Status Updates From The Life of Langston Hughes...

“Guilty and depressed, he was ambivalent about his mother’s anger. Life had been hard on her, but he had not caused her unhappiness; if anything, she and his father had caused his own.”

God, if you were a writer in the thirties and you *weren't* in Spain during the Civil War, it's like... literally what were you even doing with your life? What, couldn't catch a boat? Seems like a weak excuse when literally everyone else was there. Really seems like you couldn't throw a brick in a crowd without striking a famous somebody.

It continues to sadden and still me that there are so many insights from this man's life one hundred years ago that are relevant to our world today. Like, there are so many mirroring situations and realizations, and there's been so little that's changed.

What I find interesting about this 1934 revival of interest in Hughes is how much it speaks to the fact that poetry was really falling out favor and being superseded by the novella or by short stories. I wish Rampersad had touched on that more - that, as primarily a poet, Langston was really limiting his reach and so he had to perforce be more diverse in his form in order to be successful.

These last couple pages have been rough for anyone who knows even a little bit about Japanese involvement in WW2. Needless to say, it is what the kids call “not a great look” to be praising Japan as a nation free from imperialism when they’re literally taking over Chinese territories at that moment.

And Hughes’s girlfriend was half-Chinese!

Anyway, a lesson in always questioning your own ideology.

I like that on page 4, Rampersad is like “Hughes never had any known lover” and then throughout the book, it’s like “Here are the women he fell in love with, here are pictures of them, here’s one of them talking about how he was the first man she was ‘intimate with’”

¿¿¿No known lovers???