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LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial &
Postcolonial Literature Sandra Yowell Uncreated Things: Poems of David Diop and Phillis Wheatley …dance Hop and stomp and cry among the shark-suckers’ seductive spells, and the strange bellowing… (Aime Cesaire) Phillis Wheatley’s only memory of Africa was that of her mother kneeling in a daily ritual to welcome the morning sunrise. Kidnapped from what is now the Republic of Senegal, Wheatley was sold in New England at the age of seven. Her owner wanted a servant and companion and had Phillis educated for that purpose. The Wheatleys gave the young child their name and taught her believe as a Puritan. To the poet, however, Christianity was not a truth that belonged to or originated with a single people or race. It was a gift outright—a pre-existing treasure—and it became the basis of her identity. Wheatley’s conversion might be called conformity, but she had grasped, with both hands, the only thing available to her that transcended New England culture and gave her a symbolic citizenship in another world. That sense of citizenship and belonging is evident in her poems; Wheatley had the boldness to address poems to King George III and, later, to the intellectuals and leaders of the newly created United States. In 1778, Wheatley’s owners died and she was freed. In all, she published more than eighty poems, but only about fifty survive, along with two dozen letters. Her biographical information is sketchy, partly because of her status as a slave, and partly because after she was freed, Wheatley lived a retired, somewhat obscure life. In 1927 David Diop was born in Bordeaux, France to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother. Like Wheatley, he was a child prodigy who composed and published verse at an early age. Only twenty-two of his poems survive; the rest were lost with Diop when his plane disappeared in 1960 over the ocean. There is no full length biography of David Diop, and relatively little has been written about this poet outside of the French-African journal Presence Africaine. His one collection of poetry, Coups de Pilon, was published in 1956; it was finally translated into English in 1973, with the title Hammerblows and Other Writings. No other American edition of his complete works exists, but a few of Diop’s poems appeared in Langston Hughes’ anthology of African poets, a ground-breaking work that included Diop’s “Les Vautours”(as “The Vultures”). This poem recounts the days of colonial tyranny: En ce temps-la A coup de guele de civilisation A coup d’eau benite sur les fronts domestiques Les vautours construsiaient a l’ombre de leurs serres Le sanglant monument de l’ere tutelaire….(1-5) This extremely violent opening is characteristic of Diop, who hated colonialism, and who outlines here the terrible hypocrisy in which it took place. Intense suffering is inflicted on the Africans by a white race who nominally believed that their religion and education were blessing the people they enslaved. Far from accepting the blessing, Diop imagines a the holy water striking the faces of the servants; their blood becomes a “monument” to the tutelage of whites. Highly ironic, and deliberately blasphemous, Diop’s poem is one of the most powerful in Hughes’ collection. It is a short, skillful protest intended to fuel the revolution in which Diop hoped Africa would find freedom. Wheatley does not write of the violence against slaves, nor does she blaspheme in any obvious way. But she clings as stubbornly to a hope of heaven, as Diop does in the idea of revolution. Her spiritual hope, especially as it is expressed in poetry, is dangerous to New England’s comfortable assumption that the black race were intrinsically inferior. In her poem “On Atheism,” Wheatley warns an atheist of the effect of not having this hope: Where now shall I begin this Spacious field To tell what Curses,--Unbelief doth Yield, Thou that Doest, daily, feel his hand & rod, And dar’st deny the Essence of God, If there’s no heaven—whither wilt Thou go, Make thy Elysium—in the shades below, If there’s no God—from whence did all things spring, He made the Greatest, & minutest Thing. (1-8) Plaintively, Wheatley asks the atheist, “whither wilt Thou go,” if there is no God. In Elysium, the atheist would be separated from heaven and from the God who made everything, and whose power pre-existed the creation of the world. For Wheatley herself, heaven was a compelling alternative to the reality of New England racism, and her theology said that a redeemed slave possessed for more truth than any white atheist. In other words, salvation proves that the races are to be equal in heaven. In her Cambridge poem, Wheatley imagines heaven in traditional terms: “Life without death, and Glory without End;” but there is something exciting in the thought that she is claiming that eternal glory herself and that she longs for an incorruptible freedom and life. Wheatley asserts, too, that the “whole human race” has fallen into sin and needs salvation, and that she, a believer, has the right to warn the Cambridge students of wasting time. Wheatley has taken the “blessing” of civilization and religion, which Diop savages, but she has used them to hope for something much greater and better than New England society. Her piety and learning struck blows back against society’s