To Usward

Beauty as Resistance

The Harlem Renaissance was, among other things, a sustained argument that Black Americans were full participants in the human capacity for beauty — that the culture produced by African American communities was not inferior to European culture but different from it and equally valid. This argument had an implicitly theological dimension: the capacity for beauty is one of the marks of the image of God in the human being, and the Renaissance’s insistence on that capacity was an insistence on the full humanity of a people whose humanity had been systematically denied.

Bennett’s poetry is evidence for this argument. Its formal control, its lyrical intensity, its precise rendering of desire and loss and longing — these are the marks of a mind and a sensibility formed in the image of a God who is himself the source of beauty.

What Heritage Reveals

Bennett’s poem “Heritage” (1923) is one of the early Harlem Renaissance meditations on the relationship between African American identity and African origins. Bennett’s version is characterized by a lyrical nostalgia that is more aesthetic than political: she is drawn to the Africa of the imagination, of color and rhythm and palm trees.

What this reveals for TLA’s purposes is the persistence of a longing for origin, for home, for the place where one fully belongs — a longing that the Renaissance addressed in racial and cultural terms but that has a deeper resonance. The longing for Africa in the Renaissance poetry is, at its deepest level, the longing for Eden.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict that has included, in its historical outworking, the attempt to deny the full humanity of African peoples. The Harlem Renaissance was one of the responses to that denial — a cultural movement organized around the insistence that the image of God could not be erased by the violence of slavery and its aftermath.

Bennett’s poetry is a small but genuine part of that insistence. Its beauty is its argument. The capacity to make something this precise and this lovely, out of the materials of a life formed under the conditions of American racism, is itself a testimony to the image of God that no historical violence can finally destroy.

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