Does Hurston’s Buckets of “Characteristics of Negro Expression” Accurately Catch All African American Sentiments?

While Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) wrote during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance, her research provided commentary on the movement itself.

        In her analysis of African American cultural art forms, Zora Neale Hurston uses the terms “drama” and “will to adorn” distinctly as an all-encompassing attribute of African American expression. These founding principles of expression find themselves deeply immersed in Harlem Renaissance poetry, and are characteristically used to differentiate the works as uniquely African American at this time. However, much of the internal conflict that afflicted Harlem Renaissance artists is confused within these foundation principles. The merging of Eurocentric ideas, such as within Countee Cullen’s “Colored Blues Singer”, was a pivotal conflict point to African Americans’ situation within the world’s art, questioning whether blending within European tradition can be achieved without losing African American identity. Cullen’s work, which often clashed with Hughes’ ideals, still follow Hurston’s model of African American expression, and the grappling of mimicry and originality are specifically outlined by Hurston as well, showing the depth of Hurston’s anthropological research and how her analysis markedly includes Harlem Renaissance forms of expression.

The concept of drama and its inextricably connected will to adorn show themselves especially within Harlem Renaissance writing. The ability to create such rich and dynamic descriptors plays a vital role in characterizing blues and jazz poetry, shaping pictures of the newly created forms of music and exploring the varied emotions embedded in the art. A clear example of Hurston’s characterization of African American expression in the Harlem Renaissance is in Sterling Brown’s “Carbaret”. The multi-vocality of “Cabaret” mimics the musical scene at the time, often with syncopated and fused melodies. Brown uses the poetic form to explore the contrast between the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the Deep South. To create this contrast, Brown uses heavily ornamented language to describe the colorful Jazz speakeasy: “Rich, Flashy puffy-faced / … The trombone belches, and the saxophone / Wails curdlingly, the cymbals clash, / The drummer twitches in an epileptic fit”. Brown’s language follows the outline set out by Hurston, repeatedly using the metaphor and creating dramatic tension within the Jazz environment description. The heavy dramatization and embellishment contrasts with the bleak, parenthetical description of the post-flood South, underscoring the magnificence with the somber scene, creating an almost sarcastic characterization of the speakeasy afterwards. Instead of diverging and creating a separate ideal of expression, Harlem Renaissance poetry follows Hurston’s foundational characteristics of African American expression to expand on values.

In Hurston’s analysis of African American expression, she specifically outlines the importance of differentiating works and expression as uniquely African American. She often contrasts the rich, non-conventional style of African American expression with European style, opposing historical views that downsized the significance of African American expression and those that argued African American style mimicked European styles. The Harlem Renaissance especially dealt with the conflict of African American identity, questioning whether works or styles conformed or appealed to European audiences. The emergence of the Back to Africa movement with modernist primitivism during the Harlem Renaissance created this conflict; the perspective in many literature works at this time were viewed through the lens of European colonizers, expounding “exotic” and stereotypical views of Africa. Particularly, the new African American identity started to surround itself with outdated views of ancestral heritage, and that internal conflict of what bounds African American identity especially reveals itself in the works of Countee Cullen. Whether these new qualities of identity can be claimed as uniquely African American or that they appeal to European values created the distinct debate and contrast between Hughes and Cullen, which is also explored by Hurston.

Cullen’s “Colored Blues Singer” quite epitomizes the subtle tensions created by two diverging views explored in the Harlem Renaissance, and while Cullen’s writing may seem to exclude itself from Hurston’s understanding of African American expression, but its intentions fall under the complexities that Hurston explores with originality and imitation. Cullen’s writing, especially in “Colored Blues Singer”, follows the same curvatures of speech that Hurston characterized. The intention to describe, to provide such spontaneous generation of tension for the description of the singer, serves as the foundation behind Cullen’s writing. However, to achieve his expression, Cullen chooses to focus much of his “will to adorn” with allusions to European figures. The creation of a uniquely African American writing – one separate from all previous or permeating influence – was clear in other Harlem Renaissance writers, both in their content and use of poetic form. However, Cullen follows traditional white poetic structure and style (which stems from his professional education in white-dominated institutions, and this contrast is thoroughly explored in The Poetry Foundation’s biography/analysis of Countee Cullen, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/countee-cullen). Hurston’s analysis of expression includes this placement of African American expression in a time where intellectuals, artists, and societies were majorly surrounded by White tradition. In her analysis of originality and imitation in African American tradition, Hurston stresses the importance of mimicry to create new ideas for their community. Re-interpretation is at the heart of Cullen’s work, where Hurston points out the enveloping of White culture for African American society, and Cullen’s push for the dissolution of race/divisions by race in his poetry can be seen as a case study of Hurston’s imitation. Cullen’s work imitates White literature not to become White, but to rather revel in the artistic qualities that stem from them and repurpose their intent to apply to his own, unique writing. Hurston’s identification of African American expression in art forms creates broad themes that effectively describe various thought processes of African American artists and enables more complex understandings of artistic intent.