The Uncertainty Of Minority Identity In Claude Mckays...

The Uncertainty of Minority Identity in Claude McKay s America Claude McKay was simultaneously a central and a peripheral figure in the Harlem Renaissance. McKay s name is inextricably linked with this poetic movement; his work was included in Alain Locke s seminal anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), cementing not only his success as a contemporary poet but also his significance as a black poet in America. However, McKay is an unusual case in that, unlike other notable Harlem poets like Langston Hughes or Gwendolyn Bennett, he was not born in America. McKay moved from his native Jamaica to America when he was 22, he was already a grown man and an established poet by the time he experienced life in a racially divided†¦show more content†¦McKay inserts himself into the canonical literary history of the sonnet, exploiting this mainstream, traditional form to discuss the issue of unstable identities experienced by marginalised groups in America. Robert Smith argues that the sonnet form s rise and fall seemed quite the thing for the thought [McKay] wished to convey to his readers (Smith 273). The oscillation of sonnets between contradictory ideas allows McKay to riddle America with contesting descriptions of America, all of which destabilise the speaker s feelings towards this country, as the love which he explicitly claims to feel is undercut by consistent qualifications and mitigations. The unconventionality of McKay s type of rise and fall (Smith 273) lies in the continual nature of this oscillation; there is not just one turning point in America, it is perpetually twisting and turning as it navigates the experience of the speaker as a member of an oppressed group. Although the poem starts with ostensibly negative images of a feminised America feeding the speaker bread of bitterness (2) as she sinks into my throat her tiger s tooth (2). The plosives in the tight-knit phrase bread of bitterness create forceful, heavy sounds , sitting on the tongue uncomfortably, just like the unpalatable bread itself. The inversion of syntax in the following line is also awkward, foregrounding the act of violence being