A City’s Death by Fire

After that hot gospeller has levelled all but

the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by
fire;
Under a candle’s eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths
that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled
tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street
like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the
clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of
the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I
asked, why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden
world fails?
In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were
a flock of faiths;
To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a
green breath
Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as
nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.
 In a Green Night

Derek Walcott
(West indies

The orange tree, in varying light,

Proclaims her fable perfect now
That her last season’s summer height
Bends from each overburdened bough.

She has her winters and her spring,

Her moult of leaves, which, in their fall
Reveal, as with each leaving thing,
Zones truer than the tropical

For if at night each orange sun

Burns with a comfortable creed,
By noon hash fires have begun
To quail those splendours which they feed;

Or mixtures of the dew and dust

That early shone her orbs of brass
Mottle her splendour with the rust
She seemed all summer to surpass.
By such strange, cyclic chemistry which dooms and glories her at once
As green yet aging orange tree
The mind enspeheres all circumstance.

No Florida, loud with citron leaves,

Nor crystal falls to heal an age
Shall calm our natural fear which grieves
The loss of visionary rage

Yet neither shall despairing blight

The nature ripening into art,
Nor the fierce noon or lampless night.
Wither the comprehending heart.

The orange tree, in varying light

Proclaims her fable perfect now
That her last season’s height
Bends from each overburdened bough
  Order By Title
 
 Order By Date Added
 
 Order By Hit
 
 New Poems
1. The Fist 6/2/2015

2. The Season of Phantasmal Peace 12/31/2015

3. Ruins Of A Great House 3/30/2015

4. The Bounty 2/9/2015

5. From 'Omeros' 2/9/2015

6. A Lesson for This Sunday 2/15/2016

7. In the Village 6/16/2015

8. The Star-Apple Kingdom 4/12/2010

 9. Pentecost 4/12/2010

10. Coral 4/12/2010

11. R.T.S.L. (1917-1977) 1/13/2003

12. Parang 1/13/2003

13. Codicil 1/13/2003

14. Koening Of The River 1/13/2003

15. Sabbaths, W.I. 1/13/2003

16. In The Virgins 1/13/2003

17. The Saddhu Of Couva 1/13/2003

18. Dark August 4/12/2010

19. The Glory Trumpeter 11/7/2005

20. Blues 1/13/2003

21. Forest Of Europe 1/13/2003

22. Night In The Gardens Of Port Of Spain 11/7/2005

23. A Far Cry From Africa 1/13/2003

 24. Egypt, Tobago 1/13/2003

25. After The Storm 1/13/2003

26. The Sea Is History 1/13/2003

27. A City's Death By Fire 1/13/2003

28. Midsummer, Tobago 1/13/2003

29. Love After Love

The Fist6/2/20152.The Season of Phantasmal Peace12/31/20153.Ruins Of A Great House3/30/20154.The

Bounty2/9/20155.From 'Omeros'2/9/20156.A Lesson for This Sunday2/15/20167.In the
Village6/16/20158.The Star-Apple Kingdom4/12/20109.Pentecost4/12/201010.Coral4/12/201011.R.T.S.L.
(1917-1977)1/13/200312.Parang1/13/200313.Codicil1/13/200314.Koening Of The
River1/13/200315.Sabbaths, W.I.1/13/200316.In The Virgins1/13/200317.The Saddhu Of
Couva1/13/200318.Dark August4/12/201019.The Glory Trumpeter11/7/200520.Blues1/13/200321.Forest Of
Europe1/13/200322.Night In The Gardens Of Port Of Spain11/7/200523.A Far Cry From
Africa1/13/200324.Egypt, Tobago1/13/200325.After The Storm1/13/200326.The Sea Is History1/13/200327.A
City's Death By Fire1/13/200328.Midsummer, Tobago1/13/200329.Love After Love1/13/2003

Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville,

Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a
prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from
vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that
protested racial and economic inequities. His philosophically
ambitious fiction, including tales of Black life in both Jamaica and
America, addresses instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay
found central to the Black individual’s efforts to cope in a racist
society. He is the author of The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected
Poetry and Prose (1973), The Dialectic Poetry of Claude
McKay (1972), Selected Poems(1953), Harlem
Shadows (1922), Constab Ballads (1912), and Songs of
Jamaica(1912), among many other books of poetry and prose.
The son of peasant farmers, McKay was infused with pride in his
African heritage. His early literary interests, though, were in English
poetry. Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah
Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll,
McKay studied the British masters—including John
Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics—and European
philosophers such as eminent pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer,
whose works Jekyll was then translating from German into English.
It was Jekyll who advised aspiring poet McKay to write verse in
Jamaican dialect.
 
At age 17, McKay departed from Sunny Ville to apprentice as a
woodworker in Brown’s Town. But he studied there only briefly
before leaving to work as a constable in the Jamaican capital,
Kingston. In Kingston he experienced and encountered extensive
racism. His native Sunny Ville was predominantly Black, but in
substantially white Kingston, Black people were considered inferior
and capable of only menial tasks. McKay quickly grew disgusted
with the city’s bigoted society, and within one year he returned
home to Sunny Ville.
 
During his brief stays in Brown’s Town and Kingston, McKay
continued writing poetry. Once back in Sunny Ville, with Jekyll’s
encouragement, he published the verse collections Songs of
Jamaica and Constab Ballads in London in 1912. In these two
volumes, McKay portrays opposing aspects of Black life in
Jamaica. Songs of Jamaica presents an almost celebratory portrait of
peasant life, with poems addressing subjects such as the peaceful
death of McKay’s mother and the Black people’s ties to the
Jamaican land. Constab Ballads, however, presents a substantially
bleaker perspective on the plight of Black Jamaicans and contains
several poems explicitly critical of life in urban Kingston.
For Songs of Jamaica, McKay received an award and stipend from
the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences. He used the money to
finance a trip to America, and in 1912, he arrived in South Carolina.
He then traveled to Alabama and enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute,
where he studied for approximately two months before transferring
to Kansas State College. In 1914 he left school entirely for New
York City and worked various menial jobs. As in Kingston, McKay
encountered racism in New York City, and this compelled him to
continue writing poetry.
 
In 1917, under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, McKay published two
poems in the periodical Seven Arts. Critic Frank Hattis admired his
work and included some of McKay’s other poems in Pearson’s
Magazine. Among McKay’s most famous poems from this period is
“To the White Fiends,” a vitriolic challenge to white oppressors and
bigots. A few years later, McKay befriended Max Eastman,
communist sympathizer and editor of the
magazineLiberator. McKay published more poems in Eastman’s
magazine, notably the inspirational “If We Must Die,” which
defended Black rights and threatened retaliation for prejudice and
abuse. “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,”
McKay wrote, “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
In Black Poets of the United States, Jean Wagner noted that “If We
Must Die” transcends specifics of race and is widely prized as an
inspiration to persecuted people throughout the world. “Along with
the will to resistance of black Americans that it expresses,” Wagner
wrote, “it 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.”
Upon publication of “If We Must Die” McKay commenced two
years of travel and work abroad. He spent part of 1919 in Holland
and Belgium, then moved to London and worked on the
periodical Workers’ Dreadnought. In 1920 he published his third
verse collection, Spring in New Hampshire, which was notable for
containing “Harlem Shadows,” a poem about the plight of Black sex
workers in the degrading urban environment.
McKay returned to the United States in 1921 and involved himself
in various social causes. The next year he published Harlem
Shadows, a collection from previous volumes and periodicals
publications. This work contains many of his most acclaimed poems
—including “If We Must Die”—and assured his stature as a leading
member of the literary movement referred to as the Harlem
Renaissance. He redoubled his efforts on behalf of Blacks and
laborers: he became involved in the Universal Negro Improvement
Association and produced several articles for its publication, Negro
World. He also traveled to the Soviet Union, where he had
previously visited with Eastman, and attended the Communist
Party’s Fourth Congress.
 
Eventually McKay went to Paris, where he developed a severe
respiratory infection and supported himself intermittently by
working as an artist’s model. His infection eventually necessitated
his hospitalization. After he recovered, he resumed traveling; for the
next 11 years he toured Europe and portions of northern Africa.
During this period he also published three novels and a short story
collection. The first novel, Home to Harlem (1928), perhaps his
most recognized title, concerns a Black soldier, Jake, who abruptly
abandons his military duties and returns home to Harlem. Jake
represents, in rather overt fashion, the instinctual aspect of the
individual, and his ability to remain true to his feelings enables him
to find happiness with a former sex worker, Felice. Juxtaposed with
Jake’s behavior is that of Ray, an aspiring writer burdened with
despair. His sense of bleakness derives largely from his
intellectualized perspective, and it eventually compels him to leave
racist America for his homeland of Haiti.
 
In The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone wrote that the
predominantly instinctual Jake and the intellectual Ray “represent
different ways of rebelling against Western civilization.” The novel
also provides a detailed portrait of Black urban life, and McKay was
applauded for creating “a work of vivid social realism,” according
to Alan L. McLeod in the Dictionary of Literary
Biography. However, McKay himself “stressed that he aimed at
emotional realism—he wanted to highlight his characters’ feelings
rather than their social circumstances,” McLeod continued.
Nevertheless, it was his glimpse into the “unsavory aspects of New
York black life” that was prized by readers—and condemned by
such prominent Black leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois.
Home to Harlem—with its sordid, occasionally harrowing scenes of
ghetto life—proved extremely popular, and it gained recognition as
the first commercially successful novel by a Black writer. McKay
quickly followed it with Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), a
novel about a Black vagabond living in the French port of
Marseilles. Like Jake from Home to Harlem, protagonist Banjo
embodies the largely instinctual way of living, though he is
considerably more enterprising and quick-witted than the earlier
character. Ray, the intellectual from Home to Harlem, also appears
in Banjo. His plight is that of many struggling artists who are
compelled by social circumstances to support themselves with
conventional employment. Both Banjo and Ray are perpetually
dissatisfied and disturbed by their limited roles in a racist society,
and by the end of the novel the men are prepared to depart from
Marseilles.
 
Banjo failed to match the acclaim and commercial success of Home
to Harlem, but it confirmed McKay’s reputation as a serious,
provocative artist. “It was apparent to critics that McKay’s
imagination had been somewhat strained and that the novel was
essentially an autobiographical exercise,” McLeod remarked.
Commentators have found the autobiographical thread inHome to
Harlem and Banjo primarily in the character of Ray, whose
peripatetic existence to some extent mirrors the author’s own, as
does the character’s admiration for the beauty of young men’s
bodies. Patti Cappel Swartz digs for clues to McKay’s sexuality in
the author’s fictional works, and points to a dream sequence
in Home to Harlem and the fact that “for Ray, the bonds with men
will always supersede those with women,” as is shown in the
conclusion of Banjo. “Like McKay, Ray is not the marrying kind,
but rather the vagabond who must always travel on,” Swartz
continued.
 
