Langston Hughes and the

Futures of Diaspora
Brent Hayes Edwards

This essay is an attempt to consider whether the poetics of

diaspora can provide a point of entry to a critical understanding of
globalization. This is not to imply that the terms are necessarily
commensurate, much less synonymous: on the contrary, as James
Clifford has reminded us, diasporic practices cannot be reduced
to epiphenomena of the nation-state or of global capitalism (244).
The term globalization, slippery and contested as it is, might be
considered first and foremost an attempt to name the present,
whereas the term diaspora would seem to name a relation to a
past, as a designation for the aftermath of the scattering of
a population (Denning 24). Globalization implies the imposition of
a single mode of exchange everywhereeven if that standardization is produced by and entails the proliferation of difference and
inequitywhereas diaspora foregrounds divergence, the friction
of distance, the irreducibility of the specific conditions that
produce transnational movement and transnational sensibilities.1
If diaspora can offer a critical lens into the condition of globalization, then it must be taken not merely as a comparative
social or historical phenomenon, not even only as a predicament
shared by many people or peoples who otherwise have little else
in common, but as a positive resource in the necessary rethinking
of models of polity in the current erosion and questioning of the
modern nation-state system and ideal (Boyarin and Boyarin 5).
On the one hand, this means that diaspora as a framework of
inquiry signals an alternative to the market teleology implicit in
economic conceptions of globalization.2 On the other hand, an
invocation of diaspora must also remind us, once again, that globalization is itself a historical phenomenon stretching back in many
of its key features at least to the sixteenth century.
Brent Hayes Edwards teaches in the Department of English at Columbia
University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora and the co-editor of the
journal Social Text.
doi:10.1093/alh/ajm028
Advance 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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Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

Given the historical register implicit in the term diaspora, my

title is meant to be a provocation. To invoke the futures of
diaspora should first of all raise the question of the continuing
viability of the term (at a moment when, by some accounts, the
unchecked proliferation of its use may have vitiated any critical
force it once possessed). But it should also imply a departure from
an approach that considers diaspora to be essentially a matter of
the past, stressing the work of collective memory as foundational
in an uprooted peoples relationship to a homeland.3 It is to ask
whether diaspora can be said to involve not only a relation to
deprivation and dispossession, but also a particular link to possibility and potential.
One of the most disturbing flaws in the scholarship that has
arisen in the past two decades to focus on the dynamics of diaspora
in a wide variety of new contexts is its failure to engage with the
rich and complex history of the term in its original milieu, the
Jewish intellectual tradition in the Hellenistic period. In Jewish discourse, a vision of futurity is an important component of the condition of diaspora, because it comes to be imbued with an
eschatological dimension: there arises a dialectical tension between
dispersal and return, loss and restoration, castigation and absolution,
exile and redemption.4 In fact, although it is almost always overlooked in recent new diasporas scholarship, this tension is signaled
by the deeply significant distinction that emerges in the Jewish intellectual tradition between diaspora (the Greek term appropriated as a
self-designation by Jewish communities around the Mediterranean
basin) and galut (the Hebrew term for exile).5 Often, diaspora is used
to indicate a state of dispersal resulting from voluntary migration, as
with the far-flung Jewish communities of the Mediterranean region.
In this context, the term is not necessarily laced with a sense of violence, suffering, and punition, in part because Jewish populations
maintained a robust sense of an original homeland, physically symbolized by the Temple in Jerusalem (strikingly, Jewish settlements
around the Mediterranean Sea were commonly called apoikiai, or
colonies).6 Very differently, the term galut (exile) connotes
anguish, forced homelessness, and the sense of things being not as
they should be (Wettstein 2), and is often considered to be the
result of the loss of that geographic center and imagined home with
the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.7 It is above all in
galut that there inheres an eschatological dimension, in the longing
for return and redemption.8
By sketching this history, I do not mean to suggest that the
Jewish diaspora should be considered to be a paradigm or ideal
type, as some scholars of comparative diasporas would have it.9
Diaspora is first of all a translation, a foreign word adopted in the

