| Title | : | Banjo |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1902934040 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781902934044 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 284 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1929 |
Banjo Reviews
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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. -
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!" -
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) -
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.
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meanders a lot, good book
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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 -
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. -
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.
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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.
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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. -
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. -
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.
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"'You got a li'l' book larnin', Goosey, but it jest make you that much a bigger bonehead.'"
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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.
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68 / D+
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Even in its plotlessness, rich in detail and debate about identity across geographical regions.
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Would be a good play on Broadway
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The Kindle edition is a photocopy, a shake 'n bake process that kills the reading experience.
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I was a bit disappointed by this novel. The characters came across as repetitive, a bit stilted and somewhat lifeless as opposed to joyous/passionate characters fighting to live in their own fashion outside of the constraints/demands of the rest of the world - which I think was the author's intent. Part of this was the language. I'm sure McKay wanted to convey the story as real as possible, and perhaps in the 1930's it worked or gave voice to the authentic lingo of life on the Marseilles beaches and in the Ditch, but for me it felt a little campy, almost to the point of parody. I even felt at times as if I was in the audience at a minstrel show, which made me a bit uncomfortable and distance myself from the story to a degree.
I also felt it difficult to connect to the characters in a way that I cared enough about their struggles and fight for existence. Perhaps in trying to convey the characters' indifference to the world around them, joie de vivre, and steadfast decision to create their own social construct and live according its fashion, McKay took it too far and made them too unreal for me. Anyone who lives that kind of life ultimately feels the pressure or grind from the greater world around them at points, and I think this novel failed to convey that humanizing part of the characters which would make them more connectable. When one died or was sick or hungry, the novel was unable to get me to feel any compassion or empathy.
This however could have been a conscious decision by McKay to flip the traditional power structure by rejecting it and having the characters' show how it is possible for an oppressed or limited group to reject the societal pressures constraining them and live in their own way. This is possible as the characters in the novel seem to not need the reader's empathy, and even to actively reject it. The reader in this is treated like a person in the Ditch, if offering something, they might take it or reject it according to their personal feelings, but it would only be of their own accord. As they choose to be separate from the world, they also choose to be separate from any judgement or empathy for the results of their choices.
It's weird in that I don't regret reading it, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they were really looking for something different from early twentieth century Harlem Renaissance lit. That being said, by the length of my review it did get me to think in depth about the characters and writing, so I guess it worked in that regard. -
A picaresque work that follows the "beach boys," a group of diapora black men (from the Caribbean, U.S., and Africa) in Marseilles in the 1920s. McKay ultimately uses the novel as a way to suggest that primitive African culture might be a useful counterpoint to the crushing, consuming nature of capitalist cultures. Sometimes it drags as a read, but it's an interesting work to compare with other Harlem Renaissance works.
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Read for My Harlem Renaissance class as well....
More difficult and less intriguing book compared to the other ones we read this semester.
But if one is to teach this book for a class unit it would be a good recommendation to add DuBois readings along side, there are a lot of his references throughout this book. -
I wanted to give up on this book several times. I found the dialect of the novel nearly impossible to get through, and without classroom discussions would not have appreciated the work nearly as much.
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There's a lot of complexity in this McKay volume. If only he placed emphasis on conciseness :) At the very least, the interplay between Ray, Banjo, and the rest of the gang bankrupts monolithic images of black identity; an important job given our reductive envisioning of the New Negro aesthetics.
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Episodic and often hilarious. I'm not sure whether it's subverting stereotypes about people of African descent or upholding them; the depiction of women is also troubling.
