Page 254

Poem explanation Critical essay Work overview Biography Plot summary

The Tropics in New York

Poetry for Students

Ed Mary Ruby Vol 4 Detroit Gale 1999 p254-265 COPYRIGHT 1999 Gale Research COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale

Full Text

The Tropics in New York

Claude McKay 1922

Author Biography

Poem Text

Poem Summary

Themes

Style

Historical Context

Critical Overview

Criticism

Sources

For Further Study

Claude McKay was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance a time of unprecedented artistic achievement from African

Page 255 |

Americans during the 1920s and early 1930s McKay grew up in Jamaica which influenced much of his work Both in hispoetry and fiction writing McKay frequently profiled the life of the common people whose vitality and spontaneity hecontrasted with a restrictive and inhuman social order In ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo published in Harlem Shadows ThePoems of Claude McKay (1922) McKay portrays the speaker as a prisoner in a foreign country expressing a lyricalnostalgia for his homeland

Author Biography

Born in 1899 in the hills of Jamaica McKay was the son of peasant farmers His parentsrsquo sense of racial pride greatlyaffected the young McKay When he was growing up his father would share folktales about Africa as well as stories aboutMcKayrsquos African grandfatherrsquos enslavement Educated by his brother a schoolteacher and avowed agnostic McKay wasimbued with freethinking ideas and philosophies Walter Jekyll an English linguist and specialist in Jamaican folklore playedan equally important role in the education of McKay introducing him to works by such British masters as John MiltonAlexander Pope and Percy Bysshe Shelley and encouraging him to experiment with verse in his native Jamaican dialectMoving to Jamaicarsquos capital when he was nineteen McKay was exposed to extensive and brutal racism the likes of which

he had not experienced before in his predominantly black native town of Sunny Ville The caste society of principally whiteKingston which placed blacks below whites and mulattoes revealed to McKay the alienating and degrading aspects ofracism The overt racism in Kingston soon led McKay to sympathize strongly with the plight of blacks who he saw to hisalarm there lived under the near-total control of whites

In 1912 with Jekyllrsquos assistance McKay published his first volumes of poetry Songs of Jamaica and Constab BalladsLater in the same year McKay became the first black awarded the medal of the Institute of Arts and Sciences in Jamaica forhis poetry and he used the money from this award to travel to the United States to study agriculture He attended TuskegeeInstitute in Alabama and Kansas State College before he decided to quit his studies in 1914 and move to New York CityBy 1917 McKay established literary and political ties with left-wing thinkers in Greenwich Village and during this time hepublished his most famous poem ldquoIf We Must Dierdquo In 1923 McKay left America for twelve years traveling first toMoscow where he was extolled as a great American poet He grew disillusioned with the Communist Party when it becameapparent that he would have to subjugate his art to political propaganda and by 1923 he left for Paris Later he journeyedto the south of France Germany North Africa and Spain concentrating on writing fiction Once back in New York hewrote his autobiography an attempt to bolster his financial and literary status He developed his interest in RomanCatholicism and became active in Harlemrsquos Friendship House a Catholic community center By the mid-1940s his healthbegan to deteriorate On May 22 1948 McKay died of heart failure in Chicago

Poem Text

Bananas ripe and green and ginger-root Cocoa in pods and alligator pearsAnd tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs

Set in the window bringing memories 5 Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rillsAnd dewy dawns and mystical blue skies In benediction over nun-like hills

Page 256 |

My eyes grew dim and I could no more gaze A wave of longing through my body swept 10And hungry for the old familiar ways I turned aside and bowed my head and wept

Claude Mckay

Poem Summary

Lines 1-4

The first stanza is filled with the names of luscious exotic fruit from a land other than America It ends with a festive outdooractivity a parish fair which would have been a social event that gathered together a dispersed agricultural community It isthe sort of event that a stranger in a strange land would remember longingly

Lines 5-8

The speaker mentions a window which serves a dual purpose fruits bought at a market in the city would be put on awindow sill to ripen but the window is also a vehicle for the speakerrsquos memory to be cast outside leading into this stanzarsquosmemories of the tropical landscape

Lines 9-12

The warm nostalgia the speaker related toward his homeland in the first two stanzas now makes him sad in his longing for itNot being able to live there he feels helpless and alienated in his new surroundings The hunger in line 11 ties the end of thepoem to the luscious fruits at the beginning

Sidebar Hide

Page 256 |

My eyes grew dim and I could no more gaze A wave of longing through my body swept 10And hungry for the old familiar ways I turned aside and bowed my head and wept

Claude Mckay

Poem Summary

Lines 1-4

The first stanza is filled with the names of luscious exotic fruit from a land other than America It ends with a festive outdooractivity a parish fair which would have been a social event that gathered together a dispersed agricultural community It isthe sort of event that a stranger in a strange land would remember longingly

Lines 5-8

The speaker mentions a window which serves a dual purpose fruits bought at a market in the city would be put on awindow sill to ripen but the window is also a vehicle for the speakerrsquos memory to be cast outside leading into this stanzarsquosmemories of the tropical landscape

Lines 9-12

The warm nostalgia the speaker related toward his homeland in the first two stanzas now makes him sad in his longing for itNot being able to live there he feels helpless and alienated in his new surroundings The hunger in line 11 ties the end of thepoem to the luscious fruits at the beginning

Sidebar Hide

Topics for Further Study

Write a poem about something you see in your ordinary life that reminds you of ldquothe old familiar waysrdquo which couldinclude the time before you were born Make the details vivid appealing to the five sensesDo you think that this speaker is usually nostalgic for the old ways or is this a mood that comes up once in a whileExplain your answer

Themes

Culture Clash

The title of this poem is a contradiction a clash of landscapes New York City in the 1920s thrived with diverse immigrantcultures all living within a few city blocks of each other Just as diverse were the fruits vegetables and other foods sold onthe street or from merchantrsquos carts The narrator of the poem arranges an exotic grocery list on his windowsill for us to viewldquoCoco pods and alligator pears tangerines and mangoes and grape fruitrdquo Almost all of these foods are not native to ourAmerican culture and in the second stanza the speaker reveals neither is he

Although McKay does not describe the urban New York landscape in detail we can imagine the harsh contrast of what thespeaker sees looking through his downtown apartment window and what the exotic fruit reminds him of ldquotrees laden by low-singing rills And dewy dawns and mystical blue skiesrdquo The Jamaican-born speaker finds himself in a new landscape butrecalls old memories triggered by the discovery of this exotic fruit on his windowsill

Reminiscence and Memory

The odd contrast between the exotic fruit set against the New York urban landscape inspires the speaker to reminisce andlong for his homeland After he surveys the tropical arrangement of fruits set in his windowsill the speaker looks out thewindow into what should be downtown New York but instead sees scenes from his childhood in Jamaica Through thiswindow into the past he sees ldquofruit trees laden by low-singing rills And dewy dawnsrdquo

Memory can be triggered by many things an auntrsquos perfume the sound of popcorn on the stove a faded picture from yoursixth birthday party The speaker of McKayrsquos poem fills his apartment with fragrant ginger and bright green bananas sweetmangos and tart pink grapefruit inside thick rinds He fills his senses with the tropics ldquobringing memories of hellip mysticalblue skies In benediction over nun-like hillsrdquo By the end of the second stanza the speaker is overcome with the weight ofhis emotions and his memories flood him with longing

Alienation and Loneliness

A stranger in a strange landscape the speaker first finds comfort in the familiar fruits he has placed on his windowsill to ripenbut soon he is overcome by the memories they evoke as well as feelings of alienation and loneliness Like the alligator pearstrangely out of place against a backdrop of brownstone apartments taxis and fire escapes the speaker is alien to hisenvironment ldquoA wave of longing through [his] body swept And hungry for the old familiar ways [He] turned aside andbowed my head and weptrdquo McKay describes his longing as a hunger connecting the theme of loneliness to the exotic foodsthat first triggered the powerful childhood memories

Style

ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo is structured in three stanzas each stanza is a quatrainmdashthat is it consists of four lines The

Page 257 |

rhyme scheme of each quatrain is abab The rhythm of each line is iambic pentameter Iambic refers to the fact that each lineis made up of pairs of syllables the first unstressed and the second stressed Pentameter means that there are five of thesepairs per line (ldquopentardquo is the Greek word for five) meaning that there are ten syllables per line Iambic pentameter is one ofthe most common rhythms used in poetry because it follows the natural rising-and-falling pattern of English speech Takenalong with the simple almost song-like swaying of the abab rhyme pattern we can assume that this is a poem with simpledirect intentions with no deep mystery for the reader to unravel In the first stanza the use of words like ldquoginger-rootrdquoldquococoa in podsrdquo ldquoalligator pearsrdquo

Sidebar Hide

Compare amp Contrast

1922 The new Ku Klux Klan gains political power in the United States

1979 Still a strong force in the South Klansmen in Greensboro NC fire on members of the Workers ViewpointOrganization killing three and wounding twelve

1922 Following the Russian Revolution the Soviet Union is created

1990 Russian President Gorbachev convinces the congress to surrender power September 5th ending the Union ofSoviet Republics and communist rule

1998 Although capitalist democracy has replaced communist rule for more than eight years polls indicate that almosthalf of Russian citizens asked feel their quality of living has actually decreased with the advent of democracy andcapitalism

1922 The IRA or Irish Republican Army declares its formal constitution The aim of the organization is toldquosafeguard the honor and independence of the Irish Republicrdquo

1978 A bomb planted by IRA terrorists on a royal yacht kills Lord Mountbatten cousin of Elizabeth II The blastalso kills his young grandson and a young friend Many other British soldiers and politicians are killed within weeks ofthe bombing in similar ambushes and sniper attacks

1998 After years of violence both IRA and British leaders take a significant step toward peace by signing anagreement on April 9th This agreement will turn direct rule of Northern Ireland back over to Irish officials

1922 The Federal Reserve Board establishes the first bank-wire system to eliminate physical transfer of funds inorder to avoid theft loss or destruction of treasury certificates

