Romance in Marseille

by Claude McKay

  3.muezzin: One appointed to call Muslims to prayer, often from the minaret of a mosque.

  4.marabouts: Muslim religious teachers or wandering holy men, as in Sufi Murshids or guides. Often expert in the Quran, marabouts have been prominent in West Africa, especially Senegambia, and in Morocco and other areas of the Maghreb.

  5.hetairai: The hetairai, from the ancient Greek for “female companions,” were a class of prostitutes permitted to educate themselves and live apart from male supervision. Though often slaves and foreigners, like Aslima, they were in certain respects, like La Fleur, less housebound and more self-determining than married Attic women. Pablo Picasso, whose Blue Period precedes McKay’s novel in its fascination with evocative prostitutes, painted a portrait of a bold, gem-wearing courtesan titled L’Hétaïre in 1901. McKay’s typescript of the completed Romance in Marseille employs the somewhat mistaken term “hetairiti.”

  6.Fez: An older city than Marrakesh, founded in 808. Thanks to its prestigious Al Quaraouiyine mosque and university, the latter one of the world’s oldest continually operating institutions of higher education, Fez became Morocco’s earliest spiritual and cultural capital. In his series of “Cities” poems, written in the early 1930s, McKay praised Fez as “Baghdad / In Africa” (1–2), a place of “labyrinthine lanes and crooked souks, / And costumes hooding beauty from men’s sight” (3–4). See the poem “Fez” in McKay’s Complete Poems, 226.

  7.Moulay Abdallah: Once a government center under the Marinid dynasty, this quarter of Fez was dotted with brothels and dancehalls and largely closed to foreigners during McKay’s time in Morocco.

  8.Moorish rugs: Prized rugs in the style of the nomadic North African Muslims who invaded Spain in 711, a people conventionally thought black by Europeans, as in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603). McKay may hope that these rugs underline the complexity of Aslima’s mixed black-Arab identity: her mother, Romance tells us, was a Sudanese sold as a slave to the Moors.

  9.Casablanca: The largest city in Morocco, a port located on the Atlantic coast, Casablanca has long been an economic capital of the Maghreb. Casablanca was attacked and occupied by French forces in 1907; at the time of McKay’s writing, the city was formally colonized, and almost half of the city’s population was European.

  10.a young Corsican: A young person from Corsica, a mountainous island in the Mediterranean Sea, variously occupied by the Italians, the British, and the French, the last of whom were granted formal control at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Marseille, from its establishment, contained a significant number of Corsican immigrants, but McKay may have chosen a Corsican origin for Titin because the island’s most significant product was Napoléon Bonaparte, born there to a family of minor Italian nobility in 1769. In his fondest, wildest dreams, Titin is a similarly brave conqueror of the wealth and women of France and its possessions.

  11.a romantic sheik picture: McKay refers to the Rudolph Valentino silent film sensation The Sheik, directed by George Melford and released by Paramount Pictures in 1921, or possibly its sequel, The Son of the Sheik, also starring Valentino, directed by George Fitzmaurice for United Artists in 1926. In the shorter, earlier Beinecke Library-held version of Romance in Marseille, the sheik picture indeed features Valentino. The finished version of Romance joins both films in relying on an Orientalist palette to paint a racially mixed, erotically charged North African scene.

  12.“Pied-Coupé”: Sing-song French—the second and fourth syllables are both pronounced “AY” [eɪ], and thus rhyme—for “Chopped-Off Foot,” or, less literally, “Stumpy.” This is Titin’s consistent, abusive nickname for the amputated Lafala. Thanks to the Francophone scholars Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Brent Hayes Edwards, Andrea Goulet, Musa Gurnis, Jane Kuntz, Gayle Levy, and Allan Pero for their help with this and other French terms.

  13.“And who’re you kidding with that open knife, yourself or me?”: The resemblance between George Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875) and this scene of a spirited “gypsy” seductress, a jealous three-way entanglement, and a promise of tragic lovers’ violence is not strictly accidental. In his 1937 memoir, McKay mentions attending a Parisian Opéra Comique production of Carmen in Toulon in the mid-1920s. See A Long Way from Home, 196. Aslima deepens her resemblance to the character Carmen by dancing flamenco in chapter 19.