American Literary History

Jewish intellectual discourse of community. As such, it should

serve as a reminder that there is never a first diaspora: there is
never an originary, single dispersion of a single people, but instead
a complex historical overlay of a variety of kinds of population
movement, narrated and valuated in different ways and to different
ends. As the historian Erich Gruen has noted with regard to the
Hellenistic period, a Greek diaspora, in short, brought the Jewish
one in its wake (19). With regard to the study of the movement
of peoples under globalization in the contemporary moment, then,
this history of usage should compel us away from an understanding of the movement of groups as discrete or self-contained, and
toward a focus on the ways that the movements of groups always
necessarily intersect, leading to exchange, assimilation, expropriation, coalition, or dissension. This is to say that any study of
diaspora is also a study of overlapping diasporas.10
Instead, I am dwelling on the Jewish case in order to
highlight its consistent linking of the diasporic condition to
futurityto the prospect of return and redemption. In a more
recent, twentieth-century appropriation of diasporic discourse, it
has sometimes been supposed that Zionismthe modern, nationalist proposition of an indissoluble primacy between a people and a
homelandis the dominant or sole version of a Jewish discourse
of diasporic redemption.11 But if anything, as an invasive political
project of state-formation, Zionism is the negation of diasporic
experience, and of the eschatological valence of redemption
embedded in galut.12 In what follows, I will attempt to consider
the resonance of this futuristic quality in the discourses of diaspora
emergent in the twentieth century, particularly in the interwoven
histories (histoires entrecroisees) (Glissant 28) of the African
diaspora. It may seem especially counterintuitive to turn to the
interwar period and to the Spanish Civil War in particular, where I
will track my network of examples, because we are often told that
it is exactly the sort of internationalism at stake in the 1930s that
has been superseded by the globalization of the contemporary
period.13 At the risk of being dismissed as anachronistic, however,
I will argue that the archives of internationalism can be read for a
sensibilityor more precisely, a poeticsthat allows diaspora to
serve as a critique of the totalizing pretensions of globalization.
I will focus, in particular, on the ways that interwar internationalism might be read as a reformulation of diasporic eschatology in
the sense I have outlined, especially through a range of bilingual
or multilingual practices in literature.14
It is by now a commonplace to describe Langston Hughes as
a writer of the African diaspora. But one could with equal validity describe his work as a writerly engagement in the politics of

691

[T]he archives of
internationalism can be
read for a sensibilityor
more precisely, a
poeticsthat allows
diaspora to serve as a
critique of the totalizing
pretensions of
globalization.

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Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

capitalist globalization. For example, in his 1938 speech to the

International Writers Association for the Defense of Culture in
Paris, Hughes argued, because our world is . . . today, so related
and inter-related, a creative writer has no right to neglect to understand clearly the social and economic forces that control our
world (Writers 199). He had spent a number of months in
Spain during the previous year, working as a newspaper correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and the Cleveland Call and
Post.15 He spent most of his time in Madrid and Valencia with the
International Brigades, whose crucial role in the defense of the
republican government during the Spanish Civil War has been
well documented. About 35,000 volunteers from more than 50
countries and colonies joined in the fight against Francos invading
fascist forces. This number included 3,300 Americans, of which
some 100 were African Americans.16
Hughes was struck by the implications of the Brigades as an
integrated fighting force that brought African Americans into
contact with what he called wide-awake Negroes from various
parts of the world including South Americans, Caribbeans, and
Africans (Negroes 156).17 His writings about the black volunteers do not attempt to force them into a common project, but
instead emphasize the extraordinary variety of their paths to the
anti-fascist struggle. Over and over again, he emphasizes individual faces, individual stories: the brownskin boy from the Canary
Islands in a red shirt and a blue beret (322) whom Hughes and
the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen meet on the train across the
border; the Puerto Rican from Harlem who recognizes Hughes at a
cafe in Barcelona; the ebony-dark young man, a Guinean,
Hughes speaks to on the beach in Valencia (329); the crowd of
several Spanish-speaking Negroes and a colored Portuguese at a
nightclub (323); the Cuban boxer Raul Rojas just back from the
front lines at Belchite (378); a French Algerian Negro named
Frazal (383); the Cuban musician El Negro Aquilino, playing
jazz in besieged Madrid; and dozens and dozens of named African
Americans (352). Who were they? Hughes asked rhetorically.
I put their names in my notebooks. Yet their names cannot tell us
who they really were, nor could any additional pages I might write
about them (384). But, for Hughes, the very fact of such disparate
engagement in a voluntary struggle was a clear sign of the arrival
of 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 pose
the African diaspora in a romantic, masculine context of internationalist anti-fascism, but precisely because the Spanish Civil War
undercut any such identification. For there were men of color

American Literary History

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 of
Moroccan soldiers.18 The first modern airlift of troops involved
these Africanos, delivered by Nazi planes across the Mediterranean
region to Seville at the end of that summer.19 Hughes came to
write about the complicated dynamics of race, color, and colonialism in the war, and aimed at portraying black Loyalist soldiers and
Moorish fascist soldiers as ironic adversaries who were nonetheless 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 colored
people ranging from light dark to dark white. Now the Moors
have come again to Spain with the fascist armies as cannon
fodder for Franco. But, on the loyalist side there are many
colored people of various nationalities in the International
Brigades. I want to write about both Moors and colored
people. (Hughes Finds Moors 161)
This is to say that Hughes wanted to explore the tensions of interactions in the European metropole between transnationally mobile
African Americans and what one might call the subjects of the
new new diasporas: colonial Africans and Asians conscripted
into European conflicts. He especially wanted to consider the ways
war propaganda and nationalist discourses on both sides were
being racialized, in a heated African invasion that had raised the
specter 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 the
Afro-American and for the Volunteer for Liberty, the organ of the
International Brigades.21
Biographer Arnold Rampersad has argued that Hughess art
seemed to decline in his most radical years (339), and goes so far
as to characterize the poems he wrote during his stay in Spain as
proletarian doggerel (351). But I want to return to one of the
poems Hughes wrote in 1937. Rather than either applauding the
works revolutionary commitment or decrying its insufficient artistry, I read it to take seriously the poets contention, in the speech
in Paris he gave the following year, that the best ways of
word-weaving, of course, are those that combine music, meaning
and clarity in a pattern of social force (Writers 198 99).
In November 1937, Hughes published an epistolary ballad
called Letter from Spain (subtitled Addressed to Alabama) in

