Tuesday, September 29, 2020

 To me,who has been  an unseen landlord (@ Chennai ) and a tenant (@ Tiruchy) simultaneously  during some time earlier, this poem is nearer to my experiences as a tenant.

 The Ballad of the Landlord


Landlord, landlord,
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don't you 'member I told you about it
Way last week?

Landlord, landlord,
These steps is broken down.
When you come up yourself
It's a wonder you don't fall down.

Ten Bucks you say I owe you?
Ten Bucks you say is due?
Well, that's Ten Bucks more'nI'l pay you
Till you fix this house up new.

What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?

Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.
Talk on-till you get through.
You ain'tgonna be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.

Police! Police!
Come and get this man!
He's trying to ruin the government
And overturn the land!

Copper's whistle!
Patrol bell!
Arrest.
Precinct Station.
Iron cell.
Headlines in press:

MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT  HELD  NO BAIL

JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL!

*Langston Hughes

 

No lengthy introduction is needed to Longston Hughes for modern readers. Yet, a brief one on the poet would do.

Born in 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934).When Langston was young, his father divorced his mother Carrie and even left the country. After the separation with her husband, his mother had to go to places seeking employment. His early life was thus unstable and his childhood was not a very happy one. He had to spend most of his childhood in Kansas with his maternal grandmother Mary Patterson Langston. It was his grandmother Mary Langston who instilled a lasting sense of racial pride in Langston Hughes.

Though Hughes is known as an Afro-American, his ancestral mix shows more. His paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were African-American; his maternal great-grandfather was white and of Scottish descent; his paternal great-grandfather was of European Jewish descent. His work permeated the pride in his African-American identity and its diverse culture. Hughes died at the age of 65 on May 22, 1967 from complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer.

Hughes was a many-sided personality - poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He is considered one among the chief bards of the Harlem Renaissance. He was also one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes chose to be unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He stressed the theme of "black is beautiful". His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor.

His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working class blacks in America, lives full of struggles, joy, laughter, and music. He summed himself as "my seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind," He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.

THE BACKGROUND THEN:  During the times of Langston, in the U.S.A color discrimination was in its peak. (Has it subsided now?) The blacks suffered untold miseries. 

The tenant and landlord in the poem are symbols of the black and whites representing the perpetual human divide in the country. The police and the judges were mostly whites and were certainly not neutral. Even the Press failed to be impartial as they served as the mouthpieces of the Whites.

Here, in the poem, we witness the black (‘tenant’) being mercilessly exploited by the white (‘the landlords’). To make things worse, the police and the court also are also 'palm-touching pals' to the ‘landlord’. They congregate  to cause exploitation of the ‘black tenant’. Ironically, the hero in this ballad is not the landlord (though the title shows him), but it is the tenant, who raises voices for the injustice and turns a hero against oppression.

*

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