Nautical Desires: Tourists, Stowaways and Other Travellers in Caribbean Fiction

Abstract

This article examines two Caribbean texts which use 20th-century journeys on passenger ships as opportunities to investigate ways in which colonial anxieties of race and gender are worked out through nautical desires. Mayra Montero’s erotic novel La última noche que pasé contigo (1991) and Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille (2020) both wrestle with the imagined and material consequences of pervasive anti-blackness. They also raise crucial questions about embodied practices of struggle for survival. My analysis seeks to answer the following questions. What happens when anti-blackness masquerades as desire? How do we read and represent an anti-blackness that seeks to consume parts of the Caribbean and then dispense as refuse with what it sees as superfluous? What reading practices might we adopt in order to make sense of Caribbean bodies dehumanized on their own shores, and what narrative solutions might Caribbean fiction propose that might begin to restore humanity and value to these bodies?

1. Introduction

Nautical travel, oceans, ships, ports of embarkation and disembarkation, and the meanings they produce are indispensable lines of enquiry in any attempt to understand the historical and geopolitical import of the Caribbean in the world. The oceans of the world mark the multiple erasures and the defiant possibilities that constitute much of the history of the region. Of course, ships continue to be potent signifiers of the complicated economic, political, cultural, and affective connections the region’s present (and future) hold to its past. And they are crucial to new world epistemologies which connect the region to a wider, global black diaspora.1 Indeed, the conviction of the unparalleled significance of oceans in the deployment of globalized capitalist violence (Burch and Sekula 2010) has been integral to some of the most provocative scholarship, produced over the last decade, which considers the connections of maritime signifiers to black lives specifically. Discriminatory practices of surveillance of black bodies (Browne 2015), the articulation of black speech from the place of deep hurt and deep knowledge (Sharpe 2016) and the centralising of the intimate in the theorization of black being and black belonging (Macharia 2019) are just some of the ways in which scholars of the black diaspora have been using ships as the political impetus to explain the continuities between the past and present in the fraught politics of 21st-century black living.

If the return to the middle passage and to the hold of the slave ship is crucial for working through the implications of black ‘non-freedoms’ in the 21st century and for restoring justice to what Sharpe refers to as ‘the shipped…that fleshly wreckage that capital wrought’ (Sharpe 2016, p. 25), then the exploration of narratives that emanate from later forms of globalized maritime traffic that repeat economic and cultural colonization is equally imperative. This article examines two Caribbean texts which use 20th-century journeys on passenger ships as opportunities to investigate ways in which colonial anxieties of race and gender are worked out through nautical desires.2 Perhaps because of what Cuban author Virigilio Piñera refers to as ‘La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes [the curse of being completely surrounded by water]’ (Piñera 2018), ships are omnipresent in Caribbean literature. Mayra Montero’s erotic novel La última noche que pasé contigo (Montero 1991) [The Last Night I Spent with You] and Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille (McKay 2020) both, albeit in very different ways, wrestle with the imagined and material consequences of pervasive anti-blackness. They also raise crucial questions about embodied practices of struggle and fleshly strategies for survival. What happens when anti-blackness masquerades as desire? How do we read and represent anti-blackness that seeks to consume parts of the Caribbean and then dispense as refuse with what it sees as superfluous? What reading practices might we adopt in order to make sense of Caribbean bodies dehumanised on their own shores and what narrative solutions might Caribbean fiction propose that might begin to restore humanity and value to these bodies?

Caribbean textual recreations of nautical travel in the 20th century involve the circulation of bodies at leisure and bodies at work. They also illuminate bodies banished from sight, compelling us to look beyond what Krista Thompson (2006) refers to as the Caribbean picturesque.3 Nautical discourses of leisure, exploitation and containment take on particularly sinister resonances in their racialized and gendered registers which haunt Caribbean and black diasporic peoples. If ships inscribe opportunities for corporeal and psychological abandon for some in the global north in the 20th century, they also spell calamitous politics, neo-liberal economic devastation and environmental turmoil for many others in the global south.4 For others trying to move between different coordinates, ships become the location where the economic, racial, and cultural impediments to freedom of movement are most brutally actualized. In tracing the movement of leisured, labouring, and contained bodies in Caribbean fiction, I pay attention to the way discursive legacies of colonialism mediate both inter-racial and intra-racial contact. And I interrogate spaces of intimacy, moments of pleasure, and expressions of desire for what they reveal about both containment and the potential for freedom.

