On December 26, 1931, Countee Cullen, a young Black poet, and arguably America’s most famous living Black poet at the time—a Black poet who wrote mostly in traditional forms, especially the Keatsian sonnet—received a letter from the slightly older, but still relatively young poet Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound wrote to Cullen (and to Langston Hughes as well) enclosing a letter to be delivered to the “President of Tuskegee. But as I don’t even know who now holds that post,” Pound added, “and haven’t the faintest idea whether he is the sort of man who will have sense enough to ACT on the suggestion, I am sending the copy to you as reinforcement.”Footnote 1 The letter itself was even more astonishing. In it, Pound insists that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) like Tuskegee should be teaching the work of the German Africanist Leo Frobenius, a pseudoscientific researcher whose work would, for the most part, be fully debunked within the next half century, but whose work was important to Ezra Pound as they shared similar theories on culture. Leo Frobenius, Pound claims, without irony, “has done more than any other living man to give the black race its charter of intellectual liberties,” and that “there is no reason why a black University shd. be merely a copy of a white one.”Footnote 2
One wonders what Countee Cullen thought of this curious letter. Did Ezra Pound know this was the poet whose poem “Heritage” had asked for:
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?Footnote 3
The poem is often praised as one of Cullen’s more modernist exercises. Cullen biographer Charles Molesworth writes that the poem “stands as one of Cullen’s most modernist, if modernism is characterized by the use of ironic structures as well as details.”Footnote 4 I argue that if the poem can be read as modernist, it is worth asking what that means beyond just the use of ironic structures and details, especially within the context of Black modernism, with its convergences and divergences from developments in the modernist movement(s) at large. Specifically, I suggest that there are actually at least two competing versions of this poem, and each version of the poem offers a different perspective on the possibilities open to a bourgeoning Black modernism.
This poem first appeared in the March 1925 Survey Graphic in a special issue named “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” with Black philosopher, Alain Locke, as guest editor-in-chief. In some ways, Cullen’s poem poses a question that is at the heart of this special issue of Survey Graphic, and a question that was very much on Locke’s mind: What relationship, responsibility, and reason does the African American artist have to engage with African traditions, whether ancient or contemporary? In the current cultural climate of Black America, and Harlem in particular, this question was unavoidable. Just five years previously, Marcus Garvey’s UNIA had orchestrated a grand New York convention that was a spectacular two-day affair, beginning in Harlem and ending at Madison Square Garden. As Garvey biographer Edmund David Cronon vividly describes the scene:
On the night of August 2 the delegates gathered in Madison Square Garden to hear Garvey address an estimated 25,000 Negroes, one of the largest gatherings in the history of the hall. Prominent among the delegates, and the objects of intense interest on the part of the assembled black host, were an African prince and several tribal chiefs and descendants of chiefs. Three massed bands accompanied the audience as it solemnly sang the new U.N.I.A. anthem, “Ethopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers.” The black, green, and crimson banners of the delegates were waved enthusiastically while for two hours the crowd applauded the preliminary entertainment of a quartet, several vocal soloists, and the bands. When Garvey finally stepped forward to speak, clad in a richly colored academic cap and gown of purple, green, and gold, he received a tumultuous ovation that lasted for fully five minutes.Footnote 5
Thus, African iconography, imagery, and the Black American’s relationship to the Black diaspora were very much in the cultural zeitgeist. But Garvey was a controversial figure, and not beloved by all in the Black community. For example, his calls for a return to Africa at this time were very much at odds with sociologist and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois’ views, another Pan-Africanist. Martin O. Ijere sums up their differences quite nicely and succinctly, stating that “while Garvey wanted a return to Africa, Du Bois strove for a unified Africa co-operating with its descendants everywhere.”Footnote 6 Alain Locke, for his part, was also a Pan-Africanist, but he was somewhat at a disadvantage compared to Garvey and Du Bois: “How was someone like Locke, without the histrionic personality of a Garvey or the backing of the NAACP like Du Bois going to be able to enhance African consciousness among Negro Americans? Locke’s third way was to make the study of Africa the foundation of African American education.”Footnote 7
The study of Africa, then, also becomes an important basis for African American art for Alain Locke. Indeed, the very production history of the poem “Heritage” brings up the question of the aesthetic mission and responsibility of the African American artist, and this is because the poem exists (in published form) in two very different versions, two very different versions with competing visions of how this poem should respond to the question of what a Black modernism ought to look like: on the one hand there is Countee Cullen’s more (as George Hutchinson frames it) “decadent” and “queer” vision, and on the other hand, there is Locke’s more “pagan” and “primitivist” vision for the poem (again as Hutchinson frames it), a vision that reflected Locke’s “own position on the connection between African classicism and the Negro Renaissance.”Footnote 8 In my readings of the poem, I will demonstrate that the poem can be read fruitfully in both fashions, and that each reading of the poem highlights a different way of understanding Black modernism: on the one hand it can be read as having a more decadent vision, a Black “Waste Land” “that courts decline through excess and overindulgence” as Robert Volpicelli frames it in his discussion of “Heritage”; or on the other hand it can be read “bibliographically” (an idea which will be discussed later) as it appeared in Survey Graphic as an expression of a transnational diasporic Black modernism, which is how Alain Locke most likely envisioned it.
