Analysis of Langston Hughes Goodbye Christ - 1447 Words

Apart from his apparent disgust for the desolate life that the African Americans were subjected to, Langston Hughes also portrays an evident mistrust of religion, not necessarily towards religion itself but particularly towards those individuals who use religion as a cloak to conceal their true duplicitous and oppressive nature. In arguably he’s most controversial poem, Goodbye Christ; Langston Hughes takes on the role of a disillusioned Christian and repudiates the doctrines set forth in America, which was supposedly a Christian country. After his visit to the Soviet Union in 1932, Langston Hughes experienced the mechanisms of Socialism; he immediately noted the differences between the Soviet Union and his own country, America. Whereas,†¦show more content†¦The last 4 lines of the stanza introduce the key figures that influenced the persona’s communistic ideology. Marx, Lenin and Stalin were active communists and Hughes was particularly interested by the teac hings of Marx and the Marxist ideology. Furthermore, the persona mentions ‘peasant and workers’ who are particularly important in communism. Whereas in America, the African-Americans who were the unappreciated and mistreated workers, peasants and slaves, Communism has no peasants working for people in a higher hierarchy and everyone is regarded as the same, and part of the work force that contributes to the entire economy and all their work is equally appreciated by the government. Hughes argument that the work of the African- American is what has contributed to the wealth of the white man and the world is also evident in two of his other poems, Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria where he ironically invites the poor African-Americans to â€Å"come and dine with some of the people who got rich of their labor† and in The Negro Speaks of Rivers where he makes references to the Pyramids in Egypt which were built by the slaves. The persona capitalizes the word ‘ME’ as all the influential figures he has mentioned as well as the peasants and workers not only represent his approval and appreciation for communism but represent the communistic environment which he prefers where unlike in America, his work and