An African Elegy (Themes)

Themes

Death

“An African Elegy” presents death as a subconscious force that is not fully present to the speaker except in symbolic terms. Duncan charts his relation to death through introspection, likening his own mind to Africa’s jungles. His descriptions of those jungles are replete with images of suffering and death: “Death is the dog-headed man zebra striped/and surrounded by silence who walks like a lion, / who is black.” For Duncan, Death is both an ominous seducer, who beckons Virginia Woolf to “come back” to the river to complete her suicide, and a welcome presence, who can rescue people from torment: in death “all our tortures [are] absolved in the fog, / dispersed in Death’s forests, forgotten.” The death drive, popularized in the philosophical idea of Thanatos, is alternately welcomed and rebuffed in Duncan’s poem. As an elegy, this poem mourns not physical death, per se, but the fact that death must be a necessary part of the exotic and the beautiful, the zone of the “marvelous.”

Race and Racism

Any poem titled “An African Elegy” and written by a white American will necessarily touch on the idea of race. Duncan’s poem, written in 1942, though using Africa and the Congo in symbolic terms, nonetheless presents Africans in stereotypical ways. His representations of Africa as a dark and unknowable place and of Africans as an inscrutable and exotic people who engage in barbaric rituals play on popular misconceptions of the continent and its people. Further, Duncan’s depiction of African princes as those responsible for drinking his blood and torturing him in (what Duncan has described) a sado-masochistic ritual reinforce stereotypes of African men as sexually aggressive and dominant. These images, presented as symbolic renderings of the speaker’s subconscious desires, serve as a historical index of American attitudes toward Africans in the early 1940s.

Nature

“An African Elegy” makes a comparison between the natural world and human nature, suggesting that the latter, at its root, is a variation of the former. Duncan makes the comparison explicit in the first, fourth, and final stanzas. For example, in the fourth stanza, he states, “I know / no other continent of Africa more dark than this / dark continent of my breast.” Human beings have long debated their own nature, asking what accounts more for who we are, society or natural laws. This question is sometimes framed in terms of a debate between nature and nurture. Some philosophical and religious traditions, especially those associated with Western Judeo-Christianity, see the desires of the human body as a result of sin and humanity’s separation from God. Others see the body’s desires as natural, and religious and social prescriptions for behavior as unnatural. By using the natural world as the primary vehicle for describing human nature, and by making that natural world essentially mysterious and unknowable, Duncan suggests that true human nature is ultimately concealed from humans. All that human beings have access to is myth and imagery to explain themselves to themselves.

Topics for Further Study

• After researching the basic beliefs of Theosophy, give a report to your class outlining them. Are there connections you can draw between any of these beliefs and Duncan’s poem?
• Keep a dream diary for one month, writing down as much and as many of your dreams as you can remember. Then catalog all of the images and stories. Do certain images or stories reccur? What do these images and stories tell you about that month in your life?
• Write a poem or story about the creation of the universe using symbols that are personally meaningful to you. Do not worry if these symbols will be accessible to others. Then write a short essay describing why you chose those particular symbols.
• Research the use of magic by the Swahili. Do you see any similarities with the rituals Duncan describes in his poem?