[A review of Claude McKays "Romance in Marseille" ]
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WHO’S THE REAL WOLF?  
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Kevin Okoth
September 18, 2021
London Review of Books
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_ A review of Claude McKay's "Romance in Marseille" _

New York City by duncan, This image was marked with a CC BY-NC 2.0
license.

 

When​ Claude McKay first visited Marseille he was immediately taken
with the vagabond social life of the Vieux Port. In his early twenties
he had moved from Jamaica to the US, where he spent a few years
before setting off to travel Europe. He had reported for Sylvia
Pankhurst’s _Workers’ Dreadnought_ in London, attended the
Fourth World Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd and
Moscow, and visited the cabarets of Berlin. But it was multicultural
Marseille that made him feel most at ease. ‘It was a relief,’ he
later wrote, ‘to live in among a great gang of black and brown
humanity.’ His first visit to the city, in 1924, lasted only a few
days, but it left a lasting impression and he was back two years
later. He had already made friends in the city’s bars and cafés,
and before long he was doing occasional shifts unloading cargo at the
docks while working on his short stories.

McKay, who was born in 1889, is known as one of the foremost poets of
the Harlem Renaissance – author of _Harlem Shadows_ (1922), a
collection of poems, and the novel _Home to Harlem_ (1928). But his
radicalism often put him at odds with Harlem’s Black intelligentsia:
he decried its leadership’s social conservatism, its politics of
racial uplift, its condescending attitude towards the experiences of
working-class Black people. And his association with the Harlem
Renaissance is further complicated by his absence during the height of
the movement: between 1919 and 1934, he spent only two years in
America.

The Vieux Port taught him a lot. The cast of characters in his two
picaresque Marseille novels, _Banjo_ (1929) and _Romance in
Marseille_ (written in 1933 but unpublished until last year), are
thinly veiled fictionalisations of the motley crew of sailors,
dockers, sex workers and café and bar owners he knew. For much of the
early 20th century, Marseille was the main port of entry for migrants
travelling as _clandestins_: stowaway passengers who illegally
boarded commercial vessels bound for France. Clandestins had neither
papers nor passports that could identify them to French authorities,
so were often ascribed the status of ‘doubtful nationality’. This
made them vulnerable to arrest or deportation, but it also
characterised what the historian Jennifer Boittin calls the
‘Marseille system’: informal labour practices that fed on migrant
workers’ insecurity and shaped the experience of a lumpenproletariat
of Africans, West Indians, Arabs and Indians in the port and other
cities around the Mediterranean.

The story of _Romance in Marseille_’s anti-hero Lafala was inspired
by the stowaway tale of Nelson Simeon Dede, a Nigerian seaman who had
arrived in the Vieux Port missing both legs and with new-found riches.
McKay recounted the story in a letter to his literary agent. Dede had
hidden in the hold of a French Fabre Company steamship bound for New
York. The ship’s crew found him and he was locked away in a
freezing-cold water closet for the rest of the journey, pleading to be
let out. By the time the ship arrived in New York his feet were so
badly frostbitten they had to be amputated: his legs were sawn off at
the knee. Dede sued the company and was awarded a $17,000 settlement
(his lawyer took a $5000 cut) and got prosthetic legs. It’s unclear
how exactly Dede, as a stowaway, was able to win the case, but it’s
more than possible that McKay threatened to leak the story to the
Black press. McKay met him in Marseille, during Dede’s final visit
before being deported to Nigeria.

In the novel’s opening scene, Lafala is being detained in an
immigrants’ hospital in New York, recuperating from the amputation.
He is approached by an African American man with a ‘huge black face,
yellow teeth, in a badly moulded mouth’ who has a proposal. The man
thinks that Lafala deserves some sort of compensation for the
suffering the shipping company inflicted, and he offers to introduce
him to a lawyer. At first, Lafala is irritated by the man, but as his
chances of winning the case improve the ‘ignorant fellow Black’ is
rechristened Black Angel. The man turns out to be Lafala’s saviour,
sent from heaven to convert his stolen mobility into social ascent,
and to negotiate a ‘limbs for cash’ bargain that provides a warped
form of reparation for the disabling effects of racial capitalism.

