The Tropics in New York
The Tropics in New York
Claude McKay 1922
Claude McKay was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a time of unprecedented artistic achievement from African Americans during the 1920s and early 1930s. McKay grew up in Jamaica, which influenced much of his work. Both in his poetry and fiction writing, McKay frequently profiled the life of the common people, whose vitality and spontaneity he contrasted with a restrictive and inhuman social order. In “The Tropics in New York,” published in Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (1922), McKay portrays the speaker as a prisoner in a foreign country, expressing a lyrical nostalgia for his homeland.
Author Biography
Born in 1899 in the hills of Jamaica, McKay was the son of peasant farmers. His parents’ sense of racial pride greatly affected the young McKay. When he was growing up, his father would share folktales about Africa as well as stories about McKay’s African grandfather’s enslavement. Educated by his brother, a schoolteacher and avowed agnostic, McKay was imbued with freethinking ideas and philosophies. Walter Jekyll, an English linguist and specialist in Jamaican folklore, played an equally important role in the education of McKay, introducing him to works by such British masters as John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and encouraging him to experiment with verse in his native Jamaican dialect. Moving to Jamaica’s capital when he was nineteen, McKay was exposed to extensive and brutal racism, the likes of which he had not experienced before in his predominantly black native town of Sunny Ville. The caste society of principally white Kingston, which placed blacks below whites and mulattoes, revealed to McKay the alienating and degrading aspects of racism. The overt racism in Kingston soon led McKay to sympathize strongly with the plight of blacks, who, he saw to his alarm, there lived under the near-total control of whites.
In 1912, with Jekyll’s assistance, McKay published his first volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Later in the same year, McKay became the first black awarded the medal of the Institute of Arts and Sciences in Jamaica for his poetry, and he used the money from this award to travel to the United States to study agriculture. He attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Kansas State College before he decided to quit his studies in 1914 and move to New York City. By 1917 McKay established literary and political ties with left-wing thinkers in Greenwich Village, and during this time he published his most famous poem, “If We Must Die.” In 1923 McKay left America for twelve years, traveling first to Moscow, where he was extolled as a great American poet. He grew disillusioned with the Communist Party when it became apparent that he would have to subjugate his art to political propaganda, and by 1923 he left for Paris. Later, he journeyed to the south of France, Germany, North Africa, and Spain, concentrating on writing fiction. Once back in New York he wrote his autobiography, an attempt to bolster his financial and literary status. He developed his interest in Roman Catholicism and became active in Harlem’s Friendship House, a Catholic community center. By the mid-1940s his health began to deteriorate. On May 22, 1948, McKay died of heart failure in Chicago.
Poem Text
Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,
Set in the window, bringing memories 5
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.
My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept, 10
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.
Poem Summary
Lines 1-4
The first stanza is filled with the names of luscious, exotic fruit from a land other than America. It ends with a festive outdoor activity, a parish fair, which would have been a social event that gathered together a dispersed agricultural community. It is the sort of event that a stranger in a strange land would remember longingly.
Lines 5-8
The speaker mentions a window, which serves a dual purpose: fruits bought at a market in the city would be put on a window sill to ripen, but the window is also a vehicle for the speaker’s memory to be cast outside, leading into this stanza’s memories of the tropical landscape.
Lines 9-12
The warm nostalgia the speaker related toward his homeland in the first two stanzas now makes him sad in his longing for it. Not being able to live there, he feels helpless and alienated in his new surroundings. The hunger in line 11 ties the end of the poem to the luscious fruits at the beginning.
Topics for Further Study
- Write a poem about something you see in your ordinary life that reminds you of “the old familiar ways,” which could include the time before you were born. Make the details vivid, appealing to the five senses.
- Do you think that this speaker is usually nostalgic for the old ways, or is this a mood that comes up once in a while? Explain your answer.
Themes
Culture Clash
The title of this poem is a contradiction, a clash of landscapes. New York City in the 1920s thrived with diverse immigrant cultures all living within a few city blocks of each other. Just as diverse were the fruits, vegetables, and other foods sold on the street or from merchant’s carts. The narrator of the poem arranges an exotic grocery list on his windowsill for us to view: “Coco pods and alligator pears, / tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit.” Almost all of these foods are not native to our American culture, and in the second stanza the speaker reveals neither is he.
Although McKay does not describe the urban New York landscape in detail, we can imagine the harsh contrast of what the speaker sees looking through his downtown apartment window and what the exotic fruit reminds him of: “trees laden by low-singing rills, / And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies.” The Jamaican-born speaker finds himself in a new landscape but recalls old memories triggered by the discovery of this exotic fruit on his windowsill.