ideas of what slaves should learn—and how much—and what they should be capable of writing. Wheatley defied the unwritten education laws by taking her studies much further than reading and writing. Her learning and poetry won her some fame and honors—including a meeting with George Washington—but it did not give her an easy life, especially after she became a freedwoman. In Bid the Vessel Soar, M.A. Richmond writes, “Times were hard that year, hard enough for ordinary whites, and immeasurably harder for a newly freed black woman proficient only in intellectual pursuits and lacking any marketable skill other than writing poetry”(42). But Wheatley continued to express hope in something greater than life as she knew it in New England. She privileged things that Puritan New England could not give her: peace and glory. Diop’s poems are highly hopeful, too, for freedom, but he envisioned a free Africa. Wheatley was separated from Africa before she was old enough to remember who her people were. Even though he was reared in France, Diop spent his life remembering his people and longing for Africa, and he was able to live there for short periods of time. Wheatley’s Africa was still basically uncolonized; Europeans raided the shores, but they had not established colonial regimes. Diop looks back on all the misery that the colonialists inflicted on Africans, especially in the poem “L’Agonie des chaines:” La ronde des hyenes autour des cimitieres La terre gorgee de sang les kepis qui ricanent Et sur les routes le grondement sinistre des charrettes de haine Je pense au Vietnamien couche dans la riziere Au forcat du Congo frere du lynche d’Atlanta….(2-5) In a short essay on Diop, Gerald Moore writes, “That little pamphlet, Coups de Pilon(Pounding), was enough to establish David Diop as the most interesting and talented African poet of the fifties…the unifying passion and fire of these few poems earn Diop a place here as the spokesman of a new age”(Seven African Writers, 19). Particularly, Diop was a spokesmen of for negritude, a term used by Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor to indicate a kinship between all black peoples, a kinship that is based partly on their shared sufferings at the hands of the white race. That is why Diop speaks of the man lynched in. In her study Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba writes, “For Senghor, the experience of colonialism, for black people, is a racial experience, and it creates what Irele describes as a ‘community of blood,’ and what Senghor calls a ‘collective personality of the black people’”(211). Diop also identifies with this community of blood, which has shed its blood throughout the history of white oppression. For Diop, that community of blood would include the child who was kidnapped from her African home at the age seven, who lived an extremely difficult life in slavery in New England, and who died in hardship at the age of thirty-one. In some ways, Diop completes Wheatley’s poetry, in the sense that he finds a much more concrete hope to balance against Wheatley’s idealism. Richmond puts it this way: To the contemporary black militant, [Wheatley’s] poetry will indeed seem “superficial” and “chilly,” assuming he reads it all…The tragedy should be more germane. If this is so, then it is conceivable that in striking some militant blow for freedom, in a spirit of retribution and poetic justice, he might say, ‘This one is for you, baby.’”(Bid the Vessel Soar, 66) Richmond does not mention Diop or his Coups de Pilon by name, but there is considerable poetic justice in that another Senegalese poet came to triumph African freedom and equality. Diop had more libery than Wheatley to refuse assimilation. He avowedly wished to avoid “making byproducts of the literature of France”(Black Writers in French, 313). But Wheatley, as the first significant black writer in America, had her own subtly subversive message: in heaven, not New England, she would find peace. In the essay “Theorizing Racism,” Terry Collins writes that, “The frustrated desire to make skin colour identify(which is racism) was a linchpin of colonial authority, sustaining the cohesiveness of the ruling group…”(De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality, 66). Wheatley refused an identity based on race; she based her identity on an ideal of freedom, which transcended the Puritan class system. In one of her poems, she writes this of a young girl who has died: “She feeds on truth and uncreated things.” Wheatley fed herself what she believed to be truth; she sought things that were “uncreated,” free to all. In a way, this mirrors how Diop immersed himself in African culture, a thing uncreated by Europeans. Like Wheatley, Diop’s literary fate has been to have two or three of his poems regularly anthologized, which is hardly a slight accomplishment. But the poetry of these two poets of Senegalese origin, separated by over a hundred years and by their languages, has always appeared in separate collections. In the long-standing nationalistic tradition of grouping authors, Diop belongs to the negritude or African freedom movement, and Wheatley is the “Mother of African literature in America.” In a greater sense, each poet belongs to the traditions they have claimed—traditions that transcend the European cultures in which they were reared.
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