Banjo
Claude McKay
Banjo
Black seamen, drifters and musicians on the Marseille waterfront — the novel that gave Négritude its vocabulary, written by a Jamaican who preferred the docks to literary Paris.
Read our takeRomance in Marseille
Claude McKay
Romance in Marseille
by Claude McKay
Written around 1930, unpublished for ninety years: a novel of the Marseille docks with a disabled Black protagonist and openly queer characters, decades ahead of anything that could be printed.
- 2020
About Claude McKay
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeLafala, a West African stowaway, is discovered aboard a ship, locked in a freezing lavatory for the crossing, and loses both legs to frostbite. He sues the shipping company, wins a settlement, and returns to Marseille rich, on prosthetic legs, to the waterfront district he came from. Claude McKay wrote the novel around 1929 to 1933 and never published it. Penguin Classics brought it out in 2020, and it turned out to contain a disabled Black hero, openly lesbian and gay characters, and a frank treatment of sex work that no publisher of his own time would have touched.
The full story
Lafala stows away on a transatlantic ship, is found, and is shut in an unheated lavatory for the voyage. When he is finally released his legs are gangrenous and are amputated. In hospital in New York he meets a fellow patient who puts him onto a lawyer, and he sues the shipping line successfully.
He returns to Marseille with money and prosthetic legs, to the same waterfront quarter of dockers, sailors, sex workers and drifters he left. There he re-encounters Aslima, a Moroccan woman he blames for the theft that set the whole disaster in motion, and the novel becomes the difficult, mutually calculating relationship between two people who each have reason to distrust the other.
Around them McKay assembles the port: Black and North African workers, brothel life, dockside politics, and a group of queer characters drawn without either apology or tragedy — which in a manuscript of about 1930 is remarkable, and is a substantial part of why the book stayed in a drawer.
Why we recommend it
Ninety years in a drawer
Written around 1930 and first published in 2020. The gap is the story: almost nothing in it could have been printed at the time.
A disabled Black protagonist, written in 1930
Lafala's amputation and his prosthetics are treated as circumstance rather than symbol, which was not how the period wrote disability.
The Marseille of Banjo, from another angle
Same port, same years, same milieu — but with a plot, and with women and queer characters at the centre rather than the edge.
What this book explores
The real history
The novel draws on a real case McKay knew of: a West African stowaway who lost his legs after being confined aboard ship and won damages from the shipping company.
Timeline
1929
McKay begins the novel in September under the title The Jungle and the Bottoms.
1932
He takes it up again, renamed Savage Loving, after disagreements with his agent and publisher.
1933
He abandons the project amid the Depression; it stays unpublished.
1933
The manuscript is set aside unpublished; no publisher of the period would take it.
2020
Penguin Classics publishes it for the first time, edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell.
Book editions
Paperback
- Paperback
- Penguin Classics
- 2020
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
Home to Harlem
Claude McKay
Home to Harlem
The first bestseller by a Black American novelist — written in France, set in Harlem, and denounced by the movement it belonged to.
Read our takeA Long Way from Home
Claude McKay
A Long Way from Home
Claude McKay's account of two decades of travel — Harlem, London, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Marseille, Morocco — by a writer who refused to settle anywhere or belong to anyone's programme.
Read our takeRomance in Marseille: frequently asked questions
Why was Romance in Marseille unpublished for ninety years?
Its content — a disabled Black protagonist, openly queer characters, frank sex work, and a hostile view of the shipping industry — was unpublishable in the early 1930s. McKay set it aside and it stayed in archives until Penguin Classics issued it in 2020.
Is it connected to Banjo?
Same waterfront, same period, overlapping milieu. Banjo has no plot by design; Romance in Marseille has a strong one, and puts women and queer characters at the centre.
Was there an earlier edition?
A 2001 University of Exeter Press edition appears in some catalogue records, but the evidence indicates it never reached ordinary publication. The 2020 Penguin edition is treated here as the first.
If you like Claude McKay
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View author
Blaise Cendrars
The one-armed adventurer-poet of the Paris avant-garde — La Prose du Transsibérien, Moravagine, the memoir tetralogy — and the living writer Henry Miller ranked above all others.
View author
Henry Miller
The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.
View author