Lafala turns out to be less than completely trustworthy. He had agreed
a fifty-fifty split of the settlement with the lawyer, with his
saviour to receive a portion. But he reneges on the deal, leaving
Angel with only half what he had been promised. ‘But you wouldn’t
mean to say I ain’t worf five-hundred dollars fohal I did?’ Angel
asks. ‘Sure,’ Lafala replies, ‘but oh God! don’t ask _me_ to
pay, Angel. I’m an amputated man.’ Lafala’s change of fortune
has changed him. McKay rejected his agent’s suggestion that he show
his protagonist in a more sympathetic light: this wasn’t a story of
racial uplift. Lafala’s behaviour challenges the idea of racial
solidarity among Black people that was prominent in Harlem at the
time.

With his money secured, Lafala returns to Marseille, the
‘magnificent Mediterranean harbour ... against which the thick
scum of life foams and bubbles and breaks in a syrup of passion and
desire’. There, he rekindles his relationship with Aslima, a sex
worker from Marrakesh. Their relationship is unsettled by the presence
of La Fleur Noire, a rival sex worker who competes for Lafala’s
attention and money. Unlike Aslima, La Fleur doesn’t ‘go crazy
over men’: she sleeps with them only for money and is devoted to her
procurer, known as ‘the Greek girl’. She is also one of the
novel’s many openly queer characters. For much of McKay’s life,
the criminalisation of same-sex relationships in countries around the
world dictated how, where and why he travelled. He presented a
closeted version of himself in _A Long Way from Home_, his memoir of
1937, but _Romance in Marseille_ offers a more intimate engagement
with the community of queer workers McKay spent time with in Europe.
The manuscript of the novel, completed while McKay was living in
poverty in North Africa, was abandoned after several publishers turned
it down: editors were uncomfortable with McKay’s casual treatment of
queer characters and feared that it would not ‘be accepted by the
American reading public’.

W.E.B. Du Bois said he felt unclean and in need of a bath after
reading _Home to Harlem_. _Romance in Marseille_ would have
disturbed him even more: the novel refers to Aslima and Lafala as
‘sweet pigs’, ‘clean pigs’ or ‘loving pigs’, unashamedly
reclaiming dignity for the low-life ways of Black proletarians. It’s
hard not to read such passages as a swipe at the pretensions of
Harlem’s Black bourgeoisie, and of the attitudes of the NAACP,
which Du Bois helped found. McKay was determined to portray a version
of Black life that, as his biographer Wayne Cooper wrote, was ‘far
removed from the worries, frustrations and thwarted ambitions of the
educated middle classes’. In McKay’s more pointed words, he wanted
to avoid anything ‘fake, soft-headed and wine-watered’, to let his
‘Negro characters yarn and backbite and fuck like people the world
over’.

Du Bois and other Harlem literati would have had trouble understanding
the racial politics of interwar Marseille, but then even French Black
intellectuals would have been puzzled. In Paris, diasporic Black
people demarcated themselves based on race, but in Marseille, African
and Black Caribbean migrants referred instead to their particular
linguistic and national origins, making it more difficult to organise
them or recruit them to radical Black organisations devoted to a
united cause. One person who felt the difficulty was Lamine Senghor, a
Senegalese communist and anti-imperialist who was active in Marseille
when McKay first visited. In _Romance in Marseille_, Senghor appears
as Étienne St Dominique, a mixed-race intellectual from Martinique
who tries, and mostly fails, to organise the seamen of the Vieux Port.
He wants the habitués of the Tout-va-Bien café to attend readings
and lectures at the Seamen’s and Workers’ Club, but the club is in
the ‘drabbest and least interesting proletarian and factory quarter
of Marseille’, far from the thrills of the Vieux Port and of no
interest to the quaysiders.

The seemingly irreconcilable distance between left intellectuals and
workers is further explored through St Dominique’s relationship with
Big Blonde, a broad-shouldered worker who looks like a ‘hero
straight out of Joseph Conrad’. Big Blonde is something of an enigma
around the Vieux Port: he spends his time working hard on the docks or
courting Petit Frère, a sex worker ‘fascinating with his pale
prettiness and challenging, deep, dark-ringed eyes and insolent
mouth’. Pride, committed labour: he has all the characteristics of
the socialist realist proletarian ideal – but he won’t join the
workers’ union. Even so, despite their contrasting politics and
sexuality, there is solidarity of a different kind between St
Dominique and Big Blonde. When St Dominique is heckled at the
Tout-va-Bien, Big Blonde intervenes, reminding the habitués that the
Martiniquais is their ally. In turn, Big Blonde, who is often in
trouble with the Marseille authorities, gets to hide at the Seamen’s
and Workers’ Club when he is on the run.