Much has been written about the aesthetic differences between not only the older and younger writers, artists, and poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance but also between the younger members themselves, an aesthetic difference perhaps best summed up in Langston Hughes’ famous 1926 piece, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Here Hughes begins with a subtle dig at Countee Cullen, whom he describes as a poet who basically wants to be white, when he is in fact Black.Footnote 9 Hughes’ piece was in response to a piece by George Schulyer which had appeared in the Nation the previous week, and which argued that “the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon.”Footnote 10 Hughes’ contrary contention was that Black art had a responsibility to respond to the “Puritan standards” that made high-class Black people “dislike the spirituals.”Footnote 11 This fascinating phrase is worth unpacking, because it pits an American Puritan spirituality against the Black Christian spirituality that developed in antebellum America. By contrasting “Puritan standards” with “the spirituals” Hughes is looking at two ways of interpreting and culturally adopting Christianity, and for Hughes, the Black way of doing so worked as a moral and aesthetic corrective to the white, or Puritan, approach. This is to suggest that Hughes’ argument was essentially cultural and ethical and not essentialist.
The debate as to whether a Black American writer should consider herself a Black writer or just an American writer is one that has not been resolved. Perhaps the most vocal recent spokesperson on the debate has been the late Toni Morrison, who very much wanted to be thought of as Black writer. In a 2015 interview she sat for with the Guardian, we read:
Most writers claim to abhor labels but Morrison has always welcomed the term “black writer.” “I’m writing for black people,” she says, “in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio. I don’t have to apologise or consider myself limited because I don’t [write about white people]—which is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books. The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it.”Footnote 12
Black literature is about Black life and Black ways of being, and Black ways of being may not always be the same as the ways of white folk; but where does that leave a poem like “Heritage,” and how does Cullen’s vision fit into Black ways of being? And how does the African heritage play into contemporary Black American ways of being?
“Heritage” makes such a fascinating case study for these questions for the very reason that it is indeed two radically different poems that are actively in argument with each other, having two distinct canonized lives that deeply “disagree” about Black aesthetics, and make two different arguments using roughly the same text. Countee Cullen appears to have preferred the more often anthologized version of the poem, the version that would appear in his collection Color (1926) and again in his self-collected anthology On These I Stand (1947). Alain Locke, on the other hand, who worked with him closely on the poem, appears to have preferred the more “racialized” version, which would appear in the “Harlem Mecca” issue of Survey Graphic, and which Locke would publish again in The New Negro anthology and once again in the pamphlet anthology Four Negro Poets in 1927. Locke decided to do this even after Cullen had already published the revised version in his collection Color. Analyzing this dynamic, George Hutchinson concludes that the “relations between black authors and black editors are not necessarily less vexed by racial expectations than those between black authors and white editors.”Footnote 13 Indeed, Locke did “racialize” the poem in a way that Cullen would eventually rewrite (or restructure, at least), but of course Locke was “racializing” a poem whose theme was already race, Africa, and the tension between having missing memories of a haunting and unknowable homeland and being the despised motherless child of Western culture. Perhaps more pointedly, and this also speaks to Hutchinson’s research, the question as to whether the poem should be considered purely Cullen’s or collaborative is also worthy of consideration, and this is a question which I will take up in the next section of this article.
Nevertheless, in both versions, it is fair to say that Cullen is deeply uncertain of his relationship to Africa. Even though he feels a spiritual connection to it in some abstract way, he is also put off by the pagan spirituality practiced in African countries; on the other hand, accepting his adopted “white” God has also caused a crisis of Du Boisian double-consciousness in his psyche. He writes, as published in Color:
With my mouth thus, in my heart
Do I play a double part.