Reminiscence and Memory
The odd contrast between the exotic fruit set against the New York urban landscape inspires the speaker to reminisce and long for his homeland. After he surveys the tropical arrangement of fruits set in his windowsill, the speaker looks out the window into what should be downtown New York, but instead sees scenes from his childhood in Jamaica. Through this window into the past he sees “fruit trees laden by low-singing rills, / And dewy dawns.”
Memory can be triggered by many things: an aunt’s perfume, the sound of popcorn on the stove, a faded picture from your sixth birthday party. The speaker of McKay’s poem fills his apartment with fragrant ginger and bright green bananas, sweet mangos, and tart pink grapefruit inside thick rinds. He fills his senses with the tropics, “bringing memories / of … mystical blue skies / In benediction over nun-like hills.” By the end of the second stanza the speaker is overcome with the weight of his emotions, and his memories flood him with longing.
Alienation and Loneliness
A stranger in a strange landscape, the speaker first finds comfort in the familiar fruits he has placed on his windowsill to ripen, but soon he is overcome by the memories they evoke, as well as feelings of alienation and loneliness. Like the alligator pear strangely out of place against a backdrop of brownstone apartments, taxis, and fire escapes, the speaker is alien to his environment. “A wave of longing through [his] body swept, / And hungry for the old, familiar ways, / [He] turned aside and bowed my head and wept.” McKay describes his longing as a hunger, connecting the theme of loneliness to the exotic foods that first triggered the powerful childhood memories.
Style
“The Tropics in New York” is structured in three stanzas; each stanza is a quatrain—that is, it consists of four lines. The rhyme scheme of each quatrain is abab. The rhythm of each line is iambic pentameter. Iambic refers to the fact that each line is made up of pairs of syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed. Pentameter means that there are five of these pairs per line (“penta” is the Greek word for five), meaning that there are ten syllables per line. Iambic pentameter is one of the most common rhythms used in poetry, because it follows the natural rising-and-falling pattern of English speech. Taken along with the simple, almost song-like swaying of the abab rhyme pattern, we can assume that this is a poem with simple, direct intentions, with no deep mystery for the reader to unravel. In the first stanza, the use of words like “ginger-root,” “cocoa in pods,” “alligator pears,”
Compare & Contrast
- 1922: The new Ku Klux Klan gains political power in the United States.
1979: Still a strong force in the South, Klansmen in Greensboro, N.C., fire on members of the Workers Viewpoint Organization, killing three and wounding twelve.
- 1922: Following the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union is created.
1990: Russian President Gorbachev convinces the congress to surrender power September 5th, ending the Union of Soviet Republics and communist rule.
1998: Although capitalist democracy has replaced communist rule for more than eight years, polls indicate that almost half of Russian citizens asked feel their quality of living has actually decreased with the advent of democracy and capitalism.
- 1922: The IRA, or Irish Republican Army, declares its formal constitution. The aim of the organization is to “safeguard the honor and independence of the Irish Republic.”
1978: A bomb planted by IRA terrorists on a royal yacht kills Lord Mountbatten, cousin of Elizabeth II. The blast also kills his young grandson and a young friend. Many other British soldiers and politicians are killed within weeks of the bombing in similar ambushes and sniper attacks.
1998: After years of violence, both IRA and British leaders take a significant step toward peace by signing an agreement on April 9th. This agreement will turn direct rule of Northern Ireland back over to Irish officials.
- 1922: The Federal Reserve Board establishes the first bank-wire system to eliminate physical transfer of funds in order to avoid theft, loss, or destruction of treasury certificates.
1998: New encryption methods allow secure transfer of funds over the Internet. Families who rarely make cash purchases due to the ease of credit cards now have the option of booking flights, ordering groceries, buying rare books, and even gambling via their home personal computer on the Internet.
and “mangoes” conjures up an exotic land, unfamiliar to Americans. The second stanza continues the faraway remembrances that began in the first. The descriptions are of the countryside. The tone of the third stanza changes abruptly from the first and second. Whereas the first two talk about an open, fertile countryside, the third stanza draws back to the internal struggle of the speaker, an isolated individual far away from home.
Historical Context
During the Summer of 1919, only a few years before the publication of “Tropics in New York,” there were violent race riots in Chicago. These riots inspired McKay’s poetic anthem If We Must Die, a piece that spoke powerfully to the atmosphere of oppression and race-fueled murder. Many critics cite his poems of social protest and racial injustice as what best characterize his writing as a whole. McKay mostly rejected any ties between his race and possible interpretations of his work.
As a Jamaican native living in New York, McKay was among more than one million new immigrants to enter the United States in the early 1920s. America during that time was fiercely segregated. “White only” sports teams, restaurants, theaters, and water fountains were a part of the American landscape. Eighty-five percent of all blacks lived in the South, and 23 percent of those families were illiterate. In New York, the artistic and social scene flourished, where the Harlem Renaissance was also at its height.