One day, Lafala disappears: St Dominique suspects that the political
police are to blame. But it turns out that, like many undocumented
migrants, he has been detained by immigration authorities and charged
with stowing away to New York. In prison, Lafala runs into Babel, a
‘huge West Indian from a British island’ who had been his
‘partner in stowing away’. Since leaving Marseille, Babel has been
less fortunate than Lafala: on arrival in New York, he was immediately
sent back to Marseille, and only narrowly escaped imprisonment by
fleeing to North Africa. When he comes back to the Vieux Port he is
arrested again and landed in jail with Lafala for the same offence.
But then – because there _can_ be solidarity between workers and
intellectuals – St Dominique intervenes and persuades the
authorities to release the two vagabonds. Suddenly they gain access to
a form of citizenship that, as working-class migrants, they have
always been denied.

Such deliverance isn’t available for everyone. Towards the end
of _Romance in Marseille_ the focus turns to Aslima, under threat
from all quarters, especially from her procurer, who suspects her of
keeping money from him. _Banjo_, McKay’s previous novel of
Marseille, had celebrated a very masculine idea of Black vagabondage
– buddies prowling the waterfront, drinking, getting into scrapes,
chasing women. But now he wanted to show that there are alternatives
to a male-only strategy of liberation. Aslima has direct experience of
being enslaved: ‘The girl was worth a little prize, and someday a
nice little sum could be realised on her virgin beauty,’ her
‘mistress’ thinks to herself when Aslima is still an adolescent
living in Fez. But in Marseille she becomes a ‘strong and restless
tigress’ whose ‘reckless’ behaviour often puts her at odds with
both clients and management in the city’s brothels. She and La Fleur
challenge conventional expectations of gender norms and relations, and
are constantly longing for a world not ruled by men or the Marseille
authorities. The defiance that functions as a queer resource of
survival throughout the novel is driven by a longing for liberation
that never materialises.

In September 1930, McKay abruptly left Europe for Morocco to work on a
novel he described as ‘dealing with the religious customs and social
life of the peasantry’ in Jamaica. The move shielded him, in part,
from the effects of the Great Depression, but his writing wasn’t
making much money for either him or his publisher. He was accused of
being out of touch with Harlem, with fellow writers arguing that his
fictional version of the neighbourhood too closely resembled Black
Marseille. James Weldon Johnson, who had spent the 1920s as executive
secretary of the NAACP, went further, suggesting that McKay needed to
return to America. ‘I feel very strongly that you ought to come and
stay. New York is your market, and the United States is your field.’
So with nowhere else to turn – and worn down by constant harassment
from British and French colonial authorities for his suspected
communist affiliations – McKay reluctantly travelled back to
the US. He arrived in New York in February 1934, ill and penniless,
after almost twelve years abroad.

For​ many destitute writers in the Depression-era US, the Federal
Writers’ Project – part of Roosevelt’s New Deal – was a
lifeline. Between 1936 and 1939, the FWPpaid for McKay to collect
material for its ambitious ‘Negroes in New York’ project on the
lives of Black artists, diplomats, writers and other extraordinary
figures who lived in the city. (Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright were
also supported by the programme, though McKay was never close to
either.) FWP resources allowed McKay to produce _Harlem: Negro
Metropolis_ (1940), a sociological study of cults, occultists and
street-corner orators that includes discussions of Black luminaries
such as Marcus Garvey, Father Divine and Sufi Abdul Hamid. This rich
material would inevitably make its way into his fiction. But it
wasn’t until 2009 that Jean-Christopher Cloutier unexpectedly came
across another novel that had been buried in the archives. _Amiable
with Big Teeth_ was written in 1941 but has only now been published
for the first time, with an introduction by Cloutier and Brent Hayes
Edwards.*
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was the last novel McKay wrote, and it does for 1930s Harlem what the
other new discovery does for 1920s Marseille by opening the curtain on
a more complex political landscape than any you expect.

