Claude McKay’s The Tropics in New York

Image taken from https://fineartamerica.com/featured/tropical-fruit-monti-ladd.html?msclkid=2f699c62ab8811eca697231bf306fd5c (Fine Art America)

For the last session of Wonder, Truth, and the Everyday, we were invited to memorize a poem; I chose Claude McKay’s The Tropics in New York. While I would like to say that I was pushed by some deep connection with this particular work, the truth is much more banal. It was short, it rhymed, and I knew what all of the words meant without recourse to a dictionary. What can I say? I was daunted by the task. It was something I had never done before, owing to a high school English experience devoted in quarter to cramming for the AP exam, three-quarters to teachers that were just trying to get us to come to class.

Leaning on a recommendation pilfered from WikiHow, I tried building a mental map of the poem to learn it. It’s an incredibly visual work, but it felt strange to bring it into my world. McKay’s bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, / cocoa in pods and alligator pears, / and tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit found a home around my kitchen, his nun-like hills rolling into place in my backyard, all at odds with the chilly Pennsylvania swampland of my childhood. I found I couldn’t keep all of the images straight, my mental picture faltering around chants of bananas ripe and green, bananasripeandgreen, bananas bananas bananas, ripe and... green, ripeandgreen. Brute force persevered through the first two stanzas.

The last stanza is different. Full to bursting with emotion, it sets itself at odds with the placid imagery of the poem’s beginning. I don’t remember memorizing these lines as much as absorbing them, letting McKay’s wave of longing wash over me in mirror to his own sorrowful resignation. Reading this stanza hurt. Reciting it hurt. Being able to recall it from memory is like pressing down on a bruise, a bright flash of self-inflicted pain.

A year later, the poem still skirts around the corners of my mind. Bright days conjure up its dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies, dark days its hunger for the old, familiar ways. It feels like McKay prowls my consciousness, scrawling his words where previously my own would have had to suffice. It’s a strange sensation, sharing space with a poet. But it adds a depth to every moment that I never would have imagined.