Claude McKay in Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône (13)
This plaque, dedicated to one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, writer Claude McKay (1889–1948), was only unveiled in Vieux Port in June 2015. McKay spent several months in the late twenties in the poor (and now non-existent) area La Fosse, where he wrote the novel Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), which is set in low-life Marseille. The eponymous main character is an occasional dock worker and lives among immigrants and drifters of many nationalities, prostitutes, pimps and the like.
I was on his trail in Marseille last year. I didn't realize there a plague dedicated to him. I am a Jamaican and writer like him. I became fascinated with him during my elementary school years in Jamaica in the "70s. I have read and analyze all his work. I found Banjo hard to navigate but I believe that his autobiography is greatly over-look. I would like to write a paper about his attitude toward blackness and race relationship. I am no scholar. I teach at the middle school level. He was a very interesting person who loved to wonder and wander like myself.
ReplyDeleteS.D. Brown
I've not read any of his work yet, but if you get round to writing that paper I'd like to read it. Cheers, Tony
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