Banjo

by Claude McKay

Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known to his drifter cohorts on the 1920s Marseille waterfront as Banjo, passes his days panhandling and dreaming of starting his own little band. At night Banjo and his buddies prowl the rough waterfront bistros, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking - about their homes in Senegal, the West Indies, or the American South; about Garvey's Back-to-Africa Movement; about being black. When Ray, a writer, joins the group, it triggers Banjo's rediscovery of his African roots and his feeling that, at last, he belongs to a race weighted, tested and poised in the universal scheme.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, African American, American, Literature, African American Literature, Race

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Jamaican-born American writer Claude McKay figured prominently in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s; his works include collections of poetry, such as Constab Ballads (1912), and novels, including Home to Harlem (1928).

Home to Harlem, a best-seller, won Festus Claudius McKay, a poet and a seminal figure, the Harmon gold award for literature.
He also wrote novels Banjo and Banana Bottom . People not yet published his manuscript, called Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem , of 1941.
McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown . He authored two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica , published posthumously. He entitled a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise Harlem: Negro Metropolis . People published his poetry collection, Harlem Shadows , in 1922 among the first books during the Harlem renaissance. Survivors published his Selected Poems posthumously in 1953.

Reviews

[Kinga · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the superficial level ‘Banjo’ is a picaresque story of a group of vagabonds – beach boys who spend their days wandering about the dodgy districts of Marseilles from one bistro to another singing, dancing and drinking. McKay's descriptions of the port life in 1920’s are lyrical and enticing but the novel is far more than a romantic account of times long gone. The cosmopolitan port where the whole world meets and no one is really at home is the ideal settingfor McKay to bring up the question of race. All the characters discuss every viewpoint and attitude possible while getting drunk on yet another bottle of red wine. Such scenery and representations of blacks did not earn McKay many friends among fellow Harlem Renaissance authors who believed McKay was slashing his own race. He defends himself through the words of Ray, one of the characters:
“I think about my race as much as you. I hate to see it kicked around and spat on by the whites, because it is a good earth-loving race. I’ll fight with it if there’s a fight on, but if I am writing a story – well, it’s like all of us in this place here, black and brown and white, and I telling a story for the love of it.”
“Banjo” is essentially a transnational novel, a good example of the “race-nationhood” concept. It seems as if McKay wanted to shout "Black people of all countries, unite!” and made sure each region - Africa, West Indies and the US - was equally represented. I only wish he had given more voice to his female characters, who don’t serve for much in this book. Nonetheless, it is a good novel (however without a plot as the subtitle states) and I would give it 3.5 stars.
It is hard to say which viewpoint McKay shares with his characters, but the general conclusion seems to be expressed by this quote:
“I don’t think I loathe anything more than the morality of the Christians. It is false, treacherous, hypocritical. I know that, for I myself have been a victim of it in your white world, and the conclusion I draw from it is that the world needs to get rid of false moralities and cultivate decent manners – not society manners, but man-to-man decency and tolerance.”
Amen.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Banjo is a masterpiece of lyric prose. I can't do Claude McKay any more justice than to quote him. This passage follows a description of a band in an alley-way dive bar playing a song called "Shake That Thing":

"Shake that thing! In the face of the shadow of Death. Treacherous hand of murderous Death, lurking in sinister alleys, where the shadows of life dance, nevertheless, to their music of life. Death over there! Life over here! Shake down Death and forget his commerce, his purpose, his haunting presence in a great shaking orgy. Dance down the Death of these days, the Death of these ways in shaking that thing. Jungle jazzing, Orient wiggling, civilized stepping. Shake that thing! Sweet dancing thing of primitive joy, perverse pleasure, prostitute ways, many-colored variations of the rhythm, savage, barbaric, refined--eternal rhythm of the mysterious, magical, magnificent--the dance divine of life. . . . Oh, Shake That Thing!"

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

lol i read this for class. good work claude

[Jenna Powell]

Too hard to rate, it was interesting to study for class.

Reading it with Aarthi Vadde’s article “Stories without Plots” helped me understand it more

[Steve Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this novel. I felt close to the voice of the narrator.
It was written in the late 1920s while the author was in Marseilles and Barcelona, two active port cities on the Meditranian Sea. The ports, the ships are critical to the action of the novel.
(I had a year of so myself in Barcelona in the mid-1980s playing the guitar and singing on the streets. The people were kind and supported me and my partner. This is a personal reason the novel worked so well for me, a certain nostalgia for the end of my wild youth and perhaps the beginning of my wild old age.)

