TITLE: A FIERCE HATRED OF INJUSTICE (CLAUDE MCKAY'S JAMAICA AND HIS POWER OF REBELLION)
AUTHOR: WINSTON JAMES
REVIEWED BY: BALFORD HENRY
IN HIS book, "A Fierce Hatred of Injustice", Professor Winston James tells us of the occasion on which the Jamaican writer/poet Claude McKay met one of his literary heroes, George Bernard Shaw.
According to him, Mr. McKay had responded to the introduction to Mr. Shaw by his Jamaican mentor Walter Jekyll in London, with "uncharacteristic, even hadj-like reverence."
Mr. Shaw reacted: "It must be tragic for a sensitive negro to be a poet. Why didn't you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession? You might have developed into a successful boxer with training."
How disappointed Mr. McKay must have been. Here was a man who he had held in the highest esteem, not only because of the Irishman's importance as a comic, dramatist and literary critic, but in light of his Fabian Socialism which promised to make the world less unequal through intellectual revolution, sounding as racist as an American "redneck".
'Exotic novelty'
But, Mr. Shaw, like Mr. Jekyll earlier on, was only reflecting the early 20th century European feeling that a black man who writes poetry must surely be an "exotic novelty".
Mr. Jekyll an upper-middle-class Englishman from Surrey, and a graduate of Cambridge who excelled in music, literature, language and philosophy, was evidently responsible for Mr. McKay's conversion to poetry. He probably planted the first grains of interest in intellectual matters which fed Mr. McKay's ambition to succeed.
After university, Mr. Jekyll was ordained and served several years in the Church of England. A friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, he eventually renounced Christianity and came to Jamaica to live in 1895. Mr. McKay met him when he had just written the first authoritative documentation of Jamaican folk songs and stories, "Jamaican Song and Story", published in London in 1907.
Mr. Jekyll, says Professor James, by all accounts, lived a simple life, collecting stories and songs from Jamaican peasants, writing books and translating others. He "deepened" Mr. McKay's knowledge of philosophy and poetry.
The relationship, however, led to speculation that Mr. McKay was gay. But, Mr. James says he found no evidence to support it.
"This may well have been true, but the quality of the supposed evidence of this - even allowing for the obvious difficulty of acquiring this type of information - is far from satisfactory," he said.
Versatile
Mr. James, associate professor of history at Columbia University, rates Mr. McKay as "one of the most versatile and distinguished intellectuals to emerge from the African Diaspora." But his book is less concerned about Mr. McKay's accomplishments than it is about the basic elements of his life, including his poetry and early Jamaican experiences - which characterised his writings.
This is a most welcomed development, because while Mr. McKay's post-Jamaican achievements are well established, very little is known about his life here and how it influenced his character and his writing.
Mr. James informs us that Mr. McKay, having recovered from that initial experience with Mr. Shaw, would eventually inform the great man: "Poetry had picked me as medium."
Mr. McKay was determined to become a poet and evidently the doubts expressed by those who he looked up to the most, including Mr. Jekyll and Mr. Shaw, fed his desire to surprise them.
Mr. James takes us through a number of local issues affecting Mr. McKay's development, including his birth and youth in rural Clarendon; the colonial issues, including the repossession of small acreages owned by the local peasants and their sale which ironically made Mr. McKay's father rich and hundreds of peasants more impoverished; labour conditions in Kingston, which forced Mr. McKay to join the police force to survive, then resign after only approximately a year because he was uncomfortable with the oppressive nature of the job; the treatment of workers, including domestic servants, usually young women from the country in need of food, shelter and clothing; and petty trading, one of the few commercial activities open to poor Jamaicans seeking upward mobility. All of these are then used to show how they inform his works, including "Songs of Jamaica" and "Constab Ballads".
Jamaica has a very embarrassing record of ignoring its literary heroes and the most glaring example must be Claude McKay. For example, how do we explain the fact that his poems are virtually unknown to most Jamaicans and are not even read in our schools?
Who?
Ask the average Jamaican about Mr. McKay and it is more than likely that the response will be, "Claude who?"
Thankfully, the world beyond our borders has not followed that example and many of our great sons and daughters are being recognised for the tremendous contributions they have made to art, globally.
We should be grateful to Mr. James for this fine effort, because not only does he familiarise us with Mr. McKay's poetry, but he offers us his experience in assessing the works as well as the context in which those works were created. This historical context gives the book the added value of contributing to our knowledge of an era which is still shrouded in empirical controversy. A really important addition to local literature.
Publisher: Ian Randle
