2023-09-14 08:00:00
Just a century ago, Claude McKay arrived in Marseille. This port, a true gateway to Africa, will be the ideal setting to depict the eventful history of a band that remained at the dock, and between the lines to tell another story of the arrival of jazz in France, far from the official accounts of Worldly Paris, much more in tune with all the realities of a diaspora which composes its soundtrack, creolized as desired.
Before arriving there, the native of Jamaica (September 15, 1889) had already seen quite a few countries since his green years spent in the countryside. From 1912, the same year he published his first collection in local Creole, Songs of Jamaica, he left for Alabama to study agronomy at Tuskegee University, an establishment for Afro-descendants in this part of the country subject to severe segregation. Then joined a university in Kansas. It is there that he discovers Souls of Black Folk, the totemic work of WEB Dubois, which radically deviates from the well-trodden path that was intended for him. Direction New York, with the ambition of becoming a poet, for the one who has just married Eulalie Lewars, “ a childhood love » who will quickly leave him to return to his island. He remains there, waiting behind the scenes of an improbable glory, publishing just two texts three years later under the name of Eli Edwards, while multiplying odd jobs.
Committed traveler, enraged poet
These are the beginning of crazy years that he will record in an autobiography, recently released following a first edition in 2001 by André Dimanche. Her name, A long Way from Home (“A sacred end of the road” in French) already says a lot regarding the character who at the end of the First World War will move a lot. From London to Paris, from Moscow to Petrograd, from Berlin to Marseille, from Barcelona to Tangier. At each stage, the young man strengthens his convictions, refines his view of the world, through field practice where he can collide with the greatest thinkers of the time as well as mingle with the little people of the underworld. Her writing will bear traces of it in the future: she slaloms between styles, with an obvious swing and a sense of punctuation that heralds the best wordsmiths. In New York, he is immersed in the heart of the revolutionary broth that agitates Greenwich Village, publishes in the magazine The Liberator, which will bring him into the long line of African-American authors committed once morest institutionalized racism in the United States. If We Must Diea long poem in reaction to the bloody red summer – that of 1919, when white supremacists attacked many African-American neighborhoods, strikes the mind.
« If we must die, let it be a noble death.
To die, perhaps, but a noble death,
May our precious blood not be shed
In vain ; and although dead, the monsters themselves
Whom we defy will be forced to honor us!
O my brothers! Let’s face the common enemy!
There are many more of them, let’s show our courage,
And for a thousand blows, let’s give a mortal blow ! »
In London, where he arrived in 1920, he continued on the same path, getting closer to socialist circles, joining the editorial staff of the Workers’ Dreadnought, the newspaper of the Socialist Federation of Workers, while at the same time he continues to publish his poems. In the very young Soviet Union, where he was invited in November 1922 to participate in the fourth congress of the Communist International, he stayed six months, becoming an icon despite himself. His exchanges with Léon Troski remained famous, establishing bridges between the situation of Black Americans and the revolution in progress. Certainly, but with Stalin soon to triumph, this freedom-loving man, more anarchist than anything else, hits the road once more, landing in France, following a short stay in Berlin. He passed through Paris, as an obligatory passage for this bohemian at heart, where he returned regularly during the 1920s. As evidenced by a photo dated 1926 of Berenice Abbott, where he displays a broad smile!
Between two poses for painters in Montparnasse, where he risks pneumonia, his colorful personality causes a sensation among intellectuals, notably the surrealists, but also at the literary salon of the Nardal sisters, where a very young student listens to him: Aimé Césaire . However, it is not in the city of lights that he will find the spark, but in Marseille where he finishes his novel Home To Harlem, which will lastingly mark the Harlem Renaissance movement but also the authors of the African Presence in France. He depicts the daily life of a young African-American who went to the trenches in 1914-18, who on his return navigates the dives and bastringues of New York in the 1920s, to the rhythm of jazz and carnal pleasures. Until he crosses paths with a black intellectual from Haiti with radical political positions, who will shake his convictions. Any correspondence with the own life of the person who assumed his bisexuality is not accidental. Hailed with a prestigious prize, the crudely worded novel earned him a serious critique from WEB Dubois, one of his major influences: “Home to Harlem the whole thing made me nauseous, and following its dirtiest bits I distinctly felt the need to take a bath.”
