Claude McKay
See also: McKay
Claude McKay (September 15th 1889 - May 22nd 1948) is a Romancier and poet jamaïcain, then naturalized American. It belonged to the literary movement of the Harlem rebirth or Renaissance of Harlem. He is the author of three novels: Home to Harlem in 1928 ( black Ghetto ), a best-seller which was worth to him the Harmon Gold Award for Literature , Banjo in 1929, and Banana Bottom in 1933. Claude McKay is also the author of a collection of news, Gingertown in 1932 and of two autobiographies, has Long Way from Home in 1937 and Harlem: Negro Polished in 1940. Its poetry, lyric, nostalgic, and social, makes of it a major author of the literature Afro-American of first half of the twentieth century. He was a large traveller, passing the major part of his life between the the United States, the Europe and the Morocco. He lengthily visited the Russia after the Révolution Bolshevik. Marked by racism and the segregation, he was a committed author in the revolutionary mediums, but there remained always critical political apparatuses. Patient and without illusion, it converts with Catholicism at the end of his life.
Biography
Childhood and youth in Jamaica
Claude McKay was born with James Hill, Clarendon, Jamaica. He is the junior by an large family. His/her father, Thomas McKay, are a peasant who has sufficient property to have the right to vote. Claude draws the attention of Walter Jekyll which helps it to publish its first collection of poetry, Songs off Jamaica , in 1912. It is about the first comprising collection of the texts written in dialect. McKay publishes the same year Constab Ballads , an evocation of its experiment as police officer.
The United States
It quitea Jamaica for the United States in 1912 to join Tuskegee Institute of Booker Washington. It tests a true shock while being confronted with the intense racism of Charleston in South Carolina where for example much of public buildings are prohibited with the blacks. Putting up neither with these practices segregation ists nor of “the mechanical existence and semi-soldier” that it meets in the institute, it left it quickly to go to study at the university of Kansas. Its political commitment goes back to this time. It reads thus Souls off Black Folk , of W.E.B. Wood which marks it deeply. In spite of good performances with his examinations in 1914, Claude McKay decides that he does not want to become agronomist and goes to New York with the ambition to become poet.
Harlem
In New York, he marries his love of childhood Eulalie Lewars; but this one wearies New Yorkean life quickly and turns over to Jamaica at the end of six months. McKay must wait several years before managing to publish two poems in 1917 in Seven Arts under the name of Eli Edwards. It continues during this time to work like waiter in the trains.
The revolutionist
In New York, he attends the Bohemian white one and revolutionist of Greenwich Village. In 1919, it met max Eastman and Crystal Eastman, the editors of The Liberator. It takes part in the team of The Liberator until 1922. It publishes there one of its more famous poems, If We Must Die during “Red Summer”, one period of intense racial violences against the American blacks with leaving the war.McKay joined with a group of radical black militants in dissension as well with the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey as with the reformism of NAACP. The group includes West-Indian blacks like Cyril Briggs, Richard Moore, Wilfrid Domingo. They want to fight for the principle of black autonomy within a revolutionary socialist movement. Together, they found a semi-clandestine secret organization, the African Blood Brotherhood . However Claude Mckay rather quickly leaves the group because of his departure for London.
Hubert Harrison, a black trade unionist, had required of Claude McKay to write articles for the newspaper of the movement of Marcus Garvey, The Negro World . But only some specimens of the newspaper survived and none contains article of Claude McKay.
London
In London, it had the practice to attend a club of soldiers on Drury Lane and International Socialist Club in Shoreditch. It is at this period that its socialist engagement deepens. It lute Marx assiduously. With this club, it met Saklatvala, A.J. Cook, Guy Alfred, Jack To tan, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst and George Landsbury. One quickly proposed to him to write for the newspaper, The Workers' Dreadnought .In 1920, the Daily Herald , a socialist newspaper published by George Lansbury, publishes a racist article written by E.D. Morel. Under the title “black Plague on Europe: France leaves free course to sexual terror on the Rhine”, this article evokes the hypersexuality of the African people. Made indignant, McKay writes a right of reply, that Lansbury refuses to publish. The answer appears finally in the Workers' Dreadnought . It is the beginning of the regular collaboration of McKay with this newspaper and the Socialist Federation of the Workers (Worker' S Socialist Federation), a group of Communists active conseillists in the East End in London, and which, on all the levels of its organization, comprises a majority of women. He becomes a journalist paid for the newspaper; some affirm that he was the first black journalist in the United Kingdom. At the same time, some of its poems appear in the Cambridge Magazine published by C.K. Ogden.
When Sylvia Pankhurst is stopped according to “Defense off the Realm Act” to have published articles “likely to cause in a premeditated way sedition within the military forces of its Majesty in the navy and within the civil population”, the room of McKay is searched. He is probably the author of the text the Yellow peril and the Dockers , allotted to Leon Lopez, who belongs to the articles quoted by the government in his bill of indictment against the Workers' Dreadnought .
Russia
Paris, Marseilles
Home to Harlem
In 1928, McKay publishes its most famous novel, Home to Harlem , which gains the Hamon Gold Award for Literature. A French translation due to Louis Guilloux appears in 1932. The novel, which describes the life in the streets of Harlem, will have an major impact on the black intellectuals in the the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe. It however attracted itself the lightnings of the one of the heroes of Claude McKay, W.E.B. Dubois. For Dubois, frank descriptions of sexuality and night life with Harlem in the novel do nothing but meet “the requirements of lasciviousness of the editors and the white readers in the search of descriptions of the black license”. Dubois adds: “ Home to Harlem … as a whole gave me nausea, and after its dirtiest pieces, I felt distinctly the need to take a bath. ” Modern criticisms reject today this criticism of Dubois, who worried more use of art like means of propaganda in the political liberation struggle of the Afro-Americans than in his artistic value like representation of the true life of the blacks. Thereafter, McKay publishes other novels like Banjo in 1929, and of the news, Gingertown , 1932.
Morocco, Barcelona
Return to Harlem
It publishes two autobiographies, has Long Way from Home , 1937, and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).
Disillusion and conversion
Disappointed by the communist movement, it is converted with Christianity into marrying the social doctrines of the Catholic church. He dies of one heart attack at the 59 years age. Its collection of poems, Selected Poems , is published in posthumous title in 1953.
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