In his third novel, Banana Bottom, McKay presented a more
incisive exploration of his principal theme, the Black individual’s
quest for cultural identity in the face of racism. Banana
Bottom recounts the experiences of a Jamaican peasant girl, Bita,
who is adopted by white missionaries after being raped. Bita’s new
providers try to impose their cultural values on her by introducing
her to organized Christianity and the British educational system.
Their actions culminate in a horribly bungled attempt to arrange
Bita’s marriage to an aspiring minister. The prospective groom is
exposed as a sexual aberrant, whereupon Bita flees white society.
She eventually marries a drayman, Jubban, and raises their child in
an idealized peasant Jamaican environment. “Bita has pride in
blackness, is free of hypocrisy, and is independent and discerning in
her values,” remarked McLeod. “Praise forBanana Bottom has been
unanimous.”
 
Critics agree that Banana Bottom is McKay’s most skillful
delineation of the Black individual’s predicament. Unfortunately,
the novel’s thematic worth was largely ignored when the book first
appeared in 1933. Positive reviews of the time were related to
McKay’s extraordinary evocation of the Jamaican tropics and his
mastery of melodrama. In the ensuing years, though, Banana
Bottom gained increasing acknowledgement as McKay’s finest
fiction.
McKay’s other noteworthy fiction publication during his final years
abroad was Gingertown (1932), a collection of 12 short stories. Six
of the tales are devoted to Harlem life, and they reveal McKay’s
preoccupation with Black exploitation. Other tales are set in
Jamaica and even in North Africa, McKay’s last home before he
returned to the United States in the mid-1930s. Once back in
Harlem, he began an autobiographical work, A Long Way from
Home (1937), in which he related the challenges he faced as a Black
man. The book is considered unreliable as material for his
autobiography because, for example, in it McKay denies his
membership in the communist party, as McLeod points out.
However, A Long Way from Home does state McKay’s long-held
belief that Black Americans should unite in the struggle against
colonialism, segregation, and oppression.
 
By the late 1930s, McKay had developed a keen interest in
Catholicism. Through Ellen Tarry, who wrote children’s books, he
became active in Harlem’s Friendship House. His newfound
religious interest, together with his observations and experiences at
the Friendship House, inspired his essay collection, Harlem: Negro
Metropolis (1940), which offers an account of the Black community
in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. Like Banjo,Banana Bottom,
and Gingertown, Harlem: Negro Metropolis did not initially attract
a broad readership. Critic McLeod offers a more recent evaluation
of the work, the writing of which was based as much on scholarly
inquiry as on personal observation, as McKay was absent from the
country for a good deal of the period covered: “The book has been
superseded by many more-scholarly studies, yet it retains value as a
reexamination of Harlem by one who had established a necessary
critical distance.”
McKay moved to Chicago and worked as a teacher for a Catholic
organization. By the mid-1940s his health had deteriorated. He
endured several illnesses throughout his last years and eventually
died of heart failure in 1948.

McKay has been recognized for his intense commitment to

expressing the challenges faced by Black Americans and admired
for devoting his art and life to social protest, and his audience
continues to expand. McLeod concluded his essay in Dictionary of
Literary Biography with the following accolades: “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.”
 How can we find hope amid uncertainty, conflict, or loss? When we
feel we have lost hope, we may find inspiration in the words and
deeds of others. In this selection of poems, hope takes many forms:
an open road, an unturned page, a map to another world, an ark, an
infant, a long-lost glove that returns to its owner. Using metaphors
for hope seems appropriate, as the concept of hope is difficult to
describe. It is deeper than simple optimism, and more mysterious,
delicate, and elusive. It is a feeling we must develop and cultivate,
but like faith, it is also a state with which we are graced. Hope can
foster determination and grit—the ability to bounce back and to
remain determined despite failures and setbacks—when we make
daily efforts to change and improve what we can control. These
poems speak to the importance of hope and resilience.


o won’t you celebrate with me
LUCILLE CLIFTON

o Grace
JOY HARJO

o Still I Rise
MAYA ANGELOU

o A Center
HA JIN

o “Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)
EMILY DICKINSON

o Lift Every Voice and Sing
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

o  Second Attempt Crossing
JAVIER ZAMORA

o Facing It
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

o Psalm 150
JERICHO BROWN

o Carrion Comfort
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

o  Cymothoa Exigua
ROGER REEVES

o Try to Praise the Mutilated World
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

o Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
AMIRI BARAKA

o  It Was the Animals
NATALIE DIAZ

o  The African Burial Ground
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

o Saint Francis and the Sow
GALWAY KINNELL

o  There Are Birds Here
JAMAAL MAY

o  from Miss Crandall's Boarding School for Young Ladies of Color
 MARILYN NELSON

o Interpretation of a Poem by Frost
THYLIAS MOSS

o Goodbye to Tolerance
DENISE LEVERTOV

o To be of use
MARGE PIERCY

o Enlightenment
NATASHA TRETHEWEY

o Of History and Hope
MILLER WILLIAMS

o from   Don't Let Me Be Lonely: “Cornel West makes the point...”
CLAUDIA RANKINE

o Thanks
W. S. MERWIN

o At Last the New Arriving
GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI

o A Plagued Journey
MAYA ANGELOU

o A Portrait of a Dog as an Older Guy
KATIA KAPOVICH

o Elegy
MONG-LAN

o Failing and Flying
 JACK GILBERT

o  Hope
EMANUEL CARNEVALI

o Drawn Curtains
EDMOND JABÈS

o A Map to the Next World
JOY HARJO

o  Dance, Dance, While the Hive Collapses
TIFFANY HIGGINS

o A Ritual to Read to Each Other
WILLIAM E. STAFFORD

o us
TORY DENT

o  “Your Luck Is About To Change”
SUSAN ELIZABETH HOWE

o  On the Wall of a KZ Lager
JÁNOS PILINSZKY

o Song of the Open Road
WALT WHITMAN

o Chronic
D. A. POWELL

o Yellow Glove
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

o Self-Help
CHARLES BERNSTEIN

o  Winter Flowers
STANLEY MOSS

o Elegy for the Native Guards
NATASHA TRETHEWEY

o A Litany for Survival
AUDRE LORDE

o Pa' Césary Corky
ALURISTA

o L.A. Prayer
FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN

o An Old Story
TRACY K. SMITH

o Perhaps the World Ends Here
JOY HARJO

o A Poem for Pulse
JAMESON FITZPATRICK

o Enemies
WENDELL BERRY

o All the Dead Boys Look Like Me
CHRISTOPHER SOTO

o Biography of LeBron as Ohio
SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY
 ALL POEMS BY CLAUDE MCKAY

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Claude McKay Poems

Search in the poems of Claude McKay :   

 Order By Title
 
 Order By Date Added
 
 Order By Hit
 
 New Poems

1. Two-An'-Six 4/3/2010

2. Joy In The Woods 3/21/2012

3. Winter In The Country 1/3/2003

4. Wild May 1/3/2003

5. Homing Swallows 1/3/2003

6. Polarity 1/3/2003
7. Russian Cathedral 1/3/2003

8. To O.E.A. 1/3/2003

9. On A Primitive Canoe 1/3/2003

10
La Paloma In London 1/3/2003
.

11
Tormented 1/3/2003
.

12
Morning Joy 1/3/2003
.

13
To Winter 1/3/2003
.

14
Poetry 1/3/2003
.

15
One Year After 1/3/2003
.

16
The Plateau 1/3/2003
.

17
Memorial 1/3/2003
.

18
In Bondage 1/3/2003
.
19
Subway Wind 1/3/2003
.

20
To One Coming North 1/3/2003
.

21
O Word I Love To Sing 1/3/2003
.

22
Jasmines 1/3/2003
.

23
Summer Morn In New Hampshire 1/3/2003
.

24
On Broadway 1/3/2003
.

25
The Castaways 1/3/2003
.

26
North And South 1/3/2003
.

27
Through Agony 1/3/2003
.

28
The Night-Fire 1/3/2003
.

29
The Wild Goat 1/3/2003
.

30 The Barrier 1/3/2003

 .

31
The Easter Flower 1/3/2003
.

32
When Dawn Comes To The City 1/3/2003
.

33
The White House 1/20/2003
.

34
Thirst 1/3/2003
.

35
To A Poet 1/3/2003
.

36
Spring In New Hampshire 1/3/2003
.

37
Home Thoughts 1/3/2003
.

38
Rest In Peace 1/3/2003
.

39
Futility 1/3/2003
.

40
I Know My Soul 1/3/2003
.

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Claude McKay: Poems Summary
These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their
contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Timothy Sexton

Claude McKay was born and raised in Jamaica and published two

volumes of poetry before coming to America. Those poems are more
pastoral evocations of innocence and childhood and a love for his
homeland that are absent the outrage and anger which American inspired
when he was awakened to virulent racism. Which is not to suggest that
McKay was not already politically sensitive in his verse before heading to
Alabama and Kansas.
George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives
This early effort is a demonstration of McKay’s view of himself as political poet. The Morant
Bay Rebellion of 1865 which produced reforms by the government of Jamaica is the focus of
this poem and an exhibition of the sense of deep historical relevance that the past has on the
present.

A Midnight Woman to the Bobby

His Jamaican poetry already established McKay as a voice for the oppressed such narrative
effort about a woman who is stopped by a constable for questioning on why she is out on the
street by herself so late at night. The woman responds with taunts that he was just like her
until joining the force which has now corrupted him with delusions of authority.

Published in 1922 after Claude McKay had emigrated to the U.S. from his
homeland of Jamaica, Harlem Shadows became the very first collection of
poetry published under aegis of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition, it
was the first literary work to come out of that movement to be almost
universally hailed as a major literary work. Among others of note, Harlem
Shadows contains what became McKay’s signature poem.
If We Must Die
Ironically constructed in the form of a Shakespearean love sonnet, “If We Must Die” is a
political protest against racial oppression. Stimulated by a series of violent and blood racial
conflicts producing rioting and police brutality, “If We Must Die” defiantly urges oppressed
blacks to stand up and fight back against white oppressors. Beneath the call for rebellion is a
reminder of the cherished values of insurrection in America against those that would deny
freedom and undermine one’s self-respect.

Exhortation: Summer, 1919

Another poem partly inspired by the race riots and partly by the return of black servicemen
from World War I amid hopes that patriotism would translate into opening new opportunities.
Although McKay’s preference was the sonnet form, “Exhortation: Summer, 1919” eschews
that structure in order to extend the length of 26 lines. The extra lines are necessary for the
topic of the poem’s exhortation to the public watching these racial conflicts and holding the
key to opportunities for veterans: do the right thing!

