The Relationship between the Nation and the Disenfranchised
Perhaps the poem's most central theme is the complex relationship between the nation-state and the disenfranchised. With the vampiric image of America drinking the speaker's blood and stealing his "breath of life," the opening lines of the poem establish the premise that the "mother country" feeds off the bodies of its marginalized populations, needing them to sustain itself even as it continues to oppress them. In a similarly paradoxical way, the speaker refers to America's "vigor" giving him "strength erect against her hate," highlighting a strange dependency where the speaker needs America's antagonism to fuel his own masculine potency. McKay hints at the outcome of this antagonism in the poem's foreboding finale, which implies that the same "strength erect" that America generates in the speaker will eventually lead to her own downfall. Yet, in a perfect summation of this complex and ambivalent relationship, the speaker is only able to predict this demise because of his own status as an outsider, and he does not treat it as a cause for celebration. While the speaker even in the final lines cannot help but "love" America for its "wonders" and its utopian promise of freedom, McKay's poem unequivocally shows how that promise has never been fulfilled, ultimately suggesting that the relationship between America and its marginalized groups remains powerfully fraught and deeply ambivalent.
Anger and Ambivalence as the Basis for Art
Related to the previous theme is one of the central tensions of McKay's poetry: the fact that often, as critic James R. Giles puts it, "the positive fact of its creation relies on essentially negative emotions." The explosion of figurative language at the beginning of "America" brilliantly manifests this tension, as McKay generates a succession of alliterative metaphors ("bread of bitterness," "tiger's tooth") that demonstrate the full use of the resources of poetry even when what they actually denote is oppression and violence. Drawing inspiration from America to fight "against" America, McKay's speaker perfectly exemplifies this paradox, and McKay indeed suggests that the speaker is at his strongest and most "masculine" precisely when he is "standing" in defiance. These ideas would also find expression—and through similar images—in McKay's "The White City," where the speaker declares: "My being would be a skeleton, a shell, / If this dark Passion that fills my every mood, / And makes my heaven in the white world's hell; / Did not forever feed me vital blood." Using a similar lexicon ("being," "hell," "vital," "feed," and "blood"), this second sonnet likewise explains that it is precisely the speaker's "dark Passion" that constantly rejuvenates and inspires him, and "The White City" ends with a striking couplet that could nearly serve as a summary of "America": "The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate, / Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate."
