Subjecting Pleasure

During one of his many sermonizing moments in Banjo (1929), Ray, the Haitian intellectual protagonist of Claude McKay’s novel, declares that while he is not against racial mixing, he “should hate to think of a future in which the identity of the Black race in the Western world should be lost in miscegenation” (p. 209). Although Ray’s discussion takes place within a Black/White racial framework, his fear of mixing echoes throughout the narrative with regard to Latnah, the Afro-Asian coolie prostitute who accompanies the group of Black vagabonds in Marseilles, France. The trope of the Afro-Asian coolie woman reappears as Yoni in his subsequent novel, Banana Bottom (1933), who similarly threatens the foundations of a Black national identity. In light of other problematic formulations of women as “passive” agents scavenging for property through sexual relations, how does the Afro-Asian hybrid contest or participate within the homosocial bonds stitched in both narratives? In his politically charged texts, how does the nationally and racially ambiguous sexualized body support Banjo (and McKay’s) struggle for liberation from imperialism and capitalism?

This article explores the threat posed by the hybrid body to the Black race in Banjo and Banana Bottom. In Banjo, McKay weaves a narrative of transracial alliances that converge onto the body of the Afro-Asian prostitute, Latnah, whose positioning as a “conjunction” exposes contradictions within French liberalism. I locate Latnah within debates surrounding immigration and expulsion of colonial workers as a disciplinary mechanism to control criminality, vagrancy, and prostitution. Within this context, McKay distinguishes between the prostitute and vagrant, illustrating that even though the prostitute is marginalized, she can be imagined as incorporable within the state. Her gendered status combined with her perceived racial ambiguity marks her as the ideal reproductive worker, if not the ideal White citizen mother iconized in French political discourse. Banana Bottom also maps a conflictual relationship between Yoni, the licentious Afro-Asian coolie woman, and Bita, the middle-class, Western-educated Black subject who both wrestle with attaining national belonging and bourgeois domesticity within an idyllic Jamaica. While Banjo reveals McKay’s earnest yearnings to form transnational Black affiliations without the constraints imposed by the Afro-Asian woman, Banana Bottom reconciles the wrought relations between Black middle-class Jamaicans and the bastardized “coolie gal.” Read together, the two novels follow a trajectory that charts his travels from America to Europe to Africa, which ultimately leads him to embrace his Jamaican homeland. This trajectory also marks the development of his national consciousness through international associations that shape his transnational subjectivity, underscoring that even though he is invested in a Black transnational vision, he ultimately desires to carve a unified national space that has been wrinkled by histories of labor migrations between coolie and Black populations.

Since McKay’s encounters with marginalized colonials transformed his conceptualizations of racial duality, his narratives are best understood through his politics of travel and cultural location. ¹ Caren Kaplan explains that “travel can be defined as a manifestation of pain or work” and evokes hard labor (p. 117). After leaving Harlem in 1922, McKay lived in Marseilles intermittently from 1924 to 1927. While writing Banjo, his travels into international spaces resulted in a more comprehensive understanding of material inequalities outside the context of United States’ oppressive racial system. This system had effectively placed him within a White/Black racial dichotomy in which he would always be marginalized. Marseilles, thus, became a space in which he could assert an Afrocentric identity and self-consciousness apart from the rigid racial boundaries of the United States, which he felt devalued the African subject and an authentic folk culture. Encountering and identifying with other Black transnationals within a global political economy not only shifted his own frame of reference from a Western to a Black transnational and Afrocentric worldview, but it also informed a global political consciousness that perceived racial formation and national identity as functions of social and economic disparities caused by colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. Michelle Stephens writes in her seminal work, Black Empire, that narratives such as McKay’s “represent a desire on the part of marginalized modern black subjects to tell global stories of the race in the context of empire and conquest . . . and the survival of alternative ways of imagining political community and multiracial global democracy” (p. 59). This political community, residing in Vieux Port, Marseilles comprised of Black international subjects such as sailors, international drifters, prostitutes, and criminals, whose lives were shaped by the structural dominations imposed by colonialism. While socializing with this group, he unloaded ships and befriended seamen who identified as musicians and worked in the cafes that lined Vieux Port. These disenfranchised subjects symbolized the abject condition of modern Western civilization for McKay and embodied a more realistic or “folk” portrayal of Negro life unencumbered by the cause of racial justice. ² This vitality in McKay’s texts showed his desire to wield an authentic “artistic consciousness” fueled by a revolutionary stance against narratives of Black racial uplift and Western literary aesthetics that sought to construct a unified, homogenous, and Western literary national form. ³ Exercising a folk aesthetic, therefore, enabled a literary agency that relocated cultural expressions of Africans to the center, such as his depiction of jazz.