1998 New encryption methods allow secure transfer of funds over the Internet Families who rarely make cashpurchases due to the ease of credit cards now have the option of booking flights ordering groceries buying rarebooks and even gambling via their home personal computer on the Internet

and ldquomangoesrdquo conjures up an exotic land unfamiliar to Americans The second stanza continues the faraway remembrancesthat began in the first The descriptions are of the countryside The tone of the third stanza changes abruptly from the first andsecond Whereas the first two talk about an open fertile countryside the third stanza draws back to the internal struggle ofthe speaker an isolated individual far away from home

Page 257 |

rhyme scheme of each quatrain is abab The rhythm of each line is iambic pentameter Iambic refers to the fact that each lineis made up of pairs of syllables the first unstressed and the second stressed Pentameter means that there are five of thesepairs per line (ldquopentardquo is the Greek word for five) meaning that there are ten syllables per line Iambic pentameter is one ofthe most common rhythms used in poetry because it follows the natural rising-and-falling pattern of English speech Takenalong with the simple almost song-like swaying of the abab rhyme pattern we can assume that this is a poem with simpledirect intentions with no deep mystery for the reader to unravel In the first stanza the use of words like ldquoginger-rootrdquoldquococoa in podsrdquo ldquoalligator pearsrdquo

Sidebar Hide

Compare amp Contrast

1922 The new Ku Klux Klan gains political power in the United States

1979 Still a strong force in the South Klansmen in Greensboro NC fire on members of the Workers ViewpointOrganization killing three and wounding twelve

1922 Following the Russian Revolution the Soviet Union is created

1990 Russian President Gorbachev convinces the congress to surrender power September 5th ending the Union ofSoviet Republics and communist rule

1998 Although capitalist democracy has replaced communist rule for more than eight years polls indicate that almosthalf of Russian citizens asked feel their quality of living has actually decreased with the advent of democracy andcapitalism

1922 The IRA or Irish Republican Army declares its formal constitution The aim of the organization is toldquosafeguard the honor and independence of the Irish Republicrdquo

1978 A bomb planted by IRA terrorists on a royal yacht kills Lord Mountbatten cousin of Elizabeth II The blastalso kills his young grandson and a young friend Many other British soldiers and politicians are killed within weeks ofthe bombing in similar ambushes and sniper attacks

1998 After years of violence both IRA and British leaders take a significant step toward peace by signing anagreement on April 9th This agreement will turn direct rule of Northern Ireland back over to Irish officials

1922 The Federal Reserve Board establishes the first bank-wire system to eliminate physical transfer of funds inorder to avoid theft loss or destruction of treasury certificates

1998 New encryption methods allow secure transfer of funds over the Internet Families who rarely make cashpurchases due to the ease of credit cards now have the option of booking flights ordering groceries buying rarebooks and even gambling via their home personal computer on the Internet

and ldquomangoesrdquo conjures up an exotic land unfamiliar to Americans The second stanza continues the faraway remembrancesthat began in the first The descriptions are of the countryside The tone of the third stanza changes abruptly from the first andsecond Whereas the first two talk about an open fertile countryside the third stanza draws back to the internal struggle ofthe speaker an isolated individual far away from home

Page 258 |

Historical Context

During the Summer of 1919 only a few years before the publication of ldquoTropics in New Yorkrdquo there were violent race riotsin Chicago These riots inspired McKayrsquos poetic anthem If We Must Die a piece that spoke powerfully to the atmosphereof oppression and race-fueled murder Many critics cite his poems of social protest and racial injustice as what bestcharacterize his writing as a whole McKay mostly rejected any ties between his race and possible interpretations of hiswork

As a Jamaican native living in New York McKay was among more than one million new immigrants to enter the UnitedStates in the early 1920s America during that time was fiercely segregated ldquoWhite onlyrdquo sports teams restaurants theatersand water fountains were a part of the American landscape Eighty-five percent of all blacks lived in the South and 23percent of those families were illiterate In New York the artistic and social scene flourished where the Harlem Renaissancewas also at its height

But even McKay the man some consider the father of this artistic and intellectual black movement of the postwar 1920s

could not avoid the prejudice that pervaded every aspect of day-to-day living Invited to write a theater review of LeonidAndreyevrsquos He Who Gets Slapped McKay was questioned by management when he tried to take his assigned seat in thefront rowmdashthe row reserved for whites only

This type of hypocritical treatment forced many to question the democratic system intrigued instead by the promise of a trulyequal society as described by the Marxists Claude McKay grew more and more interested in socialism hanging out withldquoleft-wingrdquo society types like Frank Harris editor of Pearsonrsquos Magazine

In the 1922 the same year he published his first acclaimed work Harlem Shadows the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics(USSR) was established McKay was so impressed with the social and political change in Russia he traveled there Over thecourse of the rest of his life he lived in and out of the country for more than twelve years

The 1920s was a time of literary revolution worldwide During the same year Claude McKay published Harlem Shadowswhile living in urban New York Englandrsquos T S Eliot and Irelandrsquos James Joyce published their own hallmark pieces Eachwork Eliotrsquos The Wasteland and Joycersquos Ulysses drew immediate attention for their innovative forms and voices just asHarlem Shadows had crafted immigrant voices into verses

Critical Overview

In The Nation Walter F White wrote of Harlem Shadows which includes ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo that ldquo[McKayrsquos]work proves him to be a craftsman with keen perception of emotions hellip and an adept in the handling of his phrases to givethe subtle variations of thought he seeksrdquo Jean Wagner also commented positively about Harlem Shadows in Black Poetsof the United States From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes saying ldquoThe languorous sweetness of [thenature poems] is like a cool breeze from the Isles introducing a note of most welcome tranquillity into the militant fiercenessof the poems of rebellionrdquo ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo is about a man who feels imprisoned in America because he cannotreturn to his native country Geta J LeSeur in CLA Journal writes that McKay in ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo ldquospeaks forthe hundreds of West Indians who became exiles away from their homeland primarily because of economic and diplomaticreasonshellip The alienation felt is one of time and distance and the consequence and helplessness is clearly felt in the last threelines The progression is from glorious song to despair It is one of his most moving poems on this theme helliprdquo

Page 259 |

Criticism

David Kelly

David Kelly is a writer and instructor at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines Illinois In the following essayKelly discusses how within this poem of the immigrant experience McKay uses cinematic techniques that wereadvanced for his time and raises several racial issues concerning black Americans

Claude McKayrsquos poem ldquoThe Tropics In New Yorkrdquo is probably the most anthologized of all of the authorrsquos works whichmeans that it is the work that the greatest number of readers will think of when McKayrsquos name comes to mind To somedegree there is a great irony to this because the poem depicts McKaymdashwho so often played the role of the angry radicalmdashas a vulnerable lonesome foreigner not challenged by the racial politics of his new land but reduced to tears by his sense ofnostalgia Some critics would say that this nostalgia is a reason why black Americans have a difficult time formulating acomplete cultural identity and they would encourage poems such as this one that are willing to examine that sense of lossOther commentators would suggest that this poem plays to old stereotypes developed during slaverymdashthat the author isplaying the minstrel show character of the freed slave in the North longing for the simple days back on the plantation whenhe wasnrsquot troubled to think independently The subject matter of the poem comparing a natural primitive world to thecivilized ldquourban junglerdquo is bound to invite speculation about which one McKay thinks is more powerful which one he deemsrighteous as well as the implications of these settings on the role of blacks in America

Most readers of the poem would not be inclined on first reading to see it in terms of racial identity at all It is aboutloneliness and memory experiences that cross all social boundaries America is a land of immigrants and immigrantsnaturally look back longingly to the circumstances of their youth McKay does as a matter of fact capture the feeling that

anyone who has moved to a new land is bound to have He accomplishes this by having the objects that trigger his nostalgiabe innocuous objects more tantalizing to the senses than they are provocative to the intellect While a Jamaican such asMcKay might be transported back in memory by the fruits that grow in Jamaica a Lithuanian immigrant may relate to theexperience because it is the same one he or she gets from barley husks a Mexican might pine for yucca a Malian for milletor dates And seen with the fuzzy lens of nostalgia every country has dewy dawns and mystical blue skies and nun-like hills(whatever those are) McKay lures out the sentiment buried within immigrants as well as in people whose families have beenhere for generations but who have kept their ties to their motherland by downplaying what America has to offer How isNew York represented in this poem As a window sill The window doesnrsquot look out over a new land with gold-pavedstreets or over a dirty and dangerous ghetto it looks magically out on Jamaica Many transplanted persons live this way indenial of their circumstances with little sense of ldquonowrdquo but only of ldquothenrdquo

It is interesting that this poem the nostalgic wail of a speaker ldquohungry for the old waysrdquo cries out for nature but it views theworld in terms of technology with an eye that was apparently trained by the cinema In 1922 the year this poem was firstpublished movies were (of course) not as sophisticated as they are today They were filmed in black-and-white and theonly sound they had was that of a live organ playing while the picture ran Still they had worked out the visual language ofmotion pictures to a great degree One needs only look at such classic silent films as Nosferatu Blood and Sand and TheCabinet of Dr Caligari to know that McKay would have been familiar with such techniques as the close-up the fade andthe dissolve In ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo he directs the viewerrsquos eye the way that a camera does The opening ldquoscenerdquoin the first stanza could be the work of a still camera but it nonetheless bears the mark of a camera of some sort what elsein human experience could focus onersquos attention on one set of objects ignoring the context they are in What marks thispoem as a visual equivalent of motion pictures though is the widening angle from the tight shot in the first stanza to thesecond stanza which includes the window behind the fruit The objects do not move it is the readerrsquos view of them thatmoves Between lines 5 and 6 comes an even more specific movie trick a dissolve as bleary and wavy as the transition from

Page 260 |

Kansas to Oz taking us out of a New York apartment to a lush utopia springboarding off of the word ldquomemoriesrdquo Thehuman eye does not fade out and then fade in on a different scene like that movie footage does

So the poem conveys a longing for the old natural home of fruit trees and blue skies but it shows its mixed intentions byframing its longing for nature in (what was then) a high-tech way Unfortunately this division between forward-lookingtechnology and the simplicity that excludes technology happens to correspond to a long-standing philosophical problem forAfrican Americans with the love of technology indicating a love of the European culture that created slavery and love ofnature indicating a resistance to progress that some feel has held blacks back Framed as a racial issue it would appear thatthere was no way for Claude McKay to crawl away from the cultureprimitivism question without looking like a traitor tosomebody Unfortunately because of who he was and when and where he worked any poem by Claude McKay is boundto be examined from a racial perspective

