Romance in Marseille

by Claude McKay

  148.James Weldon Johnson, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 289.

  149.A Long Way from Home, 261. Thanks to Jack Bruno for noting the reference. See also Nancy Cunard, ed., Negro: An Anthology, London: Wishart & Co., 1934.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1.Lafala: A would-be West African name, as the introduction discusses, derived from the name of the character Taloufa in McKay’s earlier Marseille novel Banjo (1929). “Lafala” is also possibly tailored from either or both of the Arabic words “fallah”/“fellah” (فلاح), meaning peasant, and “falah,” roughly meaning success and well-being. The latter is employed in the daily Islamic call to prayer, which McKay heard often while living in Morocco. Perhaps not coincidentally, over the course of the novel, Lafala rises from something of a peasant to something of a great success—neither, however, as measured in Islamic terms. In any event, his African/Arabic moniker predicts his union with Aslima, a black Moroccan prostitute with a more definitely Arabic name.

  2.fine bodies supported by strong gleaming legs: Lafala’s tribal memory ironically echoes protagonist Jake Brown’s praise of the women of modern black New York in McKay’s earlier novel Home to Harlem (1928): “‘Oh, them legs!’ Jake thought. ‘Them tantalizing brown legs!’” (8). The reverence of Lafala and his people for physical vitality—a vitality he fears he has lost forever—reflects a dominant theme of the Harlem Renaissance expressed in the work of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, and others as well as McKay. New Negro authors created portraits of black beauty and robustness, both modern and “primitive,” to combat racist myths of black ugliness and physical incapacity.

  3.“The Moonshine Kid”: The title of this tune, and its association with the erotic pleasures of community, foreshadows Babel’s “Moonstruck” song, performed at Marseille’s Café Tout-va-Bien in chapter 21.

  4.from Africa to Europe, from Europe to America: This passage, among many others in Romance in Marseille, may be read through the lens of historian Paul Gilroy’s influential theory of a Black Atlantic “counterculture of modernity” in which transnational black identities emerged with the assistance of new technologies of culture and transportation, first among them rapid transatlantic shipping. Gilroy notes that McKay’s own involvement with ships and sailors—he worked as a stoker on at least one ocean journey from New York to Liverpool—offers “support to [Peter] Linebaugh’s prescient suggestion that ‘the ship remained perhaps the most important conduit of Pan-African communication before the appearance of the long-playing record.’” See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 13.

  5.It was a time of universal excitement after the war and . . . a dark cry of “Back to Africa” came over the air: McKay here describes the enthusiasm for African origins and Pan-African politics that surged among blacks in the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the New World after the Great War. It took shape in the populist “Back to Africa” movement of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a group led by McKay’s fellow Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), and in the international Pan-African Congress of black diplomats and intellectuals first organized by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Ida Gibbs (1862–1957), the initial meeting of which was held in Paris in 1919. See Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism: A History, London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

  6.“WC”: A water closet or room containing a flush toilet.

  7.“Race ain’t nothing in this heah hoggish scramble”: The “ain’t” in this sentence, missing in McKay’s original but clearly intended given the context, was inserted by the editors.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1.girdles: Lafala’s girdles are belts or sashes worn across the waist that pay tribute to his West African birthplace. In an effort at cross-cultural sympathy, his Jewish lawyer compares Lafala’s handiwork to the girdles once worn by members of the Twelve Tribes of ancient Israel.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1.Morris chair: A type of solid, wood-and-leather reclining chair first sold by the Arts and Crafts designer William Morris (1834–1896) around 1866.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1.Bellows of the Belt: Likely a parodic version of The Inter-State Tattler, a black-owned Harlem gossip sheet and society newspaper published in “off-color” blue ink between 1925 and 1932, the height of the Harlem Renaissance.

  2.United Negro: As noted in the introduction, probably a lampoon of the Garvey movement’s weekly newspaper, The Negro World, which ran from 1919 to 1933. Based in New York and “Devoted Solely to the Interests of the Negro Race,” as its masthead declared, the Negro World reached up to 200,000 subscribers at its peak, complementing its worldly name with international distribution and regular sections printed in French and Spanish.

