Claude McKay

Early life in Jamaica

Claude McKay was born in Nairne Castle near James Hill in upper Clarendon Parish, Jamaica. McKay referred to his home village as Sunny Ville, a name given to the area by locals. He was the youngest child of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, well-to-do farmers who had enough property to qualify to vote. His parents were also active and well-respected members of the Baptist faith. Thomas was a strict, religious man who struggled to develop close relationships with his children due to his serious nature. In contrast, Claude's mother had a warmth that allowed her to give love freely to all of her children. Thomas was of Ashanti descent, while Claude's mother traced her ancestry to Madagascar. Claude recounted that his father would often share stories of Ashanti customs with the family.

At the age of four, he went to school at Mt. Zion Church. Around the age of nine, McKay was sent to live with his oldest brother, Uriah Theodore, also known as U'Theo, a teacher, to be given a proper education. Due to his brother's influence, McKay became an avid reader of classical and British literature, as well as philosophy, science and theology. At the age of 10, McKay started writing poetry.

In 1906, McKay became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinet maker known as Old Brenga, maintaining his apprenticeship for about two years. During that time, in 1907, McKay met a man named Walter Jekyll, who became a mentor and an inspiration for him, who also encouraged him to concentrate on his writing. Jekyll convinced McKay to write in his native dialect and then set some of McKay's verses to music. Jekyll helped McKay publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. These were the first poems published in Jamaican Patois (dialect of mainly English words and African structure). McKay's next volume, Constab Ballads (1912), was based on his experiences of joining the constabulary for a brief period in 1911.

Career in the United States

McKay left for the U.S. in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute. McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated, which inspired him to write more poetry. At Tuskegee, he disliked the "semi-military, machine-like existence there" and quickly left to study at Kansas State University. At Kansas State, he read W. E. B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him and stirred his political involvement. But despite superior academic performance, in 1914 McKay decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York City, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars.

McKay published two poems in 1917 in The Seven Arts under the pseudonym Eli Edwards while working as a waiter on the railways. In 1919, he met Crystal and Max Eastman, who produced The Liberator (where McKay would serve as co-executive editor until 1922). It was here, as the co-editor of The Liberator, that he published one of his most famous poems, "If We Must Die", during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies. The poem was reportedly later quoted by Winston Churchill during World War II.

McKay became involved with a group of black radicals who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey's nationalism and the middle-class reformist NAACP. These included other Caribbean writers such as Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and Wilfrid Domingo. They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution. Together they founded the semi-secret revolutionary organization, the African Blood Brotherhood. Hubert Harrison had asked McKay to write for Garvey's Negro World, but only a few copies of the paper have survived from this period, none of which contain any articles by McKay. McKay soon left for London, England.

In Europe and North Africa

In London

In 1919 McKay arrived in London, where he would frequently visit two clubs, one in Drury Lane, a soldier's club and the other in Shoreditch, the International Socialist Club. A militant atheist, he also joined the Rationalist Press Association. It was during this period that McKay's commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously. At the International Socialist Club, McKay met Shapurji Saklatvala, A. J. Cook, Guy Aldred, Jack Tanner, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst and George Lansbury. He was soon invited to write for Workers' Dreadnought.

In April 1920, the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a racist article written by E. D. Morel. Entitled "Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine", it insinuated gross hypersexuality on black people in general, but Lansbury refused to print McKay's response. This response then appeared in Workers' Dreadnought. Since January 1920, he had been involved with the Workers' Dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Federation, a Council Communist group active in the East End and which had a majority of women involved in it at all levels of the organization. He became a paid journalist for the paper; some people claim he was the first black journalist in Britain. He attended the Communist Unity Conference that established the Communist Party of Great Britain. At this time he also had some of his poetry published in the Cambridge Magazine, edited by C. K. Ogden.

When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for publishing articles "calculated and likely to cause sedition among His Majesty's forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population," McKay had his rooms searched. He is likely to have been the author of "The Yellow Peril and the Dockers" attributed to "Leon Lopez", which was one of the articles cited by the government in its case against Workers' Dreadnought.