But even McKay, the man some consider the father of this artistic and intellectual black movement of the postwar 1920s, could not avoid the prejudice that pervaded every aspect of day-to-day living. Invited to write a theater review of Leonid Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped, McKay was questioned by management when he tried to take his assigned seat in the front row—the row reserved for whites only.
This type of hypocritical treatment forced many to question the democratic system, intrigued instead by the promise of a truly equal society as described by the Marxists. Claude McKay grew more and more interested in socialism, hanging out with “left-wing” society types like Frank Harris, editor of Pearson’s Magazine.
In the 1922, the same year he published his first acclaimed work Harlem Shadows, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established. McKay was so impressed with the social and political change in Russia he traveled there. Over the course of the rest of his life he lived in and out of the country for more than twelve years.
The 1920s was a time of literary revolution worldwide. During the same year Claude McKay published Harlem Shadows while living in urban New York, England’s T. S. Eliot and Ireland’s James Joyce published their own hallmark pieces. Each work, Eliot’s The Wasteland and Joyce’s Ulysses, drew immediate attention for their innovative forms and voices, just as Harlem Shadows had crafted immigrant voices into verses.
Critical Overview
In The Nation, Walter F. White wrote of Harlem Shadows, which includes “The Tropics in New York,” that “[McKay’s] work proves him to be a craftsman with keen perception of emotions … and an adept in the handling of his phrases to give the subtle variations of thought he seeks.” Jean Wagner also commented positively about Harlem Shadows in Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, saying “The languorous sweetness of [the nature poems] is like a cool breeze from the Isles, introducing a note of most welcome tranquillity into the militant fierceness of the poems of rebellion.” “The Tropics in New York” is about a man who feels imprisoned in America because he cannot return to his native country. Geta J. LeSeur, in CLA Journal, writes that McKay in “The Tropics in New York” “speaks for the hundreds of West Indians who became exiles away from their homeland primarily because of economic and diplomatic reasons.… The alienation felt is one of time and distance, and the consequence and helplessness is clearly felt in the last three lines. The progression is from glorious song to despair. It is one of his most moving poems on this theme …”
Criticism
David Kelly
David Kelly is a writer and instructor at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. In the following essay, Kelly discusses how, within this poem of the immigrant experience, McKay uses cinematic techniques that were advanced for his time and raises several racial issues concerning black Americans.
Claude McKay’s poem “The Tropics In New York” is probably the most anthologized of all of the author’s works, which means that it is the work that the greatest number of readers will think of when McKay’s name comes to mind. To some degree, there is a great irony to this, because the poem depicts McKay—who so often played the role of the angry radical—as a vulnerable, lonesome foreigner, not challenged by the racial politics of his new land but reduced to tears by his sense of nostalgia. Some critics would say that this nostalgia is a reason why black Americans have a difficult time formulating a complete cultural identity, and they would encourage poems such as this one that are willing to examine that sense of loss. Other commentators would suggest that this poem plays to old stereotypes developed during slavery—that the author is playing the minstrel show character of the freed slave in the North, longing for the simple days back on the plantation when he wasn’t troubled to think independently. The subject matter of the poem, comparing a natural, primitive world to the civilized “urban jungle,” is bound to invite speculation about which one McKay thinks is more powerful, which one he deems righteous, as well as the implications of these settings on the role of blacks in America.
Most readers of the poem would not be inclined, on first reading, to see it in terms of racial identity at all. It is about loneliness and memory, experiences that cross all social boundaries. America is a land of immigrants, and immigrants naturally look back longingly to the circumstances of their youth. McKay does, as a matter of fact, capture the feeling that anyone who has moved to a new land is bound to have. He accomplishes this by having the objects that trigger his nostalgia be innocuous objects, more tantalizing to the senses than they are provocative to the intellect. While a Jamaican such as McKay might be transported back in memory by the fruits that grow in Jamaica, a Lithuanian immigrant may relate to the experience because it is the same one he or she gets from barley husks, a Mexican might pine for yucca, a Malian for millet or dates. And seen with the fuzzy lens of nostalgia, every country has dewy dawns and mystical blue skies and nun-like hills (whatever those are). McKay lures out the sentiment buried within immigrants, as well as in people whose families have been here for generations but who have kept their ties to their motherland, by downplaying what America has to offer. How is New York represented in this poem? As a window sill. The window doesn’t look out over a new land with gold-paved streets or over a dirty and dangerous ghetto, it looks magically out on Jamaica. Many transplanted persons live this way: in denial of their circumstances, with little sense of “now,” but only of “then.”
