“Bannabees,” Bananas, and Sweet Potatoes: Claude McKay’s Songs of Jamaica and Traditional Jamaican Foodways as a Nationalist Expression

Jamaican poet Claude McKay is largely anthologized for a handful of poems he contributed to the Harlem Renaissance, but his early work authored in Jamaica has long been dismissed for a variety of racist and xenophobic reasons.This overlooked material includes his first two poetry collections, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, both authored in Jamaica before he moved to New York. His friend, benefactor, and mentor Walter Jekyll even characterized these early collections as “naive.” However, these two collections, which mix traditional English forms with Jamaican peasant dialect, constitute vital parts of McKay’s oeuvre. Songs of Jamaica in particular exhibits a mastery of Jamaican peasant dialect in combination with extensive allusions to traditional folkways in order to make an anti-colonialist, nationalist assertion about Jamaica, the country McKay so loved. I will analyze the role of Jamaican peasant dialect and foodways in making this nationalist assertion in order to advance my claim that McKay’s early poetry is at least as sophisticated and versatile as his subsequent collections authored in the States. By turns, McKay praises native Jamaican crops such as the banana, sweet potato, and Bonavist bean for their gustatory, nutritional, and economic superiority to crops imported by colonialism. Jamaican poet Claude McKay is most commonly known as a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance, with the rather unfortunate effect that his diverse oeuvre has been reduced to his 1919 sonnet “If We Must Die,” which protests the social inequality of black people in America. He penned this poem after he moved from Jamaica to New York. In light of this poem and his collection Harlem Shadows, critics often consider his poetry produced in America as the beginning of his serious writing career. They tend to dismiss his two previous poetry collections, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, both authored in Jamaica, as immature works. Even his friend, benefactor, and mentor Walter Jekyll characterized Songs of Jamaica as stylistically “naive” in his introduction to the volume (McKay 284). However, these two collections, which mix * Sarah Hovet is a senior pursuing English and journalism majors and a creative writing minor in t e Robert D. Clark Honors College. She is currently applying to master s degree programs in English literature and working on her honors thesis. Her research interests include feminism and gender in modern Welsh and Irish literature and syntax in contemporary American poetry, among other diverse topics. Please direct correspondence to shovet@uoregon.edu. Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal Hovet Volume 14 Issue 1 Winter 2019 10 traditional English forms with Jamaican peasant dialect, constitute vital parts of McKay’s oeuvre. Songs of Jamaica exhibits a mastery of Jamaican peasant dialect in combination with extensive allusions to Jamaican folk culture in order to make an anti-colonialist, nationalist assertion about Jamaica, the country McKay so loved. In particular, the role of Jamaican peasant foodways in Songs of Jamaica makes a nationalist assertion that advances the claim that McKay’s early poetry is at least as sophisticated as and more versatile than his subsequent collections authored in the States. Foodways serve as a subtle, credible way for McKay to center indigenous ways of knowing and non-colonial crops as superior. In comparison to “If We Must Die,” which is widely anthologized, McKay’s Jamaican poetry remains overlooked. Decades later, McKay scholars continue to mischaracterize the Jamaican poems as “sentimental,” even as “genre studies” of peasant life (Hansell 123). In fact, William Hansell divides the Jamaican poetry into three categories: slice-of-life commonplace, love poems, and poems that “portray the peasant mind,” in his words (124-125). Such categorizations come across as reductive and condescending, collapsing the political dimensions of the early poetry. After all, McKay’s Jamaican years remain understudied and poorly understood, obscuring their significance to his artistic oeuvre (James, “Becoming the People’s Poet” 19). Due to both these misperceptions represented by Hansell and the lack of sustained academic inquiry described by James, the subtle, sophisticated poetic style and the emphatically nationalist content of Songs of Jamaica have been downplayed in most existing scholarship. But McKay’s support of the black oppressed and his trenchant critique of racist social structures emerges in Songs of Jamaica through various expressions of anti-colonialist nationalism, such as his focus on native crops. Due to a variety of social constraints, McKay’s anti-colonial nationalism in his early poetry often proves measured and subtle. For instance, McKay’s 1912 poem “De Gubnor’s Salary” critiques Sir Sydney Olivier for taxing the Jamaican people in order to pay his salary, despite the fact