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This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Complete Prose Works

W >> Walt Whitman >> Complete Prose Works




As indispensable foreground, indeed, for Elias Hicks, and perhaps sine
qua non to an estimate of the kind of man, we must briefly transport
ourselves back to the England of that period. As I say, it is the time
of tremendous moral and political agitation; ideas of conflicting
forms, governments, theologies, seethe and dash like ocean storms, and
ebb and flow like mighty tides. It was, or had been, the time of the
long feud between the Parliament and the Crown. In the midst of
the sprouts, began George Fox--born eight years after the death of
Shakspere. He was the son of a weaver, himself a shoemaker, and was
"converted" before the age of 20. But O the sufferings, mental and
physical, through which those years of the strange youth pass'd! He
claim'd to be sent by God to fulfill a mission. "I come," he said, "to
direct people to the spirit that gave forth the Scriptures." The range
of his thought, even then, cover'd almost every important subject of
after times, anti-slavery, women's rights, &c. Though in a low sphere,
and among the masses, he forms a mark'd feature in the age.

And how, indeed, beyond all any, that stormy and perturb'd age! The
foundations of the old, the superstitious, the conventionally poetic,
the credulous, all breaking--the light of the new, and of science and
democracy, definitely beginning--a mad, fierce, almost crazy age!
The political struggles of the reigns of the Charleses, and of the
Protectorate of Cromwell, heated to frenzy by theological struggles.
Those were the years following the advent and practical working of the
Reformation--but Catholicism is yet strong, and yet seeks supremacy.
We think our age full of the flush of men and doings, and culminations
of war and peace; and so it is. But there could hardly be a grander
and more picturesque and varied age than that.

Born out of and in this age, when Milton, Bunyan, Dryden and John
Locke were still living--amid the memories of Queen Elizabeth and
James First, and the events of their reigns--when the radiance of that
galaxy of poets, warriors, statesmen, captains, lords, explorers, wits
and gentlemen, that crowded the courts and times of those sovereigns
still fill'd the atmosphere--when America commencing to be explor'd
and settled commenc'd also to be suspected as destin'd to overthrow
the old standards and calculations--when Feudalism, like a sunset,
seem'd to gather all its glories, reminiscences, personalisms, in one
last gorgeous effort, before the advance of a new day, a new incipient
genius--amid the social and domestic circles of that period--indifferent
to reverberations that seem'd enough to wake the dead, and in a sphere
far from the pageants of the court, the awe of any personal rank or charm
of intellect, or literature, or the varying excitement of Parliamentarian
or Royalist fortunes--this curious young rustic goes wandering up and
down England.

George Fox, born 1624, was of decent stock, in ordinary lower life--as
he grew along toward manhood, work'd at shoemaking, also at farm
labors--loved to be much by himself, half-hidden in the woods,
reading the Bible--went about from town to town, dress'd in leather
clothes--walk'd much at night, solitary, deeply troubled ("the inward
divine teaching of the Lord")--sometimes goes among the ecclesiastical
gatherings of the great professors, and though a mere youth bears
bold testimony--goes to and fro disputing--(must have had great
personality)--heard the voice of the Lord speaking articulately to
him, as he walk'd in the fields--feels resistless commands not to be
explain'd, but follow'd, to abstain from taking off his hat, to say
_Thee_ and _Thou_, and not bid others Good morning or Good evening-was
illiterate, could just read and write-testifies against shows, games,
and frivolous pleasures--enters the courts and warns the judges that
they see to doing justice--goes into public houses and market-places,
with denunciations of drunkenness and money-making--rises in the
midst of the church-services, and gives his own explanations of the
ministers' explanations, and of Bible passages and texts--sometimes
for such things put in prison, sometimes struck fiercely on the mouth
on the spot, or knock'd down, and lying there beaten and bloody--was
of keen wit, ready to any question with the most apropos of
answers--was sometimes press'd for a soldier, (_him_ for a
soldier!)--was indeed terribly buffeted; but goes, goes, goes--often
sleeping out-doors, under hedges, or hay stacks--forever taken before
justices--improving such, and all occasions, to _bear testimony_, and
give good advice--still enters the "steeple-houses," (as he calls
churches,) and though often dragg'd out and whipt till he faints
away, and lies like one dead, when he comes-to--stands up again, and
offering himself all bruis'd and bloody, cries out to his tormenters,
"Strike--strike again, here where you have not yet touch'd! my arms,
my head, my cheeks,"--Is at length arrested and sent up to London,
confers with the Protector, Cromwell,--is set at liberty, and holds
great meetings in London.