The Black itinerants that he befriended in Vieux Port piqued his desire to travel to Africa. After completing his first draft of Banjo, he traveled to Casablanca, where he became aware of the inequalities of French rule in Morocco. Initially, he compared the Arabs of Morocco with the East Indians he had known in Jamaica, lacking a sense of kinship with either group. Eventually, he concluded that in Morocco, different ethnic groups managed to retain internal community cohesiveness despite economic and material inequality. Each group had its place and function in the overall society, and McKay believed that this type of balance could resolve racial tensions in the United States.

McKay understood the limitations of mobility for African diasporic subjects. Although travelling to Europe allowed McKay to escape racial tensions in America, he was not blind to covert racial prejudices in France. Unlike other African Americans seeking refuge from American racism during the interwar years, he refused to propagate myths of racial harmony and egalitarianism in France and critiqued Black intellectuals for their delusions of autonomy under French liberalism. Although Europe’s racial restrictions were not as stringent or visible as South Africa’s apartheid or America’s Jim Crow system, racial oppression undergirded the facade of racial equality in France. While African colonials exercised freedom of movement, they also faced difficulties in acquiring property and employment.

In his travels, McKay exercises a “strategy of flight” or a diversion that “leads him elsewhere for the principle of domination, which is not evident in the country itself” (Glissant, 1989, p. 20). His movement from the United States to France parallels his internal migration from a restrictive duality posited on Black and White racial binaries to a more global understanding of Blackness outside of the restrictive U.S. national frame. Since narrow Black/White relations obscured the capitalist logic behind class disparities in the United States, it is only through his exile in France that McKay discovers vagrancy as symptomatic of First World/Third World global inequalities. Because France fails to ease the burdens of his race consciousness, he travels to North Africa where he affectively and imaginatively affiliates with his homeland in rural Jamaica. Morocco leads him to accept his peasant culture as an essential part of his identity and his diversions continually inform his political understandings of racial and class hierarchies within the global frame.

Institutional racism, thus, acts as the backdrop of Banjo, which wields an anarchist modernist aesthetic that considers polyvocal Blackness as resistant to industrial capitalism (Holcomb 151). Through Black proletarian agency, embodied by the African American character, Banjo, the Haitian intellectual Ray, and a group of nationally ambiguous Black itinerants, the novel illustrates emancipated subjectivities based on counterhegemonic Black primitivism seen in jazz and other African cultural forms. The vagabonds are accompanied by Latnah, a racially hybrid prostitute who solicits customers aboard docked ships in the port, and who is valued as a member of their group for her nurturing instincts and her sexual magnetism. Even though this motley group mixes freely, they do not necessarily traverse all spaces. For example, Latnah consciously avoids the bars in the Ditch, which are configured as Negro spaces of enjoyment and discourse where international Black subjects can freely articulate their concerns regarding inequality and oppression. The state exercises police brutality only in Negro spaces in order to discipline Black bodies instead of “Arab” bodies. ⁴ Depictions of invisible borders and spatial relationships that illustrate myriad forms of racialized violence (whether through limitations in mobility or through overt physical violence and discipline by the state) saturate his plotless novel and comments on the contradictions of French liberalism.

The contradictions of the state emerge in relation to racialized status of Black immigrant vagabonds. In The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Hayes Edwards investigates the word “vagabond” invoked in Banjo. Edwards believes that “vagabondage” goes beyond cultural transmission to embodying a culturally oppositional politics to British colonial policy, national belonging, and racial and class subjugation. Edwards’ singular focus on the male group of vagabonds on the Vieux Port of Marseilles in the early-to-mid 1920s precludes the role Latnah plays in Banjo. He marginally heeds Latnah’s position in the narrative, stating that even though Latnah can be considered a significant female character in Banjo, McKay takes an “uneven approach” to her role as a prostitute and as Banjo’s lover (p. 209). Although Edwards recognizes that Latnah forms a component of this group, he fails to account for exactly what that component is or how that component is linked to the novel’s focus on this international vagabond community of Black males. What are the “disturbing elements to the portrait of Latnah” and how do those elements affect the composition of not only the Black masculine group but also their relationship to the French state, especially since Latnah’s subject position as a racialized prostitute marks her as being outside the Black community and the French nation-state? The broader issue that Edwards circumvents is how Banjo, Ray, and Latnah are implicated within the cultural politics of race and labor.

