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.
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.
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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