Heritage

“Heritage” is a poem by Countee Cullen—an important 20th century African American poet. It was published in 1925, first in a magazine and then in Cullen’s first poetry collection, Colors. It was also included in the second edition of James Weldon Johnson’s influential anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) and became one of the most famous poems emerging from the Harlem Renaissance—the legendary cultural flourishing of African American artistic and intellectual achievement centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920 and 1930s. In this poem, Cullen asks what Africa means, or should mean, to Black people in America. Does it stand for distant lands and people about which most African Americans only read, or does it represent their vital heritage? Pondering that question, the poem’s speaker examines their existence as a Black person living in a white-dominated culture, their ambivalent Christian faith, and the barely suppressed anger and grief they feel in response to the pain and injustice Black people have suffered since their forced removal from Africa.

Other poems written by this author include Incident, From The Dark Tower, and For A Poet.

Poet Biography

Born in 1903, Countee Cullen grew up as an adopted son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church—the first independent Protestant denomination founded and led by African Americans, though open to everyone. His adopted father, Frederick A. Cullen, later became president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—a civil rights organization formed in 1909. Thus, Countee Cullen was exposed to Black intellectual life and political activism from an early age, and his work consistently addresses the hopes and frustrations marking the lives of African Americans.

Later in life, he married Nina Yolande DuBois, the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois—the enormously influential American and Ghanaian sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist. However, the marriage ended in divorce, partly because Cullen became more comfortable with his homosexual desires and later had relationships with several men, though none of them were long-lasting.

Cullen studied at New York University and earned his MA at Harvard. He eventually returned to New York and worked as a teacher. He began writing poetry as a teenager and his first collection, Color, was published in 1925 when he was 22. As his poems started receiving awards and appearing in popular magazines—such as Century, Harper’s Nation, and Vanity Fair—he became a prominent writer among African American artists whose original and vital work contributed to the blossoming of the Harlem Renaissance. As a literary editor of Opportunity—a periodical dedicated to African American writing—Cullen nurtured the talents of young writers and had a considerable influence on their work. After the 1920s, Cullen’s poetic output diminished and he turned to other forms, writing a poorly received novel and several dramatic works seen by some Black intellectuals as demeaning to Black people because of depicting seedier aspects of Black lives.

Cullen died from high blood pressure and diseased kidneys in 1946, at the age of 43.

Poem Text

Cullen, Countee. “Heritage.” 1922. Poets.org.

Summary

In the first stanza (Lines 1-10), the speaker acknowledges their distant African heritage and invokes images of African landscapes and people as the background for the central question of the poem: “What is Africa to me?” (Line 10). Since their ancestors left Africa centuries earlier, the speaker lives somewhere else, presumably in the United States, but wonders how much Africa is or should be part of who they are.

The second stanza (Lines 11-30) reveals that the speaker is obsessed with sights and sounds of Africa against their will. These are deeply inside the speaker, related to their very blood, threatening to emerge to the surface and overwhelm their life. The third stanza (Lines 31-63) develops the contrast between Africa—with its many associations to wildlife—and “Here” (Line 46), where the speaker currently lives in a place with no wild animals or wild passions. For them, Africa is linked to the past, like “last year’s snow” (Line 52), or something they might read about in a “book” (Line 31), so when they ask again what Africa is to them at the end of the stanza (Line 63), the answer seems to be that Africa is abstract and faraway.

However, the fourth stanza (Lines 64-84) belies that impression because the speaker is increasingly bothered by internal sensations and impulses which they identify with Africa as an untamed place, calling them to relinquish their own tameness and express themself in more passionate and unguarded ways. The short fifth stanza (Lines 85-92) introduces the theme of religion, contrasting African natives’ non-Christian religions to the speaker’s own Christianity. That theme is developed in the sixth stanza (Lines 93-116), in which the speaker reveals that their faith in Jesus Christ is troubled both by the their identification of Christianity with whiteness and by their resistance to meekness and patience as religious ideals.

Finally, in the seventh stanza (Lines 117-128), the speaker concludes that the must be on guard against these internal urges, which they relate to their African heritage, because such could disrupt the ordered and rational life they live. The speaker’s “heart” and “head” (Line 126) still resist their “civilized” (Line 128) state of being.