'Near the Congo': Langston Hughes and the Geopolitics of Internationalist Poetry

It is remarkable that after Langston Hughes’s prolific, nearly 50-year literary career, his first published poem (excepting some juvenilia) remains perhaps his best known. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921), with an opening couplet whose long, reflective second line begins by repeating the first line, has become a signature meditation on heritage and ancestry: “I’ve known rivers: / I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins” (1– 2). 1 Originally published in the June 1921 issue of the Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the poem “promptly became, along with the [W. E. B.] Du Bois editorials and Jean Toomer’s ‘Song of the Son,’ the voice of the Association itself” (Bontemps 122). As it traverses major waterways on three continents, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” inaugurates Hughes’s relationship with the Congo, which makes it representative of an ongoing internationalist sensibility both in his verse and in the larger cultural movement of which it is a part. While references to modern Africa abound in AfricanAmerican poetry of the 1960s and are understood to be products of the confluence of African national independence movements and the Black Arts movement, Hughes’s earliest poetry suggests a continuity that extends back at least to the 1920s. Throughout his career, Hughes maintained an active association with a range of political and literary institutions in which the Congo was a *Ira Dworkin is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Associate Director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for American Studies and Research at the American University in Cairo. He is the editor of Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Fiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins (2007) and is currently completing a book manuscript on the influence of the Congo on African-American literary, visual, political, and religious cultures since the late nineteenth century.