In Russia

When Russia was under the rule of communists led by Lenin he was invited to Russia during the reconstruction of the country. In November 1922, in what he referred to as his "Magic Pilgrimage," he traveled to Russia with Max Eastman to take part in the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd and Moscow. McKay financed his trip to Russia by repackaging and selling Harlem Shadows, "complete with a signed photograph and an inflated price tag" to members of an NAACP donor list. He was greeted in Russia with an "ecstatic welcome" and "rock-star treatment."

In Africa

McKay writes about his travels in Morocco in his autobiography A Long Way from Home.

Participation in Harlem Renaissance

Claude McKay was a poet who flourished during the Harlem Renaissance, a major literary movement in the 1920s. During this time, McKay’s poems challenged white authority while celebrating Jamaican culture. He also wrote tales about the trials and tribulations of life as a black man in both Jamaica and America. McKay was not secretive about his hatred for racism and felt that racist people were stupid and could not look past their shortsightedness and hatred. In tales like Home to Harlem, McKay depicts a culture in Harlem that is full of drug use, prostitution, and a variety of sexual encounters. His depiction was criticized as a negative portrayal of Harlem and its lower-class citizens by prominent figures such as W.E.B. DuBois, but was later applauded as a literary force in the Harlem Renaissance. McKay’s poetry brought awareness to the racist treatment that many black individuals faced.

Modernism

Claude McKay divested himself from many aspects and growing prescriptions of modernism. McKay paved a path of his own as a modernist in two ways. By the beginning of the 20th century, the sonnet form had become an antiquated poetic style, but McKay found it an ideal a medium to convey his ideas. Many modernists, however, rejected and criticized his use of the sonnet. Despite their reaction, he persevered and created a significant number of modern sonnets.

Having spent time amongst the artists of Paris in the 1920s, McKay was intimately acquainted with the dynamics between painters and models and the manner in which modernist painters presented African subjects and African culture. In her article, “Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys,” Leah Rosenberg writes, “The fascination with African art and its identification with female sexuality was characteristic of modernist and avant-garde primitivism”. The inclination to stereotype and caricatures the African physical form created, however inadvertently, a form of hegemony reminiscent to McKay of the colonialism he grew up with in Jamaica. “Sexuality and black culture,” Rosenberg explains, “held a privileged place in modernist and avant-garde art from Picasso to Gertrude Stein”. In need of money, McKay posed nude for the Cubist painter Andre Lhote. Through his experience, McKay saw first-hand how the larger social hegemony between European white supremacy and people of Afro-Caribbean descent could play itself out between the artist and its subject. McKay critically recalled the experience in various ways in many of his most notable works. In doing so, he shined a critical light on a cornerstone of modernism and once again pushed back against a system in which he found himself.

Political Views and Social Activism

According to McKay’s autobiographies A Long Way From Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, he claimed the black intellectual was drawn to the Communist party because it offered independence. McKay believed that the Communists in the US had other things on their agenda, and the African-Americans were not part of that at all. He also thought that they were using the Negro race to fight their battles. Because of his thoughts on communism in America, he sought out help from Russia. He addressed the Communists in Russia with his speech “Report on the Negro Question” and argued that America was not fully accepting of the Negro Communists.

After his speech, he was asked by the Communist Party in Russia to explore this idea more in the form of a book. He wrote Negry v Amerike in 1923. He wrote this in Russian, and it was not translated into English until 1979. Later in life, he came to the conclusion that the Communist party suppressed the idea of individuality and independent thought. Before coming back to America, he denounced the Communist thoughts and looked for other areas to meet his needs.

Sexuality

It is widely assumed that McKay was bisexual, despite his marriage to a woman. He pursued relationships with both men and women throughout his life. He particularly enjoyed the simultaneous secrecy and acceptance of New York City; he never officially “came out” nor explicitly stated his sexual preference, but he was able to enter the “clandestine” queer communities of New York and find acceptance within them. Despite never having confirmed his sexuality, homosexual sentiments are clear in several of his poems. In others, the gender of the speaker is not identified, which leaves to interpretation the nature of the relationships presented in said works.

