Christopher Vecoli

Italian 413 ~ Dante

Prof. Robert Rushing

Spring 2015

Black Dante: African Americanist Readings of the Divine Comedy

You drew me out from slavery to freedom, by all those paths, by all those means that were within your power.

Par. 31: 85-87

Professor Dennis Looney of the University of Pittsburgh has done painstaking and pioneering work to explore

the African-American literary reception of the Divine Comedy in, Freedom Readers: The African American

Reception of Dante and the Divine Comedy (2011). Without his work, this paper could not have been written.

That being said, Looney is neither himself of African-American descent nor representing the African American

experience or community; rather, he has gathered African American literary appreciations and appropriations

of Dante, arranged in an African Americanist chronological order: Colored Dante, Negro Dante, Black Dante, and

African American Dante. Therefore, the -ist on the end of African American in my title acknowledges a scholarly

rather than a participatory point of view, and also gives me space, after briefly describing Looney’s work, to

outline what I believe to be the fundamental narrative themes in Dante that speak to the African American

experience with special attention to The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903, 1997): exile, double

consciousness, the burden of the body, and (in the last section), verticality, freedom and agency. If successful,

this can yield not only an interesting glimpse of African American receptions of Dante, but also fruitful ways of

looking at the Divine Comedy itself. I borrow from Looney’s eloquent introduction to end mine: “In Dante they

[African Americans] find not only a politically engaged poet who speaks truth to power…they also find a master

craftsman of poetic language who forges a new vernacular out of the linguistic diversity around him,…not unlike

what authors of color have had to do in this country…This linguistic task is the ultimate political act” (2011: 3).

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1. I would like to use the Italian impegno for “political engagement,” inferno for those in absolute eternal

exile without self-awareness or remorse, and inclusion for the contested entre into the heart of the European

canon. These are the drivers in Looney’s rendition of African-American reception and appropriation of Dante.

Looney begins with Edward Said’s critique of Dante as the cornerstone of the imperial Europe of comparative

literature (2011: 5); followed by Bhaba’s argument that “hybridity is that curious formation that derives from

the encounter of the colonizing power with the colonized, which the colonized then uses in turn to subvert the

colonizer” (2011: 7). The African American reception and appropriation of Dante must deal with the challenges

of exclusion/inclusion from/into the canonicity of Dante, receiving encouragement from Dante himself as fierce

critic of the accepted conventional wisdoms of his day (although fully devoted to Virgil and the Saints). They use

eclectic formulations to integrate their own experience with the Dantean universe, even as Dante hybridized his

vernacular Tuscan with Latin, Provencal and gibberish, of the most sublime and most earthy linguistic registers.

The centerpiece of Looney’s Colored Dante is the first of H. Cordelia Ray’s trilogy of poems, “The Seer, the

Singer and the Sage” (1885; Looney 2011: 55) which builds on Dante’s 19th century reputation as an anti-

papal free thinker and patriotic nationalist (as per Foscolo and Mazzini; see Luzzi 2012:13; Jossa 2012: 30):

“Rare medieval Spirit! Brooding Seer! Grand, lonely Poet! ….With stern denunciations thou didst wage, Against

the law’s lax mandates bloody war; And all unawed rebuked the false decrees, Of kings, of conquerors, popes

and cardinals.” Thus young H. Cordelia Ray crafts high praise for Dante the activist exiled poet of civil impegno.

“American abolitionists and the promoters of Italian unity used the Italian poet to rally others to fight the good

political cause. Citizens of color in the United States, for whom the abolitionists had agitated, were beginning to

name their children Dante” (Looney 2011: 63). Of course, it is also true that years later, Dante would be used to

help recover “lost” territory for Italian irredentism (Havely 2012: 363); and that Mussolini would lionize Dante

as the prophet of the return of Roman imperial glory; Latin, after all, the official language of Heaven! (cf. Par.

18). But not so fast- this is contradicted in Par. 26: 124-132: “never has anything produced by human reason

been everlasting…how you speak- in this tongue or in that- she [Nature] leaves to you and to your preference.”

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Looney’s second section, on Negro Dante, describes W.E.B. Du Bois’ struggle for an ambitious liberal arts

curriculum for African American students, as opposed to the more practical vocational ideals of Booker T.