Thus going on, there is something in him that fascinates one or two
here, and three or four there, until gradually there were others who
went about in the same spirit, and by degrees the Society of Friends
took shape, and stood among the thousand religious sects of the
world. Women also catch the contagion, and go round, often shamefully
misused. By such contagion these ministerings, by scores, almost
hundreds of poor travelling men and women, keep on year after
year, through ridicule, whipping, imprisonment, &c.--some of the
Friend-ministers emigrate to New England--where their treatment
makes the blackest part of the early annals of the New World. Some
were executed, others maim'd, par-burnt, and scourg'd--two hundred die
in prison--some on the gallows, or at the stake.

George Fox himself visited America, and found a refuge and hearers,
and preach'd many times on Long Island, New York State. In the village
of Oysterbay they will show you the rock on which he stood, (1672,)
addressing the multitude, in the open air--thus rigidly following the
fashion of apostolic times.--(I have heard myself many reminiscences
of him.) Flushing also contains (or contain'd--I have seen them)
memorials of Fox, and his son, in two aged white-oak trees, that
shaded him while he bore his testimony to people gather'd in the
highway.--Yes, the American Quakers were much persecuted--almost as
much, by a sort of consent of all the other sects, as the Jews were
in Europe in the middle ages. In New England, the cruelest laws
were pass'd, and put in execution against them. As said, some were
whipt--women the same as men. Some had their ears cut off--others
their tongues pierc'd with hot irons--others their faces branded.
Worse still, a woman and three men had been hang'd, (1660.)--Public
opinion, and the statutes, join'd together, in an odious union,
Quakers, Baptists, Roman Catholics and Witches.--Such a fragmentary
sketch of George Fox and his time--and the advent of "the Society of
Friends" in America.

Strange as it may sound, Shakspere and George Fox, (think of them!
compare them!) were born and bred of similar stock, in much the same
surroundings and station in life--from the same England--and at
a similar period. One to radiate all of art's, all literature's
splendor--a splendor so dazzling that he himself is almost lost in
it, and his contemporaries the same--his fictitious Othello, Romeo,
Hamlet, Lear, as real as any lords of England or Europe then and
there--more real to us, the mind sometimes thinks, than the man
Shakspere himself. Then the other--may we indeed name him the same
day? What is poor plain George Fox compared to William Shakspere--to
fancy's lord, imagination's heir? Yet George Fox stands for something
too--a thought--the thought that wakes in silent hours--perhaps the
deepest, most eternal thought latent in the human soul. This is
the thought of God, merged in the thoughts of moral right and the
immortality of identity. Great, great is this thought--aye, greater
than all else. When the gorgeous pageant of Art, refulgent in the
sunshine, color'd with roses and gold--with all the richest mere
poetry, old or new, (even Shakespere's) with all that statue, play,
painting, music, architecture, oratory, can effect, ceases to satisfy
and please--When the eager chase after wealth flags, and beauty itself
becomes a loathing--and when all worldly or carnal or esthetic,
or even scientific values, having done their office to the human
character, and minister'd their part to its development--then, if
not before, comes forward this over-arching thought, and brings its
eligibilities, germinations. Most neglected in life of all humanity's
attributes, easily cover'd with crust, deluded and abused, rejected,
yet the only certain source of what all are seeking, but few or none
finding it I for myself clearly see the first, the last, the deepest
depths and highest heights of art, of literature, and of the purposes
of life. I say whoever labors here, makes contributions here, or best
of all sets an incarnated example here, of life or death, is dearest
to humanity--remains after the rest are gone. And here, for these
purposes, and up to the light that was in him, the man Elias Hicks--as
the man George Fox had done years before him--lived long, and died,
faithful in life, and faithful in death.





GOOD-BYE MY FANCY



AN OLD MAN'S REJOINDER

In the domain of Literature loftily consider'd (an accomplish'd and
veteran critic in his just out work[44] now says,) 'the kingdom of the
Father has pass'd; the kingdom of the Son is passing; the kingdom of
the Spirit begins.' Leaving the reader to chew on and extract the
juice and meaning of this, I will proceed to say in melanged form what
I have had brought out by the English author's essay (he discusses
the poetic art mostly) on my own, real, or by him supposed, views and
purports. If I give any answers to him, or explanations of what my
books intend, they will be not direct but indirect and derivative. Of
course this brief jotting is personal. Something very like querulous
egotism and growling may break through the narrative (for I have been
and am rejected by all the great magazines, carry now my 72d annual
burden, and have been a paralytic for 18 years.)

