Claude McKay was born on this day in 1890 on the island of Jamaica. He grew up poor, but was exposed to literature through an older brother. He loved English literature, he loved the Romantic poets. As a young man, McKay met Walter Jekyll, an Englishman who came to Jamaica originally to be a planter. Unlike a lot of other imported-planter-types, Jekyll immersed himself in the local culture, fascinated by the Afro-Caribbean world and its folklore and language. In 1906, Jekyll published a collection of tales he heard, feeling it was important to capture these stories from an oral tradition. Jekyll encouraged McKay to write in his own language. There were examples from the past: those colonized by England, not just politically and socially, but linguistically. McKay was inspired by Robert Burns (my post about him here). McKay wanted to do for Jamaica what Burns did for Scotland.
McKay’s first book, Songs of Jamaica, was published in 1912. Walter Jekyll wrote the introduction.
McKay published another book called Constab Ballads, drawing on his experience as a police constable. McKay won prizes for these books, and moved to America that same year to study at the Tuskegee Institute. He also attended Kansas State College. He moved to Harlem in 1914. (He became an American citizen in 1940).
One of the distinguishing characteristics of McKay’s life was his restless and constant travel. He moved to England for a couple of years, right after WWI. He wrote for Sylvia Pankhurst’s radical feminist newspaper. McKay’s “reach” widened. The Russian Revolution fired him up with excitement and he traveled there in 1922 to see what was going on. This was 1922, when the Revolution filled so many with so much hope. McKay continued to “believe” in the ideals behind the revolution, even after it turned monstrous. (Socialist writer Max Eastman wrote the preface to McKay’s Harlem Shadows.)
The early 1920s were peripatetic: McKay moved to France. He lived in Morocco. He returned to America. He devoted himself to Catholic causes. He was famous. He did not suffer in obscurity. For example, he wrote “If We Must Die” (printed below) in response to the 1919 race riots, or “race riots”. Try uprising, try legitimate protest. Those riots were part of a “Red Scare” – the first of many in America, a continued disgrace on our name. “If We Must Die” is McKay’s most famous poem. Henry Cabot Lodge read it into the Congressional Record at the time. If you watch The Man in the High Castle, you will recognize the poem.
McKay’s was an innovater, bringing the rhythms of Jamaican speech into American poetry. He was influential on the Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean poets who came after.
Harlem Shadows was published in 1922, one of the most important years in 20th century literature – high modernism arrived with a vengeance, sweeping away the dead leaves of the past. 1922: Ulysses was published, as was T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was appearing piece by piece. Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt. Anna Akhmatova’s final collection of poetry appeared in 1922, before her work was supprssed. Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Siddhartha. The Beautiful and the Damned. This is 1922. Harlem Shadows is a part of this literary revolution, and one of the opening bells of the Harlem Renaissance.
McKay often used traditional European forms, like the sonnet. This juxtaposition between form and content created startling effects when combined with his vocabulary, language, and subject matter. For example, his devastating poem “The Lynching” is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet.
The Lynching
His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
Breakthroughs like this sonnet open doors for other artists. McKay’s breakthrough signaled that the tradition of English literature, created/written by white people, was not just “FOR” white people, and the perfect literary forms of the so-called white tradition were not barred to those colonized by the countries from whence that tradition sprung. This was then and remains controversial, because indigenous forms were wiped out by colonization, and much of 20th century literature was a re-claiming of the indigenous forms. Anyone who came from a colonized culture understood that their natural tradition/language/customs were wiped out or so co-opted as to have dissolved totally. (James Joyce was all about this. He might not have become a writer without that pressurized suppression. The Irish language had been stamped out. The clearest example of Joyce’s feelings on is the famous “tundish scene” in Portrait of the Artist).
McKay claimed that white tradition as his own. Now, there were bars for entry in terms of such work being accepted. (Countee Cullen’s work – my post on him here – had similar qualities. He was a 20th century Black man, writing in the Romantic Keats-ian tradition.) One of McKay’s primary inspirations was William Wordsworth (my post on him here). McKay used Wordworth’s rhythms to plunge readers into Jamaica and the Caribbean atmosphere.
McKay was not the first poet to use Jamaican English in poetry, but he was the most successfu.