While Edwards foregoes the opportunity to place Latnah centrally in the narrative, Michelle Stephens in Black Empire reads Latnah’s exclusion at the end of the narrative as the novel’s rejection of heteronormative, domestic nationalisms. Certainly, as Stephens contends, the racial bond between the Black male subjects in the narrative is reinforced through Afrocentric and homosocial relations, particularly between Ray and Banjo. While Stephens’s argument conceptually situates race, nationalism, and internationalism within an indiscrete complex, it continues to subscribe to a binary racial dynamic. Latnah’s Oriental foreignness “reflects McKay’s own tendencies to stereotype, racially and sexually, hybrid international female subjects, thereby releasing the black male from the traps and trappings and the loyalties and affiliations of a pure, black, racial home” (Stephens, 2005, p. 199). Through this reading of Latnah, who acts as a foil for a pure-blooded, Black woman, Stephens fails to consider how her ambiguous racial positioning accounts for a tripartite racial dynamic that is at the core of the “international romance” staged by McKay. Instead of seeing Latnah as existing solely outside or peripheral to the formation of an international Black romance, I propose that we see her role as constitutive of a racial formation that connects African migratory subjects to Asian migratory subjects in relation to the dominant power hierarchies that operate within the narrative. ⁵

The novel begins with Banjo’s arrival at the Vieux Port, Marseilles oldest waterfront section, which he describes as marvelous, dangerous, and attractive. Lined with “crooked streets of dim lights, gray damp houses bunched together . . . and rowdy signs of many colors” (pp. 12-14), it showcases a multicultural milieu of foreign sailors, international drifters, prostitutes, criminals, and petit bourgeois merchants who struggle for subsistence. Mongrels with beady eyes, skeleton-like hags, and girls, touts, and vagabonds constitute the “derelicts” who reside at the port (p. 18). These proletarians circulate goods and labor to the developing world—from the Caribbean, the Gulf of Guinea, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal, the China Seas, and the Indian Archipelago. McKay writes,

Sweat-dripping bodies of black men naked under the equatorial sun . . . carrying loads steadied and unsupported on kink-thick heads hardened and trained to bear their burdens. Brown men half-clothed, with baskets on their backs, bending low . . . digging plucking for the Occident world its exotic nourishment of life, under the whip, under the terror. (p. 67)

The “modern movement of life” hinges on the port’s spatial production as “Europe’s best back door” that receives and discharges traffic from the Orient and Africa. Placed outside national and colonial spaces, the port is a licentious space of international exchange that enables interracial and transsexual intimacy that undermines legitimate boundaries between gender, sexuality, and economy. In its inversion of cultural norms, the space of the port acts as a site of transgression that propagates interracial relationships within spaces of commerce. Although the port is a commercial space with ceaseless international traffic, it also serves as a living, dining, and leisure space for what the popular press in France termed social garbage. Within this spatiality, the Black vagabonds solidify the ties of brotherhood as they beg, cohabitate, and play together, realizing transnational kinships. The port, thus, acts as a symbolic site of waste that accommodates and reproduces the “excessive” population of economic modernization (Bauman, 2004). These spaces produce perpetual uncertainties and anxieties about racialized deviants—the Black working class, the unemployed, or the improperly employed—subverting the interests of the state. Shuffled into slums of the nations, they exemplify the crisis of labor and immigration that the French state repeatedly attempted to manage through the sociopolitical and legal system.

It is within this context that the Black vagabonds—Banjo, Bugsby, Malty, and Taloufa—fail to be productive working members of society. Their subsistence is dependent on begging for food from sympathetic Black crews rather than participating in a labor regime that operates under racist capitalism. The men make a conscious choice to refrain from working, proclaiming “irresponsibility or bohemian excess,” which are categories explicitly imposed by the French authorities. ⁶ The vagabonds realize that if they work for the French state, they will have to follow the dictates of capitalism. If they subsist on employment relationships, they will be subjected to the political authority of the capitalists and will be able to exercise little control over their unencumbered and excessive lifestyles.

