A haunting poem, that operates in complex ways.

Yes, you too can discover cool and unusual things to do in Detroit (Michigan), like Heidelberg Project, https://www.heidelberg.org/ the one man’s attempt to create an artistic wonder on a run-down block in Detroit. Tyree Guyton grew up in a Detroit and his house was in a growing, middle-class neighborhood. When he was 12, he witnessed the effects of the 1967 Detroit’s result social unrest over discrimination. Using paint and a small army of local kids, he began transforming abandoned houses into massive works of art. Heidelberg Project was his attempt to reclaim an run-down and unsafe area that people were afraid to walk through the area.  

ROBERT HAYDEN spent his childhood in a Detroit ghetto, where he was born in August 1913, shuffled between his parents home and that of a foster family. Childhood events would result in times of depression, his dark nights of the soul. Reading, occupied a great deal of his time. In 1932 (through a scholarship), he attended Detroit City College and postgraduate he worked researching black history. His first book of poems was published in 1940. His work was internationally recognized in the 60s, when his “A Ballad of Remembrance” won the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar.

In his poems you can perceive his impulse of using history, but also song memory. He was an African American poet, who managed to bring the slave trade into lyrical focus. The drive for liberty has been beautifully embodied. ROBERT HAYDEN wrote this poem in the nineteen forties, when no one was really writing about these subjects. This three-part narrative poem, uses various personae to depict in the Symbolist style the trans-Atlantic slave trade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3Z4FEj7LJo “Middle Passage”, refers to the journey of the triangular slave. The first leg of the journey entailed leaving the home port. The middle passage is the journey in which Africans were transported to the New World. The third part of the trip was the return to the home port.

MIDDLE PASSAGE / Extract of the first part – Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy: Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; horror the corposant and compass rose. Middle Passage: voyage through death to life upon these shores. 10 April 1800: Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says their moaning is a prayer for death, our and their own. Some try to starve themselves. Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under. Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann: Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed. Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes. Jesus Saviour, pilot me over life’s tempestuous sea. We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord, safe passage to our vessels bringing heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

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