Songs of Jamaica (1912): Digital Edition (in progress)
Introduction by Amardeep Singh (July 2017)
Claude McKay published his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in January of 1912, in both Kingston, Jamaica, and London, England. The book marks the emergence of a formidable and new poetic voice, though it is not without its complexities. For one, there is the marked influence of McKay's mentor, a white Englishman resident in Jamaica named Walter Jekyll, who encouraged McKay to write in patois against the author's own initial instincts. Jekyll's preface to the work also suggests an emphasis on phonological novelty rather than aesthetic accomplishment -- sixteen paragraphs in the preface deal with the particulars of Jamaican patois, before Jekyll says a word about McKay himself in the concluding paragraph. The imprint of Jekyll makes a clear indication of authorship of some parts of the text a bit blurry (specifically the copious footnotes, which were clearly intended for readers unfamiliar with Jamaican patois).
Much could be said about McKay's evolution with respect to various slangs and patoises over the course of his career as a writer. For now, it might suffice to say that with his poems published in the United States beginning in the late 1910s, McKay would turn away from patois, and instead make his powerful and memorable calls for social justice using what linguists would call Standard Written English. That said, McKay returned to a different form of dialect in the mid-1920s -- specifically African American vernacular slang -- when he began to write fiction.
As mentioned above, Songs of Jamaica is heavily marked by the influence of Walter Jekyll, who some years earlier had published a book of folk stories and dialect poems called Jamaican Song and Story (a well-produced version of this text can be accessed at Project Gutenberg). Jekyll seems to have had a philologist's fascination with Jamaican patois, and the verses in Jamaican Song and Story use it extensively. According to Wayne Cooper, it was Jekyll who encouraged McKay to use patois in his first books of poems (see Cooper, 27). Cooper also indicates that Songs of Jamaica was likely the first book-length publication of dialect poetry by a black Jamaican writer: "No black West Indian educated in the British imperial tradition had ever before attempted to use a local island dialect as his primary poetic medium" (Cooper, 35). To this reader, despite the sometimes distracting footnotes in the text, many of the verses in Songs of Jamaica hold up admirably and well as documents of the lives and voices of black Jamaicans a century ago. Moreover, more than a few of these early poems show considerable overlap with the themes that would be important to McKay later in his career: labor and working-class suffering, race, and sexuality.
Authorship of the Footnotes
One of the peculiarities of Songs of Jamaica is its extensive use of footnotes; each poem has been 5 and 20 footnotes, most of them philological in nature. We believe that at least some of these footnotes (and possibly all of them) were authored by Walter Jekyll. The only other scholar we have encountered who has commented on these footnotes is William J. Maxwell, editor of McKay's Complete Poems; Maxwell assumes that all of the footnotes were authored by Jekyll (see the passage from Maxwell quoted below).
First, there's a fair amount of evidence that Walter Jekyll was deeply interested in philology and in Jamaican patois in particular, while it's not clear that the young Claude McKay (just 22 at the time these poems were published) had that kind of scholarly mindset. As mentioned above, Jekyll's preface to Songs of Jamaica is heavy on commentary on Jamaican patois phonology, and Jekyll's earlier Jamaican Song and Story collection has an extensive ethnographic and philological preface by Alice Werner. The individual "Anansi" stories in that collection also have extensive footnoting that bears some similarities to the pattern of footnoting found in Songs of Jamaica. (For example, in Jamaican Song and Story, Jekyll has a footnote for "gully" at the end of "King Daniel" that reads simply as "precipice"; in the poem "Beneath the Yampy Shade" in McKay's Songs of Jamaica, the footnote for "gully" is: "Brook. The word is more generally used in the sense of precipice.") Moreover, the text of the preface overlaps considerably with individual footnotes found throughout the collection. Take for instance this passage from Jekyll's preface:
The "continental" pronunciation Jekyll alludes to is also echoed in several footnotes. For instance, here is a footnote from the poem "Whe' fe do?" :As a broad general direction, let it be observed that the vowels have rather the continental than the English sounds, while in the matter of the consonants the variation from English is of the nature of a pretty lisp.
The exact values of the vowels cannot, of course, be described, but they approximate on the whole more to those of Italy and France than to those of England. One sound, that of aw, is entirely rejected, and ah is substituted for it. Thus bawl, law, call, daughter, etc., become bahl, lah, cahl, dahter, etc.
"What to do? equivalent to 'What can't be cured, must be endured.' The e of whe' is the French é.
Given the repetition of a somewhat idiosyncratic assertion (and given that McKay would have learned whatever French he knew at the time directly from Jekyll himself), it seems fair to presume that Jekyll is the author of footnotes of this sort.
For today's readers, by and large the footnotes might be superfluous, especially to readers with a basic familiarity with the sound and rhythm of Jamaican patois. That said, there are some terms that might be more obscure (i.e., "quattiewut"). Here we have attempted to reproduce all of the original footnotes from the 1912 edition of the text.
Dedication Page
Another intriguing feature of Songs of Jamaica is the dedication page. Songs of Jamaica is dedicated to Sir Sydney Olivier, the Governor General of Jamaica in from 1907 to 1913. Here, McKay alludes to Olivier's support for greater racial parity in the British Empire (Olivier was a well-known Fabian socialist and veteran colonial administrator who had earlier been involved in debates about the role of the British Empire in spreading democracy around the world.) According to Cooper, McKay had actually met the Governor in person in 1911 when the latter visited Walter Jekyll at home.
On this Digital Edition
This digital edition differs substantially from the most definitive edition of McKay's poems, which is William J. Maxwell's Complete Poems (2004). Maxwell explains his approach to Songs of Jamaica as follows:
Jekyll seeded the surface of McKay's poems with hundreds of footnotes translating Jamaican terms and turns for a non-Jamaican audience. In the interest of readability, I omit these footnotes, but I sometimes explicitly draw and quote from them in my own less abundant endnotes. Here, again, my translation of Jamaicanisms is deeply indebted to F.G. Cassidy and R.B. Le Page's Dictionary of Jamaican English (Maxwell 285).
Here, by contrast, we have replicated all of what are presumably Jekyll's footnotes. Indeed, as mentioned, many will be found superfluous to readers familiar with Jamaican patois' "terms and turns." But there may be some scholarly interest in giving readers access to the text as it was initially intended to be read. At present we are presenting those footnotes without additional literary-critical or linguistics-based commentary. In the future we may collaborate with linguists to look more closely at McKay's use of Patois and Jekyll's characterizations of it in his preface and in the various footnotes.
Moreover, since each footnote in the current edition has its own unique page, the footnotes give us a useful database that can be worked through and studied in its own right. (Use the "search" button on the navigation bar above and try entering the word "footnote" to see a complete list of terms and phrases footnoted in Songs of Jamaica.)
