"Is there something we have forgotten? Some precious thing we have lost, wandering in strange lands?"
About this Quote
A question like this doesn’t ask for directions so much as it stages a return. Bontemps isn’t simply nostalgic; he’s diagnosing a modern condition: the way displacement can become so routine it starts to feel like home. “Forgotten” and “lost” are close cousins, but not identical. Forgotten suggests a failure of memory, a break in transmission; lost suggests theft, rupture, or catastrophe. By pairing them, Bontemps implies both personal amnesia and historical injury.
The line’s power comes from its collective “we,” a communal pronoun that refuses to let the reader stand safely outside the wound. This is a poet of the Harlem Renaissance and its aftermath, writing in the long shadow of the Great Migration, Jim Crow, and a nation that demanded Black people reinvent themselves while denying them full belonging. “Wandering in strange lands” evokes exile without needing a passport: the estrangement of moving north, of living in America, of being told your origins are either shameful or irrelevant. The “strange lands” are geographic, but also cultural and psychic.
Bontemps frames this as a question because certainty would be too easy. The question form performs the very searching it describes, turning the reader into a participant in the recovery effort. “Precious thing” stays deliberately unspecific, which is the trick: it can be ancestry, language, dignity, spiritual coherence, a sense of safety, an undistorted history. The line doesn’t romanticize the past; it makes forgetting look like a political event, not a private lapse.
The line’s power comes from its collective “we,” a communal pronoun that refuses to let the reader stand safely outside the wound. This is a poet of the Harlem Renaissance and its aftermath, writing in the long shadow of the Great Migration, Jim Crow, and a nation that demanded Black people reinvent themselves while denying them full belonging. “Wandering in strange lands” evokes exile without needing a passport: the estrangement of moving north, of living in America, of being told your origins are either shameful or irrelevant. The “strange lands” are geographic, but also cultural and psychic.
Bontemps frames this as a question because certainty would be too easy. The question form performs the very searching it describes, turning the reader into a participant in the recovery effort. “Precious thing” stays deliberately unspecific, which is the trick: it can be ancestry, language, dignity, spiritual coherence, a sense of safety, an undistorted history. The line doesn’t romanticize the past; it makes forgetting look like a political event, not a private lapse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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