McKay, Claude. Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem. New York: Penguin Classics, 2017. 368 pp, paperback $13.65, ISBN-10: 9780143132219, ISBN-13: 978-0143132219.

Amiable with Big Teeth was written in 1941 by Claude McKay, a legend in the African American literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Amiable has the distinction of being the only novel McKay composed on American soil, the rest resulting from his years in Europe, North Africa, or even native Jamaica. The draft took four months to complete, its storyline inspired by the life of a recently deceased Pan-Africanists: Dr. Malaku Bayen of Ethiopia. Amiable did not make it to print in McKay’s lifetime. Traces of the manuscript vanished after a negative feedback from E. P. Dutton, at least until graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier stumbled into it in the archives of Columbia University in 2009. It would take another eight years of vetting before Cloutier, with co-editor Brent Hayes Edwards, was able to publish the novel with a richly detailed and informative introduction.

Set in Harlem of the mid-1930s at the time of the second Italo-Ethiopian war, Amiable revolves around the rivalries and intrigues within the Ethiopian defense campaign: racial nationalists on the one hand and interracial Communists on the other. The 1930s represented the peak of the Communist Party influence in the United States. Like all colonial expansions before it, the American left presented a class analysis of the Italo-Ethiopian war, turning it into a powerful tool of political agitation. In a parallel move, the racial nationalism of Marcus Garvey had already demonstrated that African Americans could be organized into a formidable grassroots movement. To such nationalists, who held a dim prospect of interracial integration, in the latest African tragedy lay at stake the future of an entire race, hence its value as a rallying Pan-African platform.

As a historical fiction, Amiable can be approached from different angles. For some, Amiable’s elaborate cocktail parties, freewheeling intellectuals, and status-conscious housewives draw attention to the social history of elite Harlemites that a mainstream narrative of the Great Depression neglects. Others highlight passages in Amiable that conjure images of a great African past, a reminder that Afrocentric thought was as rich and alive in the first half of the twentieth century as it was in the second. And for still others, Amiable might read as a critique of the self-indulgent left, such as of its romanticized role in the legal defense of the Scottsboro Boys, or of the idolization of Communist Jan Erlone as the selfless hero in Richard Wright’s Native Son.

The role of Ethiopia as a pawn in the politics of the League of Nations is well known.

Ethiopianists appreciate Amiable differently. In McKay’s unflattering treatment of the schemes and designs of the Comintern (Communist International) is a blueprint of what would befall Ethiopia decades later. The role of Ethiopia as a pawn in the politics of the League of Nations is well known. What McKay’s treatment of the Italo-Ethiopian war reveals is how Africa first entered Soviet foreign-policy consciousness, presciently setting the stage for Cold War rivalries over the old continent decades later.

Having spent the year 1922 in Moscow, McKay’s insider knowledge of Stalinism comes naturally. Less critical is his treatment of the Ethiopian government, which he feels was a victim of an international smear campaign. In his earlier nonfiction work, Harlem Negro Metropolis, McKay had observed how newspaper articles tried to discourage blacks from closing ranks with Ethiopians by insisting that the latter were “not Negroes.” In Amiable, an anthropology professor invokes the age-old Hamitic theory to lend credence to such claims. “Ethiopians don’t think so,” retorts back the Haile Selassie official present. “We call ourselves a black African nation.” The archaic race debate picks up again at a church venue where an Afrocentrist luminary tries to settle it through the words of Herodotus, Volney, and Champollion. “What you all should know is also what the Ethiopians should know about themselves,” he challenges. “Then they will fight better and  you will help more.”

The story that McKay tells in Amiable unfolds at the height of the war, between December 1935 and May 1936. This does not prevent subtle flashbacks, such as weaving into the fiction an actual scandalous incident from the year before. That was the sensational story of Ms. Islin Harvey, an obscure Harlem soloist turned international celebrity, thanks to a savvy Broadway promoter. As Princess Rossari Heshla Tamanya of Ethiopia, Ms. Harvey made her debut in the big dailies, and it was only after formal complaints by the Ethiopian ministry of foreign affairs that the New York Times realized that it had been duped. In Amiable, Princess Tamanya reincarnates as Princess Benebe Hoax, the brainchild of a Soviet spy instead of a local empresario. It was an example of how McKay could stretch a fact to spin a good tale, in this case using it as proof of the Communists’ evil genius.

Amiable’s central character is the Europe-educated aristocrat turned government envoy at large. He is Lij Tekla Alamaya, a name as evocative as it is exotic. Bajirond Tekla Hawariat was the Ethiopian representative at the League of Nations, a name familiar to contemporary newspaper readers. Prince Alemayehu, whose burial site at Windsor Castle McKay must have visited while living in Britain, was the son of Emperor Tewodros who ended up in Europe as a tragic war captive. References to the dashing, youthful and olive-skinned Tekla resonate with the little-known Lij Tesfaye Zaphiro, the half-Greek Ethiopian who for a few months dominated the fund-raising scene in North America.

McKay’s reason for not using the more famous Malaku Bayen as a proto-type is a point worth commenting. First, in August 1935, right after completing his medical degree at Howard University, Dr. Malaku had joined the American mission hospital in Addis Ababa. He would not return to the United States until a year later, by which time much of the pro-Ethiopian momentum had dissolved. Second, McKay knew the Bayens closely. Dorothy Hadley Bayen had served as a key informant for his Harlem Negro Metropolis, in which a picture of her husband was included along with glowing praise for his Pan-African career. Understandably, Amiable chose not to dwell on the memories of a recently deceased friend, opting for a Tekla that was a composite of several personalities.

