Langston Hughes and Sherman Alexie

If “Let America Be America Again” was published in 2016 instead of 1936, I can only imagine Donald Trump’s response. The word “again” takes an implicit historical position in both the Langston Hughes’ poem and in Trump’s campaign promise to “Make America Great Again!” Hughes poem begins with:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

But that’s about as far as we can get comparing the two men, because following the first stanza, the speaker reveals his true position:

(America never was America to me.)

The narrator of Hughes poem is excluded from an optimistic historical perspective, reduced to a brief parenthetical statement. The formal rhyme scheme of the first stanza (ABAB) is thrown off by this insertion, however marginal it appears, only to pick up the same pattern in the following stanza. But the speaker’s parenthetical opposition becomes the dominant voice with the introduction of the I the “self” of the speaker who turns out to be selves:

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

“Let America Be America Again” criticizes the hypocrisy of a “homeland of the free” that never was, in verse that protests and laments at the same time.

O, let America be America again-
The land that never has been yet-
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

There may be no such thing as the America in this poem, but that doesn’t mean he can’t yearn for it.

Sherman Alexie’s poem “Evolution” also channels the tension between dominant and marginal narratives, but from a Native American perspective. Blurring the line of history and myth, “Evolution” re-imagines Buffalo Bill as a pawn shop owner on an Indian reservation:   

Buffalo Bill opens up a pawn shop on the reservation
Right across the border from the liquor store
And he stays open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

and the Indians come running in with jewelry
television sets, a VCR, a full-length beaded buckskin outfit
it took Inez Muse 12 years to finish. Buffalo Bill 

takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it

all catalogued and filed in a storage room. The Indians

pawn their hands, saving the thumbs for last, they pawn

their skeletons, falling endlessly from the skin

and when the last Indian has pawned everything
but his heart, Buffalo Bill takes that for twenty bucks

closes up the pawn shop, paints a new sign over the old
calls his venture THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES
charges the Indians five bucks a head to enter. 

Alexie’s Buffalo Bill is a leech that sucks the life out of a people only to “preserve” Native American culture for his own profit. “Evolution,” like “Let America Be America Again,” is a title steeped in irony.