Ever at Thy glowing altar
Must my heart grow sick and falter,
Wishing He I served were black.Footnote 14
David Kirby, a poet and literary scholar, also sees Countee Cullen’s poem in the modernist tradition, and goes about reading it as a kind of “black Waste Land,” referencing the famous long modernist poem by T.S. Eliot.Footnote 15 This is because Cullen’s poem “deals with the same basic dilemma as the Eliot poem—that of the modern individual, aware of his rich heritage yet stranded in a sterile, conformist culture—and because it shares with that poem some similar imagery.”Footnote 16 Kirby, visiting the above verse, notes that the poet resolves this conflict by turning his personal Christ into a Black Christ who “had borne a kindred woe.” Cullen dares:
even to give You
Dark despairing features where,
Crowned with dark rebellious hair,
Patience wavers just so much as
Mortal grief compels, while touches
Quick and hot, of anger, rise
To smitten cheek and weary eyes.Footnote 17
Cullen’s Black Jesus, while thus fulfilling a human need, namely by becoming a God with whom Cullen can more deeply relate, and by thus metaphorically turning the burden of Jesus’ suffering into something analogous to the suffering of Black Americans in a land that despises and persecutes them (just as Jesus found himself in a land that despised and persecuted him), “Heritage” offers the reader an unstable—yet ultimately, the only possible—solution for the Black American’s dilemma of double-consciousness in Christianity. It is an idea Cullen was clearly preoccupied with, as he names his 1929 collection of poems Black Christ as well. The Black Christian heart and head are in conflict with the dichotomy that he cannot shake of the civilized Westerner and the barbaric African, and he is in some ways both; and yet he is also so removed from this African influence he feels pressing upon him, he is not entirely sure how to resolve the conflict. Kirby reads the word “civilized” here ironically, arguing that “the reader as well, by this point—realizes that the word in this context has rather uncharacteristically negative connotations, at least as far as the persona’s own ‘heart’ and ‘head’ are concerned.”Footnote 18
But the negative connotations are familiar from American literature, because after all, it is Huck Finn, who famously never wants to be “civilized,” and there is the ring of that here too—Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and the moral center of the novel, Jim, another famously uncivilized character:
And just like Jim must do, when rewritten not quite as “uncivilized” as one might think in Percival Everett’s reworking of Huckleberry Finn, James (2024), Cullen must play a double part as well. Both Cullen’s heart and his head are double agents, and so the complicated conflict resolves itself in the ambiguity of conflict itself. For Kirby, like Eliot’s “Waste Land,” “Heritage” is ultimately about the divided self in the modern world in decline. This is one of the proposed readings of Cullen’s poem, in its nod toward a more traditional understanding of modernism; however, when read as a collaborative work with Alain Locke, the poem becomes a much more multivalent work.
1. Locke and Cullen via Pound and Eliot
In some ways, Kirby’s reading of “Heritage” as a Black “Waste Land” is doubly inspired in the fact that it gives us a case study of an important Black modernist editor working together with an important Black modernist poet on what would become an iconic, often anthologized Harlem Renaissance poem, just as the “Waste Land” was largely a collaboration between Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. There are important points of convergence as well as divergence when investigating the composition of Cullen’s “Heritage” along with Eliot’s “Waste Land.” The first important point of convergence is that the texts of both poems are deeply unstable, in that there are several competing versions of the same poem in each instance, competing versions that suggest entirely different readings. In the case of Eliot’s “Waste Land,” the vast degree to which Pound participated in the composition of the final product has been clear ever since Valerie Eliot published the controversial publication drafts in 1971. T.S. Eliot’s first version, with the proposed title, “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” was a much longer and performative piece than the already long and performative text of the “Waste Land.” And there appears to be no actual consensus as to which poem is the better version, or even who the author is. All versions, as Richard Badenhausen has demonstrated, would necessarily have to be considered collaborative, as this was essential to Eliot’s vision; but Badenhausen also (to my mind) reveals his personal preference for a pre-Poundian version when he writes:
While readers often remark upon the dramatic elements embedded in the final version of “The Waste Land,” its original incarnation is even more dramatic, for the omitted material that had begun parts 1, 3, and 4 play out like scenes on the cinema screen. They contain dramatic tableaus with vivid landscapes, engaging characters, and lively dialogue. Depending on our aesthetic biases, we have Pound to thank or condemn for this outcome.Footnote 20
I find it fairly clear that Badenhausen (who finds the original full of “dramatic tableaus with vivid landscapes, engaging characters, and lively dialogue,” all of which are missing in the anthologized version) condemns Pound for this decision, even if he stops short of coming out and saying so directly. Not so John Harwood, who is very vocal in his support of Pound’s edits:
Though a few enthusiasts have tried to rescue something from the detritus of “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” it is generally conceded that the rejected passages are very bad indeed. The hallmarks of bad Eliot are fairly consistent: overinsistence, at times bordering on hysteria; prurience; portentousness; a shrill condemnation of the loathed Other (characteristically female, Jewish, or both). All are prominently displayed in the manuscript; as in the misogynist portrait of “Fresca.” (Ottoline Morrell?)Footnote 21
