Colored Dispatches From The Uzbek Border Langston Hughes' Relevance, 1933-2002
David Chioni Moore
[Figures: <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v025/25.4moore_figures.html>]
...[Langston] Hughes had first learned about the Soviet Union while in his multicultural Cleveland high school, where he heard about the ongoing Russian Revolution through Russian-Jewish classmates who were the children of émigrés. Hughes' interest was re-awakened by his arrival in the USSR, and more specifically his interest shifted two thousand kilometers south and east: that is, to Soviet Central Asia. 4 Central Asia -- now the independent nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan -- lies at the center of the Eurasian landmass. The region is bounded on its east by China, its south by India, Pakistan, and Iran, its west by the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus, and eventually Turkey, and on its north by deserts, the great Russian steppe, and Siberia....
Langston Hughes was interested in Soviet Central Asia because it represented, for him, what he called the USSR's own "dusty, colored, cotton-growing South." Indeed and ironically the formerly independent Central Asian emirates and khanates had become Russian colonies and vassal states in the middle 19th century, in part because of the lure of Central Asia's cotton, whose global price had jumped as a result of the U.S. Civil War; the Russian Czar's troops first broke through Tashkent's walls just twenty days after the last Confederate army surrendered in Shreveport, Louisiana. The Russian and then Russo-Soviet control of Central Asia is a chapter in the world's colonial and now post-colonial history which has been terribly neglected. 5
Thus in the fall of 1932, Langston Hughes decided to remain in the Soviet Union and go to Central Asia. Now, ordinarily Central Asia was closed to foreign travelers, but as an honored revolutionary poet and representative of an oppressed class of Americans, Hughes secured official permission. So for about four months, from mid-September, 1932, to late January, 1933, Hughes lived and traveled there, particularly in the legendary cities of Tashkent, Samarkand, Ashkhabad and Bukhara. During this time he had diverse experiences. As an official guest of the Soviet Writers' Union, he was constantly being taken on official tours of hospitals, schools, dams, factories, and other Soviet achievements, complete with recitations of health, education, industrial and agricultural statistics. He spent significant time with Central Asian writers and creative artists in the major cities, who received him with enthusiasm. At other times, Hughes visited the Central Asian countryside, particularly the cotton collectives that reminded him -- yet differed massively from -- the plantations of the U.S. South. Readers of his _I Wonder as I Wander_ know that he alternated regularly between discussions with the most elite cultural figures Central Asia had to offer, and humble meals with the humblest of people.
Improbably, Langston spent several weeks of his travels in the company of Arthur Koestler, later to become famous as author of the powerful anti-communist novel _Darkness at Noon_, but in 1932, like Hughes, a wandering young radical fascinated by the Soviet experiment. 6 In late January, 1933, Hughes finally decided to end his Central Asian stay. He returned to Moscow for another few months, and then in May he took the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, visited Korea, spent several weeks in China, sojourned in Japan, got thrown out by the Japanese secret police as an agitating radical, and finally passed through Hawaii on his return to the United States, landing in San Francisco on August 9, 1933. He had been away for fourteen months, and though he continued to travel throughout his life, he would never return to the USSR.
Now, of course, more than being a traveler or a radical, Langston Hughes was a writer, and so our main interest here is the nearly unknown writing that he did, over a twenty-five year period, on Central Asia. Interestingly, Langston's Central Asian travels were not simply given to him by his hosts. Rather, he funded his Central Asian sojourn with his writing. He was paid for the Russian translation rights to his novel _Not Without Laughter_ and his small collection _Scottsboro Limited_, and also for the Uzbek-language rights for a book of poems drawn partly from his 1926 _The Weary Blues_. 7 With this Uzbek volume, _Langston Hyuz She'rlari_, or "Poems by Langston Hughes," Hughes became the first American writer translated into any Central Asian language: a significant achievement, given Central Asia's near-millennium of literary history. 8 Hughes also wrote articles on Central Asia for the Moscow daily _Izvestia_ as a foreign correspondent. During his time in Central Asia he also drafted poetry and worked on assisted translations of Russian and Uzbek poets. In a powerful poem titled "Letter to the Academy," written later that winter in Moscow and published in the Soviet magazine _International Literature_, Hughes wrote, in explicit rebuke to Kipling, that "the twain have met." No doubt Langston was the organizer of that meeting.
