‘If We Must Die’ and ‘Harlem Shadows’ by Claude McKay

Festus Claudius (‘Claude’) McKay was a bisexual Jamaican-American poet, novelist and essayist who served as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. Born to peasant farmers in 1889, he developed an early interest in British poetry.

He published his first two poetry collections – Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads – in 1912. These debut works addressed slavery, poverty, and the conditions of island life. Many were also notable for their pioneering use of Jamaican dialect. McKay emigrated to America that same year, briefly studying agriculture in the South before moving to New York City. Once there, he became active in radical politics and published poetry in leftist periodicals.

His most famous work, ‘If We Must Die’, was first published by the Communist magazine Liberator in 1919. It was written in response to the ‘Red Scare’, a period of intense anti-Communist fervour following the Russian Revolution which saw race riots sweep the nation. McKay saturated his Shakespearean sonnet with antiquated British diction to link the fight against black oppression to the heroic sentimentalism of Victorian poetry. Framing the struggle for black liberation in such terms was ingenious in that it effectively turned the poetic tradition of his oppressors against them.

McKay left the USA to travel around Europe later that year. By 1920, he had reached London, where he found a job at a radical newspaper. It was while living in England that he published his third collection of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire, which included ‘Harlem Shadows’. The poem employs iambic pentameter and a strict rhyme scheme to recount the plight of black sex workers in New York. Perhaps the most striking feature of the poem is its sympathetic presentation of the women: they are not figures of hate, but ‘little dark girls’ (5) who have been ‘pushed’ into their profession by the ‘stern harsh world’ (13–15). Though the scene is set in night-time Harlem, the workers’ fate is linked to a wider, global history of black oppression: their feet are said to be those of the entire ‘fallen race’ (16).

Following his return to the USA in 1921, McKay went on to publish a compendium of his verse, which he also called Harlem Shadows. He became more heavily involved in groups championing black rights and Communism – even travelling to the Soviet Union – before leaving for Europe once again to settle in France. The next eleven years of his life were highly productive. Splitting his time between Paris and North Africa, he published three novels – Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933) – and a short story collection called Gingertown (1932). He then left France to return to Harlem, where he wrote an autobiographical work entitled A Long Way from Home (1937), abandoned Communism, became a devout Catholic, and produced the essay collection Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). One of the most intriguing aspects facts about McKay’s career is that, following his death from heart failure in 1948, a number of his unpublished writings have been disseminated posthumously, including My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979), Harlem Glory (1990), and Amiable with Big Teeth (2017). One such novel – A Romance in Marseille – appeared as recently as 2020.

—Gavin Herbertson