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Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

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 of
the date would seem to imply a metonymic reach, the aim of the
poem to stand in for a broader set of circumstances. Later, Hughes
would explain that he wrote the poem to try to express the feelings
of some of the Negro fighting men with regard to the irony of the
colonial Moors fighting for Franco (I Wonder 353), and the poem
is 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 here
Fightin against the free?
He answered something in a language
I couldnt understand.
But somebody told me he was sayin
They nabbed him in his land
And made him join the fascist army
And come across to Spain.
And he said he had a feelin
Hed never get back home again. (156)
Historian Robin Kelley, quoting only the first stanza, comments brusquely 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 and
the North African, it is articulated through comparison rather than
identity (He was just as dark as me). The initial rhetoric of recognition in the encounter is tempered by incommensurabilityfirst of
all, due to linguistic difference: He answered something in a
language/I couldnt understand. If this encounter marks a diasporic
instance, it implies that a diaspora is necessarily translated and
mediated (although the interpreter here goes unidentified: somebody
told me he was sayin).23
In the subsequent stanzas, the letter writer reads the Moors
confusion and homesickness to be auspicious, the burgeoning of
an anti-colonial consciousness. The poem continues:
He said he had a feelin
This whole thing wasnt right.

American Literary History

He said he didnt know

The folks he had to fight.
And as he lay there dying
In a village we had taken,
I looked across to Africa
and seed foundations shakin.
Cause if a free Spain wins this war,
The colonies, too, are free
Then something wonderfulll happen
To them Moors as dark as me.
I said, I guess thats why old England
And I reckon Italy, too,
Is afraid to let a workers Spain
Be too good to me and you
Cause they got slaves in Africa
And they dont want em to be free. (15657)
In the drab surroundings of a military triage tent, the soldiers prediction of foundations shakin in the colonies seems a bit brighteyed, even grandiose. This is the moment in the poem that edges
closest to a black internationalism, one capable of imagining
Morocco linked to sub-Saharan Africa beginning to reject the
impositions of European colonization. Of course, the poem figures
this articulation of the diaspora in the way that the letter writer
mis-writes seed in the place of the English simple past saw
in 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 not
simply an appeal to a popular audience in the US; it also makes
the political point that the common sense possessed by
oppressed people gives them an appropriate experiential basis for
understanding international politics (202).24
But it is crucial to recognize that this interpretation, triumphant
as it would seem, cannot be communicated to the Moorish soldier,
as he lay there dying. The poem concludes on a note of radical
difference, with even the simplest communicative gesture falling
flat. Stirred by his reverie, the African American speaks again:
Listen, Moorish prisoner, hell!
Here, shake hands with me!

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Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

I knelt down there beside him,

And I took his hand
But the wounded Moor was dyin
And he didnt understand.
Salud,
Johnny (157)
The extended hand, that is, signals the African-American soldiers
attempt to translate his epiphany into a gesturea handshake
emerging out of the vision of those colonial foundations shakin.
It is not quite as grand as an offer of alliance politics, as Nelson
would have it, but it is certainly an attempt to exchange mutual
recognition and respect in the context of the differential exploitation of peoples of African descent (202).
The most striking word in the poem is the closing salutation
before the signature: Salud. The Spanish word is not commonly
used as a greeting (like salut in French), but was adopted as a habitual, even ritual, salutation during the war among the republican
forcesas Hughes pointed out elsewhere, it was the word with
which the loyalists greet one another, and in this sense carried
nearly as much weight as another well-known catch phrase of the
period, No pasaran (They shall not pass) (Pittsburgh 189).25
If one reads it as salvation, Salud serves to index a watchword from the violent ideological struggles in Spain over the
valences of Catholicism. Whereas the loyalists hailed each other
with Salud, Francos nationalists were just as keen to claim a
Christian heritageeven as they took the country with a largely
North African, Muslim army.26 Addressed to Alabama, Salud here
is a reminder that the vernacular idiom must be understood to be a
place of crucial ideological work, the site of interminable
translations among these valences (Rafael xv).
The other meaning of Salud is health (both as a concept
and as a salutation or toast: to your health). And, in this light,
we must also hear in the term the African Americans attempt to
translate his encounter with the Moor in the simplest sense of the
word translation: the miming of the responsibility to the trace of
the other in the self (Spivak, Politics 179). To sign off wishing
health to his Brother at home is also, subtly, to point at what
cannot be helped in the encounter, what cannot be changed: that
the North African is dying. It takes a term for what cannot be
passed over in the hospital handshakesalubrity, salvation, and
solidarityand sends it back home. The poem forges and seals
a multiplicity of languages into a single idiom, and thus

