Claude McKay’s Dance With Gender

A great poem of the Harlem Renaissance

Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay is generally remembered, when he’s remembered, as one of the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance, whose fierce denunciations of racism in sonnets like  “If We Must Die” foreshadowed the Black Power movement by a half century.

McKay, though, who was bisexual, also wrote about queer identity. That aspect of his poetry was downplayed for years, in part because McKay himself spoke about it much less directly. Like many queer writers, his poems discuss and demonstrate the experience of the closet. One of the best examples of this is in his relatively unknown sonnet, “The Harlem Dancer,” which appears, like “If We Must Die,” in the 1922 volume Harlem Shadows.

The Harlem Dancer

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
Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.

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Boys and Girls

McKay’s poetry tends to be very direct, and the narrative here is easy to follow compared to many contemporary modernist poets of the time. “Harlem Dancer” describes a Harlem nightclub/strip joint in which a Black woman dancer performs for a more-or-less drunken crowd, in part for tips, and in part to encourage payments to other sex workers. The deftly-handled Shakespearean iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme are meant to mirror and pay tribute to the dancer’s skill—and to contrast modern Black American urban decadence with traditional white English pastoral themes of love and romance.

The poem picks up one other theme from Shakespeare—namely, queer love. McKay signals the centrality of homosexual attraction and experience in a phrase that is presented as a deliberate throwaway. He notes that not just “bold-eyed boys” but “even the girls” watch the dancer with “eager, passionate gaze.”

Again, McKay frames the acknowledgement of a lesbian gaze as an offhand comment, an excess addition to the heterosexual male gaze. But this is something of a deception; LGBT experience was not off to the side for McKay, nor to the Harlem Renaissance itself. Many of the most prominent musicians of the period—including Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, and Billie Holiday—were queer. So were many of McKay’s fellow poets, like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.

By highlighting queer identity, McKay opens up not just desire, but identity. If women and men can desire the Harlem dancer, then maybe McKay can not just watch her (with desire and sympathy) but also be her. And if that’s the case, then the deft performance of the poem is not just a kind of tribute to the dancer, but may indicate a more thoroughgoing identification between sonnet and dance.

This link is also emphasized by the way that McKay links the dancer to tropical images or themes.

Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.

To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.

These aren’t just generic comparisons of Black people and warm climates.  McKay writes throughout Harlem Shadows of his longing for his tropical boyhood in Jamaica, which he often contrasts with (what he presents as) the grimy and dispiriting urban landscape of Harlem.

Subway Wind

Far down, down through the city’s great gaunt gut
      The gray train rushing bears the weary wind;
In the packed cars the fans the crowd’s breath cut,
      Leaving the sick and heavy air behind.
And pale-cheeked children seek the upper door
      To give their summer jackets to the breeze;
Their laugh is swallowed in the deafening roar
      Of captive wind that moans for fields and seas;
Seas cooling warm where native schooners drift
      Through sleepy waters, while gulls wheel and sweep,
Waiting for windy waves the keels to lift
      Lightly among the islands of the deep;
Islands of lofty palm trees blooming white
      That led their perfume to the tropic sea,
Where fields lie idle in the dew-drenched night,
      And the Trades float above them fresh and free.

By presenting the dancer as a kind of personification of the tropical life he loves, transplanted incongruously in the ugly city, McKay is not just poeticizing her, but is presenting her dance as one of his own poems. Her artistry and his are one.

“Harlem Dancer”, then, on one level, is expressing compassion for a sex worker or stripper, who McKay describes (in tropes that were already somewhat hoary even in 1922) as alienated from herself by work that is degrading and ugly, even while she is beautiful, artful, and graceful. On another level, though, the poem can be read as being about McKay himself, who in writing an elegant sonnet about female beauty is also (at least partly) concealing his own erotic interests, investments, and identity.

The “self” who is not “in that strange place” is the dancer in a seedy dive and a Black woman in a world mostly controlled by men. But the alienated self is also McKay, a Black queer poet in a time and place where acknowledging that you’re a queer poet (like Shakespeare) has to be done through implication and suggestion.

Consciousness, More Than Doubled

McKay was probably aware of W.E.B. DuBois’ “double consciousness”—the idea, coined in 1903, that under white supremacy, Black people have to constantly be aware of the expectations and demands of white people. This, according to DuBois, creates a “sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.”

McKay takes this concept and applies it to sex workers, women, and Black women sex workers specifically. But in mentioning queer experience, he also links double consciousness to the closet, and to the way that queer people have to hide aspects of themselves. “The Harlem Dancer” refers, then, not just to one person, but to the ingratiating performance of identity, desire, and self that is required of a range of marginalized people—sex workers, women, Black people, queer people, and people with two or more of those identities, like the dancer and like McKay.

The slippage of desire and identity in “Harlem Dancer” inflects many of the other poems in Harlem Shadows, forcing you to think doubly (or more than doubly) about who is addressed and how McCay fits in his poems.

As one example, the title poem of the collection is another lament for sex workers—the “little dark girls who in slippered feet/Go prowling through the night from street to street.” Given the way McKay and the dancer switch places and genders in “Harlem Dancer,” it seems likely, or at least possible, that the “dark girls” in question here are not necessarily just women. It’s also difficult to miss the fact that many of McKay’s love lyrics (like the wonderful “Absence”) carefully do not specify the gender of the addressed lover.

Absence

Your words dropped into my heart like pebbles into a pool,
Rippling around my breast and leaving it melting cool.

Your kisses fell sharp on my flesh like dawn-dews from the limb
Of a fruit-filled lemon tree when the day is young and dim.

Like soft rain-christened sunshine, as fragile as rare gold lace,
Your breath, sweet-scented and warm, has kindled my tranquil face.

But a silence vasty-deep, oh deeper than all these ties
Now, through the menacing miles, brooding between us lies.

And more than the songs I sing, I await your written word,
To stir my fluent blood as never your presence stirred.

Even “If We Must Die” takes on some potential ambiguity in its stirring last lines:

If We Must Die

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!

McKay demands in the poem that Black people fight against white supremacist violence “like men,” rather than dying haplessly like animals. But we know from the other poems in Harlem Shadows that McKay is very aware that gendered desire and gendered identity is not stable; women can want women, male and female experience can overlap and meld.

The masculine assertion of “If We Must Die” in that context can be read as a call not just for Black resistance, to white supremacy, but for (Black male) queer resistance to degendering and homophobic violence. McKay’s insistent transformation in the poem of masculinity into a simile also seems like an acknowledgement from a queer poet that maleness is a kind of dance too.

“If We Must Die” isn’t primarily about queer identity; queer identity is not the only thing McKay writes about. But “Harlem Dancer” is a particularly striking example of the ways in which his knowledge of queer possibility—in general, and for himself— deepens his work. He’s a poet who’s more interesting when you realize his self is and is not in that place.