that the English rule Olivier represented had accomplished nothing but the oppression of the Jamaican people (Rosenberg 94). McKay agreed to leave the poem out of Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, as Olivier demanded. He even dedicated the former volume to the governor, who was also his benefactor. His poetry often constituted “acts of dexterity” within a system in which “oppositional views could be expressed primarily from within colonial institutions” (Rosenberg 93-94). However, his selection of the Jamaican crops that represent traditional foodways in Songs of Jamaica, such as the Bonavist bean, the sweet potato, or the banana, bespeak an anti-colonialist nationalism he could not explicitly include in his poems at the time while living in Jamaica. The most prominent example of McKay’s nationalism in his early poetry manifests in his constant use of Jamaican peasant dialect. This tactic negotiates thickets of politics around the use of dialect in writing, with various critics decrying McKay as racist for the thick Jamaican peasant dialect in which he wrote his first two collections. As Jamaican magazines and newspapers opened the subject for discussion, the controversy heightened given the cultural moment, one which “presented Jamaica as progressing toward enlightenment and morality” (Rosenberg 40). The Jamaican Local Literary Association published an anonymous 1913 essay “On Dialect” that championed the use of Jamaican dialect in literature, arguing, “Dialect tells the story of Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal Hovet Volume 14 Issue 1 Winter 2019 11 colonisation, of slavery and its villainies, of the Emancipation won for the downtrodden negro” (Rosenberg 40). The article even goes so far as to suggest, “Had we a Claude McKay, one genius at least, for every decade since 1800 ... the pride of Jamaica in things Jamaican would today be a fixed quantity” (Rosenberg 40). An inquiry into the possibility of McKay himself penning this eloquent missive, given his penchant for reputation-burnishing, might prove interesting. Regardless, the nationalist potential of McKay’s use of dialect serves as a way of proposing a linguistic distinctiveness and unity, rich with a history of struggle and perseverance under colonization. Conversely, other critics, such as the lawyer and writer James Weldon Johnson, argued that “acting modern meant not writing or speaking ‘too black’ because African-American dialect had been so tarred and tarnished by its historical associations with minstrelsy and racism” (Peppis 38). And thus McKay found himself navigating cultural and literary critics in addition to the colonial institutions in which he lived, complicating yet another intended anti-colonialist nationalist assertion. Given the complexities surrounding these expressions of McKay’s nationalism, his use of traditional Jamaican foodways in Songs of Jamaica emerges as a means of making an anticolonialist, pro-Jamaican claim that centers his authority. Thomas Francis and Ann Elizabeth McKay brought up McKay, the former being a farmer who “coaxed” cacao, coffee, bananas, sugar cane, and tropical fruits from the “difficult soil” of the country; thus, McKay grew up acquainted with farming and Jamaican foodways (Tillery 4). Upon arriving in the United States, he even intended to study agronomy at the Tuskegee Institute in South Carolina (21). McKay’s love for the island originated in part from his image of its soil as containing plentitude for all of its black inhabitants (James, “Jamaican Nationalism and Its Limits” 91). As McKay stipulates in “My Native Land, My Home” from Songs of Jamaica, “De time when I’ll tu’n ‘gains’ you is/When you can’t give me grub” (Complete Poems, 58). Therefore, McKay possesses an intimate knowledge of Jamaican agriculture, its hardships and its rewards, and links the bounty of the land to a conditional nationalism, making peasant foodways inextricable to any nationalist assertion he would level in his collections of Jamaican dialect poetry. For example, in the poem “Me Bannabees” from Songs of Jamaica, McKay elevates traditional folk foodways through the speaker’s celebration of bannabees, or the Bonavist bean. He clearly demonstrates this celebration when he concludes the poem with the preferential declaration “Caan’ talk about gungu,/Fe me it is no peas;/Cockstone might do fe you,/Me want me bannabees,” which carries additional weight as the final stanza in the poem (20). The stanza juxtaposes “gungu” and “cockstone,” or Congo peas and red kidney beans, with the bannabees -the other legumes might do for others, but not for the speaker, who wants his bannabees. Likewise, in the opening stanza, the bannabees “Run ober mango trees,” suggesting that the bannabees are more desirable than lush mangos, with the bannabees hierarchically positioned over them. Tellingly, “bannabees” is assonant with “want” and “wanna,” underscoring the speaker’s desire for the bannabees, the traditional Jamaican crop. Thus, the bannabees represent the superiority of Jamaican folk culture and foodways, which