Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance

4. The “Rude Anarchy” of “Black Boys” in Banjo

4 The “Rude Anarchy” of “Black Boys” in Banjo [T]he vagabond lover of life finds individuals and things to love in many places and not in any one nation. Banjo The more Ray mixed in the rude anarchy . . . of the black boys . . . and came to a realization of how close-linked he was to them in spirit, the more he felt that they represented . . . the irrepressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black race. And the thought kept him wondering how that race would fare under the ever tightening mechanical organization of modern life. Banjo 140 * Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha In 1929, the same year that Alexander “Sasha” Berkman spelled out the ABC of Anarchism, Claude McKay published his second primer of transnational black queer permanent revolution, Banjo: A Story without a Plot. My interest is in expanding the critical discussion of McKay’s second novel beyond its importance as a fundamental influence on négritude, as critics have customarily classified it. I am interested in Banjo as a queer négritude Marxist text. Banjo’s narrative holds an intriguing conversation with Home to Harlem (1928), then surpasses its comrade manifesto to portray the experience of the transnational black subject creating black modernity at the edges of the diaspora. In this way, McKay’s strategic, contingent négritude envisages the rhetorics for Édouard Glissant’s radical adjustment of négritude, as Banjo’s articulation of creolization demonstrates that the phenomenological condition of coming into being, of coming out beyond race, creates the potential for new emergences. Banjo wages a queer black anarchist plot, an even more radical conspiracy than its antecedent. Integrated with its radical intrigue, its lack of a narrative plot makes it possible to stage its revolutionary scheme. Through its freedom gained by way of narrative plotlessness, in other words, its Trotskyist (anti)plotting, Banjo writes its own black militant modernist aesthetics, uniting its black proletarian characters to perform a leftist négritude modernism. Banjo’s narrative collectivity, its “rude anarchy” of “black boys,” achieves the dissemination of the agency of subjectivity that engenders a black anarchist polyvocality. The proliferation of the novel’s subjectivity effects a revolutionary awareness of the significance of a protagonist in a novelistic narrative, revealing the immanent deconstruction of the isolated hero in the western novel. But Banjo does more than that. Although his second published novel is a black Trotskyist manifesto, Banjo’s modernism also articulates McKay’s variety of Gramscian counterhegemony. McKay bares the cultural manifestation of blackness as manufactured consent in racist and imperialist ideology , as black distinction faces becoming absorbed by and subsumed into capitalist discourses. Banjo is a European-imported queer anarchist little black bomb clandestinely constructed to be chucked into the works, into the Imaginary, of international capitalism and imperialism, nationalist racism and fascism. Ultimately , Home to Harlem and Banjo collectively execute an organic intellectual artistic counterdiscourse in order to expand modernist notions of subjectivity, thus performing a Gramscian “rearticulation” of the formalism of identity, and immanent in this is the integrated imposition of whiteness and heterosexuality as a means for social control. These brother in arms fictions, Banjo and Home to Harlem—both employing McKay’s fictional self-representation, Ray—expropriate the rhetoric of bohemianism and black sexual agency, thereby deconstructing The “Rude Anarchy” of “Black Boys” in Banjo * 141 the speech act intended to be performed by a white chimera on authentic black queer sexuality. To begin to understand the import of Banjo, it is necessary to investigate the record of its relatively disappointing reception. Following nimbly on his popular if critically bruised first novel, Home to Harlem, McKay published Banjo, a book that fared far less well than his 1928 best seller. It is interesting that Michael Gold deemed Banjo insufficient in political terms. Writing in New Masses, Gold praised Banjo’s critique of bourgeois values, but criticized it as inadequate as a proletarian novel. When McKay returned to the United States in the early 1920s, the Jamaican poet served as coeditor with Gold of the leftist journal Liberator, then left the position after a dispute, he says, over the kind of literature that the journal should publish (Maxwell, New Negro 95–124). He claims that Gold believed the Liberator “should become a popular proletarian magazine, printing doggerels from lumberjacks and stevedores and true revelations of chambermaids ,” while McKay argued in favor of the periodical publishing “good stuff that could...