VIII Regarding Reactionary Criticism
My little brown book of verse, Spring in New Hampshire, appeared in the midst of the radical troubles in the fall of 1920. I had not neglected the feeling of poetry, even while I was listening to Marxian expositions at the International Club and had become involved in radical activities. A little action was a nice stimulant for another lyric.
C.K. Ogden, the author of Basic English and The Foundation of Esthetics, besides steering me round the picture galleries and being otherwise kind, had published a set of my verses in his Cambridge Magazine. Later he got me a publisher.
But I was so anxious about leaving London for America that I hardly felt the excitement I should about the first book I had done since I left Jamaica. The Pankhurst group had been disrupted by the police raids. Many of the members were acquainted with Comrade Vie, but unaware of his real identity. His unexpected arrest and the disclosures of the police that he was a Bolshevik agent had started lots of rubberneck gossip. Some asserted that Comrade Vie had been deliberately betrayed. And members accused other members of being spies and traitors. A dissident group, headed by Edgar Whitehead, the secretary of the organization, desired to bring Pankhurst herself to a private trial and I also had to give an accounting of my activities.
One evening, when I visited the International Club the secretary showed me an anonymous letter he had received, accusing me also of being a spy. I declare that I felt sick and was seized with a crazy craving to get quickly out of that atmosphere and far away from London. But I had used up all of my return fare. All I had received from the Dreadnought was payment for my board. The organization was always in need of money.
My little book had brought me no money. I hadn’t been banking on it. I had stopped writing for the Negro World because it had not paid for contributions. An English friend, and I.W.W. who had lived in America (I think he had been deported thence), undertook to find a group of friends to put up the fare to get me back there.
While I was hotly preparing my departure, Sylvia Pankhurst was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. Pankhurst was a good agitator and fighter, but she wasn’t a leader. She possessed the magnetism to attract people to her organization, but she did not have the power to hold them. I remember a few of them: William Gallacher, Saklatvala (the Indian M.P.), A.J. Cook, who became the secretary of the Miners’ Federation, and that very brilliant and talented writing couple, Eden and Cedar Paul. And I was informed that before my time there had been others even more brilliant among the Left literary and artistic set. I remember saying to Springhall that it was a pity the organization was too small for him. It was a one-woman show, not broad-based enough to play a decisive rôle in the labor movement.
At last, when I was safely fixed in my third-class bunk, I had time to read and ponder over the English reviews of my book. If it is difficult to ascertain the real attitude of the common people of any country regarding certain ideas and things, it should be easy enough to find out that of the élite by writing a book. The reviews will reveal more or less the mind of the better classes.
In most of the reviews of my poems there was a flippant note, either open or veiled, at the idea of a Negro writing poetry. After reading them I could understand better why Bernard Shaw had asked me why I did not go in for pugilism instead of poetry. I think I got as much amusement out of reading them from my own angle as the reviewers had in writing from theirs.
But more than all there was one that deserves special mention. It was the review published in the Spectator, the property, I think, of the Strachey family, and the organ of the Tory intellectuals. There can be little doubt that the London Spectator represents the opinion of that English group, which, because of its wealth and power, its facilities for and standards of high education, and its domination of most of the universe, either directly or indirectly, is the most superior in the world.
Said the Spectator critic: “Spring in New Hampshire is extrinsically as well as intrinsically interesting. It is written by a man who is a pure-blooded Negro.... Perhaps the ordinary reader’s first impulse in realizing that the book is by an American Negro is to inquire into its good taste. Not until we are satisfied that his work does not overstep the barriers which a not quite explicable but deep instinct in us is ever alive to maintain can we judge it with genuine fairness. Mr. Claude McKay never offends our sensibilities. His love poetry is clear of the hint which would put our racial instinct against him, whether we would or not.”
So there it bobbed up again. As it was among the élite of the class-conscious working class, so it was among the aristocracy of the upper class: the bugaboo of sex—the African’s sex, whether he is a poet or pugilist.