It is interesting that this poem, the nostalgic wail of a speaker “hungry for the old ways,” cries out for nature, but it views the world in terms of technology, with an eye that was apparently trained by the cinema. In 1922, the year this poem was first published, movies were (of course) not as sophisticated as they are today. They were filmed in black-and-white, and the only sound they had was that of a live organ playing while the picture ran. Still, they had worked out the visual language of motion pictures to a great degree. One needs only look at such classic silent films as Nosferatu, Blood and Sand, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to know that McKay would have been familiar with such techniques as the close-up, the fade, and the dissolve. In “The Tropics in New York,” he directs the viewer’s eye the way that a camera does. The opening “scene,” in the first stanza, could be the work of a still camera, but it nonetheless bears the mark of a camera of some sort: what else in human experience could focus one’s attention on one set of objects, ignoring the context they are in? What marks this poem as a visual equivalent of motion pictures, though, is the widening angle from the tight shot in the first stanza to the second stanza, which includes the window behind the fruit. The objects do not move, it is the reader’s view of them that moves. Between lines 5 and 6 comes an even more specific movie trick, a dissolve as bleary and wavy as the transition from Kansas to Oz, taking us out of a New York apartment to a lush utopia, springboarding off of the word “memories.” The human eye does not fade out and then fade in on a different scene like that: movie footage does.
So the poem conveys a longing for the old, natural home of fruit trees and blue skies, but it shows its mixed intentions by framing its longing for nature in (what was then) a high-tech way. Unfortunately, this division between forward-looking technology and the simplicity that excludes technology happens to correspond to a long-standing philosophical problem for African Americans, with the love of technology indicating a love of the European culture that created slavery and love of nature indicating a resistance to progress that some feel has held blacks back. Framed as a racial issue, it would appear that there was no way for Claude McKay to crawl away from the culture/primitivism question without looking like a traitor to somebody. Unfortunately, because of who he was and when and where he worked, any poem by Claude McKay is bound to be examined from a racial perspective.
Any basic search for information on McKay is likely to turn up the words “Harlem Renaissance” within the first sentence or two. He was a black man who worked in Harlem during the early 1920s, and so he is grouped into this category by definition. What made McKay stand out from his African-American peers is that he grew up in Jamaica and came to experience America’s particular form of racism only later in life, during his two years at Kansas State College, after he had already tasted success as a published poet in his home land. In Harlem he was involved with the Socialist Party as an associate editor of The Liberator, a Marxist publication. This sort of radicalism was not at all unusual for that time and place. Edward Margolies’s critical study of black authors, Native Sons, published in the politically charged climate of 1968, tells us that “McKay’s best writings are found in his early Harlem poems, which alternate between a celebration of the Harlem proletariat and a clarion call for racial militancy.”
As a native of Jamaica, McKay formed a tight relationship with the countryside; the land and sky that are described in this poem are contrasted with the concrete corridors that define New York City. It is understandable that, when he thought of his own people living their lives freely and productively without the degrading roles society had cast blacks of the 1920s in, he saw them surrounded by nature—at one with the trees and free under the
What Do I Read Next?
- Claude McKay was perhaps better known for his prose than his poetry. For a healthy sampling of both verse and prose spanning his writing career, check out The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948 (1973).
- Although many critics may say McKay’s autobiography is included in his poetry, Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframerican Life (1988), is one of his self-portraits. A critical look at his fellow African Americans, this book continues to stir emotions and raise questions of the role of ethnicity in writing.
- Two recent books that look at the Harlem Renaissance not only in terms of literature, but art, music, and sculpture as well, are George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White and Cory Winz’s Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Both books are also exceptional sources for gaining a better understanding of the cultural context surrounding the black intellectual movement.
open sky. As the world has become more crowded and industrial, with society and its by-products pressing in from every direction, it is quite high praise to consider any one group as being in touch with nature, or connected to the world as it was before civilization arrived to corrupt it. “And yet,” Margolies points out, and many critics agree, “at the root of McKay’s radicalism is the ancient stereotype of the primitive Negro.” Writers of all races have excused the way that blacks locked out social progress by assuming that an extra degree of spirituality in the “primitive” people makes everything equal. Treating blacks as a group with different abilities and different historical needs than whites may be a way of facing reality, but when this idea is misapplied it leads to such weird cultural phenomena as the nightclubs of the celebrated Harlem Renaissance being staffed by black entertainers while the owners and patrons were white, or the professional sports that have mostly minority players but few nonwhite coaches. A poem such as “The Tropics in New York” can, unfortunately, be read to mean that Negroes were a people of the land, with no competence as leaders of society.
McKay didn’t stay in Jamaica, though: he left the tropics for America, showing a personal appreciation for civilization and technology that is not shown in this poem. In his life he was an ambitious man, leaving tiny Jamaica for the big time, New York, confident that he had the talent to make a name for himself. After struggling with American racism for a few years, he left Harlem to spend some of his most productive years traveling to England, France, Germany, Russia, and several African nations, experiencing particular types of racial stereotypes in each one. While it is any person’s right to live the way they choose, and to once in a while look back with some sorrow on “the old, familiar ways,” black writers have considered it no favor that he indulged in the Western culture that oppressed blacks, and that he struggled so hard to be accepted by it. He disliked and feared many of the blacks he met in Africa and felt more comfortable among whites, even while, as the poem implies, feeling alienated in white American society. As African critic Femi Ojo-Ade put it, for McKay, “America, the civilized, is hard to reach. Africa, the savage, though easily accessible, is repulsive.”