The character, Banjo, is part of a loose network of traveling black street people, men. He plays the banjo and is a carefree somewhat wild character from America.
The novel is delightfully plotless. McKay apparently didn’t feel the need to contrive some through-story to carry the reader along.. That is a good thing. For me, that kind of thing, plot, in fiction and film has become increasingly annoying feeling so surprefulusly, artificial, as a cheap mechanism of wannabe popular commercial appeal.
In this novel, as in life, there is a series of episodes with a small cast of characters who move through and in and out. In this way, the book feels more real as if it is a fictionalized memoir and there is something very appealing about that over the plot/story thing that we are so often faced with in these fiction forms.

Among the international cast of black man characters there is one who we come closer to. He is another American and a writer. The novel is written in the third person voice, yet it is Ray, the writer and thinker whose thoughts and motivations we become privy to. It is certainly Ray who I felt close to. He is definitely a kindred spirit. Ray is a writer/intelectual. (I am caught in the modern bind of thought and ideas. This causes a constant measuring and distance, a position of observation, connected yet forever separate.) The novel is given its beautifully textured and deep philosophical and political detail through Ray.
He is part of this international gang of four or five, bums and panhandlers. But he gets a bit of money from the USA with a couple instances of selling a poem or two to some unstated publication.
Through clearly more “educated” and book smart than any of the others, he is legitimately egalitarian, he sees and feels the innocent human beauty and all of the others no matter how they might mess up in ways that might be seen as not beneficial to themselves.
He cherishes the uncivilised core in the others and traces that back to the African roots of them all. This is a philosophical rebellion against the enslaving machine of money profit getting ahead Euro-culture that is building the USA empire, it’s ultimate product. You call them savage, He calls them beautiful and naturally human.
They party and form a little band that plays music in cafes. They drink. They share their windfalls. They eat and get by this way and that. Ships come into port and the cooks share food with this band of beach boys. Some of them have worked on boats themselves and know other sailors who come to port, feed, and party them all.
Toward the end of the novel we see that things are changing. There is a tightening up. The English boats are not hiring black crewmen any longer. Only whites. A couple of them are arrested and kicked out of the country on the next boat. Passage paid for by the government. But sometimes they remain free, slip away.
Some of these changes are mirrored in B Traven’s novel written around the same time The Death Ship.That novel points out that a lot of this clampdown stuff is new. This need to produce “papers” to move freely around the globe. A fact we take as a given now, but according to Traven it is a ghastly new feature of the Industrial age. Before if you could manage to get somewhere, there you were. Free to walk across Europe and enter and leave at will. But these novels are written on the cusp of nationalistic control that is not all too familiar and continues to be on the rise.

This novel remains powerful and relevant now, a century later because it so clearly sets the case for uncivilization. For the core hunter-gatherer human spirit of the ages that is being wiped out by civilisation’s necessities brought about by one of its major and troubling manifestations. Perhaps over-population contributes to a vicious circle of machine controls and one form or another of enslavement.

The novel is a sort of “Fuck you modernity. I don’t owe you a damn thing and I will live wild and free on whatever fringe I can find and whatever handout and scam I can come up with without shame for this is the world I have been given to operate in.” It’s more of “I prefer not to” than a hostile tone.
It is beautiful, wholesome and true in that.
This is a powerful graceful and beautiful piece of work of universal human relevance now and for all time.

All that said it is a man’s a male story. This is acknowledged in the final dialogue, the last paragraph. Banjo states that it’s also part of the current situation that the men can move and live on the fringes: “And theah’s things we can get away with all the time and she just can’t.”
Claude McKay saw things as they were and as they sadly yet also happily still remain 100 years on. How to set it all right? Hell if I know. We play it as it lies. There is no other choice.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slow to start and (as "a novel without a plot" as McKay calls it!) not the easiest to follow always. But, through quite complex characters - none of whom in my opinion were fully likeable or fully dislikeable - manages to lay out a representation of particular 20th century experiences, and a number of interesting political problematics. 3.5/5.

