Paul Robeson (35 page)

Robeson's interest in African culture did not emerge in 1933 out of
whole cloth. At least a decade earlier he had referred now and then to the special gifts and values of black people—to an approach to life that united those of African descent around the world, even as it set them apart from white Westerners. He had occasionally sounded the theme of a distinctive “race temperament,” and as early as 1927 had even chastised Roland Hayes and Countee Cullen for abandoning “Negro sources” in their work. This initial discovery of Africa was apparently the result of his contact with African students in London in the 1920s. By the 1930s he had gotten to know such future African leaders as Nnamdi Azikiwe and Jomo Kenyatta (and later Kwame Nkrumah), as well as the radical Caribbean theorist C. L. R. James (and possibly George Padmore). Yet their limited influence on him before 1933 is not sufficient to explain his abrupt and headlong plunge in that year into African themes.
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There is no clear-cut explanation for Robeson's pronounced shift of energy and perspective, yet it does seem more than coincidental (if less than conclusively causal) that his re-evaluations followed hard upon the end of three years of emotional turmoil. Walter White, who knew Robeson well in these years, later made an oblique but telling reference to “certain personal and romantic experiences which disabused his mind of the comfortable conception that the people of Great Britain were less prejudiced than the white people of the United States.” White may have been referring indirectly to Robeson's affair with Yolande; he was certainly pointing out that Robeson, having attained international fame as an artist, was still subjected to the same indignities—though to a lesser degree—that the white world inflicted upon black people everywhere. Yet Yolande's rejection of him was not insignificant in this regard. Robeson's prolonged involvement with her had not led to the expected consummation, but to unexpected abandonment. To put the psychological matter crudely (and all such formulas tend to be crude), her rejection symbolically portended the likely treatment he could expect from all whites—acceptance up to a point and then, should he assert full entitlement, repudiation. Yolande's abandonment shook Robeson not merely because he had lost a woman he deeply loved, but also because he had to question whether his romance with the white world in general was not set in similar sand. He could never again trust whites to the same degree he once had, nor be quite so sanguine about their ultimate intentions.
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As if
one
dam within him had burst, and overflowing with new ideas, Robeson started to jot down notes—a gauge of his excitement, since he rarely committed thoughts to paper. In the Western world, he wrote, in North and South America, the West Indies and the Caribbean, the black man “has become Western for good or for evil, and will contribute to the culture of his respective social milieu. That is, the American Negro will contribute, as he has in the past, to American culture. In fact, he may do
most of the contributing.” The black man in America
might
have taken his own direction, but “the white man stood in his path and by refusing to stand apart, settled the issue.” “Helped immeasurably” by his “most astounding inferiority complex,” the Afro-American had become “American to the core”; “his way is settled already.” The Westernized black, who heretofore has held center stage in the world's consciousness is, “speaking in the broad sense … a decadent, cut off from his source.”
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In the United States, three possibilities remained. The Afro-American would either, Robeson jotted in shorthand, “in time disappear into great American mass (which Negro prefers frankly) which is simple way—give up and disappear as race altogether,” a solution to him “spineless” and “unthinkable”; “or, remain oppressed group, servile—also unthinkable”; or else the black could “become as the Jew before him—a self-respecting, solid, racial unit—with its spiritual roots back in Africa whence he came. Not whining for this or that—but developing his powers to [the] point where there is no possible denial of equality.” In formulating these alternatives, Robeson was implicitly rejecting both the brand of black nationalism that sought salvation in a literal (as opposed to spiritual) return to Africa (Robeson never felt any pronounced sympathy for separatist movements like the Garveyites or the Nation of Islam), and also the assimilationist solution then being proposed by James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP he guided.