As fine as it is that McKay would move to the largest country in the Western Hemisphere and aspire to conquer the social order, there is an undeniable hint of self-loathing detectable when an author leaves his past behind and at the same time writes about the “hunger” he feels for the old ways. If this is a common immigrant experience, then McKay’s dilemma was and is repeated thousands of times each day by everyone who is separated from their past. If, as his harshest critics put it, McKay’s stance represents an abandonment of blacks, either by playing to the “noble savage” stereotype or by accepting the values of the oppressors, then his perpetually being defined as a Harlem Renaissance author takes on a tone of sad irony.
Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.
Chris Semansky
Chris Semansky teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon, and is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to literary journals. In the following essay, Semansky explores how McKay’s vivid and evocative imagery functions in “The Tropics in New York.”
In the first stanza of his poem, “The Tropics in New York,” Claude McKay describes a veritable cornucopia of fruits and plants. After we finish reading this stanza we can almost taste these exotic delicacies, the ripe bananas, the ginger-root, the alligator pears. The words seem to have a power of their own to make our mouths water. This is the power of imagery.
Imagery, when effective, has the ability to make the reader experience the thing or things being described, in this case the tropical fruits of McKay’s birthplace, Jamaica. It is not only the naming of the fruit that makes McKay’s imagery effective, but the manner in which he does it—by listing the different kinds. A list by its very definition is an accumulation of details and remains a popular poetic device writers use to achieve an almost photographic effect of the things described. In this case, the sense stimulated is not only vision but taste as well, for these are perfect specimens, “fit for the highest prize at parish fairs.”
We learn in the second stanza that the delicacies described are not in fact in Jamaica but in New York City, a steamy place in the summer but definitely not the tropics. McKay might be using irony by titling his poem, “The Tropics in New York,” then, or he simply might be using “tropics” as a rough synecdoche. A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to signify the whole.
In this case “tropics” might be (metaphorically) read as tropical fruit, but simultaneously stand in for all of the tropics. However, these tropical treats do remind the speaker of his homeland. The sight of them brings memories “of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills / And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies / in benediction over nun-like hills.” Rills are small brooks or streams that lace Jamaica’s countryside, and the hills are nun-like because blue skies are offering a blessing.
This stanza also signals a move from the specific to the general, as the sight of individual pieces of fruit (possibly in a bowl) moves the speakers so that he remembers the conditions that physically enabled their existence (dawn, skies, hills). The reader can also consider the present, in which the speaker initially sees the fruit in the window as the fruit of the past. That is, the speaker’s initial experience of his homeland made possible the nostalgia and longing he feels when seeing a bowl of fruit years later.
Nostalgia is a fitting theme for a poet who left his native country as a young man to come to the United States. It is also a subject made popular by English Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, who wrote many poems mourning the loss of traditions, people, and humanity’s relationship to nature. McKay, in “The Tropics in New York,” is not merely expressing his yearning for Jamaican fruit. He is showing the reader through his choice of details what he misses about his country: its spectacular landscape; its spirituality; its sheer fecundity. McKay could have written a poem about how after stumbling across seashells at a corner store he was suddenly reminded of the Jamaican coast, but writing about such a commonplace item as fruit allowed him to pack more resonance in his images.
We associate ripe fruit, especially tropical fruit, with abundance, with the sheer headiness of being alive and growing. It is exotic and sweet and pleasurable, much like many of our own (good) memories of childhood. Though as readers we are not consciously aware of these associations, they are there nonetheless and affect our reception of the poem.
After two stanzas of description, the narrator discusses its significance. We now understand that we were seeing what the speaker was seeing, that the narrator’s “I” was the photographic eye. This stanza, however, contains no description because the speaker’s “eyes grew dim.” Instead we have a comment on the previous description, which allows us to understand the description’s purpose. This stanza tells us the meaning of what the first two stanzas showed us. The speaker is hungry, not for bananas, cocoa, mangoes, and grapefruit, but “for the old, familiar ways.” McKay’s use of the word “hungry” to describe his desire is appropriate, given the poem’s imagery.
In “Claude McKay’s Romanticism,” in CLA Journal, Geta LeSeur writes that “the progression [from the first two stanzas to the third] is from glorious song to despair. It is one of his most moving poems on this theme.” The reader must keep in mind, however, that the despair is also informed by the speaker’s implicit recognition of the discrepancy between New York City, one of the largest urban centers in the world, and the pastoral, idyllic setting McKay portrays as his home.