[Callie · Rating 3 out of 5]

more like a 2.75

extremely repetitive, but every so often had wonderful discourse about race and racism. i just think modernists aren't my cup of tea (she says, not even halfway through a transnational modernism seminar)

[Stephen Bywater · Rating 3 out of 5]

Revelatory, but you have to love Marseille to persevere - or maybe I was just reading it for the wrong reasons and the fault's my own, not the novel's.

[Tate Fonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unmistakably queer and sensual story from a closeted author. Lucid, shrewd, and detailed; brilliant but, at times, inaccessible. Four stars for Ray and his melancholy.

[Rio Morales · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book was very interesting and i liked reading mckays thoughts on black politics and internationalism in this period of time, and the street scenes in marseille were vibrant- boats, sailors, consulates, hospitals, bars. i somehow missed the subtitle “a story without a plot” and crawled through this book at a snails pace.

[Matthew Elmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

meanders a lot, good book

[Ross Torres · Rating 5 out of 5]

This text speaks of beautiful amorous relationship with mother earth. Roy and the crew live like flowers in 1920s Marseilles. Living, dancing, drinking, crying under the sun and moon. It was a time when one could slip through the cracks of bureaucratic controls although one can feel the cracks dissapearing.

Mckay demonstrates the intricacies of black/African culture and its clash with and oppresion by the dominant white/European culture.

It seems to be a clash of ideologies one warm with the blood of life the other cold with the metal of civilization.

Banjo & Co. smile as the pick up the fruit given forth from the earth although tomorrow they may be hungry.

Ray is a synthesis of Dionysus and Apollo.

The crew lives like music for the moment, when death appears they don't turn away or ignore but keep living.

[Kit Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never read anything by a Harlem Renaissance writer before, and this is a great one to start with. Seriously, I need to move to France. Like, right now. And even though this was written in the 1920s, the author's observations on race still feel incredibly topical. Be forewarned: this one's kinda a-narrative but awesome nonetheless.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Banjo was on and off my reading list for awhile. Off, because some of the reviews were lukewarm and the subtitle 'a novel without a plot' is not enticing. I'm very glad I finally decided to read it.

There are some aspects of the book I am not crazy about: it is written in dialect, which can be tedious to read; it is a bit meandering and is difficult to really relate to the characters; some stereotyping-- references to the proclivities and traits of various ethnic groups and nationalities, as well as women.

What I did like about it is that it is so very different from other novels of the Harlem Renaissance that I've read. Most of those books present Blacks, in McKay's words, as "the colored intelligentsia" who lived "to have the white neighbors think well of us so that it could move more peaceably into nice 'white' streets." When I read that statement, I realized how true that is. So many of the other novels of the era are about fitting into the white world, often about passing as white. Banjo is refreshing in its appreciation of Black culture, in all its diversity-- Africans, Caribbean Blacks, North American Blacks. Reading Banjo, I almost felt I was eavesdropping in private conversations that I would not otherwise hear.

Banjo is also a sensual book. McKay writes descriptively of foods, sounds, smells, noises of the wharf and streetlife in Marseille. It is often dirty, drunk, poor, sexual, hungry and irresponsible but also joyous, carefree, and full of music.
The meandering nature of the story didn't bother me. It certainly didn't seem any more meandering than Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. There is a plot-- although somewhat thin. And although the book is ostensibly about Banjo, it is just as much about his friend Ray, who also presents McKay's perspective (and duplicates some of his history).

It did trouble me that McKay seems to suggest that Blacks have an innately more 'primitive' and happy-go-lucky nature. Also, the book ends with an ethical situation, which seems to suggest that Blacks, because of the racially unjust world in which they live, have different ethical boundaries than Whites.

