Smoke, Lilies, and Jade

Nugent, Richard B. "Smoke, Lilies and Jade." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 569-83. Print.

This prose was extremely difficult to understand. What I did manage to grasp from it, though, is a sense of worldly unification. The main character, Alex, finds love in two places – one a black woman and the other a white man. The interwoven dream sequences with the distorted reality paint a hazy picture of a kind of love that spans sex and race, bringing into it all of the famous names from the Harlem Renaissance. The message, if I’m reading this correctly, is that the writers and artists of the Renaissance are, in a way, working together to form this unification of love.

In order to understand this piece better, I did a bit of research on the internet. I’m a bit disappointed that the name “Melva” has no deeper meaning – I would have expected it to, since the character is the second half of the fulfillment opposite Beauty to Alex. However, I did find that the author, Nugent, was an open homosexual during the Renaissance and is considered to be the first African American to openly write about homosexuality. I have the same problem with this single-minded focus on the fact that the author was homosexual as I did while studying works such as Death in Venice. The critics seem to miss the point entirely – that love is sexless, ageless, and genderless, and instead choose to focus on the breech in the taboo surrounding homoeroticism. It is, for lack of a better word, a bit pathetic – like a bunch of school children enamored with the first mention of sex in their grade school classroom. Rather than focus on the fact that one of the relationships in this story is homosexual, I think that to understand what Nugent is trying to say one must be able to disregard orientation and work out the deep, foundational meaning, which I’ve already stated.

And it is this deep meaning of uninhibited love that, at least for some, fueled the works of the Harlem Renaissance (it’s a shame that not all famous artists of this time can be considered in this category, with a nod towards abominations like Marcus Garvey and the late works of Langston Hughes (with apologizes to Hughes’ otherwise brilliant mind)). I’m sure that the format of this work is troublesome to many, but I feel that it speaks on a deeper level than what normal literature can. Rather than appealing to reason and attempting to convince its reader that racial issues need to be overcome, it simply shows how love can be and lets the rest speak for itself. Truly, and without a shard of doubt, I believe that this piece is the best we have read in this class. Time in class needs to be spent discussing it, if I may be so bold.