By Chaos, Freelance Writer
Claude McKay - Contributed
FOUR MEMBERS of Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies (UWI) formed a panel to discuss Jamaican poet, author and activist Claude McKay last Saturday.
Held at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts (PSCCA), the panel members were Michael Bucknor, David Williams, Carol Hunter-Clarke and Carolyn Allen, who chaired the event.
Michael Bucknor was up first. His presentation was somewhat academia-oriented, as he spoke of McKay's 'Adamic' role as one of the first writers to explore the new history of black people in the Caribbean. He quoted lines from Noble prize laureate Derek Walcott, agreeing with his assertion that "the degrading arrival in the New World must be seen as a beginning, and perhaps not the end of our history". However, Bucknor went on to say that Walcott "...demands too much when he expects that the past of the Old World, which has determined the New, must be obliterated". This was in relation to Claude McKay's role, as mentioned earlier, as an 'Adam' in the annals of West Indian Literature.
Prior to this discourse, Bucknor had explored areas which were much more accessible to the audience on-hand, which included representatives of two high schools, Munro College and Claude McKay High. He focused on McKay's Banana Bottom and his use of imagery based on varied aspects of Jamaica. To quote, Bucknor said a "wide range of ethnic skin shades is celebrated in the text (Banana Bottom) and the rich resource taken from the local cuisine and the fruit variety (of Jamaica) facilitates McKay's metaphoric expression".
"The twinning of the human body with the body of the landscape expresses McKay's joint celebration best in the description of a character's assertion that she is worthy of love with the lines:
She caressed her breasts like maturing pomegranates, her skin firm and smooth like the sheath of a blossoming banana, her luxuriant hair, close curling like thick fibrous roots, gazed at her own brown eyes, the infallible indicator of real human beauty,
Bucknor continued.
Next up was Carol Hunter-Clarke. The bespectacled young lady seemed somewhat nervous at first, but she soon warmed to her task as she detailed "the fusion of ancient classical material with what he (McKay) formed from his own experience" in his works. She detailed how he used his sonnets to express rage against racism and describe the black man's struggle for selfhood "by using the colonial's language to denounce him and the injustice he represents".
According to Ms. Hunter-Clarke, a contradiction between form and content is what makes McKay's work dramatic. She used a number of poems to illustrate her point - 'The Lynching', 'The White Fiends', 'The White House' 'Baptism', 'The Harlem Dancer', 'The Tired Worker' and 'Like A Strong Tree'. Several themes were addressed. Think you are not a fiend and savage? is asked of the 'lynchers', while the white house of the poem of the same name stands as a simple symbol of racism - Your door is shut against my tightened face - the door a denial of opportunities to the blacks of the 1920s and 1930s.
FIRE
McKay's use of 'fire' as both representing anger and a refining element, among other ideas, his reluctance to turn to violence as an answer and the need for blacks to stand proud were also mentioned. Glass can be broken, but persons must remain calm was quoted. So were lines from the classic 'If We Must Die', which was written in 1919 in response to a wave of race riots at the time in the United States and contains the immortal lines:
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 - oh, 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!
These lines were used to inspire England during World War II by then Prime Minister Winston Churchill, without, according to Hunter-Clarke, his giving credit to the author.
The most vibrant, engaging presentation came from David Williams. The eldest of the three panellists, he caused some raised eyebrows with the tone of his presentation, in which McKay's metaphor of Harlem as a woman featured prominently.
Williams detailed the author's effect on the 'Harlem Renaissance' and the opposition he received from the 'black elite' or 'intelligencia' of the time, including W. E. DuBois. McKay, said Williams, appropriated Harlem and changed it from the shrine the elite wanted it to be. He converted it into the body of a strong black woman with all the relevant associations, needs, appetites, desire and mystery. This, to people like DuBois, was "securalising what they needed to remain a dream".
McKay also dispelled white people's perception of Harlem as a "city within a city, an exotic place where white people could go to see black people perform".
The use of woman as a metaphor for the city was two-fold in that she - or it - represented the fulfilment of a man's wildest dreams and could engender the best in a man but also represented danger, leading man into risk and to surrendering to the worst in himself.
Williams went on to detail how McKay, in this context, was a precursor to latter-day writers such as Toni Morrison, in demonstrating ideas about the empowerment of women which were years ahead of their time. A question and answer session followed the lectures, in which the depth of feeling some Jamaicans have about Claude McKay came to the fore.
