British intelligence tracked and restricted poet Claude McKay across three continents for decades.

Evidence

Cooper and Reinders recount: “McKay escaped arrest but his ‘big black grin’ [McKay’s description] did not prevent the Home and/or Foreign Office from preparing a dossier on him. In 1930 McKay wrote to Max Eastman that the English government prevented him from visiting Gibraltar (McKay was still a British subject) and that a French official in Fez told him that the ‘British Secret Service had me listed as a propagandist.’ Two years later McKay was having trouble with the British Consul in Tangiers and was prevented from entering British territory—including his home island of Jamaica. And in the following year he complained to Eastman that ‘those dirty British bastards working respectably in the dark’ were blocking his re-entry into the United States.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2390

Categorization

• SHARE: A poet being surveilled and barred from his own home island by colonial intelligence makes a striking anecdote for anyone interested in literary history or surveillance studies.