[Ita is a Nigerian educator and critic. In the following essay, which was originally published in the journal African Arts/Arts d'Afrique in 1970, he remarks on the themes of Black-Label and asserts that the poem has been largely misunderstood in the English-speaking world.]

Black Label has, in the English-speaking world, the reputation of being a crude glorification of blackness, and a rather unintelligent example of black racialism. This undeservedly bad reputation is based on the fact, that of the whole poem sequence, the only part generally known to the English-speaking public are the following lines:

       The White will never be negro
       for beauty is negro
       and negro is wisdom
       for endurance is negro
       and negro is courage
       for patience is negro
       and negro is irony
       for charm is negro
       and negro is magic
       for love is negro
       and negro is loose walking
       for the dance is negro
       and negro is rhythm
       for laughter is negro
       for joy is negro
       for peace is negro
       for life is negro

These lines are, in fact, quoted by Mr. Gerald Moore in his introduction to Seven African Writers, where he prefaces them with the words: "The chief danger carried by Negritude is that of degenerating into a racialism as intolerant and arrogant as any other. At its fiercest, it can lead to the writing of defiant, if invigorating, nonsense like this: 'The White will never be negro …'"

By isolating Damas' lines, Mr. Moore has endowed them with a crudity which is not theirs when read in context. The lines are not, of course, intended to be an entirely self-contained poem, but constitute part of a sequence, representing the musings, reminiscences and vituperations of a negro in exile during a night spent drinking Black Label. This exile had begun, not in Paris, but in the colonies with the birth of a child deprived a maternal love, "that no maternal bosom will ever fail to nurse for lack of tenderness."

[In a footnote, the critic states that the phrase "that no maternal bosom will ever fail to nurse" is "a mistranslation. It should read 'which no maternal breast will ever nourish.'"] It was a child whose pram a stiffly uniformed nurse pushed endlessly from avenue to boulevard, and from park to square—a child perpetually drilled in the false gentility of a colonial bourgeoisie, in the hushed conversational tones and the fingers crooked over the teacup:

       At tea, the two pointed fingers stabbing, pointing
       Exactly at the bourgeois sense of conventions.

It is the Negro-ness of the child which nurse and parents, teachers and clergy all try to eradicate. Thus, the child's experiences force upon it (and temporarily upon the reader) an identification of negro-ness with all that is natural and spontaneous in its nature.

The lines "The White will never be negro …" are, in part, a summing up of identifications forced upon, and beaten into, the poet by his childhood experience. But the lines do not occur in the immediate context of the poet's convention-ridden childhood; they are a tirade provoked by the memory of fashionable Parisians in a metropolitan jazz dive aping what they suppose to be the natural spontaneity of the African.

       DO YOU REMEMBER
       The CUBAN CABIN
       The liveried page with the red parasol
       the stairs which gave sheer on to the giddying darkness
       and threw you straight into the fevered rhythm
       the harshness of the blues
       the stomp …

Their immediate context is:

       The White at the Negro's school
       at the same time
       well behaved
       docile
       submissive and a mimic
       The White will never be negro …

The lines

       and negro is loose walking
       for the dance is negro
       and negro is rhythm

probably refer not so much to "loose walking" in general, but to an actual attempt of Parisians (seen or remembered by the poet) to imitate negro dance movements. For the Parisians search for the spontaneity of "Africa" through jazz and blues—that is to say, through the music and dance forms of the already exiled negro world. There is a fairly obvious irony in the situation: while the "fashionable" coloured colonial bourgeoisie cripple themselves in an attempt to adopt the norms of the white metropolis, the metropolis is struggling to imitate "African" spontaneity. But what the poet sees here is not merely another form of falsity and artificiality, but artificiality intensified to the highest degree; for surely no artificiality can be more artificial, and more of a mockery of all authenticity, than that which apes spontaneity. Besides this, the decision of Parisians to patronise Africa is doubly insulting. First, Paris has stunted and thwarted the development of the negro poet. Now its interests in "Africa" seem like an attempt to take over such crumbs of personality and vitality as had been left to him. The lines "The White will never be negro …" represent the forceful, if one likes, crude, outburst of the poet faced with phony Parisian Afrophilia.

There is a sharp contrast between the style of his passage, which is, superficially at least, straight forward and almost pompous in tone, and Damas' usual poetic style which is highly elliptical and shot through with double entendre. The passage in the framework of a more mannered sequence constitutes not only a denunciation, but a jeer at the folly of artificiality aping spontaneity.

Within the framework of Black Label genuineness and spontaneous life have become identified with the negro (that is, with the pre-exile negro) and artificiality with the white. But the poem cycle as a whole is not concerned with stating baldly the merits of the blacks and the demerits of the whites, or at least, not in the crude way which critics like Mr. Moore might be prone to suppose. It is little concerned with the whites. It is concerned with negro lackeyism, and the crippling effects of being brought up to despise what one is, and cannot help but be. Far from being crude, Black Label is a work of considerable complexity. Sprung from the negro experience, it burns that experience into its readers; but its treatment of negro self-contempt is relevant to all self-contempt, just as its treatment of the speciousness of the patrons of the Cabane Cubaine is relevant to all speciousness. It is a poem sequence whose complexity and scope entitle it to more serious and more sustained critical attention than it has so far received.