“The Negro’s Tragedy…Binds Me Like a Heavy Iron Chain”:
Claude McKay’s Reinvention of the Sonnet Form as Space
for Sociopolitical Discourse and Ideological Critique
Claude McKay’s Reinvention of the Sonnet Form as Space
for Sociopolitical Discourse and Ideological Critique
For the rebel sojourner Claude McKay, poetry was one outlet through which he confronted the ill-treatment of Blacks in the United States and across the globe, refusing to be silenced in the face of societal and cultural oppression. His protest sonnets, such as his widely anthologized “If We Must Die,” therefore played a pivotal role in stirring African-American resistance to racial violence, discrimination, and inequity while preserving a literary record of the dejection and distress commonly felt in response to events such as the Red Summer of 1919. The sonnet, reinvented here to meet the emotional needs of a community far too often denied an outlet to speak out against U.S. race terror, moved away from a form traditionally aimed at expressing love and desire to one that delved headfirst into the anger of the Black community as they looked out over a landscape of ravaged Black bodies, some beaten and others violently lynched. In this sense, “If We Must Die,” argues Robert A. Lee, “must [be] read…as a racial poem” (221).
But expression of that deep-seated pain was not the only goal of the sonnet in African-American hands. According to Antonella Francini in her article, “Sonnet vs. Sonnet: The Fourteen Lines in African American Poetry,” the “sonnet began to acquire distinctive characteristics in the hands of some of the Harlem Renaissance poets” (36). Specifically, it was conceived as ‘an invitation to converse’” (Francini 37)—“an ideal forum, a public space for dynamic argumentation of social and political themes” (38). By exploring the way in which Claude McKay employed the sonnet form as a space for sociopolitical discourse and ideological critique, we can reach a better understanding of the power of poetry to promote social change, particularly at a time “when the Negro was in vogue,” according to Langston Hughes, and therefore had the attention of many in this not-so-united society. This proposed paper will trace the argumentation in McKay’s protest sonnets—specifically “If We Must Die, “Look Within,” and “The Negro’s Tragedy”—as a way to probe poetry as a key tool in the civil rights and racial uplift agenda of the early- to mid-twentieth century.
But expression of that deep-seated pain was not the only goal of the sonnet in African-American hands. According to Antonella Francini in her article, “Sonnet vs. Sonnet: The Fourteen Lines in African American Poetry,” the “sonnet began to acquire distinctive characteristics in the hands of some of the Harlem Renaissance poets” (36). Specifically, it was conceived as ‘an invitation to converse’” (Francini 37)—“an ideal forum, a public space for dynamic argumentation of social and political themes” (38). By exploring the way in which Claude McKay employed the sonnet form as a space for sociopolitical discourse and ideological critique, we can reach a better understanding of the power of poetry to promote social change, particularly at a time “when the Negro was in vogue,” according to Langston Hughes, and therefore had the attention of many in this not-so-united society. This proposed paper will trace the argumentation in McKay’s protest sonnets—specifically “If We Must Die, “Look Within,” and “The Negro’s Tragedy”—as a way to probe poetry as a key tool in the civil rights and racial uplift agenda of the early- to mid-twentieth century.
Christopher Allen Varlack is an assistant professor of English at Arcadia University, where he teaches courses in African-American literature and creative writing. President of the Langston Hughes Society, he explores sociopolitical discourse in literature of the past and present, particularly by the authors of the Harlem Renaissance era.