Any basic search for information on McKay is likely to turn up the words ldquoHarlem Renaissancerdquo within the first sentence ortwo He was a black man who worked in Harlem during the early 1920s and so he is grouped into this category bydefinition What made McKay stand out from his African-American peers is that he grew up in Jamaica and came toexperience Americarsquos particular form of racism only later in life during his two years at Kansas State College after he hadalready tasted success as a published poet in his home land In Harlem he was involved with the Socialist Party as anassociate editor of The Liberator a Marxist publication This sort of radicalism was not at all unusual for that time andplace Edward Margoliesrsquos critical study of black authors Native Sons published in the politically charged climate of 1968tells us that ldquoMcKayrsquos best writings are found in his early Harlem poems which alternate between a celebration of theHarlem proletariat and a clarion call for racial militancyrdquo

As a native of Jamaica McKay formed a tight relationship with the countryside the land and sky that are described in thispoem are contrasted with the concrete corridors that define New York City It is understandable that when he thought of hisown people living their lives freely and productively without the degrading roles society had cast blacks of the 1920s in hesaw them surrounded by naturemdashat one with the trees and free under the

Sidebar Hide

What Do I Read Next

Claude McKay was perhaps better known for his prose than his poetry For a healthy sampling of both verse andprose spanning his writing career check out The Passion of Claude McKay Selected Poetry and Prose 1912-1948 (1973)Although many critics may say McKayrsquos autobiography is included in his poetry Harlem Glory A Fragment ofAframerican Life (1988) is one of his self-portraits A critical look at his fellow African Americans this bookcontinues to stir emotions and raise questions of the role of ethnicity in writingTwo recent books that look at the Harlem Renaissance not only in terms of literature but art music and sculpture aswell are George Hutchinsonrsquos The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White and Cory Winzrsquos Black Culture andthe Harlem Renaissance Both books are also exceptional sources for gaining a better understanding of the culturalcontext surrounding the black intellectual movement

open sky As the world has become more crowded and industrial with society and its by-products pressing in from everydirection it is quite high praise to consider any one group as being in touch with nature or connected to the world as it wasbefore civilization arrived to corrupt it ldquoAnd yetrdquo Margolies points out and many critics agree ldquoat the root of McKayrsquosradicalism is the ancient stereotype of the primitive Negrordquo Writers of all races have excused the way that blacks locked out

Page 259 |

Criticism

David Kelly

David Kelly is a writer and instructor at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines Illinois In the following essayKelly discusses how within this poem of the immigrant experience McKay uses cinematic techniques that wereadvanced for his time and raises several racial issues concerning black Americans

Claude McKayrsquos poem ldquoThe Tropics In New Yorkrdquo is probably the most anthologized of all of the authorrsquos works whichmeans that it is the work that the greatest number of readers will think of when McKayrsquos name comes to mind To somedegree there is a great irony to this because the poem depicts McKaymdashwho so often played the role of the angry radicalmdashas a vulnerable lonesome foreigner not challenged by the racial politics of his new land but reduced to tears by his sense ofnostalgia Some critics would say that this nostalgia is a reason why black Americans have a difficult time formulating acomplete cultural identity and they would encourage poems such as this one that are willing to examine that sense of lossOther commentators would suggest that this poem plays to old stereotypes developed during slaverymdashthat the author isplaying the minstrel show character of the freed slave in the North longing for the simple days back on the plantation whenhe wasnrsquot troubled to think independently The subject matter of the poem comparing a natural primitive world to thecivilized ldquourban junglerdquo is bound to invite speculation about which one McKay thinks is more powerful which one he deemsrighteous as well as the implications of these settings on the role of blacks in America

Most readers of the poem would not be inclined on first reading to see it in terms of racial identity at all It is aboutloneliness and memory experiences that cross all social boundaries America is a land of immigrants and immigrantsnaturally look back longingly to the circumstances of their youth McKay does as a matter of fact capture the feeling that

anyone who has moved to a new land is bound to have He accomplishes this by having the objects that trigger his nostalgiabe innocuous objects more tantalizing to the senses than they are provocative to the intellect While a Jamaican such asMcKay might be transported back in memory by the fruits that grow in Jamaica a Lithuanian immigrant may relate to theexperience because it is the same one he or she gets from barley husks a Mexican might pine for yucca a Malian for milletor dates And seen with the fuzzy lens of nostalgia every country has dewy dawns and mystical blue skies and nun-like hills(whatever those are) McKay lures out the sentiment buried within immigrants as well as in people whose families have beenhere for generations but who have kept their ties to their motherland by downplaying what America has to offer How isNew York represented in this poem As a window sill The window doesnrsquot look out over a new land with gold-pavedstreets or over a dirty and dangerous ghetto it looks magically out on Jamaica Many transplanted persons live this way indenial of their circumstances with little sense of ldquonowrdquo but only of ldquothenrdquo

It is interesting that this poem the nostalgic wail of a speaker ldquohungry for the old waysrdquo cries out for nature but it views theworld in terms of technology with an eye that was apparently trained by the cinema In 1922 the year this poem was firstpublished movies were (of course) not as sophisticated as they are today They were filmed in black-and-white and theonly sound they had was that of a live organ playing while the picture ran Still they had worked out the visual language ofmotion pictures to a great degree One needs only look at such classic silent films as Nosferatu Blood and Sand and TheCabinet of Dr Caligari to know that McKay would have been familiar with such techniques as the close-up the fade andthe dissolve In ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo he directs the viewerrsquos eye the way that a camera does The opening ldquoscenerdquoin the first stanza could be the work of a still camera but it nonetheless bears the mark of a camera of some sort what elsein human experience could focus onersquos attention on one set of objects ignoring the context they are in What marks thispoem as a visual equivalent of motion pictures though is the widening angle from the tight shot in the first stanza to thesecond stanza which includes the window behind the fruit The objects do not move it is the readerrsquos view of them thatmoves Between lines 5 and 6 comes an even more specific movie trick a dissolve as bleary and wavy as the transition from

Page 260 |

Kansas to Oz taking us out of a New York apartment to a lush utopia springboarding off of the word ldquomemoriesrdquo Thehuman eye does not fade out and then fade in on a different scene like that movie footage does

So the poem conveys a longing for the old natural home of fruit trees and blue skies but it shows its mixed intentions byframing its longing for nature in (what was then) a high-tech way Unfortunately this division between forward-lookingtechnology and the simplicity that excludes technology happens to correspond to a long-standing philosophical problem forAfrican Americans with the love of technology indicating a love of the European culture that created slavery and love ofnature indicating a resistance to progress that some feel has held blacks back Framed as a racial issue it would appear thatthere was no way for Claude McKay to crawl away from the cultureprimitivism question without looking like a traitor tosomebody Unfortunately because of who he was and when and where he worked any poem by Claude McKay is boundto be examined from a racial perspective

Any basic search for information on McKay is likely to turn up the words ldquoHarlem Renaissancerdquo within the first sentence ortwo He was a black man who worked in Harlem during the early 1920s and so he is grouped into this category bydefinition What made McKay stand out from his African-American peers is that he grew up in Jamaica and came toexperience Americarsquos particular form of racism only later in life during his two years at Kansas State College after he hadalready tasted success as a published poet in his home land In Harlem he was involved with the Socialist Party as anassociate editor of The Liberator a Marxist publication This sort of radicalism was not at all unusual for that time andplace Edward Margoliesrsquos critical study of black authors Native Sons published in the politically charged climate of 1968tells us that ldquoMcKayrsquos best writings are found in his early Harlem poems which alternate between a celebration of theHarlem proletariat and a clarion call for racial militancyrdquo

As a native of Jamaica McKay formed a tight relationship with the countryside the land and sky that are described in thispoem are contrasted with the concrete corridors that define New York City It is understandable that when he thought of hisown people living their lives freely and productively without the degrading roles society had cast blacks of the 1920s in hesaw them surrounded by naturemdashat one with the trees and free under the

Sidebar Hide

What Do I Read Next

Claude McKay was perhaps better known for his prose than his poetry For a healthy sampling of both verse andprose spanning his writing career check out The Passion of Claude McKay Selected Poetry and Prose 1912-1948 (1973)Although many critics may say McKayrsquos autobiography is included in his poetry Harlem Glory A Fragment ofAframerican Life (1988) is one of his self-portraits A critical look at his fellow African Americans this bookcontinues to stir emotions and raise questions of the role of ethnicity in writingTwo recent books that look at the Harlem Renaissance not only in terms of literature but art music and sculpture aswell are George Hutchinsonrsquos The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White and Cory Winzrsquos Black Culture andthe Harlem Renaissance Both books are also exceptional sources for gaining a better understanding of the culturalcontext surrounding the black intellectual movement

open sky As the world has become more crowded and industrial with society and its by-products pressing in from everydirection it is quite high praise to consider any one group as being in touch with nature or connected to the world as it wasbefore civilization arrived to corrupt it ldquoAnd yetrdquo Margolies points out and many critics agree ldquoat the root of McKayrsquosradicalism is the ancient stereotype of the primitive Negrordquo Writers of all races have excused the way that blacks locked out

Page 260 |

Kansas to Oz taking us out of a New York apartment to a lush utopia springboarding off of the word ldquomemoriesrdquo Thehuman eye does not fade out and then fade in on a different scene like that movie footage does

So the poem conveys a longing for the old natural home of fruit trees and blue skies but it shows its mixed intentions byframing its longing for nature in (what was then) a high-tech way Unfortunately this division between forward-lookingtechnology and the simplicity that excludes technology happens to correspond to a long-standing philosophical problem forAfrican Americans with the love of technology indicating a love of the European culture that created slavery and love ofnature indicating a resistance to progress that some feel has held blacks back Framed as a racial issue it would appear thatthere was no way for Claude McKay to crawl away from the cultureprimitivism question without looking like a traitor tosomebody Unfortunately because of who he was and when and where he worked any poem by Claude McKay is boundto be examined from a racial perspective