Cullen’s “Heritage” presents a similar conundrum. Any version of the poem has to be considered collaborative. Cullen originally sent it to Locke for inclusion in the “Harlem Mecca” issue of Survey Graphic, and for Locke, it was a deeply important piece, just as Eliot’s “Waste Land” was deeply important for Pound. Both Pound and Locke had been looking for a piece representative of their respective visions for poetry, Pound’s various experimentations on the one hand, and Locke’s search for an African American neo-classicism on the other, with the African really borrowing from classical West African traditions, just as European art borrowed from classical Greek and Roman traditions. As Locke biographer Jeffrey Stewart writes, “The importance of this poem to Locke was immeasurable, for it was the poem that best captured the renaissance theme he wished to encourage among the younger poets, by meditating on the meaning of the African past to Black Americans.”Footnote 22 For this reason then, the question of “heritage” was essentially the question not only at the heart of the poem but also the Survey Graphic issue at large, and for Alain Locke, Black American literature in general. Because the poem was so important for Locke, it turned into a collaborative effort between him and Cullen; Locke worked with Cullen not only as an active editor but as Braddock writes, the collection “in the Alain Locke Papers at Howard University shows how together Locke and Cullen managed the conditions of the poem’s publication.”Footnote 23 From October to November, Locke and Cullen also exchanged revisions and newly edited versions of the poem, until finally, Cullen, in exasperation claimed he was finished with the thing and it would have to appear the way it was.Footnote 24 George Hutchinson describes how collaborative the work appears to be in the archives in his discussion of the poem in the collection Publishing Blackness (2013):
A typescript copy of a never- published early version of “Heritage,” closer to the one used by Locke than by “later” published versions, can be found in the Alain Locke Papers. It provides invaluable perspective on the poem’s development and glosses on ambiguous lines in the later versions. The typescript, probably by Cullen himself, has handwritten revisions (in handwriting resembling Locke’s) that were incorporated into the version published by Locke, and yet differs from that published version as well. I would surmise that it dates to spring 1923, when Cullen and Locke were corresponding about the poem, and that Cullen and Locke together made further changes prior to its first publication.Footnote 25
Obviously, Cullen wasn’t finished with the poem, however. Because, sometime between March 1925 and the fall of that same year when his first book of poetry, Color, would appear, Cullen would change the poem into the longer piece that usually appears in current anthologies. This is to say that Cullen’s newer version appeared before the publication of The New Negro in December 1925, which had the original Survey Graphic version of the poem. This is to make the rather startling observation that two very different versions of the poem were published in official authorized versions—one a definitive anthology of the new Black poetry (the New Negro anthology) and the other the first book of verse by an emerging young Black poet (Color)—within a few weeks of each other. Which version of “Heritage” was the “real” one?
We do well to respect the wishes of the author, and so the version which Cullen published himself in his collection Color, and later in his definitive collection On These I Stand, is the version which has been taken as the definitive version, at least as far as anthologizing is concerned. The difference between what I will call the “Cullen-[preferred-]version” of “Heritage” and what I will call the “Lockean-[preferred-]version” of “Heritage” is basically the inverse between Eliot’s “He Do the Police in Different Voices” and the final, Pound-edited version of the “Waste Land” that appears in most anthologies; in short, where Pound cut, Cullen expanded.
The real structural change begins with the second stanza(s), and the change is important and instrumental to the reading of each incarnation of the poem. Here, Cullen pulls what had been the fourth stanza up to the second, thus stressing the refrain “So I lie,” which begins the stanza. Jeremy Braddock rightly makes much of this refrain. This “lying,” as Braddock sees it, not only is an act of repression regarding his real relationship to the African continent, which is to say he has no relationship to Africa and yet this feels like a repression, because there does seem to be a repressed relationship which he senses, and it is also a homosexual repression, where in the public space Cullen is not free to express his homosexuality.Footnote 26 Furthermore, Braddock reads the lie as an admission that “the clearly exoticized African imagery has itself been a ‘lie.’ ”Footnote 27 In the version he publishes in Color, Cullen combines this stanza with the one that follows, which also begins with the refrain “So I lie,” thus making it into a much longer stanza. As originally published, however, this stanza, divided into two, emphasizes the syntax of the sentence that begins it, by making the following sentence one complete stanza unto itself:
So I lie and all day long
Want no sound except the song
Sung by wild barbaric birds
Goading massive jungle herds,
Juggernauts of flesh that pass
Trampling tall defiant grass
Where young forest lovers lie
Plighting troth beneath the sky.Footnote 28
On first read the image of the young lovers promising themselves to each other in the last two lines of the stanza seems to be a single image, but the sentence can also be read with the “So I lie” connected to the “plighting troth beneath the sky,” thus the poet is pledging faith, but doing so faithlessly. Moreover, we know from Zora Neale Hurston, particularly from Mules and Men, that “lies” are tall tales from Black folklife, so Cullen’s lie is not just a lie that he alone tells but a “lie” in the sense that Africa, as a general Black American folk-myth, is indeed the exoticized fiction he is creating. Certainly by pulling this stanza up to the start of the poem, extending its length (Cullen adds an additional four lines that were not in the original at all), and by putting so much priority on this refrain, the version in Color supports Braddock’s reading, where the Cullen version puts much more emphasis on the repressed homosexuality of Countee Cullen and the homoeroticism hidden in the poem, and contrasts that with the pretense of the dubious and uncertain relationship the poet has with the African continent as well. This is especially true if we consider, as Braddock does, how Cullen restructures the poem so that the emphasis on the “hidden ember” replaces the emphasis on an absent Black Christ, which ends the Lockean version. Cullen takes what had been the third stanza of the poem and chooses it to conclude his poem. Braddock notes that the entire poem has an “insistent rhythm [that] is clearly meant to resemble African drums,” and this is especially true of this stanza, as it is the only stanza in which none of the lines employs enjambment, where each line completes the linguistic phrase, and so the reader is “forced” to read the lines in their heavy trochaic tetrameter.Footnote 29 Compare the lines preceding this stanza:
Lord, forgive me if my need
Sometimes shapes a human creed.