American Literary History

commemorates the singularity of the encounter (Derrida,

Shibboleth 325). Letter from Spain thus strives to instantiate
diasporic responsibility in the strong sense: neither by condemning
nor absolving, but by attempting to attend toand embrace, and
carry homethe alterity of the other. Of course, it is crucial to
add that the letter does not sign off with, say, Arabic (i.e. bisahtak,
to your health, or simply sahha, health), which would simply
fix that alterity as an essence. Diasporic responsibility can only be
signaled here at a distance, in the specific instance of encounter,
through the specific interface of communication: the war in Spain
and the particular Spanish idiom it engenders.
But this is to assume that Salud is written in Spanishthat
one can know in the final analysis [en dernie`re instance] how to
determine rigorously the unity and identity of a language, the
decidable form of its limits (Derrida, Des Tours 173, 217). The
word is not cushioned or contextualized (except by its position as
the closing salutation in a letter), nor indeed is it italicized to
indicate that it is a foreign word.27 I am suggesting, in other
words, that the singular idiom of Salud is grafted into the letter
in a manner not just to carry over and commemorate that singular
instance in Spain, but also and thereby to transform the contours
of English, and of brotherhood at home.
Of course, we read the richness of this specific poetic
instance above all in a layering of readings (that is, we read the
brother at home reading the soldiers reading of the encounter
with the Moor, in which they each attempt and fail to read the
others attempts at communication). Whether interlingual or not, this
effect still involves a procedure that has something to do with translation. Although translation necessarily involves domestication, it
does not necessarily thereby reify the lexicon of the home or target
language: on the contrary, it can also decenter or redirect that
lexicon (Venuti 82). As Maurice Blanchot puts it, translation is
transformational because the translator comes to possess the home
or target language sur un mode privatif et riche cependant de cette
privation quil lui faut combler par les ressources dune autre
langue, elle-meme rendue autre en loeuvre unique ou` elle se rassemble momentanement (in a mode that is privative and yet rich
with this privation, which the translator must fill using the resources
of another tongue, itself rendered other in the unique work where it
is momentarily gathered) (72).
Critics who disparage this poem as maudlin have not given
sufficient attention to the ethical subtlety of Salud in its last lines
(Rampersad 351). But the charge also bespeaks a dissatisfaction
with the poems ballad form: Letter from Spain is maudlin, that
is, due to its recourse to a cloying meter and rhyme scheme that

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Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

would seem to simplify and sentimentalize the encounter it records.

But there may be a different reason that the poem risks its particular
music. While he was in Spain, Hughes was not only writing his own
poetry but also translating. During the months in the fall of 1937
when he wrote Letter from Spain, he was working on a version of
Federico Garca Lorcas Gypsy Ballads (1928).28 We might hear in
Hughess adoption of the ballad form in the Letter an attempt to
adopt the mode of the 1928 book by Garca Lorca, who was one of
the best-known casualties of the Civil Warand thus another
attempt to translate, on yet another register. The formal choice simultaneously reminds us of Hughess contention that word-weaving
involves not just clarity and social force, but also a certain practice of music (Writers 19899).
It is important to recognize the discontinuity even at this
apparent level of correspondence. The original title of Garca
Lorcas book is Primer romancero gitano (First Collection of
Gypsy Ballads), and the poems in the book, vivid and powerful
portraits of Andalusia, are adaptations of the classic Spanish form
of the romance, an octosyllabic verse in which the even-numbered
lines rhyme with the same assonance. Although sometimes referred
to in English as a ballad or Spanish ballad, this form differs
markedly from the sing-song of the alternating quatrameter and trimeter lines of the ballad stanza in English employed by Hughes in
Letter from Spain.29 The similarities are associative and contextual rather than formal: both romances and ballads are vernacular
modes 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 of
the folk ballad, writes that as appropriated in black culture, it is
geared to tell a story with economy, without sentimentality, and
often with a pronounced sense of the tragic (221). Garca Lorca
likewise connects the romance with storytelling and with a particular kind of suffering: regarding The Gypsy Ballads, he writes that
the poems are infused with
anguish [ pena], dark and big as the summer sky, which
percolates through the bone marrow and the sap of trees and
has nothing to do with melancholy, nostalgia, or any other
affliction or disease of the soul, being more heavenly than
earthly. Andalusian anguish, which is the struggle of the
loving intelligence with the incomprehensible mystery that
surrounds it. (qtd in Maurer xxxviii)
He liked to say that he considered anguish [ pena] to be the
protagonist of the book, and called one character (Soledad

