13 - The Caribbean voices of Claude McKay and Eric Walrond

Summary

The Caribbean

Claude McKay and Eric Walrond have long been regarded as important figures of the Harlem Renaissance. They were not African Americans, however. McKay, born in Jamaica, and Walrond, born in present-day Guyana and raised in Barbados and Panama, were part of a large contingent of migrants from the Caribbean who came to the USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their Caribbean origins had a profound influence on their attitude toward American race relations as well as on their literary development.

The impact of Caribbean immigrants on the Harlem Renaissance was widely noted at the time. As early as 1919, the editor Fenton Johnson wrote that “We of America owe much to the West Indian . . . In every field of American life we find the West Indian pushing ahead and doing all in his power to uphold the dignity of the Negro race.” Yet there has been a tendency to subsume writers like McKay and Walrond into the American canon without taking full account of their Caribbean origins. There is a need to reclaim them for Caribbean literary history and to see them as precursors of major contemporary writers such as Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat, who were born in the Caribbean but have lived in the USA for much of their writing lives.

In his last novel, Banana Bottom (1933), Claude McKay described the beginning of the twentieth century in Jamaica as a period of “inquietude” (45). That was somewhat of an understatement. Jamaica and other British colonies in the Caribbean were undergoing profound social, economic, and political upheavals that would contribute to the massive migration that took place from the 1890s to the 1920s.