“Sensible of Being Etrangers”: Plots and Identity Papers in Banjo

Abstract

Claude McKay’s novel Banjo immediately informs its readers what not to expect by its subtitle: “A Story without a Plot.”¹ The story, or lack thereof, takes place in the imperial port city of Marseille in the 1920s, amid constant traffic of bodies and goods. Banjo reflects its port setting in its serial narrative structure, which hinges on arrivals and departures, shifts in focalization, and the instability of the central group of characters: tramps living off the refuse of imperial trade. That these men are black, displaced, and geographically marginalized within the city telescopes the ruptures of colonialism and the authorities devoted to dealing with resulting “suspect” populations. Much of the action of the novel concerns the failure of these mobile subjects to comply with what historian Mary Dewhurst Lewis has called Marseille’s “street-level bureaucracy,” or unique system of law and order in the early twentieth century, as the characters in the novel struggle with questions of racial and national categorization and deal with nebulous identity document regulations on a daily basis. McKay’s novel provides a valuable perspective on the passport system in the interwar period, and, like Aaron’s Rod and Stein’s autobiographies, emphasizes the complicity of linear narrative with dominant bureaucratic discourses of identity.