Washington: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and

Dumas” (1903: 102). However, Spencer Williams’ (later to become Andy, of Amos and Andy) folk-drama

Go Down, Death (1944) is Looney’s highlight of this historical period for Dante appropriation: “simple tales of

good and evil… are set against the backdrop of the religious experience of southern blacks on the eve of

the great migrations” to the urban north. Jim, a juke joint owner, tries to entrap a popular pastor who is hurting

his business, with “incriminating” photographs; the elderly woman who raised Jim finds the pictures. They fight

and she is accidentally killed. Several minutes of Milano Films 1911 L’inferno, featuring sins like lust, gluttony

and flattery, are spliced into Go Down, Death, sensationalizing the guilt and torment that drive Jim to his death.

The character of Dante in L’inferno is the only living white person to appear in Go Down, thus integrating and

dramatically enhancing it at the same time. Looney believes that here is a strategy using L’inferno to appeal to

the upwardly mobile new black middle class, allowing the film to also reach northern markets beyond the deep

south. Classical, compelling, vivid attractions of Dante’s Inferno aside, it is in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)

that Looney finds a deep similarity to the split narrative in the Divine Comedy between the pilgrim and the poet,

the “hermeneutic tension between those two periods of Dante’s life” (2011: 88); reflected in Ellison’s evocation

of the Du Boisian notion of “double consciousness,” of the Negro divided between an African and an American

self…. Ellison writes, “I not only entered the music, but descended, like Dante, into its depths” (2011: 88).

Black Dante, the third section Of Looney’s chronology, is about the complex and conflicted but profound

engagement with Dante’s Divine Comedy by Amiri Baraka: “the function of writing about Dante and the access

to [that] part of the tradition… can liberate the black writer. At least it liberates Leroi Jones, turning him into a

new man with a new name, Amiri Baraka, whose experimental literary project culminates in The System of

Dante’s Hell in 1965“ (2011: 105). Dante’s underworld opens up a rich haphazard cartography for Baraka to

chronicle his own descent into the inferno of self-destruction: “Escape Bolgia in a Buick” (2011: 123).

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Baraka refers to “Hell in the head. The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed

subject. The flame of social dichotomy. Split open down the center” (2011: 136), another painful iteration of

double consciousness. Baraka’s emblematic Black Dante of the 1960’s is chaotic and revolutionary, and

challenges the Euro-canon even as it appropriates it:

Baraka’s radical response to the poet at once confirms and belies Edward Said’s claim that Dante’s Divine

Comedy is essentially an imperial text that is foundational to the imperial discipline of comparative literature:

that Baraka can found his struggle against imperialist culture, as he sees it, on none other than this specific

poem suggests the extent to which it is a richer and more complex text than even Said imagined. (2011: 106)

Perhaps the most interesting point of Baraka’s System is the extent to which the unreflective life in the Inferno

becomes purgatorial in the process of writing and achieving psychic distance from, and discipline over, that

former self; that is, the positive potentiality of this form of double consciousness and objective self-awareness

is the enabling of a movement from hell to purgatory. Perhaps it is for this that Dante’s pilgrim must descend,

before he can climb. He must encounter all of the sinfulness that is in his/our DNA and reflect deeply upon it,

in order to transmute it into the system of P’s on his forehead in Purgatorio. The pilgrim’s immersion in Inferno

and climb to purgatory serves as the Poet’s virtual education. As Looney puts it, “The journey described in the

novel prepares Roi the pilgrim and would-be poet to become Baraka the activist” (2011: 144).

The last major section of Looney’s work is centered on Gloria Naylor’s (1985) Linden Hills, although he also

discusses Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and makes a gesture towards Dante’s appearance in rap music.

One could wish for more contemporary material. The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art is currently

hosting an exhibition, The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists:

Curated by the internationally acclaimed writer and art critic Simon Njami, this dramatic multi-media exhibition

reveals the ongoing global relevance of Dante Alighieri’s 14th century epic as part of a shared intellectual

heritage. http://africa.si.edu/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/

But as for African American literary arts, we must make do. That said, Naylor’s work is a fascinating reworking of

Inferno, using an intricate scheme of color terms to substitute for the Terza Rima. Her appropriation is complete,

unapologetic and creative. She owns the canon. Naylor’s inferno is an upper middle class black neighborhood