Any basic search for information on McKay is likely to turn up the words ldquoHarlem Renaissancerdquo within the first sentence ortwo He was a black man who worked in Harlem during the early 1920s and so he is grouped into this category bydefinition What made McKay stand out from his African-American peers is that he grew up in Jamaica and came toexperience Americarsquos particular form of racism only later in life during his two years at Kansas State College after he hadalready tasted success as a published poet in his home land In Harlem he was involved with the Socialist Party as anassociate editor of The Liberator a Marxist publication This sort of radicalism was not at all unusual for that time andplace Edward Margoliesrsquos critical study of black authors Native Sons published in the politically charged climate of 1968tells us that ldquoMcKayrsquos best writings are found in his early Harlem poems which alternate between a celebration of theHarlem proletariat and a clarion call for racial militancyrdquo

As a native of Jamaica McKay formed a tight relationship with the countryside the land and sky that are described in thispoem are contrasted with the concrete corridors that define New York City It is understandable that when he thought of hisown people living their lives freely and productively without the degrading roles society had cast blacks of the 1920s in hesaw them surrounded by naturemdashat one with the trees and free under the

Sidebar Hide

What Do I Read Next

Claude McKay was perhaps better known for his prose than his poetry For a healthy sampling of both verse andprose spanning his writing career check out The Passion of Claude McKay Selected Poetry and Prose 1912-1948 (1973)Although many critics may say McKayrsquos autobiography is included in his poetry Harlem Glory A Fragment ofAframerican Life (1988) is one of his self-portraits A critical look at his fellow African Americans this bookcontinues to stir emotions and raise questions of the role of ethnicity in writingTwo recent books that look at the Harlem Renaissance not only in terms of literature but art music and sculpture aswell are George Hutchinsonrsquos The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White and Cory Winzrsquos Black Culture andthe Harlem Renaissance Both books are also exceptional sources for gaining a better understanding of the culturalcontext surrounding the black intellectual movement

open sky As the world has become more crowded and industrial with society and its by-products pressing in from everydirection it is quite high praise to consider any one group as being in touch with nature or connected to the world as it wasbefore civilization arrived to corrupt it ldquoAnd yetrdquo Margolies points out and many critics agree ldquoat the root of McKayrsquosradicalism is the ancient stereotype of the primitive Negrordquo Writers of all races have excused the way that blacks locked out

Page 261 |

social progress by assuming that an extra degree of spirituality in the ldquoprimitiverdquo people makes everything equal Treating

blacks as a group with different abilities and different historical needs than whites may be a way of facing reality but whenthis idea is misapplied it leads to such weird cultural phenomena as the nightclubs of the celebrated Harlem Renaissancebeing staffed by black entertainers while the owners and patrons were white or the professional sports that have mostlyminority players but few nonwhite coaches A poem such as ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo can unfortunately be read to meanthat Negroes were a people of the land with no competence as leaders of society

McKay didnrsquot stay in Jamaica though he left the tropics for America showing a personal appreciation for civilization andtechnology that is not shown in this poem In his life he was an ambitious man leaving tiny Jamaica for the big time NewYork confident that he had the talent to make a name for himself After struggling with American racism for a few years heleft Harlem to spend some of his most productive years traveling to England France Germany Russia and several Africannations experiencing particular types of racial stereotypes in each one While it is any personrsquos right to live the way theychoose and to once in a while look back with some sorrow on ldquothe old familiar waysrdquo black writers have considered it nofavor that he indulged in the Western culture that oppressed blacks and that he struggled so hard to be accepted by it Hedisliked and feared many of the blacks he met in Africa and felt more comfortable among whites even while as the poemimplies feeling alienated in white American society As African critic Femi Ojo-Ade put it for McKay ldquoAmerica thecivilized is hard to reach Africa the savage though easily accessible is repulsiverdquo

As fine as it is that McKay would move to the largest country in the Western Hemisphere and aspire to conquer the socialorder there is an undeniable hint of self-loathing detectable when an author leaves his past behind and at the same timewrites about the ldquohungerrdquo he feels for the old ways If this is a common immigrant experience then McKayrsquos dilemma wasand is repeated thousands of times each day by everyone who is separated from their past If as his harshest critics put itMcKayrsquos stance represents an abandonment of blacks either by playing to the ldquonoble savagerdquo stereotype or by acceptingthe values of the oppressors then his perpetually being defined as a Harlem Renaissance author takes on a tone of sad irony

Source David Kelly in an essay for Poetry for Students Gale 1998

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College in Portland Oregon and is afrequent contributor of poems and essays to literary journals In the following essay Semansky explores howMcKayrsquos vivid and evocative imagery functions in ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo

In the first stanza of his poem ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo Claude McKay describes a veritable cornucopia of fruits andplants After we finish reading this stanza we can almost taste these exotic delicacies the ripe bananas the ginger-root thealligator pears The words seem to have a power of their own to make our mouths water This is the power of imagery

Imagery when effective has the ability to make the reader experience the thing or things being described in this case thetropical fruits of McKayrsquos birthplace Jamaica It is not only the naming of the fruit that makes McKayrsquos imagery effectivebut the manner in which he does itmdashby listing the different kinds A list by its very definition is an accumulation of details andremains a popular poetic device writers use to achieve an almost photographic effect of the things described In this case thesense stimulated is not only vision but taste as well for these are perfect specimens ldquofit for the highest prize at parish fairsrdquo

We learn in the second stanza that the delicacies described are not in fact in Jamaica but in New York City a steamy placein the summer but definitely not the tropics McKay might be using irony by titling his poem ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquothen or he simply might be using ldquotropicsrdquo as a rough synecdoche A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part ofsomething is used to signify the whole

Page 262 |

In this case ldquotropicsrdquo might be (metaphorically) read as tropical fruit but simultaneously stand in for all of the tropicsHowever these tropical treats do remind the speaker of his homeland The sight of them brings memories ldquoof fruit-treesladen by low-singing rills And dewy dawns and mystical blue skies in benediction over nun-like hillsrdquo Rills are smallbrooks or streams that lace Jamaicarsquos countryside and the hills are nun-like because blue skies are offering a blessing

This stanza also signals a move from the specific to the general as the sight of individual pieces of fruit (possibly in a bowl)moves the speakers so that he remembers the conditions that physically enabled their existence (dawn skies hills) Thereader can also consider the present in which the speaker initially sees the fruit in the window as the fruit of the past That isthe speakerrsquos initial experience of his homeland made possible the nostalgia and longing he feels when seeing a bowl of fruityears later

Nostalgia is a fitting theme for a poet who left his native country as a young man to come to the United States It is also asubject made popular by English Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth who wrote many poems mourning the loss oftraditions people and humanityrsquos relationship to nature McKay in ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo is not merely expressing hisyearning for Jamaican fruit He is showing the reader through his choice of details what he misses about his country itsspectacular landscape its spirituality its sheer fecundity McKay could have written a poem about how after stumblingacross seashells at a corner store he was suddenly reminded of the Jamaican coast but writing about such a commonplaceitem as fruit allowed him to pack more resonance in his images

We associate ripe fruit especially tropical fruit with abundance with the sheer headiness of being alive and growing It isexotic and sweet and pleasurable much like many of our own (good) memories of childhood Though as readers we are notconsciously aware of these associations they are there nonetheless and affect our reception of the poem

After two stanzas of description the narrator discusses its significance We now understand that we were seeing what thespeaker was seeing that the narratorrsquos ldquoIrdquo was the photographic eye This stanza however contains no description becausethe speakerrsquos ldquoeyes grew dimrdquo Instead we have a comment on the previous description which allows us to understand thedescriptionrsquos purpose This stanza tells us the meaning of what the first two stanzas showed us The speaker is hungry notfor bananas cocoa mangoes and grapefruit but ldquofor the old familiar waysrdquo McKayrsquos use of the word ldquohungryrdquo to describehis desire is appropriate given the poemrsquos imagery

In ldquoClaude McKayrsquos Romanticismrdquo in CLA Journal Geta LeSeur writes that ldquothe progression [from the first two stanzas tothe third] is from glorious song to despair It is one of his most moving poems on this themerdquo The reader must keep in mindhowever that the despair is also informed by the speakerrsquos implicit recognition of the discrepancy between New York Cityone of the largest urban centers in the world and the pastoral idyllic setting McKay portrays as his home

ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo first appeared in 1920 in The Liberator a radical socialist newspaper There is nothinghowever explicitly or implicitly radical about the poem In fact an argument could be made that the piece is conservativebecause of the (implicit) desire the speaker expresses to go home again

Though a communist sympathizer for a good part of his adult life many of McKayrsquos early poems deal with traditional themesand subject matter In many ways he was a modern romantic Like the Romantics McKay frequently wrote out of personalexperience the ldquoIrdquo in the poem was more often than not McKay LeSeur observes that ldquoMcKay obviously is the speaker inthis poem although he speaks for the hundreds of West Indians who became exiles away from their homeland primarilybecause of economic and diplomatic reasons The poem therefore does have a oneness of feeling about it The alienationfelt is one of time and distance and the consequence and helplessness is clearly felt in the last three linesrdquo

Though McKay wrote about his hunger for the old ways of his native land we can also read this poem as an example

though not the best of McKayrsquos own theory of poetry In his theory he frequently promoted traditional poetic forms In hisintroduction to Harlem Shadows his only book of verse McKay writes that the eighteenth-century Scottish poet RobertBurnsmdasha traditionalistmdashwas a primary influence on his work McKay believed that the traditional should ldquowork best onlawless and revolutionary passion and words so as to give the feeling of the highest degree of spontaneity and freedomrdquo

However it is hard to see exactly how lawless and revolutionary McKayrsquos own words and passions are in ldquoThe TropicsrdquoWritten in iambic pentameter and employing an abab cdcd efef rhyme scheme this lyric poem focuses on the lament of oneindividual not as LeSeur suggests the numerous exiles from the West Indies A lyric is usually a short poem consisting of thewords of a single speaker Employing the first person ldquoIrdquo the lyric most often revolves around or expresses the feeling orstate of mind of the speaker