The Lynching
The events of 1919 also urged McKay to directly address the most outrageous form of
senseless racial oppression: lynching. Perhaps because he is looking back to a more distant
place in history—the long history of lynching following Reconstruction—rather than
immediate headlines, the outrage here is tempered by a spiritual metaphor. Once again
adopting his preferred sonnet form, the blacks who are lynched and murdered are given a
symbolic weight well beyond mere social outrage: they are depicted as sacrificial Christ
figures.

Mulatto
Appearing in 1925, “Mulatto” uses the double consciousness of mixed racial heritage as a
metaphor for the entire black experience in America. The mulatto symbols the enforced
introduction into a country not of its own choosing with the consequent rejection of that
society when it tries to assimilate.

Invocation
“Invocation” is inextricably tied to the conceptual thematic foundation of “Mulatto.” In a nod
toward his British poetry heroes, this effort demonstrates the lyrical quality of John Milton as
the poet feels compelled to justify the black experience as worthy of a literary tradition that
essentially traces the development of white civilization.

America
McKay was still crafting protest poetry late in his life, but “America” is tempered with the
realizations that come with time. It is a ferocious assault against his adopted country for the
many ways it which systematically organizes to dehumanize an entire race. At the same time,
however, this oppression also serves to harden his soul and strengthen his resolve to overcome
his oppressors.

Claude McKay was not all sound and fury, signifying protest and social
conscience. He also write poetry of extraordinary lyrical quality and
profound emotional depth with a precise eye toward details that brought
his observations to life.
Tropics in New York
This poem is resonant of his pastoral reflections of innocence and the yearning of childhood.
Not about the sultry and deadening heat within the skyscrapers of New York, the poem was
occasioned by the sight of fresh tropical fruit on display behind large pane glasses in
storefront windows. Aptly, the poem almost becomes a loving grocery list of the sweet fruits
from the tropics that seem so out of place in the urban jungle of the Big Apple.

Flame Heart
“Flame Heart” is another of McKay’s most well-known poems as stands out among all the
protest and politics as a reflection upon being ten years removed from Jamaica. The yearning
for innocence of youth is combined with the realization of how much one forgets when one is
away from home. It is a lyrical tribute to both to the past and the way that memory impacts
the reality of that past.
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After All These Decades, The Complete Poems of Claude McKay
Reviewed by Professor John Lowney
 
Complete Poems.
By Claude McKay
Edited and with an introduction by William J. Maxwell
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004
Hardcover: $39.95
 
            Who was the first poet acclaimed for his writing in Jamaican dialect and the first
black writer to receive the Medal of the Jamaica Institute of Arts and Sciences?  Who wrote
the first book of poetry identified with the Harlem Renaissance, a book that expressed the
righteous anger of the New Negro?  Who was the first well-known black writer to tour
the Soviet Union, and the first to subsequently condemn Stalin’s leadership?  Who was the
first black writer to write a novel that made the best-seller lists in the United States? Who is
most recognized in the Francophone Caribbean and West Africa as the literary “inventor”
of négritude?  Who is the most prominent writer whose poetry appeared regularly in
theCatholic Worker in the 1940s?  The answer to all of these questions is, remarkably, the
same writer: Claude McKay.
 
From the publication of Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads in 1912 when he was in his
early twenties, to his migration to the United States shortly thereafter and the acclaim for his
1922  Harlem Shadows, to his subsequent decade of travel in the Soviet Union, Europe, and
North Africa, when he became famous as both a Communist activist and the popular author of
such controversial novels as Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), to his growing
disillusionment with Communism and his conversion to Catholicism before he died in 1948,
McKay’s journey as an artist and activist was as tumultuous as that of any poet of the
twentieth century.  With the publication of the first edition of his Complete Poems, readers
can now experience the life’s work of this writer who characterized himself as a “troubadour
wanderer” in his autobiography, A Long Way  From Home (1937).  The Complete Poems is
superbly edited by William J. Maxwell, the author of New Negro, Old Left: African-American
Writing and Communism  Between the Wars (Columbia University Press, 1999). In addition to
the poetry he has assembled from periodical as well as book publications, Maxwell includes
within his thorough explanatory endnotes the introductions to McKay’s books by such figures
as Walter Jekyll, Max Eastman, I.A. Richards, and McKay himself. Given that much of the
poetry included in this volume either has been out of print for a long while or has never been
published, the publication of McKay’s Complete Poems is an event that will transform our
understanding of African diaspora writing and international modernism.
  
McKay is best known in the United States as the writer of the New Negro anthem, “If We
Must Die,” a poem whose measured but defiant appeal—“O kinsmen! We must meet the
common foe!”—has inspired readers worldwide since its 1919 publication in The
Liberator.  Indeed, McKay’s success in expressing the militant anger of revolutionary black
resistance in elevated literary English and the sonnet form distinguished him as one of the
foremost literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance.  Harlem Shadows, his first and only
American book of poetry, preceded the publication of first books by such renowned poets as
Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, and it earned McKay international
acclaim as the proud voice of a new generation of African American writers.  Only recently,
however, have readers of McKay begun to question his reputation as the radical “black poet at
war,” as Addison Gayle, Jr. characterized him in 1972, a poet whose representative voice was
presumably compromised by his reliance on English poetic diction and European poetic
forms. 
 
The McKay who has emerged in recent years corresponds with the African diasporic, black
Atlantic, and Marxist internationalist reconsiderations of African American modernism,
evident most recently in Brent Hayes Edwards’ The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,
Translation, and the Rise of Black Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), Kate A.
Baldwin’s Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black
and Red, 1922-1963 (Duke University Press, 2002), and the collection of essays edited
byGeveviève Fabre and Michel Feith, Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem
Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 2001).  As these studies have suggested, McKay’s
impact on Anglophone Caribbean, African American, Francophone Caribbean and African,
and Left literary cultures makes him a more important figure than literary historians have
previously recognized.
 
Maxwell’s introduction to the Complete Poems is the most thorough overview of McKay’s
poetic accomplishment to date.  It also elaborates on previous biographical studies of McKay,
such as Wayne F. Cooper’s Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem
Renaissance (Louisiana State University Press, 1987) and Winston James’s A Fierce Hatred
of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion (Verso, 2000).  Most
importantly, Maxwell reconsiders the myths that have shaped McKay’s literary reputation,
including those that were initiated by McKay himself. McKay was born in the rural mountain
village of Nairne Castle, Jamaica in 1889.  His family was hardly representative of the
impoverished Jamaican peasantry, as McKay would later suggest.  By the time that McKay
was born his father had advanced from a day laborer to a successful commercial farmer.  As a
young man, McKay was the beneficiary of two mentors who provided him with an unusual
education: his brother U. Theo McKay, a schoolteacher who supported Fabian socialism, and
Walter Jekyll, an English-born gentleman who was a scholar of Jamaican folklore.  Their
mentorship informed his early poetry, which expressed a commitment to social reform in the
vernacular of rural Jamaica. The opening lines of “Quashie to Buccra” exemplify how McKay
addressed such topics as the social and psychological impact of rural poverty through the
voice of Jamaican farmworkers: “You tas’e petater an’ you say it sweet / But you no know
how hard we wuk fe it” (19).  This poem, like many others in his first two volumes of
poetry,Songs of Jamaica and Constab  Volumes (both published in1912), contrasts the
perspective of the agrarian worker with that of the landlord or tourist—“De fiel’ pretty? It
couldn’t less ‘an dat” (19).  While the vernacular expression of pastoral themes in these
volumes earned McKay a reputation as the “Jamaican Bobby Burns” (according to Jekyll), his
frank treatment of controversial racial and colonial topics has assured the lasting popularity of
his early poetry in Jamaica.
 
McKay’s subsequent journey to the “black mecca” of Harlem hardly corresponds with the
archetypal narratives of migration to New York. He in fact spent two years
in Manhattan,Kansas before he ever set foot in New York City. McKay initially came to
the U.S. to pursue a diploma in agricultural science at the Tuskegee Institute, with the
intention of returning to Jamaica to help improve the lives of farmers in his native
parish. Disappointed by the military discipline at Tuskegee, however, he transferred
to Kansas State University to continue his studies. When he left college for New York in
1914, he became involved with bohemian literary and radical political circles in Greenwich
Village and Harlem while supporting himself as a waiter on a Pennsylvania Railroad dining
car. At this time, he began to publish his poems in the Liberator, the Communist journal that
had succeeded theMasses. Another chapter of McKay’s migrant life began in 1919: he
embarked for London, where he spent two years as a poet, a radical activist, and editor of the
Communist newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought.  When he returned to New York in 1921,
he had become as well known as an activist as he was as a poet. He became an editor for
the Liberatorand a member of the radical black nationalist African Blood Brotherhood, and in
1922, his first (and only) American book of poetry, Harlem Shadows, was published.  It was
immediately acclaimed as the most compelling expression of the New Negro cultural
renaissance.  The poems he published in Harlem Shadows included his most militant
indictments of racial injustice, sonnets such as “The White House,” “America,” and
“Enslaved,” whose passionate, often violent rhetoric contrasts dramatically with their formal
properties. The tension between emotional intensity and formal restraint is inscribed within
the metric “feet” of poems like “The White House”: 
 
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
A chafing savage, down the decent street,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass. (148)
 
This same book also includes such introspective poems of urban alienation as “Tropics
in New York” and “Subway Wind,” poems which nostalgically contrast an idyllic
childhoodJamaica of “fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, / And dewy dawns, in mystical
blue skies” (154) with the harsh streets of Manhattan. New York is more often a dynamic site
of refuge and renewal, however.  Among the most remarkable poems from Harlem
Shadows are McKay’s love poems, which are often passionately erotic and which,
significantly, given that McKay was bisexual, rarely identify the gender of the lover who is
addressed.
 
With such an auspicious U.S. literary debut, why would McKay then leave for Europe and not
return to New York until 1934?  Maxwell’s introduction is most revealing about this period of
travel, which is usually attributed to the poet’s wanderlust.  A year after the publication
of Harlem Shadows, McKay departed for Moscow to participate in the Fourth Congress of the
Third Communist International, where he played an important role in shaping policy on “the
Negro question.” As a result of his revolutionary activism, the FBI moved to prohibit his
return to the U.S., sending orders to block his entry to port cities around the nation. He was
also virtually prohibited from returning to Jamaica, as British authorities likewise barred his
entry to British colonial or protectorate territories.  Contrary to the mythic narratives of
modernism, whether of the Lost Generation or the Great Migration, McKay’s period of travel
was in fact more compulsory than voluntary.  While his writing of this period is recognizably
modernist in its transgressive crossing of boundaries, it is also informed by a consciousness of
racial injustice that is likewise transnationalist.  This is evident especially in the “Cities”
poems, a series of urban portraits in various forms that is published in its entirety for the first
time.  These poems restlessly evoke the “changing moods” of cities where McKay had visited
or made his home, however
temporarily:Barcelona, Tanger, Fez, Marrakesh, Tetuan, Xauen, Cadiz, Berlin, Moscow, Petr
ograd, Paris, London, and, once again, Harlem.
 
The poetry that McKay wrote after returning to the U.S. is not well known.  During the 1930s
he wrote more prose fiction and nonfiction than poetry, including his autobiography and a
history of Harlem, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), that was supported by the Federal
Writers’ Project. McKay spent the last decade of his life impoverished and intellectually
isolated, however, as he had renounced Communism at the time of its greatest impact on
African American cultural work, especially in Harlem. The poetry that he wrote before his
1948 death was no less aggressive in its social criticism, however, as the previously
unpublished 54-poem sonnet sequence, “The Cycle,” demonstrates. This sequence is
uncompromising in its satirical treatment of political and intellectual hypocrisy.  No poem is
fiercer, for example, than the critique of U.S. imperialism that begins “The white man is a
tiger at my throat.”  This poem, written during World War II, states bluntly:
 
Europe and Asia,  Africa await
A  new Fascism, the American brand
And new worlds will be built upon race and hate
And the Eagle and the Dollar will command. (259)
 
This poem was initially published in the Catholic Worker, the pacifist-socialist newspaper
edited by Dorothy Day that became the primary venue for McKay’s poetry in the
1940s. While McKay’s conversion to Roman Catholicism is often dismissed by his readers as
a retreat from his radical convictions, the poetry he published in the Catholic Worker suggests
otherwise.  The Catholic vision embraced by his poetry focused on black suffering—“It is the
Negro’s tragedy I feel / Binding me like a heavy iron chain” (260)—and as reverent as this
poetry is, it is no less incisive in its exposure of social injustice.
 
Because McKay’s life as a writer was comprised of so many apparent contradictions, he
remains a controversial figure.  The publication of the Complete Poems will surely complicate
and intensify debates about his significance, as it collects for the first time in one volume his
Jamaican vernacular poetry, his revolutionary political poetry, his nostalgic pastoral poetry,
his erotic love poetry, and his Catholic religious poetry. The fact that he chose to compose in
conventional forms after publishing his pioneering vernacular verse contradicts basic
assumptions about the development of modern poetry, as McKay’s most radical poetic
statements are expressed through the presumably outmoded form of the sonnet.  The fact that
he appealed to a wide working-class and trans-Atlantic black readership through his renewal
of the sonnet as a mode of public discourse suggests the inadequacy of models of modernism
that would dismiss this accomplishment.  As Maxwell writes in his introduction, “Taken
together, the unexpected variety of McKay’s Complete Poems—rural and urban, Communist
and Catholic, caustic and erotic—reveals that he is not simply the preeminent ‘poet of hate’ in
black letters … Positive passion was rarely far from the surface of McKay’s verse, whether
the subject was the black city, or the Clarendon hills, or sexual desire, or the Catholic Church,
or the revolutionary future” (xxix-xxx).  The “passion” of McKay’s poetry has already moved
several generations of readers worldwide, but the scope of this passion has not been
sufficiently recognized. Thanks to Maxwell’s dedication as a scholar and editor of
the Complete Poems, readers now have the opportunity to experience the extraordinary course
of McKay’s life as a poet.
 
__________________
 
John Lowney is an Associate Professor of English at St. John’s University. He earned his
Ph.D. from Brown University.
Postcolonial Theory
J Daniel Elam

 LAST MODIFIED: 15 JANUARY 2019

 DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780190221911-0069

Introduction
Postcolonial theory is a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic,
historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century.
Postcolonial theory takes many different shapes and interventions, but all share a fundamental claim: that the
world we inhabit is impossible to understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule.
This means that it is impossible to conceive of “European philosophy,” “European literature,” or “European history”
as existing in the absence of Europe’s colonial encounters and oppression around the world. It also suggests that
colonized world stands at the forgotten center of global modernity. The prefix “post” of “postcolonial theory” has
been rigorously debated, but it has never implied that colonialism has ended; indeed, much of postcolonial theory
is concerned with the lingering forms of colonial authority after the formal end of Empire. Other forms of
postcolonial theory are openly endeavoring to imagine a world after colonialism, but one which has yet to come
into existence. Postcolonial theory emerged in the US and UK academies in the 1980s as part of a larger wave of
new and politicized fields of humanistic inquiry, most notably feminism and critical race theory. As it is generally
constituted, postcolonial theory emerges from and is deeply indebted to anticolonial thought from South Asia and
Africa in the first half of the 20th century. In the US and UK academies, this has historically meant that its focus
has been these regions, often at the expense of theory emerging from Latin and South America. Over the course
of the past thirty years, it has remained simultaneously tethered to the fact of colonial rule in the first half of the
20th century and committed to politics and justice in the contemporary moment. This has meant that it has taken
multiple forms: it has been concerned with forms of political and aesthetic representation; it has been committed
to accounting for globalization and global modernity; it has been invested in reimagining politics and ethics from
underneath imperial power, an effort that remains committed to those who continue to suffer its effects; and it has
been interested in perpetually discovering and theorizing new forms of human injustice, from environmentalism to
human rights. Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and
transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars.
Despite frequent critiques from outside the field (as well as from within it), postcolonial theory remains one of the
key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world.

General Overviews
There are a number of good introductions to postcolonial theory. Unique to postcolonial theory, perhaps, is that
while each introductory text explains the field and its interventions, alliances, and critiques, it also subtly (or not)
argues for a particular variety of postcolonial criticism. Loomba 2005 gives an overall sense of the field, and the
theoretical relationships between colonialism and Postcolonialism. Given that postcolonial theory has repeatedly
come under attack from outside (and from within) the field, these introductions often argue for the necessity of the
field, seen most vibrantly in Gandhi 1998 and Young 2003. Additionally, there have been a number of very helpful
edited volumes, each of which take place at key points in the field’s history, that keep important texts in circulation
where they might not otherwise be available; among these remainWilliams and Chrisman 1994 and Afzal-Khan
and Seshadri-Crooks 2000. Because so much postcolonial theory is built on or responds to colonial texts, Harlow
and Carter 2003, a two-volume set of colonial documents, is a necessary resource to scholars at all levels. Young
2001, an understated “historical introduction” to postcolonialism, is an invaluable resource. For students
interested in psychoanalytic or psychological approaches to postcolonial theory, Hook 2012 is a good resource.
  Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, eds. The
Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000.
E-mail Citation »
This collection, though frequently overlooked, is a valuable resource of essays about postcolonial theory at a
moment of alleged crisis. The volume includes essays that argue for the expansion of postcolonial studies to new
contexts, as well as critiques of the theoretical underpinnings and commitments of the field. Noteworthy essays
include those by Walter Mignolo, R. Radhakrishnan, Daniel Boyarin, Joseph Massad, and Hamid Naficy.
 Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: An Introduction. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998.
E-mail Citation »
Gandhi’s introductory text to postcolonial theory is useful for undergraduates, but it is also a helpful resource for
anyone working within the field at any stage. The short book covers the emergence of postcolonial theory in the
US and UK academic worlds, its subsequent debates and fissures, and possibilities for its political affiliations. The
book is mostly neutral in its approach but does offer critiques of certain postcolonial theorists and theoretical
trajectories.
 Harlow, Barbara, and Mia Carter, eds. Archives of Empire. 2
vols. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
E-mail Citation »
Harlow and Carter’s two-volume work is the most extensive collection of legal, philosophical, scholarly, and
literary original source materials relating to European colonialism. The collection includes Hegel’s writing on
Africa, T. B. Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education,” and Charles Dickens’s image of the “noble savage,” among
many others. This is a crucial resource to scholars in postcolonial theory, which has drawn on, responded to, or
discussed these key texts.
 Hook, Derek. A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The
Mind of Apartheid. London: Routledge, 2012.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203140529E-mail Citation »
Hook’s book is a very good introduction to the relationship between postcolonial theory and psychology (and
psychoanalysis). Drawing on works by Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and others, Hook analyzes anticolonial,
postcolonial, and critical race theory approaches to and critiques of psychology. The book is a good introduction
to postcolonial theory, especially for students in the social sciences, and does a good job illustrating the
contributions of anticolonial and postcolonial critique to psychology.
 Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London:
Routledge, 2005.
E-mail Citation »
Loomba’s volume offers a lucid synthesis of postcolonial theory, both as it emerged from colonial rule as well as
within the US/UK academy. The book does a particularly good job aligning the historical and theoretical
components of the field. Loomba is also interested in the field’s commitment to other forms of political theory,
especially feminist thought. The book is ideal for undergraduates. Originally published in 1998.
 Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse
and Post-Colonial Theory. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994.
E-mail Citation »
This edited volume remains the most widely available source for many important influential essays that are
foundational to the field but difficult to find, some of which are listed here (Senghor 1994, cited
under Anticolonialism; Hall 1994, cited under Affiliations and Alliances). In other cases, it offers a good selection
of longer texts for undergraduate classes, like those by Aijaz Ahmad, Cesaire, and Said. The book also includes
good examples of early postcolonial literary criticism.
 Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction.
London: Blackwell, 2001.
E-mail Citation »
This sweeping account of the emergence of Postcolonialism not only offers a phenomenal introduction to
anticolonial thought, but it illuminates the ways in which postcolonial theory is directly indebted to anticolonial
thought. Young also argues for understanding anticolonial thought and postcolonialism as inherently transnational
by foregrounding its circulation across the “tricontinental” world (South America, Africa, and South Asia; a term
first coined by Fidel Castro) in the 20th century.
 Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonial Theory: A Very Short
Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780192801821.001.0001E-mail Citation »
Young’s primer to postcolonial theory is perfect for scholars new to the field. It provides an overview of the field’s
theoretical and political commitments, while also demonstrating how postcolonial theory can be used to examine
texts and politics. In the guise of a neutral text, it is actually a vibrant defense of the field and a
reconceptualization of its origins. It is also, therefore, an excellent manifesto for the field.
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Postcolonial theory (or often post‐colonial theory) deals with the effects of colonization on
cultures and societies and those societies' responses. The study of the controlling power of
representation in colonized societies began in the 1950s with the work of Frantz Fanon and
reached a climax in the late 1970s with Edward Said's Orientalism . This study led to the
development of the colonialist discourse theory in the work of critics such as Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The term “postcolonial” per se was first used in
literary studies by The Empire Writes Back in 1989 to refer to cultural interactions within
colonial societies. Postcolonial theory accompanied the rise of globalization theory in the
1990s, which used the language of postcolonial theory in studies of cultural globalization in
particular.

Postcolonial theory
A theoretical approach to analyzing the literature produced in
countries that were once colonies, especially of European
powers such as Britain, France, and Spain. Postcolonial theory
also looks at the broader interactions between European
nations and the societies they colonized by dealing with issues
such as identity (including gender, race, and class), language,
representation, and history. Because native languages and
culture were replaced or superseded by European traditions in
colonial societies, part of the postcolonialist project is
reclamation. Acknowledging the effect of colonialism’s
aftermath—its language, discourse, and cultural institutions—
has led to an emphasis on hybridity, or the mingling of cultural
signs and practices between colonizer and colonized. The
Palestinian American cultural critic Edward Said was a major
figure of postcolonial thought, and his book Orientalism is
often credited as its founding text. Other important
postcolonial critics include Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, and Frantz Fanon.

Browse all terms 

Postcolonial Theory  
Vijay Mishra
Subject:
 
Literary Theory
Online Publication Date:
  
Apr 2020
DOI:
 
10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1001
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In This Article

 Designing, Defining, Declaring an Idea

 Origins of a Theory: Negritude and Liberation
 Memmi and Fanon
 Homi Bhabha and Cultural “Hybridity”
 The Ghost of Conrad
 Edward W Said
 The Subaltern School
 The Death of a Theory
 A Theory’s Afterdeath
 Conclusion: The Road Not Taken
 Discussion of the Literature
 Further Reading
 Notes
Summary and Keywords
Postcolonial discourse is the critical underside of imperialism, the latter a hegemonic
form going back to the beginnings of empire building. In the languages of the colonized—
those of the ruling class as well as its subjects—a critical discourse of displacement,
enslavement, and exploitation co-existed with what Conrad called the redemptive power
of an “idea.” Postcolonial theory took shape in response to this discourse as a way of
explaining this complex colonial encounter. But the discourse itself required a
consciousness of the colonial experience in its diverse articulations and a corresponding
legitimation of the lives of those colonized. This shift in consciousness only began to take
critical shape in the mid-20th century with the gradual dismantling of the non-settler
European empires. In Africa anti-colonial agitation congealed, as a theoretical
problematic, around the idea of négritude, a nativist “thinking” that was built around
alternative and self-empowering readings of African civilizations. In the writings of
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire, négritude affirmed
difference as it foregrounded an oppositional discourse against a “sovereign” European
teleological historiography. The African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o pushed this further by
insisting that, where possible, postcolonial writing should be in the vernacular. But even
as difference was affirmed, with the emergence of the psychoanalytic–Hegelian writings
of Frantz Fanon , the discourse ceased to be defiantly oppositional and moved towards
an engagement with the larger principles of Western humanism, including a critique of
the instrumental uses of the project of the Enlightenment. Out of this grew a language of
a postcolonial theory which could then trace the colonial experience in its entirety, in all
its complex modes and manifestations, to uncover the genesis of a critical postcolonial
discourse, a discourse shaped in the shadow of the imperialist encounter. However, for
the theory to take shape as an analytic it needed something more than a binary
exposition or a simple historical genealogy; it required an understanding of those power
structures that governed the representation of colonized peoples. The text that gave a
language and a methodology for the latter was Edward W. Said’s 1978 book,Orientalism.
Although Said did not use the term “postcolonial theory” in the first edition of his work, his
argument (after Foucault) of the links between discourse and power provided a
framework within which a postcolonial theory could be given shape. Works by two key
theorists followed in quick succession: Homi K. Bhabha on complicit postcolonialism and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the subaltern and postcolonial reason. The three—Said,
Bhabha, and Spivak—regularly invoked as a triumvirate or a trinity provided solid plinths
for the scaffolding of innumerable studies of postcolonialism. Of these studies, in the
Anglophone context a few may be cited here. These are: Robert J. C. Young and Bart
Moore-Gilbert on critical Western historiography and colonial desire, Aijaz Ahmad, Neil
Lazarus, and Benita Parry on the globality of capitalism and the need to historicize
scholarship, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam on Eurocentrism, Dipesh Chakrabarty on
provincializing Europe, Gauri Viswanathan on the role of premodern thought in
postcolonial activism, and Harish Trivedi on postcolonial vernaculars. In all these studies
the specters of Marx emerge as ghostly flares, which is why postcolonial theory is not so
much an established paradigm with identifiable limits but an idea, a debate which in
existential parlance carries a sense of exhaustion, ennui, that has no closure but is
always an opening delimited only by a given theorist’s disciplinary boundaries.

Keywords: postcolonial, negritude, subaltern studies, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi

Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, recognition,specters of Marx, Conrad, ethnography

Vijay Mishra
Department of English, Murdoch University

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Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s-present)

History is Written by the Victors
Post-colonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique
perspective on literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion.
Specifically, post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial
powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory
looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these
elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (Western colonizers controlling the
colonized).
Therefore, a post-colonial critic might be interested in works such as Daniel
Defoe's Robinson Crusoewhere colonial "...ideology [is] manifest in Crusoe's
colonialist attitude toward the land upon which he's shipwrecked and toward the
black man he 'colonizes' and names Friday" (Tyson 377). In addition, post-colonial
theory might point out that "...despite Heart of Darkness's (Joseph Conrad) obvious
anti-colonist agenda, the novel points to the colonized population as the standard of
savagery to which Europeans are contrasted" (Tyson 375). Post-colonial criticism
also takes the form of literature composed by authors that critique Euro-centric
hegemony.
A Unique Perspective on Empire
Seminal post-colonial writers such as Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and Kenyan
author Ngugi wa Thiong'o have written a number of stories recounting the suffering of
colonized people. For example, inThings Fall Apart, Achebe details the strife and
devastation that occurred when British colonists began moving inland from the
Nigerian coast.
Rather than glorifying the exploratory nature of European colonists as they expanded
their sphere of influence, Achebe narrates the destructive events that led to the death
and enslavement of thousands of Nigerians when the British imposed their Imperial
government. In turn, Achebe points out the negative effects (and shifting ideas of
identity and culture) caused by the imposition of Western religion and economics on
Nigerians during colonial rule.
Power, Hegemony, and Literature
Post-colonial criticism also questions the role of the Western literary canon and
Western history as dominant forms of knowledge making. The terms "First World,"
"Second World," "Third World" and "Fourth World" nations are critiqued by post-
colonial critics because they reinforce the dominant positions of Western cultures
populating First World status. This critique includes the literary canon and histories
written from the perspective of First World cultures. So, for example, a post-colonial
critic might question the works included in "the canon" because the canon does not
contain works by authors outside Western culture.
Moreover, the authors included in the canon often reinforce colonial hegemonic
ideology, such as Joseph Conrad. Western critics might consider Heart of
Darkness an effective critique of colonial behavior. But post-colonial theorists and
authors might disagree with this perspective: "...as Chinua Achebe observes, the
novel's condemnation of European is based on a definition of Africans as savages:
beneath their veneer of civilization, the Europeans are, the novel tells us, as barbaric
as the Africans. And indeed, Achebe notes, the novel portrays Africans as a pre-
historic mass of frenzied, howling, incomprehensible barbarians..." (Tyson 374-375).
Typical questions:

 How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects
of colonial oppression?
 What does the text reveal about the problematics of post-colonial identity,
including the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such
issues as double consciousness and hybridity?
 What person(s) or groups does the work identify as "other" or stranger? How
are such persons/groups described and treated?
 What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anti-
colonialist resistance?
 What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference - the
ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs,
and customs combine to form individual identity - in shaping our perceptions of
ourselves, others, and the world in which we live?
 How does the text respond to or comment upon the characters, themes, or
assumptions of a canonized (colonialist) work?
 Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of different post-
colonial populations?
 How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine
colonialist ideology through its representation of colonialization and/or its
inappropriate silence about colonized peoples? (Tyson 378-379)

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your understanding

of this theory:
Criticism

 Edward Said - Orientalism, 1978; Culture and Imperialism, 1994

 Kamau Brathwaite - The History of the Voice, 1979
 Gayatri Spivak - In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1987
  Dominick LaCapra - The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and
Resistance, 1991
 Homi Bhabha - The Location of Culture, 1994

Literature and non-fiction

 Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart, 1958

 Ngugi wa Thiong'o - The River Between, 1965
 Sembene Ousmane - God's Bits of Wood, 1962
 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Heat and Dust, 1975
 Buchi Emecheta - The Joys of Motherhood, 1979
 Keri Hulme - The Bone People, 1983
 Robertson Davies - What's Bred in the Bone, 1985
 Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day, 1988
 Bharati Mukherjee - Jasmine, 1989
 Jill Ker Conway - The Road from Coorain, 1989
 Helena Norberg-Hodge - Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, 1991
 Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient, 1992
 Gita Mehta - A River Sutra, 1993
 Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things, 1997
 Patrick Chamoiseau - Texaco, 1997

Derek Walcott and the Peculiar

Disturbance of His Poetry

A fresh language and a fresh people: Derek Walcott, 1993.Credit...Ulf Andersen/Getty

Images
By Ishion Hutchinson

 Aug. 4, 2017

o
o
o
o
o

“Blown canes.” Those were his first words to mark me. Like any true discovery, they
came tangled in myth. I was about 16, a sixth former at Titchfield, my high school on
a peninsula in Port Antonio, a town on the northeastern coast of Jamaica. Almost
daily, for my last thing after school, I went to the town’s library. Once inside, I was at
sea, isolated, but not alone.

The myth of evening: porous light aslant a single bookshelf labeled West Indian
Literature. Was it new? I had never, impossibly, seen it before. I picked up the first
book at hand, the soft-covered, fading Caribbean Writers Series Heinemann of Derek
Walcott’s “Selected Poetry,” edited by Wayne Brown, a Trinidadian poet and critic. I
opened to the lines, “Where you are rigidly anchored, / the groundswell of blue
foothills, the blown canes.” A sort of force triggered in me at “blown canes” that
fogged my eyes. I stood, rigidly anchored. West Indian literature had arrived on two
words.

Blown canes. The force was partly because what I saw I heard — canes blowing in the
breeze, their flags flowing backward like waves. But that pastoral presence, in the
rhythm of the words, also quickened the Caribbean’s most brutal historical pain into
the present. In them I felt the stressed aftermath of plantation slavery.

The shock was immediate and oppressive. Every time I repeated them under my
breath, the blade swish of “s” on “cane,” slashed my tongue. But I couldn’t stop
repeating blown canes, blown canes until I was home, in pitch dark. How can a poet
do that, reveal with the stroke of two words, instantaneously, the horrors concealed in
the canes, the sea? Here was the cadence of experience, language pitched from the
marrow of the world around me.

Days after Derek Walcott’s death in March, this early encounter returned with
frightening exactness. By then he was someone I had met and gotten to know. Once,
in 2010, I tried to share my library memory with him. We were by the pool of his home
in St. Lucia. But I failed and ended up sputtering something about how Miltonic light
moves without fatality in his poem “The Hotel Normandie Pool.” Next thing I knew
we were having ice cream at the marina near Castries, the capital city of St. Lucia, and
his birthplace. Dusk falling as if to contrast my Milton remark with lines from “White
Egrets,” only recently published, set on the same marina:

In this orange hour the light reads like Dante,

three lines at a time, their symmetrical tension,
quiet bars rippling from the Paradiso…

I kept a conspiratorial peace in the dusk, one of gratitude. There I was, being witness
to Walcott’s gift, which ultimately abolishes literary parallels for physical radiance;
for his allegiance, always, is with the actual tension of life. Though more dusks were
to come when I saw him — in New York City, in Boston, at his home — I was never
able to speak about that library evening, or the day that followed when I was further
altered by these lines from “Another Life”:

...All of the epics are blown away with the leaves,

blown with the careful calculations on brown paper,
these were the only epics: the leaves.

Blown away. The other side of terror is beauty. The beauty is the verse itself, the
strange disquiet in blowing leaves, which becomes more menacing if you hear the
echo of wartime Eliot: “as if blown towards me like the metal leaves.” Here the vision
of despair is unrelenting. The gravitational rhythm of Walcott’s lines, however,
doesn’t deny but works under duress to assuage despair: Ending the stanza on “the
leaves” asserts the Caribbean landscape’s (and its people’s) natural utterance, the
dignity of dialect, over History. The lines pulled me into some sort of spiritual oasis in
which resilience reached beyond the poet’s self-consciousness. The self-consciousness
was not a burden. Far from it. It was a blessing, akin to what Charles Williams once
wrote about Milton, which could be about Dante or Walcott: “Self-consciousness can
only be calm.”

The calm flowered intensely and intimately for me in the last three lines of an early
poem, “A Sea-Chantey,” its repeated phrase I have recited to bring calm to some of
my most troubled times:

The amen of calm waters,

The amen of calm waters,
The amen of calm waters.

The self-consciousness in Walcott’s poetry, still, is a peculiar disturbance in the last

half of the 20th century and in the beginning of our century. Born in 1930 in what
used to be called a “colonial backwater” by the center of power, he inherited the
psychic deluge many flailed under. That he triumphed was testimony to his genius
and an unusual industry, contradicting the order of the times. And one of his earliest
honors came from that same center of power, in 1964, in the authority of Robert
Graves, who praised Walcott for possessing “English with a closer understanding of
its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries.”

A strike against English-borns! Nonetheless belated, as Graves only reiterated what

many of Walcott’s Caribbean-born contemporaries had been saying since Walcott
self-published his first book, “25 Poems,” at age 18 in 1948. Radically more belated
than Graves is the interesting — though not so surprising — case of V. S. Naipaul, who
in an essay on his encounter with Walcott’s first volume (while Naipaul was at school
in Trinidad), confesses: “Fifty years on, I see more than I did in 1955.” Well, yes. He
sees and praises the miracle of his contemporary.

But these are the mute facts of data — both birth and praise — which Walcott’s self-
consciousness breaks in the voice of his persona Shabine, from his masterpiece, “The
Schooner Flight.” Shabine’s love song to poetry and his island, in a section called
“The Flight Anchors in Castries Harbor,” animates quietly the truth beyond statistics:

When the stars self were young over Castries,

I loved you alone and I loved the whole world.
What does it matter that our lives are different?
Burdened with the loves of our different children?
When I think of your young face washed by the wind
and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea?
The lights are out on La Toc promontory,
except for the hospital. Across at Vigie
the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own
promise, to leave you the one thing I own,
 you whom I loved first: my poetry.
We here for one night. Tomorrow, the  Flight will be
gone.

The lines are not the most famous. Yet I hear in them the sonic, somber complement
to the credo Walcott makes in his Nobel lecture: “Poetry is an island that breaks away
from the main.” The vernacular of the lines shelters me into a manifold self. It is the
cadence of experience that performs the gathering, a healing, to use a line from “The
Bounty,” of “our blown tribes dispersing over the islands.”

Blown tribes. Schoolchildren in uniform, market people, the posh dignitaries, friends
from distant countries, daughters, granddaughters, even the wandering tourists —
they were all there, the disparate tribes all gathered on the day of his funeral. Where
else? Everywhere else. In every nook of private homes pierced by his poetry.

The day of his funeral I didn’t see the crowds. From my winter outpost in Ithaca,
N.Y., an “accident” happened that felt like its own ceremony of farewell. I knew the
moment his funeral was going on and I wanted to be in his poetry, in Caribbean light.
I went into my study and took down “White Egrets,” his most valedictory book, and a
battered, unremembered copy of Thomas Hardy’s last, posthumous collection,
“Winter Words,” fell from the shelves to the floor.

The two books lay next to each other, companions in serenity. For companions they
were, in literature as in life. Both lived and wrote vigorously into old age. Both died at
age 87. Walcott adored Hardy with a vigilant esteem. Lines of Hardy came to serve as
the epigraph — “Down their carved names / the raindrops plough” — to Chapter 20 of
“Another Life,” the most moving of Walcott’s autobiographical work.

I took down “Another Life,” finding the page, sliding from Hardy’s couplet heading
the passage, to Walcott’s couplet closing it, forming a parenthesis of insurmountable
grief: “His island forest, open and enclose him / like a rare butterfly between its
leaves.”

Blown leaves. Blown canes. Blown tribes. I left both books on the floor, closed the
door of my study, and climbed the stairs in Caribbean light.
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Cultural Tensions and
Hybrid Identities in Derek
Walcott's Poetry
By Nidhi Mahajan
2015, VOL. 7 NO. 09 | PG. 1/2 | »
   
CITE REFERENCES PRINT
1668

KEYWORDS:

Derek Walcott Poetry Caribbean PoetryCaribbean Culture Colonialism Identity

In his Nobel Lecture, Derek Walcott described the experience of watching

a Ramleela performance in a village in Trinidad, remarking: "... Two different religions, two
different continents, both filling the heart with the pain that is joy.” The pain that fills Walcott’s
heart is the pain of a fragmented identity. This pain is also joy, the joy of a hybrid existence.
Derek Walcott (b. 1930), a Caribbean poet and playwright who won the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1992, published his first collection of poetry at the age of fourteen, in which he described the
beautiful and rich landscapes of the Caribbean Islands. As Walcott understood his surroundings,
he realised that his identity was fraught with racial and colonial tensions. In his early poems,
Walcott confronts the conflicts of his European and African ancestry.

However, in these poems, the paradoxes of his identity remain largely unresolved. In Walcott’s
later poems, one observes a heightened historical and political awareness. This analysis
discusses an early poem, “A Far Cry of Africa” (In a Green Nigh: Poems, 1948-60, 1962), and two
later poems, “Names” (Sea Grapes, 1976) and “The Sea is History” (The Star-Apple Kingdom,
1979), in order to highlight the ways in which the poems present a search for a Caribbean history
while exploring the racial, colonial, and cultural tensions inherent in Caribbean identity. Moreover,
this analysis reveals Walcott’s celebration of the hybridity and cosmopolitanism of
Caribbean culture.

Walcott attempts to rewrite the history of the Caribbean people from a

subaltern perspective. He celebrates the hybridity and cosmopolitanism of
Caribbean culture, but he never loses sight of its colonial past and remains
critical of the forces shaping its future.
It is first important to understand the historical and political context in which Walcott wrote these
poems. The Caribbean Islands, which served as Walcott’s subject and inspiration, are a group of
scattered islands between the North and South America that were occupied by the Caribs or the
American-Indian tribe before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

The different islands were colonised by the British, the French and the Dutch. The colonisers
brought-in slaves from parts of Africa to work on the land. When slavery was abolished by the
Emancipation Act of 1863, the colonisers began “importing” labour-force from India and China.

An imaginative reconstruction of the situation of the first generation of people who were brought
to the Islands is attempted by a number of Caribbean writers and poets. When Columbus
“discovered” the Islands, he assumed that the native population did not exist. While the natives
were denied human existence, the position of the slaves and the indentured labourers was hardly
any better.

They were displaced from their homeland, brought to an entirely unfamiliar environment, and
forced to work. They could hardly communicate with one another. Over the years, the different
Diasporas developed a language of communication (Pidgin and Creole), and the intermixing of
cultures (Native American, African, Indian, French, British and Dutch) resulted in a hybrid culture.

The later generations inherited this hybrid culture. Though the later generations did not
experience displacement or colonisation first-hand, the inheritance of an identity informed by
such complexities resulted in a form of cultural schizophrenia. Walcott’s poem, “A Far Cry from
Africa” explores this psychological condition. The central question asked in the poem is, “I who
am poisoned with the blood of both / Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” (26-27). Walcott
evokes the Mau Mau rebellion of Kenya and holds both the Europeans and the Kenyans
responsible for the bloodshed. He is critical of the colonial discourses based on statistics and
laws that justify the killing of the Kenyan people.

However, he can neither turn away from his English identity, nor from his African ancestry. Frantz
Fanon theorises this psychological conflict as Negrophobia in Black Skin, White Masks.
According to Fanon, the black man “lives an ambiguity that is extraordinarily neurotic” (169). In
the black man’s “collective unconscious,” being black means being “wicked, spineless, evil, and
instinctual,” the opposite of being white (169). In “A Far Cry from Africa,” therefore, Walcott
confronts this psychological conflict but the paradoxes in his identity remain unresolved because
the central question is never answered.

In his later poems, such as “Names” and “The Sea is History,” there is a more mature and
historical understanding of the racial, colonial, and cultural tensions in the collective Caribbean
identity. Both “Names” and “The Sea is History” trace the beginnings of the Caribbean “race”
(referring to the social concept but also meaning journey). In the first part of “Names,” Walcott
describes how his race began with no nouns, no horizon, no memory, and no future. The shift
from “my race” and “I began” to “our souls” and “our names” is significant as it marks the growth
from an individual to a collective sensibility. Walcott writes that his race began as the sea began.
The reference is to how African slaves were brought to the Caribbean Islands via the sea. They
had to leave behind their homeland and the memory of their native culture was lost. Walcott uses
the image of an osprey’s cry to describe the condition of these people- “and my race began like
the osprey / with that cry, / that terrible vowel, / that I!” (I. 24-27). This cry is the agonizing cry of
the displaced people in an effort to define an identity (the “I”).

While tracing the beginnings of the Caribbean race, Walcott is searching for a particular moment
in history when “the mind was halved by a horizon” (“Names,” I. 11). By this phrase, Walcott
means the introduction and the internalisation of the binary opposition between the black and the
white. Walcott is unable to find the moment when this opposition was placed into the mind
because the history of the Caribbean Islands remains, largely, the history documented by the
European colonisers. This history is governed by the discourse of orientalism.
In Orientalism, Edward Said discusses the various institutional apparatuses that promoted certain
statements about the ‘orient’: about its homogeneity, mystical appeal, and barbarity. These
statements validated the “truth” about the ‘orient’ and formed the discourse of orientalism. The
‘occident’ had the agency to “gaze at” the ‘orient’; the ‘occident’ assumed the knowledge of
and power over the ‘orient’. Through this discourse, a binary opposition was created between the
‘occident’ and the ‘orient’ where the former was empowered and the latter was increasingly
disempowered and primitivised. Walcott’s attempt to locate the historical moment when the world
was halved fails because the history of the Caribbean people is informed by these European
discourses.