The politics of itinerancy lie at the heart of much of the literary production of both Claude McKay (1890–1948) and Mayra Montero (b. 1952). McKay’s landmark 1928 novel Home to Harlem established him as a preeminent voice in the early years of the Harlem Renaissance. However, this first novel simultaneously solidified and fractured his standing within this literary movement. The complex reasons for this have been amply documented by historians and critics of the Harlem Renaissance. What is significant for this discussion is that the transnational, global, and ambulatory themes that will dominate McKay’s later novels are already fully present in this fictional debut. As is clear from in his memoir, A Long Way Home (McKay 1937) McKay’s own itinerant life takes him away from Harlem and the USA for more than a decade as he travels through France, Spain, Russia, and North Africa, among other places. It is in this itinerant context that both Banjo (McKay 1929) and Romance in Marseille (McKay 2020) are conceived and produced. Mayra Montero is one of the most prolific and certainly one of the most distinguished living writers from the Spanish Caribbean. A white Caribbean woman born in Cuba; she has lived in Puerto Rico since her teenage years. While she herself greatly admired Fidel Castro, her family felt forced to leave Cuba after the Revolution because her father, the famous humourist and scriptwriter Manuel Moreno Ojea, fell afoul of the government, for which he was punished and severely censored. Montero and her family thus became part of the huge community of Cuban exiles who settled in Puerto Rico between 1959 and the early 1970s. However, Mayra Montero’s narratives of Caribbean errantry and errantry in the Caribbean do not often focus on her biography. Her novels, such as Tú la oscuridad (Montero [1995] 1997) [In the Palm of Darkness], Del rojo de su sombra (Montero [1992] 2001) [The Red of His Shadow], and La última noche que pasé contigo, highlight the oppressive imposition of western epistemologies on local Caribbean sites of knowledge, the forced economic migration of black Caribbean subjects, and the gendered struggles of power which dominate both voluntary and forced movement in the region. In this essay, I read McKay alongside Montero to demonstrate two very different but complementary strategies of writing towards racial justice. Both novels have a strong investment in the erotics of race. Montero uses the erotic as one of several tools to expose the racism of the white travellers in her novel and ultimately to demolish them. McKay, on the other hand chooses to champion the agency of the black sailors and members of the port community. Montero chastises the purveyors of racial degradation and McKay restores dignity to the degraded black subjects.

2. La Última Noche Que Pasé Contigo: Erotic Excess and Caribbean Apocalypse

The Caribbean cruise is the focus of La última noche que pasé contigo. Tourism, and cruise tourism in particular, remains an especially invidious concern for Caribbean cultural critique. Recent data on global trends in cruise travel confirm that the Caribbean Sea has become the main hub for cruise tourism in the world.5 According to the latest Cruise Industry Annual Report, the region was expected to host almost half of the world’s passenger capacity in 2024. Attracting some 40% of the world’s cruise market, in the last year the Caribbean welcomed more than twice as many cruise passengers as its nearest competitor, the Mediterranean.6 Clearly, as the principal industry for many Caribbean states, tourism represents huge revenue. However, symbolised by the enormous cruise ships that dock in their ports, cruise tourism also implies the economic and social encroachment of the wealthy on the impoverished and depends, as Michaeline Crichlow has put it, ‘on the sale of the national patrimony in trans-national markets’ (Crichlow 2009, p. 196). Tanya Shields is trenchant in her analysis of the impact of cruises on Caribbean geographies. ‘Cruise ships’, she notes, ‘disrupt any sense of empathy; they make fanciful and fun the historical tragedy of the Caribbean’ (Shields 2014, p. 40). What is also undeniable is the industry’s dependence on nations seeing and selling themselves through the eyes of white foreigners. Indeed, there is a reasonable degree of consensus among scholars of the politics of leisure in the region that the tourist gaze has been essential to the way the Caribbean sees itself (Sheller and Urry 2004; Thompson 2006; Edmonson 2009).