“The Tropics in New York” first appeared in 1920 in The Liberator, a radical socialist newspaper. There is nothing, however, explicitly or implicitly radical about the poem. In fact, an argument could be made that the piece is conservative because of the (implicit) desire the speaker expresses to go home again.
Though a communist sympathizer for a good part of his adult life, many of McKay’s early poems deal with traditional themes and subject matter. In many ways he was a modern romantic. Like the Romantics, McKay frequently wrote out of personal experience; the “I” in the poem was more often than not McKay. LeSeur observes that “McKay obviously is the speaker in this poem, although he speaks for the hundreds of West Indians who became exiles away from their homeland primarily because of economic and diplomatic reasons. The poem, therefore, does have a oneness of feeling about it. The alienation felt is one of time and distance, and the consequence and helplessness is clearly felt in the last three lines.”
Though McKay wrote about his hunger for the old ways of his native land, we can also read this poem as an example, though not the best, of McKay’s own theory of poetry. In his theory, he frequently promoted traditional poetic forms. In his introduction to Harlem Shadows, his only book of verse, McKay writes that the eighteenth-century Scottish poet, Robert Burns—a traditionalist—was a primary influence on his work. McKay believed that the traditional should “work best on lawless and revolutionary passion and words, so as to give the feeling of the highest degree of spontaneity and freedom.”
However, it is hard to see exactly how lawless and revolutionary McKay’s own words and passions are in “The Tropics.” Written in iambic pentameter and employing an abab cdcd efef rhyme scheme, this lyric poem focuses on the lament of one individual, not, as LeSeur suggests, the numerous exiles from the West Indies. A lyric is usually a short poem consisting of the words of a single speaker. Employing the first person “I,” the lyric most often revolves around or expresses the feeling or state of mind of the speaker.
Burns’s poem, “O my love’s like a red, red rose,” for example, expresses the speaker’s passion for his sweetheart. Lyrics may or may not be written in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter means that each of the poem’s lines consist of five (penta) feet. Meter is measured in feet, and a foot usually contains a stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables. An “iambic” foot, the most common in English poetry, consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The first line of “The Tropics,”—“Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root”—contains ten syllables, alternately unstressed and stressed.
McKay uses a traditional form to write about traditional subjects, loss and nostalgia. It is precisely his use of tradition that critics have applauded, viewing him as a poet whose work embodies universal rather than African American ideals. Perhaps better examples of his theory of how traditional forms can give shape to radical content are his Shakespearean sonnets, “America” and “The White City.” Both of these poems criticize America and the cultural oppression of African Americans but they do so in a way that conventional critics appreciate. Said another way, critics have praised McKay because he played by the rules.
Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.
P. S. Chauhan
In the following excerpt, Chauhan disagrees with those who think McKay’s works reflect the consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance, instead pointing out a “colonial sensibility” that stems, he believes, from the poet’s Jamaican heritage.
If McKay’s conflicting views were an enigma to his friends, the ambiguities of his work are a bafflement to his critics. Naturally, the variant readings of the man and his fiction today constitute the central problem of McKay scholarship. Wayne Cooper, McKay’s biographer [who wrote Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance], trying to find an acceptable solution, locates the source of all ideological paradoxes in the personal pathology of a personality “characterized always by a deep-seated ambivalence” that was caused mainly by “dependence upon a succession of father figures.”
There is another way, however, to explain the presence of incongruous elements in McKay’s work. It is more than likely that his work seems paradoxical because it has been read in an inappropriate context. Beginning with James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1930), critics have concluded, certainly to their satisfaction, that McKay was “of the Harlem group,” indeed that he was “one of the movement’s ornaments” [according to George E. Kent in his article “Patterns of the Harlem Renaissance”]. In the latest study of the Harlem School, The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations (1989), Geta LeSeur affirms that “Claude McKay remains today part of the acknowledged literary triumvirate of the Harlem Renaissance. He shares this prestigious position with Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer.” Her view is typical of the current scholarship’s understanding of McKay’s affiliations.
One fruitful close reading of McKay’s work—a reading heretofore denied him—however, forces us to the conclusion that to anchor his consciousness in Harlem is to dislocate his true emotional geography; it is, indeed, to misread the map of his political awareness. If we would account for all the elements of his thought, we might have to take McKay for what he really was in life: a colonial writer who happened to stop over in Harlem on his lifelong quest for a spiritual home, on a quest, incidentally, that no colonial writer has ever effectively escaped. His association with Harlem, it can be affirmed, was no more than what Harlem itself has been to Afro-American letters: “a moment in renaissancism” [according to Houston A. Baker, Jr. in his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance]. Such being the case, by continuing to identify his work exclusively with Harlem’s ethos, we have not only robbed it of its uniqueness but also denied it the central place it deserves in the global discourse of black writers that McKay so ably initiated. Arbitrary points of reference have led us only to skewed inferences.