The book is set against the backdrop of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War
and deals with the tangled motives of Stalinists, Trotskyists, Black
nationalists, Afrocentric occultists and Harlem scammers in their
fundraising efforts to help Ethiopia defend itself against
Mussolini’s invading army. In the opening scene, a parade organised
by a Black-led group called Hands to Ethiopia proceeds through Harlem,
with the Ethiopian envoy Lij Tekla Alamaya (‘a slight olive-coloured
youth with large calf’s eyes’) at its helm. Before long tensions
emerge within the organisation. Its chair, Pablo Peixota, a
real-estate mogul with considerable influence in Harlem, suggests that
Dorsey Flagg, a distinguished ‘professor in a recognised Aframerican
college’ should accompany Alamaya on his fundraising tour. But
another member of the group, Newton Castle, demands Flagg’s
expulsion, bitterly accusing Flagg of being a ‘Trotskyite-Fascist’
with ‘anti-Soviet’ views. Flagg and Peixota soon suspect that
Castle is a communist agent, tasked with infiltrating Hands to
Ethiopia. Is this a deliberate attempt by the CPUSA to mobilise
Black opposition to Italy’s invasion in order to further its end of
building a Popular Front? While the phrase that lends the novel its
striking title, ‘amiable with big teeth’, is never used in the
text, the communists are referred to as wolves in sheep’s clothing
who corrupt ‘God’s humble black sheep’ – the Black people of
Harlem.

Peixota and Flagg’s suspicions are confirmed when another
organisation supporting the Ethiopian cause, the White Friends of
Ethiopia, appears on the scene. Maxim Tasan, the mysterious communist
pulling the strings, at first appears to be on the side of the Black
Harlemites, but his intentions are sinister. To undermine support for
Hands to Ethiopia, Tasan employs a startling array of schemes. He
begins by engineering a police raid on an innocent gathering of
friends of Peixota’s who meet every few months to play cards. He
then makes manoeuvres to discredit Alamaya – presumably because he
has turned against the White Friends – before persuading his
secretary to pretend to be an Ethiopian princess and take Alamaya’s
place. Hands to Ethiopia’s initiatives are thwarted at every turn,
and Tasan and the Popular Front are soon everywhere in Harlem.

Tasan’s attitude towards Alamaya and the Harlemites is in many ways
characteristic of the CPUSA’s treatment of Black ‘allies’ under
the Stalinist Comintern. In the novel’s final pages, it transpires
that Alamaya is himself a communist agent, recruited by the party in
France and sent to Harlem to drum up Black support for the Popular
Front. Alamaya accepts the mission because he believes that working
with the communists gives him a better chance in the struggle for
Ethiopia’s sovereignty. But then he finds out that the Soviets have
been supplying arms to the Italians, and he realises he is just a
pawn. Alamaya is alarmed by Tasan’s racism. When confronted about
the arms treaty, Tasan snaps: ‘Ethiopia is only a land of howling
black savages, over-sexed cannibals with many wives gorging themselves
with raw meat.’

When McKay went to the Soviet Union to attend the Comintern’s Fourth
World Congress in 1922, he found to his surprise that he was already
something of a political celebrity. He discussed the ‘Negro
Question’ – the question of Black people’s self-determination
– with the ‘big Bolsheviks’, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Trotsky, and
travelled the country educating the Soviets about Black people in
America. (His book _Negry v Amerike_, published in the Soviet Union
in 1923 but not in the West until 1979, was possibly the first
Black-authored study of relations in the US between race and class.)
In an address to the World Congress, he referred to the ‘great
element of prejudice among the Socialists and Communists of
America’. The greatest difficulty that American communists had to
overcome was ‘the fact that they first have got to emancipate
themselves from the ideas they entertain toward the Negroes before
they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of radical
propaganda’.

After 1935, when it became official Comintern policy to support the
creation of Popular Fronts abroad, the question of Black
self-determination was pushed aside and Black organisations forced to
toe the party line. For McKay, who had been instrumental in shaping
Comintern policy on the Negro Question, the Popular Front was a step
backwards and, in some ways, a betrayal that hastened his break with
communism. Other Black radicals also distanced themselves from the
Comintern during these years: Wright, Ellison and Margaret Walker all
expressed their deep disappointment at the Comintern’s failure to
respond to the Negro Question. When it came to race, the Communists
were simply not radical enough.

The Italo-Soviet pact of 1933 intensified McKay’s disillusionment
– now bordering on hostility – with international communism. The
treaty established strong trade links between the Soviet Union and
Italy, and gave Mussolini access to the oil and gas he needed to
launch his invasion of Ethiopia. The Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George
Padmore, head of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro
Workers and editor of _The Negro Worker_, was similarly dismayed and
suggested in print that the Soviet Union was placing its own interests
ahead of those of colonised Black people. He was quickly expelled from
the Comintern and forced to resign his editorship.