  14.mulcting: Swindling or defrauding.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1.yearly festivities: Probably a reference to the annual celebration of Bastille Day, called “la Fête nationale” in France, that commemorates a turning point of the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789. Bastille Day festivities in Marseille’s Vieux Port are traditionally among the most spectacular in the country, with the holiday in the city spanning several days and including parades, music, and folk-dancing, all represented in McKay’s rendition.

  2.“beguine”: A “beguine,” in this sense, is a crush or attraction, as in the French expression J’ai le béguin pour toi (“I’ve got a crush on you”). While the use of the word in this way may date from the Middle Ages, “beguine” also refers to a form of dance and music originated by African-descended people in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, its rhythm compared to the rhumba and bolero. In Romance, a novel featuring several Martiniquais characters and repeated references to the musical beguine, McKay plays a running, punning game with the two meanings of the term. A few years later, so did the American composer Cole Porter, who legendarily wrote the song “Begin the Beguine” (1935) as a paying customer on a Cunard ocean liner.

  3.“when them redskins wouldn’t stand being good an’ native them ofays had to import us to implace them”: Lafala’s African American friend Rock laughs to keep from crying about the historical replacement of Native American slaves with imported African captives—the former common in Virginia, for example, between the founding of Jamestown and the end of the eighteenth century. Rock calls white European settlers “ofays,” using the African American slang term taken from the Pig Latin translation of “foes.”

  4.Vin Mousseux: A sparkling French white wine not necessarily produced in the Champagne region in the northeast of France. Like Italian spumante, it is served in the Tout-va-Bien as a cheaper stand-in for true champagne.

  5.castaneting her fingers: Moving her fingers as if playing the castanets, small percussion instruments resembling concave shells used by singers and dancers in Spanish folk music, among other styles. Castanets evoke a Spanish atmosphere in the music of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875), a significant influence on the plot of Romance in Marseille.

  6.“‘I’m not a Senegambian,’ said Lafala”: The proprietor of the Tout-va-Bien derisively links Lafala with the royalty of Dakar, the largest city in Senegal, but Lafala quickly specifies that he is not a Senegambian, a resident of the area of West Africa comprising not just Senegal but also Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1.serviettes: Napkins—in this case, especially unsanitary ones.

  2.a loving feast: Like other aspects of Aslima’s dream or vision of “The Sword of Life!,” a grandiose prophecy of her love and martyrdom for Lafala, the “loving feast” embroiders and secularizes Islamic tropes and traditions. In this case, the tradition is Iftar, a fast-breaking meal eaten after sunset during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1.the Domino: With some dose of irony, McKay seems to have named this Marseille café patronized by pimps in mind of a haunt of revolutionary artists in the Soviet Union. In his 1923 essay “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” McKay recalls visiting the Domino, a Moscow café where young Mensheviks and amateur anarchists shared their poetry and other writings. See The Crisis 27 (December 1923): 61–65.

  2.a Levantine sort of person: A sort of person hailing from the Levant, in the largest sense a loose cultural region o
f the eastern Mediterranean stretching from Greece to Libya. McKay may also or instead be thinking of the “Levant States,” a term used to refer to Syria and Lebanon in the wake of the French mandate granted after World War I.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1.“guillotine”: The machine for efficient beheading—thought more humane than the ax—introduced during the French Revolution. It remained France’s means of legal execution until the country abolished capital punishment in 1981.

  2.the golden age of her people conquering all that . . . earth between the Pillars of Hercules and Marseille: Aslima here identifies with the Moors, the enslavers of her mother, and recalls their emergence from Africa and conquest of Portugal and Spain that began in 711 in sight of the Pillars of Hercules, promontories in the Strait of Gibraltar. The Moors were turned back from west-central France at the Battle of Tours in 732.

