McKay's Way

It has been argued that the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, is the defining moment in African American literature because of an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among black writers. The importance of this movement to African American literary art lies in the efforts of its writers to exalt the heritage of African Americans and to use their unique culture as a means toward re-defining African American literary expression.

The sudden blossoming of literature called the Negro Renaissance gave a voice to Negroes in the twenties. The Negro Renaissance became part of a general revolt by the writers of the decade against the gross materialism and outmoded moral values of America’s new industrial society. Negro writer’s found strength in their own folk culture. Claude Mckay was one of the first to express the spirit of the New Negro.

Claude McKay (1890-1948)-, named Fetus Claudius after a Biblical Roman Emperor, was born the youngest of eleven children in Jamaica, then a British Colony in the West Indies. His mother’s family was originally slaves in Madagascar; his father had Ashanti ancestors. Grounded in black peasant culture within a color-conscious society, the ambitious dark-skinned Mckay’s belonged to an educated economic minority. Although later he severed most ties with his family, Claude Mckay’s earliest years were pleasant one’s, a “time when…Imagination itself awoke” for him(11). Even as child, in literature he found, “broad new worlds romance and thought” (14). Reading widely amongst the English and continental poets and philosophers, McKay developed the “highly intuitive capabilities of a poet” (20).
McKay spent a brief time in the Jamaican constabulary in 1911, but his heart was elsewhere. In 1912, he published two poems of dialectic poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. These books represent the first attempt by a West Indian educated in the British imperial tradition as using local dialect as poetic medium. McKay’s career as a social rebel began with his social commentary that appeared on the pages of island newspapers. But in 1912, McKay came to America and never returned to Jamaica.

Like many other Negro writers of the twenties most notably, Langston Hughes, Mckay shared to a degree, the same feeling of alienation that characterized Gertrude Stein or Hemmingway’s “lost generation”. In 1918, McKay could’ve wrote “And now this great catastrophe [World War I] has come upon the worlds proving real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride, one of the many things one was taught to respect and revere.”(Cooper 5) Particularly, One of the six poems now famous “If We Must Die”. It’s a very tension-filled strategic, and paradoxical poem. It was a desperate shout of defiance “While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs/ Making their mock at our accursed lot”(501 Line4-5) almost, seemed tragic and hopeless, “If we must die, let it not be like hogs/ hunted and pinned in an inglorious spot.” At the same time, it proclaimed that in Negroes the spirit of human courage remained fully alive, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack/ pressed to the wall, dying but fighting pack.”(502 Line14-15)

Works Cited

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, pg-501-502

Claude McKay and the New Negro of the 1920's Author(s): Wayne Cooper Source: Phylon (1960-), Vol. 25, No. 3 (3rd Qtr., 1964), pp. 297-306