What is Africa to me

What is Africa to me? is the culminating question in the epigraph to Passing, drawn from Countee Cullen’s poem Heritage. Set against an image of ancestral distance, it introduces a novel in which racial identity is at once historically inherited, socially imposed, and difficult to read from appearances alone.

Source and Placement

The epigraph is taken from Heritage, which appeared in Cullen’s first published poetry volume, Color, in 1925. Its lines move from a speaker three centuries removed from the scenes his fathers loved, through images of a spicy grove and cinnamon tree, to the question What is Africa to me? The movement matters: the question follows an evocation of inherited scenes, so distance and connection remain present together rather than resolving into a simple claim of belonging or estrangement.

Cullen was a celebrated poet among the New Negro writers, and the foreword notes an irony in his public position: although he had insisted on being a poet rather than a Negro poet, his best-known poems address race. The epigraph brings that tension into the novel’s opening frame. Its question is not an answer about what racial identity means; it makes that relation a problem the narrative will examine.

Ancestry and Historical Distance

The phrase three centuries removed places the speaker at a remove from ancestral life, but the possessive reference to his fathers keeps that past within the present. The poem’s question therefore carries more than uncertainty about geographical or cultural connection. It evokes the historical rupture through which ancestry can remain consequential even when the scenes and practices associated with it are no longer directly accessible.

The foreword situates the passing narrative within the history of slavery and its aftermath, when racial classification became tied to freedom, social standing, and material privilege. Read alongside that account, the epigraph’s distance is not merely personal: the relation to African ancestry is shaped by a society that assigns value and status through racial categories. The question opens onto this contradiction, in which inheritance may be obscured or disavowed while remaining powerful in the conditions of everyday life.

The Question in the Novel

Passing makes racial identity legible neither through ancestry alone nor through reliable physical signs. Irene dismisses the supposed bodily clues used to identify racial difference, yet later interprets Clare’s eyes as revealing her Black identity. Brian, reflecting on people who pass, observes that they return, while admitting that he does not know why. The novel thus places the epigraph’s uncertainty beside characters’ efforts to explain a category that resists stable definition.

At the same time, the story shows that uncertainty does not make racial classification harmless. The foreword connects passing to the legal color line and the one-drop rule, which treated Black ancestry as decisive regardless of visible appearance. John Bellew’s insistence that there can be no Black people in his family makes that boundary intimate: his racist declaration depends on treating race as fixed, even while his marriage to Clare gives the novel a pointed contradiction to his claim of racial purity. The epigraph’s question consequently resonates in a world where the meaning of ancestry is contested but its social consequences are real.

Interpretive Significance

As a frame for the novel, the epigraph holds distance and attachment in unresolved tension. It does not reduce the characters’ identities to a direct expression of ancestry, nor does it suggest that ancestry can simply be left behind. Instead, it prepares readers to see race as both a lived relation to history and a category produced and enforced by social and legal power. The question remains open because the novel’s central conflict lies precisely in the gap between what identity may mean to a person and what a racial order insists it must mean.