  3.a legend that the cathedral was built on the site of a mosque . . . [and] a silent prayer that the lost dominions of her people might be restored: Aslima quietly recalls the legend that Marseille’s iconic Notre-Dame de la Garde (Our Lady of the Guard), a Catholic basilica sitting on the highest point of the city overlooking the Vieux Port, replaced a Moorish mosque built over the body of a Muslim holy man. European historians believe that the first version of the Notre-Dame was constructed on the limestone foundations of an ancient fort in 1214; the heavily touristed, Neo-Byzantine structure prized by Aslima, topped with a 135-foot-tall bell tower, was finished in 1864. Her “silent prayer,” along with other elements in this scene, indicates that Aslima has come to cast her struggle with Titin as one between Islamic and Christian civilizations.

  4.The official’s sentiment towards Negroes was based upon Uncle Tom’s Cabin and David Livingstone: The official’s sentiment is therefore built on the antiquated, patronizing forms of nineteenth-century Christian abolitionism expressed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the consequential 1852 antislavery novel by the American Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), and in the restless African explorations of the Scotsman David Livingstone (1813–1873). Before he shook hands with the journalist Henry Morton Stanley on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in 1871, Livingstone had crisscrossed the continent as a representative of the London Missionary Society, hoping to end the slave trade while converting African souls to Christianity and European-style commerce.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1.Seaman’s and Workers’ Club: This club is modeled on Marseille’s Communist-sponsored “International Seamen’s Building,” a favorite of Lamine Senghor, McKay’s Senegalese Communist friend, as the introduction explains. The shorter, Beinecke Library version of Romance in Marseille refers to the club as the “Proletarian Hall,” a name that, in contrast, highlights its Marxist mission.

  2.following the era of the Russian Revolution: McKay ties the formation of Marseille’s Seaman’s Club, and others elsewhere like it, to the overthrow of Russia’s czarist government and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. Such local radical institutions were sometimes supported or controlled by the Communist International, or Comintern, a worldwide association of national Communist parties directed from Moscow and founded by Vladimir I. Lenin in 1919.

  3.mistral wind: The cold wind that blows with great force—at an average rate of forty-five miles per hour—from the Rhône Valley to the Mediterranean Sea, particularly in the winter, and with special power in Marseille.

  4.Etienne St. Dominique: The significance of St. Dominique’s name—shared in part by François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803), the military hero of the Haitian Revolution—is discussed at some length in the introduction.

  5.brasserie: A type of French eating place more formal than a café or bistro, and thus fancier than the Tout-va-Bien, but still more relaxed than a full-fledged restaurant. Revealingly, “brasserie” also means “brewery” in French.

  6.Falope Sbaye: “Falope” is a given name, roughly meaning “thanksgiving,” among the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria and Benin. It is an appropriate choice for this character, a clerk in a coastal trading business from West Africa.

  7.an impressive magnified photograph of Lenin on the right of which there was a smaller one of Karl Marx: Vladimir I. Lenin (1870–1924), the Volga-born Russian revolutionary, initiator of Bolshevism, and founding father of both the Soviet Union and the Communist International, here takes visual and ideological precedence over Karl Marx (1818–1883), the exiled philosopher, historian, economist, and German revolutionary who was the single greatest intellectual influence on modern socialism and communism. McKay, then a Communist who admired what he perceived as Lenin’s “simple voice and presence,” pulled all the strings in his possession to meet the great Bolshevik when traveling through the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, but was unable to speak with him. Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), the People’s Commissar of War, was more obliging, asking McKay “straight and sharp questions about American Negroes. . . .” See McKay’s A Long Way from Home, 124, 160.

  8.“Workers of the World, Unite to Break Your Chains!”: An often-quoted digest of the final three lines of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848), whose most influential English translation closes with this peroration: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”

  9.“Is it the same as the Back-to-Africa organization?” . . . That was the only movement that had penetrated his ears in the portholes: Lafala wonders if Communism is the same as “Back-to-Africa” Garveyism, the latter depicted by McKay as the radical movement with the better ability to communicate with black sailors. St. Dominique, Romance’s specimen Communist, genuinely respects, enjoys, and assists Marseille’s black workers, but is a soft-handed, soft-spoken intellectual who makes few converts. So is the president of the Seaman’s Club, “a very polite person from the middle class” who “had been a professor” (76).

