The Congo

Meant for verbal performance, Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo” has a problematic legacy. The poem’s apparent Primitivism conveys racist ideas, not only today but even during Lindsay’s own era. Lindsay devoted himself to progressive ideals and causes; his work inspired experimental poetics like the Beat movement and Spoken Word/Performance Poetry. While the poet would not have seen himself as racist and even played a role in the Harlem Renaissance, “The Congo” represents a kind of tone-deaf cultural insensitivity as Lindsay’s speaker assumes a kind of verbal blackface. Physical descriptions of Black bodies, generalizations about Black behavior, and depictions of tribal rituals in a near satire complicate the experience of the poem. Whether or not his genuine enthusiasm for Black American art and artists led Lindsay to take on this role, “The Congo” leaves the reader to question Lindsay’s actual understanding of Black identity. At best, Lindsay assumes his role as a white poet allows him the authority to speak for Black culture in a way that amounts to a shallow pantomime, even as it attempts to condemn imperialism and racism.

Poet Biography

Vachel Lindsay’s Springfield, Illinois roots fostered a lifetime sense of connection to American history, especially through Abraham Lincoln. Born in 1879 to a prominent family, Lindsay grew up in a home on the same street as the Illinois Governor’s Mansion. He followed his parents’ wish that he pursue a medical career like his father, attending medical school in Ohio. Before finishing a degree there, Lindsay left for Chicago to study at the Art Institute. From Chicago, he moved to the New York School of Art to follow a program of study in pen and ink. Though his full artistic expression would come later in his writing and performance, Lindsay continued to draw and to take an interest in visual arts. His arts education provided a base for the experimental, mixed media work he would pioneer.

While in art school, Lindsay began to write and self-publish poems, following a model of self-promotion somewhere between Walt Whitman and a traveling medicine show hawker. Unable to find a publisher willing to take a chance on his unconventional verse, Lindsay performed and sold his work on the road from 1906 to 1908, financing poetry tours by trading performances or pamphlets for food. He traveled from the deep South to the Midwest, then from the Northeast back to Ohio, sometimes alone, sometimes staying with friends or family. By the time he went back on the road in 1912, his work had caught the attention of Harriet Monroe, the influential editor of Poetry magazine. In 1913, Poetry introduced Lindsay’s work to a serious, more academic audience when it published “General William Booth Enters Heaven,” one of Lindsay’s poems inspired by the history of his hometown.

Known as the Prairie Troubadour, Lindsay became a wandering advocate for aesthetic beauty, pursuing his mission to chronicle American identity and culture. Lindsay’s work expands Whitman’s democratic vision, attempting to encompass multitudes of American voices, and prefigures the Beat poets’ elevation of American contemporary and folk culture, both rural and urban. Lindsay used the term “higher vaudeville” for the genre he invented, a performance with the rhythmic elements of music and traditional poetry, interspersed with colloquial dialogue, sound, and gesture. Lindsay’s performances delivered drama and excitement for his audiences. His popularity increased, allowing him to travel the country, observing American life and recording its rhythms.

Lindsay espoused a progressive social and political outlook, advocating for and attempting to elevate voices not yet heard fully in mainstream American art and literature. His enthusiasm for causes often exceeded his ability to render useful support. Having witnessed race riots in his hometown of Springfield, Lindsay attempted to foster understanding by writing a series of 10 lectures on ethnicity and culture within the context of contemporary Springfield. But “The Congo,” a poem Lindsay hoped would convey the intensity and beauty of Black American culture, revealed a shallow understanding of his subject. W. E. B. DuBois, who would go on to praise Lindsay’s writing and to publish his story “The Golden-Faced People” in The Crisis magazine, found the poem limited in its understanding of Black culture in his review in Poetry. Lindsay played an instrumental role in Langston Hughes’s early career when the Harlem Renaissance luminary still worked at the Wardman Hotel where Lindsay often dined. Recognizing the poet, Hughes offered him a group of handwritten poems. The works moved Lindsay to help Hughes enter Lincoln University. While Lindsay demonstrated enthusiasm and sincerity in his commitment to supporting Black American culture, his good intentions did not always ensure a sensitive, nuanced portrayal.

Lindsay enjoyed moderate success professionally and personally before financial and creative struggles led him into a decline that waxed and waned throughout the 1920s. By 1931, Lindsay gave into his darker impulses and drank a bottle of lye in order to end his life. His optimistic vision of an American cultural community at times outran his ability to convey it. But Lindsay’s expansive, rhythmic poetic style would go on to influence Beat poetry and spoken word poetry movements. His predictions for the role of a new genre, one he saw as uniquely American, did not resonate fully until the 21st century, when his ideas in The Art of the Moving Picture began to see full realization in American film.

Poem Text

Lindsay, Vachel. “The Congo.” 1913. Project Gutenberg.

Summary

Vachel Lindsay’s three-part poem “The Congo” bears the subtitle “A Study of the Negro Race,” as if introducing an anthropological tract. The poem itself however relies on vivid, romantic imagery, onomatopoeia, rhythmic language, and theatrical presentation in its cinematic, if flawed and stereotypical, portrayal of Black life and art. Section I, entitled “Their Basic Savagery,” describes a group of American Black men pounding on a table, a vision that prompts the speaker to imagine “tattooed cannibals” (Part I, Line 18) in the Congo. The speaker goes on to meditate on the power of the rhythmic beating, as well as the warlike Africans and their sinister god, Mumbo-Jumbo.

The second section, “Their Irrepressible High Spirits” returns to an American scene in “the gambling-hall” (Part II, Line 3). Soon the speaker once again perceives a vision of the Congo as he watches the men dance and laugh. “A negro fairyland” emerges (Part II, Line 12), with “a minstrel river” (Part II, Line 13) and an ensuing performance by “witch-men” (Part 11, Line 24). Mumbo-Jumbo returns, echoing the booming rhythms of the first section as the background for celebratory dance rather than for war.

The final section begins in a Christian religious ceremony where a Black preacher “Beat on the Bible till he wore it out” (Part III, Line 7). Called “The Hope of Their Religion,” the speaker sees in the vigor of a Black church meeting another glimpse of the Congo in which Christianity defeats Mumbo-Jumbo at last. The line “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,” repeated in each section, resolves near the end of this section: “Never again will he hoo-doo you” (Section III, Lines 48 and 49). But even after redemption, the final three lines of the poem repeat Mumbo-Jumbo’s exhortation in a “terrified whisper” (Section III, Line 54), giving Lindsay a dramatic ending to perform.