McKay Can Leave the Caribbean But the Caribbean Can't Leave Him

Claude McKay became one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. This cultural movement was a cosmopolitan grouping of racially black artists from diverse places and ethnicities. McKay was born in a farming family in Jamaica. He began writing poetry as a child. McKay's talent for poetry led him to immigrate to the United States in early adulthood. Once in the United States, McKay witnessed the extreme racial polarization, persecution and discrimination prevalent of the age.

McKay's work reflects the racial issues of the time. One of the unique aspects of McKay as writer though is his thorough integration of his Caribbean background; much of his work uses the dialect and local color details of his native landscape. While the Caribbean local color provides one paradigm to examine McKay's work, in another way McKay uses his heritage to address the racial problems in the United States that were current at the time.

Themes that McKay addressed included personal and collective identities, racial unification and resistance to oppression. McKay's poem, "A Midnight Woman to the Bobby," uses heavy Jamaican dialect and references that create local color. However, the plight of the woman who is harrassed by the police officer--the subject of the work--is a situation universal to the black American experience in the Harlem Renaissance and before.

In "The Harlem Dancer," the narrator describes a beautiful street performer that the audience admires. Despite the performer's beauty and passion, McKay's narrator senses that, "her self was not in that strange place," (501). Re-examining the poem, it appears as if the performer's "self" was absent because she lost her identity, her identification with her heritage and or race. McKay describes her performance as, "graceful[ly] and calm," and the appearance of her hair as, "her swarthy neck black shiny curls / Luxuriant fell;" (501). The narrator implies with these quotes that she is "passing" for white, that she has lost her true self under her "falsely-smiling face."