Works

In 1928, McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The novel, which depicted street life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe.

McKay's novel gained a substantial readership, especially with people who wanted to know more about the intense, and sometimes shocking, details of Harlem nightlife. His novel was an attempt to capture the energetic and intense spirit of the "uprooted black vagabonds." Home to Harlem was a work in which McKay looked among the common people for a distinctive black identity.

Despite this, the book drew fire from one of McKay's contemporaries, W. E. B. Du Bois. To Du Bois, the novel's frank depictions of sexuality and the nightlife in Harlem only appealed to the "prurient demand[s]" of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of black "licentiousness." As Du Bois said, "Home to Harlem ... for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath." Modern critics now dismiss this criticism from Du Bois, who was more concerned with using art as propaganda in the struggle for African-American political liberation than in the value of art to showcase the truth about the lives of black people.

McKay's other novels were Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo was noted in part for its portrayal of how the French treated people from its sub-Saharan African colonies, as the novel centers on black seamen in Marseilles. Aimé Césaire stated that in Banjo, blacks were described truthfully and without "inhibition or prejudice". Banana Bottom was McKay's third novel. The book is said to follow a principal theme of a black individual in search of establishing a cultural identity in a white society. The book discusses underlying racial and cultural tensions.

McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979), and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His collection Selected Poems (1953) was published posthumously and included a Foreword by John Dewey.

McKay became an American citizen in 1940.

In 1943, before his death, one year before his conversion into Catholicism, McKay started "Cycle Manuscript", it was a collection of 44 poems,most of it being sonnets. In addition, McKay wrote a letter to Max Eastman, editor of the socialist journal The Liberator, Harlem Renaissance leader, and McKay's close friend, asking Eastman "to look through" all the poems and to make any needed "revisions". Despite Eastman's revisions, McKay's collection would never be published. The "Cycle Manuscript" remains to be a typescript at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, as the "Cycle Manuscript" is an important document that illustrates the reflections of an emotional poet who was seeking self-actualization at his point of his life.

Becoming disillusioned with communism, McKay embraced the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, to which he converted in 1944. He died from a heart attack in Chicago at the age of 58 and is buried at Calvary Cemetery (Queens, New York).

Religion

Toward the end of McKay's life, McKay embraced Catholicism, retreating from Communism entirely. His sudden conversion into Catholicism puzzled many for over half a century. When McKay converted into Catholicism in his final years, he was perceived to be suffering from poverty, health problems, and political and social exclusion by his own beloved Harlem. Before his actual conversion, he wrote to long-time friend and mentor, Max Eastman, about "doing a lot of reading and research, especially on Catholic work among Negroes----Because if and when I take the step I want to be intellectually honest and sincere about it".(McKay to Eastman, June 1, 1944). Five months later, when McKay was baptized into the Holy Roman Catholic Church, he wrote to Eastman to assure him that "I am not less the fighter" for doing so (McKay to Eastman, October 16, 1944, Rpt. in Passion 305)".

Legacy

In 1977, the government of Jamaica named Claude McKay the national poet and posthumously awarded him the Order of Jamaica for his contribution to literature.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Claude McKay on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. McKay is regarded as the "foremost left-wing black intellectual of his age" and his work heavily influenced a generation of black authors including James Baldwin and Richard Wright.

Awards

Unknown manuscript

A previously unknown manuscript of a 1941 novel by McKay was authenticated in 2012. The manuscript, Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, was discovered by Columbia graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier in the Samuel Roth Papers, a previously untouched university archive at Columbia University, in 2009. The novel centers on the ideas and events that animated Harlem on the cusp of World War II (such as Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia). Working in collaboration, Professor Cloutier (now at the University of Pennsylvania) and his advisor Professor Brent Hayes Edwards successfully authenticated the manuscript, and have received permission from the McKay estate to publish the novel, a satire set in 1936, with an introduction about how it was found and its provenance verified.