The Road to Psychic Unity: The Politics of Gender in Claude McKay's Banana Bottom

In The West Indian Novel and Its Background, Kenneth Ramchand applauds Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay for framing Banana Bottom, his 1933 novel about a late 19th-century Jamaican village, around one single protagonist, Bita Plant, and exorcising from his work the “polarized pair,” the dichotomized voices of cultural dissonance, Ray and Jake from Home to Harlem (1928) and Ray and Banjo from Banjo, published in 1929 (259–60). And Michael Stoff in “Claude McKay and the Cult of Primitivism” congratulates McKay for at long last successfully formulating an “aesthetic solution” to the black intellectual’s crisis—the dilemma of the values of the indigenous black folk vis-à-vis the “civilized” values of Western culture (142). David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was In Vogue agrees that in Banana Bottom McKay makes a “long-overdue distinction between the knowledge of Europe and the values of Europe” (295). For many critics, Banana Bottom, the last full-length narrative to address McKay’s theme of cultural duality, stood as proof that he had worked through the contradiction and disunity that undermined the cohesion of his previous two novels and had come to settle upon a reasonably harmonious solution to cultural discord. But a deeper examination of this fictive world that unfolds somewhere in McKay’s psychic past yields evidence of the author’s lingering fragmentation, concealed perhaps by the patriarchal layers of the work.

My Green Hills of Jamaica ¹ is an autobiographical account of McKay’s childhood in the West Indies. Although the book was not published until 1979, the manuscript was drafted some time in 1946, two years before the writer’s death in 1948. It is the work of an ailing artist on a sentimental journey into a sheltered past where he felt protected by the lush, rich mountains of Clarendon and the uncomplicated, well-defined relationships contained within the provincial boundaries of Jamaica, relationships that often included alliances between European missionaries and “their black peasants.” ² In his reminiscence of Sunny Ville, his own community within upper Clarendon Parish, McKay visualized a paradise, where nature flourished prodigiously, “as if spilled straight out of the Hand of God” (MGHJ 23) and people thrived together, blooming in a “beautiful garden in human relationships,” making unnecessary organizations designed to foster “better race relations” (MGHJ 46). In his brilliant biography on Claude McKay, Wayne Cooper wrote that he would consistently memorialize the image of his mountain village as a pastoral paradise throughout his life. He would forget the deeply entrenched class hierarchies (with whites on the top and blacks on the bottom) that locked firmly into place an unfair status quo, he would forget the brutal poverty borne of that rigid system, and he would forget the bleak future faced by the average black Jamaican. In reality’s place (a reality that he as an intellectual understood well) McKay substituted “the proud, lovely, independent island he had enshrined forever as part of that lost, idyllic childhood of his imagination” (62). In times of confusion and restlessness, it would offer him solace.

Banana Bottom, written fifteen years earlier, is but a fictional precursor of My Green Hills of Jamaica, though McKay himself insisted that “all the characters, as in [his] previous novels, [were] imaginary,” except for Squire Gensir. ³ (See “Author’s Note” in BB.) Clearly, however, the imprint of his personal and psychological history is branded upon this 1933 novel, for it in fact mirrors the non-fiction world of My Green Hills of Jamaica. Nearly every major character and many key incidents have some grounding in the “factual” memory of his autobiographical text. And McKay’s misty-eyed evocations of the old days of paternalistic coziness suffused throughout both works (most conspicuously symbolized by the relationship between Bita and Squire Gensir) certainly bind the two Jamaican narratives and argue for one being the textual complement to the other. If we can then assume the likelihood of Banana Bottom as an autobiographical text, can we assume further that Bita Plant is actually Claude McKay, the self-exiled artist who experiences through...