A Long Way From Home (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas (MELA)) by Claude McKay

A Long Way From Home (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas (MELA)) Reviews

• 
  James F

  This is the autobiography of the Jamaican-born poet and novelist Claude McKay, whose Collected Poetry I read and very much enjoyed last month. If anything, this autobiography was even better. It begins a couple years after he arrived in the United States; there is nothing beyond a few isolated recollections about his earlier life in Jamaica. He has left college and is working as a waiter on a railway car, and has just received an invitation to visit the editor Frank Harris to discuss publication of his poetry. The second part discusses his visit to England, where he is introduced to radical labor and Marxist literature and works for a time at Sylvia Pankhurst's publication, The Worker's Dreadnought; the third part deals with his return to Harlem and his collaboration on Max Eastman's The Liberator.
  
  The fourth and most interesting part deals with his visit in 1922-23 to the new Soviet Union. He attends the Fourth Congress of the Communist International -- he is there as a poet, not a delegate, and never joined the Communist Party. McKay clearly has no use for either the British or American CP delegates; it's very clear that the only American CP leader he has any respect for is James P. Cannon. After the Congress, he travels in the USSR speaking but mostly observing. The descriptions of the Soviet Union under Lenin are extremely interesting, from the viewpoint of a person who is sympathetic to the Revolution but also not uncritical; there is neither the uncritical enthusiasm of the Communist visitors nor the denunciations of the bourgeois visitors, but a very profound observation of what was actually happening. He meets three of what he calls the "Big Four", Trotsky, Radek and Zinoviev -- Lenin was already ill and unavailable to visitors. It is interesting that after the Congress and having been in Russia for several months, someone points Stalin out to him, and he admits he's never heard of him (so much for his "leading role" at the time). He contrasts Trotsky's intelligent estimation of the American Blacks with the ignorance, sometimes bordering on racism, of many of the other leaders; Trotsky sends him on a several month tour of the Red Army and Navy.
  
  From the USSR, he goes to Berlin, then to France, Spain, and Morocco; altogether he spends twelve years writing and traveling abroad before returning to the United States. The autobiography ends just before his return. There is a brief last chapter in which he indicates his opinions on the way forward for the American Black movement, emphasizing a Black nationalist perspective (though rejecting as nonsense the idea of a Black state in the South) with Blacks organizing independently of white "friends", and distinguishes between forced segregation of society and all-Black organizations in the communities (this was an unheard of position in the 30s, although it later became an accepted view in the Black movement of the 60's).
  
  Considering that he praises Trotsky and Cannon in a book written about 1934 and published in 1937, it is no surprise that he became anathema to the Stalinists, and the bitterness of his relations with them would later lead him to a more anticommunist position, although unlike many anticommunists of the time he never turned to supporting capitalism, or abandoned his support for the Black and workers movements -- even after converting to Catholicism at the end of his life, his association was with the Catholic Workers Movement of Dorothy Day. But this was all later than the time of the autobiography.
• 
  Justin

  Claude McKay is that dude! I will admit some of his ideas don't hold up almost a century later, and also there are a plethora of times in this autobiography where he simply neglects to tell you his thoughts (like, there will be dialogue of someone else speaking, and McKay doesn't even tell you if he agrees or disagrees with the person!), but...Claude McKay is that dude!
• 
  Barbara Carder

  Oh boy, Claude, tell it like it is!! From the perspective of the 1920s and 30s, the expatriate experience in Europe and Africa is a tour de' force of art and literary and low down life - a masterpiece.
• 
  sienna

  4.5 stars (when will Goodreads introduce half stars fr!!!)
  
  "I think all people are interesting to write about."
  
  This is a genuinely fascinating autobiography about writing and political life - the only reason I didn't get through it faster is because I had to catch up on other (much more boring, medieval) uni work. But Mckay's life is an admirable one, and the way he found space for himself and others who found themselves frequently without a voice in society through the writing community is so inspiring. He seems to have been everywhere, at politically critical moments: in England when the suffragists and trade unions were organizing radical protests; in Russia when Lenin was first coming to power; and in America, for the most part, contributing to radical minority-led literary magazines and writing poetry and meeting with so many amazing writers of the period and using writing as his method of protesting the insidious, brutal racism of the early 1900s (much of which still persists today...).
  
  There is so much to say about this book, and I can't fit it all into a Goodreads review. But what I can do is implore you to read it, and leave you with this poem of his:
  
  If We Must Die
  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!
• 
  Kit Fox

  An extraordinary life told in wonderful prose. I especially enjoyed the portions on McKay's time in Russia and Africa. Now I think I need to go re-watch Reds to see if a character based on Mckay showed up at all.