The vagabonds embody the very condition of waste and excess of the port. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the French nation-state was obsessed with vagabondage, considering it to be one of France’s greatest social ills. It was a “veritable” industry in not just France, but across Europe. ⁷ They believed that criminality naturally emerged from vagrancy. ⁸ Public charity for vagabonds became a source of antagonism among citizens and some argued that assistance provided by welfare bureaus was the culprit for the rise in vagabondage. ⁹ The French state, therefore, wanted to reduce the assistance to vagrants in an effort to refocus resources on the elderly, mothers and children. ¹⁰ Assistance led to the creation of a work-relief program, which utilized the assisted by providing them with tasks, such as breaking stone, reconstructing roads, and restoring canals that aimed to repress the perceived deviancy of the vagrant. Depots, designed after the Belgian national prison-labor camp, and colonial prisons were also designed to contain the problem. French elites believed that the reasons behind vagrancy were related to morality and individual choice rather than socioeconomic factors. According to Timothy Smith (1999), the “pauper was increasingly portrayed as a sub-human” or “social garbage” in the popular press, and in award-winning books mainly from fields of medicine and science. Within these textual spaces, elites claimed that vagrancy was a biological condition that lay in the blood. The line between the migrant and the vagrant, therefore, was also blurred, as the French believed that race and begging were clearly linked.

While France was invested in curing itself from begging, it was also addressing the social dimensions of prostitution as the antithesis to the state’s interest in reproduction and national rejuvenation of its citizens. The obscure definition of prostitution, like vagrancy, typified a prostitute as any woman partaking in indecent behavior, exemplifying bad morals, or acting freely, such as widows, separated women, or foreign women. Because their matrimonial status was suspect, they lived on the fringes of society as non-procreative, racialized immigrants. Like vagrancy, sexual ideology was lodged within regulatory and disciplinary laws and institutions meant to control deviant behavior, which was generally attributed to colonized people. The French believed that their lack of sexual and social control was evidenced by population growth in Africa and Asia. ¹¹ Alain Corbin (1990) notes that the prostitute symbolized “disorder, excess, and improvidence,” and signified the “rejection of order and economy” (p. xv). Prostitutional commerce, as a whole, opposed the French state’s interest in developing White mother citizens who could produce children who would eventually assimilate into the French nation-state through intergenerational reproduction.

The prostitute, unlike the vagrant, was granted more tolerance after neoregulation policies became widespread in 1904, which only required the sequestration of prostitutes if they failed to get health checks. ¹² Thus, while the vagrant continued to be vilified and imprisoned, the prostitute became accepted as a part of society because she provided a social function. Whereas vagrancy laws did not even grant beggars the formal right to choose their work due to imprisonment, unregistered prostitutes were not even strictly marginalized. Unregistered prostitutes operated in various milieus and were able to move into different communities, which empowered them with social and geographical mobility. ¹³

In McKay’s text, the Black vagabond and Black prostitute are subject to schemes of exclusion and marginalization as they are either imprisoned or under surveillance for their deviancy. The Black immigrant vagrant, however, is positioned differentially from the Afro-Asian immigrant prostitute in relation to the French state. The colonial state exercises disciplinary power, continually intruding into pure Black spaces in the novel, in order to expel Negro colonial workers. The end of the novel is replete with images of the state repatriating colored migrants by providing them with “Nationality Doubtful” papers and free trips to their countries of origin in the hopes of securing employment for French men at the expense of Black foreigners (Banjo, p. 313). Imposing an institutional solution to the problem of “wayward” subjects who have failed to assimilate into society, the state’s effort to recruit and resend Black workers to their colonies strategically reorganizes the empire into a fixed and racialized geopolitical order in which the colonial Other returns to the colonies while the French citizen enjoys the benefits of the metropole. Ray understands this institutional violence inflicted on the beach boys as the “universal” attitude toward colored men, invoking the contradictions of French Republican universalism that emphasized the role of color blindness within national identity (Banjo, p. 313). In underscoring the denial of citizenship rights for colonial workers based on racial hierarchies constitutive of immigration discourse that prized Whiteness as indicative of “biological” and cultural similarities to the French national body, McKay highlights the culmination of imperial anxieties around national degeneration and exclusion as the basis for Black displacement. ¹⁴ The reinvigoration of France depended on purging foreigners and carefully selecting compatible bodies that could prevent national decline. Such racialized inclusions meant to foster a new vision of a virile France that could only be achieved through a prosperous French economy.

