Essay on Transcendentalism in Poetry

Aims and Objective:

The aim and objective of this research is to study self-actualization as a coping mechanism to deal with the post-colonial identity crisis in the poetry of African poets like Ben Okri, and Langston Hughes. With Post-colonialism comes an age of ambiguity, a battle between appropriation and abrogation concerning assimilation into the now-foreign scene. The chaos in the external landscape paves the way for a chaotic internal landscape, which calls for a coping mechanism to deal with it. African writers, like Ben Okri and Langston Hughes, used their poetry as a tool to employ self-actualization as a coping mechanism for dealing with the post-colonial identity crisis.

Introduction:

To begin with a critical analysis of a text, it is important to understand the historical, political, social, and economic background of the writers. It is important to consider the motivation of Ben Okri for writing his poetry, which was the fact that he witnessed a lot of political violence during the Civil War in Nigeria. The Nigerian Civil War took place between Northern Nigeria and Eastern Nigeria, which was a state called Biafra. Biafra represented the nationalist aspirations of the Igbo people as they realized that they could not co-exist with the northern-dominated federal government. It is noted that Ben Okri’s paternal side sided strongly with the Biafran state as they were staunch supporters of the nationalist approach of the Igbo people. It is to be noted that as a result of this, a famine also broke out and two million civilians of Biafra died. It was termed one of the worst forms of genocide when the matter came into the hands of the United Nations. Hence, Ben Okri back in Nigeria witnessed the conflict between the two states which was driven in the following directions: ethnic, cultural, religious, political, and economic. However, later he moved to Essex University in England, becoming a victim of an identity crisis.

Similarly, Langston Hughes witnessed a similar situation as he had a lifelong of Mullato experiences as his ancestors were of mixed races, leaving a void in him that longed for a coping mechanism to deal with the post-colonial identity crisis. He found a hard time assimilating into the foreign scene as instead of believing in the American dream, his dream of the future of the Afro-Americans oscillated between the American dream and the African Dream of reclaiming one’s identity. Therefore both the writers, Ben Okri and Langston Hughes through their poetry promote the overarching themes of hope, humanism, and a quest for self-actualization as a solution to the problems arising from the post-colonial diaspora.

Literature Review:

Self-actualization is a universal concept that is embedded with the ideas of Transcendentalism and the Sufi school of thought. This idea had been dealt with and worked upon by writers, universally. From Asian to American, to African, all thinkers realized that the quest for self-discovery could be taken as a coping mechanism to deal with the ever-evolving chaos and the existential dread in the world.

Allama Muhammad Iqbal, a Pakistani poet employed the mechanism of using Self-Actualization as a tool to deal with the chaos during and after the Partition of the Sub Continent. In one of his verses, he culminates the idea of self-discovery in the anguished and ambiguous people of his time, by making them believe that you are a bird whose limit is even beyond the skies.

“Tu Shaheen Hai, Parwaz Hai Kaam Tera,

Tere Samnay Asmaan Aur Bhi Hai”

Walt Whitman, an American poet thinks along the same lines as he opens his poem ‘The Song of Myself’ with a powerful, assertive statement:

“I celebrate myself and sing myself

The above-mentioned verse is not the egoistic representation of a man, but the ability of him to discover and celebrate his own ‘self’ to realize his abilities and potential in the challenging world.

Verisimilitude is the idea of faithfully representing the reality. Self-actualization is closely linked to verisimilitude in terms of thinking and dreaming. It could be related to Martin Luther King JR’s speech.

“I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

One day this nation will rise and live up to its creed”

This could be related to a few verses from Ben Okri’s poem, ‘As Clouds Pass Above Our Heads’, ‘The wise say life is a dream/And soon the dream is done/But what you did in the dream/Is all that counts beneath the sun/The dream is real, and the real is a dream.

Martin Luther King Jr. in the above-mentioned quote is trying to assert that to faithfully represent reality, it is important to dream of one’s ‘self’ at a higher stature so that one can think about the ways to transform the dreams into reality by working towards achieving those dreams of self-actualization.

