French musician Lamine Diagne opened the 2023 Marseille Jazz festival with a show entitled Kay! Letters to a lost poet. “If we must die, let us nobly die,” Diagne recited to the strumming of a double bass and an electric guitar, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack. Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”[i] As Diagne recited a French translation of Claude McKay’s most famous poem, “If We Must Die,” images of George Floyd, Malcolm X, and Tommie Smith raising his fist in the Black Power salute flashed behind the musicians. With these words Diagne also launched “McKay: 100 years Later,” a series of events, shows, and publications organized by French politician Christiane Taubira to commemorate the 100 years since McKay first travelled to France.
Figure 1 Poster for the 2023 show “Kay! Lettres à un poète disparu” by Lamine Diagne and Matthieu Verdeil.Marseille, France’s second largest city, has rediscovered the Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay in recent years.[ii] Two of the writer’s novels take place there, Banjo (1929) and Romance in Marseille (published posthumously in 2020). Both books chronicle the lost world of La Fosse, a port-side neighborhood that was destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. “It is surprising that it is a black man from a small Caribbean Island who wrote the most beautiful novel about the cultural richness of Marseille,” noted journalist Hélène Lee at the launching of “McKay a 100 years later.”[iii] In an interview in July 2023, another Marseille-based journalist called McKay a visionary “punk.”[iv] The municipal government renamed a small alley in the city’s Vieux Port “Passage Claude McKay” in 2015. In 2021, a small publication house in Marseille, Héliotropismes published a French translation of Romance in Marseille. In 2022, Héliotropismes also published a French translation of McKay’s autobiography, A Long Way from Home. Un sacré bout de chemin sports a rust-colored cover showing a well-dressed Black man, presumably McKay, walking from New York City’s iconic Flatiron building across a black expanse of ocean to the arching gates of a Moroccan mosque. “This powerful and complex book,” wrote the French editors in their introduction, which “surprises by its modernity [for McKay is never] duped by the ordinary racism of [the] left-wing white European elite, or by the elitism of the black intelligentsia of the Harlem Renaissance.”[v]
Figure 2 Cover of the 2022 French translation of McKay’s autobiography, A Long Way from Home.Considering his itinerant lifestyle, it is surprising that McKay has left us with any archival material at all. The poet’s papers, housed in the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library comprise 12 linear feet of correspondence, photos, and unpublished book manuscripts, several of which were published in the past few years.[vi] When Romance in Marseille came out in 2020 it was an immediate hit in the literary world. Vulture literary critic, Molly Young, included it in her list of Best Books of 2020, explaining: “It’s about bodies, disability, sex, Islam, slavery, and capital. There are lesbians. There is gender-bending. There is socialism. All of this in 130-pages—custom-designed, it would seem, for the modern obliteration attention span!”[vii] Talya Zax, of the New York Times, claimed that the book “was so far ahead of its time, it took 87 years to find a publisher.”[viii] Modern readers of Claude McKay are fascinated by his exploration of sex, race, and disability in Marseille. But what fascinated McKay most about what he dubbed “Europe’s best back door,” was the fact that it opened up onto Africa and “the Orient.”[ix] Indeed, though les Marseillais are happy to claim McKay as one of their own, what McKay loved about Marseille was its African-ness. When the writer moved to Marseille in 1924, the city was the closest he had ever come to Africa.
Those who write about McKay often take his interest in Africa and in the Black Atlantic as a given, mentioning his travels on the African and European continents in passing, as a way to demonstrate how visiting Paris, London, and Casablanca opened McKay’s eyes to the shared history and common suffering of Africans and members of the African diaspora.[x] McKay was certainly not the first of his Black American contemporaries to visit Paris. W.E.B Dubois, Langston Hugues, Alain Locke, and Countee Cullen all spent significant amounts of time in the French capital, cementing the reputation of the city as a center of Black internationalism. For Black Americans, France represented liberté and égalité, if not quite fraternité.[xi] McKay was one of the first to use Paris as a gateway to the African continent.[xii] Unlike Cullen or Hughes, McKay was not enthralled by Paris, where he found some of the same megalomania and elitism he had observed amongst his fellow artists in New York. And so, in search of a place where he could feel more at home, McKay turned to the African continent.
Morocco was the only country that McKay visited in Africa. He wrote to his friend and editor Max Eastman that he would travel to Morocco to “go native.”[1] McKay’s first trip to Morocco lasted a few months between 1928 and 1929. He toured Casablanca, Marrakesh, Tetouan, and Tangier, before returning to France. In 1930, McKay decided to return to Morocco and settle in the outskirts of Tangier. He lived near Tangier from 1930 to 1934. Those years were his most productive; he wrote Romance in Marseille, Gingertown (1932), and Banana Bottom (1933), his last novel published during his lifetime.[xiii] Through his writing, which circulated widely in the Black American community, McKay inspired an entire generation of Black Americans to look towards North Africa. Later, in the 1960s, more Black Americans followed in McKay’s footsteps, bypassing Paris and settling in Tangier, Algiers, and Tunis. Black American beat poet, Ted Joans, spent months in Tangier, reading poems at the Librairie des Collones and playing trumpet at Fat Black Pussycat café.[xiv] Black American musician Randy Weston settled in Morocco in 1967 to run his African Rhythms Club in Tangiers.