I appreciated McKay's more 'in your face' presentation of racial issues. 3.5 as literature, 4.0 for its historical and cultural perspective.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 4 out of 5]

True to the book’s subtitle, there is no real “plot” in the sense of narrative arcs being built and resolved.
What it is instead is a wonderful slice of the atmosphere in Marseille, France in the early 1920’s. More specifically, the disparate people who inhabited it. Marseille was, as it is now, a port city, and as such it is populated by a large number of transient sailors, grifters, thugs, prostitutes, and people just trying to stay under the radar and have a good time.
It is and was also a multi-racial city with black and brown skinned people from all over Africa, the Middle East, America, and even Canada.
All these people come together to sometimes find trouble, but more often camaraderie. While their existence may be hand to mouth (most of the characters here get by either by begging or receiving favors of food and cash from ships temporarily docked in the city) the time they have is their own, and in the case of Banjo who fled the American South. The occasional violence of Marseille is preferable to the racially charged lynchings happening back in the South.
While nothing really happens other then following them from night to night as the drink wine, dance, love, and fight, we start to become emotionally attached to this motley crew of drifters and their bohemian lifestyle.
Even though I know I could never live such a life, I did find myself wishing I had a few sous at a jazz club in 1920’s France so I could drink red wine and dance to “Shake that Thing” all night.
It’s a credit to Claude McKay’s lyrical, and almost poetic description of the people and the city that a story that has no story still feels like something you genuinely feel sad to put down for the final time.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

An episodic novel of the black diaspora in which the loose unity of the vagabond characters is reflected and celebrated in the structure of the narrative itself. (The subtitle of the novel is “A Story without a Plot.”) Unfortunately, I found this structure to be more tedious than breezy, as characters spend their time telling jokes, sharing stories, playing music, and tramping around the seaport town of Marseilles. While still facing racism and xenophobia, they generally find a sense of community not among their individual nationalities or under the flag of any one nation, but in their shared joy in living as a ragtag family of vagabonds (the “beach boys,” as McKay refers to them).

The main obstacle I had in enjoying this novel is that I understood the point within the first forty pages, so I found myself seeing much of the dialogue and action (or lack thereof) as mostly filler for what could have been condensed into a novella, at most. I also realize that this narrative structure was precisely McKay’s purpose in crafting a novel that focuses on the unifying nature of storytelling itself rather than the sensationalism of the protest novel, which documents the hardships of black protagonists in a more traditional narrative arc (either a meteoric rise-and-fall or a tragic downfall). In short, while I appreciated the intent of the novel, I was rather frustrated with the execution. That being said, I do look forward to reading more of McKay's work in the near future.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book very distinctly of its time, which was the 1920s. I had never read any of Claude McKay's novels, then I found a first edition of this book in the rare book room at Powell's in Portland, Oregon. I knew McKay as a poet and essayist. I ended up reading a biography of him before taking on this novel, which I found really helpful - especially because it spotlighted the fact that the character of Ray was a clear stand-in for McKay himself. It was published just as the Great Depression began, so it didn't sell very well, but was fairly popular in France because it captured the strange life of the bawdy areas of Marseilles before it was destroyed by the Germans in WWII.

It's important to read things of the past to reflect on how much we've changed as a society, and how much we haven't changed. This book is easy to read and has some fascinating characters. At times, it's more like a series of vignettes than a cohesive story, but there is a thru-line of plot and characters. Recommended for anyone with knowledge and curiosity about the Harlem Renaissance and what was going on in other areas of the world while that flowering happened in New York City.

[Seth Shimelfarb-Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. Incredible incredible incredible book. I would give it 5 stars if I could but the whole women as symbols theme was annoying, even if witty and aggressive towards its own shortcoming. But simply put: this is a prescient book about power, desire, diaspora, the aesthetic and affectual power of sound, class, and ontology. The way McKay uses the idea of civilization is similar to how wynter uses the idea of the human—some unreachable and constantly shifting pole that necessarily excludes black people. What ray does w the idea of civilization (a type of thoughtful and critical disinvestment from that project) is powerful and helped me with some of my own thoughts. And then on top of all the aforementioned—the language is stunning. Rich and thoughtful and musical and just smart. A really really smart book (besides it’s woeful placement women throughout). I found this book because Nadine Jane sojourner from mosquito (GJ) ranted about how she didn’t think it was that anti woman. I don’t agree w Nadine but I am happy I read this book. If I’m ever in a position where I could teach young adults I would assign this book. The end.

[Drywud · Rating 5 out of 5]

J'ai adoré ce bouquin!
Je joue du banjo et j'ai passé un peu de temps à marseille, je suppose que ça joue....
J'étais juste fascinée par l'histoire, la liberté du personnage, vagabond qui vit au jour le jour, la description de la vie de marginaux à l'époque.