Unable, or unwilling, to read McKay as a writer from Jamaica, then a British colony, and hence as one with a mind-set entirely different from that of the Harlemite, many critics have landed themselves in a puzzle. James Weldon Johnson, a person whom McKay in the dedicatory note to Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940) calls a “friend and wise counselor,” finds McKay’s lifelong nostalgia for Jamaica intriguing. “Reading McKay’s poetry of rebellion,” says Johnson, “it is difficult to conceive of him dreaming of his native Jamaica and singing,” Such perplexity results, obviously, from an ignorance of, or from ignoring, a basic fact about the colonial sensibility: that it straddles two worlds—the one of its origin, the other of its adoption. Politically, its values and attitudes derive from, and swing between, the two sets. It sides, at once, with each of the two antagonists: the victim and the victimizer.
That McKay should have been assimilated into the Harlem Renaissance looks rather natural in retrospect. For one thing, noticed when literary history understood artistic works in terms of schools or movements, Claude McKay was bound to be read as part of the Harlem Renaissance, especially since to be black and to have a powerful literary voice was considered nothing less than miraculous. … [According to Alain Locke in The New Negro: An Interpretation,] his poems truly served as a clarion call to the New Negro, “the younger generation
“Unable, or unwilling, to read Mckay as a writer from Jamaica, then a British colony, and hence as one with a mind-set entirely different from that of the Harlemite, many critics have landed themselves in a puzzle.”
[that was] vibrant with a new psychology.” But to credit McKay with the boom and bloom of black art and literature, or with the general growth of interest in Harlem, is to be guilty of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. That the birth of the Renaissance followed McKay’s departure from Harlem need not argue for his paternity of the movement.
McKay’s own comments about the Harlem Renaissance, distant and mocking, would argue against his incorporation into the movement. Invited by James Weldon Johnson “to return to America to participate in the Negro renaissance movement,” McKay found himself loathe to return to Harlem, for, he explained years later [in his A Long Way from Home], “if I did return I would have to find a new orientation among the Negro intelligentsia.” This is hardly the sentiment of an author who is said to have been the progenitor of the Renaissance. Even when he did devote a book to the Negro Metropolis [titled Harlem: Negro Metropolis], McKay could not bring himself to say anything more sympathetic about the Renaissance than the following:
New Yorkers had discovered the existence of a fashionable clique, and an artistic and literary set in Harlem. The big racket which crepitated from this discovery resulted in an enormously abnormal advertisement of bohemian Harlem. And even solid real estate values were affected by the fluid idealistic art values of Harlem.
The truth is that McKay was even less responsible for the Harlem Renaissance than Pound had been for the Chicago School of Poetry. He was for the Harlem Renaissance, but certainly not of it.
Yet to stress McKay’s colonial heritage is by no means to minimize his value to the movement or the overall worth of his work. To the contrary, his work did, indeed, carve out a path which black writers all over the world, not only the Harlemite, could, if they would, follow. Some of them … dared not follow McKay’s lead. But a few others did. Aimé Césaire, according to the interview published in Discourse on Colonialism (1955), was inspired by McKay’s novel Banjo (1930), which for him was “really one of the first works in which an author spoke of the Negro and gave him a certain literary dignity.” That McKay’s self-assurance, like his passionate devotion to the cause of the black race, did a yeoman’s service to the advancement of African American literature is a fact widely, and correctly, accepted.
What is little suspected, however, is the pervasive presence of the colonial sensibility in his work. This essay seeks to identify only a few of the traits distinguishing the colonial strain.…
Linguistically, his work bears the mark all too common to the writing done in colonies. It is pulled by two gravitational forces: the one of his native tongue, the other of the language of the colonizer. In his first book of poems published in the United States, Harlem Shadows (1922), McKay confesses to the linguistic tension that had been part of his upbringing. “The speech of my childhood and early youth,” he writes, “was the Jamaica dialect … which still preserves a few words of African origin, and which is more diffcult of understanding than the American Negro dialect. But the language we wrote and read in school was England’s English.” The dual versions of the language, like those of the island culture, internalized during the period of his cognitive development, haunt McKay’s work to the very end and affect its tone and texture in various ways.…
The argument of McKay’s later poetry, like the diction of his earlier poems, is disposed around two poles: the vernacular and the metropolitan. The progression of his well-known poems readily reveals the bipolar tensions that underlie the conceptual design of his verses. Whether it be “To One Coming North,” “North and South,” or “The Tropics in New York,” the absent landscape of Jamaica is so powerfully present in the poems as to displace the New York scene, the immediate locale and the subject of the poem.…
[F]or a poet grounded in British education and well versed in Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and Hopkins, it was as natural that he should use the disciplined form of a sonnet as it was that he should possess “the classical feeling” which Frank Harris discovered in his poetry. Just as McKay’s cynicism and invective came from his experience as a subaltern in an imperial colony, the sonnet form came from his formal education in the classics of the colonizer.
