Langston Hughes' poem "House in the World" is brutal and harsh. My friend Emily Bernard, a Langston Hughes scholar, recently invited me to discuss this poem with her. She also bid me two years ago to contemplate the poem's multiple meanings and figurative dimensions.

It would be too easy to merely read the poem in light of American racial politics. The degree to which one agrees or disagrees with Hughes could serve as a barometer by which one detects (or not) the footprints of imperialism, colonialism, and racism across the globe, by which one cares (or not) about the ravages and impact of Western powers, thought, and arrogance on non-Western and “third-world” nations.

We know "white shadows" do not exist, but in Hughes' metaphoric mind, they do. Hughes was a deeply sensitive poet who could not turn his aesthetic eye away from history, from the injustices done to his “dark brothers.” This “turning away” is an unbridled privilege we “poets” exercise, and maybe it is very, very necessary.

I, for one, try not to take this for granted, especially as I consider this poem on the fifth anniversary of America’s war in Iraq.

Thanks for posting this powerful poem. It's one of the most spine-tingling I've read recently by a poet I frequently find spine-tingling. The sounds of the w's in the first stanza contrasted with the u sounds in the second stanza are part of it, but it's really everything---syntax, imagery, feeling--making a dense whole, a talisman poem.

To me the crux is the word "world"--the impossibility of a house in the world, of unmitigated presence in the world, the irony of having to try to deconstruct one's inheritance in order to gain access to what we know on some level should by rights have been "natural"ly available before the inheritance was ever made conscious. But it isn't.

As does so much of Hughes, this poem evokes the tragedies of racism so aptly that it feels to me it also evokes the pain of other kinds of tragedies that dispossess us from ourselves and from having a place for ourselves in the world.

Thanks again Major.

Annie

Thank you for this.
Hughes' poem made me think of this one:

CUARTO OSCURO

en cada casa
hay un cuarto
oscuro

enclaustrado
entre paredes
de otros cuartos

a los hombres
no les parece
molestar

lo consideran
lo más normal
de la vida

pero viven ahí
en esa mazmorra
sin ventanas

lla madre
la hija
la esposa

FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN

DARK ROOM

in every house
there is a dark
room

hidden
by the walls
of other rooms

it doesn't seem
to bother
men

they consider it
the most normal
thing in life

but there inside
that cell without
windows live

the mother
the daughter
the wife

my translation from the Spanish

from FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF NIGHT
New and Selected Poems

Dear Major,

Thank you for sharing this poem.

Hope to see you soon.

Warm wishes,
Prageeta