Though contemporary readers may be surprised by the modernity of McKay’s Marseille novels—with their queer, non-binary and socialist characters—a reading of the writer’s work on Morocco shows a man very much a product of his time—one fascinated by the Orient and its supposed lasciouviousness. One of the recurring characters in McKay’s works, including Romance in Marseille and Banjo, is the “Oriental” woman or “Fatma”— a feminine trope of ambiguous origins who seduces and deceives Black men. Banjo’s only female character, Latnah, is an “oriental” woman who speaks “Arabese.”[xv] In Romance in Marseille, the main character Lafala fled Marseille after Moroccan prostitute Aslima stole all his money. The “Fatma” is at the center of most of McKay’s writings on Morocco, published and un-published. At times servant, prostitute, thief or dancer, she infiltrates McKay’s writing, replacing the Black prostitutes, sole female characters, that McKay included in his earlier work. “The Arab girl is growing bigger than I ever dreamed,” McKay wrote to his friend Bradley while working on Romance in Marseille; “[she is] running away with the book and me.”[xvi] The letters McKay wrote his friends from Morocco in the early 1930s are full of anecdotes about “fatmas”—Moroccan women who clean, cook, swim, and party with McKay—never do they have names, their role is purely domestic and sexual. In fact, the possibility of hiring these Moroccan women for their services seems to be one of the central reasons McKay chose to travel to Morocco in the first place. McKay’s writings about Morocco reveal a man who did not shy away from racist language or predatory behavior, much like his French and American contemporaries, and ours.
A SERIES OF DETOURS ON THE ROAD TO MORROCCO
Claude McKay was born in a farming family in southern Jamaica in 1889-90. At twenty-two he left his home to study agronomy at the Tuskegee institute. What McKay found when he disembarked in Charleston, South Carolina, was a horrifying system of racial segregation. Disappointed by the regimentation of his student life, or what he called the “semi-military, machinelike existence” at Tuskegee, and determined to leave the Southern US, McKay moved first to Kansas, where he pursued and then abandoned a degree in agronomy, and then to New York, before taking a job on the Pennsylvania railroad.[xvii] He became, in his words, “a vagabond—but a vagabond with a purpose.”[xviii] He wandered to write. In his first years of vagabonding across the US, McKay had no desire to return to Jamaica, because he believed that in the US he could “achieve something new, something in the spirit and accent of America.”[xix] McKay was enamored with the US he discovered in New York and Pennsylvania, “awed by its brutal bigness,” fascinated by “its titanic strength.”[xx] While he suffered from racism, he found solace in the idea of joining this “bigness,” this new country he discovered through its miles of steel tracks. In 1919, after publishing “If We Must Die” in The Liberator, and after the horror of the Red Summer, McKay desperately needed a respite from the racial pressure-cooker of the US. He accepted an invitation from two of his admirers, “the Grays,” and accompanied them on a free vacation to London.[xxi]
Throughout his travels in Europe, McKay offered a shrewd commentary on class and race relations. In London, McKay wrote in his autobiography, “prejudice against Negroes had become congenital” amongst the British. Needless to say, he did not like Britain or the British, whom he found to be “a strangely unsympathetic people, as coldly chilling as their English fog.”[xxii] His analysis of race in Britain was no doubt informed by his childhood in the British colony of Jamaica. After London, instead of returning to the US, McKay travelled to Russia, where he hoped to find proof that communism was the only way forward for Black Americans in their quest for justice. McKay spent almost a year in Russia, from September 1922 to May 1923. McKay reveled in the warmth of the Russian people. Locals saw him as “an omen of good luck,” even a “black ikon [sic],” he wrote, and “carried [him] along on a crest of sweet excitement.”[xxiii] McKay’s feelings about communism, however, were mixed. He was fired up by “the thundering mass movement of the people, their boisterous surging forward, with their heads held high, their arms outstretched in an eager quest for more light, more air, more space, more glory, more nourishment and for comfort for the millions of the masses.”[xxiv] The bureaucracy and discipline of the communist system, however, bored him. He was born a poet and could not find a place in the ranks of a Communist Party he saw as too stiff.[xxv]
From Russia, McKay made his way to Paris, where he enjoyed the mix of “radicals, esthetes, painters and writers, pseudo-artists, bohemian tourists,” all blending in relative congeniality, particularly pleasant after the “high pressure propaganda spirit of the new Russia.”[xxvi] But unlike many of the white expatriates, and later generations of Black artists and intellectuals, McKay was not particularly enamored with the cafes of Montparnasse and the cabarets of Montmartre. He liked the cosmopolitan nature of the city but disliked the niceties of the expatriate circles, often rich and white. He refused to hang out at Gertrude Stein’s house despite frequent invitations because of his “aversion to cults and disciples.” He liked meeting people as persons, he claimed, “not as divinities in temples.”[xxvii] Eager to leave the cold dampness of Paris winters, McKay abandoned the city for Marseille. Overall, Europe had left McKay feeling lonely and out of place and yearning for his native Jamaica. When McKay finally got to Marseille, he was overcome with the relief of living once more “among a great gang of black and brown humanity.”[xxviii] In Marseille, at last, after the communist pageantry of Russia and the society life of Paris, McKay felt once more the assurance of belonging to a group.
