The Caribbean in Harlem

The discovery of a previously unknown novel by the Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay (1889-1890) brings to the fore, once again, the seminal role played by persons of Caribbean origin in shaping the Afro-America ethos – and the wider world. The manuscript, “Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem,” written c1941, was dubbed “a major discovery,” by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard University scholar, “It dramatically expands the canon of novels written by Harlem Renaissance writers and, obviously, novels by Claude McKay.”
Born in Jamaica in 1889 (some say 1890), McKay deeply imbibed British literature, which irrevocably shaped his sensibility. Two collections of his poems were published, the first being, “Songs of Jamaica, in 1912 – the first poems published in Jamaican Creole. He left for the US in the same year, but inspired by WEB DuBois, “The Souls of Black Folks”, he quit vocational college in 1914 to pursue writing.
The beginning of WWI and America’s entry into that war had unleashed a great ferment in US race relations. McKay’s fellow countryman Marcus Garvey had also arrived in Harlem and he launched what was to soon become the largest Afro-American organisation in the world: the United Negro Improvement League. The Harvard-trained DuBois had helped launch the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). Working on the railroad as a waiter, McKay published poem was to be considered as the shot that launched the Harlem Renaissance, which was remarked on above by Gates.
The poem, “If we must die”, was written in 1919 in response to the terrible upsurge in the lynching of black men in the US and of virulent racism in the British colonies. The lynchings were a reaction to African men, returning to their homes after making the world “safe for democracy”, refusing to be second class citizens. McKay had already written about the rabid racism he had experienced in his new country of residence. But in “If we must die’, he offered a challenge to fellow people of colour, based on his Jamaican-ingrained sense of honour, as to how they should face the onslaught.
“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 accursèd 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 honour 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 death-blow!/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!”
It is more than ironic that two decades later, Winston Churchill – the arch imperialist who insisted that coloured people across the world were not ready for independence – quoted the poem as he rallied the British people against the legions of Adolf Hitler. McKay had been rallying all people of colour to stand up to those who would slaughter them like dogs.
McKay’s flirtation and later disillusionment with communism was symptomatic of many coloured radicals of the time who were sceptical of the responses of Garvey and DuBois to the ingrained racism of western society. After living in Britain and Europe in the early 1920’s, McKay returned to Harlem, where he wrote and published three novels: Home to Harlem (1928, Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933). The first, a best seller, depicted life in Harlem so graphically that DuBois declared himself ‘disgusted” – he felt that McKay was pandering to the prejudices of white racists.
“Banana Bottom, focusing on the black individual’s quest for cultural identity in a white society in Jamaica was unsurprisingly unsuccessful in 1933, but highly acclaimed afterwards.