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John Milton's poetry also propagated that self-actualization is all about perspective and attitude. We must dream first in full swing to work towards attaining that dream. Dream good and support good. Life is but a dream and it matters what you do in that dream as it'll define who you wake up to be as a person.

'The mind is its place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.'

This could be related to Ben Okri’s verses from the poem, ‘As Clouds Pass Above Our Heads’: ‘But there is nothing we can do/If we don’t begin to think anew/We are not much more than what we think.’ Also, ‘In our minds we swim or sink/If there is one secret I’d like to share/It’s that we are what we dream/Or what we fear.

A French Philosopher Rene Descartes describes self-actualization as a coping mechanism by alluding to the reason of existence to the ability to think about one’s self.

“I can think, therefore I exist.”

Discussion and Analysis:

Keeping in view the historical and socio-political background of both Ben Okri and Langston Hughes, it can be established that they both used poetry as a means of assimilating into the post-colonial scene by culminating a sense of nationalistic spirit by propagating the importance of self-actualization in the people of their times. A longing for a utopian discourse and a quest for self-discovery can be easily seen in the poems of both poets. The beauty of African Literature is that the first impression that a reader gets by reading a text is equivalent to viewing the tip of the iceberg, which hints towards a much greater depth underneath. For instance, Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart’s title suggests that things are crumbing in the present but it hints at the past that although things are now falling apart, they were once okay. The poems, ‘As Clouds Pass Above Our Heads’ and An African Elegy by Ben Okri, ‘I too Sing America’, and ‘Themes for English B’ appear to be positive and meditative at first glance, yet they hint towards struggle from a dystopian discourse to a utopian discourse, by culminating the quest of self-discovery in the readers.

Ben Okri’s and Langston Hughes’s poetry revolves around providing solutions to African problems such as existential crisis, a constant battle between appropriation vs abrogation in the foreign scene, and identity crisis. The hopeful solutions that they propagate through their poetry are the notion of celebration of negritude, humanism, transcendentalism, and self-actualization.

Ben Okri in his poem, ‘An African Elegy’ calls the African race ‘The miracles that God made’, and the ‘Precious wonders of the Earth’. He does this to culminate the sense of self-worth and self-realization in the African race who has tasted the ‘bitter fruit of Time’, and endured the ‘sufferings of Poverty’. Still, he views them to be strong individuals who possess the ability to feel ‘blessed even in their pain’. For them, there is ‘always hope’, and the ‘sky is not an enemy’ for them. Similarly, in his poem ‘As Clouds Pass Above Our Heads’, he is trying to assert that as ‘As clouds pass above our heads/So time passes through our lives/Where does it go/And when it passes/What do we have to show?’ As rain clouds symbolize gloom or disaster, and such clouds can obscure our vision or dim our optimism. Therefore, clouds could be the symbolic representation of life obstructions, and he indirectly asks a question to the collective unconscious of humanity in general since now the life obstructions in the form of post-colonialism have passed by, how can we make the best use of the time to discover ourselves. He employs natural imagery by using words like ‘clouds’, ‘sun’, ‘tree’, and ‘plants’, he is trying to refer to and address the internal landscape of the collective unconscious of the people of his times so that they could ‘seek out a higher way’. He also uses the symbol of ‘Buddha’, he is trying to refer to a desire for enlightenment, of seeing or trying to achieve more in life that is for the greater good, and could be taken as a coping mechanism to deal with the ever-evolving time.