Marseille to the sound of Banjo
It is also and above all Marseille which will be the scene of his second novel, Banjo, definitively placing him in the pantheon of twentieth-century authors. “ It was a relief to go and live in Marseille among people with black or brown skin, who came from the United States, the West Indies, North Africa and West Africa, and who were all gathered together to form a warm group. Negroid features and complexion were not exotic, arousing curiosity or hostility, but group-specific and natural. The smell of black bodies having sweated during a hard day’s work, like the smell of horses in the stable, was not unpleasant, even in a crowded café. It was good to feel the strength and difference of a social group, and to have the certainty of being part of it. », he wrote a posteriori in his autobiography. The Phocaean city, and in particular the neighborhoods around the old port, are not to displease this anti-system personality whose state of mind is completely in tune with the soul of Marseille on the docks. He himself will also be a docker on several occasions.
He depicts like few, except perhaps Albert Londres, the Restricted District, an area frequented by a night owl: the underworld, prostitution, revelers of all kinds like the zonards find themselves there… In this interlacing of dilapidated streets located in the heart of the Saint-Jean district – which was dynamited on February 17, 1943 at the request of the Germans – all these little people pulse to the sounds of the bal musette, to the sounds of ragtime and jazz. It is therefore in this vast open-air brothel, nicknamed the Pit, that he zones Banjo, the narrator whose name refers to the precursor instrument of the blues people – subject of many debates and frolics between the characters – and all those who form a strange group alongside him. All are dockworkers, each embodies an Afro-diasporic puzzle piece: there is a hillbilly from Alabama, a middle-class black from the East Coast, a Nigerian, a Senegalese, two West Indians and a Haitian, McKay’s alter ego himself. even. This distribution allows the novelist to put into music the different currents of thought of the community, shared between resigned assimilation to “Western” values and the desire for radical rupture as advocated by Garvey. “ Claude McKay, who had communist commitments, with rather anarchist or even fourierists in the open, he maintained all his critical distance towards these two very antagonistic leaders. Looking back, I don’t think he was faithful to either one. And perceptive enough to stay away from the heavy ambivalences of his compatriot Garvey, without reducing him to these errors. », analysis in Release Christiane Taubira. In many respects, this novel by Claude McKay, who proclaimed himself “ author with universal reach », prefigures the Everyone as portrayed by Edouard Glissant. Or a vision of the decompartmentalized world, like the version of jazz that he develops implicitly throughout the pages.
Open (jazz) society
They all follow Banjo in his desire to start a jazz orchestra, the soundtrack at the forefront of fashion in these crazy twenties. McKay, through these characters, gives a more Afro-diasporic reading of jazz, than simply anchored in the memory of the cotton fields. As a point of intersection between all, as dance is a “liberating” movement which allows us not to remain with both feet stuck in the heavy mold of European culture. As the symbol of a possible unity, among those who do not stop separating elsewhere in this novel which has chosen for its title a blues instrument which makes the connection with the first hours and misfortunes of the black Atlantic.
This “open” vision of jazz, a multiple resonance chamber of a singular thought, refers to what would be called Great Black Music half a century later in Chicago. It is above all a matter of swing, a story of groove which is available on a flute as well as on percussion, on foot-to-the-floor tempos as well as on more flowing ballads. “Shake that thing » is the watchword of this funny pan-African gang. This is in fact the title that they never stop playing, in public squares as well as in a crowded Senegalese bar… a precursor standard of hot jazz by the banjoist Papa Charlie Jackson who made a big success in 1925 in the United States in the voice by Ethel Waters, great lady of the blues. It is the unifying theme par excellence, as this quote demonstrates. “ And one followingnoon, he entered his dream. A freighter had arrived at the dock, whose colored crew knew how to play music. Four guys – with a banjo, a ukulele, a mandolin, a guitar and a cornet. That evening, Banjo and Malty, wild with enthusiasm, literally carried the little orchestra to the old port. They played some catchy, fashionable tunes but the Senegalese shouted at the top of their lungs for “Shake That Thing”. So Banjo began to play out the notes of this piece and the guys on the boat quickly learned them. So Banjo jumped in and started playing in his own way, crazy and wonderful at the same time. ».