American Literary History

Montoya in the Romance de la pena negra [Ballad of the Black

Anguish]) the personification of anguish with no solution (qtd
in Gibson 136). Both romances and ballads, then, deal with hurt,
not so much physical injury as spiritual deprivation and ill-fated
love; both involve a poetics of irredeemable loss.
A number of critics have commented on Garca Lorcas
fondness for what Christopher Maurer terms stylization, the
deliberate reference to other art forms or to the work of other
artists (with a poem titled a song [cancion] or a theory
[teora], for instance), in an allusion so persistent that it inscribes
the work within another, secondary allusive system (Maurer xli).
In other words, if Hughess epistolary poems allude to Garca
Lorca, they allude to writing that is already itself allusive, already
itself pointing elsewherein this case, to the folk culture of
Andalusia, the region of southern Spain associated both with
gypsy culture and flamenco, and with the Moorish occupation of
the country during the middle ages. So this poetics of an encounter
of African others during the Spanish Civil War makes reference to
a prior poetics of otherness within Spain itself, a literature of the
recurrent mystery of alterity in which, as one critic puts it,
what we think we recognize is often undercut by what we cannot
decipher (Morris 313). One might term this allusion a species of
translation on a formal level. What Hughes finds in Garca Lorca
is a poetics that continually strives to figure absolute otherness,
using abrupt shifts in register, tone, and image to force the reader
into a confrontation with alterity.30
Interestingly, if in Garca Lorcas writing even the guitar
weeps for distant/things [llora por cosas/lejanas] (Guitar
100 101), one of the recurrent figures for that distance turns out to
be the New World, and specifically the black cultures of the
Americas. In one letter, he refers cryptically to his Poema del cante
jondo (Poem of the Deep Song), a series of poems that take up the
modes of flamenco singing, as an American puzzle (qtd in Morris
183). In his most famous essay, the extraordinary 1933 Play and
Theory of the Duende, Garca Lorca compares the flamenco
singing 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 de
los Peines leaped to her feet, tossed off a big glass of
burning liquor, and began to sing with a scorched throat:
without voice, without breath or color, but with duende. She
was able to kill all the scaffolding of the song [matar todo el
andamiaje de la cancion] and leave way for a furious, enslaving duende, friend of sand winds, who made the listeners rip

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Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

their clothes with almost the same rhythm as do the blacks of

the Antilles when, in the lucum ritual, they huddle in heaps
before the statue of Santa Barbara [que haca que los oyentes
se rasgaran los trajes, casi con el mismo ritmo con que se
los rompen los negros antillanos del rito lucum apelotonados ante la imagen de Santa Barbara]. (Play 53, translation modified)31
Langston Hughes also saw Pavon perform while he was in Spain,
and tellingly he also draws a connection between flamenco and
New World black expression, now to the blues:
Shortly, without any introduction or fanfare, she herself sat
up very straight in her chair and, after a series of quavering
little cries, began to half-speak, half-sing a soleato moan,
intone and cry in a Gypsy Spanish I did not understand, a
kind of raw heartbreak rising to a crescendo that made half
the audience cry aloud with her after the rise and fall of each
phrase. . . . This plain old woman could make the hair rise on
your head, could do to your insides what the moan of an
air-raid siren did, could rip your soul-case with her voice. I
went to hear La Nina many times. I found the strange, high
wild crying of her flamenco in some ways much like the
primitive Negro blues of the deep South. The words and
music were filled with heartbreak, yet vibrant with resistance
to defeat, and hard with the will to savor life in spite of its
vicissitudes. (I Wonder 332 33)32
Again, as in Letter from Spain, these connections are posited
not at the level of identity (that is, a direct musical filiation
between flamenco and blues) but at the level of a formal parallel:
both musics privilege the point where the voice pushes beyond
itself, scorching or ripping its technical qualities to find
another register of expression, a register Nathaniel Mackey has
termed an eloquence of another order, a broken, problematic,
self-problematizing eloquence (195).
In Garca Lorcas romances, that breaking or doubleness is
pursued through a writing that attempts to meld the transport of
lyric into the traditional narrative of the folk form.33 In Hughess
Letter from Spain, as a sort of translation of that formal effect in
Garca Lorca, it is sought not only through the incongruity
between the epistolary and the musical, but also in the shift
between English and Spanish, between the intimacy of black
southern vernacular and the peculiarity of that grafted idiom,
Salud. Garca Lorca argues in Play and Theory of the Duende

American Literary History

that the duendeas the term in flamenco for that haunting force
or bedeviling muse that grants inspiration at the moment of
collapseenjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of the well
[los bordes del pozo], and that in that struggle, the duende
wounds. In the healing of that wound, which never closes, he
continues, lies the strangeness [lo insolito], the invented quality
of a mans work (58, translation modified).34 It is through the
open wound that the duende draws near the sites where forms
fuse together into a yearning [se funden en un anhelo] superior to
their visible expression (59).35 In Letter from Spain, one might
suggest that the foreign language functions to open a wound in
this exact sense, in the interest of indexing that greater longing.
If Letter from Spain seems all too schematic, even dogmatic, in its scrupulous instancing of an ethics of diaspora through
an emblematic face-to-face encounter, one should recall that
Hughes employs a bilingual poetics to very different ends in some
of his other Spanish Civil War poems. I will briefly consider one
other 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 uniform
Or a nurse in a clean white dress
But death with steel in your brain,
Powder burns on your face,
Blood spilling from your entrails,
And you didnt laugh
Because there was no laughter in it.
You didnt cry PROPAGANDA either.
The propaganda was too much
For everybody concerned.
It hurt you to your guts.
It was real
As anything you ever saw
In the movies:
Moonlight. . . .
Me caigo en la ostia!
Bombers over
Valencia. (306)
The poem encapsulates an insufficiency of response, the inadequacy of language to speak to the experience of death in war.

