Claude McKay is a modern American poet who was born in Jamaica in the late 1800s. He was given the opportunity as a young child to receive the best education possible, and he eventually left Jamaica to live in America because he won a prize for his writing. Much of McKay’s work grapples with the challenges he faced as a Caribbean black man in America.
When McKay first moved to America, he enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was at this college that McKay first encountered the realities of racism in America (Giles). His Caribbean heritage made him a target for racist behavior in the Alabama college, and the experiences he had there heavily influenced his writing. At the time McKay was writing in New York City, racist tensions were extremely high. He was there for the Red Summer of 1919, and because of that experience he wrote the poem “If We Must Die,” an influential poem that Winston Churchill later quoted during World War II (Giles).
The Red Summer of 1919 was a period of time in the United States where a reported 76 blacks were lynched and 26 race riots took place. One of the worst race riots took place in Washington, DC, where six blacks were killed and around 100 blacks were wounded (Callum). This period of American history is a time of severe racial discrimination and tensions between different sects of the country. This intense display of anti-black violence was the unstable and hostile environment in which McKay was writing his poetry.
Clearly McKay’s Caribbean heritage played an obvious and vital role in his writing. Though he wasn’t a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance in terms of his writing style--his preferred style was that of the Shakespearean sonnet--he was hugely influential in his ability to speak of racial issues in his poetry (Giles). McKay was able to masterfully juxtapose the romantic, serene Shakespearean sonnet with violent, uncomfortable topics such as racial discrimination and lynching. He also used the Caribbean dialect, or the Creole dialect, in many of his poems. McKay was a poet who was able to write in a way that forced his readers to pause and contemplate the issues he so directly addressed in his work.
McKay’s poem “The Harlem Dancer” illustrates the isolation he felt from the American community, not only because he was black but also because he was a Caribbean man in America. He was therefore fairly marginalized by the society as a whole. This isolation is expressed in one of his most famous poems, “But looking at her falsely-smiling face,/I knew her self was not in that strange place” (501). This excerpt mirrors what McKay felt as a dissociation from the “strange place” he lived in, an inhospitable and racist America. The dancer in the poem, though she is physically present, has mentally escaped from her harsh surroundings. Perhaps this detachment from the harsh environment she is in is similar to McKay’s attempt at accepting the harsh, bigoted world he lived in.
Works Cited:
Callum, Agnes Kane. "A Killing Season: 'Red Summer' of 1919. [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/a_killing_season.htm]
Glies, Freda Scott. "Claude McKay's Life." [http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mckay/life.htm]
Images:
Dancers-- [http://www1.assumption.edu/users/mcclymer/His130/P-H/Harlem2/jeunesse.jpg]
McKay Cover-- [http://farm1.static.flickr.com/158/416037600_aecede4543.jpg?v=0]
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