As Ray reconciles the Negros place within the “mechanical march of civilization” (p. 324), when embarking on his journey with Banjo under the pretense of a wage labor contract, he coveys his desire to invite Latnah. Banjo replies, “A woman is a conjunction. Gawd fixed her different from us in moh ways than one. And theah’s things we can git away with all the time and she just kain’t” (p. 326). He binds Latnah to the French state and precludes her from participating in the Black transnational sphere even though her subjectivity has been informed through international mobility and travel.

Latnah’s characterization as a “conjunction” is then, laden with meaning and multiply expressed in fantastic ways, first through the recurring image of the serpent and then through cultural relativity. ¹⁵ Her relationship with Banjo begins early in the narrative when Banjo arrives at the port on a “tramp” and sexually engages a Black tramp operating in the Ditch. After the tramp deserts Banjo, divesting him of economic means, he meets Latnah, a “little olive-toned woman of an indefinable age, clean-faced, not young and far from old, with an amorous charm round her mouth” (Banjo, p. 16) who leads him to her home, located outside the ditch. Her inviting abode displays several Oriental objects, and she provides Banjo shelter and food. Against the backdrop of the debauched port, Latnah’s orderly domestic space illustrates a pure ambiance uncontaminated by sexual economic exchange. Although she normally engages in unregistered sexual commerce like the other free women of the port, thereby also rejecting colonial order and economy, she develops an intimate and nurturing bond with the vagabond boys, which differentiates her from other prostitutes.

Her Oriental goods, especially her dagger, mark her dissimilarity from the Black vagabonds. When one of the vagabonds rescues her from a peddling woman and a sexually aggressive and intoxicated man, McKay writes that she “slipped from her bosom a tiny argent-headed dagger” that made him recoil with fear because

it was as if Latnah had produced a serpent from her bosom . . . not an instrument familiar to his world, his people, his life. It reminded him of the strange, fierce, fascinating tales he had heard of Oriental strife and daggers dealing swift death. (pp. 29-30)

Noting that unlike the other women of the Negro race, Latnah “glided” gracefully like a serpent through the water (pp. 30-34). Her form reminds the men of coolie women who were “weighted down with heavy silver bracelets on arms, necks and ankles, their long glossy hair half hidden by the cloth that the natives called coolie-red”(p. 30), and the eruptive image of the serpent simultaneously induces fear and admiration within the vagabonds. McKay’s reinforcement of the stereotype of the Oriental woman produces an ambivalence of otherness that articulates the racial and sexual transgressions of difference for vagabond males. ¹⁶ This ambivalence of otherness is dependent on denying Latnah a racial or ethnic identity besides her Aden origins and her Negress mother. ¹⁷

Aside from distinctly orientalizing Latnah, the serpent epitomizes her intermediary status between Blacks and Whites. Banjo explains to Goosey, another vagabond,

A nigger is a bohn mistake . . . When Gawd made the white man, he put a little stuff in his haid for him to correct his mistakes. And so when the white man invented writing and pencil, he put an eraser on that pencil to rub out mistakes. But Gawd nevah gived the nigger no brain-stuff foh’m to correct his mistakes, and so the nigger kaint invent anything to correct his mistakes. For when God was making the first nigger, a blue bird jest fly down into the Tree of Life and started singing that the wul’ was ready and waiting foh the love a Gawd. And the tune was so temptation that Gawd lost his haid and set down the golden bowl with the nigger’s brain in it. And the serpent was right there. And he ups and et the nigger’s brain and put a mess a froth in the golden bowl. And that stuff for the nigger’s brain gived the serpent the run of the earth. . . . And when Gawd done took up his work again, he took the froth in the bowl and dumped it into the nigger’s brain and finished his job. And that’s why you find the world as it is today. The debbil ruling hell and earth, the white man always getting by and there, and the nigger always full a froth or just dumb. (p. 181)

The parable participates in the discourse of creation myths and polygenesis circulating within the realm of science, religion, and ethnology, particularly in relation to African Americans, which were meant to exclude Negros from the human family. ¹⁸ Within these alternate Biblical scenes, temptation became personified as a Black man instead of a snake. ¹⁹ Standing in for seductive evil and creating anxieties about miscegenation, the production of the Black man as Tempter of Eve attempted to eradicate Black male sexual threat from the nation’s collective White consciousness.

