Haiti and Black Transnationalism: Remapping the Migrant Geography of Home to Harlem - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by John Lowney

Not surprisingly, Bellegarde's article is especially passionate in decrying the ongoing United States "'civil occupation' whose evident aim is to absorb or destroy all the moral and economic forces of the Haitian people" (Bellegarde 354). Reiterating some of the same points made by James Weldon Johnson (whom he cites), Bellegarde, in his thorough indictment of United States economic and political policy in Haiti, reveals the absurd disjunction between American propaganda and the realities of everyday life for Haitians. The American policy, he writes, serves nobody's long-term interests, especially those of the American imperialists:

By the methods of government that they have employed and by the failure of most of their enterprises in Haiti since 1915, the Americans have struck a deadly blow not only at the prestige of the United States, but at that of the whole white race. The great mass of the Haitian people had kept as a heritage of the colonial regime a faint belief if not in the superiority of the white race at least in its efficiency. This belief has disappeared.... The American action in Haiti is in bankruptcy. (Bellegarde 357)

Given that Home to Harlem itself reveals how the "bankruptcy" of the "American action" had everything to do with the white supremacist ideology through which it was justified, it is remarkable that so many reviewers of McKay's novel felt that it had "struck a deadly blow" at the whole black race. Paradoxically, the critical objection to McKay's representation of Harlem relates to desires--and anxieties--that similarly have informed American cultural mythologies of Haiti. As Michael Dash has written, American representations of Haiti since its independence most often have been projections of fantasy or insecurity: Haiti has been "the extreme case, whether it was virgin terrain, a garden of earthly delights where the black race could begin again or the closest and most histrionic example of Africa's continental darkness" (2-3). During the Occupation, these dichotomous representations of Haiti intensified.

Such projections also characterized popular perceptions of Harlem in the 1920s, as McKay's novel itself exemplifies. Like the sensationalist vision of Haiti, Harlem nightclubs offered the exotic appeal of unrestrained sensuality. As Dash writes, Harlem nightlife provided "a safe safari into the world of the primitive ... a plunge into the unknown, a salutary disorientation for those who were willing to indulge their wildest fantasies" (46). Home to Harlem's commercial success attests to the popular desire for such "disorientation," and the polarized critical response to the novel among black American reviewers suggests how politically charged primitivist representations of black life still were in the late 1920s. But if the more conspicuous narrative of Jake's amorous adventures provoked the controversy that dominated critical discussion of the novel, it also seemed to deflect its readers' attention from the embedded narrative of the historically conscious Haitian exile. [18] Ray's narrative in fact undersco res the hegemonic power of primitivist stereotyping as it appeals to a pan-Africanist vision that can embrace such divergent experiences as those of Jake and Ray, of the African American and the African Caribbean, of the proletarian and the intellectual.