The Congo

In her introduction to Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo and Other Poems (1914), Harriet Monroe emphasizes the poet’s use of the “primitive” as a way to recover artistic authenticity and vitality. Some artists make genuine use of this technique, gesturing at enduring human traits by evoking the “primitive” through imagery, either acoustic or visual. Lindsay’s contemporary audiences experienced “The Congo,” through both kinds of images as Lindsay performed the work live. Reading the poem today requires imagining the poet’s movements and interpreting his stage directions embedded in the text. The poem’s critical reception from the beginning questioned the work’s success as a Primitivist celebration of Black American temperament and culture. While Lindsay’s reputation as an advocate for Black artists protected “The Congo” somewhat from being seen as a racist text, its reliance on stereotypes and exaggerated gestures undermine any sincere attempt to foreground Black identity. In “The Congo,” Lindsay prioritizes exotic imagery and drama, appropriating a culture he admires rather than allowing that culture to emerge with appreciation, understanding, or respect.

“The Congo” demonstrates Lindsay’s particular style of composition for performance. Divided into three acts, the poem returns at the end of each section to a chanted refrain in which a god-like figure called Mumbo Jumbo will “hoo-doo you” (multiple lines in sections I, II, and III). The chant offers dramatic potential for Lindsay’s performances, which took place on his extended tours across the country. The term “Mumbo Jumbo” came most directly for Lindsay from The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman, a children’s work that combined tropes from folk tales and minstrelsy. In these stories, the central character’s parents are called “Black Mumbo” and “Black Jumbo.” Other uses of the term in Charles Dickens’s and Thomas Hardy’s works show its 19th-century meaning as a kind of superstitious nonsense, a barbaric muttering. Lindsay’s Mumbo Jumbo could be seen as a serious homage to African religion, except for its cultural context as a dismissive reference, an assessment of African culture as barbaric and base. By the end of the poem, Lindsay reduces Mumbo Jumbo to a defeated boogeyman, a specter of destruction and ignorance.

The Sambo stories also exploited racist stereotypes by employing a burlesqued form of rural accents in dialogue. Lindsay’s similarly comic representations of Black American dialect in “The Congo” provide rhythm for his poem’s performance, but they follow a cultural pattern of reducing and demeaning Black American accents for humorous purposes. Lindsay came out of two oracular traditions: Protestant preaching, and vaudeville, one the most popular forms of entertainment in 19th-century America. Lindsay deliberately set out to integrate some aspects of vaudeville showmanship in his poems, seen clearly in his plentiful performance and staging directions interspersed throughout the poem’s text. These bracketed directions become a part of the written poem’s text, Lindsay’s way of performing for the reader even when he cannot be present. From the third line of the first section, “[A deep rolling bass],” readers can imagine Lindsay’s voice or the drum he used at times bringing an urgency to the lines. The text often slips into sections of fully capitalized lines, especially in rhythmic lines of onomatopoeia. Repeated sounds and words anchor Lindsay’s poems; all three sections of “The Congo” feature long or extended o sounds: boom, blood, boomlay, hoo-doo, and Mumbo Jumbo all harking back to the word “Congo” itself. Shrill and tinny sounds, especially l and t sounds, punctuate the deep o sounds repeated through each section. Even though Lindsay’s primary interest lies in this creation of acoustic features for performance, the stereotypes he reinforces while mimicking dialect undermine any earnest attempt in the poem to illuminate aspects of Black American art and culture.

Like each section, the opening movement of the poem, “Their Basic Savagery,” begins with a contemporary vision. Black men in a “wine-barrel room” (Section I, Line 1), a pub or bar, gather around a table, beating on its surface with their hands, a broom handle, and an umbrella. The speaker calls up this scene for the reader or listener with “Boom, boom, BOOM” (Section I, Line 8) and “Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM” (Section I, Line 10). As the reader joins the speaker in his vision, we join on the outside of this group, unobserved and apart. Lindsay as the poet never clarifies whether this observation constitutes a judgement of this culture’s value. The speaker verges between condescension and awe, never fully inhabiting either. In Line 11 of the first section, the speaker exclaims his discovery of “religion” as he “had a vision”; this revelation renders the observer as a student of the scene, one who benefits from witnessing the cultural transaction between the men. But the description in the first line of Section I reduces those men to “fat black bucks” (Section I, Line 1), dehumanizing them and removing their individuality. The speaker’s vision transports him to the Congo, the shift in setting indicated by the stage direction in Line 13: “[More deliberate. Solemnly chanted.]” Lines 14 and 15, fully capitalized, transport the reader or audience to the Congo with the speaker, whether intoned by Lindsay or in our imaginative interpretation of the stage directions, the capital letters, the rhyme, and the rhythm of the lines. The alliterative percussion in “THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK” (Section I, Line 14) invites the reader to inhabit the dramatic role of the speaker, though still at a remove from the subjects of the scene. The speaker describes the native people of the Congo, the correspondents to the men around the bar table. In the Congo, the men beat “a blood-lust song” (Section I, Line 19) with a “thigh-bone” (Section I, Line 21) while screaming “witch-doctors” (Section I, Line 23) accompany. Even in Lindsay’s time, the cannibal stereotype reduces the poem’s ability to speak to authentic culture. The percussion, the echoes, the chilling dance of the tribesman, and the appearance of the “God of the Congo” (Section I, Line 54), whispered near the end of this act, provide a scene of excitement and horror, rather than any cultural enlightenment.

While the first section of “The Congo” portrays violent, savage origins for Black Americans, the second section praises what the section title calls “Their Irrepressible High Spirits.” Starting with a vision of gamblers who “danced the Juba” (Section II, Line 3) and “guyed the policemen (Section II, Line 5), the speaker again pivots the vision back to the Congo, now described as a “negro fairyland” (Section II, Line 12) with a “minstrel river” (Section II, Line 13). While the speaker conveys a sense of wonder at the “ebony palace” (Section II, Line 15) and “cake-walk princes in their long red coats” (Section II, Line 36), he also describes a “baboon butler” (Section II, Line 20) and “hats that were covered in diamond-dust” (Section II, Line 27). The Congo of Section II does not resemble reality any more than the Congo of Section I, only this time the white lens fetishizes and infantilizes the native population.

Section III promises a vision of the future with its title, “The Hope of their Religion.” Even in this title, the speaker externalizes Black Christianity as “their” religion. Again, the section begins with a glimpse of a contemporary camp meeting: the “good old negro” in the third line “beat on the Bible till he wore it out” (Section III, Line 7). This rhythm continues through the congregation’s song, bringing the speaker again to his fictionalized Congo setting. In this final section, figures from Christianity subdue the native god Mumbo Jumbo, releasing native people from “their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong” (Section III, Line 12). The “pioneer angels” (Section III, Line 34) herald a new era, with “temples clean” (Section III, Line 36).

In his note on the poem, Lindsay attributes inspiration for the poem’s third section to a sermon on the life of Disciples of Christ missionary Ray Eldred, who drowned in the Congo. The note brings up again the poem’s focus on white perspective rather than any true gesture at exploring or honoring Black identity. Lindsay associated with Harlem Renaissance writers; his own writing style demonstrated the influences of jazz improvisation. The speaker of “The Congo” offers little of this context in his glimpses of Black American culture. “The Congo” gives readers a pleasant journey through three cinematic scenes of peril, wonder, and redemption. The poem enlivens those scenes with vivid images and rhythmic language. In this way, the poem functions as one of Lindsay’s performance pieces, more in the tradition of vaudeville than poetry.