Burnsrsquos poem ldquoO my loversquos like a red red roserdquo for example expresses the speakerrsquos passion for his sweetheart Lyricsmay or may not be written in iambic pentameter Iambic pentameter means that each of the poemrsquos lines consist of five(penta) feet Meter is measured in feet and a foot usually contains a stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllablesAn ldquoiambicrdquo foot the most common in English poetry consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable Thefirst line of ldquoThe TropicsrdquomdashldquoBananas ripe and green and ginger-rootrdquomdashcontains ten syllables alternately unstressed andstressed

McKay uses a traditional form to write about traditional subjects loss and nostalgia It is precisely his use of tradition thatcritics have applauded viewing him as a poet whose work embodies universal rather than African American ideals Perhapsbetter examples of his theory of how traditional forms can give shape to radical content are his Shakespearean sonnetsldquoAmericardquo and ldquoThe White Cityrdquo Both of these poems criticize America and the cultural oppression of African Americansbut they do so in a way that conventional critics appreciate Said another way critics have praised McKay because heplayed by the rules

Source Chris Semansky in an essay for Poetry for Students Gale 1998

P S Chauhan

In the following excerpt Chauhan disagrees with those who think McKayrsquos works reflect the consciousness of theHarlem Renaissance instead pointing out a ldquocolonial sensibilityrdquo that stems he believes from the poetrsquos Jamaicanheritage

If McKayrsquos conflicting views were an enigma to his friends the ambiguities of his work are a bafflement to his criticsNaturally the variant readings of the man and his fiction today constitute the central problem of McKay scholarship WayneCooper McKayrsquos biographer [who wrote Claude McKay Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance] trying to find anacceptable solution locates the source of all ideological paradoxes in the personal pathology of a personality ldquocharacterizedalways by a deep-seated ambivalencerdquo that was caused mainly by ldquodependence upon a succession of father figuresrdquo

There is another way however to explain the presence of incongruous elements in McKayrsquos work It is more than likely thathis work seems paradoxical because it has been read in an inappropriate context Beginning with James Weldon JohnsonrsquosBlack Manhattan (1930) critics have concluded certainly to their satisfaction that McKay was ldquoof the Harlem grouprdquoindeed that he was ldquoone of the movementrsquos ornamentsrdquo [according to George E Kent in his article ldquoPatterns of the HarlemRenaissancerdquo] In the latest study of the Harlem School The Harlem Renaissance Revaluations (1989) Geta LeSeuraffirms that ldquoClaude McKay remains today part of the acknowledged literary triumvirate of the Harlem Renaissance Heshares this prestigious position with Langston Hughes and Jean Toomerrdquo Her view is typical of the current scholarshiprsquosunderstanding of McKayrsquos affiliations

One fruitful close reading of McKayrsquos workmdasha reading heretofore denied himmdashhowever forces us to the conclusion that to

Page 263 |

anchor his consciousness in Harlem is to dislocate his true emotional geography it is indeed to misread the map of hispolitical awareness If we would account for all the elements of his thought we might have to take McKay for what he reallywas in life a colonial writer who happened to stop over in Harlem on his lifelong quest for a spiritual home on a questincidentally that no colonial writer has ever effectively escaped His association with Harlem it can be affirmed was no morethan what Harlem itself has been to Afro-American letters ldquoa moment in renaissancismrdquo [according to Houston A Baker Jrin his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance] Such being the case by continuing to identify his work exclusively withHarlemrsquos ethos we have not only robbed it of its uniqueness but also denied it the central place it deserves in the globaldiscourse of black writers that McKay so ably initiated Arbitrary points of reference have led us only to skewed inferences

Unable or unwilling to read McKay as a writer from Jamaica then a British colony and hence as one with a mind-setentirely different from that of the Harlemite many critics have landed themselves in a puzzle James Weldon Johnson aperson whom McKay in the dedicatory note to Harlem Negro Metropolis (1940) calls a ldquofriend and wise counselorrdquo findsMcKayrsquos lifelong nostalgia for Jamaica intriguing ldquoReading McKayrsquos poetry of rebellionrdquo says Johnson ldquoit is difficult toconceive of him dreaming of his native Jamaica and singingrdquo Such perplexity results obviously from an ignorance of or fromignoring a basic fact about the colonial sensibility that it straddles two worldsmdashthe one of its origin the other of its adoptionPolitically its values and attitudes derive from and swing between the two sets It sides at once with each of the twoantagonists the victim and the victimizer

That McKay should have been assimilated into the Harlem Renaissance looks rather natural in retrospect For one thingnoticed when literary history understood artistic works in terms of schools or movements Claude McKay was bound to beread as part of the Harlem Renaissance especially since to be black and to have a powerful literary voice was considerednothing less than miraculous hellip [According to Alain Locke in The New Negro An Interpretation] his poems truly servedas a clarion call to the New Negro ldquothe younger generation

Sidebar Hide

ldquoUnable or unwilling to read Mckay as a writer from Jamaica then a British colony and hence as one with amind-set entirely different from that of the Harlemite many critics have landed themselves in a puzzlerdquo

[that was] vibrant with a new psychologyrdquo But to credit McKay with the boom and bloom of black art and literature or withthe general growth of interest in Harlem is to be guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy That the birth of theRenaissance followed McKayrsquos departure from Harlem need not argue for his paternity of the movement

McKayrsquos own comments about the Harlem Renaissance distant and mocking would argue against his incorporation into themovement Invited by James Weldon Johnson ldquoto return to America to participate in the Negro renaissance movementrdquoMcKay found himself loathe to return to Harlem for he explained years later [in his A Long Way from Home] ldquoif I didreturn I would have to find a new orientation among the Negro intelligentsiardquo This is hardly the sentiment of an author who issaid to have been the progenitor of the Renaissance Even when he did devote a book to the Negro Metropolis [titledHarlem Negro Metropolis] McKay could not bring himself to say anything more sympathetic about the Renaissance thanthe following

New Yorkers had discovered the existence of a fashionable clique and an artistic and literary set in HarlemThe big racket which crepitated from this discovery resulted in an enormously abnormal advertisement ofbohemian Harlem And even solid real estate values were affected by the fluid idealistic art values of Harlem

The truth is that McKay was even less responsible for the Harlem Renaissance than Pound had been for the Chicago Schoolof Poetry He was for the Harlem Renaissance but certainly not of it

Page 262 |

In this case ldquotropicsrdquo might be (metaphorically) read as tropical fruit but simultaneously stand in for all of the tropicsHowever these tropical treats do remind the speaker of his homeland The sight of them brings memories ldquoof fruit-treesladen by low-singing rills And dewy dawns and mystical blue skies in benediction over nun-like hillsrdquo Rills are smallbrooks or streams that lace Jamaicarsquos countryside and the hills are nun-like because blue skies are offering a blessing

This stanza also signals a move from the specific to the general as the sight of individual pieces of fruit (possibly in a bowl)moves the speakers so that he remembers the conditions that physically enabled their existence (dawn skies hills) Thereader can also consider the present in which the speaker initially sees the fruit in the window as the fruit of the past That isthe speakerrsquos initial experience of his homeland made possible the nostalgia and longing he feels when seeing a bowl of fruityears later

Nostalgia is a fitting theme for a poet who left his native country as a young man to come to the United States It is also asubject made popular by English Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth who wrote many poems mourning the loss oftraditions people and humanityrsquos relationship to nature McKay in ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo is not merely expressing hisyearning for Jamaican fruit He is showing the reader through his choice of details what he misses about his country itsspectacular landscape its spirituality its sheer fecundity McKay could have written a poem about how after stumblingacross seashells at a corner store he was suddenly reminded of the Jamaican coast but writing about such a commonplaceitem as fruit allowed him to pack more resonance in his images

We associate ripe fruit especially tropical fruit with abundance with the sheer headiness of being alive and growing It isexotic and sweet and pleasurable much like many of our own (good) memories of childhood Though as readers we are notconsciously aware of these associations they are there nonetheless and affect our reception of the poem

After two stanzas of description the narrator discusses its significance We now understand that we were seeing what thespeaker was seeing that the narratorrsquos ldquoIrdquo was the photographic eye This stanza however contains no description becausethe speakerrsquos ldquoeyes grew dimrdquo Instead we have a comment on the previous description which allows us to understand thedescriptionrsquos purpose This stanza tells us the meaning of what the first two stanzas showed us The speaker is hungry notfor bananas cocoa mangoes and grapefruit but ldquofor the old familiar waysrdquo McKayrsquos use of the word ldquohungryrdquo to describehis desire is appropriate given the poemrsquos imagery

In ldquoClaude McKayrsquos Romanticismrdquo in CLA Journal Geta LeSeur writes that ldquothe progression [from the first two stanzas tothe third] is from glorious song to despair It is one of his most moving poems on this themerdquo The reader must keep in mindhowever that the despair is also informed by the speakerrsquos implicit recognition of the discrepancy between New York Cityone of the largest urban centers in the world and the pastoral idyllic setting McKay portrays as his home

ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquo first appeared in 1920 in The Liberator a radical socialist newspaper There is nothinghowever explicitly or implicitly radical about the poem In fact an argument could be made that the piece is conservativebecause of the (implicit) desire the speaker expresses to go home again

Though a communist sympathizer for a good part of his adult life many of McKayrsquos early poems deal with traditional themesand subject matter In many ways he was a modern romantic Like the Romantics McKay frequently wrote out of personalexperience the ldquoIrdquo in the poem was more often than not McKay LeSeur observes that ldquoMcKay obviously is the speaker inthis poem although he speaks for the hundreds of West Indians who became exiles away from their homeland primarilybecause of economic and diplomatic reasons The poem therefore does have a oneness of feeling about it The alienationfelt is one of time and distance and the consequence and helplessness is clearly felt in the last three linesrdquo

Though McKay wrote about his hunger for the old ways of his native land we can also read this poem as an example

though not the best of McKayrsquos own theory of poetry In his theory he frequently promoted traditional poetic forms In hisintroduction to Harlem Shadows his only book of verse McKay writes that the eighteenth-century Scottish poet RobertBurnsmdasha traditionalistmdashwas a primary influence on his work McKay believed that the traditional should ldquowork best onlawless and revolutionary passion and words so as to give the feeling of the highest degree of spontaneity and freedomrdquo

