Banjo
Black seamen, drifters and musicians on the Marseille waterfront — the novel that gave Négritude its vocabulary, written by a Jamaican who preferred the docks to literary Paris.
Read our take
Romance in Marseille
by Claude McKay
Written around 1930, unpublished for ninety years: a novel of the Marseille docks with a disabled Black protagonist and openly queer characters, decades ahead of anything that could be printed.
- 2020
About Claude McKay
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeLafala, a West African stowaway, is discovered aboard a ship, locked in a freezing lavatory for the crossing, and loses both legs to frostbite. He sues the shipping company, wins a settlement, and returns to Marseille rich, on prosthetic legs, to the waterfront district he came from. Claude McKay wrote the novel around 1929 to 1933 and never published it. Penguin Classics brought it out in 2020, and it turned out to contain a disabled Black hero, openly lesbian and gay characters, and a frank treatment of sex work that no publisher of his own time would have touched.
The full story
Lafala stows away on a transatlantic ship, is found, and is shut in an unheated lavatory for the voyage. When he is finally released his legs are gangrenous and are amputated. In hospital in New York he meets a fellow patient who puts him onto a lawyer, and he sues the shipping line successfully.
He returns to Marseille with money and prosthetic legs, to the same waterfront quarter of dockers, sailors, sex workers and drifters he left. There he re-encounters Aslima, a Moroccan woman he blames for the theft that set the whole disaster in motion, and the novel becomes the difficult, mutually calculating relationship between two people who each have reason to distrust the other.
Around them McKay assembles the port: Black and North African workers, brothel life, dockside politics, and a group of queer characters drawn without either apology or tragedy — which in a manuscript of about 1930 is remarkable, and is a substantial part of why the book stayed in a drawer.
Themes and analysis
A remembered outing on the bay
The bay outing reaches us through Lafala’s memory in the hospital. Repeated references to doing things together make companionship feel like a rhythm, while the comparison to birds gives the couple a lightness sharply opposed to his present immobility. He had wanted Aslima to mean an end to wandering, not merely another encounter. The account of her theft interrupts that hope, but cannot remove the vividness of the shared pleasure. The memory preserves both the intimacy and the disappointment without making either cancel the other.
Black Angel’s offer
Black Angel’s arrival interrupts a dream of heavenly rescue with an offer of practical help. Lafala dislikes him, and the visitor’s own prejudices keep the encounter from becoming an uncomplicated lesson in brotherhood. Yet his questions make Lafala describe exactly how he was confined, turning suffering into a case someone might pursue. Unlike the staff’s pity, the offer gives him something to imagine beyond discharge. The visitor speaks confidently, but the excerpt ends before any result: the immediate change is that Lafala can imagine a future.
Why we recommend it
Ninety years in a drawer
Written around 1930 and first published in 2020. The gap is the story: almost nothing in it could have been printed at the time.
A disabled Black protagonist, written in 1930
Lafala's amputation and his prosthetics are treated as circumstance rather than symbol, which was not how the period wrote disability.
The Marseille of Banjo, from another angle
Same port, same years, same milieu — but with a plot, and with women and queer characters at the centre rather than the edge.
What this book explores
The real history
The novel draws on a real case McKay knew of: a West African stowaway who lost his legs after being confined aboard ship and won damages from the shipping company.
Timeline
1929
McKay begins the novel in September under the title The Jungle and the Bottoms.
1932
He takes it up again, renamed Savage Loving, after disagreements with his agent and publisher.
1933
He abandons the project amid the Depression; it stays unpublished.
1933
The manuscript is set aside unpublished; no publisher of the period would take it.
2020
Penguin Classics publishes it for the first time, edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell.
Book editions
Paperback
- Paperback
- Penguin Classics
- 2020
Reader reviews
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A Long Way from Home
Claude McKay's account of two decades of travel — Harlem, London, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Marseille, Morocco — by a writer who refused to settle anywhere or belong to anyone's programme.
Read our takeRomance in Marseille: frequently asked questions
Why was Romance in Marseille unpublished for ninety years?
Its content — a disabled Black protagonist, openly queer characters, frank sex work, and a hostile view of the shipping industry — was unpublishable in the early 1930s. McKay set it aside and it stayed in archives until Penguin Classics issued it in 2020.
Is it connected to Banjo?
Same waterfront, same period, overlapping milieu. Banjo has no plot by design; Romance in Marseille has a strong one, and puts women and queer characters at the centre.
Was there an earlier edition?
A 2001 University of Exeter Press edition appears in some catalogue records, but the evidence indicates it never reached ordinary publication. The 2020 Penguin edition is treated here as the first.
Who is Lafala?
Lafala is a West African stowaway who loses both legs after being confined in freezing conditions aboard a ship. Compensation from the shipping company changes his position when he returns to Marseille.
Is Romance in Marseille a conventional love story?
No. Relationships matter, but the novel also concerns disability, money, exploitation, and the waterfront community’s response to Lafala’s altered circumstances. The title should not suggest a gentle tourist romance.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Romance in Marseille, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1Claude McKay
WebsitePoetry FoundationUsed forUsed to place Romance in Marseille within Claude McKay's published work and verify its bibliographic context.
2Claude McKay's Harlem Renaissance Public
PeriodicalPublic Humanities (Cambridge University Press)Used forUsed for independent biographical, archival, or historical context surrounding Claude McKay's career and the period in which Romance in Marseille appeared.
3From Harlem to Marseilles: A Journey with Claude McKay
WebsiteSeton Hall UniversityUsed forUsed to cross-check authorship, chronology, and the work's place in Claude McKay's wider catalogue.
4Claude McKay letters and manuscripts, 1915–1952
ArchiveSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public LibraryUsed forUsed to verify Claude McKay's bibliography and place Romance in Marseille within the broader chronology of Claude McKay's career.
5Romance in Marseille — Chapter One excerpt
WebsitePenguin Random House Library Marketing, 2020Used forPrimary Chapter One excerpt for the two illustrated-scene readings.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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