Montero’s novel is astute and detailed in its exploration of the eroticism of the tourist gaze.7 Fernando and Celia, the middle-aged protagonists of La última noche que pasé contigo leverage the Caribbean cruise as an occasion to bolster their white middle-class credentials and to enhance their cultural capital as ‘worldly’ rather than provincial. We learn from Fernando that the pair are well-travelled. But even for them, the Caribbean cruise constitutes the quintessential symbol of social triumph, the ultimate symbol of urbane distinction: ‘‘Quién de todos los amigos, aun de los más viajeros, se había bañado nunca en las caletas borrascosas de la Marie Galante” (p. 13), Fernando asks. [Which of our friends, even the best-travelled among them, had ever bathed in the turbulent coves of Marie Galante?].8 Located roughly 27 km to the southeast of Guadeloupe to which it is officially, a dépendance, Marie-Galante is a small island of about 158 km². Anthropologist Ron Emoff, in his detailed study of music and identity performance on Marie-Galante, laments the fact that the island ‘often appears on maps, if at all, as an unnamed trace, an unidentified place that from its geographic proximity and namelessness appears to be under Guadeloupe’s aegis’ (Emoff 2016, p. 1). Marie-Galante, as an overseas department is, administratively and legally, French. The condition of citizenship from afar which this confers on the people of what Emoff refers to as ‘an out-of-the-way island’ is fraught with tension. The island is out of the way not just because of its geographical removal from France but because the long history of slavery and the politics of servitude of the present have given the islanders a necessarily distanced relationship to the French state. The island’s status as a ‘globally out of place locale’ (Emoff 2016, p. 2) is also exacerbated by its historical insularity within the archipelago of Guadeloupe. Up until the 1970s, Marie-Galante had little interaction or communication with its more ‘globally visible neighbour (Emoff 2016, p. 7). Aside from four years of British occupation (1759–1783), Marie-Galante has been under French control in one way or another since 1648. By the 18th century, the island would become known as the island of a hundred mills, testifying to its outsized role in sugar production. Sugar and rum production continue to be the mainstay of the economy of Marie-Galante. Ironically, along with the white sandy beaches which are a staple in most Caribbean tourist advertising, the publicity used to market Marie-Galante as a destination today ubiquitously features images of sugar cane plantations and oxcarts depicting the island’s putatively unspoiled, undiscovered nature. Fernando’s selection of Marie-Galante as the tourist destination to highlight in his ostentatious claims to world knowledge, though completely self-serving, is an important instance that retrospectively allows us to contemplate the multiple meanings of isolation, nature, global capitalism, the exoticization of place, the politics of control, and egotistical consumption which are major concerns throughout the novel. And, as we will see, the entire adventure of the cruise also comes to its cataclysmic end in the Guadeloupean archipelago.

Once onboard, the couple abandon all sense of propriety, attention to social rules and consideration for reputation. The cruise in La última noche que pasé contigo is a zone of excess, exotic, erotic excess. The ship scribes a zone of pleasure that would seem to extinguish all rules. But while the journey sees the couple make numerous detours into the forbidden, it ultimately reinscribes strategies of control which foreclose any real liberation. Most readings of La última noche rightly challenge Celia’s willing relinquishing of her sexual autonomy and her acquiescence to a machista idealism. Indeed, the unassailability of prescribed gender norms is hard to miss in the novel. But without wishing to dismiss the significance of the woman’s complicity in her own victimhood, I pursue a different line of thinking. I am interested in the ways in which she participates in the fetishistic debasement of the tropical subjects, ‘natives’ if you will, with whom she comes into contact or about whom she fantasizes. In this regard, she becomes an active consumer (physically and otherwise) of the tropical flesh which the Caribbean cruise promises. As Vinodh Venkatesh has noted, Celia is complicit with the discursive positioning of the Caribbean and its peoples as ‘closer to the visceral barbarity of the non-human and necessarily separated from the civility of the (northern) urban’ (Venkatesh 2015, p. 72).

Bermúdez, Fernando’s homosocial confidante and homoerotic interlocutor, counsels him that the nautical environment inspires a dangerous loss of composure in women: ‘Las mujeres, en los barcos, medio que se desbocan’ (p. 13) [Women lose their self-control on ships]. His masculinist self-righteousness ascribes the perniciousness of nautical travel to flaws in the anatomy and psychology of women, and thus he warns Fernando to be prepared. This advice is accompanied by pseudo environmental theories which cast the Caribbean as diabolical: ‘de junio a noviembre el caribe es el diablo’ (p. 14) [From June to November the Caribbean is a devil]. Parading ignorance as knowledge, this sexist mythmaking simply renames what it does not know or, as Edouard Glissant might say, ‘challenges the right to opacity’. As it turns out, the cruise becomes the complete unwinding of both man and woman. It signals what Celia imagines as ‘su particular peregrinaje al centro de la perversión’ (p. 56) [Their own private pilgrimage to the center of perversion]. Fernando and Celia imagine, indulge in, relive, comment on, witness, and accuse each other of, a wide range of erotic fantasies including incest, torture, ritual humiliation, and necrophilia. For them, the cruise becomes an erotic opportunity not so much to find themselves but to attempt to reinvent themselves through stories woven onboard. If the predictability of the ground, tierra firme, confers relative reliability on the narrative of their lives, the sea presents countless unpredictable discursive opportunities. Once couples lose sight of land, explains the omniscient Bermúdez, vertigo takes over and ‘Cielita…te volverás una leona’ (p. 14) [You will turn into a lioness]. The first day onboard the couple meet a woman, Julieta, to whom Celia takes a visceral dislike and with whom her husband Fernando will have an ardent and highly revelatory sexual affair.9 Celia deduces that nothing the woman says can be trusted and convinces herself that this Julieta ‘se ha gastado todos sus ahorros en subir a ese barco para poder mentir’ (p. 54) [She has spent all her savings to board this ship to tell lies]. All three, as it happens, have come on board to create alternative truths. This process of ‘lying’, the conscious rescripting of the gendered self, has the potential to remake the self productively. As Audre Lorde has taught us, ‘the erotic, a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman’ is a particularly effective tool for self-making (Lorde 1978). And a growing body of scholarship, form a vast number of fields, is beginning to show the multiple ways in which expanding this potential of the erotic might shift the conceptual horizon of Caribbean gender and sexuality and, in so doing, produce greater freedoms. But what La última noche shows is a white couple who, in their attempt to write new selves rely on an archaic grammar and are afflicted with a stagnant (colonized) imagination. The stories they create for themselves and the roles that they craft for the Caribbean Other align more closely with what Lorde might have referred to as the ‘trivial, the psychotic and plasticised sensations’ (Lorde 1978, p. 23). In their narratives, black women and black men only function to produce excess; excess colour, excess sex, excess violence, and excess danger.

