Claude McKay's "The Biter Bit": "Calalu" and Caribbean Colonialism

Abstract

Claude McKay's "The Biter Bit":Calalu" and Caribbean Colonialism Gary Edward Holcomb (bio) In 1912, the same year Claude McKay (1889–1948) immigrated to the United States, he published two volumes of poetry in Jamaica, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Though the radical poet is renowned for such sonnets and other generally traditionally styled verse as "If We Must Die" (1919) and "America" (1921), the Caribbean author's early writing is primarily "dialect," or creole, verse. "The Biter Bit" appeared in McKay's opener, Songs of Jamaica, an omnibus introduced by his first patron, expatriate English ethnologist Walter Jekyll. During a time when he was beginning to be recognized as a literary prodigy, McKay had shared his juvenilia, nearly all of which were composed in traditional form, with Jekyll. The ethnologist became enthusiastic about a single vernacular poem, titled "Cotch Donkey," and encouraged the black author to write more dialect verse (Maxwell xiv). McKay was initially hesitant about the potential of dialect poetry—customarily light verse—to express weighty themes. Judging from his later writing, it is likely that McKay, even at this early stage, believed that in order to generate an emergent national literature, the poet must exercise a solemn literary commitment. Indeed, Jekyll's counsel effectively discouraged McKay's aspiration to compose in high manner. Bringing to bear his erudition as a foremost ethnologist of Jamaican Basilectal speech, moreover, and wishing to promote the work of his discovery, Jekyll annotated the poem's creolisms. As a result of this union, McKay achieved fame as the "Jamaican Bobby Burns." McKay likely would have been unable to publish his poetry without Jekyll's assistance, and indeed he was grateful to his benefactor for lending his name. The act of the white cultural linguist decoding the Jamaican author's common speech verse nonetheless illustrates the predicament of a black writer who produces language poetry for a primarily white readership: the reading of a poem like "The Biter Bit" as more anthropological artifact than art. These circumstances offer insight into why, after he left Jamaica behind in 1912, McKay no longer wrote vernacular lyrics. Much dialect and regional writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is recognizable for its light touch—its charming mode of expression—and wry comic flourish, and "The Biter Bit" delivers in this regard. Yet it also registers as well the grim condition of the Caribbean colonial. A hungry "ole woman" eagerly anticipates the growth of her "calalu" plant. The poem's omniscient voice then narrates the plant's viewpoint: "But calalu [ . . . ] / Is swearin' too fe wuk him gut"; that is, the dasheen shrub vows to "bite" back the woman by giving her diarrhea. Neither the woman nor the plant, however, gets the satisfaction, the "biter bit." Concealed "ratta," also starved, gobbles up the greens. A recognizably African-originated folk tale irony, the rodent suffers from the trots that [End Page 313] the plant intended for the woman. Through the conventions of regional dialect humor writing, its staging of a comic struggle over a callaloo plant, "The Biter Bit" chronicles the bleak situation of the Jamaican colonized class living under the oppressive conditions of buccra—British Crown Colony—rule. Gary Edward Holcomb Gary Edward Holcomb is an associate professor of English at Emporia State University (Kansas). His work has appeared in a number of periodicals, including African American Review, American Quarterly, Callaloo, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies. In June 2007, the University Press of Florida will publish his Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. Works Cited Maxwell, William J. Introduction. Complete Poems. By McKay. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004. xi-xliv. Google Scholar McKay, Claude. "The Biter Bit." Songs of Jamaica. London: Watts, 1912. 36-37. [End Page 314] Google Scholar Copyright © 2007 Charles H. Rowell