After his death, he was declared the national poet of Jamaica.
Here are a couple of his famous poems.
If We Must Die
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Harlem Shadows
I hear the halting footsteps of a lass
In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall
Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass
To bend and barter at desire’s call.
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!
Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;
Through the lone night until the last snow-flake
Has dropped from heaven upon the earth’s white breast,
The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet
Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.
Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
In Harlem wandering from street to street.
America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
QUOTES:
James Weldon Johnson:
Claude McKay, although still quite a young man, has already demonstrated his power, breadth and skill as a poet. Mr. McKay’s breadth is as essential a part of his equipment as his power and skill. He demonstrates mastery of the three when as a Negro poet he pours out the bitterness and rebellion in his heart in those two sonnet-tragedies, “If We Must Die” and “To the White Fiends,” in a manner that strikes terror; and when as a cosmic poet he creates the atmosphere and mood of poetic beauty in the absolute, as he does in “Spring in New Hampshire” and “The Harlem Dancer.” Mr. McKay gives evidence that he has passed beyond the danger which threatens many of the new Negro poets–the danger of allowing the purely polemical phases of the race problem to choke their sense of artistry.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Along with southern blacks, Caribbean migrants were among those moving north, including Claude McKay, later declared the national poet of Jamaica. Arriving in the United States in 1912 and abandoning the Jamaican English of his early verse, McKay was politically the most militant if prosodically among the most conservative of the new African American writers. In Harlem Shadows (1922), he preferred the sonnet among European lyric forms, but if the genre was traditional, McKay’s use of it – dislocating its norms of intimacy to express racial fury and estrangement – was not. Living mostly in France and Morocco for eleven years after 1922, he inspired francophone poets such as Leopold Sedar Senghor–African and Caribbean poets of the Negritude movement, who beginning in the 1930s asserted black pride and resistance to colonial assimilation.
Arthur D. Drayton, “Claude McKay’s Human Pity”:
McKay does not seek to hide his bitterness. But having preserved his vision as poet and his status as a human being, he can transcend bitterness. In seeing … the significance of the Negro for mankind as a whole, he is at once protesting as a Negro and uttering a cry for the race of mankind as a member of that race. His human pity was the foundation that made all this possible.
Robert Bone:
These first two volumes [Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads] are already marked by a sharpness of vision, an inborn realism, and a freshness which provides a pleasing contrast with the conventionality which, at this time, prevails among the black poets of the United States.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
The sonnets “America” and “The White City” compact intense ambivalence toward white society in muscular syntax and violent images. The tension between McKay’s strict form and molten subject parallels the intense racial alienation represented in some of his poems. “Outcast” registers the poet’s sense of permanent estrangement from African culture. The figure of “The Harlem Dancer,” though idolized and exoticized, reflects the poet’s alienation: “looking at her falsely-smiling face, / I knew her self was not in that strange place.”
Jean Wagner:
Along with the will to resistance of black Americans that it expresses, [“If We Must Die”] voices also the will of oppressed people of every age who, whatever their race and wherever their region, are fighting with their backs against the wall to win their freedom.
Alan L. MacLeod:
That he was able to capture a universality of sentiment in ‘If We Must Die’ has been fully demonstrated; that he was able to show new directions for the black novel is now acknowledged; and that he is rightly regarded as one of the harbingers of (if not one of the participants in) the Harlem Renaissance is undisputed.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
The year 1922 saw many important tendencies in modern writing put into motion. It was the year of The Waste Land, of James Joyce’s Ulysses (published in Paris), and, at the start of the Harlem Renaissance, of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows and James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry.
Robert A. Smith, “Claude McKay: An Essay in Criticism”:
Although he was frequently concerned with the race problem, his style is basically lucid. One feels disinclined to believe that the medium which he chose was too small, or too large for his message. He has been heard.
“I am a black man, born in Jamaica, B.W.I., and have been living in America for the last years. It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable…Looking about me with bigger and clearer eyes I saw that this cruelty in different ways was going on all over the world. Whites were exploiting and oppressing whites even as they exploited and oppressed the yellows and blacks. And the oppressed, groaning under the leash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows. I ceased to think of people and things in the mass. [O]ne must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself.” — Claude McKay
