Literature of the United States

Words Like Freedom
There are words like Freedom
Sweet and wonderful to say.
On my heart-strings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry,
If you had known what I know
You would know why. (Hughes, 2033)


Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) «If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what’s expected of him, he’s lost the battle before he takes the field». His importance to American letters is partly due to this independence. He also did the unexpected, however, in not following his fine first novel with the others that were predicted. «Invisible Man» published in 1945, and won the National Book Award. The novel outlived Ellison’s expectations, but not without suffering attacks from critics. The most powerful of these, Irving Howe, took the authors to task for not following R. Wright’s lead and devoting his fiction to the Negro cause. Howe believed that African Americans should write social protest novels about the tragedy of black ghetto life. Invisible Man had used its protagonist’s «invisibility» to entertain a much broader range of possibilities; and though by no means socially irresponsible, the novel is dedicated to the richness of life and art that becomes possible when the imagination is liberated from close realism.
We have come to understand the genre of African American literature as encompassing any piece of literature that deals specifically with issues unique to African Americans as a culture.
In the last half of the 19^th century, African-American plays began to be written. Prior to this time, African-Americans did not participate nor did they have a voice in the American theater. Because white playwrights wrote and enacted African-Americans with blackface, the true essence of the African-American struggle was not viewed by the American audience. Though African-Americans found success in Europe, they wanted to have a voice in America that portrayed what they went through and appealed to them. Several playwrights started the movement in which African-Americans wrote and acted in plays about African-Americans and their struggles with racism in America.
There are quite a few notable African-American playwrights that have created plays reflecting the African American experience, including some whose plays have been performed on Broadway. Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and author, wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by an African-American woman to debut in Broadway theaters. She also was the first African-American woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Langston Hughes, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, wrote a number of plays. Two of his plays, Mullato, a play about miscegenation, and Simply Heaven, were seen from Broadway stage. NtozakeShange, African-American playwright and poet, wrote For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf, appeared on Broadway and won the OBIE award. The play is about the struggles of seven African-American women that not only have to deal with being an African-American but have to deal with life issues such as rape and abortion.
The African-American struggle is one that could only be told by African-Americans. Important figures created works that reflected issues that were prevalent within the race and created a place for more African-American playwrights to follow. African American writers in the early twentieth century were using Realism in their art to tell their story.
Black writers can write about anything, they are certainly not limited to issues of race or slavery. An author's skin color should not have anything to do with what label goes on that author's writing.
The novel «The Bluest Eye» by Toni Morrison, a book that deals with the issue of skin color as it correlates to beauty and equality. Throughout her career Morrison has been dedicated to constructing a practical cultural identity of a race and a gender whose self-images have been obscured or denied by dominating forces. This genre does not have to refer to pieces that deal only with slavery, inequality, or segregation. In «Bluest Eye» the girl’s need to be loved generates the novel’s action, action that involves displaced and alienated affections (and eventually incestuous rape); the family’s inability to produce a style of existence in which love can be born and thrive leads to such a devastating fate for Morrison’s protagonist.
Her short story «Recitatif» directly addresses the issues of individual and family, past and present, and race and its effacements that motivate the larger sense of her work. A «recitatif» is a vocal performance in which narrative is not stated but sung. In her works Morrison’s voice sings proudly of a past that in the artistic nature of its reconstruction puts all Americans in touch with a more positively usable heritage.
Another remarkable «ever vocal woman» of African American literature Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) wrote about activists in their societies, societies that in their flux demand creative readjustment at every stage. In «Tales and Stories of Black Folks» (1971) an anthology that provides ample evidence for how African Americans not only created folk legends but adapted European and African materials to their own uniquely American ends. In this writer’s fiction readers can see the same process taking place, a joyful embrace of voice as the most personal statement possible in a world dependent on self-invention for survival.