Bewilderment, suspicion, and estrangement mark the relationship between Fernando and Celia on a Caribbean cruise that, ostensibly, was supposed to reinvigorate their exhausted marriage. In one of the most pivotal moments of non-recognition that threaten the dissolution of their union during the cruise, Fernando finds Celia in their cabin, dripping wet, trembling with cold and, he reports in shock, she reveals to him her preeminent sexual fantasy, the desire to become a black woman: ‘Cambiarse por una negra, dígame usted, fue lo único que le pude sacar’ (p. 79) [Trading places with a black woman, believe it or not, was all I could get out of her]. Fernando’s thoughts immediately shift from his unrecognizable wife to his onboard mistress Julieta and simultaneously to his own fantasies about black women and black men. He wonders whether Julieta too would also like to become a black woman whom he imagines as: ‘procaz, maquinadora, pervertida; una negra devoradora de ardientes negros insaciables’ (p. 81) [shameless, scheming, corrupt; a black woman who devoured ardent, insatiable black men]. As the ship approaches Charlotte Amalie, the port which inspires the revelation, Celia, for her part, provides her own details of her desire to become a black woman which she reveals to the reader but keeps hidden from Fernando. The houses in Charlotte Amalie she imagines will be inhabited by ‘black men and also black women, ‘negras perezosas, complacidas, encantadas de las magníficas dagas con que las obsequiaban’ (p. 66) [sluggish, contented black women delighted by the magnificent tools their black men offered them].

There is, of course, an extensive literary archive within the Caribbean of black subjects scripting an eroticized desire for whiteness. Caribbean abolitionist novels of the 19th century, negrista poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, négritude narratives, pre-independence and post-independence fiction from the anglophone territories, and 21st-century visual and scribal texts from across the region all struggle to different degrees in negotiating what Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, refers to as a ‘zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region’ (Fanon [1967] 1986, p. 10), the territory of black desire for whiteness. The same literary archive proposes a range of solutions to the intractable crises of being and non-being within history which invariably coalesce in the various iterations of desire for self-erasure such as those expressed by the woman speaker in a famous 1938 poem by Puerto Rican Carmen Colón Pellot (1938), ‘Ay señor mío, yo quiero ser blanca’ [Oh Lord I want to be white]. Cultural and imaginative repatriation to Africa, ‘resolute’ political blackness (Césaire [1972] 2000), black pride aesthetics, social commitment to Caribbean nationhood and the envisioning of a praxis of the human (Sylvia Wynter) are among the solutions to internalized black hatred that Caribbean literature has proposed over the last century. The fetishization of blackness and the production of white pleasure through black humiliation also have long histories in the Americas. Equally ingrained in the cultural history of the Americas has been the opportunistic scripting of the white self as black. And as recent work on ‘neo-passing’ suggests, this discursive strategy also seems to have a buoyant future.10 Celia’s supposed racial longing inspired by her sexual desires admits no space for black women’s erotic freedom. Her imagination deforms black women and their sexuality. Her fantasy implies conquest, not community. Black women in her mind are both scheming and contented, indolent and sexually insatiable, acquiescent and dangerous. She will flirt with the idea of being one while she is on the cruise, and she will forget the abominable secret when she returns to the ‘developed’ north.

The Caribbean cruise is an occasion for the mingling of rich and poor economies, the global north and the global south, continental and insular cultures, leisured and labouring bodies, black and white subjects. But what kind of community is produced by the proximity of these bodies? What new kinds of knowing do the ensuing ‘frictions of intimacy’ (Macharia 2019) facilitate? The novel suggests very little potential for progressive knowledge between the different constituencies. The corporeal and imagined intimacies here all seem to exacerbate colonially endorsed myths, to foster contempt and reproduce technologies of humiliation. Fernando’ is ecstatic about his trip to the Caribbean yet, as soon as he gets there, he reveals his complete disdain for the countries visited. He describes the different territories variously as ‘filthy’, ‘plastic’, ‘infernal pit’, ‘savage slaughterhouse’ and, to culminate, ‘el culo del mundo’ (p. 190) [the asshole of the world]. The only cultural benefit of the trip for Fernando, it would seem, is the confirmation of his imagined superiority over the Caribbean bodies he encounters.

Both Celia and Fernando consume black male bodies as they cruise through the Caribbean. In both cases, what they perceive as the excessive blackness of the respective male bodies, accounts for the sexual ecstasy that they experience. Their physical and ocular pleasure necessitates the consumption of objects as far from whiteness as can be imagined. Mimi Sheller explains this phenomenon in the following terms: ‘Consuming the Caribbean occurs first through its own displacement from the narrative of Western modernity and its recontextualization as an Other to serve Western fantasy” (Sheller 2003, p. 143) And Montero channels this concept through an aesthetics of superfluity and exaggeration. Predictably, the unnamed black man with whom Celia actualizes her tropical erotic fantasy in Guadeloupe has a grossly oversized sexual organ which renders him something other than human. Equally, his undue blackness suggests to Celia a monstrous perversion. As though that were not enough, he is a mix of black and Chinese embodying, for Celia, an inordinately grotesque attraction: ‘No era negro, era más que eso… le vi la piel casi violeta’. Tenía unos ojos achinados y perversos, un negro chino, una fisonomía diabólica … negro y renegro, me recorrió un escalofrío’ (pp. 147–48) [He wasn’t black, he was more than that…his skin looked almost purple. He had slanted, perverse eyes, he was a Chinese black with a diabolical face, black, jet black. A chill ran up my spine.]. Fernando’s description of a black taxi driver who has sex with Julieta while he observes, is almost identical to the one above. He recalls his visual pleasure in the following terms:

‘vi su carne retinta, más que negra, mucho más que eso, casi azul, lo vi por delante… un auténtico instrumento para provocar dolor. Abrí la boca y me salió un hilo de baba, me acaricié a mí mismo, me concentré en la espalda del taxista, me fascinó la dura brega de sus nalgas, dos juegos de músculos perfectos que subían y bajaban’

(p. 168)

[I saw his dark skin, more than black, much darker, almost blue, I saw him from the front…a real instrument for causing pain. I opened my mouth, and a thread of saliva dribbled out, I stroked myself, I concentrated on the driver’s back, fascinated by the hard labour of his buttocks, two sets of perfect muscles that rose and fell].

Ultimately, in La última noche que pasé contigo, the Caribbean becomes the site where the erotic actualizes its most apocalyptic potential. As Krista Thompson reminds us, by the end of the 19th century, the British and North American imaginations were haunted by a fear of the Caribbean as islands infested with tropical diseases.11 British Colonial interests, and local white elites, in addition to British and North American commercial interests therefore had to initiate visual campaigns to refashion the islands as paradise in order to market the region’s fledgling tourist product (Thompson 2006, p. 4). The novel picks up on the continuities in Western myth creations of the Caribbean that link the centuries-old colonial lust for its wealth potential, the subsequent pathologization of the region as infectious, and the neo-colonial refashioning of it to appease, once more, Euro-American tastes for the exotic. The meeting of sex and death, like the rest of the adventures on the cruise is forged in the colonial fantasies that imagine the Caribbean as hell and paradise simultaneously. If the trip is going to be Celia’s last and what she craves the most is black sexuality, then the cruise brings us back to the primordial moment of conquest as desire. The Caribbean cruise, we are told, is the trip Fernando and Celia had dreamed of all their lives. It seems too that the Caribbean is the ultimate destination for the enigmatic Julieta who becomes Fernando’s lover on the ship. Having cruised into paradise and overindulged themselves on the sexually (but mostly racially) forbidden, the tourists learn that pleasure is also extinction, jouissance is also calamity. A lucky passenger, according to Celia, dies as the ship makes its final stop in Guadeloupe. Fernando knows instinctively that having experienced a passion he would never feel again, he also left himself on the island. Julieta does not get back on the ship. She stays on the island where her husband, it is revealed, had also lost his life on an earlier adventure. The fervently desired Marie-Galante is the end of the world.12

Mayra Montero’s exploration of the sexual escapades of Fernando, Celia, and Julieta on their Caribbean cruise is, on the one hand, an endorsement of the erotic as a mode of knowing and creating. On the other hand, the novel also takes the opportunity to satirize prevailing stereotypes of the Caribbean as being more closely aligned to the telluric, the animalistic, and the instinctual than the urban North. The circularity of the cruise, the futility and excess of the tourists’ sexual engagement, and the violence which invariably accompanies it serve as an indictment of the assumed superiority of the global North as evinced, for example, in Fernando’s attitude toward the Caribbean and its peoples. The narrative voice, while indulging all the erotic fantasies of the protagonists, also seems to distance itself from the politics of domination implicit in their excursion through its candid presentation of the tourists’ conspicuous consumption of black Caribbean bodies, their ruthless fetishization of the local (geographical and sexual) terrain, and their libidinous apocalypse.

3. Romance in Marseille: Frottage at Sea and at Port

Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille figures Caribbean bodies and black sexuality not in terms of apocalypse but as agentic sites of potential despite mutilation. The black body as site of labour (physical, intellectual and erotic) is the focus of Romance in Marseille. Gender, sexuality, labour and colonial governmentality are, as Keguro Macharia (Macharia 2019, p. 130) has noted, ongoing interests in McKay’s literary work. In Romance in Marseille, these concerns are filtered through a literary consciousness which is decidedly global and in which black diasporic histories serve as laboratories to diagnose crises fomented by capitalist injustice. Romance in Marseille presents a much wider array of travellers and gives an even more complex view of maritime subjectivities than that which appears in La última noche que pasé contigo. Although it was completed in 1933, Romance in Marseille was only published in 2020.13 While the plot appears relatively simple, it nonetheless presents intricate insights into the way nautical travel and port life in the early 20th century condense race and class oppression. And the novel laments the pernicious deployment of colonial ideologies of gender and sexuality to truncate black futures.

Set in the 1920s, Romance in Marseille, follows the fortunes and misfortunes of Lafala, a young West African sailor for whom Marseille becomes a pivotal point of contact between Africa and the West, between love and loss, youth and maturity, the past and the future.14 Lafala falls in love with Aslima, a young Moroccan woman who works as a prostitute in Marseille. Aslima tricks him into believing that she is in love with him, robs him of all his possessions, and returns to her life with Titin, the pimp who governs her and passes himself off as her boyfriend. The betrayal is too much for Lafala, who decides to leave Marseille, stowing away in the bunker of an ocean liner bound for New York. Unfortunately for him, he is caught and imprisoned in a freezing toilet in the ship. By the time the ship arrives in New York, his legs are destroyed by frost bite, and he is forced to have them amputated. Lafala sues the shipping line successfully, and with the fortune he wins goes back to Marseille, the site of his ‘sufferings and defeat’ now that he had ‘conquered the world’ (p. 28). Concretely, this means that Lafala goes back to Marseille to take revenge on Aslima and re-establish his self-worth and reputation in his milieu. As life would have it, the reconnection with Aslima breeds true love (rather than revenge) and this time it is reciprocal. Lafala decides, now that he is a man of means, to get married to Aslima and take her back to his African homeland. But things do not go as planned. Various forces conspire against the marriage plan between the newly minted man and the sea-side prostitute. Lafala returns to Africa on his own and, on that very afternoon, Aslima is spectacularly murdered by Titin, her pimp/lover.15 The horrors that mark Aslima’s life (sex trafficking, spousal abuse, poverty, homelessness), the tragedy of her death, and the social and moral economies that collude against her require more extensive commentary that goes beyond the scope of this article. They are, however, intricately related to the following observations I make about the argument of the novel and the political work that it does.

Romance in Marseille conducts detailed scrutiny of the havoc that racially determined, global institutional structures wreak on the black male body. The text uses the ocean liner as a fulcrum in a set of circumstances which throw up questions of race and ownership as well as the criminalization of black movement. In proffering the black male body as the discursive site on which these questions are worked out, the novel anticipates important 21st-century developments regarding precarious mobilities, gendered labour, and black queer diaspora aesthetics. It also prefigures current debates which re-animate ideas concerning the ethics and efficacy of reparations in the African diaspora. And finally, it provides an early 20th-century map which might aid us in navigating the complex legal and moral terrain that constitutes the so-called migrant crisis in Europe today. For example, the novel does not call into question whether Lafala has committed a crime by stowing away. It is clear that he has broken the law.16 But the inhumanity with which he is treated once discovered and the language with which his claim for justice is contested crystallise the novel’s contention of the (trans-national) devaluation of black life. If tourists constituted the open, visible, and courted embodiment of Caribbean nautical travel in the 20th century, their contained, invisible, and reviled Other are stowaways. The 20th-century history of Caribbean stowaways to North America and Europe, it seems, was brutal. British colonial reports, according to historian, Tony Kushner, present ‘coloured’ stowaways from the West Indies as highly objectionable and the lowest in a hierarchy of undesirable immigrants (Kushner 2012, p. 187). ‘Beyond the law and doubly outsiders’, stowaways in post-war Britain, who were mainly men from West Africa and the West Indies, Kushner explains, were deemed unsuitable for absorption in the socio-economic life of the country, cast as difficult social problems and viewed through the prism of suspicion and incredulity (p. 192).

Lafala directly articulates the discourse of devalued black masculinity when he thinks about his future as he is told that he might be awarded a thousand dollars if he wins the lawsuit against the shipping company: ‘I wonder, he says, ‘if they could give that much for a pair of black feet on the shelf. I could go back to one of those ports where all the seamen know me and open up a little grogshop’ (p. 9). The question of the black body as capital and the debate over colonial strategies to depreciate the value of black men are further elaborated in the text through a series of tropes that register freedom vs. containment, kinesis vs. stasis, power vs. vulnerability, ability vs. disability. The novel dedicates the first two pages to the erotic celebration of Lafala’s ‘handsome pair of legs’ (p. 30). As Laura Ryan notes, Lafala’s legs are an essential facet of his identity, and so when he loses them, he is ‘effectively removed from the bodily system of value into which he was born’ (Ryan 2021, p. 80). The celebration of black male vitality through the contemplation of Lafala’s legs is a strategy which exacerbates the loss and mourning which are staged when we learn that they have been amputated. Through these structural oppositions then, the novel laments the enforced shift in the discourse of value in Lafala’s life from the power and artistry of his (black) body to the legal and commercial determinations of a (white) capitalist enterprise. More importantly, the novel enacts a pre-emptive disavowal of the symbolic violence of ableism which many argue is indispensable to the construction of the neoliberal subject in the 21st century (Jammaers et al. 2019; Goodley 2014; Fritsch 2015). Lafala’s disability does not liquidate him as an erotic agent. To the contrary, he enjoys several fulfilling sexual liaisons which are enabled and energised specifically by his disability. The novel therefore achieves what Kelly Fritsch says must be done if we are to imagine disability differently. We must begin, she insists, ‘with marginal, heterotopic imaginations whereby disability is not something to overcome but, rather, is part of a life worth living’ (Fritsch 2015, p. 43).

Though he returns to Marseille from New York as a first-class passenger (paid for by the company on whose ship he had made the earlier journey as a stowaway), Lafala’s body and mind are still subjected to unspeakable horrors. The journey is a perverse return to what Éduouard Glissant might have referred to as ‘the unknown’; the same cramped space in which he was inhumanely imprisoned on his outbound journey. But although Lafala’s own nautical triangulations are a poignant recollection of the middle passage, McKay seems less concerned with the nautical past and more with the port as a site of the future. McKay’s Marseille is a rough city which is contemptuous of safety. But it is a port of possibilities. And throughout the novel the men and women often deliberately reject safety for possibility. Aslima actively educates Lafala about this, reminding him that the quayside has its own rules. The universe of the novel is mainly comprised of what the narrator refers to as the ‘flotsam and jetsam of port life’ (p. 77). And he describes Marseille as ‘port of innumerable ships, blowing out, booming in, riding the docks, blessing the town with sweaty activity… Port of the fascinating, forbidding and tumultuous quayside against which the thick scum of life foams and bubbles and breaks in a syrup of passion and desire’ (p. 29). The focus of this effusive, erotic celebration of the port of Marseille is the vast array of African diasporic subjects who people the texts and whose lives it investigates. Seen as ‘scum’ by some, they constitute the essence of a possible anti-colonial future, a challenge to the various racial and cultural hegemonies which, in different ways, are responsible for their presence in Marseille at the beginning of the 20th century.

Marseille in the interwar years was a city that witnessed demographic and social change on a massive scale. The huge loss of life and proliferation of disabilities suffered during the first world war gravely threatened its economic viability. This partly accounts for the new and highly diverse immigrant population which became an indispensable source for the replenishment of labour. By 1926, approximately twenty-five percent of the city’s population were foreigners. As Mary Dewhurst Lewis explains, the thousands of casual labourers upon whom the economy of the city depended in the 1920s and 1930s were not only mainly foreigners but also transient figures. They were ‘stevedores, sailors, migrants for whom Marseille was simply a way station en route to a final destination, (Dewhurst Lewis 2004, p. 81). When he first arrives in France in the early 1920s, Claude McKay becomes an active participant in this transient postwar labour market, surviving on casual work as a docker in the port of Marseille. Partly informed by this experience, Romance in Marseille, like his 1920 novel Banjo, narrates both the economic insecurity and the social perils for which Marseille had become known by the second decade of the 20th century. By 1919, Marseille was associated with ‘transience, criminality and social instability’ (Dewhurst Lewis, p. 88). Nicholas Hewitt’s extensive study of the city’s cultural history reveals that Marseille, by the mid-1920s, had ‘established a reputation as a Southern European point of transit disproportionately notorious as an international centre of vice and corruption’ (Hewitt 2019, p. 94). The increased global traffic of the interwar years and the travel writing associated with it, Hewitt notes, rehearse and compound the mythology’ of Marseille as ‘the wicked city’. And, as historian Minayo Nasiali (2016) has argued, attempts to ‘sanitize’ the city and rehabilitate its image would face insurmountable social and technological challenges. Consequently, the reputation of Marseille as a city of disorderly slums would persist throughout the 20th century.

In Romance in Marseille, North Africans, West Africans, Jamaicans, Martinicans and African Americans, among others, all gather in the Tout-va-Bien, the social hub of the novel, to map and remap the different routes that took them to Marseille. Keguro Macharia activates the term frottage, ‘a relation of proximity, to figure the black diaspora’ (Macharia 2019, p. 4). Frottage, contends Macharia, ‘unsettles the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined and idealized’. The concept ‘captures the aesthetic and the libidinal, and gestures to the creative ways the sexual can be used to imagine and create new worlds’ (p. 4). Most recognizable in popular culture as a non-penetrative gay male sexual practice which achieves jouissance through erotic robbing, frottage as a concept also has pivotal significance in the surrealist art that emerges in Europe during the interwar years. According to Max Ernst, the artist who coined the term in 1926, the materiality of frottage was a conduit to the unconscious. Frottage, for Ernst, was a transcendental practice which transported the individual beyond the despotism of social conventions. And as scholars such as Maya Pindyck (2018) and Adrienne Adams (2024) have shown, frottage constitutes a highly efficacious method of intellectual enquiry and an especially productive praxis for reading black queer cultural production. Romance in Marseille sustains all these ideas in its depictions of global blackness. The text follows black subjects as they love each other, conspire against each other, fight each other, and learn from each other. The frictions out of which the text emerges facilitate the possibility of cultural transcendence and engenders new knowledges in a hostile France of the 1920s.

More than anything else, McKay’s Marseille is a port of queer possibilities. Queer love among some of the men and women of the Quayside unsettles its heteronormativity. The abjected ‘scum, flotsam and jetsam’ become the locus of a queer vitality which intensifies the liberatory potential of the port. In a frank exchange in the Tout-va-Bien, Rock, a young African American man who is something of a drifter in the port, verbalises the challenge to prescriptive gender which many of its patrons embody: ‘Ain’t nothing a woman do you can’t find a man to do. If you haven’t a way, make one they say. Every white, black and brown man at Quayside knows that. And the womens know that too’ (p. 38). Throughout the text, queer desire demands its legibility and visibility. The port city is written as a site where inter-racial, transnational queer love can be sustained and flourish. But the future is still the future, yet to be realised. In the 1920s the prospect of interracial marriage is still a scandal and marriage to women who work as prostitutes still unpalatable. Stephanie Brown argues convincingly that Romance in Marseille depicts the dilemma of black migrants under capitalist surveillance. And I agree with her she suggestion that the protagonist returns to Africa to ‘escape an increasingly global system of surveillance operated in the name of capital’ (Brown 2021, p. 94). But Lafala’s return to his native land is also a response to the surveillance of gender. His return to Africa without Aslima is a return to ‘proper gender’ which leaves the potential for queerness at bay, for now. In this regard, Lafala’s return works more as a question than a resolution; a question which places in doubt both the putatively redemptive ‘Back to Africa’ discourses of the early 20th century and the conventional sexuality which it implies for some.

Reading Montero alongside McKay provides productive opportunities to consider the range of possibilities that have always been encoded in the capitalistic negotiation of racial and sexual intimacies in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. Read together, the novels map the racial/sexual trajectory from fetishization as an egocentric practice of consumption of the Other to frottage as mutually nutritive sexual and intellectual affinity. For Montero’s tourists, black Caribbean bodies are things, un-named dissected appendages to be consumed and expelled at will. McKay, in restoring subjecthood despite disability, articulates a route out of violation and into desire. A humanising project, McKay’s Romance shows the subject-making potential for desire to thrive even when appendages are severed.