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.

Claude McKay, Poet Extraordinaire-2

I stated in my last post that Claude McKay is an important poet. Let me now clarify how so.

First of all he is a treasure to us Jamaicans. Anyone who can immortalize a simple Jamaican pass time such as gig throwing (the live ya Jamaican never calls them tops), or enshrine so much of the beloved landscape as Mckay does in this poem, is bound to be idolized.

FLAME-HEART
by: Claude McKay (1890-1948)

O much have I forgotten in ten years,
So much in ten brief years! I have forgot
What time the purple apples come to juice,
And what month brings the shy forget-me-not.
I have forgot the special, startling season
Of the pimento's flowering and fruiting;
What time of year the ground doves brown the fields
And fill the noonday with their curious fluting.
I have forgotten much, but still remember
The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December.

I still recall the honey-fever grass,
But cannot recollect the high days when
We rooted them out of the ping-wing path
To stop the mad bees in the rabbit pen.
I often try to think in what sweet month
The languid painted ladies used to dapple
The yellow by-road mazing from the main,
Sweet with the golden threads of the rose-apple.
I have forgotten--strange--but quite remember
The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December.

What weeks, what months, what time of the mild year
We cheated school to have our fling at tops?
What days our wine-thrilled bodies pulsed with joy
Feasting upon blackberries in the copse?
Oh some I know! I have embalmed the days
Even the sacred moments when we played,
All innocent of passion, uncorrupt,
At noon and evening in the flame-heart's shade.
We were so happy, happy, I remember,
Beneath the poinsettia's red in warm December.

But Claude McKay is probably more important to African Americans (and by extentsion African Hyphen Anyones) because he was a leading figure in the Harlem Rennaisance. The Harlem Renaisance was, similar to that other Renaisance, a proliferation of all kinds of art and literature (I'm not sure about science) by African Americans. This came at a time when African Americans were just coming into a sense of themselves, and so it made sense that they should find expression in art. He is also important to African Americans because of the voice he gave to their cry against racism and injustice. He was a communist for some time but abandoned his views after visiting Russia and experiencing Communism first hand. A working class man himself, and a negro at that, living in the early nineteen hundreds, one is not surprised that (in his own words) this sonnet exploded in his head:

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 accursed lot.
If we must die--oh, 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!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
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!

The work of Mckay and others influenced the birth of a new movement among Black writers, called Negritude, which was a sort of consciousness and acceptance of their blackness. Chief among these writers were Leopold Senghor, former president of Senegal and Aime Cesaire of Haiti . Not all blacks suscribed to this movement, notably Wole Soyinka, one of Africa's Nobel Laureates who remarked that "a tiger does not shout its tigritude" , instead, "it acts". Ouch, not a bad point at all. It's this belief that preoccupation with blackness only reinforces prejudice that informs Denzil Washington's rejection of the idea that he's one of the best black actors of all time. I feel the same way. I'd rather be remembered as one of the best actors of time. But were Negritude not lost on so many negroes, like these women in this video at Stunner's, maybe we would save ourselves some emotional energy not to mention, money, which we could then expend toward bettering our lot.

If we were to look at the evolution of thought about black identity, we start with the Harlem Renaissance (of which Claude McKay was a leading figure), progress to Negritude then on to Wole Soyinka's idea that we should simply be. We have that right.

Primary Sources: The Jamaica Gleaner, http://kirjasto.sci.fi/soyinka.htm,

Claude McKay, Poet Extraordinaire-1

Claude McKay is such an important poet (and novelist) that I think I'll do a whole series of posts on him. He was born in Clarendon, Jamaica in 1889 but moved to the United States in 1912, after serving as a police officer and publishing his first collection of poetry; Songs of Jamaica. I'll begin by exposing you to one of his very nolstalgic poems, the first one, reminscent of Wordsworth's Daffodils, is (or used to be) memorised by Jamaican school children as a matter of course. Any Jamaican in the thirty something age group remembers this?

The Spanish Needle

Lovely dainty Spanish needle

With your yellow flower and white,

Dew bedecked and softly sleeping,

Do you think of me to-night?

Shadowed by the spreading mango,

Nodding o'er the rippling stream,

Tell me, dear plant of my childhood,

Do you of the exile dream?

Do you see me by the brook's side

Catching crayfish 'neath the stone,

As you did the day you whispered:

Leave the harmless dears alone?

Do you see me in the meadow

Coming from the woodland spring

With a bamboo on my shoulder

And a pail slung from a string?

Do you see me all expectant

Lying in an orange grove,

While the swee-swees sing above me,

Waiting for my elf-eyed love?

Lovely dainty Spanish needle,

Source to me of sweet delight,

In your far-off sunny southland

Do you dream of me to-night?

Claude McKay