  3.C.U.N.T. (Christian Unity of Negro Tribes): As the introduction observes, in part an undisciplined swipe at the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading U.S. civil rights organization launched in 1909. The NAACP’s widely circulated monthly magazine, The Crisis, was from 1910 to 1934 edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, a vocal critic of McKay’s deliberately bourgeois-shocking fiction. McKay hailed The Souls of Black Folk (1903), but took Du Bois to task in print for “sneering” at the Russian Revolution, which the younger black writer once went on record to defend as “the greatest event in the history of humanity.” See Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987, 140–141. In “Back in Harlem,” a chapter of his 1937 memoir A Long Way from Home, McKay notes that he admired the NAACP stalwarts James Weldon Johnson and Mary White Ovington. But he mocks Walter White, the organization’s well-connected assistant executive secretary, for his surname and light complexion, and Jessie Fauset, the literary editor of The Crisis, for her “fastidious and precious” novels. In the end, McKay seconds Hubert Harrison’s often-quoted radical view of the NAACP as the “National Association for the Advancement of Certain People.” See A Long Way from Home, 90–92. As the misogynous thrust of “C.U.N.T.” indicates, McKay’s pseudo-organization also takes unsubtle aim at the historical prominence of women in the African American church and at middle-class black women’s groups such as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), its motto “lifting as we climb,” founded by the educator and activist Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) in 1896.

  4.Nubian Orphanage: Nubia, a domain along the Nile River, was home to one of the oldest civilizations of Africa, born as early as 2500 BCE and extending from Khartoum to Aswan. The racial identity of its people, who ruled Egypt in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, has been debated by ancient and modern scholars. In African American slang, however, the term “Nubian” came to refer to a dark-skinned person of (definitely) sub-Saharan African ancestry. Hence the butt of McKay’s satire: this is a “Black Belt” orphanage operating under the blackest of names that refuses to embrace black children. McKay may be targeting one actual orphanage in particular, the Colored Orphan Asylum (COA), founded in 1836 by three white Quaker women. The COA, located in Harlem at the turn of the twentieth century, in fact took in black orphans unable to find shelter in other institutions but long refused to promote black staff beyond menial positions. See Catharine Reef, Alone in the World: Orphans and Orphanages in America, New York: Clarion, 2005, 13.

  5.He did not belong to any of the two free states . . . and was therefore either a colonial subject or a protected person: By 1914, the close of the European imperial “scramble for Africa,” only two never-colonized “free states” remained on the African continent: Liberia and Ethiopia, the latter a central concern of the posthumously discovered McKay novel Amiable with Big Teeth (2017). Lafala, his place of birth reminiscent of the “British sphere” of Nigeria but never specified, is not a native of either of these two holdout states, and is thus “a colonial subject or a protected person” of one of the fifteen European
powers which divided up or parceled out Africa at the Congress of Berlin in 1884.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1.a Pyrrhic victory . . . to Aslima: A Pyrrhic victory is one so costly for the winner that it is tantamount to a defeat. Named after King Pyrrhus of the Hellenistic state of Epirus, who defeated the Romans in two great battles during the 280–275 BCE Pyrrhic War yet saw his army destroyed in the process.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1.Marseille lay bare to the glory of the meridian sun: Marseille, the second-largest city in France in McKay’s era and ours, is a major Mediterranean port that recorded a population of 800,801 in 1931, around the time of McKay’s writing; Paris, by contrast, was then home to 2,891,020 people, more than two million more. Established as the Greek colonial outpost of Massalia, Marseille remains a port of empire in McKay’s imagination, the seaside hub where Metropolitan France, and by extension Europe, communicates with its black and Islamic colonies. It also beckons as an international black crossroads, a not-just-Francophone refuge where one could live among “Negroids from the United States, the West Indies, North Africa and West Africa, all herded together in a warm group” (McKay, A Long Way from Home, 213). Both traditionally and in McKay’s Romance, Marseille is associated with revolutionary history (the rallying march of the French Revolution that became the French national anthem is of course “La Marseillaise”); with the hot, dry climate of Provence (dictated by “the glory of the meridian sun”); and with an outsider culture of regional independence and self-organized crime centered on the bars and brothels of the city’s Vieux Port or “Old Port” (often called “Quayside,” home to the “peddler and prostitute, pimp and panhandler” [29], in McKay’s novel).

