ModPo 2013 #34 Humanity in Sonnet: On McKay's "If We Must Die"

Image of the Red Summer of 1919 from northamarillonow.

If We Must Die
BY CLAUDE MCKAY

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
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I liked how there was the constant question in the video discussion of "who is McKay addressing?" It definitely was not enough to identify his fellow persecuted African Americans. Indeed, this was not their language, the high Shakespearean sonnet. Rather, he is addressing those who are influenced by the long tradition of English, all the way back to the source. I liked that anecdote that Winston Churchill possibly used this very poem during World War 2. It is the kind of rousing rhetoric that he would actually use.

I also liked how it was mentioned that "if you destroy us...you also destroy this." That word again: this. There was a reason that McKay chose this form. Racism destroys the best of what is human and, in this poem, it destroys the humanity that created the Shakespearean sonnet. I guess McKay had to choose something that would reflect what is considered art and thus, the traditional sonnet. Destroy this and destroy human attainments in history.

There may have been other ways to express this sentiment, I agree. "If We Must Die" is not very specific in its cause. Dying "like hogs" does not just necessarily refer to racist riots or the Red Summer of 1919...it refers to any kind of war, actually, which reduces the "enemy" to a hog to be butchered or a mad dog. There is a senselessness to it in the end. Both sides are animals which have shrugged off their humanity. But I don't fault McKay for his choice. He felt that his cause was something universal, something of a call to not just comrades but to humanity. It might be in the same vein as Dylan's "Do not go gentle into that good night" which also used a traditional form. I can understand why the poet, faced with dissonance and senseless death, would turn towards the formal harmony of a sonnet. The rhymes and the cadence begs to be remembered.

ModPo 2013 #33 Let Us Apply Some Whitening Lotion: On Cullen's "The Incident"

Image from Jhenny's blog, seller of whitening lotion.

Incident
BY COUNTEE CULLEN
(For Eric Walrond)

Once riding in old Baltimore,  
   Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,  
I saw a Baltimorean
   Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
   And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
   His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore
   From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
   That’s all that I remember.

Countee Cullen, “Incident” from My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen. Copyrights held by the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, administered by Thompson and Thompson, Brooklyn, NY.

Source: My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen (Anchor Books, 1991)

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This was very powerful. I disagree with some thoughts expressed in the video discussion that the word "nigger" was diminished by being part of a rhyme (bigger), that the power of the poem was reduced because of the sing-song nursery rhyme form. 

The nursery rhyme form calls attention to the innocence (and perhaps the start of the end of that innocence) of the speaker at the time of the incident. The form is a statement in itself. It is a statement about childhood, about the playfulness and fun that children ought to be afforded in any society. And there is that discordant word right in the middle which the child-speaker even rhymes, not yet judging, perhaps, that it is discordant. 

That single word is so disturbing that even a nursery rhyme in which it is nested cannot dull its impact. It has forever separated the speaker-child from the universal "children" and has identified him with an ugly name. 

You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of little brown brother, a term of paternalistic racism applied to Filipinos. I don't know what's worse: to be given an outright derogatory and hate-inspired label like "nigger" or to be called "little brown brother" by a patronizing colonizer. Either way, they are politicized terms meant to show who is in the margins (and who is in power). 

And you know what is even sadder? Filipinos have adopted this inherited racism from the colonizer, privileging those who are fair (white) over those who are dark. Even today you will hear the term "negra/ negro" or "nognog" as insults referring to skin color (no matter how veiled in humor). Sales for whitening soaps and lotions in the Philippines alone will attest to this phenomenon. Imagine whole generations trying to rub and soap away the color of their skins.