Claude McKay and Freudian critical concepts

The problem of this study was to examine, in the collection Harlem Shadows, Claude McKay's poetic reactions to love, culture, and oppression, through the lens of Freudian critical concepts. Though exploring several topics and subtleties of love, McKay's narrators remain unfulfilled and even (in some instances) cynical. It may be that McKay harbored a haunting desire to rediscover (if only by memory) the mother's love that he never fully experienced; this desire may account for some of the obvious nostalgia he continually felt for Jamaica, which (in comparison with a then seemingly corrupt and racially brutal America), his narrators frequently idealized---even to the point of regressing psychologically to a childhood state. It seems inevitable, then, that McKay's poems would expose the harsh treatment of blacks in America, a treatment which encouraged them to resist their oppression, while at the same time promoting in them an elevated sense of their own power and humanity. In any case, all three thematic expressions---love, culture, and oppression---reveal on McKay's part a deep-seated frustration and feeling of incompleteness, all of which he dramatized by means of the Freudian concepts of the pleasure-reality-death principles, the ego-defense mechanisms, and the relationship between play/day-dreaming and creative activity. It is this very frustration which makes McKay's poetic achievement even more remarkable and seems to refute Countee Cullen's complaint about the impossibility of God's making poets black and expecting them to sing---because, consistent with the Freudian proposition, McKay's frustration over the racial predicament was one of the fundamental causes of his creative song.