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arranged on a steep hillside, where the folks get richer and more rotten and hypocritical as one descends:

“in Linden Hills class trumps everything: love, sexuality, even ethnicity. The goal of those who live there is to

appear as wealthy as possible at all costs” (Looney 2011: 168). Paolo and Francesca, Ulysses and Count Ugolino

all have their analogues. Ironically, in Linden Hills blacker is better, and the myth of black racial purity leads to its

ultimate downfall. Looney’s final chapter, entitled Poets in Exile, implies that all of these artists of color write

from exilic positions, but then provides a neat summary of the book rather than exploring this notion. An end-

note offers more satisfying closure, noting with irony that the painting Dante in Exile, by Domenico Peterlin in

1865, graces the cover of Edward Said’s last book of essays, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000).

Looney writes, “It may be that Said’s reading of Dante had come full circle by the end of his life: foundational

author on the one hand, but radically antiestablishmentarian on the other” (2011: 210). Looney fittingly notes

that, in 1865, “Italians gathered to celebrate their new state and the sixth centennial of their new nation’s first

hero;” and the painting presents “a pensive and somber Dante with book in hand stretched out on a hill over-

looking the sea. Exile removes the urban poet from his city, which he can visit only in writing” (2011: 210).

2. “Dante’s vision in the Divine Comedy is tremendously powerful in its universality and detail, but even the

beatific peace achieved in the Paradiso bears traces of the vindictiveness and severity of judgment embodied in

the Inferno. Who but an exile like Dante, banished from Florence, would use eternity as a place for settling old

scores?” This is what Edward Said actually writes about Dante in Reflections on Exile (2000: 145); in my view very

sympathetic to Dante’s bitterness, acknowledging the centrality of Dante’s exile to the Divine Comedy, as well as

the centrality of Dante to Said’s analysis of exile. Exile is key to understanding the deep narrative themes in the

Divine Comedy: Farinata’s prophecy of Dante’s exile, the eternal exile of Caiphas and Vergil, Adam’s long exile,

and above all Par. 17: 46-60: “You shall leave everything you love most dearly: this is the arrow that the bow of

exile shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know how hard a path it is

for one who goes descending and ascending others’ stairs.” Similarly, W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk

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speaks of the “voice of exile” in the old Negro folk-songs: “you may bury me in the East, you may bury me in the

West, but I’ll hear the trumpet sound in that morning” (1997: 154). The notion of exile is fundamental to the

descendants of the Africans brought to the New World in chains, and it is fundamental to that African American

reception of Dante which appreciates the bitterness of his exile, and the outspoken commitment to blind justice

and righteousness that forced him to it. Dante’s evolution as the poet of the Divine Comedy truly begins with his

exile- “lost in a dark wood”- and is shaped by that suffering. Exile is hell.

Furthermore, the experience of exile is directly related to the experience of double consciousness, as Said

in a sense points out: “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are

aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an

awareness that to borrow a phrase from music- is contrapuntal” (2000: 148; original emphasis). While Said

proceeds to argue for a positive side of this awareness, and, as mentioned above it may be critical/essential to

Purgatory, Du Bois’ famous statement is all about the pain of “twoness,” the lack of a strong unified selfhood:

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness… One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro;

two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged

strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (1997: 38). Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness has

gained considerable traction in African Americanist studies; for example as translated into Bakhtin’s “double

voice” (Hale 1994), Frantz Fanon’s “dual consciousness” (Black 2007), and even Said’s “contrapuntal awareness”

(2000: 148). It is simple to locate double consciousness in Dante’s “ironic duality of the distinct voices of the

poet and the pilgrim” (Baldissaro 1995: 260). In addition, there is the poet’s self-consciousness of his effects on

current and future readers (see the evolution from Inf. 16: 124-136, where the poet struggles to maintain the

reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, to the confident authorial voice of Par. 2: 1-15). There is also the

pilgrim’s self-consciousness as a source of amazement as a mortal being to interlocutors in the Inferno and then

Purgatorio. Double consciousness, “hailed as the central theme of African American literature” (Hale 1994: 446),

should be a rich theme for further African Americanist study of the double-voiced Dante of the Divine Comedy.