  2.Aslima: A transliteration of the female Arabic name تسليما—“Taslima” is the more common version—that can mean “greeting” or “salutation.” In a now lost, initial draft of the novel, Aslima is “Zhima.”

  3.La Fleur Noire: As the introduction notes, French for “the Black Flower,” and perhaps a tip of the hat to the decadent proto-modernism of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), or The Flowers of Evil, which McKay read in the original French.

  4.prinked herself up: Adorned or dressed herself with the intention to preen.

  5.the rubicund’s face: In other words, the face of the rubicund—or blooming and full-blooded—gentleman. McKay goes on to employ this nominalization of the adjective “rubicund” several other times.

  6.pianola: A type of mechanical player piano, introduced in the 1880s, that lost ground to the gramophone beginning in the 1920s.

  7.Café Tout-va-Bien: French for the “Café Where Everything’s Fine,” a description not always true of this main “rendezvous of the colored colony” (31) in McKay’s novel.

  8.Diup: “Diop,” close to McKay’s variant, is a common surname in Senegal and Gambia. To take just one example, Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) was a Senegalese historian whose studies of trans-African cultural continuities helped to inspire Afrocentric thought in the United States.

  9.spumante: A sparkling white Italian wine produced through the “méthode champenoise,” or method of secondary fermentation, sometimes favored as a less expensive alternative to certified French Champagne.

  10.“La Reine Fleur!”: French for “the Flower Queen,” here said mockingly of La Fleur Noire by her rival Aslima.

  11.when he handed her money, she obstinately refused it: Aslima’s refusal to accept Lafala’s money for sex recalls an early incident in McKay’s first published novel, Home to Harlem (1928), when the prostitute Felice returns to the protagonist Jake Brown the fifty dollars she had demanded for a night of love the evening before. “‘Just a little gift from a baby girl to a honey boy!’” Felice writes on a note pinned to the cash (16). Realizing that he is as especially fond of Felice as she is of him, Jake spends the rest of the novel searching for her “leaf-like face” tinted “to a ravishing chestnut” in city crowds (11). When he finds her at last, back home in Harlem, the two quickly cohere as a couple and, after a contrived misunderstanding, prepare to shove off for Chicago in the final scene. In Romance in Marseille, by contrast, Aslima’s gesture of refusing payment from Lafala may be calculated to produce a bigger payoff, at least initially, and is not fully reciprocated. Near the end of this later novel, a cash-rich, love-poor Lafala shoves off for Africa on his own.

  12.Titin: A name possibly derived from the gigantic Titans of Greek mythology, somewhat appropriate given Titin’s birth on Corsica, a Mediterranean, if not Greek, island, and his reputation as one of Quayside’s toughest pimps.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1.stoker: Someone who does the hot, dirty, and difficult job of tending a furnace on a steamship or elsewhere. When perhaps the most famous black poet in the English-speaking world, McKay worked as a ship’s stoker to pay part of his way from New York to Moscow in 1922. Jake Brown, McKay’s protagonist in Home to Harlem, enters the novel as a replacement stoker on a freighter from Cardiff to New York. But Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the blunt-force Native Son (1940), is the best remembered and most politically pointed stoker-type in African American literature.

  2.“all your Lynchburgs in the States”: Not just a reference to Lynchburg, Virginia, and Lynchburg, Tennessee, and other towns named Lynchburg in the United States, but a punning generic term for the many locations in the American South where African Americans were lynched, or subjected to extra-judicial killing.

  3.bistro: A type of small, modest restaurant, selling alcohol and home-style food, born in Paris in the nineteenth century. As the context of this use indicates, the Café Tout-va-Bien has some characteristics of a bistro as well as a café.