where “need” bleeds into “Sometimes” to the lines which follow it in the next stanza:
All day long and all night through,
One thing only must I do:
Quench my pride and cool my blood,
Lest I perish in the flood.
This pounding of the blood, in the Lockean version leads to the refrain “So I lie,” which is an escape from the jungle, of sorts, whereas in the Cullen version, Cullen never recovers from this condition of pounding blood like African drums. It ends the poem. It is what the poem has been building up to the entire time, and Cullen’s realization of this renders the final lines of the poem as a statement in the Cullen version, as opposed to a question:
The heart and head don’t know. Only the poet does. This, instead of:
Ironically, in the Cullen version, the poet in these last three lines, despite being trapped in the condition of “savagery,” uses a cool, even “civilized” tone, not identifying with either the heart or the head; transcendentally above, especially in comparison with the desperate appeal of the Lockean version to a “stubborn heart and rebel head” that worry the poet deeply.
Somehow, the two versions of the poem remain very similar but make important structural decisions that change the way we read them. Braddock suggests Cullen was probably never comfortable with the placement of his poem alongside a series of African masks, as it appears in Survey Graphic, or even accompanied by a single African mask as it appears in the New Negro. “On the contrary,” Braddock argues:
the implications of Cullen’s project (if not stated explicitly) may call into question even that impulse for serious historical study of the work. What is so crucial to understanding Cullen’s poetry is acknowledging its grounding in the absolute present. This is why, for example, the Shakespeare of “A Song of Praise” is the received image of Shakespeare proper to his cultural moment. It is also why the only African experience available to the poet is one made manifest by an expression of his own alienation-not achieved through the act of identifying with an object already carefully prepared for the occasion.Footnote 32
As biographer Jeffrey Stewart notes, Locke himself was very much responsible for this layout of the page in Survey Graphic, and if it is useful to consider a poem like the “Waste Land” as essentially collaborative, then it is also useful to consider “Heritage” as a collaborative poem as well, in that there is so much evidence that the poem was worked over by and important to both Countee Cullen and Alain Locke.Footnote 33 Thus, it is also useful to move beyond Cullen’s vision of the “absolute present” when reading “Heritage”—as even its very title suggests that the poem will address something that, admittedly, the poet finds it impossible to fully address honestly, namely the Black past and its relationship to the Black present. Finally, as a collaborative poem, and as a collaborative poem that first appeared with a very specific layout in a very specific context, it is useful to consider the poem within this collaborative context as well.
2. The Lockean version
This is to say that we limit the way we think of African-influenced African American modernism if we allow ourselves to stop here at Cullen’s impasse of the absolute present. So in this final section of the article, I would like to pull my focus away from a strict textual analysis of Cullen’s poem and read Cullen’s poem in the context within which it was originally published, namely in the “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” special issue of Survey Graphic; because, while certainly, a poem as famous and anthologized as Cullen’s deserves the larger attention it commands as a stand-alone work of art in the version preferred by its primary author, it is also interesting to consider the conversation the poem is having with the other pieces in a special issue devoted to the way that Black American artists and authors see their aesthetic legacies, especially since this version of the poem is so structurally different than the revised version which Cullen would later publish. Indeed, as a poem about the poet’s relationship to Africa, in a magazine issue about the Black American’s relationship to Africa, presented as a spread in dialogue with pictures of African masks and sculptures, the poem as a multimedia piece of work can almost be read as a different work entirely than the Cullen version, and just such an analysis is what I propose to do here. This is to move into the territory of material and ephemera studies, or the study of the transient print art artifacts that literary texts are often couched in. Of course this has been a subject of interest for modernism, which has such an important history in little magazines, but not as much work has been done within the context of Black modernism on how to read this materiality in Black modernist artifacts.Footnote 34 For example, what happens if “Heritage” is read “bibliographically,” which is to say within the concept of “bibliographic code” as suggested by Jerome McGann and George Bornstein? Bornstein writes that the “bibliographic code of a work carries part of its meaning, and that the texts that we should read and study are composed not only of words but also of material elements of display, that do for the work what speech acts do for oral language—they change it from sentence to utterance.”Footnote 35 In that spirit, it is interesting to read “Heritage” not only within its context in Color but also within the issue of Survey Graphic where it originally appeared.