McKay also utilizes the parable to differentiate the races in terms of origin and knowledge, and rather than depicting the serpent as a threatening Black male presence, he configures it as a liminal figure that deceptively acquires knowledge for its personal gain. Latnah, who displays the easy mobility of the mythical serpent, the sexual lure of the serpent, the ambiguous darkness, the lack of origin of the serpent, and cultural capital (Malty recalls that Latnah knows everything, including all languages), stands in-between the inferior Black man and the knowledgeable White man. Configuring the serpent and Latnah as intermediary figures that cross boundaries, McKay endows the hybrid “feminine with an autonomous cosmic value” (Mehta, 2002, p. 654) who mediates the physical and spiritual realms and ensures “the effective elimination of binary oppositional forces that would undermine a more holistic conception of human development” (Mehta, 2002, p. 65). The narrative empowers Latnah by linking her to the enduring potency of the serpent, rather than demonizing her as in the Genesis myth and the parable ultimately becomes an allegory explaining the reasons behind racial inequality.

These reasons of inequality have implications within the context of the French nation, where assimilation policies ultimately failed to incorporate immigrants into the national body. The parable Banjo relates is followed by similar conclusions drawn by Ray toward the end of the novel, which propels him to unite with Banjo and leave the port. In accordance with Banjo’s ideas, it seemed socially wrong that “a black child should be brought up on the same code of social virtues as the white” within a society that thrived on the “survival of the fittest” when a “Chinese or Indian could learn the stock virtues without being spiritually harmed by them, because he possessed his own native code from which he could draw, compare, accept, and reject while learning” (p. 319). It becomes apparent to Ray that the Negro child cannot compete for a legitimate place, because he lacks the right kind of knowledge—folk wisdom. Ray’s epiphany, his comparison of the relational histories and attributes of the different races, echoes Banjo’s earlier sentiments bemoaning the nature of the Negro and his place in the geopolitical sphere. The code of social virtues in Whites and the native code in Asians is the knowledge that Negros need to harness in order to compete in the global marketplace, and their lack of wisdom confines them to either menial jobs in the ports, the waste areas of the world, or to a life of vagabondage.

The development of Ray’s Afrocentric consciousness in which he wrestles with an imposed identity that determines his material and spiritual place in life spurs him to think about the cultural location and reality of the African subject. As he attempts “the deliberate and systematic effort to assume fully one’s place in the world,” he struggles to reconcile racialized differences by confronting his own dislocation arising from “borrowed cultural terms” or realities from other groups (Mazama, 2001, pp. 397-398). His critique of Eurocentric knowledge is coupled with the realization that Africans must use folk wisdom in order to reposition themselves in society.

Ray’s (and McKay’s) standpoint mirrors the Du Boisian crisis of double consciousness in which the Negro’s racialized subjectivity affects his subject formation within the nation-state where he struggles to carve his legitimacy. Legitimacy becomes pertinent within immigrant debates in France in the 1920s when the place of colonial workers who aspired for citizenship was decided on the basis of Whiteness, or the putative markers of race, and productive value. Unlike the Black vagabonds, afflicted by the material and psychological effects of industrial capital, McKay endows Latnah with cultural capital and reproductive value. Since the stakes of migration had changed for the dwindling population of a war-harried France, the national workforce required an augmentation of assimilable citizens. Elisa Camiscioli explains that the French state defined maternity and paternity as obligations of citizenship during the demographic crisis, which could be resolved through reproductive practices. Latnah, unlike the purely Negress prostitutes, is neither White nor Black, but multilingual and part of an established “Arab” community. Her home and the ability to reproduce Whiter citizens for the French nation because of her gendered and racially ambiguous status constructs her as less threatening to a White polity that imagined regeneration through taxonomies of differentially racialized immigrants.

