The Harlem Renaissance – A radical expression of racial identity.

By Ava Goldson

In an English Literature Modernism module somewhere inside a Science Faculty building on Oxford Road in 2022, we are being asked to consider how much the Harlem Renaissance was a modernist movement. My lecturer notes that the likes of T.S Eliot, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield were exiles from their home countries. By choice, they left their birthplaces. Their writing grapples with questions of rejecting and embracing identity. It is non-traditional and novel work.

At the same time, in the early 20th century, a neighbourhood in New York City bubbles with an influx of new residents. First slowly, with some families moving into the area in the early 1900s, and then quickly - ‘by 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the south had moved north’. This neighbourhood reached its boiling point, the Harlem Renaissance. Most were exiles from their hometowns, but this eruption brought home an African Amer ican cultural capital. Whilst modernist in nature with its questions of identi ty, the art is preoccupied with Black identity in America, yet another departure from mainstream and traditional writings of the time. It was a movement of its own that dealt with a different set of identity issues. Houston A. Baker, writer of ‘Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance’ said, “It seems to me that Africans and Afro-Americans […] have lit tle in common with Joycean and Eliotic Projects.” Literature from this movement is doing some similar things to the writing from the modern ist movement but to label these writers as modernists doesn’t seem to be so cut and dry.

One such figure of this movement is Gwendolyn Bennett, a lesser-known figure but one of the earliest participants. She mentored young writers who grew to be significant figures of the movement such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Born in 1902 in Giddings, Texas, her parents divorced just after a move to Washington D.C. where her father kidnapped her at age seven. They moved around for her whole childhood. As well as this and despite this, she excelled at school throughout her life.

A scholar and an apparent personality (a ‘favorite at literary salons and parties’), she ended up taking classes at Columbia University. She was the first Black graduate at the Pratt Institute and was hired by Howard University to teach fine arts. During this time, she began to publish poetry, first in Crisis (1923) and in Opportunity, two of many ‘little magazines’ featuring work from writers in the Harlem Renaissance. These magazines were a true artistic revival in that the work was novel, experimental and critical. Most importantly, for a revival of a suppressed voice in literature, it regularly featured little-known artists. Bennett’s work seems to be an exploration of feminine Blackness, at once a reclamation of the quality of darkness and a rejection of the external gaze; the gaze which pins one down to definitions. It is a little like the modernist quest to escape external definition which risks an identity crisis: Eliot’s Prufrock pictures the abstract ‘eyes’ of the external gaze which leave him “sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,”. Mourning a lack of ability to self-define, Prufrock is fearful and passive. But where Eliot mourns, Bennett rejoices:

‘Night wears a garment

All velvet soft, all violet blue…

And over her face she draws a veil

As shimmering fine as floating dew…

And here and there

In the black of her hair

The subtle hands of Night

Move slowly with their gem-starred light.’ (Street Lamps in Early Spring published in Opportunity, May 1926)

Here and in other poems by Bennett, darkness is her own. ‘Night’ is a woman who evades the external gaze using softness and beauty. Hidden by the veil, she is a person self-defined by some worldly power that feels starry and wondrous. The veil itself, the thing that obscures her, is a textured part of her being that subtly reveals and obscures her hair; her ability to evade a judgmental gaze is within her control. What lies beneath the veil is equally as powerful, Maureen Honey describes this kind of work and Bennett herself as ‘self-assured, she parades through the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance with regal grace.’ Her preoccupation with the nighttime, stemming from her earliest work, Nocturne, ‘This cool night is strange/ Among midsummer days’ unveils Bennett’s grapple with identity to be one that strives to embrace and reclaim Black feminine identity away from the White World and the White literary world. Maybe it is in this reclamation of personal, racial identity where some Harlem Renaissance writers differ from the modernists…

Gwendolyn Bennett won a scholarship to study in Paris aged 23, where she moved and became an exile for a while in Europe. On her return she co-edited Fire!! Magazine and became assistant editor at Opportunity. Her father was then killed in a subway accident, and she was made to resign from her position at Howard University when she became engaged to a medical student within the university. In the mid-1930s, he died, and Bennett returned to Harlem. But it was too late, the arrival of the Great Depression and the FBI’s investigation into communist affiliations of Black writers stopped her from publishing for the rest of her life.

Unjustly, Bennett never got to have a full literary career. Her poems that depicted personal and literary power as a young Black woman in the 1920s are her legacy.