Most Jamaicans of a certain age recall delightfully the sensually lyrical poetry of Claude McKay.

Franklin W Knight

He was a founding spirit of the Harlem Renaissance that burst magnificently upon the literary scene in the 1920s. One of McKay's lovely poems, Flame-Heart, featured in Jamaican elementary schools' elocution contests for many years. Another, If We Must Die, was quoted by Winston Churchill in his exhortation to the British people in 1940 and became widely quoted and misquoted internationally, especially in the 1960s.

McKay was simply an extraordinary poet and novelist and a great son of Jamaica. Moreover, his work provides a poignantly moving picture of Jamaica and Jamaicans over the course of the 20th century.

Born on September 15, 1889, in Sunny Ville, Clarendon, McKay was the youngest of eleven children of Thomas McKay and Hannah Ann Edwards. At age seven he went to live with his older brother, an elementary schoolteacher, near Montego Bay. By age 10 he was writing astonishingly sophisticated poetry, and reading every book he could find.

MCKAY... felt comfortably close to nature in all its tropical excess

Both Jamaican teachers and Jamaican elementary education had extremely high standards then. Later, McKay dabbled with cabinet-making and served a short stint with the Jamaican Constabulary in Spanish Town before leaving Jamaica in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute in Alabama where he hoped to study agronomy.

By the following year, he was studying at Kansas State University where undoubtedly the severe winters indelibly scarred his experience.

He never became a scientist, and he never returned to Jamaica before he died in Chicago in 1948, but in his heart and in his poetry he never really left. He would travel far and wide - to London, Moscow, Paris, Marseilles, as well as Morocco - and was a restless person most of his life. Wherever he was he wrote vividly about Jamaica, creating word-scenes of unsurpassed beauty and eloquence.

Photographs of McKay taken between the 1920s and the 1940s show quite a handsome young man with sharp, wide eyes, high forehead, and fulsome lips. His invariably smiling face radiates a sunny disposition and the essence of sensuality.

It is not, however, a narrow, sexually-driven sensuality. Rather, it is the broader, more general sensuality that represents the innate ability to utilise fully and concurrently the creative impulses of all the sensory organs - eyes, ears, nose, and tongue. His poetry and occasionally his prose, therefore, evoke the empathetic qualities of heightened sensitivity.

It is hardly surprising that one of the things McKay did in his early years in New York was to open a Jamaican restaurant. As a commercial venture it was an utter fiasco, indicative of his later political activities. But then, poets are dreamers rather than men of action. Cooking, like music, is poetry in action.

That was not natural to McKay. He would rather create marvellous imaginative worlds with his pen. Indeed, his use of language and his elaborate vocabulary are both a tribute to the Jamaican elementary education of his day as well as a reflection of his precocious love of learning.

Flame-Heart is a poem of exuberant sylvan nostalgia, filled with vivid reminiscences of the Jamaican countryside - albeit countryside more easily imagined than observed nowadays. The author mentions purple apples, forget-me-not, pimento, honey-fever grass, ping-wing, rose-apple, blackberries, as well as flame-heart and poinsettia. But he also mentions bees, ground doves, and rabbits.

Clearly, wherever he lived, whether in Clarendon, Montego Bay or Spanish Town, McKay felt comfortably close to nature in all its tropical excess. The repetition of the phrase, "the poinsettias red, blood-red in warm December", clearly indicates that the poem was written during the winter months of 1922 in the northern hemisphere when every tropical person unconsciously and inevitably thinks of their native land.

Unfortunately, the inevitable nostalgia for tropical pavements hardly evokes sylvan scenes these days. The fact is that Jamaica, along with much of the world has become urbanised. But even in the rural areas the massive destruction of the forests and fruit trees means that many children lack even the foggiest notion of local trees, fruits, flowers and birds.

Far too often they no longer constitute an organic component of our memory. I would be prepared to wager that not many rural schoolchildren would recognise the blackberry, even if they have not forgotten the forget-me-not.

Yet it is hard for any expatriate to think of Jamaica at any time of the year and not think of its delectable food and delicious fruits. For me, the thoughts would be less about honey bees and rabbits than about curried goat and rice, and the irresistible smell of freshly-brewed Blue Mountain coffee in the early morning.

And my fruit would definitely be the varieties of sumptuous mangoes rather than the rose-apples and the other purple, juicy, but not terribly attractive succulent sort. Naseberry, jackfruit, ackee, soursop, golden tree-ripened bananas, and honey-sweet pineapple would definitely force their way into my mind. Just thinking about those fruits elicits spontaneous salivation to an almost uncontrollable degree.

McKay does mention the banana, and one of his novels is called Banana Bottom. Strangely, for someone from the deep rural Jamaican countryside of 1912 there is no mention of the sugar cane.

Nor, for some reason, does the sugar cane feature much in the nostalgic reveries of writers from the British West Indies, a situation quite the contrary in writers from the French and Spanish Caribbean. This is not to indicate that the sugar cane is absent in British Caribbean literature, but to suggest that maybe the memory is not a comforting or comfortable one.

Nostalgia by its very essence is selective of incidents and experiences that bring pleasure rather than pain. It is a passion that serves as a palliative for physical or psychological suffering. So this might have something to do with the Caribbean psyche.

The powerful sweetness of the sugar cane cannot compensate for the centuries of pain and misery that that productive complex inflicted on succeeding generations of West Indians and perhaps for that reason it finds no place in the sensitive reflections of Claude McKay. Had it been otherwise, he would have been a lesser poet.

Franklin W Knight is the Leonard and Helen R Stulman Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

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