World: WHERE GOD IS BLACK

MOST black Africans only learned to write down their songs and tales in the past hundred years, but they are heirs to centuries of oral literature. In their search for an African identity, the continent's contemporary poets—many of them leading politicians—today have forsaken their mission-school Golden Treasury to rediscover the pagan rhymes and rhythms that enlivened tribal life long before the white man came. Says Léopold Sédar Senghor, who is black Africa's most distinguished poet as well as President of Senegal: "Poetry must find its way back to its origins."

The attempt to explore and revive these origins is illustrated in a new anthology, Poems from Black Africa (Indiana University Press; $4.95), edited by U.S. Negro Poet Langston Hughes. Some of the poets are self-consciously primitive, and a few of the English-speaking ones write with echoes of T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins. But they are also busy transcribing and translating traditional folk poetry and evolving what Anthologist Hughes hopefully describes as a literature that "walks with grace and already is beginning to achieve an individuality quite its own."

Most of the black New Wave poets are concerned with négritude, a French word for the essence of blackness and, by extension, for a world in which despair is white, while God and innocence are black. Many writers celebrate nature and memories of a pristine Africa. Most are preoccupied by the West's failure to understand them. But in their poetry—if not in their U.N. speeches—Africans waste surprisingly little time inveighing against imperialism, notwithstanding a tirade by a part-time poet named Patrice Lumumba, the late, rabblerousing Congolese leader ("For a thousand years, you, African, suffered like a beast . . .").

A sampler of voices from the new Africa:

TO ADHIAMBO

I hear many voices like it's said a madman hears; I hear trees talking like it's said a medicine man hears.

Maybe I'm a madman, I'm a medicine man.

Maybe I'm mad; for the voices are luring me, urging me from the midnight moon and the silence of my desk to walk on wave crests across a sea.

Maybe I'm a medicine man hearing talking saps, seeing behind trees; but who's lost his powers of invocation.

But the voices and the trees are one name spelling and one figure silence-etched across the moonface is walking, stepping over continents and seas.

And I raised my hand — my trembling hand, gripping my heart as handkerchief and waved and waved — and waved — but she turned her eyes away. -Gabriel Okara (Nigeria)

BLUE BLACK

God! glad I'm black; pitch-forking devil black: black, black, black; black absolute of life complete, greedfully grabbing life's living . . .

BLACK BLUES

the blues is the black o' the face, I said: black is the blues' face; it's black in the mornin' beige in the sun, and blue black all night long.

Oh, the blues is a black devil face, I said: devil black is the blues' face; it's black in the mornin' beige in the sun, and blue black all night long.