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

2. The “Distilled Poetry” of Queer Black Marxism in A Long Way from Home

I have nothing to give but my singing. All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence. And all I offer here is the distilled poetry of my experience. A Long Way from Home The “Distilled Poetry” of Queer Black Marxism in A Long Way from Home 2 “I guess when the gang sees me with these here, . . . they’ll be thinking that I’m turning queer.” A Long Way from Home 56 * Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha It is noteworthy that in A Long Way from Home (1937), Russia’s sensational “Byzantine” effect on McKay is simultaneously “Oriental” (159). Throughout the text, the memoirist weaves a web of narratives and observations that generate linguistic and epistemological confrontations between native and foreign, state nationalism and cultural chauvinism, sex and art. In order to follow the traces in this network of imagery, one must explore the narrative’s plotting of its course through Byzantine passages—how it not only obscures and reveals his political past but also bares and buries his queer history. Focusing on A Long Way from Home, with calls on writings going back to his Jamaican verse and other works, in this chapter I offer an examination of how his leftism merged with his sexual difference. It is crucial to contemplate where McKay situates his sexual identity vis-à-vis the discourses and apparatuses of state nationalism and other forms of identity policing. I examine his difficult disposition toward the New Negro movement, emphasizing how his multiplicity should be recognized. I also look at his attitude toward patronage and its link to radicalism and proletarianism. But first I consider the importance of his three years in North Africa in terms of how same-sex culture in Tangier and other Moroccan locales informs Communism , anarchism, anticolonialism, queer struggle, and related forms of dangerous dissidence. Ultimately I consider how all of these strands meet on the problematics of state chauvinism and imperialism, McKay’s critique of power at both the cultural and national levels. By laying bare the subtle poetry of memory, my intention is to show that McKay’s queer black Marxist voice is very much alive, if surviving several levels beneath the surface of his ironic simultaneous effort to conceal (and reveal) his past. In 1930, without divulging his destination to anyone in Paris, McKay suddenly migrated to Morocco, where he resided for three years. After finishing up Banjo (1929), he also produced three books of fiction in Morocco: the still unpublished though extant late 1920s/early 1930s novel manuscript Romance in Marseille (c. 1929–32); his second collection of short fiction, Gingertown (1932); and his last published novel, Banana Bottom (1933). McKay did not even visit the United States for twelve years, from 1922 to 1934—absent, in other words, for most of the American New Negro Renaissance by any analogue—and much of this time he spent in Morocco. His critics have never sufficiently taken up why this anomalous black littérateur decided to settle in French colonial Tangier, where the author of Home to Harlem (1928) by his own account would inhabit his first and only domicile. To put it another way, why would Claude McKay, the prototypical Pan-African nationalist author, not travel south to black Africa since he was so close? Hughes visited the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and the Belgian Queer Black Marxism in A Long Way from Home * 57 Congo during the 1920s,1 so why didn’t McKay cross the diaspora frontier and make tracks for his hereditary homeland?2 Such questions reflect the inheritance of a long-standing supposition that would benefit from another interrogation. No scholarship has considered the significance of McKay’s choice of early 1930s Tangier for an expatriate retreat. No study has adequately contemplated the significance of his tarriance in Tangier with respect to his return to the United States in 1934. In his memoir, he refutes the notion that North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa are binary opposites, thus rejecting the idea that he never made it to the genuinely black Africa: “divided into jealous cutthroat groups, the Europeans have used their science to make such fine distinctions among people that it is hard to ascertain . . . when a Negro is really a Negro. I found more than three-quarters of Marrakesh Negroid” (304). Among his “Cities” poems are several that fondly remember Moroccan cities: “Fez,” “Marrakesh...