Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Its title evocative of a Cold War era spy film, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha argues that the Jamaican poet and novelist fashioned himself in the interwar years as the "deepest mole, a diaspora undercover agent of queer black Marxism" (15). Sasha was the secret name McKay adopted upon his tour of the Soviet Union in 1922 in order to duck FBI investigators, who suspected him of proselytizing Bolshevik propaganda in the United States. Contrary to popular scholarly belief, McKay's life as Sasha—as a subversive queer black Marxist—extended well into the late 1930s when he wrote his allegedly anti-communist memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937). Code Name links McKay's hitherto critically unexamined sexuality to his Marxist politics, contending that the "quest for Comrade Claude is the pursuit of queer Sasha" (53).

Suppressed in the 1940s and 50s, McKay's now highly anthologized sonnets were first recovered by the Black Arts movement for their Black Nationalist sentiments. Recent critical recovery work on McKay, however, has emphasized his status as an international writer, venturing beyond the militant sonnets and into the rich totality of his oeuvre. Holcomb's book takes the work of Heather Hathaway, Brent Hayes Edwards, William J. Maxwell, and McKay biographer Wayne F. Cooper¹ in new directions. Code Name paints the Caribbean vagabond—most often considered a progenitor of the Harlem Renaissance and destabilizer of the traditional sonnet form—as perhaps the prototype of twentieth-century queer black diasporic writers, a figure as much politically as geographically mobile.

Central to Holcomb's book is the question of where to locate McKay as a political figure. How does one reconcile the militant black nationalism of the early 1920s sonnets with what Edwards calls the "vagabond internationalism" (187) of such later novels as Banjo (1929)? To answer this complex question nonreductively, Holcomb imports queer theory's concern with identity as a process of becoming rather than a fixed category of being in order to articulate the ménage à trois of queerness, blackness, and Marxism as it develops across McKay's work. For those who know McKay as the progenitor of the Black Arts Movement and the militant, manly sonneteer of "If We Must Die" (1919) and "The Mulatto" (1925), such a queer reading may seem odd; however, McKay would be considered "bisexual" by clinical standards (12). By nonclinical standards, McKay's queer becoming resists the classificatory schemes of institutional power, just as the word queer in its 1920s usage designates anything outside the norm, beyond the reach of categorization. Given McKay's ambiguous sexual identity and the sheer diversity of work he produced in the late 1920s and 1930s, the militant sonnets are more the exception than the norm. Holcomb amasses an array of archival evidence to support his argument. Most notably, he recovers McKay's long-suppressed FBI file and the unpublished novel Romance in Marseille—works that reveal the author's commitment to Leftist politics and demand we recontextualize McKay's more well-known poetry and prose.

The "Harlem Renaissance" in Code Name's subtitle is a bit of a misnomer, for Holcomb shows that the movement and its geographic locale were almost incidental to McKay's queer black Marxism, a mere one-night stand in McKay's "diaspora cruising" (5). This book might be read as a "queering" of the Harlem Renaissance itself—one that releases the movement from its New York locale and sets it adrift in international waters. Hol-comb shows that McKay's internationalism was rooted in multi-localism, a commitment to grassroots activism and a love for the particularities of locations, as his "Cities" poems and titles of his novels attest. Holcomb's queer reading stays faithful to McKay's love for all things local, his cosmopolitan ethos that allowed him to find a "home" anywhere and nowhere.

In the introduction, Holcomb argues that McKay's "diasporic itinerary" (1) had a "kind of logic" that traces the...