Mckay: a Study of His Works

.J THE FRAGMENTED VISION OF CLAUDE MCKAY: A STUDY OF HIS WORKS BY BARBARA J. GRIFFIN '/I Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Maryland in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1989 G\ ~~\-\/ Advisory Committee: Professor Jackson Bryer, Chairman/Advisor Associate Professor Maurice Bennett Associate Professor Joyce Joyce 1, . l. Professor John Howard Professor David Grimsted L 7) ~,I .- I --·) I/··/ .. /{), _j i ,' I;.. ..,·.//} . ; ' ,, ' / ___ ;, '-/ , Vu/ / I-:) l .=" J> C Copyright by Barbara Jackson Griffin 1989 Abstract The Fragmented Vision of Claude McKay: A study of His works Barbara Jackson Griffin, Doctor of Philosophy, 1989 Dissertation directed by: Professor Jackson Bryer, Department of English Claude McKay, born in Jamaica in 1890, played a significant role in the development of Black American literature. His search for a Black aesthetic and his poems of defiance gave inspiration to young Black artists hungry to explore new ideas. Their creative spirit flowered into the Harlem Renaissance. But, McKay, whose themes helped to stimulate this movement, was plagued by the very concepts that helped to define it. Throughout his life, he was ambivalent about three things: his Afrocentric universe, his role as rebel spokesman, and his relationship to Jamaica. Already a poet of some consequence in Jamaica, McKay thought of America as a grander arena for his voice, but when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in 1912, he was shaken by the intense racism of America. His upbringing in rural Clarendon Hills had not prepared him for what he witnessed. By nature, a proud man, McKay turned his lyrical expression into an instrument that would change the arrogance of the Whites. "Harlem Dancer" and "Invocation" (1917) implied the nobility of African roots and affirmed the superiority of primitivistic value system over Western cultural standards. But in McKay's psyche lay the germ of ambivalence that rejected the code of any "world" not sanctioned by the West. During the years following World War I, when relations between Whites and Blacks were strained, McKay became a rebel spokesman for the masses with his defiant poem "If We Must Die" (1919). It urged oppressed people to stand valiant in the face of defeat. But McKay later denied that the poem spoke for Blacks and further questioned the artistic worth of his other "militant" poems. McKay was also ambivalent about his homeland. Throughout most of his life, he ignored in his writing the political, social, and economic realities of Jamaica and evoked instead the image of an Edenic island that offered him refuge from the complexities of the twentieth century. ii To my husband, Ronnie Griffin, and my sons. Thank you for your love and encouragement. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: THE JAMAICAN HOMELAND 8 CHAPTER II: SPOKESMAN FOR THE PEOPLE: THE MILITANT POEMS 64 CHAPTER III: THE DILEMMA OF PRIMITIVISM 122 CHAPTER IV: THE DILEMMA OF COLOR: GINGERTOWN 160 CHAPTER V: THE PROBLEM OF AFRICA 190 CHAPTER VI: BARBARISM VERSUS CIVILIZATION: HOME TO HARLEM 219 CHAPTER VII: THE PRIMITIVE SPIRIT IN EUROPE: BANJO 257 CHAPTER VIII: JAMAICAN ETHOS WESTERN CULTURE: BANANA BOTTOM 279 CHAPTER IX: THE EVOLUTION OF A CONSERVATIVE: McKAY'S LAST YEARS 309 EPILOGUE 351 BIBLIOGRAPHY 356 1 Introduction Claude McKay, born in Jamaica in 1890, was important to the development of twentieth-century Black literature. According to John Hope Franklin, he was "the first significant writer of the Harlem Renaissance."1 He, along with other pioneers, "prepared the ground and planted the seeds" for this literary movement. 2 His two sonnets, "The Harlem Dancer" and "Invocation," published 1917 in Waldo Frank and James Oppenheim's seven Arts Magazine made him one of the first Black artists to ponder the theme of the Black man's cultural relationship to Africa. However, it was in 1922 that he published his most important collection of poems, Harlem Shadows. This volume set the spirit for the flowering of Negro creativity realized during the Harlem Renaissance because it brought together concepts that would stimulate the minds and hearts of artists, critics, and readers eager to explore an Afrocentric world. From Harlem Shadows emerged three thematic concerns that would figure prominently in McKay's later works: that of anger and rebellion, the search for a valid Black identity, and the place of Jamaica in his life. 1John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom; A History of Negro Americans 3rd edition (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 503. 2Arthur P. Davis, From the Dark Tower; Afro-American Writers 1900 to 1969 (Washington, o.c.: Howard University Press, 1974), p. 15. 