In That Strange Place

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Every year I teach sonnets to my Grade IX students, and so every year I teach Claude McKay. A Jamaican, an Afro-Caribbean, a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, a Communist, a bisexual, he wrote not just poems of passion and protest, but also delightful novels about Black life in Jamaica (Banana Bottom) and America (Home to Harlem). One of my favorite poems of his is "The Harlem Dancer," where he finds himself in a highly pensive mood.

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls
Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.

Every year I ask my students what they understand by the last line of the poem ("Her heart was not in the dancing because she was doing it only for white patronage."), and every year I ask them how the speaker "knew" it. Someone or another eventually hits on it: the speaker too is a Black immigrant artist, and he knew it from his own experience.

Then I ask, does it matter that the speaker is male and the dancer is female? For the man to claim to know the innermost part of a woman? Does not the man "devour" her in his claim of knowledge, just as the wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys and girls do? Here, the distinction between speaker and poet becomes important because how can we be sure that the poet has not taken that possibility—that the speaker is also a devourer—into account? Another way of putting this is that the poem always knows more than the poet.

Jee Leong Koh
February 29, 2024

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