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A review by thechanelmuse
The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes
5.0
The Big Sea is an intimate, sweeping (travel) memoir that engulfs you into the world, thoughts, revelations, and life of Langston Hughes as he comes of age in his 20s in the 1920s to the onset of The Great Depression. The book’s title symbolizes the emotional states of deep sadness (depression) and loneliness, the vastness life has to offer, the curiosity of flowing into uncharted territories, the beauty of what lies beneath soon to reach the surface, the voyage by water itself and, most of all, freedom.
"Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling."
Life is literature; it's a reflection of fork in the road journeys amongst a sea of possibilities along the way. There are motifs from childhood trauma and child-parent relationships to dreams and happiness that arise in The Big Sea, alongside one of the book's main themes: race.
Black — the bottom classification of the US caste system built on a social construct transitioning into the cultural identity for a specific ethnic group (Black Americans) — is underscored against the higher deemed status and permanence and flatness of "white." Hughes and I share the same great-grandmother on his maternal side, Lucy Jane Langston—his first and my sixth. In The Big Sea, he describes Lucy as "colored" as he would himself although she was Pamunkey. (For complex reasons at the hands of the Walter Pleckers and Naomi Drakes in the US, she would've been reclassified as such during Hughes' time.)
In turn, upon touching down on the soil of Dakar in Senegal, Langston notes: “The great Africa of my dreams! But there was one thing that hurt me a lot when I talked with the people. The Africans looked at me and would not believe I was a Negro.”
What you’re (“racially”) called in your house won’t be understood in someone else’s house. Race that’s defined in colors (black, white, red) was a foreign ass concept then and now for anyone from differing homelands with tribes, or similar words but different meanings absent of skin color. It’s heritage that’s attached. That same (Black/US Negro) heritage was a revulsion for Hughes’ self-loathing father, James Nathaniel Hughes. He hated Negroes and was willing to assimilate to anything else, leading him to try to permanently meld into the cultural identity of Mexicans in Mexico.
Throughout this memoir, Hughes interchangeably uses the US (re)classifications of Negro, Colored and Black to make sense of the world for himself. He deep dives into how he views himself and cultural identity; the way his family, himself, and others in his community choose to navigate through caste barriers; and compares and contrasts his racial status during his wide travel within and outside the United States, all while maintaining his steady net in the big sea.
"Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling."
Life is literature; it's a reflection of fork in the road journeys amongst a sea of possibilities along the way. There are motifs from childhood trauma and child-parent relationships to dreams and happiness that arise in The Big Sea, alongside one of the book's main themes: race.
Black — the bottom classification of the US caste system built on a social construct transitioning into the cultural identity for a specific ethnic group (Black Americans) — is underscored against the higher deemed status and permanence and flatness of "white." Hughes and I share the same great-grandmother on his maternal side, Lucy Jane Langston—his first and my sixth. In The Big Sea, he describes Lucy as "colored" as he would himself although she was Pamunkey. (For complex reasons at the hands of the Walter Pleckers and Naomi Drakes in the US, she would've been reclassified as such during Hughes' time.)
In turn, upon touching down on the soil of Dakar in Senegal, Langston notes: “The great Africa of my dreams! But there was one thing that hurt me a lot when I talked with the people. The Africans looked at me and would not believe I was a Negro.”
What you’re (“racially”) called in your house won’t be understood in someone else’s house. Race that’s defined in colors (black, white, red) was a foreign ass concept then and now for anyone from differing homelands with tribes, or similar words but different meanings absent of skin color. It’s heritage that’s attached. That same (Black/US Negro) heritage was a revulsion for Hughes’ self-loathing father, James Nathaniel Hughes. He hated Negroes and was willing to assimilate to anything else, leading him to try to permanently meld into the cultural identity of Mexicans in Mexico.
Throughout this memoir, Hughes interchangeably uses the US (re)classifications of Negro, Colored and Black to make sense of the world for himself. He deep dives into how he views himself and cultural identity; the way his family, himself, and others in his community choose to navigate through caste barriers; and compares and contrasts his racial status during his wide travel within and outside the United States, all while maintaining his steady net in the big sea.