Claude McKay and the Ghosts of our Heritage

It is fascinating to open the Selected Poems of Claude McKay after first perusing poetry anthologies. First, the anthologies have been very selective. The second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry features five poems by McKay; Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Gioia, Mason, and Schoerke has six; the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry has a whopping twelve.

The anthologist's imperative to be selective, however, forces these unfortunate editors to decide which McKay they want to present. While all the notes agree that McKay's most important and influential work was comprised of angry yet controlled poems of social protest against racism and racial violence, there's another McKay that has gone missing: a poet so firmly shaped by the experiences of the landscape of his youth that he remains haunted by memories of place. McKay's childhood in Jamaica roils just beneath the surface, and his early Songs for Jamaica explores the ruptures of past into present.

"North and South" begins "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!" These tropic lands burst into the conscious mind as the speaker inhabits a much different place. For example, the speaker in "Home Thoughts" imagines a connection back to the island:

Oh something just now must be happening there!
That suddenly and quiveringly here,
Amid the city's noises, I must think
Of mangoes leaning to the river's brink

There's a sort of synchronicity that allows the adult to overlay his current urban surroundings with the Caribbean of his youth. The speaker experiences two places simultaneously. This is its own sort of doubling; though the speaker is still one, he inhabits and is acted upon by two worlds.

I think this sort of synchronicity or dual subjectivity establishes an important argument that can help us read his more well-known protest poems. The adult is shot through with unconscious memories of the past; he cannot deny or erase his heritage. In fact, the poem "Heritage" begins:

Now the dead past seems vividly alive,
And in this shining moment I can trace,
Down through the vista of the vanished years,
Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face.

The important question about youth, then, is what sort of spirit is released into the future. In perhaps his most well-known poem, a sonnet called "The Lynching," McKay's final couplet is: "And little lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee." The most wrenching lines of the poem, and the ones that cause such outrage, are those that condemn the next generation to the sins of their fathers. If McKay's boyhood yields "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!", then one shudders to imagine the worlds that lads in "The Lynching" will inhabit in the future.