Claude McKay, Poet Extraordinaire-3

I digressed a bit from the series on Claude McKay, to muse about the day when the spectre of racism is a dim memory of the past, the day when a black man can offer himself for president of the USA and the colour of his skin is not a consideration. But in a sense I was still on topic, for another of McKay's seething sonnets, The White House, did not dare to anticipate the day a black man could possibly sit in the oval office, but here we are on the eve of November 4, wondering whether the door will open up to Obama's relaxed face. Much of the pain has eased, though much still remains.

The White House

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
And find in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate.

On the international scene Cluade McKay is remembered for his anthems of resistance, such as the sonnets If We Must Die, The Lynching, and Baptism. The Gleaner notes that other Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and Countée Cullen, cited him as a leading inspirational force. Winston Churchill, in a speech before British Parliament in the 1940s in which he issued a rallying cry for Britain to go to war against Hitler's Nazi Germany, borrowed the opening lines of If We Must Die.

In Jamaica we remember Claude McKay mostly for his for his poems of idyllic times, such as I shall Return, which PJ Patterson (yanking the meaning from its context) was qouting after he was banished from parliament over the Shell waiver affair. We have honoured Claude McKay by naming a high school for him. He was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica for Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. In 1977 the Government on behalf of the people of Jamaica posthumously awarded Claude McKay the Order of Jamaica in respect and admiration for his great contribution to literature. I remember some years ago attending a celebration of his life and work at the Ward Theatre. Claude McKay died without ever returning to Jamaica, making this poem even more poignant:

I Shall Return

I shall return again; I shall return
To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes
At golden noon the forest fires burn,
Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies.
I shall return to loiter by the streams
That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses,
And realize once more my thousand dreams
Of waters rushing down the mountain passes.
I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife
Of village dances, dear delicious tunes
That stir the hidden depths of native life,
Stray melodies of dim remembered runes.
I shall return, I shall return again,
To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.