Riappropriazione della ‘blackness’ in «The Song of the Smoke» di W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois’s poem «The Song of the Smoke» (1907) is a vehicle for a political statement of affirmation of racial pride. As Du Bois writes: “I will be black as blackness can– | The blacker the mantle, the mightier the man! | For blackness was ancient ere whiteness began”. In only three lines Du Bois manages to condense effectively his ideas on the problem of the “color line”: a new, positive connotation of the term ‘black’ encouraging a growing racial awareness and a historical (re)vision(ism) that, on the grounds of Herodotus’s speculations revealing that the ancient Egyptians were black, denied the routine commonplace of Africa as a synonym of primitivism and backwardness. Strangely enough for someone who had been accused of not being black enough, like a poet/prophet Du Bois insists on the idea of blackness as an element of distinction through a figurative language characterized by evocative metaphors and repetitions. «The Song of the Smoke» is therefore a groundbreaking poem if one considers the spreading of the ideas of ‘Black power’ and ‘Black is beautiful’ in the 1960s and the later cultural reevaluation and reappropriation of the slang term ‘nigga’.