To The Diaspora

“Heritage” by Gwendolyn Bennett (1922)

In this poem by Harlem Renaissance writer Gwendolyn Bennett, Bennett represents an imagined Africa as a place of beauty. Like Brooks, Bennett associates Africa with authentic Black American identity. Her Africa is one from which Black Americans are estranged, and the description of the inhabitants gathered around a “heathen fire” (Line 11) of “a strange black race” (Line 12) makes it clear that the speaker’s sense of identity is decidedly Western.

“Middle Passage” by Robert Hayden (1962)

Hayden, a peer of Brooks, takes the revolt of enslaved Mende people (from the Western coast of Africa) on the slaving ship Amistad as it crossed the Atlantic as his topic. Using fragments—passages from the ship’s log, snatches of Black spirituals, direct quotes from court records, and the names of slavers’ ships—Hayden constructs a Black history that from the beginning shows the “deep immortal human wish / the timeless will” (Lines 161-62) of people of African descent to be free. In the poem, their only wish is to survive a “[v]oyage through death / to life upon these shores” (Lines 165-66). Brooks mentions the journey in the holds of slave ships obliquely, but the speaker in her poem is less certain about survival in the Americas as the greatest achievement of the ancestors of Black Americans.

“The Near Johannesburg Boy” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1986)

Brooks’s engagement with South Africa had already begun by the time she wrote the collection in which “To the Diaspora” appears. “The Near Johannesburg Boy” is the title poem from her 1986 collection. In this poem, the speaker is one of the many young people who played such a critical role in the movement to end apartheid. For many Black artists and writers such as Brooks, the anti-apartheid movement recalled them to the importance of connections among members of the African Diaspora.