However it is hard to see exactly how lawless and revolutionary McKayrsquos own words and passions are in ldquoThe TropicsrdquoWritten in iambic pentameter and employing an abab cdcd efef rhyme scheme this lyric poem focuses on the lament of oneindividual not as LeSeur suggests the numerous exiles from the West Indies A lyric is usually a short poem consisting of thewords of a single speaker Employing the first person ldquoIrdquo the lyric most often revolves around or expresses the feeling orstate of mind of the speaker

Burnsrsquos poem ldquoO my loversquos like a red red roserdquo for example expresses the speakerrsquos passion for his sweetheart Lyricsmay or may not be written in iambic pentameter Iambic pentameter means that each of the poemrsquos lines consist of five(penta) feet Meter is measured in feet and a foot usually contains a stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllablesAn ldquoiambicrdquo foot the most common in English poetry consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable Thefirst line of ldquoThe TropicsrdquomdashldquoBananas ripe and green and ginger-rootrdquomdashcontains ten syllables alternately unstressed andstressed

McKay uses a traditional form to write about traditional subjects loss and nostalgia It is precisely his use of tradition thatcritics have applauded viewing him as a poet whose work embodies universal rather than African American ideals Perhapsbetter examples of his theory of how traditional forms can give shape to radical content are his Shakespearean sonnetsldquoAmericardquo and ldquoThe White Cityrdquo Both of these poems criticize America and the cultural oppression of African Americansbut they do so in a way that conventional critics appreciate Said another way critics have praised McKay because heplayed by the rules

Source Chris Semansky in an essay for Poetry for Students Gale 1998

P S Chauhan

In the following excerpt Chauhan disagrees with those who think McKayrsquos works reflect the consciousness of theHarlem Renaissance instead pointing out a ldquocolonial sensibilityrdquo that stems he believes from the poetrsquos Jamaicanheritage

If McKayrsquos conflicting views were an enigma to his friends the ambiguities of his work are a bafflement to his criticsNaturally the variant readings of the man and his fiction today constitute the central problem of McKay scholarship WayneCooper McKayrsquos biographer [who wrote Claude McKay Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance] trying to find anacceptable solution locates the source of all ideological paradoxes in the personal pathology of a personality ldquocharacterizedalways by a deep-seated ambivalencerdquo that was caused mainly by ldquodependence upon a succession of father figuresrdquo

There is another way however to explain the presence of incongruous elements in McKayrsquos work It is more than likely thathis work seems paradoxical because it has been read in an inappropriate context Beginning with James Weldon JohnsonrsquosBlack Manhattan (1930) critics have concluded certainly to their satisfaction that McKay was ldquoof the Harlem grouprdquoindeed that he was ldquoone of the movementrsquos ornamentsrdquo [according to George E Kent in his article ldquoPatterns of the HarlemRenaissancerdquo] In the latest study of the Harlem School The Harlem Renaissance Revaluations (1989) Geta LeSeuraffirms that ldquoClaude McKay remains today part of the acknowledged literary triumvirate of the Harlem Renaissance Heshares this prestigious position with Langston Hughes and Jean Toomerrdquo Her view is typical of the current scholarshiprsquosunderstanding of McKayrsquos affiliations

One fruitful close reading of McKayrsquos workmdasha reading heretofore denied himmdashhowever forces us to the conclusion that to

Page 263 |

anchor his consciousness in Harlem is to dislocate his true emotional geography it is indeed to misread the map of hispolitical awareness If we would account for all the elements of his thought we might have to take McKay for what he reallywas in life a colonial writer who happened to stop over in Harlem on his lifelong quest for a spiritual home on a questincidentally that no colonial writer has ever effectively escaped His association with Harlem it can be affirmed was no morethan what Harlem itself has been to Afro-American letters ldquoa moment in renaissancismrdquo [according to Houston A Baker Jrin his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance] Such being the case by continuing to identify his work exclusively withHarlemrsquos ethos we have not only robbed it of its uniqueness but also denied it the central place it deserves in the globaldiscourse of black writers that McKay so ably initiated Arbitrary points of reference have led us only to skewed inferences

Unable or unwilling to read McKay as a writer from Jamaica then a British colony and hence as one with a mind-setentirely different from that of the Harlemite many critics have landed themselves in a puzzle James Weldon Johnson aperson whom McKay in the dedicatory note to Harlem Negro Metropolis (1940) calls a ldquofriend and wise counselorrdquo findsMcKayrsquos lifelong nostalgia for Jamaica intriguing ldquoReading McKayrsquos poetry of rebellionrdquo says Johnson ldquoit is difficult toconceive of him dreaming of his native Jamaica and singingrdquo Such perplexity results obviously from an ignorance of or fromignoring a basic fact about the colonial sensibility that it straddles two worldsmdashthe one of its origin the other of its adoptionPolitically its values and attitudes derive from and swing between the two sets It sides at once with each of the twoantagonists the victim and the victimizer

That McKay should have been assimilated into the Harlem Renaissance looks rather natural in retrospect For one thingnoticed when literary history understood artistic works in terms of schools or movements Claude McKay was bound to beread as part of the Harlem Renaissance especially since to be black and to have a powerful literary voice was considerednothing less than miraculous hellip [According to Alain Locke in The New Negro An Interpretation] his poems truly servedas a clarion call to the New Negro ldquothe younger generation

Sidebar Hide

ldquoUnable or unwilling to read Mckay as a writer from Jamaica then a British colony and hence as one with amind-set entirely different from that of the Harlemite many critics have landed themselves in a puzzlerdquo

[that was] vibrant with a new psychologyrdquo But to credit McKay with the boom and bloom of black art and literature or withthe general growth of interest in Harlem is to be guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy That the birth of theRenaissance followed McKayrsquos departure from Harlem need not argue for his paternity of the movement

McKayrsquos own comments about the Harlem Renaissance distant and mocking would argue against his incorporation into themovement Invited by James Weldon Johnson ldquoto return to America to participate in the Negro renaissance movementrdquoMcKay found himself loathe to return to Harlem for he explained years later [in his A Long Way from Home] ldquoif I didreturn I would have to find a new orientation among the Negro intelligentsiardquo This is hardly the sentiment of an author who issaid to have been the progenitor of the Renaissance Even when he did devote a book to the Negro Metropolis [titledHarlem Negro Metropolis] McKay could not bring himself to say anything more sympathetic about the Renaissance thanthe following

New Yorkers had discovered the existence of a fashionable clique and an artistic and literary set in HarlemThe big racket which crepitated from this discovery resulted in an enormously abnormal advertisement ofbohemian Harlem And even solid real estate values were affected by the fluid idealistic art values of Harlem

The truth is that McKay was even less responsible for the Harlem Renaissance than Pound had been for the Chicago Schoolof Poetry He was for the Harlem Renaissance but certainly not of it

though not the best of McKayrsquos own theory of poetry In his theory he frequently promoted traditional poetic forms In hisintroduction to Harlem Shadows his only book of verse McKay writes that the eighteenth-century Scottish poet RobertBurnsmdasha traditionalistmdashwas a primary influence on his work McKay believed that the traditional should ldquowork best onlawless and revolutionary passion and words so as to give the feeling of the highest degree of spontaneity and freedomrdquo

However it is hard to see exactly how lawless and revolutionary McKayrsquos own words and passions are in ldquoThe TropicsrdquoWritten in iambic pentameter and employing an abab cdcd efef rhyme scheme this lyric poem focuses on the lament of oneindividual not as LeSeur suggests the numerous exiles from the West Indies A lyric is usually a short poem consisting of thewords of a single speaker Employing the first person ldquoIrdquo the lyric most often revolves around or expresses the feeling orstate of mind of the speaker

Burnsrsquos poem ldquoO my loversquos like a red red roserdquo for example expresses the speakerrsquos passion for his sweetheart Lyricsmay or may not be written in iambic pentameter Iambic pentameter means that each of the poemrsquos lines consist of five(penta) feet Meter is measured in feet and a foot usually contains a stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllablesAn ldquoiambicrdquo foot the most common in English poetry consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable Thefirst line of ldquoThe TropicsrdquomdashldquoBananas ripe and green and ginger-rootrdquomdashcontains ten syllables alternately unstressed andstressed

McKay uses a traditional form to write about traditional subjects loss and nostalgia It is precisely his use of tradition thatcritics have applauded viewing him as a poet whose work embodies universal rather than African American ideals Perhapsbetter examples of his theory of how traditional forms can give shape to radical content are his Shakespearean sonnetsldquoAmericardquo and ldquoThe White Cityrdquo Both of these poems criticize America and the cultural oppression of African Americansbut they do so in a way that conventional critics appreciate Said another way critics have praised McKay because heplayed by the rules

Source Chris Semansky in an essay for Poetry for Students Gale 1998

P S Chauhan

In the following excerpt Chauhan disagrees with those who think McKayrsquos works reflect the consciousness of theHarlem Renaissance instead pointing out a ldquocolonial sensibilityrdquo that stems he believes from the poetrsquos Jamaicanheritage

If McKayrsquos conflicting views were an enigma to his friends the ambiguities of his work are a bafflement to his criticsNaturally the variant readings of the man and his fiction today constitute the central problem of McKay scholarship WayneCooper McKayrsquos biographer [who wrote Claude McKay Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance] trying to find anacceptable solution locates the source of all ideological paradoxes in the personal pathology of a personality ldquocharacterizedalways by a deep-seated ambivalencerdquo that was caused mainly by ldquodependence upon a succession of father figuresrdquo

There is another way however to explain the presence of incongruous elements in McKayrsquos work It is more than likely thathis work seems paradoxical because it has been read in an inappropriate context Beginning with James Weldon JohnsonrsquosBlack Manhattan (1930) critics have concluded certainly to their satisfaction that McKay was ldquoof the Harlem grouprdquoindeed that he was ldquoone of the movementrsquos ornamentsrdquo [according to George E Kent in his article ldquoPatterns of the HarlemRenaissancerdquo] In the latest study of the Harlem School The Harlem Renaissance Revaluations (1989) Geta LeSeuraffirms that ldquoClaude McKay remains today part of the acknowledged literary triumvirate of the Harlem Renaissance Heshares this prestigious position with Langston Hughes and Jean Toomerrdquo Her view is typical of the current scholarshiprsquosunderstanding of McKayrsquos affiliations