To look at the table of contents of the Survey Graphic issue, one notes that the magazine had been conceived of in three sections, although there is nothing separating these sections in the magazine itself, just in the TOC. The first part is called “The Greatest Negro Community in the World”; the second part is called “The Negro Expresses Himself”; and the third part is called “Black and White—Studies in Race Contacts.” Of most interest here, for this analysis, is the second part, which is concerned with Black aesthetics.Footnote 36
The magazine already makes a bold aesthetic statement straight away. It is worth contextualizing the cover of the magazine of this special issue with other special issues Survey Graphic published. As an offshoot of the highly academic magazine The Survey, Survey Graphic was meant to appeal to a broader, more popular audience, and published what we might call today “social justice” articles as well as a series of special issues about people and places that deserved more attention; this includes “special issues following ‘nationalist ‘awakenings’ in Mexico, Ireland, and Russia,’ ” and of course, Harlem (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Survey Graphic, special issues.
Each of the issues concerning Mexico, Ireland, Russia, and Harlem in some way tries to represent the “spirit” of the region covered, whether the green for Ireland, the red, and the accompanying apocalyptic graphic from the Russian Art section of the Brooklyn Museum for the Russia issue, the Mexican iconography of the “Mexico: A Promise” issue, or through the West African inspired designs of the “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” issue. The art deco text, with the mask-like drawing of Roland Hayes’ face, brings West African aesthetics (at least as understood by Westerners), jazz, and spirituals together into a conversation about Black poetics.
The section begins with a series of portraits by German artist Winold Reiss. The portraits immediately recall the portrait on the cover of Roland Hayes. The European-African-American transcontinental conversation going on here is also worthy of note. Winold Reiss would act as the tutor to Aaron Douglass, one of the best-known visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, who had a prominent place in the design and look of The New Negro anthology, which grew directly out of the Survey Graphic “Harlem” special issue project. The Harlem Renaissance writers were aware of the way European modernists had appropriated African aesthetics, and this becomes one of the interests in Survey Graphic, especially in this second section about “Negro” aesthetics. Reiss’ portraits open the section, and Cullen’s poem “Heritage” closes the section, giving the final, conflicted word on the relationship Black Americans have to the African continent; but right before Cullen’s poem, Locke contributes his own short article on “The Art of the Ancestors.” Here Locke writes that:
Primitive African wood and bronze sculpture is now universally recognized as a “notable instance of plastic representation.” Long after it was known as the ethnological material, it was artistically “discovered” and has exerted an important influence upon modernist art, both in France and Germany. Attested influences are to be found in the work of Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Archipenko, Lipschitz, Lembruch and others, and in Paris, centering around Paul Guillaume, one of its pioneer exponents, a coterie profoundly influenced by the aesthetic of this art has developed.Footnote 37
Locke’s article is not a full article in any sense (see Figure 2); it is an introduction or companion piece to a spread of African art pieces which are displayed in the magazine as photographs on that page and over the next two pages as well; and placed alongside and among these photographs on the next two pages, we find Cullen’s poem, which in this sense can be also read as work that is in direct conversation with the ancestors (see Figures 3 and 4). Considered in this context, then, “Heritage” is drawing an important connection between the art of the ancestors and the displaced poetry of the diaspora hundreds and even thousands of years later. Moreover, in this sense, the poem also comments on the somewhat predatory relationship European artists have had with the African artwork: after all, Locke writes, “surely this art, once known and appreciated, can scarcely have less influence upon the blood descendants than upon those who inherit by tradition only”; or in other words, the European artists are in some sense faking the funk, and it is up to a new Black coterie to demonstrate how a relationship with the African continent is not one that should be predatorily mined, razed, and colonized by white Europeans, but rather one that even a Black American has to consider within the context of a deep cultural divide in order to approach the tradition with respect.Footnote 38
Figure 2. “The Art of the Ancestors” Article, with three West African masks.
Figure 3. “Heritage,” Page 674 with two West African masks.
Figure 4. “Heritage,” Page 675 with two West African masks.
Thus, read within the context of its placement in the magazine, surrounded as it is by African iconography, and appearing in a section called “The Art of the Ancestors,” Cullen’s poem is in direct aesthetic conversation with the African art which surrounds it. There is a clear design to the structure in the Lockean version, and to this end, while I see David Kirby’s themes of alienation and displacement from a cultural heritage as both appearing in the Cullen version of “Heritage” and in Eliot’s The Waste Land; and while there is certainly a lamenting of the spiritual deadness of modernity in the Cullen version of “Heritage,” as in Eliot’s epic, it strikes me that re-read in the context of Survey Graphic, and re-read within the context of the text of the Lockean version, the emphasis in “Heritage” is not so much on “the modern individual, aware of his rich heritage yet stranded in a sterile, conformist culture” (remember, Cullen is “lying,” he is telling tall tales and he is being ironic even in his sincerity), rather his call at the end of the Lockean version for a Black Christ embraces, instead of rejects, Christian culture, and only wishes that the poet could appropriate for Blackness the iconic white face of Jesus Christ, just as white artists have appropriated the Black masks of African artists. Moreover, it seems to me that the Lockean version has four sections, and not the seven that Kirby identifies in the Cullen version, and each one of the four sections in the Lockean version is in conversation with the accompanying graphics from the collection of African artwork included in the spread.
