Remembering the Morant Bay Rebellion with Claude McKay

Abstract: In his 1912 poem "George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives," Claude McKay writes his own history of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. The poem imagines George William Gordon, who was executed for his supposed leadership of the Rebellion, rousing his listeners to "struggle to be free" (line 24) and to "Break, break de oppressor's hand!" (4). The direct address and driving trochaic tetrameter of McKay's poem gesture back to radical Romantic poetry, including Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Song to the Men of England" (1819) and Robert Burns's "Robert Bruce's Address to His Troops at Bannockburn" (1794). McKay's poem fuses together Jamaican and British traditions, incorporating nineteenth-century calls for British freedom while also highlighting histories of resistance by the enslaved. This essay explores how differently the events of Morant Bay were remembered in Jamaica and Britain, and shows how McKay made use of his colonial education, deploying nineteenth-century poetics to write his own history of Jamaican rebellion.