One fruitful close reading of McKayrsquos workmdasha reading heretofore denied himmdashhowever forces us to the conclusion that to

Page 263 |

anchor his consciousness in Harlem is to dislocate his true emotional geography it is indeed to misread the map of hispolitical awareness If we would account for all the elements of his thought we might have to take McKay for what he reallywas in life a colonial writer who happened to stop over in Harlem on his lifelong quest for a spiritual home on a questincidentally that no colonial writer has ever effectively escaped His association with Harlem it can be affirmed was no morethan what Harlem itself has been to Afro-American letters ldquoa moment in renaissancismrdquo [according to Houston A Baker Jrin his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance] Such being the case by continuing to identify his work exclusively withHarlemrsquos ethos we have not only robbed it of its uniqueness but also denied it the central place it deserves in the globaldiscourse of black writers that McKay so ably initiated Arbitrary points of reference have led us only to skewed inferences

Unable or unwilling to read McKay as a writer from Jamaica then a British colony and hence as one with a mind-setentirely different from that of the Harlemite many critics have landed themselves in a puzzle James Weldon Johnson aperson whom McKay in the dedicatory note to Harlem Negro Metropolis (1940) calls a ldquofriend and wise counselorrdquo findsMcKayrsquos lifelong nostalgia for Jamaica intriguing ldquoReading McKayrsquos poetry of rebellionrdquo says Johnson ldquoit is difficult toconceive of him dreaming of his native Jamaica and singingrdquo Such perplexity results obviously from an ignorance of or fromignoring a basic fact about the colonial sensibility that it straddles two worldsmdashthe one of its origin the other of its adoptionPolitically its values and attitudes derive from and swing between the two sets It sides at once with each of the twoantagonists the victim and the victimizer

That McKay should have been assimilated into the Harlem Renaissance looks rather natural in retrospect For one thingnoticed when literary history understood artistic works in terms of schools or movements Claude McKay was bound to beread as part of the Harlem Renaissance especially since to be black and to have a powerful literary voice was considerednothing less than miraculous hellip [According to Alain Locke in The New Negro An Interpretation] his poems truly servedas a clarion call to the New Negro ldquothe younger generation

Sidebar Hide

ldquoUnable or unwilling to read Mckay as a writer from Jamaica then a British colony and hence as one with amind-set entirely different from that of the Harlemite many critics have landed themselves in a puzzlerdquo

[that was] vibrant with a new psychologyrdquo But to credit McKay with the boom and bloom of black art and literature or withthe general growth of interest in Harlem is to be guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy That the birth of theRenaissance followed McKayrsquos departure from Harlem need not argue for his paternity of the movement

McKayrsquos own comments about the Harlem Renaissance distant and mocking would argue against his incorporation into themovement Invited by James Weldon Johnson ldquoto return to America to participate in the Negro renaissance movementrdquoMcKay found himself loathe to return to Harlem for he explained years later [in his A Long Way from Home] ldquoif I didreturn I would have to find a new orientation among the Negro intelligentsiardquo This is hardly the sentiment of an author who issaid to have been the progenitor of the Renaissance Even when he did devote a book to the Negro Metropolis [titledHarlem Negro Metropolis] McKay could not bring himself to say anything more sympathetic about the Renaissance thanthe following

New Yorkers had discovered the existence of a fashionable clique and an artistic and literary set in HarlemThe big racket which crepitated from this discovery resulted in an enormously abnormal advertisement ofbohemian Harlem And even solid real estate values were affected by the fluid idealistic art values of Harlem

The truth is that McKay was even less responsible for the Harlem Renaissance than Pound had been for the Chicago Schoolof Poetry He was for the Harlem Renaissance but certainly not of it

Page 263 |

anchor his consciousness in Harlem is to dislocate his true emotional geography it is indeed to misread the map of hispolitical awareness If we would account for all the elements of his thought we might have to take McKay for what he reallywas in life a colonial writer who happened to stop over in Harlem on his lifelong quest for a spiritual home on a questincidentally that no colonial writer has ever effectively escaped His association with Harlem it can be affirmed was no morethan what Harlem itself has been to Afro-American letters ldquoa moment in renaissancismrdquo [according to Houston A Baker Jrin his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance] Such being the case by continuing to identify his work exclusively withHarlemrsquos ethos we have not only robbed it of its uniqueness but also denied it the central place it deserves in the globaldiscourse of black writers that McKay so ably initiated Arbitrary points of reference have led us only to skewed inferences

Unable or unwilling to read McKay as a writer from Jamaica then a British colony and hence as one with a mind-setentirely different from that of the Harlemite many critics have landed themselves in a puzzle James Weldon Johnson aperson whom McKay in the dedicatory note to Harlem Negro Metropolis (1940) calls a ldquofriend and wise counselorrdquo findsMcKayrsquos lifelong nostalgia for Jamaica intriguing ldquoReading McKayrsquos poetry of rebellionrdquo says Johnson ldquoit is difficult toconceive of him dreaming of his native Jamaica and singingrdquo Such perplexity results obviously from an ignorance of or fromignoring a basic fact about the colonial sensibility that it straddles two worldsmdashthe one of its origin the other of its adoptionPolitically its values and attitudes derive from and swing between the two sets It sides at once with each of the twoantagonists the victim and the victimizer

That McKay should have been assimilated into the Harlem Renaissance looks rather natural in retrospect For one thingnoticed when literary history understood artistic works in terms of schools or movements Claude McKay was bound to beread as part of the Harlem Renaissance especially since to be black and to have a powerful literary voice was considerednothing less than miraculous hellip [According to Alain Locke in The New Negro An Interpretation] his poems truly servedas a clarion call to the New Negro ldquothe younger generation

Sidebar Hide

ldquoUnable or unwilling to read Mckay as a writer from Jamaica then a British colony and hence as one with amind-set entirely different from that of the Harlemite many critics have landed themselves in a puzzlerdquo

[that was] vibrant with a new psychologyrdquo But to credit McKay with the boom and bloom of black art and literature or withthe general growth of interest in Harlem is to be guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy That the birth of theRenaissance followed McKayrsquos departure from Harlem need not argue for his paternity of the movement

McKayrsquos own comments about the Harlem Renaissance distant and mocking would argue against his incorporation into themovement Invited by James Weldon Johnson ldquoto return to America to participate in the Negro renaissance movementrdquoMcKay found himself loathe to return to Harlem for he explained years later [in his A Long Way from Home] ldquoif I didreturn I would have to find a new orientation among the Negro intelligentsiardquo This is hardly the sentiment of an author who issaid to have been the progenitor of the Renaissance Even when he did devote a book to the Negro Metropolis [titledHarlem Negro Metropolis] McKay could not bring himself to say anything more sympathetic about the Renaissance thanthe following

New Yorkers had discovered the existence of a fashionable clique and an artistic and literary set in HarlemThe big racket which crepitated from this discovery resulted in an enormously abnormal advertisement ofbohemian Harlem And even solid real estate values were affected by the fluid idealistic art values of Harlem

The truth is that McKay was even less responsible for the Harlem Renaissance than Pound had been for the Chicago Schoolof Poetry He was for the Harlem Renaissance but certainly not of it

Page 264 |

Yet to stress McKayrsquos colonial heritage is by no means to minimize his value to the movement or the overall worth of hiswork To the contrary his work did indeed carve out a path which black writers all over the world not only the Harlemitecould if they would follow Some of them hellip dared not follow McKayrsquos lead But a few others did Aimeacute Ceacutesaireaccording to the interview published in Discourse on Colonialism (1955) was inspired by McKayrsquos novel Banjo (1930)which for him was ldquoreally one of the first works in which an author spoke of the Negro and gave him a certain literarydignityrdquo That McKayrsquos self-assurance like his passionate devotion to the cause of the black race did a yeomanrsquos service tothe advancement of African American literature is a fact widely and correctly accepted

What is little suspected however is the pervasive presence of the colonial sensibility in his work This essay seeks to identifyonly a few of the traits distinguishing the colonial strainhellip

Linguistically his work bears the mark all too common to the writing done in colonies It is pulled by two gravitational forcesthe one of his native tongue the other of the language of the colonizer In his first book of poems published in the UnitedStates Harlem Shadows (1922) McKay confesses to the linguistic tension that had been part of his upbringing ldquoThespeech of my childhood and early youthrdquo he writes ldquowas the Jamaica dialect hellip which still preserves a few words of Africanorigin and which is more diffcult of understanding than the American Negro dialect But the language we wrote and read inschool was Englandrsquos Englishrdquo The dual versions of the language like those of the island culture internalized during theperiod of his cognitive development haunt McKayrsquos work to the very end and affect its tone and texture in various wayshellip

The argument of McKayrsquos later poetry like the diction of his earlier poems is disposed around two poles the vernacularand the metropolitan The progression of his well-known poems readily reveals the bipolar tensions that underlie theconceptual design of his verses Whether it be ldquoTo One Coming Northrdquo ldquoNorth and Southrdquo or ldquoThe Tropics in New Yorkrdquothe absent landscape of Jamaica is so powerfully present in the poems as to displace the New York scene the immediatelocale and the subject of the poemhellip

[F]or a poet grounded in British education and well versed in Milton Wordsworth Keats and Hopkins it was as naturalthat he should use the disciplined form of a sonnet as it was that he should possess ldquothe classical feelingrdquo which Frank Harrisdiscovered in his poetry Just as McKayrsquos cynicism and invective came from his experience as a subaltern in an imperialcolony the sonnet form came from his formal education in the classics of the colonizer

Even when McKay had managed to slough off the Jamaica dialect he continued to be possessed by the memories of theJamaican flora and fauna It is only by reconginizing McKayrsquos unconscious proclivity towards Jamaican animals that one mayexplain why his imagery militates against the texture of the traditional narrative His yarn spun with the staple of the Englishidiom sets up expectations associated with the tenor of the average English novel But before the reader has a chance tosettle down he is suddenly jolted as tropical imagery leaps at himhellip