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Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

With its use of simple sentences and its address to a second person
you, the poem attempts to project the reader into the imagination
of a death in which one is disallowed the solace or pretension of
any secondary significance (whether heroism, humor, or propaganda) that would transcend or alleviate the banality of physical
suffering. The poem eschews enjambment with the exception of
its conclusion, where a simple sentence (It was real) is distended
from a stark declaration into a more ambiguous comparison: It
was real/As anything you ever saw/In the movies. The realism of
the moment breaks or exceeds our expectations of the real to the
degree that it is only comparable to the extreme artifice of cinema.
Moonlight in Valencia recalls Letter from Spain in its
recourse to Spanish as a means of marking the singularity of
idiom and historical context. The wound in form effected by the
linguistic shift is, here, the only way to index that singularity. One
might go so far as to claim that in Hughess work, formal discontinuity and disjuncture are the paradigmatic indexical effect (recall
for instance that in the passage from Hughess autobiography
quoted earlier, if Pastora Pavons voice is remarkable in its intensity, part of that power is its ability not just to penetrate the soulcase but also to reference the penetrating environment of war: she
sings with the moan of an air-raid siren).
At the same time, the two poems strive to instance that effect
at starkly different registers. Rather than the staging of diasporic
incommensurability through imbedded reading practices in Letter
from Spain in Moonlight in Valencia we are left with a host
of questions that seem simpler, if more perplexing: just who is
speaking here? How does one come to terms with this poetics of
direct address, which seems at once to tug the reader into the
singularity of that past scene (It hurt you to your guts) and to distance the reader irrevocably outside its blunt artifice (as precisely a
you that could not have experienced this death)? In coming to
terms with these questions, of course, one is forced to wonder
about the interjected Spanish: is it the same speaker, exclaiming in
another language to mark a mortal woundinga yearning
towards alterity, in other words, that registers the sole and singular
idiom of that experience of moonlight in Valencia? Or is it another
voice, one never tied down to a speaking subject: an invasive,
other voice, overriding, possessing the speakers voice and breaking its tongue, finding inspirationthe tone of that singular
momentin that breaking, in a tearing of the simple-sentence
English address that is something like a parallel to the formal
tearing of duende in flamenco? Or, quite differently, is it instead
the you who speaks here, who transgresses the space of address
with the exclamation of your singular, untransferable suffering?

American Literary History

In the notes to Hughess Collected Poems, the Spanish phrase

Me caigo en la ostia! is glossed with a translation in to English: I
feel it in my bones!36 This is clearly incorrect (the word for
bones is huesos). In fact, the line is an extremely vulgar
exclamation that takes liberties with the rhetoric of Catholicism.
Me caigo en la ostia! means literally I fall into the host, the
eucharistic bread in the Catholic communion ceremony (ostia here
is misspelled or rendered phonetically; the word is normally
written hostia). To an English-language reader who has looked up
the words, this might come across as an appropriateeven passionatephrase to invoke at the moment of mortal suffering. In fact,
although, the phrase is a phonetic elision of a common oath that is
much more obscene: Me cago en la hostia!, or literally I shit on
the host. (This tempering is not unfamiliar in English: it is akin to
saying Shoot! instead of Shit! or more precisely, Gosh darn
it! in the place of God damn it!). That is, as an interjection, the
elided curse bespeaks the altogether mundane obscenity of death
in 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 differently
to invect a discourse of the transcendental.
The poetics of diaspora is above all the task of instancing
such a yearning of the particular, taking the measure of its
distances. To read a diaspora means to strive to move between
these levels, to activate the interval between them. One might
suggest that in this poetics, such an invectiona speaking against
the grain of Christian salvation in particularis the way that the
discourse of the African diaspora translates the eschatological
content carried by the term galut in the Jewish tradition, and refigures it into what may be the only form (elsewhere, otherwise,
against the grain) of an ethics that eschews grounding in a
prior transcendental. I do not mean that this effect somehow captures the exact force bound up in galut. On the contrary, in translating the eschatological quality of diaspora, the poems transform
the meaning of redemption, in a manner that may be instructive
for an understanding of diaspora as a critical lens into the condition of globalization. In Letter from Spain, as I have pointed
out, the exchange between the African American and the North
African fails to result in any sort of internationalist collaboration
much less salud in the sense of salvation. The closing salutation
Salud is, more simply, a sign of the speakers accommodation to
the idiom of the encounter, sent home. It does not indicate some
sort of redemption of that home (African-American) audience,
of course, but it does use the trace of the encounter in Spain to

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Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