Robeson had never been a mere assimilationist—one who works for and welcomes the day when cultural variations will disappear. He recognized that what they were marked to disappear
into
was the dominant Anglo-Saxon outlook—and of that he had never been more than a temperate fan. But even in the early thirties, in the flush of his enthusiasm for Africa, he was not merely a “cultural pluralist,” either—not parochially insistent on the narrow loyalties and values of one particular cultural or racial group. While rejecting melting-pot aesthetics, Robeson was at the same time attracted to an encompassing, universal vision for mankind. This combined view—ethnic integrity
and
international solidarity—had already been marked out in the early thirties by the New York Jewish intellectuals grouped around the
Menorah Journal
. There is no evidence that Robeson knew any of these men—Elliott Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Herbert Solow, Felix Morrow, Sidney Hook, etc.—or even that he had read any of their publications. But, in a parallelism of development common to the history of ideas, he had begun to share their nonsectarian, cultivated spirit, one that declared itself willing to borrow from many cultures in the name of the ultimate goal of a humane society that was simultaneously anti-assimilationist and cosmopolitan.
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In the early thirties, Robeson tilted toward a strong racial identification congenial to the theory of cultural pluralism. But by the end of the
thirties, after his experience in Spain and his exposure to the Soviet Union, he would tilt more toward identification with the superseding claims of revolutionary internationalism. Much later, in the fifties, after his cosmopolitan hopes had been trampled by the hostile climate of the Cold War, he would renew and re-emphasize his own black cultural roots. But even then he could never be simply categorized as a “black nationalist.” All of Robeson's shifts were subtle, none sudden or complete. For most of his life, he managed to hold in balance a simultaneous commitment to the values (sometimes competing, but in his view ultimately complementary) of cultural distinctiveness
and
international unity.
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Like James Weldon Johnson (and in some respects Du Bois), Robeson implicitly accepted the notion of culturally derived “racial traits”—and the importance of taking pride in them; though he located them not, as Johnson tended to, in a large imitative capacity and a love of humor but, rather, in a highly sophisticated sense of community and a primary emphasis on things of the spirit—“the
inner
urge” (as opposed to mere religious “mythology”) and a trust in “higher intuition—neither instinct nor reason.” Again like Johnson, as well as other leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, Robeson would continue for a while longer (and to some extent, always) to share the assumption that it was the path of culture, not politics, that best expressed black values and held out the best hope for changing the image of the black man in the white mind—thereby ultimately improving the lot of the black masses. But, while continuing, like most of the black literati, to stress the importance of culture, Robeson was beginning to move beyond them in seeing the “true genius of the race” not in the great deeds of great men but in the accumulated experience and superior wisdom of the
folk
, of the collectivity—in an African cultural heritage that understood the primary importance of spiritual values, in contrast to the desiccated rationalism, and the worship of technology and material accumulation, that characterized the West.
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Far from believing, as did many of his contemporaries who considered the issue, that American blacks would and should take the lead in “uplifting” Africa, Robeson argued that it was in Africa itself that the black man's future was to be sought: “From there will come his real contribution to [the] culture of the world.” That future, in Robeson's view, was “fraught with danger.” The African had been told “he is a primitive,” congenitally inferior. A “nonsensical” view, yet one the African might come to believe. The African spirit
was
different—but not inherently inferior, as the history of the resplendent early African empires attested. But, ancient Africa aside, the culture of the contemporary African was itself of “high quality,” as exemplified in his intricate music, in a complex tribal development, and in a group of languages capable of expressing the “most subtle ideas” (“It is astonishing and, to me, fascinating to find a flexibility and subtlety in a
language like Swahili, sufficient to convey the teachings of Confucius, for example”). In presenting this portrait of the “contemporary African,” Robeson was choosing to de-emphasize the many tribal differences that subdivided the continent in favor of stressing a shared set of cultural attitudes and forms.
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Africa, in his view, was in danger of being “bludgeoned or persuaded into throwing that equipment away,” just as the Afro-American “had—until recently—been taught to hate his own music and folklore.” “This is all right with us
decadent
Westernized Negroes—but a halt must be called when the sacred regions of Africa are approached.” “Can a whole race of people,” Robeson asked rhetorically in his private notes, “spiritually commit suicide? Strange & terrible as it may seem—following the lead of his supposedly advanced American & Caribbean brothers (who incidentally
disown him
) he is on the way.… And I hear no deep protest from black Africa about the destruction of his institutions. Here & there feeble attempts are being made & those often by idealistic Europeans to save them—but on the contrary there should be a positive spirit of positive determination to preserve them as one's very life-blood, which assuredly they are.” To avoid the catastrophe that had befallen the Westernized black, young Africans had to reject “with contempt any philosophy or spiritual message—any teaching or instructions as to fundamental values of humanity”—from the West, borrowing its “technique” alone, even while remembering that technique was “mechanical and only fit for certain uses.” In this, Robeson advised young Africans to look for a model to China and the East.
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The Chinese had always lived

as artists concerned mainly with [the] inner development of
man
… which we have neglected …
man
in relation to his fellow man as a “
social
”
being
—not as a kind of “lone wolf” … have evolved a man with much deeper
capacity
for “good life” than our scientific
man
of West.… Long ago this most ancient of living cultures assigned soldier and warrior and glorious
hero
to lowest rank—and the scholar stands first—certainly there is no question of fundamental Tightness of the latter.… [No] need to glorify this fighting business as in the West … leave war in its place. Certainly not an ideal of human relations.

China had learned how to borrow from the West without succumbing to it—borrowing applied science, rejecting culture and ideology. “It's my belief,” Robeson wrote, “that even an ideology as strong and fanatical as communism may later disappear into the deeper roots of Chinese philosophy.” The African, too, must “in his deeper processes … look Eastward. For the technical and mechanical needs to West.”
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Yet, in using China as a model, Africans should be neither confined to it nor bound by it, Robeson wrote. Other Eastern cultures, “like those of India and Polynesia,” had aspects worth emulating, and the American Negro could use Russian culture “to advantage” as well—because “the history of the Russian peasant closely parallels that of [the] Negro peasant in America.” Robeson was not trying to postulate a common origin among these varied cultures and races but, rather, to pinpoint “a common element of centuries of serfdom … [and therefore a] common way of looking at life. The Western culture is abstract, from the outside looking in.… The Negro and Eastern culture is pure apprehension.…”
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But finally, Robeson warned, all these examples must be applied with caution. “Even comparison with Chinese only to give him [the African] courage to follow his own way. He can't be Chinese, Arabian, European or anything else. He must be African.” The experience of other peoples could at best serve as “a temporary superstructure to help get one's bearings—but only that—and with certain knowledge that as long as that superstructure is necessary—true progress is retarded.” Besides, the “human
stem
was one”; “Man's final destiny, when all technique is applied is to live this inner existence—which is close enough to hidden mystery.” The African's special destiny—rejecting scientific method, logical thought, and the rules of reason as ultimate values—was to build on “the consciousness of inner spirit,” to “look beyond himself” to the “higher apprehension” that “has been his way for untold centuries.” “The Negro's whole outlook on life,” he told a reporter,

… is one peculiarly his own … he does not regard people, things, or incidents in exactly the same way as the European. In many instances, I protect myself in life with weapons entirely different from those used by the white man.… When a man comes into my room, the words he speaks, his reasoning, mean little to me. But I can “sense” very quickly what manner of man he is, and there are many other things I “feel” which I can never express entirely through the medium of the English language.
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