No great poem or other literary or artistic work of any scope, old or
new, can be essentially consider'd without weighing first the age,
politics (or want of politics) and aim, visible forms, unseen
soul, and current times, out of the midst of which it rises and is
formulated: as the Biblic canticles and their days and spirit--as the
Homeric, or Dante's utterance, or Shakspere's, or the old Scotch or
Irish ballads, or Ossian, or Omar Khayyam. So I have conceiv'd and
launch'd, and work'd for years at, my 'Leaves of Grass'--personal
emanations only at best, but with specialty of emergence and
background--the ripening of the nineteenth century, the thought and
fact and radiation of individuality, of America, the secession war,
and showing the democratic conditions supplanting everything that
insults them or impedes their aggregate way. Doubtless my poems
illustrate (one of novel thousands to come for a long period) those
conditions; but "democratic art" will have to wait long before it is
satisfactorily formulated and defined--if it ever is.

I will now for one indicative moment lock horns with what many Think
the greatest thing, the question of _art_, so-call'd. I have not seen
without learning something therefrom, how, with hardly an exception,
the poets of this age devote themselves, always mainly, sometimes
altogether, to fine rhyme, spicy verbalism, the fabric and cut of the
garment, jewelry, _concetti_, style, art. To-day these adjuncts are
certainly the effort, beyond all else, yet the lesson of Nature
undoubtedly is, to proceed with single purpose toward the result
necessitated, and for which the time has arrived, utterly regardless
of the outputs of shape, appearance or criticism, which are always
left to settle themselves. I have not only not bother'd much about
style, form, art, etc., but confess to more or less apathy (I believe
I have sometimes caught myself in decided aversion) toward them
throughout, asking nothing of them but negative advantages--that they
should never impede me, and never under any circumstances, or for
their own purposes only, assume any mastery over me.

From the beginning I have watch'd the sharp and sometimes heavy and
deep-penetrating objections and reviews against my work, and I hope
entertain'd and audited them; (for I have probably had an advantage in
constructing from a central and unitary principle since the first, but
at long intervals and stages--sometimes lapses of five or six years,
or peace or war.) Ruskin, the Englishman, charges as a fearful and
serious lack that my poems have no humor. A profound German critic
complains that, compared with the luxuriant and well-accepted songs
of the world, there is about my verse a certain coldness, severity,
absence of spice, polish, or of consecutive meaning and plot. (The
book is autobiographic at bottom, and may-be I do not exhibit and make
ado about the stock passions: I am partly of Quaker stock.) Then
E.C. Stedman finds (or found) mark'd fault with me because while
celebrating the common people _en masse_, I do not allow enough
heroism and moral merit and good intentions to the choicer classes,
the college-bred, the _etat-major_. It is quite probable that S. is
right in the matter. In the main I myself look, and have from the
first look'd, to the bulky democratic _torso_ of the United States
even for esthetic and moral attributes of serious account--and refused
to aim at or accept anything less. If America is only for the rule
and fashion and small typicality of other lands (the rule of the
_etat-major_) it is not the land I take it for, and should to-day feel
that my literary aim and theory had been blanks and misdirections.
Strictly judged, most modern poems are but larger or smaller lumps of
sugar, or slices of toothsome sweet cake--even the banqueters dwelling
on those glucose flavors as a main part of the dish. Which perhaps
leads to something: to have great heroic poetry we need great
readers--a heroic appetite and audience. Have we at present any such?

Then the thought at the centre, never too often repeated. Boundless
material wealth, free political organization, immense geographic
area, and unprecedented "business" and products--even the most active
intellect and "culture"--will not place this Commonwealth of ours
on the topmost range of history and humanity--or any eminence of
"democratic art"--to say nothing of its pinnacle. Only the production
(and on the most copious scale) of loftiest moral, spiritual and
heroic personal illustrations--a great native Literature headed with
a Poetry stronger and sweeter than any yet. If there can be any such
thing as a kosmic modern and original song, America needs it, and is
worthy of it.

In my opinion to-day (bitter as it is to say so) the outputs through
civilized nations everywhere from the great words Literature, Art,
Religion, &c., with their conventional administerers, stand squarely
in the way of what the vitalities of those great words signify, more
than they really prepare the soil for them--or plant the seeds, or
cultivate or garner the crop. My own opinion has long been, that for
New World service our ideas of beauty (inherited from the Greeks,
and so on to Shakspere--_query_--perverted from them?) need to be
radically changed, and made anew for to-day's purposes and finer
standards. But if so, it will all come in due time--the real change
will be an autochthonic, interior, constitutional, even local one,
from which our notions of beauty (lines and colors are wondrous
lovely, but character is lovelier) will branch or offshoot.

