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“The Beauty of Other Horizons”: Sartorial Self-Fashioning in Claude McKay's Banjo: A Story without a Plot
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2014
Abstract
This article considers whether the novel Banjo's sailors and vagabonds, described by James Smethurst as proponents of “a transnational proletarian blackness,” provide a Harlem Renaissance-era alternative to Monica L. Miller's Harlem-centred notion of “subversive dandyism.” Indeed, author Claude McKay – a Jamaican who spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad before taking American citizenship in 1940 – has come increasingly to be regarded, as by the novelist Caryl Phillips, as one among numerous twentieth-century “writers for whom the national label is unhelpful if we wish to see the full nature of their achievement.” McKay declared that “a patriot loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life of which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.” This article addresses Banjo's representation of sartorial self-fashioning as part of this critique of narrowly national identities.
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References
1 McKay, Claude, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (New York: Harvest, 1970), 259–60Google Scholar.
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4 Ibid., 324.
5 Ibid., 3, 14. Claude McKay, letter to Harold Jackman, 10 March 1928, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Folder 105, call no JWJ MSS 27.
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7 Phillips, Caryl, “Claude McKay and Banjo: An Introduction,” in McKay, Claude, Banjo (London: Serpent's Tail, 2008), xviGoogle Scholar. As a pioneering figure of the black Atlantic and of transatlantic modernism, the Harlem Renaissance label often affixed to him is also insufficient. Indeed, reflecting in the memoir A Long Way from Home (1937) on his time in France in the 1920s and early 1930s, McKay was no less ambivalent about his encounters with the African American elite abroad, including The New Negro (1925) editor Alain Locke, than he was about his experiences with “the white expatriates” in Paris. In addition to describing Locke's introduction to The New Negro as “a remarkable chocolate soufflé of art and politics, with not an ingredient of information inside,” McKay made disparaging reference to an “Uncle Tom attitude” existing among the Harlem Renaissance elite. As evidenced by Banjo, McKay identified more comfortably with the values and behaviours of a working-class milieu. Despite his disavowals, and despite his spending the 1920s abroad after residing only relatively briefly in Harlem from 1917 to 1919, and again in 1921–22, McKay has remained powerfully associated with the movement as the author of the influential poetry collection Harlem Shadows (1922) and the novel Home to Harlem (1928). Recounting his experiences among the white expatriates, McKay would write, “the majority of them were sympathetic toward me. But their problems were not exactly my problems. They were all-white with problems in white which were rather different from problems in black.” He noted the particular influence, however, of the writing of Joyce, James, Hemingway, Ernest and McKay, Claude, A Long Way from Home (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 187Google Scholar, 247, 189.
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22 Ibid., 57, 25, 85, 131.
23 Early in the novel, however, McKay depicts the white beach boys as “stinking-dirty, and lousy, without any apparent desire to clean themselves. With the black boys it was different … They drank wine to make them lively and not sodden, washed their bodies and their clothes on the breakwater, and sometimes spent a panhandled ten-franc note to buy a second-hand pair of pants.” The more self-respecting black vagabonds are shown in the subsequent chapter stripping to the waist to launder their shirts in the sea. Ibid., 255, 18–19, 34.
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25 Ibid., 160.
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30 The distinctive appeal of American products is demonstrated elsewhere: “Once when Ray was badly broke he had gone with Bugsy to sell an American suit and shirt to a young West African called Cuffee.” Ibid., 126–27, 231, 309.
31 Banjo contains one brief mention of the openly gay culture of the Ditch, where the beach boys “were suddenly surrounded by a troop of painted youths who, holding hands, danced around them with queer gestures and queerer screams, like fairy folk in fables.” Ibid., 230–31, 232, 196.
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39 Banjo, 229, 227, 233, 234.
40 In Banjo's final chapter, Taloufa's newfound song, “Hallelujah Jig,” invites his audience to “Lay off the coal, boy, and scrub you’ hide … Bring me a clean suit and show some pride.” Ibid., 315.
41 Ibid., 305, 324–25.
42 Ibid., 142, 288.
43 Ibid., 13.
44 Claude McKay, letter to Harold Jackman, 14 Jan. 1927, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Folder 103, call no JWJ MSS 27. Banjo, 129–30.
45 McKay, A Long Way from Home, 195.
46 Goosey also recovers from an illness, emerging from the hospital in another passage conflating clothes with racial identity: he “had come out quite emaciated, like a skeleton with his nigger-brown suit hanging loose on him.” Banjo, 254, 243, 259, 257.
47 Ibid., 259.
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58 Banjo, 66. McKay was no stranger to the assumption of aesthetic disguises. Wayne F. Cooper indicates that, in submitting his poetry to Boston's Evening Transcript editor William Stanley Braithwaite, “McKay adopted an almost girlish tone of shyness and hesitancy and even concealed his real name behind the pseudonym of Rhonda Hope.” Braithwaite, William Stanley, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 78Google Scholar.
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