The challenge for Walcott is to rewrite this history from a subaltern perspective. In this regard, a
significant question to be addressed is- In which language is this history to be written? The
debate surrounding language has been an important one in many postcolonial countries.
In Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes, “Language, any language, has a dual
character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture” (13). For Ngugi, language
carries the values of a community which are passed on from one generation to another (hence,
the importance of memory). These values accumulate over time to form the culture of the
community, and culture forms the basis of people’s identities. However, the question of language
for the Caribbean people is again a complex one.

The African slaves and the Indian indentured labourers who were brought to the Caribbean
Islands spoke different languages and dialects. They were forced to learn the colonisers’
language (what may be called the adopt phase). As they attempted to learn the language, they
altered it with pronunciations and mispronunciations (the adapt phase). Over time, they mastered
the coloniser’s language and began using it in a manner to write back to the empire (the adept
phase).

Walcott explores these three phases in “Names.” The second part of the poem describes how the
colonisers named everything on the Caribbean Islands after places and structures in Europe.
This naming process was important to the colonisers for both nomination and domination. The
poem describes how the Africans first agreed to the names (adopt), repeated them (adapt) and
then changed them (adept). Repetition of the names also suggests mimicry- repeating the words
or actions of the coloniser in a comic manner in order to subvert them. However, as Walcott
writes in “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” “What would deliver [the New World Negro] from
servitude was the forging of a language that went beyond mimicry… the writer’s making creative
use of his schizophrenia, an electric fusion of the old and the new” (17).

Therefore, in “Names,” mimicry of the French words spoken by the teacher is not enough, the
words must be spoken in “fresh green voices” (II. 66) to forge a new language. The creation of a
new lexicon is represented by the description of the stars in the last line of the poem- the student
sees the stars as “fireflies caught in molasses” (II. 82) as opposed to the constellations of Orion
or Betelgeuse. The metaphor stands for the condition of the African slaves who are like fireflies
capable of emanating light but caught in the coloniser’s physical and ideological trap.

Walcott’s task, as a poet, is to aid the forging of this new language. Historically, in the Caribbean
Islands the fusion of the different languages produced Pidgin and Creole. However, Walcott
writes mostly in English and sometimes in French. There remains a debate between the relative
importance of Creole and English in encapsulating the diversity of Caribbean culture. What is
important to note, in this regard, is that Walcott appropriates the coloniser’s language to
challenge the coloniser’s discourse and to rewrite the history of the Caribbean people. “The Sea
is History” is a suitable example. The poem, in an odyssey-like fashion, traces the events in the
history of the African slaves and compares them to the mythical events in the Bible. Continued on Next
Page »

 
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CITE REFERENCES PRINT
1668

Nidhi Mahajan graduated in 2015 with a Bachelors degree in English Literature fromMiranda House University
College For Women in Delhi, India.

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In his 1918 autobiographical essay, "A Negro Poet Writes," Claude McKay (1889–1948), reveals
much about the wellspring of his poetry.
"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."
So wrote the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance, whose collection of poetry, Harlem
Shadows (1922), is widely regarded as having launched the movement. But McKay's literary
significance goes far beyond his fierce condemnations of racial bigotry and oppression, as is
amply demonstrated by the universal appeal of his sonnet, "If We Must Die," recited by Winston
Churchill in a speech against the Nazis in World War II.
While in Jamaica, McKay produced two works of dialect verse,Songs of Jamaica and Constab
Ballads, that were widely read on the island. In richly authentic dialect, the poet evoked the
folksongs and peasant life of his native country. The present volume, meticulously edited and with
an introduction by scholar Joan R. Sherman, includes a representative selection of this dialect
verse, as well as uncollected poems, and a generous number in standard English from Harlem
Shadows. (less)
GET A COPY

Claude McKay Biography
(1889–1948)

UPDATED:
JUN 26, 2020
ORIGINAL:
APR 2, 2014
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Claude McKay was a Jamaican poet best known for his novels and
poems, including "If We Must Die," which contributed to the Harlem
Renaissance.
Who Was Claude McKay?

Claude McKay moved to Harlem, New York, after publishing his first books of poetry,
and established himself as a literary voice for social justice during the Harlem
Renaissance. He is known for his novels, essays and poems, including "If We Must
Die" and "Harlem Shadows." He died on May 22, 1948, in Chicago, Illinois.

Early Life

Festus Claudius McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, on
September 15, 1889. His mother and father spoke proudly of their respective
Malagasy and Ashanti heritage. McKay blended his African pride with his love of
British poetry. He studied poetry and philosophy with Englishman Walter Jekyll, who
encouraged the young man to begin producing poetry in his own Jamaican dialect.

Literary Career

A London publishing house produced McKay's first books of verse, Songs of

Jamaica andConstab Ballads, in 1912. McKay used award money that he received
from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences to move to the United States. He
studied at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) and Kansas State
College for a total of two years. In 1914, he moved to New York City, settling in
Harlem.

McKay published his next poems in 1917 under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. More
poems appeared in Pearson's Magazine and the radical magazine Liberator.
The Liberator poems included "If We Must Die," which threatened retaliation for racial
prejudice and abuse; this quickly became McKay's best-known piece of work. McKay
then left the United States for two years of European travel. In 1920, he published a
new collection of poems, Spring in New Hampshire, containing "Harlem Shadows."

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McKay returned to the United States in 1921 and involved himself in various social
and political causes. He worked with the Universal Negro Improvement Association
and continued to explore Communism—even traveling to the Soviet Union to attend
the Communist Party's Fourth Congress. After spending some time in the United
States, McKay again left the country, spending what would prove to be 11 extremely
productive years in Europe and North Africa; he wrote three novels—Home to
Harlem, Banjo and Banana Bottom—and a short story collection during this
period. Home to Harlem was the most popular of the three, though all were well
received by critics.

Returning to Harlem, McKay began work on an autobiography entitled A Long Way

from Home, which focuses on his experiences as an oppressed minority and agitates
for a broad movement against colonialism and segregation. The book has been
criticized for its less-than-candid treatment of some of McKay's more controversial
interests and beliefs. His consistent denial of having joined the Communist Party,
despite multiple trips to the Soviet Union, is a point of particular contention.

Later Life and Death

 McKay went through several changes toward the end of his life. He embraced
Catholicism, retreating from Communism entirely, and officially became an American
citizen in 1940. His experiences working with Catholic relief organizations in New
York inspired a new essay collection, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, which offers
observations and analysis of the African-American community in Harlem at the time.
McKay died of a heart attack in Chicago, Illinois, on May 22, 1948.

In 2012, a researcher discovered an unpublished Claude McKay novel, Amiable with

Big Teeth, in the Columbia University archives.

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Citation Information
Article Title
Claude McKay Biography

Author
Biography.com Editors

Website Name
The Biography.com website

URL
https://www.biography.com/writer/claude-mckay

Access Date
July 31, 2020

Publisher
A&E Television Networks

Last Updated
June 26, 2020

Original Published Date

April 2, 2014

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Claude McKay, born in Jamaica in 1890, is the first modern master of the sonnet form. Yeats
of course had turned out a few—one a classic—as had Pound. Cummings wrote plenty of
sonnets, but, because of their idiosyncrasies, they are more complications than masterworks.
Wilfred Owen, if he had lived, might have rivaled McKay, as he was disposed to the sonnet
and masterful in its usage. The only other serious contender, to my mind, would be Edna St.
Vincent Millay, and perhaps later, Berryman. In the Selected Poems, first published in 1953,
several years after his death, Max Eastman writes (with what McKay’s biographer, Wayne
Cooper, generously describes as an “unconscious condescension”):
Claude McKay was most widely known perhaps as a novelist, author of Home to Harlem, a
national best-seller in 1928. But he will live in history as the first great lyric genius that his
race produced.

Why then has McKay’s work languished in relative obscurity? Eastman writes in 1953
that his “place in the world’s literature is unique and is assured.” Yet in his fifties, after a
decade of illness, McKay sought to end his financial difficulties by taking on employment as
a riveter—something he was not physically equipped to handle, and which surely contributed
to a stroke at age fifty-three. He had turned down a “sizeable” book advance, explaining, “I
haven’t been able to concentrate on a plot. It’s quite impossible when one’s mind is distracted.
People can’t realize the state of one’s mind under such conditions, and the few I meet make
me angry by telling me how happy I look.” Reading this now, one cannot help but think of the
poem that solidified McKay’s contemporary fame, “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, 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 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!

A sign of its lasting resonance, the poem has transcended race and circumstance (it was
written while traveling through Soviet Russia in 1923). Winston Churchill reputedly recited
the poem before the House of Commons during World War II. More recently, through
protests around the death of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Staten Island, and elsewhere—
in too many places and far too often—the poem has experienced something of a resurgence.
Recitations have been posted on YouTube. Black America, rightfully, does not forget its
origins.

The occasion for “If We Must Die” was the infamous Red Summer of 1919. What began early
in the year as a series of terrorist attacks, purportedly by communists—mail bombs were sent
to a variety of governmental and business figures—had morphed into a series of riots against
black communities by summer. A report produced in October of that year by George E.
Haynes, the first African American to earn a PhD in Economics from Columbia University
and special assistant to the Secretary of Labor, identified thirty-four such instances across the
country. In many cities, attacks against African Americans were led, or permitted, by
uniformed whites: military or police officials. Rioting in Chicago—considered the bloodiest
of the season—was facilitated as the authorities refrained from acting (from “serving and
protecting” as we would say now). Carl Sandburg described it:

The so-called race riots in Chicago during the last week of July, 1919, started on a Sunday at
a bathing beach. A colored boy swam across an imaginary segregation line. White boys threw
rocks at him and knocked him off a raft. He was drowned. Colored people rushed to a
policeman and asked for the arrest of the boys throwing stones. The policeman refused. As the
dead body of the drowned boy was being handled, more rocks were thrown, on both sides.
The policeman held on to his refusal to make arrests. Fighting then began that spread to all the
borders of the Black Belt. The score at the end of three days was recorded as twenty negroes
dead, fourteen white men dead, and a number of negro houses burned.

Sandburg’s figures were low: it is now believed that thirty-eight people had died by the time
rioting was quelled, of which twenty-three were black. Illinois Attorney General Edward
Brundage and State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne gathered evidence for a Grand Jury
investigation.

