"A Unique Plan of Getting Deported": Claude Mckay's Banjo and the Marked Passport

"While scrupulously complying with official regulations regarding passports, identity cards and visas," Claude McKay recounts in his 1939 autobiography A Long Way From Home, "in all my traveling in strange places, I have always relied on my own personality as the best passport" (301). McKay's claim articulates a tension familiar to the modern traveler, caught between the homogenizing limitations of a legally documented identity and the wider possibilities of individual expression. There are few novels in which passports, and the paperwork of identity and affiliation, play a more central role than McKay's 1929 Banjo. Without the demand for identifying and legitimating documents, and the attendant acceptance of the state's power represented in official paperwork, Banjo would lack motion: McKay's "beach boys" might never leave the beach. As the nation-state attempts to force a particular identity on its citizens, reified in legal documentation, Banjo's titular character demonstrates the power of the individual to resist bounded stasis by working within the system rather than outside of it. By emphasizing the way the passport's visas fundamentally alter its nature, McKay depicts a community that is founded not in nationalism or internationalism, but in a dialectic between them. This dialectic, created by transnational mobility, inscribes a new form of kinship on the modern mobile individual.

Banjo is the product of a society newly dependent on the passport as it still exists today.¹ While the twentieth century was not the first time the state attempted to control citizens' movement, the commencement of European hostilities in 1914 saw the implementation of an international passport system of unprecedented scope, and the initiation of new implications for these documents. Germany was the first Western European state to introduce a war-time passport mandate, and the UK, much of the rest of Europe, and the U.S. quickly followed suit. While the end of the American Civil War resulted in the relaxation of temporary passport controls, the end of World War I led to the calcification of identificatory demands. Despite the League of Nations' Organization for Communication and Transit holding conferences in 1920 and 1926 with the expressed intention of once more phasing out the passport, member states' concerns about displaced immigrants flooding labor markets and security threats instead lead to further standardization of this document (Salter 2003, 79).

The proposal that the form identification requirements take plays a role in literature is not novel. Looking long before the modern passport's introduction, Jesper Gulddal claims free movement was fundamental to emplotment in the early novel, and border controls had an effect on the form literature took (2013, 293-94). Gulddal traces state-sanctioned movement controls back to the French revolution, arguing that these restrictions led to a rupture with earlier literary tradition. In a twentieth-century context, Paul Fussell's influential Abroad: Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980) makes a persuasive claim about the relationship between literature and the passport. Fussell suggests "so small a phenomena as the passport picture is an example of something tiny which has powerfully affected the modern sensibility" (26), going on to state that the mindset provoked by the passport photo's implementation manifests in the work of T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett. Along with the thumbnail photo—introduced by the United Kingdom in 1914, and swiftly made standard practice across Europe and the United States—the modern passport's multi-page booklet form marked another key distinction from earlier instantiations. This new format facilitates the mutability that proves integral to Banjo's embrace of the passport in McKay's novel.

The passport's sudden ubiquity meant all classes of travelers were abruptly forced into familiarity with a document previously only known to certain populations, in certain periods, in certain countries. Craig Robertson's The Passport in America (2010) articulates the decisive conceptual shift implemented by the modern passport: the full-scale displacement of identification practices from the individual's body onto the document. Reliance on the passport meant personal knowledge was not sufficient for verified identity, and power rested in...