2 McKay's impatience with social injustice is clear in Harlem Shadows as he signals a new stance for twentieth century Black artists: an intolerance of racial oppression. His angry, defiant poems urging Blacks not to accept passivity in the wake of racial discrimination were responsible for the thrust toward protest writing that has since remained a significant concept in Black literature. 3 James Weldon Johnson, calling McKay "preeminently the poet of rebellion," credits him with voicing more effectively than any other artist during his time the emotions that Blacks in America were experiencing following the unsettling years after World War I. 4 And Robert A. Smith says that McKay, in Harlem Shadows, expresses "the passionate language of a persecuted race."5 Arthur D. Drayton observes that McKay's protest poetry articulates the outrage not only of Afro-Americans but of all humanity. 6 411 c1aude McKay," in Twentieth-Century Literary criticism 7, eds. Sharon K. Hall and Others (Gale Research Company, 1982), p. 456. 511 c1aude McKay: An Essay in Criticism," in Phylon: ~ Atlanta Review of Race and Color 9 (September 1948): 210. 6"McKay's Human Pity: A Note on His Protest Poetry," Black Orpheus 17 (June 1965): 48. 3 Through his protest poems appearing in "little magazines," as well as those in his Harlem Shadows, McKay has earned the right to be called "America's Chief Poetic Spokesman for Negro Rights."7 Certainly, little can be said to refute the traditional evaluation of McKay as a forerunner of the defiant posture in Black literature. But it is significant that popular assessments of his artistic contributions fail to explore below the surface of his so-called protest poems. Satisfied with his one-dimensional bravado and angry facade, most critics overlook the conflict at the heart of his rebellious poetry. Accepting McKay's poems as the articulation of mass sentiment, they do not see that, in his poems, McKay is concerned with expressing his own private range and not that of others. In his militant poems, he is a man alienated not only from America but his own "group" as well. When McKay included in Harlem Shadows poems about his Jamaican home, he brought a new dimension to the alien/ exile theme popular in Afro-American literature. Through remembrances of Jamaica and the persona of the homesick exile longing for his island home, he challenged the prevailing myth of the deracinated Black man, powerless to call any 7charles Terrance, "The Making of a Black Poet: A Critical Biography of Claude McKay For the Years 1889-1922" (Ph.D. dissertation abstract, Temple University, 1972). 4 country his own. Through his "real" memories of Jamaica, he seemed to declare to his American readers, both Black and White, "Here is a Black man who has roots in a soil untouched by your racial bigotry." Through these poems that painted Jamaica as a haven, he implied pride in his Black heritage. In subsequent works, especially in his last novel, Banana Bottom (1933), McKay would continue to evoke positive images of his boyhood home. Because McKay was boastful of his home, critics have cited his kinship with Jamaica as an important factor that not only helped to mold his philosophy of negritude but also separated him from Black American artists, who wasted "much psychic energy" agonizing over whether a Black man ought to be a Black poet or just "a poet. 118 They argue that his philosophy of negritude was a natural culmination of his positive experiences in Jamaica. Because he grew up in a predominantly Black rural village, he saw race as a natural part of his identity as an artist and a human being; for him, to refuse one's racial identity was tantamount to rejecting one's humanity. 9 And through his portrait of Jamaican peasants, he seemed not only "to reaffirm the virtues of simple [peasant] life" but to imply the superiority of a 8George E. Kent, "The soulful Way of Claude McKay," Blackness and the Adventure of western culture (Chicago: Third World Press, 1972), pp. 36-52. 9rbid. 5 primitive/ African ethos over a European value system.10 One critic suggests that McKay drew on the image of his Jamaican home throughout his life as a source of "solace and inspiration.nll McKay's West Indian background certainly must assume a significant place in any discussion of his themes, for Jamaica was a wellspring for many of his ideas. But too often critics have discussed Jamaica as the pastoral oasis from which McKay gained his rebellious pride and positive Black perspective, but they have not examined it as a significant source of conflict in his work. For along with inheriting a supposed rebellious spirit, a secure identity, and an appreciation of a Black ethos, McKay inherited from Jamaica a colonial mind-set that would, throughout his life, challenge the validity of the very themes that distinguish him as a pioneer artist. Although some critics have noted the conflict in McKay's themes, no study has been undertaken to examine in-depth the fragmentation in his works.

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