I was very excited to be able to look at the literary magazine Fire!! (1926) during our last lab day. I was a part of Professor Tracy’s Harlem Renaissance class and am an avid fan of Langston Hughes. So, from the moment I heard that the Archives had a copy of Fire!!, I was itching to get my hands on it, i.e., Gollum and that little ring of his.
Edited by six great names of the Harlem Renaissance’s “New Negro” movement, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce (Nugent), and John Davis, Fire!! is full of political and personal poetry. Black Americans had only recently obtained the human right of literary expression. Newfound access (and interest) to the publishing world saw a large discussion of what black Americans should and should not write about (or share via any other media). Consequently, there was not only a racial divide but also a generational one. Generally speaking, older Renaissance icons like W. E. B. Du Bois campaigned for “propaganda” art that inspired “racial uplift” (see “Criteria of Negro Art” published the very same year) and discouraged works that did not carry out this mission. If any reader was unaware of what generation side Fire!! authors belonged to; it becomes clear from the start. Just before the table of continents, the magazine is captioned “A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists.” Similarly, Bennett’s poem “To Usward,” which she read at the famous Civil Dinner two years prior, is dedicated to “all Negro Youth known and unknown who have a song to sing, a story to tell or a vision for the sons of earth.” I find the use of “devoted” (as opposed to dedicated” and “younger” (as opposed to “young”) quite interesting, but I’d like to move on to the magazine’s actual contents.
While race is certainly very evident, especially in the selection of poems titled “Flame From the Dark Tower” (which begins with Countée Cullen’s “From the Dark Tower”), the short-story-prose “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” (33-39) by Richard Bruce is more about sexuality than race and its persistent use of ellipses is modernism to an extreme. Fire!! is well aware of the criticism it received. In the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Vol 1), Langston Hughes is quoted as saying, “Dr. DuBois in the Crisis roasted it. The Negro press called it all sorts of bad names, largely because of a green and purple story by Bruce Nugent, in the Oscar Wilde tradition, which we had included” (Norton 1332).
Fire!! Is an excellent magazine to look at, from poems to prose, drawings to plays, and even down to historical context and reflections. I highly recommend checking it out. For this reason, I have made a Google folder composed of images of the magazine in its entirety. It is actually a fairly quick read.
