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4. America Cannot Hold Unless Black Meets White: The Harlem Renaissance’s Transatlantic Influence
- University of Iowa Press
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4 amer ica cannot hold un less black meets white The Harlem Renaissance’s Transatlantic Influence In H.D.’s “Two Americans,” the U.S. reenters Raymonde’s expatriate life in Switzerland through the visit of two African Americans, Saul and Paula Howard: “‘Mohammed and the mountain,’ said Raymonde, facing, as it happened, the ridge of the French Grammont, ‘did or didn’t it come to him? It’s come to me anyway. I mean,’ she said, ‘America’” (68). Like Mohammed, Raymonde would not or could not go to the mountain—for her the U.S.—but she recognizes it coming to her in the form of racial difference embodied by Saul and Paula. Their entrance into her life clearly recalls her native land: “Oddly and for almost the first time, in her tragically rooted London war-consciousness, Raymonde Ransome felt that America was her home” (64). Simply through their presence, the Howards return to her a strong sense of her American identity because they evoke the racial multiplicity that, for Raymonde and H.D., is synonymous with the U.S. In sharp contrast to Switzerland, and European nations as a whole, racial diversity signifies the American nation throughout H.D.’s life and enters her texts in that way.1 Ethnic and racial identities, those powerful social constructions, would have been learned by H.D. during her American childhood, a time of massive European immigrant influx and of sweeping changes for the African American community. Like sacred land, the nation requires a homogeneous ethnic and racial identity so that it can create a sense of 152 Chapter 4 unity and sameness among all its citizens. Once again, the U.S. lacked this characteristic of nation because of the heterogeneous nature of its citizens and so manufactured a sense of itself as having primarily British and northern European ethnic origins as well as a white racial identity, despite the many immigrants from other parts of Europe and the millions of Africans brought to the Americas. Because these constructed identities so belied the reality of the U.S., the codes delineating ethnic and racial identity were taught to citizens from birth onward. European ethnic differences were still acknowledged, and different ethnic groups were endowed with singular characteristics. As a white American, H.D. did not see herself as part of a monolithic, seamless group but as an amalgamation of her ethnic heritage, as those ethnicities were defined in the U.S. to benefit the nation. Anderson characterizes the European settlers as creating a parallel existence to their European origins, in part, by naming places in the Americas after European towns, such as New York and New London. Their goal was not eventually to overthrow the original York or London but to emulate it: “New London alongside London : an idiom of sibling competition rather than of inheritance” (187). This parallelism between such vastly distanced continents assisted the retention, or reformulation, of ethnic identities (188). H.D.’s characters, particularly in Asphodel and Hermione, are inflected by the characteristics assigned to the ethnic groups from which they come, a belief H.D. developed through the influence of nineteenth-century scientific theories . Similarly, in her poetic imagery, to be white is not monolithic but fragmented, not invisible but visually marked. This chapter begins, then, by interrogating H.D.’s sense of her own identity as a white American, which resonates through its ethnic heritage. The sense of ethnic multiplicities that existed within the white community would, however, instantly consolidate into “whiteness,” what Ruth Frankenberg has defined as “a location of structural advantage, of race privilege” (1), when juxtaposed with the position of black Americans. Originally a colonial enterprise, the European settlers of the Americas exterminated the native peoples of the Americas, stole their land and natural resources, and then imported slave labor from Africa to work that land. Racial identities, based primarily on skin color, served as a America Cannot Hold Unless Black Meets White 153 dividing line between colonizers and colonized. In the U.S., this line, which grew increasingly more solid as the nation developed, was taught to citizens and determined one’s lot in life. Wiebe explains, “As at other colonial sites, Europeans and their progeny in America set out to seize what they could get, murdering indigenous people of color and destroying their habitat as they went. Blacks served as replacement labor. So, in effect, did white immigrants, whose single most important task was to get to and stay on...