17 pages • 34 minutes read
William Waring CuneyNo Images
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: The Harlem Renaissance
What is remarkable about the movement that stirred to life in the working-class neighborhoods of New York City’s Harlem in the 1920s was the reach of this cultural celebration of Black life, the Black community, and supremely Black artists, a reach so vast the movement came to be called the Harlem Renaissance.
The movement was not only expressed in literature. Black composers, essayists, choreographers, sculptors, photographers, and painters gathered in the clubs, churches, and speakeasys of Harlem and together encouraged expressions of the Black imagination. The artists in the Harlem Renaissance challenged, upended, and upcycled every art form inherited from the United States’ white establishment in a joyous and raucous declaration of their cultural independence.
The Harlem Renaissance was sparked in large part by what cultural historians call the Great Migration. In the opening decades of the new century, an estimated 150,000 Black families left the poverty and indignities of the Jim Crow South and relocated to the North for better employment opportunities and a better life in northern cities such as Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago, and New York. Long after the Civil War had ended slavery, Black families still struggled against discrimination and bigotry in the South and lived as second-class citizens. The leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, most notably civil rights activist W. E. B. Dubois and William Waring Cuney’s charismatic college friend, the poet Langston Hugues, encouraged a generation of young Black artists to give life and immediacy to the Black experience.
Cuney became a part of the Harlem arts community and found a welcoming and receptive audience for his experimental poems that celebrated the commonplace experiences of Black life in the city. Although the advent of the Great Depression curtailed the Renaissance, its impact on stirring a revolutionary appreciation of Black pride and Black identity made it an influential cultural movement.
Historical Context: 1920s New York
Given the plethora of images in today’s global culture of a wide variety of women of color from all fields who are celebrated for their beauty, their grace, and their power, it may be difficult for a contemporary reader to understand the tragedy that centers Cuney’s poem. In the 1920s, women of color in New York City, either from the Deep South or first-generation African or Caribbean immigrants, worked, if they found work at all, in menial jobs that gave them no sense of dignity or empowerment. A beautiful woman in the swanky neighborhoods of 1920s New York, the United States’ most cosmopolitan city, was defined entirely by Eurocentric standards, the so-called “flapper” look: pale, ivory skin; heavy applications of makeup in vibrant colors to accentuate the eyes; thin, pouty lips; slender hips; tight bobbed hair; expensive clothes, accessorized by dazzling jewelry. None of these criteria reflected the tropical cultures of either Africa or the Caribbean. In 1920s New York, white women set the standard for beauty.
These accustomed notions of female beauty denied Black women the opportunity to see their own beauty. They lived within a white culture that defined beauty on its terms whether in print media or in advertising or in the emerging film industry. Black women did not know how to regard their bodies as beautiful. Art museums and novels and poems alike offered few images that depicted much less celebrated women of color as expressions of female beauty. Thus, exiled from the tropical homelands and the buoyant energy of their culture, these women of color had no points of reference. Rather, like Cuney’s woman of color toiling away long hours in the Harlem kitchen, they endured a kind of collective body-shaming that, as Cuney argues, was little more than an insidious expression of white supremacy and cultural racism.
Change would be coming. In addition to its celebration of the energy of Black creativity, the Harlem Renaissance addressed exactly that kind of subtle racism. As the Jazz Age unfolded, women of color began to challenge Eurocentric notions of what beauty in women can be. They upended assumptions by introducing the idea that beauty might be dark-skinned as well white-skinned. This first generation of Black cultural icons—Josephine Baker, Zora Neal Hurston, Hazel Scott, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne—expressed what was most privileged by America’s Black and immigrant cultures: They were women in tune with the tropical life, bold, sensual, unapologetically jazzy and profoundly in touch with the kinetic vibes of nature itself. That cultural revolution, however, was only beginning when Cuney composed his heartbreaking lyric on the beauty of women of color.
Literary Context: Ekphrasis
Ekphrasis, from a Greek word meaning “description,” has been applied narrowly to a kind of literature that seeks to capture in words the effect of visual arts such as a painting or a sculpture. In the modern era, however, the term applies to literature that seeks to recreate in words the experience of other art forms, most notably music. The idea emerged as critical readers in the early 20th century began exploring the connection between American poet Walt Whitman, whose poetry Cuney admired, and Whitman’s copious acknowledgments of the effects of opera on his anything-but-free verse lines and how consciously he crafted his lines to echo the emotional effects of opera.
“No Images” is not so much a poem as a lyric, heartbreaking and soulful, that begs to be sung. Cuney studied music, and in college he aspired to be a classically trained singer. During college, he discovered the eccentric rhythms and subtle metrics of Delta gospel, Southern blues, and New Orleans jazz. In the closing decade of his life, he was one of New York City’s most respected music critics.
What is remarkable is that it took 40 years for Cuney’s poem to be transcribed into music. Despite its apparent simplicity in form and its near-haiku precision, “No Images” recreates in words the open-ended fragmented rhythms typical of the blues and of jazz. Its transcription by Nina Simone in the late 1950s as an expression of Black pride in the tumultuous beginnings of the civil rights movement testifies to Cuney’s development of the feel, flow, and the suggestive (rather than emphatic) tempo that fuses the blues and jazz. In this, his poem captures the actual experience of music, words defying the limits of language and transcending into music.
