CLAUDE MCKAY
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CLAUDE McKay Jamaica [18…-1948] Claude McKay was an important poet and novelist identified with the revival of Black literature, art and music in the United States known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though he spent all his adult life abroad, he was born, and grew up in Jamaica and he never forgot his native island, as many of his poems show. McKay was born in Claredon, Jamaica, the son of poor peasants of pure African descent. He came to the States in 1912 and entered the Agricultural College of Kansas, intending to study scientific farming and return to Jamaica to give practical help to his people. He studied there for two years, thinking less and less about agriculture and more and more about literature. As early as 1912 he had published his first volume of verse, Songs of Jamaica, which had been widely praised and had won a medal for poetry. Gradually he abandoned the idea of returning home. He left college in 1914 and decided to be a poet, supporting himself in a variety of menial jobs typical of the Black in the Northern cities of America at that time. At different periods he worked as wheelright, porter, dishwasher, waiter, longshoreman. McKay didn’t take his jobs very seriously - they were just a matter of earning enough cash to quit for a while and write. McKay was acutely interested in politics and like so many thinkers and artists in this period he became a socialist. He was associate editor of The Liberator, a socialist U.S. journal of art and literature. In 1923-24 he was in Moscow to examine the Bolshevik Revolution in action. As a black, McKay was useful to the Soviets to demonstrate their commitment to racial equality, and he was lionised, being lavishly entertained and exhibited on platforms with the most famous revolutionary leaders. But McKay remained sceptical of all this adulation, though sympathetic to the Revolution. After a year in Russia, he went to France, and then to Morocco, to live quietly and write. In 1928 he published his famous novel, Home to Harlem, which was a national best-seller in the U.S. and created a literary sensation. His last years were spent in illness and poverty, and his great talents seemed to be unappreciated. In 1942 he was converted to Roman Catholicism; he had always been a deeply spiritual man. McKay died in 1948. McKay’s best legacy is his poetry. He was a leader of the Black literary revolt of the l920s and 1930s, an authentic voice of the American and West Indian Black. He was also a fine lyric poet: most of his poems are short and lyrical, often sonnets. Many of his poems express
the longing of the exile in the Northern city for his island home.
Thinking of Jamaican fruits, he writes: “A wave of longing through my
body swept/And, hungry for the old, familiar ways/I turned aside and bowed
my head and wept.” ‘I shall return’ he says. I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife.
(I shall return) His
attitude to America, the land of his exile, is ambivalent. He hates her as
a land of oppression, and yet... Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
(America) The poem which first brought him fame in the U.S. was Harlem Shadows, a deeply compassionate lyric about black prostitutes in Harlem. Most of McKay’s finest
poems are pervaded with the sense of being a black in a white man’s
world. They express hatred, pride, defiance - the
Black revolt. His most famous poem is certainly If we must die (1919) which has been called ‘perhaps the most quoted and
reprinted poem of this (i.e. McKay’s) generation’. If we must die, let it not be like hogs If we must die, O let us nobly die, Like men we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack But probably a finer and deeper poem is Baptism, which expresses the Black man’s ability to endure anguish and grow stronger: Into the furnace let me go alone: Stay you without in terror of the heat. Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears,
(Baptism) "Caribbean
Emancipators “, a publication
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