But while McKay’s final novel is scathing about the CPUSA’s
propaganda work, it also takes aim at the Black bourgeois groups that
were so ineffective in organising the Harlem masses. For McKay,
self-determination was not merely a matter of guaranteeing civil
rights or removing the barriers to Black political and economic power
– as it was for the NAACP – or of creating a nation wherever
Black people were an oppressed minority. The real goal, as he saw it,
was to support independent Black organisations that could reinvigorate
the American labour movement, something the communists, Garveyites
and NAACP had all proved incapable of. Later in the novel, after
Hands to Ethiopia has been infiltrated and neutralised, all hope of
action disintegrates: ‘The popular Aframerican leaders, beaten and
discouraged, could not be whipped together again into the first line
of propaganda activity, and the masses were apathetic. The comrades
paraded and slugged their slogans into the air, but the communist
leadership was weak and ineffective without the support of the local
leaders.’ Harlem’s bourgeois leadership is too easily discouraged,
while the communists fail to see that they need the help of local
leaders to recruit the Harlemites.

Much of McKay’s early work – including the poems in _Harlem
Shadows_ so often celebrated for peaceably ushering in the Harlem
Renaissance – was produced in response to a moment of political
tumult: the emergence of the Third International in 1919, the
violently suppressed race riots in American cities later that year.
But by the mid-1930s, McKay had no real place in the communist
movement, or in Harlem’s Black literary circles, or in Garvey’s
Back-to-Africa movement. ‘In his vocation as writer, poet and
intellectual,’ Wayne Cooper wrote in his 1987 biography, ‘McKay
never found a comfortable niche.’ It’s no wonder. He had launched
critiques of every dominant left discourse in the US and had
alienated both communist and Black intellectuals with his biting
polemics. How to make sense of McKay’s shifting and often
conflicting radicalism?

One starting point is his lifelong admiration for Irish nationalism,
and the lessons he drew from the Irish Literary Revival. In the summer
of 1920, he attended a rally in support of the Irish cause in
Trafalgar Square and wrote a summary of the event, ‘How Black Sees
Green and Red’, for Max Eastman’s _The Liberator_ in New York:
‘With both hands and my bag full of literature I had to find a way
for hearty handshakes and brief chats with Sinn Féin communists and
regular Sinn Féiners. I caught a glimpse also of proud
representatives of the Sinn Féin bourgeoisie. For that day at least I
was filled with the spirit of Irish nationalism – although I am
black!’

In London, Berlin, Paris and Marseille, McKay had come into contact
with the future leaders of several anti-colonial revolutions and been
inspired by their passionate demands for self-determination.
Self-determination, he continued to insist, meant much more than
economic independence: it was driven by a hunger for freedom among
people like the peasant farmers he had known as a boy in the hills of
Jamaica. He was proud to have been ‘born and reared a peasant’ and
‘loved to think of communism liberating millions of city folk to go
back to the land’. Cooper implies that these attachments were
somehow at odds with McKay’s radicalism and demonstrated his
‘limitations as a communist theoretician’. But some of the most
innovative and important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century
– C.L.R. James, George Padmore – came from colonised Caribbean
countries and recognised the central role the peasantry was to play in
anti-colonial revolutions. Lenin – the only communist McKay writes
of admiringly in his memoir (‘out of all the big Bolshevik leaders,
I had desired most to have a personal word from Lenin’) – shared
this conviction. ‘It is one thing to draw up fantastic plans for
building socialism by means of all sorts of workers’
associations,’ he wrote in ‘On C0-operation’. ‘But it is quite
another thing to learn to build it practically, in such a way every
small peasant may take part in the work of reconstruction.’

Like Padmore and James, McKay never truly broke with Lenin. And he
didn’t let his anti-Stalinism distort his critique of imperialism or
support of anti-colonial liberation movements in Trinidad, Ireland,
Ethiopia or Jamaica. In a letter to Max Eastman written not long
before he died in 1948, McKay chastised his friend and mentor for
seeking to justify some of the manifestations of US and British
imperialism. ‘I do not think,’ he wrote, ‘that ... the
democracies have anything to offer’ the people of Asia and Africa. I
should say to the so-called democracies of the United States and Great
Britain: set your own house in order and try not to scare up a war
against Soviet Russia.’

At the very end of _Amiable with Big Teeth_, Alamaya angrily
confronts Tasan. If he had to make a choice, Alamaya says, he ‘would
prefer the European wolves as real wolves to the Comintern wolves
hiding in fleece’. But unlike his final novel’s protagonist, McKay
never did prefer the real wolf – no matter how disastrously ‘the
love affair between the communists and the poor black sheep of
Harlem’ had turned out.

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