The Harlem Dancer
By Claude Mckay
Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black, shiny curls
Profusely fell; and, tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze;
But, looking at her falsely-smiling face
I knew her self was not in that strange place.
Though I’m not particularly fond of the sonnet structure, McKay works with the it in a very poignant way, evoking the “Harlem Dancer[‘s]” complex feelings into the tightly structured poem. He does this using potent imagery which fluctuates between a Petrarchan glorification of a woman’s sensual beauty—her voice “like the sound of blended flutes,” her “shiny curls,” her body like a “proudly-swaying palm”—and a gritty portrayal of a woman’s plight against the “devour[ing] eyes of misogyny, specifically a black woman’s. And although sex and race are both significant in this poem, I feel like gender is a more central theme to this specific Claude McKay poem.
Leaving the “bold-eyed boys” racially ambiguous, the speaker depicts the “applauding youths” as animals drunken animals starving with lust, drinking in the Harlem dancer’s sensualities, using her to satisfy their lascivious natures, and consequently turning her into an object who must “falsely smile” her way through life in order to live in a hegemonic white male society. Not to mention they are watching her “with young prostitutes” by their sides. As sonnets traditionally work, the last two lines of the poem changeup the flow and elicits the truth about the situation happening in this Harlem cabaret club; so while we are presented with a picture of this graceful, poised, gorgeous black beauty in the first twelve lines, the last two exhibits the true nature of the Harlem dancer. As the speaker says while staring at her, “I knew her self was not in that strange place,” meaning he knows that she is putting on an act and placating these horny young men, playing into their sexist actions because she feels that, as a black woman, she has no authority. Hence, her true self would not be stripping in a jazz club if it were up to her, but her lowly social location forces her to go against her own morals—to put aside her true self to fit into the male dominant construct of femininity.
Before I leave this poem I want to comment on the voyeuristic quality McKay incorporates in “The Harlem Dancer”: the speaker is watching and observing the dancer’s just as the “wine-flushed” boys are, except the speaker is gazing one step back, taking both the dancer and the audience into account. Still, the speaker is objectifying the dancer in almost the same way the boys are, although he is able to see beyond the sexual façade she puts up. He can see her true nature hidden behind that “proudly-swaying” body and can see that something is wrong with what he is seeing; even so, he’s somehow wound up in this strip-club of sorts, probably on his own volition, and he is ogling at the passionate beauty she is able to exude despite her inner melancholy. Perhaps this is a comment on the complex nature that black women must face, seeing as they are faced with both the sexist gaze and the racist gaze. I know that the audience isn’t specified to be white, but I just have this inkling that they are a bunch of white boys; likewise, I’m going to assume the speaker is a black male. With this assumption in mind, the speaker can see her sadness by silently empathizing with her racial plights as an African American. He can’t, however, quite see his repressive male gaze, at least not as well as he can see the racial gaze she is being subjugated to by the seemingly white patrons. So whether McKay meant to bring it up or not, the major theme of this poem is the complications of African American women who were forced to fit into two normative aspects of American society, white society and male society. Thus, the gaze becomes double-layered and immensely convoluted.
If We Must Die
By Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Another sonnet, McKay’s “If We Must Die” is an empowering call to arms for the African American community at the time. Not that he is telling people to literally take up arms and start shooting their white oppressors, but rather he’s affirming African Americans’ right to liberty to stand up for themselves against racism rather than taking the more obsequiously and placating stance like their parents generation had done, who were still under slavery’s horrific indoctrination. Harlem Renaissance writers and artists like McKay were attempting to create the “New Negro”; that is, to recreate the image of African Americans around their art and cultural views. Perhaps this is why McKay writes in the traditional sonnet structure, so that he can redefine it based on his culture rather than the white culture that originally created the poetic format.
This poem is a response to the race riots in 1919, “the Red Summer”; African Americans returned from war and defending their country only to be met with ardent racism back in the States. This lead to the riots, which McKay says they must fight nobly against in order to force their white oppressors “to honor us though dead!”
20th Century Literature 