths, Draconian immigration laws, and devastations to our natural world affecting the most vulnerable communities, I am that young girl again, witnessing the disconnect between what I was being taught about the American dream being within everyone’s reach and the gruesome scenes of Black folks being hosed down and shot at on TV.
Once again, a Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again,” breathes grit and plants a seed of hope in me. This time, the oath is one “we, the people,” must undertake together. Especially we, the lucky ones (I did become a writer, thanks to your encouragement, Mr. Hughes), have a responsibility: to listen to those who mumble in the dark, whose starry futures are veiled, whose way to the voting booth or health clinic is blocked. “The function of freedom is to free someone else,” Toni Morrison wrote. We, the people, must come out from behind the parenthesis of cynicism and erasure and redeem the dream. Hughes’s poem is also prescient in reminding us that the rivers and mountains, the great green states require redemption, too.
And time is ever shorter. The dream, as Hughes warned (1936), is “almost dead today.” If that first Hughes poem was a personal message in a bottle, this poem is a rallying cry for this critical moment we are living.
For more from the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” you can purchase the issue here.
