Heritage
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
So I lie, who all day long
Want no sound except the song
Sung by wild barbaric birds
Goading massive jungle herds,
Juggernauts of flesh that pass
Trampling tall defiant grass
Where young forest lovers lie,
Plighting troth beneath the sky.
So I lie, who always hear,
Though I cram against my ear
Both my thumbs, and keep them there,
Great drums throbbing through the air.
So I lie, whose fount of pride,
Dear distress, and joy allied,
Is my somber flesh and skin,
With the dark blood dammed within
Like great pulsing tides of wine
That, I fear, must burst the fine
Channels of the chafing net
Where they surge and foam and fret.
Africa?A book one thumbs
Listlessly, till slumber comes.
Unremembered are her bats
Circling through the night, her cats
Crouching in the river reeds,
Stalking gentle flesh that feeds
By the river brink; no more
Does the bugle-throated roar
Cry that monarch claws have leapt
From the scabbards where they slept.
Silver snakes that once a year
Doff the lovely coats you wear,
Seek no covert in your fear
Lest a mortal eye should see;
What's your nakedness to me?
Here no leprous flowers rear
Fierce corollas in the air;
Here no bodies sleek and wet,
Dripping mingled rain and sweat,
Tread the savage measures of
Jungle boys and girls in love.
What is last year's snow to me,
Last year's anything?The tree
Budding yearly must forget
How its past arose or set
Bough and blossom, flower, fruit,
Even what shy bird with mute
Wonder at her travail there,
Meekly labored in its hair.
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
So I lie, who find no peace
Night or day, no slight release
From the unremittent beat
Made by cruel padded feet
Walking through my body's street.
Up and down they go, and back,
Treading out a jungle track.
So I lie, who never quite
Safely sleep from rain at night--
I can never rest at all
When the rain begins to fall;
Like a soul gone mad with pain
I must match its weird refrain;
Ever must I twist and squirm,
Writhing like a baited worm,
While its primal measures drip
Through my body, crying, "Strip!
Doff this new exuberance.
Come and dance the Lover's Dance!"
In an old remembered way
Rain works on me night and day.
Quaint, outlandish heathen gods
Black men fashion out of rods,
Clay, and brittle bits of stone,
In a likeness like their own,
My conversion came high-priced;
I belong to Jesus Christ,
Preacher of humility;
Heathen gods are naught to me.
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
So I make an idle boast;
Jesus of the twice-turned cheek,
Lamb of God, although I speak
With my mouth thus, in my heart
Do I play a double part.
Ever at Thy glowing altar
Must my heart grow sick and falter,
Wishing He I served were black,
Thinking then it would not lack
Precedent of pain to guide it,
Let who would or might deride it;
Surely then this flesh would know
Yours had borne a kindred woe.
Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
Daring even to give You
Dark despairing features where,
Crowned with dark rebellious hair,
Patience wavers just so much as
Mortal grief compels, while touches
Quick and hot, of anger, rise
To smitten cheek and weary eyes.
Lord, forgive me if my need
Sometimes shapes a human creed.
All day long and all night through,
One thing only must I do:
Quench my pride and cool my blood,
Lest I perish in the flood.
Lest a hidden ember set
Timber that I thought was wet
Burning like the dryest flax,
Melting like the merest wax,
Lest the grave restore its dead.
Not yet has my heart or head
In the least way realized
They and I are civilized.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Countee Cullen's poem presents a divided consciousness: the poet or speaker looks toward Africa as an ancestral origin, but that origin arrives through fragments of image, stereotype, memory, and longing rather than direct possession. The opening question is not simple curiosity; it is a challenge to inherited identity. Africa is imagined through lush, powerful, and unsettling scenes, yet each vision is immediately qualified by distance, time, and the speaker's life in a very different cultural world.
The poem progresses through a series of inward conflicts. The speaker rejects and then cannot escape African inheritance, feels the pull of bodily rhythm and racial memory, and admits a troubled Christian devotion shaped by the wish for a God who would understand Black suffering. By the end, the poem's central tension becomes clear: civilization, religion, and modern identity do not erase the pressure of ancestry. Instead, they coexist uneasily with pride, shame, desire, and fear, leaving the speaker struggling to keep inner forces from breaking through restraint.
Theme
- Racial identity and inheritance - The poem wrestles with what it means to be connected to Africa while living far removed from it in time, culture, and experience.
- Distance from ancestral roots - Africa appears as something half-imagined and historically separated, making heritage feel both intimate and unreachable.
- Double consciousness - The speaker speaks as someone split between cultural belonging and the expectations of a dominant Western, Christian world.
- Bodily memory - Rhythm, blood, rain, and pulse suggest that ancestry is not only intellectual but also physical and instinctive.
- Religious conflict - Christian belief is sincere, yet it is complicated by the speaker's wish for a faith that reflects Black suffering more directly.
- Pride and restraint - The poem shows the effort to control powerful feelings of racial pride and inner vitality so they do not overflow socially acceptable bounds.
Literary Devices
- Rhetorical question - The repeated question about Africa frames the poem as a search for meaning while also emphasizing uncertainty and estrangement.
- Repetition - Repeated phrases and refrains create the sense of a mind circling the same unresolved concerns.
- Imagery - Vivid visual and sensory details give Africa an intense, almost dreamlike presence, even when that presence is filtered through stereotype and memory.
- Metaphor - Blood, rain, drums, and fire become figures for ancestry, impulse, and emotional pressure.
- Personification - Rain, blood, and memory behave like active forces, suggesting that heritage acts on the speaker rather than remaining passive.
- Juxtaposition - The poem places Africa, Christianity, civilization, and the modern self side by side to expose their tension.
- Allusion - Biblical language and references to Christian doctrine deepen the speaker's spiritual conflict.
- Symbolic contrast - The opposition between restraint and eruption helps dramatize the struggle between learned control and inherited force.
Symbolism
- Africa - Africa functions as both ancestral homeland and imagined origin, carrying the weight of identity, distance, and desire.
- Drums - The throbbing drums suggest ancestral rhythm, bodily memory, and the persistence of cultural inheritance.
- Rain - Rain becomes a trigger for involuntary remembrance, as if nature can awaken buried instincts and rhythms.
- Blood - Blood symbolizes racial lineage, pride, and the pressure of inherited identity within the body.
- Christian altar - The altar represents organized faith, but also the speaker's uneasy effort to fit personal longing into inherited religion.
- Tree - The tree suggests natural renewal and the uneasy idea that identity must grow beyond what it has been, even while carrying its roots.
Tone
Cullen's tone is inward, conflicted, and intensely self-aware, with moments of yearning, irony, and suppressed anguish. The emotional atmosphere for the reader is uneasy and charged: the poem feels spacious and lyrical at first, but that spaciousness gradually tightens into pressure, as if the mind itself is trying to hold back forces of memory, race, and desire.
Historical Context
Countee Cullen wrote within the Harlem Renaissance, a period in which Black writers, artists, and thinkers were vigorously reimagining African American identity, modernity, and cultural memory. Many writers of the era turned to African heritage as a source of pride and creative power, while also confronting the distance created by slavery, migration, and assimilation into Western culture.
The poem reflects a broader early twentieth-century debate about race, heritage, and artistic expression. Its language also shows the influence of traditional lyric forms and elevated diction, even as it addresses modern questions of identity. That combination places the poem at the crossroads of cultural assertion and personal ambivalence that shaped much Harlem Renaissance poetry.