| When Africans were brought to the Americas 400 years ago as slaves, their European masters tried to forcibly cut the Africans off from their past culture and way of life, including the suppression of native languages and the destruction of the African's societal and communal order. But try as they might, the Europeans failed to fully extricate African culture and mores out of American slave societies. African Americans -- no matter how distorted over time -- retained a part of their Africanness in their souls and culture. Dr. Kwame Dawes, a distinguished poet, playwright and professor at the University of South Carolina -- and the keynote speaker at the Distinguished Madison African Lecture Series at the Red Gym August 10 at 7 p.m. -- has traced these connections intellectually and spiritually during his distinguished career. The history of Africans in American is a history of the triumph of the human spirit. "To a large extent, the Africans who were slaves in America were cut off from Africa because they were slaves, but the severing could not be complete simply because of the nature of human beings," Dawes said during a telephone interview with The Capital City Hues. "In other words, human beings when extricated from one place have the profound force of memory and the profound force of culture as it lends itself in the way that people behave. Yet, one of the contradictory repercussions of the effort to break Africans away from their Africanness was that they entered a place in which they had no sense of home and they were alienated and therefore they sought to reconstruct their Africanness through the imagination and through memory. And that is one of the beautiful elements that have been recreated even beyond the desires of the Africans themselves. In other words, even when Africans saw it in their best interest to identify with European values and European notions, even beyond their will and desire, they still maintained some of the fundamental ideas and practices and cultural mores that emerge out of their African connection." Dawes has traced the influence of Africa to many facets of African American culture. For instance the Gullah language, a derivative language of English and African languages was spoken by many Africans in America in the southern states. "[We see the] retention in the southern states of America in a place like New Orleans where we see more of a kind of chrysalis of societies that have retained a strong African presence within them," Dawes said about the Gullah language. "But we also see it in music. We also see it in the construction of community. We also see it in ideas about the world and the conception of the spiritual where the spiritualism is endemic to every day life in society and it isn't dichotomized between the secular and the spiritual. So these are elements that even against many Africans' better judgment in America, they have continued to retain them and they exist in the American psyche." One important reason that the African presence remained so strong in America, according to Dawes, is that Europeans and their culture controlled slave societies, but did not penetrate them. "The idea of the communal family, the extended family living in a multi-family village, which is part of many of the West African cultures in terms of family construction, many of those patterns would still be retained in slave communities because those communities were run by slaves and had very little European presence in them," Dawes said. "We replicated that, in other words, in the construction of the church and the role of the church within the society. The church in the African American community is the place in which the African American has ultimate ownership of their sense of self and economic ownership of their own wealth. There is a sense in the way that African Americans congregated around the church and created the church as the fulcrum of their identity and the expression of their identity. It was the safe haven of the expression of their identity. It represents that retention of the communal. It represents that ability to allow them to have chiefs again, to allow them to have queen mothers again, to allow them to have leaders again in a society in which those things were being repressed. We see that and it continues to be a real presence there. Now how does that impact America? Well, it impacts America because one of the great orators and speakers of American life and experience, Martin Luther King Jr., emerges out of that culture and that sensibility. And his ideas and words permeate the larger African American and American culture and society." In cases where the European masters did have an impact on the African mores of the slaves, Dawes views them as negative influences. "The bastardization [of African culture] happened in a society in which the male position is repressed and the female sense of individuality and identity is constantly being challenged by being the property of White male society," Dawes said. "And therefore, we get these peculiar circumstances where men are encouraged to be 'studs' within the slave society to maintain the slave population. We have retained some of those parts and we see in contemporary society some of the negative retention." In spite of the negativity and the historical context through which the Africans arrived in America, Dawes believes that the past and future of Whites and Blacks are inextricably linked. "America has to contend with its sense of self and its very basic identity as a nation of people who arrived there with quarrels with the place they were coming from, in other words, the New World sensibility," Dawes emphasized. "The Europeans came there abandoning an idea of Europe and its hegemony and tried to create something distinctive and new. The slaves are forced to come in and have to contend with their presence in America, but also with the imposed amnesia and the cutting off of their connection to another country and redefine themselves in that context. The point is that they share a strained relationship with their history and their past and therefore coming together, they have to find a way to work together as a nation. Therefore all efforts to create separate nations, that is a Black nation and a White nation, have suffered because there is much that connects these people, that is Blacks and Whites --; and I use these very carefully -- it is that contention between these particular races that begins to define American multiculturalism sensibilities and America's multiracial sensibilities," Dawes continued. "It is out of this that we get the idealism of the American Dream and what that American Dream breeds is the idealism and the identity. But the process to get there involves a terrible and hard journey that America has to contend with. At the center of that journey is the African presence." And it is this journey, in Dawes view, that has shaped the African influence on America. "I think in the historical dynamic, the impact of Africans on this hemisphere is a coherent narrative, a coherent story knowing the connections between what happened in the Caribbean, North America including Canada and South America would be important," Dawes said. "But the bottom line is that there has been for 400 years an African presence in the Americas. And that presence has activated profound questions of freedom, idealism and identity in ways that have begun to shape the way in which America understands itself. America cannot understand itself without understanding its relationship to slavery. And America cannot understand itself without understanding its relationship to the ideals of freedom during the slave trade. So that profound and basic way in which the African American presence and consequently the African presence has come to shape what we call America." While some may look at the history of Africans in America and not understand, Dawes, in his poetic and esthetic way, profoundly understands the continuity of that experience from the shores of West Africa in the early 1600s to the problems that the African American community faces today. And until America -- all of America -- understands and embraces that African presence in America; America will continue to fruitlessly grope in the dark for its identity. Dawes will speak at the UW-Madison's Red Gym on August 10 at 7 p.m. His Distinguished Madison African Lecture Series talk, ";Influence of the African Diaspora on American Arts and Culture," is free and open to the public. |
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