Ethiopia Observer reviewed Claude McKay’s novel on Harlem, Communists, and Ethiopia’s 1930s crisis

On 14 June 2019 Ethiopia Observer published Fikru Negash Gebrekidan’s review of Claude McKay’s novel Amiable with Big Teeth, written in 1941 and only published in 2017 after a Columbia archive find, and inspired in part by Ethiopian Pan-Africanist Dr. Malaku Bayen.

The review said the Harlem Renaissance novel stages rivalries between racial nationalists and interracial Communists during Italy’s war on Ethiopia, and it read the book as both social history of elite Harlem and a cautionary tale that echoes later Ethiopian revolutionary politics.

Kept as literary-history archive, the Observer essay dates a scholarly Ethiopian reading of McKay’s Ethiopia-themed novel in June 2019.

Sources: Ethiopia Observer