“One-Way-Ticket”: When Langston Hughes Traduces the Massive, Absolute and Obligatory Immigration of Today's Africans

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze how Langston Hughes through his poem “One-Way-Ticket” while expressing why blacks were obliged to flee the Big South to the North of the United Sates. He expresses also in a metaphorical and symbolical language many centuries later in the same poem the reasons why and the reality linked to the motivations of today’s Africans mass immigration towards Europe, the North also. Although separated in time and space, the different characteristics are the same in terms of pull and push factors concerning the past “Great Migration” and today’s Africans mass immigration.