18 pages • 36-minute read
When Dawn Comes to the City
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Themes
The Anxiety of Displacement
“When Dawn Comes to the City” is an example of the literature of the Black diaspora, creative works that anatomized the emotional, psychological, and spiritual impact of the scattering of African cultures around the world for more than four centuries largely through the institution of slavery.
Even as historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists have tracked the migration routes of African exiles, creative writers have looked into the impact of the displacement of Africans to America and what happens to the integrity of racial and ethnic identity when a person lives in a different (inevitably hostile) environment. Indeed, McKay’s own family roots traced back to different areas of Africa and then to the Caribbean and now, within the narrative present of the poem, in New York City.
Rather than reflecting the expansive rush of being part of a global community, his identity forever evolving and defined only by an elusive horizon, the poet here taps into the anxiety of displacement, the feeling of identity lost not expanded, the feeling of the self alone, not magnified; alienated, not embraced.
The speaker is that classic expression of diaspora literature: a stranger in a strange land. Stanzas 2 and 4 capture the kinetic confusion of life in the Caribbean burst with a sense of vividness. The detailing is so specific—the sights, the colors, the sounds—the Caribbean world comes alive in ways that the New York environment—cold, quiet, dark—does not and, as the speaker no doubt fears, cannot. In the end, such a celebration of the island culture settles into a disquieting chill: that, the reader understands, is the world lost.
In the argument McKay makes, his theme is wider than his own life narrative and his odyssey from Jamaica to Manhattan, relocating from one island to the next. Given McKay’s allegiance to several Black organizations during the Harlem Renaissance and his commitment to defining Black identity in a racist white America, the poem argues that no matter how distant one is from one’s cultural home, it is important to uphold one’s cultural identity. The speaker’s island home is as close and as distant as memory itself: “There I would be at dawn” (Line 44). The poem ends with this wistful yearning for a place that is real despite being a construct of the speaker’s yearning. Within the literature of the Black Diaspora, home becomes an absence so compelling that it becomes a presence.
The Consolation of the Imagination
In the poem, the world of the “island of the sea” (Line 9) is animated, vivid, and arresting, its landscape detailed and enumerated: the roosters, the hens, the goats, the horse, the cow, the babbling stream, the grasses. The energy of the island world is stirred to life by the first hints of dawn. The detailing is precise: “hens are cackling in the rose-apple tree” (Line 12); the horse neighs “on the brown dew-silvered lawn” (Line 14); the goat tends to her corner of a farm field, there along a stream tumbling over rocks on its way to the nearby sea. The reader is immersed in the inviting world of this island morning.
However, there is dark irony at the heart of McKay’s poem: The place most vividly recreated is a world that only exists in the speaker’s imagination. If the description of the lost island world is expansive (suggested by the irregular line lengths in the two stanzas that focus on the island), that world is accessible to the speaker only through the consolation of the imagination. The world around him—the world of a distinctly different island, Manhattan—is by contrast thinly detailed, left in somber grays and whites, cold and quiet like some uninhabited alien planet. That the city is the speaker’s reality and the island the speaker’s imagination makes the imagination both consolation and refuge. Without the alternating stanzas, this poem would be a lively celebration of island life; with the New York stanzas, the poem suggests a kind of sadness, a spiritual desperation. Fantasy becomes a survival strategy, that is, a fantasy born of and sustained by the heartache of homesickness.
The Existential Threat of the City
In the 1920s, America was beginning to grapple with the implications of evolving into an urban culture. In a quick transition, less than 30 years, the city became the social unit of America and the key to its evolution into a world economic force. Writers such as McKay born in the closing decade of the 19th century were too young to remember the comforts of an agrarian America, but they were not so young that they could completely engage with the animation and energy of the city. The city posed an existential threat to McKay’s generation: How does an individual survive, the integrity of their identity intact, when the sheer size of the city threatened to depersonalize existence, reducing people to cogs within a sprawling industrial environment that rendered individuality irrelevant?
The two sections set in the metropolis are discomforting. Stanza 1 juxtaposes the isolated speaker and the “dark figures” (Line 6) walking “out of the tenements” (Line 5); less like humans and more like shadows as they “sadly shuffle” (Line 7) to work. They have been pulled from their beds by the dawn’s violation, the morning’s cutting light triggering an ironic resurrection: The workers are more like zombies than people. In Stanza 3, the same sense of alienation is created now by the juxtaposition of the “dying stars” (Line 26) overhead with the “lonely newsboy” (Line 27) hurrying through the streets, whistling a tune to fill the emptiness of the streets.
McKay, despite (or perhaps because of) his association with the artists’ colony in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, does not here tap into what his fellow Black artists celebrated in their works, the vivacity of Harlem as a city-within-a-city symbolizing a community where the heart and the soul could be expressed, finally apart from the constrictions of white America. That thematic reading of the poem is lacking—McKay offering a stark sense of the city as claustrophobic, unconvinced by the dawn’s generous offer of reanimation.
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