Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth as a Political Satire

Abstract

Claude McKay, a distinguished African American writer of the twentieth century and one of the pioneers of the black American literature, gives an exact picture of the pitiable plight of the African Diaspora people who were colonized, opposed, and dominated by the white communists in the Harlem in 1930s, in his literary creations. His fourth novel, Amiable with Big Teeth is a political and a historical fiction. It deals with the efforts of the Harlem intelligentsia to form an organization to support the liberation of the fascist controlled Ethiopia. Maxim Tasan, the antagonist of the novel, is a white communist. Through the portrayal of Tasan, McKay aptly depicts the popular front of the white communists in the second half of the 1940s and 1950s of the Harlem Renaissance. The author focuses on the racial issues and shows how the renaissance continued as a vibrant thing during the time. He effectively highlights how the blacks being proud of their black heritage, retained their cultural identity, cherished their cultural values, and eventually expressed their protest against the white communists and Mussolini’s dictatorship through various agitations. This paper attempts to highlight how the novelist satirizes the political atmosphere of the Harlem in 1930s, particularly the cunning nature of the American white communists, who pretended to support the cause of the African Americans but in reality were wolves in sheep’s clothing.