Langston HughesHarlem And The Figurative Lynching Of Dreams

â€Å"Harlem† and the Figurative Lynching of Dreams During the years preceding the publication of â€Å"Harlem†, Langston Hughes was subject to an increasing censorship of his work and serious accusations of treason by the U.S government (J. Miller 79). Throughout his entire career as an author and activist, he wrote extensively on racial injustices experienced by his fellow African Americans in the early twentieth century. Though support for racial equality was growing at the time, his criticisms of American society were often used to incriminate him. To avoid the consequences of speaking out directly against the status quo, he began to use more elusive language that could bypass censors (B. Miller 165). In â€Å"Harlem† Hughes incorporates figurative†¦show more content†¦Until then, the dream will continue to deteriorate like the images he uses to portray it. But how is a dream like a raisin or a sore? Can the complex emotional impact of racial oppress ion really be expressed as unpleasant depictions of food and the body? The visual imagery of a sun-dried raisin could be interpreted as a dream once ripe and full, now left to stagnate like a grape in the sun. The sore, perhaps inconsequential, can be envisioned as an infected wound that could spread and thus the dream is one so necessary that it may be impossible to continue without its actualization. Onwuchekwa insists, â€Å"the Afro-American is not unlike the raisin, for he is in a sense a desiccated trunk of his original African self, used and abandoned in the American Wilderness with the stipulation that he rot and disappear† (78). The olfactory and gustatory imagery of the meat and sweet also stir up unpleasant memories of putrid smells and rancid tastes and together express the emotional degradation that arises when one is denied their basic rights. However, the deeper meaning behind these various types of imagery lies in the cultural context of Hughes’s