In one instance, however, the literary value of Malaku outweighs other considerations. The Bayens had returned to the United States in September 1936, their fund-raising mission endorsed by a letter bearing the imperial seal of Haile Selassie. To a public wary of pretenders and racketeers, the official paper would immediately take on an almost sacral significance. Inspired, McKay would build the central plot of the story around the palace artifact, and to great literary success.

Amiable thus opens as Lij Tekla, armed with the above commendation, shows up in Harlem just few months into the Italo-Ethiopian war. His arrival is timely as the two pro-Ethiopian groups (the Pan-Africanist Hands to Ethiopia and the Communist-run Friends of Ethiopia) are in a mortal contest for legitimacy. Since it is the one hosting the diplomat, the Hands to Ethiopia expects on winning the support of the Harlem masses. Surprise happens. The Friends of Ethiopia manages to steal the priceless royal souvenir at a dinner party. A few days later, its newspaper resorts to a character assassination denouncing Tekla as an imposter. Unable to defend himself without credentials, Tekla would not only cancel his fund-raising tour with the president of the Hands to Ethiopia, he would also surrender to the Communists’ demand that he join their Friends of Ethiopia.

The lesson drawn is obvious. The machination and intrigue manifested by Friends of Ethiopia, thanks to Soviet agent Maxim Tasan, allows McKay to expose the duplicitous and authoritarian nature of the radical left. Communists are neither colorblind nor progressive; or they so appear to be only from the outside. When pressed by Tekla for an explanation why the Soviets continued to trade with Italy despite their antifascist rhetoric internationally, Tasan betrays his true racist self: “What do you know or understand about treaties and diplomatic action among civilized peoples?” he rants. “Ethiopia is only a land of howling black savages, over-sexed cannibals with many wives gorging themselves with raw meat. … You ought to be glad and grateful if the Comintern takes a human interest in Ethiopia.”

The novel concludes around the time of the fall of Addis Ababa. That was when, in a blunt volte–face, the Communists wrote off Ethiopia as a lost cause and turned their energy to the Spanish Civil War. That the Ethiopian underground resistance continued unabated made no difference. Rather, whatever resources were collected in the name of Ethiopia were diverted to Republican Spain along with empty battle cries: “Fight for Spain to Free Ethiopia”; … “If Spain Wins Freedom, Ethiopia Will Obtain Liberty”; “Stop the Fascists in Spain and Block Them in Africa.”

The story reads like a cautionary tale to a generation yet to come.

McKay’s 1941 novel will continue to be celebrated, and rightly so, as a sociopolitical commentary on the 1930s. When set against what Ethiopia went through in the second half of the twentieth century, however, the story reads like a cautionary tale to a generation yet to come. In explaining the Communists’ embrace of violence as an ordinary political tactic, McKay writes, “they’re assassins in ambush. When they were hounded by the Czarists they developed that offensive weapon. And when they got the power they could not rid themselves of it, for it had become an ineradicable attribute of their minds, which carried it over into their new system.” What happened in Ethiopia in the mid-1970s was exactly that. Barely ten weeks in power, the Derg resorted to a summary execution of scores of former top officials then under detention. It was a sinister act that left in its wake a cynical appreciation of violence as politics by other means, and which eventually paved the path for the genocidal Red Terror.

Thus, it is in post-1974 Ethiopia that Amiable finds its most real and enduring relevance. Before World War II, Soviet propagandists had tried to revolutionize rural and urban African American masses in the name of colorblind ideology. Yet it was in Cold War Ethiopia in which Pan-African nationalism and Communist internationalism made strange bedfellows. Likewise, the “self-determination thesis” which the Stalinists tried to apply to the so-called American Black Belt never took roots. By contrast, nations and nationalities comprise the building block of Ethiopian federalism today, a carryover from the days of the radical student movement.

Why were educated Ethiopians unable to grow out of the imprisonment of dogma unlike their African American counterparts?

Beyond its prophetic insight, McKay’s novel raises profound existential questions. Why were educated Ethiopians unable to grow out of the imprisonment of dogma unlike their African American counterparts? Why were such intellectuals more interested in the apocalyptic rhetoric of Marx and Lenin than the humanistic values of their own tradition? Two possible answers conclude this review. First, an open Ethiopian society, a sine qua non for a vibrant intellectual culture, would have allowed for the market place of ideas to flourish and for some of those quaint worldviews to go out of circulation on their own. Second, in line with Messay Kebede’s classic thesis, Ethiopian political culture would have evolved in a healthier and more linear fashion if its modernization project had not succumbed to a Eurocentric preoccupation. Superficially acquainted with the cynical experience of the global black left, its change-minded students lacked a broader framework with which to critically analyze the racial hypocrisy of the East. With an exaggerated sense of exceptionalism, they were left reinventing the proverbial wheel of a nonexistent utopia, the end of which was a vicious cycle of violence and a collective downward spiral as a nation.

References:

Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1940), pp. 175-177.

“Ethiopian Princess Sees World War,” New York Times, July 14, 1935.

“Princess is Disavowed,” New York Times, July 23, 1935.

“Haile’s Doctor Arrives to Solicit Ethiopia Funds,” New Journal and Guide, October 3, 1936.

“Haile Selassie Nephew is Snubbed by New York Hotel,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 3, 1936.