Since Locke was largely responsible for this layout arrangement, reading the poem in the context of Survey Graphic is to read it as a collaborative, multimedia piece, and it may in fact be that Cullen himself rejected this fate for “Heritage,” and considered Eliot’s epic as a possible solution to the difficulties he was having with the poem, and as a corrective to anxieties he may have felt about his ownership of the piece—and so it is very possible Cullen considered turning the poem into something of a Black epic. It is, after all, as Jeremy Braddock notes, “one of only a very few long poems of the Harlem Renaissance period” (Jean Toomer’s often very long work being the obvious exception), and Cullen may have thought that this might serve as his Black modernist epic.Footnote 39 This might explain why Cullen felt the need to expand on the piece, which was already long for a poem coming out of the Harlem Renaissance, and it may also be why he felt he needed to shift the focus away from more racialized themes and to “universalize” the poem by making its focus the divided self instead of questions of colonialism and Black cultural aesthetics.
Cullen may have found that the poem also worked as a good bookend to the first section of Color. Read as originally conceived, many of the poetry books published during the Harlem Renaissance were meant to be read as books unto themselves with structure and an aesthetic form as a whole, as well as operating as collections of individual poems, almost the way the “concept album” of the late 20th century worked as both an album in itself and a collection of songs. In the case of Color, Cullen begins the book (after the poetic address to the reader) with his famous poem “Yet Do I Marvel,” which (also famously) ends with the proclamation, “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing.”Footnote 40 The book is divided into four sections: “Color,” “Epitaphs,” “For Love’s Sake,” and “Varia.” Where “Yet Do I Marvel” opens the “Color” section of Color, “Heritage” closes it. The entire section then functions as Cullen wrestling with this question of being a Black poet, and what that means in Western culture. For Cullen to end “Heritage” with the realization that he sings as a Black poet because he realizes (albeit ironically) that he is “civilized” gives a unity to the entire “Color” section of Cullen’s book that resonates nicely with the development of the theme of the Black poet singing in America.
Given how much the poem changes, then, depending on the context in which it appears, and depending on the architects at work on it, it becomes even more interesting unpacking what is happening on the page in the Lockean version, especially in the dialogue between text and image. The first two stanzas of the poem appear above two figures labeled simply “African sculpture.” The indistinctness of the title and the simplicity of the two figures it depicts reflect the ambiguity the opening of the poem feels toward Africa. Indeed, “What’s your nakedness to me?” the poem asks, and the reader immediately sees the “African sculpture,” as if to reinforce the question—what does this thing mean to me as a Westerner?
The second image, “Bushongo,” references an African religion from Congo. This pagan religion has a creation myth in which Bumba, the Chembe, or God, existed alone in the beginning of time with nothing but chaos, darkness, and water. Into this chaos, Bumba literally vomits up the entire cosmos and thus brings about being as we know it.Footnote 41
This pagan influence must be suppressed, the speaker argues in the next two stanzas that accompany the photo of the Bashongo mask, possibly a depiction of Bumba himself:
All day long and all night through
One thing only I must do
Quench my pride and cool my blood
Lest I perish in their flood.Footnote 42
The next long stanza appears under a ceremonial mask from the Ivory Coast. This section Kirby dubs “The Rain” in the Cullen version. He sees Cullen as channeling a “primal language” in the same way that Eliot’s “Waste Land” channels “the mother of all Western tongues,” “Sanskrit.”Footnote 43 The connection is an interesting one, for sure, but there is also the drum that talks to the poet at the start of the stanza, and the evocation of the jungle beneath the ceremonial mask from the Ivory Coast which accompanies the stanza. The mask resembles the mask which lies directly to the left of it on the preceding page, and the theme of the poet’s discomfort with wearing the mask of Africanism is further developed, although here it seems the poet acknowledges the fact that there is something irrepressible about the African heritage which is somehow a given birthright. Where the mask labeled “Bushongo,” then evokes a spiritual ancestor who paradoxically, might help suppress the “flood” of “blood” within, the ritualistic mask speaks to something that is beyond conventional rationality; it is ritualistic, and it is an inheritance which, sprouting horns like the mask in the spread, seizes the poet with demonic influence.