Even when McKay had managed to slough off the Jamaica dialect, he continued to be possessed by the memories of the Jamaican flora and fauna. It is only by reconginizing McKay’s unconscious proclivity towards Jamaican animals that one may explain why his imagery militates against the texture of the traditional narrative. His yarn, spun with the staple of the English idiom, sets up expectations associated with the tenor of the average English novel. But before the reader has a chance to settle down, he is suddenly jolted as tropical imagery leaps at him.…
It seems that McKay’s mind, harking back to the tropical landscape of his native island, quietly ushers its beasts into the parlors of Manhattan and the restaurants of Marseilles. Even as the author negotiates the surge and rhythm of the English sentence, his memory drags in the native creatures, populating, in consequence, the metropolitan English narrative with strange birds, beasts, and flowers.
His punctuating the English prose with the bestiary of Jamaica creates resonances that travel beyond the fictional narrative.…
McKay seems … to have picked up bits and pieces of the white colonizer’s disdain for the native black community, for it is the Master’s stance that comes through in the colonial author’s unguarded moments.
One reason why McKay’s attitude towards black characters is less than respectful is that, unlike Harlem writers—Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rudolph Fisher, who went to their folk roots—McKay went for literary inspiration to Anglo-Saxon masters, to Dickens, Shaw, Whitman, and Lawrence. As a person raised in a colony, it was impossible for him totally to divest his mind of the literature and the attitudes of the colonizer and to adopt the literary genealogy of the African-American peers of his generation.
Nothing in McKay’s writing so powerfuly registers his ambivalence towards the interest of the Harlem community as his shifting attitude towards the Harlem prostitute. If the narrator of the poem “Harlem Shadows” is the rueful patriarch bemoaning the corruption of the “little dark girls who in slippered feet / Go prowling through the night from street to street,” that of the novel Home to Harlem gloats in the depredations of Jake and his associates who, like predators, go stalking through the night, always “hungry foh a li’l brown honey.” The poem and the novel, read together, suggest an author running with the hare and hunting with the hound.…
The only character of McKay’s who ever finds a home is Bita (Banana Bottom, 1933), but such arrival for a fictional character becomes possible only when the writer’s fancy returns to settle in his native land, as, for once, it did. The home for McKay was never Harlem, but Jamaica, where alone his characters could regain their integrity.
It can well be argued that McKay’s vacillation between alternating preferences for the native culture and the metropolitan, like his pull between the pastoral and the urban, between an allegiance to Marxism and a desire for free peasantry, can be satifactorily explained only in terms of the colonial’s attachment to the simple rhythms of his native world and to a fascination for the metropolitan systems of the West, whose cruelty and inequity would constantly drive his thoughts back to the security of a remembered community. A creature of colonial experience, McKay was condemned to dwell in the limbo of the imagination of the colonized, unable forever to state a clear-cut preference. That is the primary reason why his work seems so paradoxical, why it bears the print of the journeys between the polarities of a divided mind.
To comprehend him satisfactorily, therefore, one must approach McKay not from one direction alone, but from two. One must read McKay, indeed one must re-read McKay, in a context different from that of the Harlem Renaissance, the context he has long been relegated to. In order to appreciate the nature of his ambiguities, one must recognize the intellectual baggage he brought with him to Harlem—the English attitudes, a European sensibility, and the general impedimenta of a colonial mind, congnitive elements altogether unknown to most Harlemites.
Source: P. S. Chauhan, “Rereading Claude McKay,” in CLA Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1, September, 1990, pp. 68-80.
Sources
LeSeur, Geta J., “Claude McKay’s Romanticism,” in CLA Journal, Vol. 32, No. 3, March, 1989, pp. 296-308.
Margolies, Edward, Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Black American Authors, Philadelphia: J.P. Lippencott Company, 1968.
Ojo-Ade, Femi, “Claude McKay: The Tragic Solitude of an Exiled Son of Africa,” in Of Dreams Deferred, Dead or Alive: African Perspectives on African-American Writers, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Wagner, Jean, “Claude McKay,” in Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, translated by Kenneth Douglas, University of Illinois Press, 1973, pp. 197-257.
White, Walter F., “Negro Poets,” in The Nation, New York, Vol. 114, No. 2970, June 7, 1922, pp. 694-95.
For Further Study
Cooper, Wayne, Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography, Louisiana State University Press, 1996.
In this comprehensive biography, Cooper traces McKay’s search for identity, from his Jamaican family background to his years in Harlem, Paris, England, and beyond.
Tillery, Tyrone, Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity, University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Addresses McKay’s “tough and angry” personality in a well-rounded look at the writer and his work. The study is as much of a look inside the thriving intellectual Harlem scene as it is a biography of the “black, radical, socialist” poet.