J'ai cherché à Marseille où était le quartier de 'La Fosse', d'après ce bouquin, ce quartier était un pleins de macs de prostituées et de marins, et a été dynamité par les nazis. Mais on en trouve peu de mention et de souvenir à Marseille aujourd'hui. Je crois que ça couvrait le quartier qu'on appelle le Panier aujourd'hui ? je ne suis pas sûre...

Ça fait longtemps que je l'ai lu... je l'ai prêté à une pote qui l'à paumé : (

I play banjo and i spent some time in marseille and i love this book. was fascinated by the story, the context, first person narration of a black sailor living marginal life in marseille...

I looked for this neighboorhood called "La Fosse" that was dynamited by the nazis, but found little remaining clues of its existence in contemporary marseille. I couldn't figure exactly where it is.

[M-AY · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vision et portrait de la diaspora noire (et dans une moindre mesure étrangère) dans toute sa complexité, ses contradictions et ses questionnements dans le Marseille des bas-fonds de la fin des années 20, autour des pérégrinations de Banjo et sa bande d'acolytes noirs venant du monde entier ayant échoué dans le port au melting-pot culturel le plus bigarré et cosmopolite de l'époque.

La vision très chauvine du "froggy" lambda pensant sa très chère France comme terre d'accueil des noirs (oubliant au passage que dans un pays à l'histoire coloniale aussi forte, la diaspora noire ne peut se résumer aux afro-americains...) comparé à la méchante et ségrégationniste Amérique en prend pour son grade et esquisse des problèmes et mises en garde qui en plus de s'être confirmés (voire exacerbés) résonnent aujourd'hui plus que jamais dans l'actualité française.
Une claque !

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a very slow read due to all the dialogue in dialect. The book really didn't have much of a plot. "Banjo", the title character, leads a group of itinerant black seamen in negotiating life in the French port of Marseilles in the 1920s. Two characters from McKay's "Home to Harlem" appear, one in a very prominent role. The author was a follower of Marcus Garvey's "Back To Africa" movement and he is quite adamant about expressing race relations, not only between blacks and whites but also between blacks based on their nationality, skin tones and socioeconomic class. This makes the book fascinating to read and quite a militant political document.

[penelopewanders]

This is the next book club read, although I won't be able to attend. I gather it's been greatly appreciated by the others, but I had a hard time getting into it.
After finishing it I noticed the subtitle: A Story Without a Plot, and perhaps that was part of my problem. I did find the descriptions of Marseilles and the people who more or less washed up on its shores fascinating, as well as the insight provided into the situation of blacks and POC in the period between the two world wars.
When I picked the book up, I was caught up in it, but when I put it down, I was not pulled to pick it up again.
As it was for book club, I did pick it up, again and again.

[Joey Carney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book, simple, but good. I think he wrote this when he was still pretty young and travelling a lot. But I had never heard about that side of France in those years, and you can tell a lot of it comes from McKay's life. The musician is the hero, has nothing to hold him, is a bum but lives life as he wants. The narrator is maybe more like McKay, would like to live that way. Also cool that he plays the banjo, he's black, not country boy bluegrass stereotype, when jazz was king.

[Chuck Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminds me of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. Except set in Marseilles about blacks from all over. One interesting theme is how the French though tolerant of blacks and Africans still harbor a strong sense of superiority (often in there supposed tolerance) and racism.

[Karen Hough · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy book, for me. Interesting none the less. Interesting perspective of blacks outside the US. More than just African Americans. Blacks from many places in the 1920’s in Marseilles. What it was like to be in this melting pot of culture. Glad I can add it to my lexicon.

[Paul Villoutreix · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un chef-d'œuvre ! Une magnifique immersion dans Marseille année 30, une réflexion philosophique sur le mélange des cultures, en particulier noires et une mise en garde contre les effets de l'impérialisme occidental sur les autres cultures..

[Carmen Petaccio · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'You got a li'l' book larnin', Goosey, but it jest make you that much a bigger bonehead.'"

[Mick Bordet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thin on plot, but full of character and a wealth of thoughts on race and life below the bread line, all set in depression-era Marseille.

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zero slap tbh!!!!

[Tallon Kennedy · Rating 2 out of 5]

68 / D+