|
Claude McKay
The Revolutionary Poet
|
Festus Claudius McKay was born 1n 1890 in James Hill, Clarendon
the youngest of eleven children born to Thomas and Hannah
McKay. Claude became an avid reader and started writing poetry at
the age of ten. Claude was home schooled by his eldest brother,
Uriah, a school teacher, who had an extensive library and the young
Claude studied classical literature, British literature, philosophy,
science and theology. In 1907 he met an
Englishman, Walter Jekyll, who encouraged the young teenager in his
writing and suggested he write in patois. Jekyll helped him publish
his first book, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. This was the first
written work in patois. A few months later he published Constab
Ballads, based on his very short stint with the Jamaica Constabulary
Force.
1912 was also the
year he left Jamaica to study agronomy at Tuskegee University in
South Carolina in the United States. It was there that his soul
began its awakening, as the young Jamaican was shocked and
distressed by the rampant racism of the American South. He became a
Socialist and then transferred to Kansas State University. Despite
excellent grades, in 1914 he left university and moved to New York,
married his childhood sweetheart, Eulalie Lewars, the marriage did
not last and Eulalie returned to Jamaica before their only child was
born. |
 |
|
Addressing the Third
Congress of Communist International
Moscow, 1923 |
In 1917 another
fortuitous even occurred, Claude met Max and Crystal Eastman who
published the socialist magazine, The Liberator. He quickly became
an editor, a position he held until 1922. He was not impressed with
either Garvey's Nationalism or the middleclass NAACP and became
involved with a group of Black radicals who expounded social
revolution and Black self-determination. During this period he also
travelled to England and Europe, including the U.S.S.R., where he
quickly became disillusioned with the rigidity of Communism and
returned to mainstream Socialism.
Living in New York in
the 1920s, it was only natural that McKay became one of the first
and most vocal players in
the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural revolution which played
out in New York and which brought many Black writers and musicians
to prominence during that period. There were also very serious race
riots during this period and McKay published several works at this
time. In 1928 he published Home to Harlem, which would become the
first bestseller written by a Black author.
|
|
|
McKay never returned
to Jamaica and never earned a comfortable living from his writings.
He died of a heart attack in Chicago in 1959.
In Jamaica we think
of Claude McKay as a great poet but in America he helped lay the
foundations of racial equality and of African-America literature. In
1939 when Winston Churchill declared war on Nazi Germany his
rallying cry was the first few lines of McKay's poem written during
the 1920s racial unrest in Harlem.
If
we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
|
 |
|
| The many sides
of
McKay's Poetry. Romantic, revolutionary and homesick. |
Spanish Needle
Lovely dainty Spanish needle
With your yellow flower and white,
Dew bedecked and softly sleeping,
Do you think of me to-night?
Shadowed by the spreading mango,
Nodding o'er the rippling stream,
Tell me, dear plant of my childhood,
Do you of the exile dream?
Do you see me by the brook's side
Catching crayfish 'neath the stone,
As you did the day you whispered:
Leave the harmless dears alone?
Do you see me in the meadow
Coming from the woodland spring
With a bamboo on my shoulder
And a pail slung from a string?
Do you see me all expectant
Lying in an orange grove,
While the swee-swees sing above me,
Waiting for my elf-eyed love?
Lovely dainty Spanish needle,
Source to me of sweet delight,
In your far-off sunny southland
Do you dream of me to-night? |
If We Must DieIf
we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! |
I Shall Return
I shall return again; I shall return
To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes
At golden noon the forest fires burn,
Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies.
I shall return to loiter by the streams
That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses,
And realize once more my thousand dreams
Of waters rushing down the mountain passes.
I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife
Of village dances, dear delicious tunes
That stir the hidden depths of native life,
Stray melodies of dim remembered runes.
I shall return, I shall return again,
To ease my mind of long, long years of pain. |
|