The duality that informs Ray and Banjo’s Black consciousness, materialized by continued exteriorization and internal exclusion, inhibits their ability to counter or feel liberated from colonial racism. Not only do they fail to see that “the other White is also the bad White,” but they also reinforce sexism as a function of their own racism (Balibar, 1991, p. 43). The hierarchy to the social taxonomy posed by McKay consolidates Latnah’s perceived incorporability into the French state even as it limits her participation among the Black transnational constituency; this interconnected, complementary exclusion of the hybrid from the transnational, figures racialization as a dialectical element of (Black) nationalism. In order to take Latnah along, the duo would need to reconcile the plethora of racisms between different “nations,” “communities,” and “nationalities.” ²⁰

Leaving Latnah and the idealized space of the port also signals Ray and Banjo’s disenchantment with constructing solidarities within a stratified, international, and differentially racialized working class. The French port ceases to be a space of utopic possibilities when the protagonists realize that the racially coded universalism spouted by the French Republican state will never bestow legitimacy. It is this search for legitimacy that carries McKay, like Banjo and Ray, to Africa after leaving Marseilles where he comprehends an alternative model of community in which different ethnic groups cohere despite material inequalities. Such a vision opposed the classic duality of the American Negro subjectivity that dogged McKay through his travels from the United States to the Europe.

While Banjo articulates McKay’s fraught search for belonging outside of the nation-state, Banana Bottom illustrates his reconciliation with the Jamaican national space. Banana Bottom traces Bita Plant’s complex awakening to and acceptance of folk life in rural Jamaica. After being raped by the mentally deranged Crazy Bow, a mixed-race descendent of a Scotsman who purchased Banana Bottom and married a Black slave, at the age of 12, Bita is adopted and educated by the Craigs, the White missionary couple that founded Jubilee and spouts racialist ideologies regarding African primitivism and European superiority. Eventually, she breaks from the Craigs, questioning the validity of the knowledge that she has attained from them, and returns to Banana Bottom, securing a legitimate place within the rural utopian landscape through her marriage with Jubban, her father’s drayman. Bita’s return is accomplished through the advice of Squire Gensir, who urges her to question the values instilled in her by the Craigs and to see the restraints that repress her, which prevent her from attaining the “unconscious freedom” of the peasant folk (p. 121).

On a surface level, this novel can be read as a “return to roots” narrative wherein McKay, through Bita Plant, returns to an essentialist origin, enacted through a utopian, speculative vision. Through careful placement of this text in relation to Banjo, however, this return is anything but simplistic and is not invested in a root identity. Complicated by cultural hybridity, cultural contact, and a persistent mongrelization, the text denies the notion that the search for origin stands in opposition to creolization. Banana Bottom exemplifies that political possibilities of creolization are realized only through a return dissociated from a longing for ancestral origins. According to Glissant (1989),

Diversion is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must put to work the forces of creolization, or perish. (p. 26)

Reversion, through diversion, becomes a political undertaking that requires a reconnection rather than a reductive narrative of return. Glissant’s conceptualization of return is crucial in understanding McKay’s solidification of a unified Caribbean identity as the point of entanglement, which can be achieved through a reconciliation between the licentious Afro-Asian hybrid and the Black peasant community.

Thus, Bita’s own return to the folk is challenged by Yoni, the unruly Afro-Asian “coolie gal” miraculously conceived on the Sunderland Sugar Estate that employed many East Indian indentured coolies. These coolies “magnetized” the Negro peasantry with their loin cloths and “their women moving with little steps almost gliding like serpents, draped in loose flowing garments of many colors and weighted down with heavy silver rings and bracelets in nose and ear, on arms and ankles” (p. 65). Yoni’s magnetic quality attracts Tally Tack, a fellow that proudly flaunts his newly acquired wealth from Panama. Unlike Bita, whose struggle for liberation warrants the realization of her folk belonging, Yoni’s liberation is tied to the vulgar and aberrant Tack Tally and his success in Panama, a potent signifier of Pan-Africanism. ²¹ McKay writes, “ . . . Yoni’s head was turned for Tack . . . she liked his “panamerican” clothes . . . and his Colon strut. . . . And if Tack was too raw mannered . . . she would go back to Panama with him” (p. 68). Yoni aligns herself with the only transnational working body in the narrative, asserting a desire for a place outside of Jamaica where she and Tack can freely engage in a relationship. Aside from his relationship with Yoni, Tack also solicits Bita’s affections, a woman of property and education whose station in life exceeds his, threatening the social and class structures of Banana Bottom. Although he considers himself equal to Bita because of his travels and economic success, the idea that a New World man can be a suitor for Bita is rendered ludicrous in the narrative even though McKay provides ample context that such transnational crossings symbolized development.