So much have I now rattled off (old age's garrulity,) that there is
not space for explaining the most important and pregnant principle of
all, viz., that Art is one, is not partial, but includes all times and
forms and sorts--is not exclusively aristocratic or democratic, or
oriental or occidental. My favorite symbol would be a good font of
type, where the impeccable long-primer rejects nothing. Or the old
Dutch flour-miller who said, "I never bother myself what road the
folks come--I only want good wheat and rye."

The font is about the same forever. Democratic art results of
democratic development, from tinge, true nationality, belief, in the
one setting up from it.


Note:

[44] Two new volumes, "Essays Speculative and Suggestive," by John
Addington Symonds. One of the Essays is on "Democratic Art," in which
I and my books are largely alluded to and cited and dissected. It
is this part of the vols. that has caused the off-hand lines
above--(first thanking Mr. S. for his invariable courtesy of personal
treatment).


OLD POETS

Poetry (I am clear) is eligible of something far more ripen'd and
ample, our lands and pending days, than it has yet produced from
any utterance old or new. Modern or new poetry, too, (viewing or
challenging it with severe criticism,) is largely a-void--while the
very cognizance, or even suspicion of that void, and the need of
filling it, proves a certainty of the hidden and waiting supply.
Leaving other lands and languages to speak for themselves, we can
abruptly but deeply suggest it best from our own--going first to
oversea illustrations, and standing on them. Think of Byron, Burns,
Shelley, Keats, (even first-raters, "the brothers of the radiant
summit," as William O'Connor calls them,) as having done only their
precursory and 'prentice work, and all their best and real poems being
left yet unwrought, untouch'd. Is it difficult to imagine ahead of
us and them, evolv'd from them, poesy completer far than any they
themselves fulfill'd? One has in his eye and mind some very large,
very old, entirely sound and vital tree or vine, like certain hardy,
ever-fruitful specimens in California and Canada, or down in
Mexico, (and indeed in all lands) beyond the chronological
records--illustrations of growth, continuity, power, amplitude
and _exploitation_, almost beyond statement, but proving fact and
possibility, outside of argument.

Perhaps, indeed, the rarest and most blessed quality of transcendent
noble poetry--as of law, and of the profoundest wisdom and
estheticism--is, (I would suggest,) from sane, completed, vital,
capable old age.

The final proof of song or personality is a sort of matured, accreted,
superb, evoluted, almost divine, impalpable diffuseness and atmosphere
or invisible magnetism, dissolving and embracing all--and not any
special achievement of passion, pride, metrical form, epigram,
plot, thought, or what is call'd beauty. The bud of the rose or the
half-blown flower is beautiful, of course, but only the perfected
bloom or apple or finish'd wheat-head is beyond the rest. Completed
fruitage like this comes (in my opinion) to a grand age, in man
or woman, through an essentially sound continuated physiology and
psychology (both important) and is the culminating glorious aureole of
all and several preceding. Like the tree or vine just mention'd, it
stands at last in a beauty, power and productiveness of its own, above
all others, and of a sort and style uniting all criticisms, proofs and
adherences.

Let us diversify the matter a little by portraying some of the
American poets from our own point of view.

Longfellow, reminiscent, polish'd, elegant, with the air of finest
conventional library, picture-gallery or parlor, with ladies and
gentlemen in them, and plush and rosewood, and ground-glass lamps, and
mahogany and ebony furniture, and a silver inkstand and scented satin
paper to write on.

Whittier stands for morality (not in any all-accepting philosophic
or Hegelian sense, but) filter'd through a Puritanical or Quaker
filter--is incalculably valuable as a genuine utterance, (and the
finest,)--with many local and Yankee and _genre_ bits--all hued with
anti-slavery coloring--(the _genre_ and anti-slavery contributions all
precious--all help.) Whittier's is rather a grand figure, but pretty
lean and ascetic--no Greek-not universal and composite enough (don't
try--don't wish to be) for ideal Americanism. Ideal Americanism would
take the Greek spirit and law, and democratize and scientize and
(thence) truly Christianize them for the whole, the globe, all
history, all ranks and lands, all facts, all good and bad. (Ah this
_bad_--this nineteen-twentieths of us all! What a stumbling-block it
remains for poets and metaphysicians--what a chance (the strange,
clear-as-ever inscription on the old dug-up tablet) it offers yet for
being translated--what can be its purpose in the God-scheme of this
universe, and all?)