announce a potential internationalist solidarity shared among

African Americans. And, in this sense, Hughess poem attempts to
produce the same effect as his speeches and articles about Spain
in the African-American press, which call for solidarity and internationalist consciousness.
There is another level of transformation implicit in Hughess
discourse of diaspora. If it is not exactly a matter of redemption,
neither is it exactly a matter of return. Although it necessitates
transnational mobility and involves a negotiation of African heritage, diaspora here involves an encounter among similars37
(just as dark as me, as the poem puts it) in a place that is
home to neitherin other words, in what Edouard Glissant
would call a shared elsewhere.38 In July 1937, on his way to
Spain, Hughes gave a brief speech at the Second International
Writers Congress in Paris that is one of his most memorable
public interventions. He told an audience including luminaries
such 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 a
representative of the Negro peoples of America, and the poor
peoples of Americabecause I am both a Negro and poor. We
are the people, Hughes proclaimed, who have long known in
actual practice the meaning of the word Fascismfor the
American attitude towards us has always been one of economic
and social discrimination (Too Much 221).39 Hughes
denounced the spread of fascism on a world scale, and then
spoke of the significance of the crowd gathered before him
which some might have dismissed as only a meeting of writers.
Why was there such intense, worldwide political persecution of
writers and activists? he asked, naming the Indian Raj Anand, the
Haitian Jacques Roumain, and the African-American Angelo
Herndon, among others. It was because the reactionary and
fascist forces of the world were fully aware that such writers and
activists
represent the great longing that is in the hearts of the darker
peoples of the world to reach out their hands in friendship and
brotherhood to all the white races of the earth. The Fascists
know that we long to be rid of hatred and terror and oppression, to be rid of conquering and being conquered, to be rid
of all the ugliness of poverty and imperialism that eat away
the 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),

American Literary History

the passage offers something like a discourse of racial diaspora.

Yet, it closes with a seeming conundrum, which it is precisely the
coalition among people of colorwhat today would be termed
the global Souththat represents the end of race. It is tempting
to hear end in both senses of the word: that is, if it means the
abolition or overcoming of racial logic (and the persecution
race enables), it also seems to mean the goal or aim of that very
same logicfor it is precisely through race consciousness (the
alliance of the darker peoples of the world) that it is possible to
imagine a future of universal friendship and brotherhood.
Clearly, this discourse of diaspora is inflected by its moment
above all in its complex negotiation with the discourse of international communismand yet it is a stance that still resonates
today, in the current conjuncture of neo-imperialism, in which
accumulation by dispossession continues to be justified by blatant
racism.40 Again, this is neither redemption nor return, but it is a
political stance that finds in diaspora the ground of a critique of
globalization. It is a critique without guarantees, however. Like the
poem, it represents its end in a gesture: a longing to reach out
hands to shake.

Notes
1. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (2003), 72, and
especially Stuart Hall, The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,
Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the
Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (1991): 28 29, in which Hall
reminds us that, in Marx, capitalism advances not simply through homogenization
but on contradictory terrain. The phrase the friction of distance comes from
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (2003), 94, where he argues that in capitalist
accumulation, a space economy emerges as an attempt to minimize the effects
of geographical distance on global exchange.
2. On the teleology of the market as the master narrative of globalization, see
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern
World (2003), 48.
3. For other versions of this argument, see Khachig Tololyan, Rethinking
Diaspora(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 and
Exiles: Varities of Jewish Identity, ed. Howard Wettstein (2002), 18.
4. See for instance Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Exile and Expulsion in Jewish
History, in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391 1648, ed.
Benjamin Gampel (1997), 5; Walter Brueggemann, A Shattered Transcendence?
Exile and Restoration, Biblical Theology: Problems and Perspectives. In Honor

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Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

of J. Christiaan Beker, ed. Steven J. Kraftchick, Charles D. Myers, Jr, and Ben
C. Ollenburger (1995).
5. Diaspora is a Greek word used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of
the Hebrew Torah completed around 250 BCE). Much new diasporas scholarship
tends to assume that diaspora translates a range of Old Testament Hebrew words
relating both to scattering and to exile. However, as scholars of the Hellenistic
period have long pointed out, the Greek word never translates the important
Hebrew words for exile (such as galut and golah). In fact, the concordances to
the Septuagint indicate that diaspora mainly translates derivations of the Hebrew
root pvtz (disperse), in passages that describe processes of scattering, separation, 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 of
the 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. And
see the relevant entries regarding instances of the Greek diaspeirein and diaspora
in the Septuagint in Edwin Hatch and Henry A. Redpath, A Concordance to the
Septuagint and Other Greek Versions of the Old Testament (Including the
Apocryphal Books) (1998), which lists the Hebrew terms translated by those Greek
words. For a summary of this issue, see my entry for Diaspora in Keywords of
American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (2007).
6. See Gruen, 2627; James M. Scott, Exile and the Self-Understanding of
Diaspora Jews in the Greco-Roman Period, Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and
Christian Conceptions, ed. James M. Scott (1997), 18993; Yerushalmi, 7.
7. As Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson explains, Only the loss of a political-ethnic
center 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 indispensable
starting points include Yitzhak Baer, Galut (1947); Arnold M. Eisen, Galut: Modern
Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming (1986); Diaspora: Exile and
the 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 a

History of Overlapping Diasporas, American Historical Review 100 (1995): 786
87; 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 the
writings of W.E.B. Du Bois as he edged toward the founding of the Pan-African
movement in 1919. In one article, he wrote that the African movement means to
us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of race
effort and the recognition of a racial fount. . . . [T]he ebullition of action and
feeling that results in an amelioration of the lot of Africa tends to ameliorate the
condition of colored peoples throughout the world. Du Bois, Africa,
Colonialism, and Zionism, The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric
Sundquist (1998), 639 40.