The summer of 1919 has been referred to as the first occasion when blacks en masse defended
themselves against mob violence. Cameron McWhirter’s book Red Summer is subtitled “the
awakening of Black America” pointing to the political cohesion and will which was forged at
that time. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of black soldiers returned from fighting in Europe: “By the
God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal
every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against
the forces of hell in our own land.”
McKay himself did not see any of that violence. As an immigrant, he had not, until that point,
closely identify with African Americans. During the summer of 1919, however, that
identification forced itself upon him. Wayne Cooper writes:

The poem [“If We Should Die”] eloquently expressed black America’s mood of desperation
and defiance that summer. McKay had first read the poem to the men of his dining-car crew.
They had reacted with intense emotion. Even the irresponsible fourth waiter, a man afflicted
with “a strangely acute form of satyriasis,” had wept. […] McKay had written a poem that
immediately won a permanent place in the memory of a beleaguered people. Because of it,
American blacks embraced him and have ever since claimed him as one of their own.
“Indeed,” McKay eventually concluded, “that one grand outburst is their sole standard of
appraising my poetry.” White America has remained less impressed.

McKay, however, held complicated views about man’s inhumanity to man. During the
summer of 1918, he wrote in markedly humanist terms of a global struggle:

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 lash,
evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows. I ceased to think
of people and things in the mass—why should I fight with mad dogs only to be bitter and
probably transformed into a mad dog myself? I turned to the individual soul, the spiritual
leaders, for comfort and consolation. I felt and still feel that one must seek for the noblest and
best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself.

His careful, skeptical, sensitive prose stands in stark contrast to poems like “The Negro’s
Friend,” an excoriation of civil rights activists and white liberal reformers alike:

What waste of time to cry: “No Segregation!”

When it exists in stark reality,
Both North and South, throughout this total nation,
The state decreed by white authority.
McKay’s earliest poems are written in dialect while he was still in Jamaica. Paul Laurence
Dunbar, born eighteen years before McKay—and dead in 1906 at age thirty-three—set a
certain precedence for the success of the style. But McKay’s poetry in standard English far
outstrips that of Dunbar. Indeed, no other American writer of the time wrote with such smooth
facility. It is no exaggeration to suggest that he invented the modern American iambic
pentameter line. But McKay walked the weird bifurcated line between colonized subject and
assimilated citizen, both essential to the North American settlement and antithetical to
it. Eastman writes:

Claude was born in 1890 in a little thatched farm house of two rooms in the hilly middle
country of Jamaica in the West Indies. He learned in childhood how a family of his ancestors,
brought over in chains from Madagascar, had kept together by declaring a death strike on the
auction block. Each would kill himself, they vowed solemnly, if they were sold to separate
owners. With the blood of such rebels in his veins, and their memory to stir it, Claude McKay
grew up proud of his race and with no disposition to apologize for his color.

It is an interesting vignette, apocryphal or not—both for what it shows of McKay’s character

as well as what it reveals about Eastman’s interpretation of it. The cultural ferment of the
twenties was remarkable and the milieu of black artists that came of age then would leave an
indelible mark on American culture. McKay, just in his thirties then, stands as a Dante to the
Harlem Renaissance: antecedent, predecessor, instigator. Yet, by the time the renaissance
came to full bloom, McKay had largely left the scene.

A number of forces have resulted in McKay’s work being less well known than it should be.
Poetry has moved from the public domain, so to speak, to the ivory tower. Furthermore, in
Richard Wilbur’s phrase, “[t]here is a thoroughly crazy recent idea, sometimes held by bright
people, that we have put meter and rhyme forever behind us”. That McKay wrote for a
general readership, just at the cusp of Modernism, and wrote in formal verse, puts him out of
step with the prevailing literary history of his era—though not entirely.

“A poet writes for people,” Elizabeth Sewell said. “He does not write for professors, English
classes, textbooks, examination papers.” While any of these may contribute to “better
understanding” of a poem, usually “something else happens: they come between the living
man who writes poems and the living beings he writes for, with an icy, sterilizing, or just
plain wearisome apparatus of technicality and scholarship.”

Then there’s the question of race: as impossible to ignore as it is foolish to overlook. What

may be perceived as a stridency that inheres in “If We Must Die” and “The Negro’s Friend”
runs throughout Claude McKay’s poetry, whether it deals directly with race or not.
Undoubtedly, lines such as these made professors, publishers, and critics wary:

Oh white man, you may suck up all my blood

And throw my carcass into potter’s field,
But never will I say with you that mud
Is bread for Negroes! Never will I yield.

The white establishment would never raise up McKay, preacher of power and resistance. His
sense of the “white man’s menace” sets the stage for Richard Wright’s “huge, implacable
elemental design” against which he felt “a longing to attack” decades later. McKay’s
formulation makes racism explicit, and seems written for an audience of similar experience,
but that fact does not render his poetry less universal: cruelty exists, both in the abstract as an
idea to be pondered and as seen in boys (“lynchers that were to be”) dancing “in fiendish
glee.”

McKay’s cantankerous personality did not smooth the way for him. “Despite his love for its
folk culture,” Cooper writes, “McKay never really learned to function in black American
society.” When he protested it was “simply because I have no close academic associates” that
he failed to gain employment suitable to his “intellectual attainments”, he was blind to the
part he himself played in hampering those relationships that would have helped him. His
biographies are replete with instances of him burning bridges before he came to them.
Furthermore he did not help his literary career by being absent from the American scene for
most of two decades after the Red Summer. He left for England in fall of 1919: the high racial
pitch got too hot for him, some of his peers suggested.

Then, as today, money did not come from writing poetry. McKay had patrons, of whom he
was unabashedly contemptuous. Needless to say, friends tended to drift away; the loyalty of
Max Eastman was a rarity, and even there, signs of strain grew apparent.

McKay had—as Eastman and others knew—a natural lyric genius, but his talents did not
translate well to the more lucrative genre of novels. He never could come up with an
acceptable plot, and insisted on portrayals of American blacks that were far from
complimentary. “A part of him always remained the outside observer and critic,” writes
Cooper.
 May 1922 Liberatorissue, which includes sonnets by McKay

As an editor of Max Eastman’s Liberator, McKay reached the professional apex of his career.
Tyrone Tillery, in his biographyClaude McKay, describes an incident that would alter
McKay’s relation to Eastman and the rest of the white staff:
The Liberator received an invitation extended by the Theatre Guild’s publicity agent to send
its drama critic to review Leonid Andreyev’s play He Who Gets Slapped. Since the regular
drama critic was away, McKay as coeditor decided to assume the role of theatre critic. In the
company of William Gropper, the Liberator’s artist, McKay went to the theater, where he
discovered that the management had intended the “first row” tickets to be used only by
whites.While the white Gropper was offered a seat near the stage, McKay, who was
functioning as the official drama critic, was shunted upstairs to the balcony. Gropper declined
to sit alone and accompanied the outraged and terribly hurt McKay to the balcony.
“Suddenly,” McKay recalled, “the realization came to me, I had come here as a dramatic
critic, a lover of the theater, and a free soul. But—I was abrubtly reminded—those things did
not matter. The important fact, with which I was suddenly slapped in the face, was my color. I
am a Negro.

“I had come to see a tragic farce—and I found myself unwittingly the hero of one”, McKay
wrote, according to Cooper reaching “polemical heights that he never again equaled in his
prose”:

Poor painful blackface, intruding into the holy place of the whites. How like a spectre you
haunt the pale devils! Always at their elbows, always darkly peering through the window,
giving them no rest, no peace. How they burn up their energies trying to keep you out! How
apologetic and uneasy they are, yes, even the best of them, poor devils, when you force an
entrance, blackface, facetiously, incorrigibly smiling or disturbingly composed. Shock them
out of their complacency, blackface, make them uncomfortable, make them unhappy! Give
them no peace, no rest. How can they bear your presence, blackface, great unspeakable ghost
of Western civilization.
Perhaps his status as an outsider had kept him from feeling the full force of what black
America had been facing all along. Needless to say, the incident shook him profoundly, and
he resigned his editorship. McKay’s last article for the Liberator, published in August 1922,
warned, “This racial question may be eventually the monkey wrench thrown into the
machinery of the American revolutionary struggle. The Negro radical wants more than
anything else to find in the working class movement a revolutionary attitude toward the
Negroes different from the sympathetic interest of bourgeois philanthropists and capitalist
politicians.” In London, he had worked with Sylvia Pankhurst’s Worker’s Dreadnought, a
radical newspaper of the working-class movement. He would retreat to Russia, and not return
to Harlem until 1934.
McKay, like so many others, initially had high hopes for the Russian experiment. He was
impressed by Lenin. Trotsky was responsive to McKay’s assessment that “the greatest
difficulty that the Communists of America have to overcome” was “the fact … that they first
have to emancipate themselves before they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of
propaganda.” Later he would say, “I went into Russia as a writer and a free spirit and left the
same, because I was convinced that however far I was advanced in social ideas, if I could do
something significantly creative as a Negro it would mean more to my group and the world
than being merely a social agitator.” If a “word on the communist side” would have raised
him from poverty, as Eastman suggested, he not only refused to speak it: he grew virulently
anti-communist, going on the attack even when there was no personal benefit in doing so.

Back in America in 1934, following brief stints in France and Morocco, McKay found that the
Harlem literary movement had passed into the hands of a younger generation. During the
expatriate years, when he might have shepherded his literary career forward at home, he was
occupied himself with projects that never seemed to come to fruition. In 1940, McKay
became a naturalized United States citizen as well as a fervent Catholic, relocating to Chicago
until his death in 1948.

McKay once disparaged Wright that “he knew from which side his bread was buttered”: a
given individual’s stance in relation to the ruling powers might run the gambit, but McKay
remained ever inflexible. His acute moral vision, though it changed over the course of his life,
would be welcome today. Today, as colonialism’s ubiquitous tentacles reach inward, and
one’s placement within the corporate structure—privately-owned corporations seen as
controlling the military-industrial-congressional complex, not governments—guarantees
“freedom.” The names and faces change (if not the general hue), but the power dynamics are
not so different.
 The hundredth anniversary of the Red Summer is fast approaching, and it seems little progress
has been made toward racial or economic justice. It remains to be seen whether great poetry
will arise from our current moment of social unrest. Of course, the production of great poetry,
and even great literary reputations, is really beside the point. Poetry will make its own place;
form and mastery will reveal itself. Some will even be remembered, if not always the right
ones.

McKay’s ghost may not walk the halls of academia, but it walks in Ferguson, in Staten Island,
on the Washington mall. His poetry is not the sort that lauds victimhood. Confronted with the
worst forms of violence, intolerance, and abuse, his poems demands dignity.

About David X. Novak
David X. Novak is a poet and playwright living in Chicago. His books include Against Holy
War and Sonnets, published by Non Fit Press, as well as several titles at Lulu.com. He is a
member of The Society of Midland Authors, and a former contributing editor for The
Chicago Poetry Letter News.

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