Langston Hughes through his poetry asserts a similar idea that we must deal with the identity crises induced by post-colonialism and the sufferings of the past by using self-actualization as a tool to cope with the self/other binary in the changing times. In his poem, ‘I too sing America’, he is making a humanistic appeal to promote the notion of brotherhood to assimilate into the foreign, post-colonial scene. Despite being a ‘darker brother’ and viewed as a lowly race by the white ‘brothers’, he is trying to celebrate the negritude, and assert the power of the self and consciousness, by quoting that ‘Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table/When company comes/Nobody’ll dare/Say to me/“Eat in the kitchen,”. He is trying to make a humanistic plea to white readers, and culminating a sense of self-worth in the black ‘brothers’ to realize that they are ‘beautiful’ people. He wants to escape from the physical realm embedded with the class boundaries into a ‘beautiful’ imaginary realm where every ‘self’ is equally beautiful and worthy. In another hopeful and prophetic poem, ‘Theme for English B’, Langston Hughes is trying to accentuate that the ethnicities of the ‘white’ or the ‘black’ don’t matter, it is the realization of ‘being’ yourself that differentiates individuals from one another. The divisions of caste, color, and creed make people believe that the whites and blacks are not a ‘part’ of each other, but it is not ‘true’. The truth is what comes out of ‘you’, and your inner self’, so it is pertinent enough to idealize one’s self to be at a higher stature and realize one’s worth.

Another acclaimed African female writer, Maya Angelou shares similar themes of realization of the individual ‘I’ in her poetry, which could be taken as a coping mechanism for the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) induced by the challenging times of post-colonialism. In one of her poems, ‘Still, I Rise’, she accentuates a journey of self-actualization when she says “I am the dream and the hope of the slave, I rise I rise I rise’. It could be related to a few verses from Ben Okri’s poem ‘As Clouds Pass Above Our Heads’, ‘Each one of us is a powerful being./Wake up to what you are, /You are a sun, you are a star./Wake up to what you can be./Search, search for a new destiny.’

The purpose of Art is to convey the truth, the original form of reality. This philosophy could be related to the idea employed by John Keats in ‘Ode to Grecian Urn’ that implies that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty/that is all /ye know on earth/and all ye need to know’. In African literature, it has been incorporated in a manner that the harsh realities of the present shouldn’t be ignored or concealed under glorified lies, which could be termed as appropriation in the foreign scene, but no matter how bitter it is, it must be first accepted as it as, so that the human consciousness could be prepared to find out the necessary coping mechanisms to deal with the anxiety induced by it. Langston Hughes in his poem, ‘Theme for English B’ asserts the importance of accepting the truth about one’s self, when the ‘instructor’ asked him to write an essay in a manner that ‘page must come out of you’ as only ‘then, it will be true.’.

Post Colonialism is amalgamated with Post Modernism as it also promotes focus on one’s inner self which is a kind of self-assessment or a notion of self-reflexivity, which could be construed as an aspect of postmodernism, as it does not believe in hierarchy or divisions of any sorts, as one’s focus only lies upon the self which helps him to transcend beyond the physical divisions. The Punjabi Sufi poet from Pakistan, Mian Muhammad Baksh promotes this idea of self-actualization to transcend from the physical realm where the distinctions and divisions are believed into an imaginative realm that knows no boundaries or distinctions of caste, color, or creed. When Mian Muhammad Bakhsh in one of his verses quotes:

“Loye Loye Bhar le Kuriye, Je Tu Bhanda Parna,

Shaam Payi Bin Sham Muhammad, Ghar Jandi Ne Darna”

He is trying to accentuate the importance of time, in fulfilling one’s aims in life, which could be taken as a coping mechanism that Ben Okri also employs in one of his poems, ‘As Clouds Pass Above Our Heads’, as he says, ‘We can plant deeds in time/As gardeners’ plant roses./We can plant thoughts, or good words too/especially if they are noble and true./Time is an act of consciousness: /One of the greatest forces/Of the material world./We ought to use time/Like emperors of the mind/Do magic things that the future./Surprised, will find.

Conclusion:

It can be concluded that in Literature, there are certain phases of post-colonialism. The pre-colonial period focuses on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, the colonial period, focuses on the power dynamics, and the post-colonial period where the question of assimilation and identity crisis begins, which focuses on seeing self-actualization as a coping mechanism for combat the post-colonial identity crisis. As Ben Okri in his poem, ‘As Clouds Pass Above Our Heads’ says ‘We could change our life today/And seek out a higher way/We can join that growing fight/To stop our world being plunged into night/We can wake to the power of our voice/Change the world with the power of our choice/Let each moment of our life/Somehow help the good fight/Or help spread some light.