A long way from home

by Claude McKay

But more than all there was one that deserves special mention. It was the review published in the Spectator, the property, I think, of the Strachey family, and the organ of the Tory intellectuals. There can be little doubt that the London Spectator represents the opinion of that English group, which, because of its wealth and power, its facilities for and standards of high education, and its domination of most of the universe, either directly or indirectly, is the most superior in the world.

Said the Spectator critic: "Spring in New Hampshire is extrinsically as well as intrinsically interesting. It is written by a man who is a pure-blooded Negro.... Perhaps the ordinary reader's first impulse in realizing that the book is by an American Negro is to inquire into its good taste. Not until we are satisfied that his work does not overstep the barriers which a not quite explicable but deep instinct in us is ever alive to maintain can we judge it with genuine fairness. Mr. Claude McKay never offends our sensibilities. His love poetry is clear of the hint which would put our racial instinct against him, whether we would or not."

So there it bobbed up again. As it was among the élite of the class-conscious working class, so it was among the aristocracy of the upper class: the bugaboo of sex—the African's sex, whether he is a poet or pugilist.

Why should a Negro's love poetry be offensive to the white man, who prides himself on being modern and civilized? Now it seems to me that if the white man is really more civilized than the colored (be the color black, brown or yellow), then the white man should take Negro poetry and pugilism in his stride, just as he takes Negro labor in Africa and fattens on it.

If the critic of the organ of British aristocracy had used his facilities for education and knowledge and tolerance (which the average black student has not) to familiarize himself with the history and derivations of poetry he might have concluded that the love poetry of a Negro might be in better taste than the gory poetry of a civilized British barbarian like Rudyard Kipling.

It seems to me that every European white lover of lyric and amatory poetry should be informed that one of the greatest, if not the greatest, poets of love, was a Negro named Antar. And that European or white man's love poetry today probably owes much of its inspiration to Antar, who was the son of a Negro woman and an Arabian chieftain.

One of the big surprises of my living in North Africa was the discovery that even the illiterate Moor is acquainted with the history and the poetry of Antar. Often in the Arab cafés (which I haunted like a loco, because of the native music), when I was especially enthralled by the phrasing of a song, I was informed that it was an Antari (a song from Antar). When I was introduced as a poet there was not a suspicion of surprise among the natives. Instead I was surprised by their flattering remarks: "A poet! Mezziane! Mezziane! Our greatest poet, Antar, was a Negro."

W.A. Clouston, who writes with authority on Arabian poetry, says: "It is far from impossible that the famous romance of Antar produced the model for the earliest of the romances of chivalry." Certainly it was the Arabian poets who, upon the Arab conquest of Spain, introduced lyric feeling into the rude and barbaric accents of the Europeans. The troubadours of southern Europe stem directly from the Arabian poets. The Arab poets and musicians were the original troubadours. And happily they exist today exactly as they did thirteen centuries ago, wherever Moslem culture holds sway.

Says Sismondi, the famous scholar: "It is from them that we have derived that intoxication of love, that tenderness and delicacy of sentiment and that reverential awe of woman, by turns slaves and divinities, which have operated so powerfully on our chivalrous feelings."