In their repertoire, there is also a fashionable hit “Then I’ll be happy” from the Fletcher Henderson orchestra or the “Jelly Roll Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton (1915). And then there’s also “Stay Carolina Stay,” a song from Africa’s Gold Coast. Everyone comes together, despite their differences, in a momentum that prefigures the future fusions that the second of the twentieth century, following the decolonization of thoughts, will largely abound. “If jazz took a more politicized turn following the Second World War and the emancipation represented by the political and aesthetic positions of bebop musicians, we realize that it was already in the 1920s the place of an articulation of countercultural values of a racially discriminated minority. », recalls Emmanuel Parent, lecturer in contemporary music and ethnomusicology at Rennes 2 University whose research focuses on popular music and the anthropology of African-American music, in an article devoted to this aspect of Claude McKay’s novel . Which adds: “ In this sense, this jazz culture is closer to slackness Jamaican as a form of resistance to capitalism than entertainment as the reification of black culture in the elite hedonistic circuits of bourgeois and white audiences consuming black exoticism… The refusal of work, the rejection of legal or regulatory opportunities available to characters of the novel, do not fit so much into a logic of alienation and black pathology, but as an attitude of resistance, of flight vis-à-vis a system from which blacks, according to Banjo, do not will never own the keys “. QED.
Marseille, artists in Kay
A century later, Marseillais Lamine Diagne, himself a wanderer for a long time before setting down his bags for the Belsunce district, uses the terms in a multimedia concert entitled Letters to a deceased poet. Associated with the director Mathieu Verdeil, who devoted many years to producing a documentary around Claude McKay, this saxophonist also initiated the Kay collective, an informal group which starts from this visionary thought to project itself into current affairs. Enough to finally put Claude McKay back at the center of the issues: died in oblivion in Chicago in 1948, he has recently been resurrected as if by magic thanks to the efforts of many (special dedication to the journalist Armando Cox and the artist Moussu T who were pioneers in the field) since recent years have seen a succession of publications, including two unpublished God’s black sheep at Nouvelles éditions Place and Romance in Marseilleat Heliotropismes, who following his autobiography in 1937 has just published a collection of unpublished short stories, Dinner in Douarnenezwhilee Return to Harlem was released by Nada editions. France, never short of commemorative ideas, is even celebrating the centenary of the American’s arrival in Marseille this year!
From the avenues of reflection traced by this atypical author, this heterogeneous collective (musicians, dancers, rappers, slammers, actors, authors, graffiti artists, etc.) enters into communion in a jam session which takes stock of the situation in 2023. To each of find your place, to speak, to take your hand, in what Lamine Diagne calls an open stage. « At the beginning it was regarding coming together in a ritual of freedom, without the idea of presenting oneself in front of the public, just by opening up a space of time. It went very well, in moments to which we did not return so as not to crystallize things “. Since then, they have intervened in the form of “ participatory and immersive performances » in schools, medical-educational establishments for people with disabilities, or parks in the heart of the northern districts. “ This allows Claude McKay’s thinking to connect to current realities.” And to reach audiences, in their diversity, as predicted by Lamine Diagne in the conclusion of these Letters to a deceased poet : “We will always be closer than far.”
KAY! Letters to a deceased poet October 21 at the Cité de la Musique in Marseille, December 2 at the MUCEM in Marseille at the conclusion of the international conference on McKay, and December 5 in Paris Maison de la Poésie
The film Claude McKay, from Harlem to Marseille (directed by Mathieu Verdeil) will be screened on September 17 at the Fête de l’Humanité
All the news from the McKay 100 years project can be followed here
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