Reconstructing The African Identity in the Poetry of Hughes and Al-Fayturi (original) (raw)

This paper investigates the dialectics between homeland and identity in the poetry of the Sudanese poet, Muhamed Al-Fayturi and his master, Langston Hughes in order to underline their attitudes toward crucial issues integral to the African and African American experience such as identity, racism, enslavement and colonisation. The paper argues that, in Hughes's early poetry Africa is depicted as the land of ancient civilisations in order to strengthen African American feelings of ethnic pride during the Harlem Renaissance. This idealistic image of a pre-slavery, a pre-colonial Africa, argues the paper, disappears from the poetry of Hughes, after the Harlem Renaissance , to be replaced with a more realistic image of Africa under colonisation. The paper also demonstrates that unlike Hughes , who attempts to romanticise Africa, Al-Fayturi rejects a romantic confrontation with the roots. Interrogating western colonial narratives about Africa, Al-Fayturi reconstructs pre-colonial African history in order to reveal the tragic consequences of colonisation and slavery upon the psyche of the African people. The paper also points out that in their attempts to confront the oppressive powers which aim to erase the identity of their peoples, Hughes and Al-Fayturi explore areas of overlapping drama between the turbulent experience of African Americans and the catastrophic history of black Africans dismantling colonial narratives and erecting their own cultural mythology.

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