American Literary History

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, Modern
Judaism 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 Global
Solidarity? 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 call
for an attention to what he terms bilanguaging in his Local Histories/Global
Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000): The
celebration of bi or plural languaging is precisely the celebration of the crack in
the global process between local histories and global designs, between mundialization and globalization, from languages to social movements, and a critique of
the idea that civilization is linked to the purity of colonial and national monolanguaging (250). My example may also seem to be reminiscent of the recent
work of Doris Sommer, as in Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education
(2004). But Sommer tends to argue for the use of bilingualism in a national
context: she suggests that in a multicultural society, bilingual instances (especially
jokes) can serve as a useful approach to the training of citizen-subjects in ethical
responses to strangeness (74).
15. See Michael Thurston, Bombed in Spain: Langston Hughes, the Black
Press, and the Spanish Civil War, The Black Press: New Literary and Historical
Essays, ed. Todd Vogel (2001), 140 58.
16. The black volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigades came to Spain at the
beginning 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 invasion of Ethiopia the year before, in a fascinating dynamics of detour: as one
soldier put it famously, This aint Ethiopia, but itll do. See the collection of
materials from the Lincoln Brigades Archives at Brandeis University in African
Americans in the Spanish Civil War, ed. Danny Duncan Collum (1992), as well
as Robin D.G. Kelley, This Aint Ethiopia, But Itll Do: African Americans
and the Spanish Civil War, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black
Working Class (1994), 124, 136; and Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston
Hughes, 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 what
seemed to them very good pay. Francos personal bodyguard consisted of
Moorish soldiers, tall picturesque fellows in flowing robes and winding turbans
(I Wonder 350). Other contemporary coverage includes Thyra Edwards, Moors
in 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).

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21. Rampersad, 339. Although Negroes in Spain was never published, Hughes
drew 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 (along
with two of Hughess other epistolary ballads from the period) that was published
in the Daily Worker in Jan 1938; see Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering
the Poetry of the American Left (2003), 2045.
23. Leopold Sedar Senghor suggests that the African diaspora is structured in
decalage in his Problematique de la Negritude, Liberte III: Negritude et
civilisation de luniversel (1977), 274. I have elaborated the implications of
Senghors term in The Uses of Diaspora, Social Text 66 (2001): 64 6.
24. This broader argument has been elaborated most fully by Robin Kelley in
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (1990),
especially Chap. 5, Negroes Ain BlackBut Red!: Black Communists and the
Culture of Opposition, 92116.
25. On its adoption into the vernacular during this period, see for example
Thomas, 447, 465; and Salud!: Poems, Stories and Sketches of Spain by
American Writers, ed. Alan Calmer (1938).
26. This situation led to a number of moments of absurd rhetorical contradiction. For example, at the Feast of the Assumption in Seville on 15 Aug 1936, the
religious invective of one monarchist poet named Jose Mara Peman was forceful
enough 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 centuries of Christian civilization are at our backs, he intoned, even describing the
war being fought with North African troops as a new war of independence, a
new Reconquista, a new expulsion of the Moors! (qtd in Thomas 403).
27. Regarding literary strategies of cushioning and contextualization (aiming
at mediating the readers experience of a foreign word with a definition or contextual 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, Gypsy
Ballads, trans. Langston Hughes, Beloit Poetry Journal 2 (1951). See Rampersad,
386. A more recent bilingual edition is available in Federico Garca
Lorca, Collected Poems, ed. Christopher Maurer (2002), 545613. In his autobiography, Hughes says that he was aided by Rafael Alberti and Manuel Altolaguirre
for 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),
712 13, 62 64.
30. To a certain extent, my argument here regarding what I have termed translation on a formal level is in consonance with William Scotts insightful reading of
Letter from Spain in his recent essay on Hughes and Nicolas Guillen (5256). In
elucidating the function of translation in the correspondence between the two
poets work, Scott suggests that Hughes and Guillen both practice a poetics of

American Literary History

nonrepresentational translation in which black music is used to signal in

language the presence of this lived experience of suffering that appears to resist
being contained by representational language itself (44). Scott, however, does not
consider the ways that this kind of formal translation in Hughes is continually linked
to linguistic translation, as shifts in language within a particular poem are used to
perform or enact this resistance to containment. (As I have argued elsewhere, one
might suggest the same thing with regard to Guillen; see my Pebbles of
Consonance: A Reply to Critics, Small Axe 17 [2005]: 146). Scott does not take up
Hughess own work as a translator, nor does he consider the function of Salud in
Letter from Spain or Hughess bilingual poetics more broadly.
31. The original is Garca Lorca, Juego y teoria del duende, Conferencias
vol. 2 (1984), 97. On this passage, also see Nathaniel Mackey, Cante Moro, in
Sound States, Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide
Morris (1997), 196.
32. These are not the only such comparisons. In a 1954 review of a flamenco
recording, Ralph Ellison comments that the nasal, harsh, anguished tones heard
on these sides are not the results of ineptitude or primitivism; like the dirty
tone of the jazz instrumentalist, they are the result of an esthetic which rejects
the beautiful sound sought by classical Western music (99).
33. See C. Brian Morris, Son of Andalusia: The Lyrical Landscapes of Federico
Garca 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 in
Baudelaire, for which there is no English equivalent.
38. Glissant invokes the notion of an Ailleurs partage (in rather more dismissive 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 the
chapter of that title in The New Imperialism, 137 82.

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