When the Tom-Tom Beats

Enjoy Jacques Roumain's "When the Tom-Tom Beats", translated by African-American literary giant Langston Hughes, courtesy of Poetry Nook. For another translation from May 1943, check out Poetry Foundation's page for a version from L.C. Kaplan. It is worth nothing that the water blends with the audience of the poem in the Hughes translation, but Kaplan's omits that. Hughes, who wrote similar poetry, seems to capture the deeper meaning of Roumain's poetry and its message for readers of African descent, particularly mixed-race readers who reject their African ancestry but cannot escape it. 

Your heart trembles in the shadows, like a face reflected in troubled water

The old mirage rises from the pit of the night

You sense the sweet sorcery of the past:

A river carries you far away from the banks,

Carries you toward the ancestral landscape.

Listen to those voices singing the sadness of love

And in the mountain, hear that tom-tom panting like the breast of a young black girl

Your soul is this image in the whispering water where your fathers bent their dark faces

Its hidden movements blend you with the waves

And the white that made you a mulatto is this bit of foam cast up, like spit, upon the shore