Why should a Negro’s love poetry be offensive to the white man, who prides himself on being modern and civilized? Now it seems to me that if the white man is really more civilized than the colored (be the color black, brown or yellow), then the white man should take Negro poetry and pugilism in his stride, just as he takes Negro labor in Africa and fattens on it.
If the critic of the organ of British aristocracy had used his facilities for education and knowledge and tolerance (which the average black student has not) to familiarize himself with the history and derivations of poetry he might have concluded that the love poetry of a Negro might be in better taste than the gory poetry of a civilized British barbarian like Rudyard Kipling.
It seems to me that every European white lover of lyric and amatory poetry should be informed that one of the greatest, if not the greatest, poets of love, was a Negro named Antar. And that European or white man’s love poetry today probably owes much of its inspiration to Antar, who was the son of a Negro woman and an Arabian chieftain.
One of the big surprises of my living in North Africa was the discovery that even the illiterate Moor is acquainted with the history and the poetry of Antar. Often in the Arab cafés (which I haunted like a loco, because of the native music), when I was especially enthralled by the phrasing of a song, I was informed that it was an Antari (a song from Antar). When I was introduced as a poet there was not a suspicion of surprise among the natives. Instead I was surprised by their flattering remarks: “A poet! Mezziane! Mezziane! Our greatest poet, Antar, was a Negro.”
W.A. Clouston, who writes with authority on Arabian poetry, says: “It is far from impossible that the famous romance of Antar produced the model for the earliest of the romances of chivalry.” Certainly it was the Arabian poets who, upon the Arab conquest of Spain, introduced lyric feeling into the rude and barbaric accents of the Europeans. The troubadours of southern Europe stem directly from the Arabian poets. The Arab poets and musicians were the original troubadours. And happily they exist today exactly as they did thirteen centuries ago, wherever Moslem culture holds sway.
Says Sismondi, the famous scholar: “It is from them that we have derived that intoxication of love, that tenderness and delicacy of sentiment and that reverential awe of woman, by turns slaves and divinities, which have operated so powerfully on our chivalrous feelings.”
But it should not be necessary for me in this place to attempt to enlighten the English gentlemen. I am not a scholar and this book is not scholarly. The English gentleman has the means and the material to educate himself that no Negro has. If he does not make the proper use of them it must be because he is spoiled by his modern civilization. The story of Antar was translated from the Arabian into English way back in 1820, and by an Englishman named Terrick Hamilton.
Antar is as great in Arabian literature as Homer in Greek. Said the founder of Islam: “I have never heard an Arab described whom I should like to have seen so much as Antar.” In the universal white system of education the white school boy learns about Homer and Virgil and their works, even if he does not read Greek and Latin. He learns nothing of Antar, although it is possible that European poetry derives more from Antar than from Homer. Yet the white child is so rich in its heritage that it may not be such a great loss to him if he grows up in ignorance of the story and poetry of Antar. The Negro child, born into an inferior position in the overwhelming white world, is in a different category. He should know something of the Antar who was born a slave, who fought for his liberation, who loved so profoundly passionately and chastely that his love inspired and uplifted him to be one of the poets of the Arabian pleiades.
Behold the sport of passion in my noble person!
But I have thanked my forebearance, applauded my resolution.
And the slave has been elevated above his master;
For I have concealed my passion and kept my secret,
I will not leave a word for the railers, and I will not ease the hearts
of my enemies by the violation of my honor.
I have borne the evils of fortune, till I have discovered its secret meaning...
I have met every peril in my bosom,
And the world can cast no reproach on me for my complexion:
My blackness has not diminished my glory.
My mother is Zebeeda,
I disavow not her name and I am Antar,
But I am not vainglorious...
Her dark complexion sparkles like a sabre in the shades of night
And her shape is like the well-formed spear....
To me these verses of Antar written more than twelve centuries ago are more modern and full of meaning for a Negro than is Homer. Perhaps if black and mulatto children knew more of the story and the poetry of Antar, we might have better Negro poets. But in our Negro schools and colleges we learn a lot of Homer and nothing of Antar.