This context is situated within debates surrounding coolie importation, also considered the source of Negro emigration to the Panama Canal Zone and the plantations in Central America. The replacement of the labor source through indentureship drives the antagonistic feelings toward coolies, preventing the extension of “liberal sympathy “ to Indian coolie immigration as “it was just another form of chattel slavery under cover of indenture, with the slaves strange brown men instead of black” (p. 238). Although coolies effected a transition within Jamaica, by driving a “more intensive development of the hardy Negro peasantry” (p. 238), whose refusal to work for coolie wages entailed alternative survival strategies, the natives, Bita and Squire Gensir in particular, favor stunting coolie importation.

Yoni’s jealousy of Bita compels her to visit an Obeahman who convinces her of Bita’s enmity toward her. It is only after Tack commits suicide that Yoni reconciles with Bita, withdrawing from the peasant community. She confides in Bita that in one of her marvelous dreams about Tack, she was “an open grave” that he had fallen into. Yoni’s dream evokes images of sexual intercourse and her body serves as a receptacle of death, foreshadowing his suicide. McKay’s attribution of an essential gendered identity through the name Yoni, which literally means female genitalia in Hindi, and her biological function of awaiting Tack’s body, provides an imagined space in which the union between the transnational subject and the bounded coolie woman is denied.

Tack, Yoni, and Bita’s triadic identities as transnational worker, bastardized coolie, and privileged native are “produced in a chaotic network of Relation” linked by the “contradictory experience of contacts among cultures” (Glissant, 1997, p. 144). As Tack lusts after both women, his death provides the space in the narrative for Yoni and Bita to come to terms with each other while they undergo significant alterations. Yoni becomes infused by the spirit of Revival and then impregnated by a reformed Afro-Jamaican boy, Hopping Dick, who tames her unruly sexual desires by agreeing to marry her. Bita, on the other hand, has managed to retain her morality regardless of her multiple interests and attempts of rape by “White” men. In doing so, she has never fully awakened to her own sexual desires. In the novel, this awakening can only happen when Bita’s internal duality resolves itself. After the second rape attempt by a nearly White man of the planter class, Bita reflects,

The finest qualities of mind or brain or heart were the attributes of only the rarest spirits . . . in the proud domain as well as the peasant’s lot and even in hothouses. How then could any class or people or nation or race claim a monopoly of a thing so precious and so erratic in its manifestations? Oh, she marveled at the imbecilities of a sepulcher-white world that has used every barrier imaginable to dam the universal flow of human feelings by suppressing and denying to another branch of humanity the highest gifts of nature, simply because its epidermis was coloured dark. (p. 266)

This realization is trailed by the discovery of her Black body and the delight of her “real human beauty” (p. 266). While they both follow opposite trajectories with Bita’s sexual awakening and Yoni’s curtailment, they each come to occupy a legitimate place within rural Jamaica.

McKay’s reconciliation with the geopolitical migration histories of the Caribbean, advanced through these characters, surely excludes the errant, mobile subject as a rightful citizen of Jamaica. With Tack’s death, the homosocial bond between Yoni and Bita becomes possible through a shared celebration of domesticity (they have dual wedding and both conceive children) that entrenches them within the Jamaican national imaginary. Banana Bottom, therefore, departs from Banjo’s thematic explorations of transnational subjectivities and solidarity between Black subjects by mapping a parallactic shift between the native Jamaican and the Afro-Asian hybrid woman. In managing the unruly hybrid body by taming her sexuality and binding her reproductive value to Jamaica, the novel attempts to reconstitute a Caribbean history ruptured by multiple dislocations. Bita’s struggle for self-liberation, fulfilled through her marriage with the drayman, cannot occur in isolation from Yoni’s.

For McKay, the Afro-Asian body functions as a site of struggle that needs to be accounted for in transnational and national contexts. My paper traces the cultural logic of the hybrid figure in Banjo and Banana Bottom, asserting the impossibility of her participation in a Black masculine transnational sphere without national resolutions. This reading of McKay’s novels punctures ideas of Third-World solidarities desired by Black intellectuals of the early-to-mid-20th century, underscoring that such liberatory visions were stained by the imprint of colonial racism, migration histories, and capitalism. This obscure figure that peppers McKay’s visions demands to emerge as an object of study as she provokes questions about the necessity of understanding national and diasporic belonging through colonial hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality.