Right to scrap in Marseille, with Claude McKay – Liberation
Each week, a reader chronicles a literary favourite. This week, Jean-Charles Canu, collaborator of film festivals, sinks into the Marseilles slums of the “Banjo” of the author of the “Harlem Renaissance”.
There was in Marseilles, between the famous Panier and the old port, which was the oldest district of the city, a network of alleys and dark passages, filthy and stinking, lined with decrepit buildings where a miserable fauna came from all corners of the world, of those attracted by the ports and who survive on schemes, plunder, gambling and prostitution. It was this infernal Marseille that surprised Maupassant in 1880: “Arabs, Negroes, Turks, Greeks, Italians, and still others, almost naked, draped in bizarre rags, eating nameless food, squatting, lying, wallowing under the heat of this burning sky, refuse of all races, marked with all the vices, wandering beings without family, without ties to the world, without laws, living haphazardly by day in this immense port, ready for all tasks, accepting all salaries, swarming on the ground like vermin swarm over them, making this city a sort of human dunghill where all the rottenness of the Orient is fermenting stranded there.” It is this Marseille that repels Dorgelès in To leave (1926): “We see everything in these teeming streets, Greeks, Levantines, Arabs, Egyptians, Syrians, Turks, a residue of all races, all the scum that the East can sweat and crosses of all that, frightening mixtures of half-blacks and Circassians. It is this space of 14 hectares that the Nazis, in retaliation for the actions of the Resistance who often hide there, will raze. On January 23, 1943, its 20,000 inhabitants were evacuated, 1,642 were deported, all those whom the regime abhorred, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, vagabonds, resistance fighters… The collaborating commentator of France Actualité prospered: “This inextricable island of alleys, cul-de-sacs, courtyards, landmark of an entire international underworld […] will no longer be able in the future to serve as a framework for the fertile imagination of novelists.
Was he thinking of Claude McKay, a figure of the “Harlem Renaissance” who, in 1929, made the La Fosse district the setting for Banjo ? Banjo, Ray, Goosey, Malty, Dengel, Ginger and the others rarely venture beyond the Vieux Port or onto the Canebière. Their world is in these lowlands whose main artery they have renamed the Boodie Alley, where sailors and dockers have been stranded, intoxicated with more or less invented memories and tales of adventures that only happen to others. They are Italian, Corsican, Armenian, Greek, Arab or Chinese. Blacks came there from all continents, lived in the “United Snakes”, in Paris, Germany, Martinique, Senegal, Ivory Coast, sailed on all companies and anchored in all ports. . But their epic stopped at La Fosse. Each boat is an opportunity to make a little money, to beg a meal from the cook on board, to guide the crews in the cabarets or at the blue (pornographic) cinema, for a ticket or a drink. Their daily life is made up of music, especially jazz, dances and alcohol. When they’re feeling down, their minds wander somewhere between the spicy-smelling shores of the tropics and the sweaty clubs of Harlem. Their irreplaceable knowledge of the world fuels long conversations about the comparative suffering of blacks in America, Africa or Europe. Jim Crow laws and colonial brutality compete in tricks and cruelty to ensure the domination of whites, of whom they quickly spot the perversity of some and the hypocrisy of others, even if sometimes they make sincere friends of them. At the same time, they mock these wealthy black Americans who ape the whites and are indignant at certain “Senegalese” who reproduce the clichés by playing the savages, but they have understood that what separates men is much more surely money. as the country or the color of the skin. And to echo Maupassant or Dorgelès, McKay in turn gave his definition of the city in 1928: “Marseilles, however, offered a barbaric, international charm that amazingly embodied the great flow of modern life. Small in size, with a population that is manifestly too numerous, a service port for Europe, loading and unloading its trade with the East and Africa, a favorite port for sailors on board without permission, infested with all the scum of the Mediterranean countries, teeming with guides, whores, pimps, repulsive and attractive in its long-fanged abjection beneath its picturesque exterior, this city seemed to proclaim to the whole world that the most wonderful thing in modern life was the brothel.