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1.Babel: Babel’s name evokes the biblical story of the Babylonian city, in which Noah’s descendants began building a tower that would reach into heaven. For the sin of their presumption, their single, common language was splintered into many, and they were scattered across the earth. See Genesis (11.1–9). Though the opinions of McKay’s Babel sometimes speak for the Quayside community as a whole, his name reminds us of the linguistic divisions among Marseille’s blacks, and of the forced diaspora that dispersed Africans around the Atlantic world.

  2.Genoa: Sitting on the Ligurian Sea, Genoa is the chief port of Italy and one of the busiest of the Mediterranean. Nicknamed “La Superba,” or the Proud One, the city is the (assumed) birthplace of Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), the Italian explorer who led the first European excursions to the Caribbean and Central and South America. Babel’s canny, frustrating, and partially stowaway ocean journey reverses the path of Columbus with a twist.

  3.East-of-Suez rate: The East-of-Suez rate would be one less fair than that offered to a largely European crew—the phrase “East of Suez,” chiefly British, referred to the non-European theater of empire east of the Suez Canal in Egypt. Rudyard Kipling, whose collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) was a somewhat guilty sourcebook for McKay’s Jamaican dialect poetry, popularized the phrase in his poem “Mandalay” (1890): “Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, / Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst” (43–44). See Peter Washington, ed., Kipling: Poems, New York: Everyman’s Library-Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, 49–51. In the opening pages of Home to Harlem, Jake Brown, steaming back to New York from the Great War as a stoker, is said to “despise the Arabs” with whom he works because of their “way of eating” (2). Yet when a white sailor attempts to establish a comradeship based on mutual distaste for “dirty jabbering coolies,” Jake demurs: “He knew that if he was just like the white sailors, he might have signed on as a deckhand and not as a stoker” (3). />
  4.“coolie crew”: A crew of sailors from Asia, described using a derogatory term—“coolie”—that emerged in South Asia in the seventeenth century. Such a crew, Babel suspects, would be paid at the “East-of-Suez rate” whatever the initial guarantee.

  5.“a darter of a dawg”: A daughter of a dog, in distinction to a son of a bitch.

  6.one of those miniature republics . . . in the Spanish Main: One of those small states, created from former possessions of Spain’s New World empire, in Central America or the north coast of South America.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1.Latin peoples: Those peoples with native modern languages derived from Latin, including the French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese—and, as McKay conceives it, the Corsicans.

  2.a woman whose card of identity was the yellow one of prostitution: Prostitutes in Marseille and elsewhere in France were licensed by the national government and asked to carry identity cards—cartes d’identité—noting their profession. Such official recognition, ordered by Napoléon in 1804, came at a price. As Titin’s comment suggests, “once a woman was registered, it was difficult for her to resume legitimate work” or to alter her social identity. See Rachel G. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 193.

  3.whoreson: A bastard son of a whore or prostitute. Nearly as unflatteringly, “whoreson” can also refer to a wretch or scoundrel.

  4.“une jeune fille de famille”: French for “a young family girl,” or, more precisely, a young girl from a decent and respectable family.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1.like a hero straight out of Joseph Conrad, an outstanding enigma of Quayside: Like a hero from the pages of Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), the great realist-to-modernist author of Heart of Darkness (1899) and The Secret Agent (1907). Conrad’s Polish origins, like McKay’s birth in Jamaica, helped to make him a perceptive participant-observer of English society and English prose. In tune with McKay’s Marseille fictions, several of Conrad’s best-known novels employ nautical settings and characters to explore the social and psychological effects of European imperialism. McKay may well be thinking of one famously enigmatic Conrad character in particular, the eponymous hero of the novel Lord Jim (1900), in describing the enigmatic Big Blonde. Akin to Lord Jim, McKay’s oddly refined dockworker is strong, light-haired, and quick with his fists, in flight from crimes that may have cost him his “respectable position in the merchant service” (95). Much as Conrad’s hero retreats from shameful tragedy aboard the Patna to a Malay island in the South China Sea, Big Blonde flees from an American ship or port to bury his mysterious guilt amid the variously “colonized” people of Marseille’s black Quayside.