After Hughes returned to the United States, his _Izvestia_ articles were collected into a small English-language book published in Moscow and Leningrad called _A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia_, which compared Central Asia with the U.S. South. Since I am currently preparing a revised and expanded edition of this book for publication, I will return to it later in this essay. Some 1,500 copies of the text were printed, but only one of them is known today, and that is Hughes' own, now held in the Hughes archive at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Searches by colleagues in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and even the personal assistance of the directors of the Alisher Navoi State Library of Uzbekistan and the State Library of Kyrgyzstan, have not uncovered any other copies even in the former Soviet Union. Thus the mystery of the other 1,499 remains.
Once back in the U.S., Hughes quickly began to write some more. From 1934 to 1938 he placed seven Central Asian items in American periodicals, ranging from a radical extract from his Moscow book in the socialist magazine _New Masses_, to two surprisingly challenging essays in the glossy monthly _Travel_, to a titillating true-life story called "In an Emir's Harem" in the popular and very white _Woman's Home Companion_. 9 For this latter piece Hughes received an astonishingly hefty $400 fee, something akin to $10,000 today. Blessed with rich experiences and notes, in the later 1930s Hughes began work on a Central Asian memoir he titled "From Harlem to Samarkand." Numerous chapters and autonomous unpublished essays lie in Yale's Beinecke archive from this period, though a combination of uncompleted writing, lack of publisher enthusiasm, and other writing projects kept Hughes from finishing this work. Hughes returned to that writing in the later 1940s, reworking old material and composing some afresh, though again he never brought any of this to print.
Finally in 1954 he began his 1956 memoir _I Wonder as I Wander_, a 405-page compendium of his global travels from 1931 to 1938, which included ninety Central Asian pages. 10 These ninety pages from the middle 1950s constitute about the only Central Asian writing known to most Hughes readers, and in one sense, it is a miracle that they exist at all. Having once been an energetic leftist, Hughes became a right-wing target during the McCarthy era. In March 1953 Hughes was forced to testify before McCarthy's Senate Subcommittee on Investigation, and that day he nearly saw his writing life destroyed. Though Hughes named no names, he offered McCarthy an extremely mild presence and admitted only to an early, perhaps misguided flirtation with the Left, and a subsequent return to the center.
Hughes began writing _I Wonder as I Wander_ just one year later; thus that he chose to write at all, and not negatively, about the Soviet experiment is remarkable. However, the price Hughes paid for doing so was evident in the genial and anecdotal tone that kept _I Wonder as I Wander_'s politics and rage below the surface. Whereas Hughes' 1930s Central Asian writings bristle -- call them "Hughes unplugged" -- _I Wonder as I Wander_, though brilliant, is more "Hughes lite." J. Saunders Redding's contemporary review (1956) of Hughes' memoir, indeed, closed by suggesting that "Mr. Hughes, it seems, did more wandering than wondering."
That is, in sum, the totality of Langston Hughes' Soviet Central Asian writings: a tough small book in Moscow in 1934, some U.S. journalism when he returned, two stalled attempts at an autobiography, many draft essays all along the way, and finally a genial memoir in the McCarthy era. The writing consists almost entirely of essays, each treating a different topic, such as Soviet industrial development, the liberation of women, dance, music, the battle against repressive Islam, and more. And of all this writing, only the very last phase is widely known today. The reason for this is simple. Some time ago Gayatri Spivak (1988) argued that the subaltern cannot speak. This is only half right, since most subalterns speak just fine. What the subaltern typically cannot do is print.
As mentioned some paragraphs above, I am currently in the process, along with my collaborator Jennifer Bouta, of restoring Hughes' little-known and archival Central Asian writings to the public sphere, in an expanded edition of his Moscow- and Leningrad-published 1934 _A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia_. The new text will be, in one sense, the politically charged book Hughes could never publish in the U.S. in his lifetime....
Let me take as a first example a brilliant Hughes essay called "Tamerlane's Samarkand, Samarkand the New," which will be a key chapter in the expanded Central Asian book. The editorial challenge is that "Samarkand the New" exists in no less than eight versions written over nineteen years, from 1936 to 1955. In its final form the essay runs like this. Hughes first compares the ancient city's glory with its duller Soviet incarnation. Then he recounts his city tour and discusses the Komsomol-led restoration of the ancient monuments. Then he turns to the new hospitals, factories and schools the Soviets have built, and explains the unveiling and liberation of women and the end of oppression by the Czars and Khans. Hughes ends by wandering one evening to Tamerlane's tomb and reflecting on the changes 600 years have brought. Let me offer here the first two, and then the last two paragraphs of the piece:
Samarkand! Green-curled Samarkand! City of Tamerlane, the Earth Shaker; before that, city of Genghis Khan, leader of the Mongols; and ere that the sporting ground of Alexander the Great, who murdered his old friend Clitus within its gates, twenty-four hundred years ago when both were drunk with wine. Samarkand, flourishing center of Arabic culture in the twelfth century; seat of the ancient observatory of the astronomer Ulug Beg; golden name to the Venetian merchants of the Middle Ages when silks came from Cathay; lovely song-city of the Oriental poets; city of the turquoise domes -- Samarkand! Green-curled Samarkand.
Now, the express direct from Moscow thunders into a station whose platform is crowded with the belted blouses and high boots of Red Army boys and members of the O.G.P.U. and the white kerchiefs of Russian peasant women -- mingling with the robes and turbans of a thousand years ago. Outside the station horse-drawn droskis, old Fords, and new auto-buses await the incoming travelers. Samarkand today is a Soviet Samarkand -- with a man on the corner selling ice-cream sandwiches against a poster announcing the latest Pudovkin movie from Moscow. The town, as Asiatic towns have a strange habit of being, is several miles from the railroad. Down a long straight street of trees our auto-bus sped with a continual horn-honking, out-doing even a Paris taxi. With every bolt rattling, windows shaking, speed never slackening -- scattering donkeys, camels, Fords, and human beings to the right and left of it, radiator steaming -- the bus drew up to the leading European hotel in the former Russian quarter and stopped with sudden precision, depositing its delegation of Amerikanski Negroes come to visit.
It is quite a fast-paced opener, rapidly juxtaposing old and new and depositing its readers, like its subjects, squarely at the start of an adventure. Now here are the two last paragraphs. When reading them, please remember that they were written by a 31-year-old African American in the Jim Crow era, writing with clear if unstated awareness of the awful and uprooted condition of his "colored people," in the southern part of his own country, a land of sharecropping and lynching:
On my last night in Samarkand, I went alone at sunset to the opposite side of the city, to Tamerlane's tomb with its pale inscriptions in yellow gold, its ancient alabaster and jade. The outer gates were locked, but I looked through into the courtyard that I had often visited before. Birds were nesting in the trees and a little grey lizard scurried across the ground. The red sun gleamed on ancient tiles and the tops of sun-dried walls. I sat near a stream that flowed along the edge of the road outside, and I thought how old this earth is, this city, and this tomb! The wise men have written that in 362 B.C. Alexander came to Samarkand. In 1221, Genghis Khan. In 1369, Tamerlane. In 1886, the Tsar's General Kauffman. In 1917, the voice of Lenin. And today come the orders of the Communist Party through Stalin of Moscow.
Under the plane trees outside the ancient walls is a small tea house with a raised platform for the customers. Above that platform is a radio amplifier, so that those drinking tea in the shadows of the tomb may listen to their native folk music and the latest decrees from Moscow. Out of the air, a far-off city that Tamerlane never conquered is speaking. From Moscow, a theory Tamerlane never dreamed of is being put into action. The Mighty Earth-Shaker, conqueror of half the Asiatic world, builder of splendid tombs, killer of millions, herder of women and driver of slaves, invincible warrior and ruthless ruler, dying rich and old and full of power and honor. Today Tamerlane lies in his tomb in the heart of Soviet Asia and listens to an electronic voice outside among the trees saying, "Among us, no man shall live on another man's labor. Marx and Lenin have shown us the way. No more Tzars, Emirs, mullahs, or beys. Workers and peasants, unite! Under the leadership of the International Communist Party, build the proletarian state!"
Whereupon Tamerlane, no doubt, turns over in his tomb.
This is, of course, very beautiful writing, characterized by a complex mix of pastoral and anger, elegy and irony. The editorial problem, however, is that the complete essay I've been discussing does not exist -- or at least it was never produced in this final form by Langston Hughes. As I have mentioned, the Beinecke Library houses eight different versions of "Samarkand the New." Drafts 1 and 2 are rough, but contain all the elements I have described. Drafts 3 and 4 greatly expand the details on present-day Samarkand, but replace the incantatory opener with mechanical paragraphs on Marx. Subsequently, Hughes decided he'd rewrite the essay for the Soviet-sponsored international public-relations magazine _Soviet Russia Today_. So he restored all of the previous sections, improved the writing overall, but then replaced the Tamerlane-in-his-grave closing with an embarrassing ending extolling the tyrant Joseph Stalin; there Stalin's voice sounded over the radio, ordering new schoolbooks for children. _Soviet Russia Today_ never brought the piece to print. Now having written five versions, in the early 1950s Hughes went through three more drafts. Many of his formerly rough metaphors and images spring into life, but the essay also loses immediacy with a shift from present tense to past, and much of the trenchant politics get replaced with charm. None of the eight versions was ever published....
[I]n the Moscow-published _A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia_ Hughes regularly refers to Komsomols -- the members of the Soviet youth league who guided him on daily tours. In later revisions he renames the Komsomols more neutrally as "young workers," a depoliticizing shift that masks Hughes' middle-1930s experiences and views. Likewise, in the Moscow text he notes that "Ford turns his machine guns on them in Detroit; and in Washington the army is called out against them" (ANLASCA, 28). This refers to the brutal repression of strikers at Henry Ford's River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, on March 7, 1932, and to the U.S. veterans' "Bonus Army" march on Washington in summer 1933. But again in later revisions he crosses out those words. Our edition will, again, work to preserve the more radical middle-1930s voice of Langston Hughes.
I should note, in this regard, that numerous fragments of Hughes' more radical 1930s Central Asian writings eventually made their way -- or did not make their way -- into later, different, and less revolutionary texts. Like all prolific authors, Hughes constantly reworked old material and incorporated it in later publications. Small parts of the "Tamerlane's Samarkand," for example, are found on pages 184 and 187 of the 1956 _I Wonder as I Wander_. Even more interesting is the connection between chapter four, "Youth and Learning in Turkmenia," of _A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia_, and an essay Hughes later published in the _Crisis_, "Cowards from the Colleges," which focused exclusively on the black colleges of the United States. A substantial portion of the middle of that Crisis essay can be found in an early version in the very differently focused Moscow text. And predictably, Hughes' most significant alterations quelled the fire. To be sure, "Cowards from the Colleges" has long been counted as one of Hughes' most trenchant texts; Faith Berry gives it good space in her anthology of Langston's social protest writings. But even the tough-minded _Crisis_ text has nothing like the anger found in this:
What kind of a school is this Hampton staffed by meek teachers educating spineless students? A religious school, of course, a Christian charity school supported by the philanthropy of rich and kind-hearted white capitalists who are willing for them to know how to work, but not to protest; and who are willing for black children to go to a black school, but not to a free white state school; and who therefore support and condone with their philanthropy the vicious color-caste system of America. (ANLASCA 31)...
David Chioni Moore has published articles in a number of periodicals, including Diaspora, Research in African Literatures, Resources for American Literary Study, Transition, Genre, and PMLA. He is an associate professor of international studies and English at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
[The full text of the article is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v025/25.4moore.html> and <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v025/25.4moore.pdf> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>