One subject that we touched on in class that really interested me was the idea of ambivalence. I had never heard the term before, and learned that it refers to two when two or more identities intersect with one another. Although Professor Eversley presented it as all of the identities meeting together from different roads at an intersection, I kind of like to think about it like a soup in that many different ingredients (identities) come together, and kind of mix, and cook together, but also sometimes remain solely themselves within the soup. And if Ambivalence is a soup, I don’t think that anyone would be a more interesting soup than Claude Mckay. In class we discussed how he was a member of the black diaspora, a NYC resident, a gay man, a Jamaican man, and a few other things. Now this already makes for a very interesting soup. But Claude Mckay didn’t make soup, he made poems, and all of these identities come together in his poetry book Harlem Shadows, which features many interesting and unique poems. What really made his expression of all of these identities so interesting was another one of his identities, which was European style poetry, which has him using the poem structure of sonnets to discuss things that had never really been discussed in a sonnet format before. In addition to that I took the time to look at his Wikipedia page, and find out that his story, and therefore identity, gets even more unique after he wrote Harlem Shadows, with him becoming a socialist and going to the Soviet Union after being invited by Lenin himself. The fact that his already ambivalent soup of an identity got even more interesting after he wrote Harlem Shadows makes me interested in checking out some of his later works.