The poem ends with a turn toward Christianity. Cullen, whose form par excellence was the sonnet, was well versed in the way a volta turns the argument of the poem, and a clear volta appears here in this “Africanized Sonnet,” which is no longer a sonnet, but a praisesong to the ancestors and the poet’s troubled relationship not only with them but also with the birthright of Western inheritance in general. Thus, this section begins:
My conversion came high-priced.
I belong to Jesus Christ.Footnote 44
It is the first direct mention of Christianity in the poem (despite the early reference to “Eden”), marking a clear new direction of thought. Below this Christianized conclusion, the reader sees a statue that resembles the first statue on the opposite page, thus giving a symmetry not only to the graphic design of the two-page spread but also to the poem itself, which begins with the poet questioning their relationship to Africa in the first section, moves in the second two stanzas into the poet’s recognition that Africa in some way still remains with them, and then pulls back in the fourth section to a Westernized speaker, whose Christianity must then, in some way merge with this African spirituality which continues to haunt the poet in some nebulous undefined manner.
The statue represented here is identified simply as “Zouenouia” which seems to be art from the Gura people of the Ivory Coast region as well.Footnote 45 It depicts what appears to be a person carrying a bucket on their head and in some sense can be read as the poet’s relationship with Africa being one in which their head is also expanded by their Christian spirituality although it “came high-priced.”
But this might be even too stable a way of reading this poem, as was pointed out to me by Dr. Amardeep Singh at the MLA conference 2025 in New Orleans, where I first presented a much-truncated version of this article. Because there is no reason why one should necessarily read the blocks of poetry as only in dialogue with the image directly above or below them; for example, it makes just as much sense to see the pictures in conversation with the blocks of text to the left or right of them. When reframed in this way, even more interesting results emerge. For example, if we read the “Bushongo” mask as Bumba, the God who vomited the universe into being, together with the first lines of the poem, then it almost works as the opening to a dramatic monologue:
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?Footnote 46
Indeed, as a pilfered artifact, far in distance both in space and time from home, a mask of Bumba then has its own story to tell about heritage, and what Africa might mean to it. In fact, the layout, with four blocks of text and four graphic images, allows for any kind of coupling of text, block, and image. The poem invites the reader to move the stanzas around, to play with the form and the way the stanzas speak not only to each other but also to the graphic images on the page, and this also invites the reader (or the audience member at this point) to imagine how the graphic images might be in dialogue with each other as well. Indeed, this moving of blocks of text around is essentially what Cullen did when he revised it for Color—he moved blocks of stanzas around to re-emphasize different aspects of the poem, and he expanded the length from 102 to 128 lines. He did not cut.
Robert Volpicelli begins his recent 2023 analysis of Cullen with the question as to why Cullen’s star has declined so greatly since the 1920s, when he was once recognized as a foremost Black talent. Volpicelli argues that Cullen’s refusal to make modernism “new” in the Poundian sense largely contributed to his later neglect.Footnote 47 He argues the point well; although I would add that Cullen also seemed conflicted about his poetic Western heritage, his poetic African heritage, the exploitation of African art by Westerners, and his realization that his heritage owed at least as much to the West as to this constant looking toward Africa. Thus, it is not hard to imagine that Cullen did not want to see himself as engaging in the same kind of cultural appropriation that white writers engaged in, in a shallow and possibly racist effort to remake old traditions anew. In this sense, his integrity as an artist may have made it difficult for him to adopt these traditions as capriciously as white writers. On the other hand, as a Black writer with some claim to a diasporic heritage, and as a writer who was also experimenting with form not only textually, as we see with his rearrangement of the text of “Heritage,” but also “bibliographically,” as we see in the overall design of his first book of verse Color, Cullen represents a poet who was caught not only between the past and the present but also between the color line—two cultural touchstones already deeply exploited by white modernist writers.
The original, Lockean version of “Heritage,” thus, interestingly, has not been given enough attention in the way that it is structured and in the way that it is in conversation with the periodical in which it originally appeared and with the African artwork with which it is in conversation. In this way, it is actually quite fitting that there are two versions of this poem, one which can effectively be read within the Western modernist tradition, as a kind of new “Black” “Waste Land,” and another which can be read as a neo-African diasporic production, one which not only uses African aesthetics to create a new Black modernism but that is also in direct conversation with the ancestors in a spiritually intimate way that European modernists borrowing from African traditions were not.
Author contribution
Whit Frazier Peterson is a lecturer and research associate at the University of Stuttgart in Stuttgart, Germany, with interests in African American literature, modernism, Black speculative fiction and the Black esoteric tradition. He has published scholarly articles in Callaloo, the Journal of American Studies, Black Perspectives, the Black Scholar, Amerikastudien and Siècles. His monograph The Image and the Fire will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in May, 2026.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Dr. Amardeep Singh for his comments (mentioned in the article) at the MLA 2025 in New Orleans, as well as the comments from all the other participants who attended the panel. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer, who also added some great perspective to this piece as well.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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