  4.“split”: Rock and Diup attempt, to the tune of comic asides on the differences between male and female anatomies, to do the split, or “splits,” a difficult, gymnastic dance move in which one lowers quickly to the floor with legs held at right angles.

  5.the apéritif hour: The hour for apéritifs, or pre-dinner alcoholic drinks. Common choices for such drinks, meant to rouse the appetite, would in Marseille include vermouth, champagne, and other sparkling wines, and pastis, the anise-flavored spirit especially identified with the city. Digestifs, in opposition to aperitifs, are taken after the meal is through.

  6.habitués: A French term, assimilated into English, for regular, habituated patrons.

  7.“‘Toujours’”: “Always,” in French, and here a song title. Perhaps a reference to the hit ballad “L’Amour, Toujours L’Amour,” or “Love Everlasting,” written by Rudolph Friml, introduced in a 1922 musical, and frequently recorded in the 1920s and 1930s.

  8.“the jolly pig”: Aslima’s dance in imitation of a jolly pig embellishes a long line of flirtatious baby talk in the novel in which she and Lafala compare their erotic satisfaction to the happiness of “sweet” and “darling” pigs. Both they and McKay, then, flout the Islamic prohibition on the consumption of pork, and the letter of Islamic law in general. See this verse, among others, from the Quran: “Allah has forbidden you only carrion, and blood, and the flesh of swine . . .” (16: 115).

  9.“Halouf!”: A French word, extracted from an Arabic source (حَلُّوف), meaning “pork,” and emphasizing the uncleanliness of this meat.

  10.Cardiff: The capital city of Wales since 1955, and, beginning in the nineteenth century, a major Atlantic seaport built to facilitate the transportation of coal.

  11.cerise: In English, a shade of bright, deep red. In French, the equivalent of “cherry.”

  12.“pea-eye”: As in “P-I,” short for “pimp,” used in Harlem slang of the 1920s.

  13.“métier”: French for a job, trade, or specialized skill. Aslima’s employment of the word suggests that she sees pimping as a line of work much like any other.

  14.“Lalla”: “Lady,” in Berber; a title of respect meaning “Lord” as well
as “Lady” used to refer to women in the Moroccan nobility who are descended from the Prophet Muhammad and one of the ten Moroccan noble families; and/or one of “the most widespread terms for a female saint in Morocco.” See Issachar Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration among the Jews in Morocco, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988, 21. Whichever resonance Aslima intends, she employs the term ironically.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1.Marrakesh: A Moroccan city founded in 1062 that is set between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert. McKay, perhaps thinking of its shimmering khettera, or ancient irrigation channels, compares the city to “jewels of wild tropical extravagance” (44). Marrakesh impressed McKay as Morocco’s most “Negroid” city, a depot of the African slave trade transformed into something “like a big West Indian picnic, with flags waving and a multitude of barefoot black children dancing to the flourish of the drum, fiddle, and fife” (A Long Way from Home, 234). If McKay’s Morocco can be said to contain a version of McKay’s Marseille, then Marrakesh is it. Interestingly, McKay’s memoir A Long Way from Home observes that it was “the Senegalese in Marseilles [who] often mentioned Marrakesh as the former great caravansérai [sic] for the traders traveling between West Africa and North Africa” (234). The affair between Lafala and Aslima symbolically travels between these African regions as well. The third-person narrator’s impressionistic guide to Marrakesh and other touchstones in Aslima’s past shows McKay’s Afro-Orientalism in full bloom. For more of this charmed, fascinated, and exoticizing mode, see McKay’s “Cities” poems “Tanger,” “Fez,” “Marrakesh,” “Tetuan,” and “Xauen,” written around 1934 and collected in his Complete Poems, 225–228. And see part six, “The Idylls of Africa,” in McKay’s memoir A Long Way from Home, 227–260.

  2.Djemaa el-Fna: A large square and bazaar in the medina quarter, or old city, of Marrakesh, also transliterated from Arabic as “Jemaa el-Fnaa.” Known as “the largest market in Africa,” the Djemaa el-Fna’s traditional animal trainers, storytellers, and musicians inspired the United Nations to establish the UNESCO Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity program in 2001.