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If exile is the defining characteristic of the Inferno, and double consciousness (the flawed past to a perfected

future), is key to the Purgatorio, then the burden of the body, corporeality and its eventual obsolescence is key

to the ascent to the Paradiso. Poet Dante’s avatar, the pilgrim, carries the burden of the only living body in the

afterlife. Graham Pechey (2007: 1) says “Dante Alighieri’s use of the dialogue of the dead—by no means new in

itself—places the solid shadow-casting body of a living ongoing consciousness among the variously judged

shades of the next world; the upshot is a defamiliarization on both sides.” Dante’s shadow causes a stir among

the shades in Purg. 3: 88-100 and Purg. 5: 1-9, and even the earth casts a shadow into the heavens in Par. 9:

118-120. Clearly the burden of the body, projecting dark shadows onto the psychic screen (cf. psychoanalytic

discourse: Freud, Jung, Zizek?) is a determining characteristic of the African American experience. “As the

dominant community would have it, the identity of African Americans is bound up predominantly, if not

exclusively, with the terms of the body, a signal identification, since in European philosophizing the body is

restricted to being the object of thought and never its subject” (Barrett, 2001: 174). In a different context, that

of European films about immigration, Santaolalla writes that: “…the immigrant is seen as ethnically – even

‘racially’- marked, thus following a long Western tradition in which the term ‘race’ is applied to non-white

people/skin/bodies… the immigrant is often over-identified through the body” (2014: 153). Thus the darkness

of the solid body is burden and stigma marking the emptiness of one-self in Du Boisian double consciousness:

“two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (1997:

38), even as Dante the pilgrim’s shadow marks him as an anomalous trespasser in the realms of the afterlife.

The dark body is metonymously and paradigmatically related to the body in general, whose weaknesses and sins

are to be cleansed, expiated and expurged in the ascent to Paradise. The body, an instrument of eternal torture

in Inferno, a mechanism of prodigious striving in the Purgatorio, becomes a mere historical artifact in Paradiso.

The ascent that consumes the majority of the poem is the concern of the last of the four narrative themes (exile,

double consciousness, burden of the body, verticality-freedom-agency), undergirding both the Divine Comedy

through the pilgrim protagonist and the folk-religious-activist subtexts of the African American experience.

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From descent in Inferno, to the arduous mountain climbing of Purgatorio, to the effortless floating up in

Paradiso, verticality is key to the Divine Comedy. Pechey (2007: 3) argues that Dante is the preeminent

influence on Bakhtin, as the poet of eternal verticality; followed by Rabelais (prose) and Goethe (poetry) for the

horizontality of history. In the African American anologue to verticality, Du Bois writes:

It was the ideal of ‘book-learning’: the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of

the cabalistic powers of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the

mountain path to Canaan ; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight,

leading to heights high enough to overlook life. (1997: 41)

Climbing, verticality and ascent are essential to the Divine Comedy as they are to African American aspiration.

This climb both entails and creates a unified striving self: “The history of the American Negro is the history of

this strife, --this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self”

Du Bois 1997: 39). The goal is freedom, but- what is freedom? In the Divine Comedy, ultimate freedom is the

desire to follow God’s will, Par. 74-74: “It is your free love that fulfills eternal Providence.” For Looney, the

challenge of reading freely is to “explore how the medieval work of art might speak directly to a contemporary

audience” (2011: 206). Amini Baraka’s journey/ascent evolves to enable activism and agency; for Dante it is the

arrival at ultimate contemplation. Perhaps both journeys require a descent before the ascent; that is, a genre

of “regression in service to the ego” (cf., ARISE-edge.org); or a Deleuzian progression from the active utilitarian

focus of the movement-image, to the time image: “a passive searching, sometimes confused observation of the

character’s surroundings” (2007: 31). This process captures the projection of the activist poet’s pilgrim avatar

and alter ego: somatic, empathetic, bewildered, frightened and naively emotional- to virtually enact the poet’s

descent into the unawareness and eternal exile of the Inferno, to ascending through the doubly conscious pain

of Purgatorio, and finally to transcendence of body and emotion in paradise; achievement of ultimate freedom.

Martin Luther King’s speech, I Have a Dream, refers to exile, the denial of selfhood, the abuse of the black body,

the ringing of freedom across the mountaintops of America. Not an appropriation of Dante, per se, but deeply

resonant with Dante’s themes of impegno, exile, double consciousness, the dark shadow, ascent and freedom.

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