Claude McKay Poetry

McKay, Claude. "Claude McKay." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 289-98. Print.

It was interesting to return to Claude McKay’s poems at this point in the semester. If I remember correctly, I commented in some length on If We Must Die very early on in the semester, most likely in that detached academic frame that I lambasted in my last post. I want to briefly revisit the same poem and then bring in a bit on one of the others that caught my attention.

If We Must Die is much as I said in my earlier post, sans the lack of emotion. What really drives this home, and what really makes it stand out among McKay’s poetry, is the raw anger it emits. McKay isn’t commenting on the plight of the blacks, he is telling – ordering – them to get out of their homes and start kicking some butt. It is probably the rebel in me leftover from my teenage years, but McKay is spot on here. He is, very succinctly, telling his fellow blacks to stop pouting and do something, and I don’t think I can find anyone who won’t agree. There are so many bad places to belong to in society, and far too many of them do not have the daring to stand up for themselves. McKay saw this in the blacks of the 20s, and I see it in the gays of the 2000’s. Nothing, really, has changed other than the surface presentation of those who are being discriminated against. I don’t pretend to be an activist myself (they tend to annoy me, actually), but there is something very warm to be said about people who can put themselves out there and fight for a cause.

Now, the other poem that caught my attention in this section destroys much of the credit McKay had in my mind. The poem is The Tropics in New York. Perhaps it is the Garvey-esque idealization, or perhaps it is the whinny self-absorbedness that If We Must Die speaks so directly against, but this poem is just terrible. I’m not sure which of the two was written before the other, but something must have happened in McKay’s life to sever his courage and cause him to resort to the kind of useless crying he so adamantly opposed. Further, the short intro to this section of the anthology mentions that McKay eventually moved to the USSR. I don’t think that running away from one’s problems is a bad thing (rather, I’ve been outspoken about the ridiculous stupidity of machismo our society places on “sticking to your guns”), but I do find it hard to reconcile some of the things McKay wrote about with his defection. I can only assume that he moved to the USSR not as an act of retreat from the segregated and racist United Stated, but as a safe haven from the pretentiousness of the Harlem Renaissance with which he was so often associated and so openly ridiculed.

What is there to be said, then, about a man who can face racism but can’t bare his own fellows? I think that this theme is overlooked in much of the literature we’ve discussed in this class, but it is one of some importance: what about the blacks who did not agree with the Renaissance? Just as many gays today do not follow the Human Rights Movement or attend gay pride parades, many blacks of the 20s did not do anything for the Renaissance nor even endorse it. I suppose the fact that the Renaissance is discussed as an all-encompassing event is an artifact of the way we record history – no one of the time period cared about the dissenters, and therefore today we do not learn about them.