Yet Do I Marvel

The Complaint as Faith

Cullen’s most famous poem begins with an affirmation of faith — “I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind” — and ends with a complaint: the observation that the most curious thing this good God has done is to make a poet Black and bid him sing in a country that does not want to hear him. The poem is not a rejection of faith but its most demanding form: the insistence that the God who is good and kind must be held accountable for what he has permitted.

This is the tradition of the Psalms of Lament, of Job, of Jeremiah. The complaint that Cullen makes is not the complaint of an atheist who denies God’s existence but of a believer who cannot reconcile God’s goodness with God’s permission. It is, in its way, a deeper form of faith than easy affirmation.

What Heritage Reveals

Cullen’s “Heritage” is one of the most theologically complex poems of the Harlem Renaissance — a meditation on the relationship between the poet’s African heritage and his American Christianity that refuses easy resolution. The poem moves between a longing for Africa — for the jungle gods, the drums, the undomesticated spiritual life — and a recognition that the Christ he has been given is a white Christ, a domesticated Christ, a Christ who has been used to justify the very oppression the poem mourns.

The poem ends with a cry for a Black Christ — a Christ who shares the specific suffering of Black Americans rather than presiding over it. This cry is, from TLA’s perspective, the most theologically significant thing in the poem: the recognition that the gospel’s claim to universality must be demonstrated in the specific, and that a Christ who does not share the suffering of the Black poet is a Christ whose universality is not yet fully realized in his church.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict in which the seed of the woman bruises the serpent’s head at the cost of a bruised heel — a cost that has been borne, in American history, disproportionately by the people who were enslaved and their descendants. Cullen’s complaint is the complaint of someone who has been bearing that cost without understanding why the God who promised the victory has allowed the bruising to go on so long.

The gospel’s answer to Cullen is the answer of Holy Saturday: the bruising is real, the cost is real, the victory is coming but has not yet arrived in its fullness. And the seed of the woman who bears the bruising most fully is not a white Christ in a European church but the one who, in James Cone’s formulation, hangs on every lynching tree. Cullen was looking for that Christ. His poetry is a testimony to the search.

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