It seems that McKayrsquos mind harking back to the tropical landscape of his native island quietly ushers its beasts into theparlors of Manhattan and the restaurants of Marseilles Even as the author negotiates the surge and rhythm of the Englishsentence his memory drags in the native creatures populating in consequence the metropolitan English narrative withstrange birds beasts and flowers

His punctuating the English prose with the bestiary of Jamaica creates resonances that travel beyond the fictional narrativehellip

McKay seems hellip to have picked up bits and pieces of the white colonizerrsquos disdain for the native black community for it isthe Masterrsquos stance that comes through in the colonial authorrsquos unguarded moments

One reason why McKayrsquos attitude towards black characters is less than respectful is that unlike Harlem writersmdashJean

Page 265 |

Toomer Zora Neale Hurston and Rudolph Fisher who went to their folk rootsmdashMcKay went for literary inspiration toAnglo-Saxon masters to Dickens Shaw Whitman and Lawrence As a person raised in a colony it was impossible for himtotally to divest his mind of the literature and the attitudes of the colonizer and to adopt the literary genealogy of the African-American peers of his generation

Nothing in McKayrsquos writing so powerfuly registers his ambivalence towards the interest of the Harlem community as hisshifting attitude towards the Harlem prostitute If the narrator of the poem ldquoHarlem Shadowsrdquo is the rueful patriarchbemoaning the corruption of the ldquolittle dark girls who in slippered feet Go prowling through the night from street to streetrdquo

that of the novel Home to Harlem gloats in the depredations of Jake and his associates who like predators go stalkingthrough the night always ldquohungry foh a lirsquol brown honeyrdquo The poem and the novel read together suggest an author runningwith the hare and hunting with the houndhellip

The only character of McKayrsquos who ever finds a home is Bita (Banana Bottom 1933) but such arrival for a fictionalcharacter becomes possible only when the writerrsquos fancy returns to settle in his native land as for once it did The home forMcKay was never Harlem but Jamaica where alone his characters could regain their integrity

It can well be argued that McKayrsquos vacillation between alternating preferences for the native culture and the metropolitanlike his pull between the pastoral and the urban between an allegiance to Marxism and a desire for free peasantry can besatifactorily explained only in terms of the colonialrsquos attachment to the simple rhythms of his native world and to a fascinationfor the metropolitan systems of the West whose cruelty and inequity would constantly drive his thoughts back to the securityof a remembered community A creature of colonial experience McKay was condemned to dwell in the limbo of theimagination of the colonized unable forever to state a clear-cut preference That is the primary reason why his work seemsso paradoxical why it bears the print of the journeys between the polarities of a divided mind

To comprehend him satisfactorily therefore one must approach McKay not from one direction alone but from two Onemust read McKay indeed one must re-read McKay in a context different from that of the Harlem Renaissance the contexthe has long been relegated to In order to appreciate the nature of his ambiguities one must recognize the intellectual baggagehe brought with him to Harlemmdashthe English attitudes a European sensibility and the general impedimenta of a colonial mindcongnitive elements altogether unknown to most Harlemites

Source P S Chauhan ldquoRereading Claude McKayrdquo in CLA Journal Vol 34 No 1 September 1990 pp 68-80

Sources

LeSeur Geta J ldquoClaude McKayrsquos Romanticismrdquo in CLA Journal Vol 32 No 3 March 1989 pp 296-308

Margolies Edward Native Sons A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Black American Authors Philadelphia JPLippencott Company 1968

Ojo-Ade Femi ldquoClaude McKay The Tragic Solitude of an Exiled Son of Africardquo in Of Dreams Deferred Dead or AliveAfrican Perspectives on African-American Writers Westport CT Greenwood Press 1996

Wagner Jean ldquoClaude McKayrdquo in Black Poets of the United States From Paul Laurence Dunbar to LangstonHughes translated by Kenneth Douglas University of Illinois Press 1973 pp 197-257

White Walter F ldquoNegro Poetsrdquo in The Nation New York Vol 114 No 2970 June 7 1922 pp 694-95

For Further Study

Cooper Wayne Claude McKay Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance A Biography Louisiana State UniversityPress 1996

In this comprehensive biography Cooper traces McKayrsquos search for identity from his Jamaican familybackground to his years in Harlem Paris England and beyond

Tillery Tyrone Claude McKay A Black Poetrsquos Struggle for Identity University of Massachusetts Press 1992

Addresses McKayrsquos ldquotough and angryrdquo personality in a well-rounded look at the writer and his work Thestudy is as much of a look inside the thriving intellectual Harlem scene as it is a biography of the ldquoblack radicalsocialistrdquo poet

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) The Tropics in New York Poetry for Students Ed Mary Ruby Vol 4 Detroit Gale 1999 254-265 Gale VirtualReference Library Web 13 Mar 2013

Document URLhttpgogalegroupcompsidoid=GALE7CCX2691200030ampv=21ampu=k12_gvrlampit=rampp=GVRLampsw=w

Gale Document Number GALE|CX2691200030

Page 265 |

Toomer Zora Neale Hurston and Rudolph Fisher who went to their folk rootsmdashMcKay went for literary inspiration toAnglo-Saxon masters to Dickens Shaw Whitman and Lawrence As a person raised in a colony it was impossible for himtotally to divest his mind of the literature and the attitudes of the colonizer and to adopt the literary genealogy of the African-American peers of his generation

Nothing in McKayrsquos writing so powerfuly registers his ambivalence towards the interest of the Harlem community as hisshifting attitude towards the Harlem prostitute If the narrator of the poem ldquoHarlem Shadowsrdquo is the rueful patriarchbemoaning the corruption of the ldquolittle dark girls who in slippered feet Go prowling through the night from street to streetrdquo

that of the novel Home to Harlem gloats in the depredations of Jake and his associates who like predators go stalkingthrough the night always ldquohungry foh a lirsquol brown honeyrdquo The poem and the novel read together suggest an author runningwith the hare and hunting with the houndhellip

The only character of McKayrsquos who ever finds a home is Bita (Banana Bottom 1933) but such arrival for a fictionalcharacter becomes possible only when the writerrsquos fancy returns to settle in his native land as for once it did The home forMcKay was never Harlem but Jamaica where alone his characters could regain their integrity

It can well be argued that McKayrsquos vacillation between alternating preferences for the native culture and the metropolitanlike his pull between the pastoral and the urban between an allegiance to Marxism and a desire for free peasantry can besatifactorily explained only in terms of the colonialrsquos attachment to the simple rhythms of his native world and to a fascinationfor the metropolitan systems of the West whose cruelty and inequity would constantly drive his thoughts back to the securityof a remembered community A creature of colonial experience McKay was condemned to dwell in the limbo of theimagination of the colonized unable forever to state a clear-cut preference That is the primary reason why his work seemsso paradoxical why it bears the print of the journeys between the polarities of a divided mind

To comprehend him satisfactorily therefore one must approach McKay not from one direction alone but from two Onemust read McKay indeed one must re-read McKay in a context different from that of the Harlem Renaissance the contexthe has long been relegated to In order to appreciate the nature of his ambiguities one must recognize the intellectual baggagehe brought with him to Harlemmdashthe English attitudes a European sensibility and the general impedimenta of a colonial mindcongnitive elements altogether unknown to most Harlemites

Source P S Chauhan ldquoRereading Claude McKayrdquo in CLA Journal Vol 34 No 1 September 1990 pp 68-80

Sources

LeSeur Geta J ldquoClaude McKayrsquos Romanticismrdquo in CLA Journal Vol 32 No 3 March 1989 pp 296-308

Margolies Edward Native Sons A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Black American Authors Philadelphia JPLippencott Company 1968

Ojo-Ade Femi ldquoClaude McKay The Tragic Solitude of an Exiled Son of Africardquo in Of Dreams Deferred Dead or AliveAfrican Perspectives on African-American Writers Westport CT Greenwood Press 1996

Wagner Jean ldquoClaude McKayrdquo in Black Poets of the United States From Paul Laurence Dunbar to LangstonHughes translated by Kenneth Douglas University of Illinois Press 1973 pp 197-257

White Walter F ldquoNegro Poetsrdquo in The Nation New York Vol 114 No 2970 June 7 1922 pp 694-95

For Further Study

Cooper Wayne Claude McKay Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance A Biography Louisiana State UniversityPress 1996

In this comprehensive biography Cooper traces McKayrsquos search for identity from his Jamaican familybackground to his years in Harlem Paris England and beyond

Tillery Tyrone Claude McKay A Black Poetrsquos Struggle for Identity University of Massachusetts Press 1992

Addresses McKayrsquos ldquotough and angryrdquo personality in a well-rounded look at the writer and his work Thestudy is as much of a look inside the thriving intellectual Harlem scene as it is a biography of the ldquoblack radicalsocialistrdquo poet

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) The Tropics in New York Poetry for Students Ed Mary Ruby Vol 4 Detroit Gale 1999 254-265 Gale VirtualReference Library Web 13 Mar 2013

Document URLhttpgogalegroupcompsidoid=GALE7CCX2691200030ampv=21ampu=k12_gvrlampit=rampp=GVRLampsw=w

Gale Document Number GALE|CX2691200030

For Further Study

Cooper Wayne Claude McKay Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance A Biography Louisiana State UniversityPress 1996

In this comprehensive biography Cooper traces McKayrsquos search for identity from his Jamaican familybackground to his years in Harlem Paris England and beyond

Tillery Tyrone Claude McKay A Black Poetrsquos Struggle for Identity University of Massachusetts Press 1992

Addresses McKayrsquos ldquotough and angryrdquo personality in a well-rounded look at the writer and his work Thestudy is as much of a look inside the thriving intellectual Harlem scene as it is a biography of the ldquoblack radicalsocialistrdquo poet

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) The Tropics in New York Poetry for Students Ed Mary Ruby Vol 4 Detroit Gale 1999 254-265 Gale VirtualReference Library Web 13 Mar 2013

Document URLhttpgogalegroupcompsidoid=GALE7CCX2691200030ampv=21ampu=k12_gvrlampit=rampp=GVRLampsw=w

Gale Document Number GALE|CX2691200030