Then William Cullen Bryant--meditative, serious, from first to last
tending to threnodies--his genius mainly lyrical--when reading his
pieces who could expect or ask for more magnificent ones than such
as "The Battle-Field," and "A Forest Hymn"? Bryant, unrolling,
prairie-like, notwithstanding his mountains and lakes--moral enough
(yet worldly and conventional)--a naturalist, pedestrian, gardener and
fruiter--well aware of books, but mixing to the last in cities and
society. I am not sure but his name ought to lead the list of American
bards. Years ago I thought Emerson pre eminent (and as to the last
polish and intellectual cuteness may-be I think so still)--but, for
reasons, I have been gradually tending to give the file-leading place
for American native poesy to W. C. B.

Of Emerson I have to confirm my already avow'd opinion regarding his
highest bardic and personal attitude. Of the galaxy of the past--of
Poe, Halleck, Mrs. Sigourney, Allston, Willis, Dana,

John Pierpont, W. G. Simms, Robert Sands, Drake, Hillhouse, Theodore
Fay, Margaret Fuller, Epes Sargent, Boker, Paul Hayne, Lanier, and
others, I fitly in essaying such a theme as this, and reverence for
their memories, may at least give a heart-benison on the list of their
names.

Time and New World humanity having the venerable resemblances more
than anything else, and being "the same subject continued," just here
in 1890, one gets a curious nourishment and lift (I do) from all those
grand old veterans, Bancroft, Kossuth, von Moltke--and such typical
specimen-reminiscences as Sophocles and Goethe, genius, health, beauty
of person, riches, rank, renown and length of days, all combining and
centering in one case.

Above everything, what could humanity and literature do without the
mellow, last-justifying, averaging, bringing-up of many, many years--a
great old age amplified? Every really first-class production has
likely to pass through the crucial tests of a generation, perhaps
several generations. Lord Bacon says the first sight of any work
really new and first-rate in beauty and originality always arouses
something disagreeable and repulsive. Voltaire term'd the Shaksperean
works "a huge dunghill"; Hamlet he described (to the Academy, whose
members listen'd with approbation) as "the dream of a drunken savage,
with a few flashes of beautiful thoughts." And not the Ferney sage
alone; the orthodox judges and law-givers of France, such as La
Harpe, J. L. Geoffrey, and Chateaubriand, either join'd in Voltaire's
verdict, or went further. Indeed the classicists and regulars there
still hold to it. The lesson is very significant in all departments.
People resent anything new as a personal insult. When umbrellas were
first used in England, those who carried them were hooted and
pelted so furiously that their lives were endanger'd. The same rage
encounter'd the attempt in theatricals to perform women's parts by
real women, which was publicly consider'd disgusting and outrageous.
Byron thought Pope's verse incomparably ahead of Homer and Shakspere.
One of the prevalent objections, in the days of Columbus was, the
learn'd men boldly asserted that if a ship should reach India she
would never get back again, because the rotundity of the globe would
present a kind of mountain, up which it would be impossible to sail
even with the most favorable wind.

"Modern poets," says a leading Boston journal, "enjoy longevity.
Browning lived to be seventy-seven. Wordsworth, Bryant, Emerson, and
Longfellow were old men. Whittier, Tennyson, and Walt Whitman still
live."

Started out by that item on Old Poets and Poetry for chyle to inner
American sustenance--I have thus gossipp'd about it all, and treated
it from my own point of view, taking the privilege of rambling
wherever the talk carried me. Browning is lately dead; Bryant, Emerson
and Longfellow have not long pass'd away; and yes, Whittier and
Tennyson remain, over eighty years old--the latter having sent out
not long since a fresh volume, which the English-speaking Old and New
Worlds are yet reading. I have already put on record my notions of T.
and his effusions: they are very attractive and flowery to me--but
flowers, too, are at least as profound as anything; and by common
consent T. is settled as the poetic cream-skimmer of our age's melody,
_ennui_ and polish--a verdict in which I agree, and should say that
nobody (not even Shakspere) goes deeper in those exquisitely touch'd
and half-hidden hints and indirections left like faint perfumes in the
crevices of his lines. Of Browning I don't know enough to say much;
he must be studied deeply out, too, and quite certainly repays the
trouble--but I am old and indolent, and cannot study (and never did.)

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