It was while he was in Marseille that McKay first thought of visiting Morocco. Africa had a quasi-mythological appeal for McKay, as was the case for many members of the African Diaspora in the Americas. In the Senegalese bar he frequently visited in Marseille, McKay started asking around about where to visit in this mystical continent. It was a sailor from Martinique, who had allegedly visited every large port in Africa, that recommended Morocco. McKay’s first question was, “What are the harems like?”[xxix] Clearly, McKay had some a preconceptions about Morocco and about the sexual availability of Moroccan women in particular. There were other reasons McKay was considering Morocco, but they palled at the prospect of a good harem. Indeed, McKay was also having trouble writing Romance in Marseille, which his editors disliked. They had suggested drastic changes. Fleeing his editors and their thirst for their commission, McKay decided to travel to Morocco to do some research about this North African Black woman character, Aslima.[xxx]
CLAUDE MCKAY SETTLES IN MOROCCO WITH HIS STAFF OF “FATMAS”
McKay crossed from Spain into Tangiers in early September 1928, before proceeding to Casablanca. On this first foray into Morocco, which lasted about seven months, and on his second longer sojourn in the country from 1930 to 1934, McKay was fascinated by the country’s relationship to blackness. In his journals, letters, and poems, he wrote extensively of questions of race in North Africa, working hard to dispel European beliefs that Morocco was not part of Black Africa. Apparently, on the boat over to Morocco, some Europeans had attempted to correct McKay’s understanding of Morocco as part of the Black continent; to the French, Morocco was l’Afrique Blanche. “Themselves divided into jealous cutthroat groups,” explained McKay, the “Europeans have used their science to make fine distinctions among people.” To them, concluded McKay, who is to know who was Black and who was white. To McKay, it was clear that most Moroccans were Black. “I found more than three-quarters of Marrakesh Negroid,” he wrote in his autobiography.”[xxxi]
On his first day in the port city of Casablanca, McKay happened onto a group of Gnawa musicians, or as he called them “Guinean sorcerers,” preforming what he interpreted as a form of exorcism. McKay was fascinated, as he watched them dance “a kind of primitive rhumba, beat their heads against posts, and throw off their clothing in their excitement.” He was reminded of “certain peasants of Jamaica who give themselves up to the celebrating of a religious sing-dance orgy.”[xxxii] Despite McKay’s enthusiasm for the Gnawa musicians, his language is mired in racial stereotypes; he revels in what he perceives as their primitivism and their desire for nudity, after months in what he considered to be a buttoned-up French high society.
After enjoying the hospitality of various friends in Casablanca and Rabat, McKay travelled to Fez. In Fez, McKay felt he was coming alive. In A Long Way from Home, he wrote:
I felt that I was walking all the time on a magic carpet. The maze of souks and bazaars with unfamiliar patterns of wares was like an oriental fantasy. In Fez I got into the inside of Morocco. Hitherto I had been merely a spectator. But the Fassis literally took me in. There I had my first native meal of cous-cous in a native house, and the first invitation was the prelude to many. […] Excited and intoxicated and fascinated by the Fassis and their winning and welcome ways, I went completely native. I was initiated into the practice of living native and cheaply.[xxxiii]
Throughout his autobiography, letters, and other texts McKay’s descriptions of Morocco are replete with orientalist imagery: magic carpets, souks, and bazaars.
In Fez and the neighboring town of Moulay Abdallah, McKay bargained in the souks, in French and in his rudimentary Darija [Moroccan Arabic], roamed the marketplaces, and reveled in Moroccan musicians “playing African variations of the oriental melodies.”[xxxiv] For the first time in his life, McKay described feeling “singularly free of color-consciousness.” He compared it to the feeling of “physical well-being a dumb animal [must feel] among kindred spirit, who lives instinctively and by sensations only, without thinking.”[xxxv]
McKay wrote to a number of his friends of the pleasures of Morocco. Throughout his time in Morocco, he kept a regular correspondence with white American political activist and communist sympathizer, Max Eastman. Eastman and his sister, Crystal Eastman, had co-founded the communist magazine The Liberator, where McKay had published “If We Must Die.” “I feel like I’m settling here for good,” McKay proudly wrote Eastman from Tangier in December 1930, “I am a good Moslem now, waring tarbosh and burnous sometimes. I have a little house (exactly like yours at Antibes) for 100 Francs a month out of the town in an Arab village, but I want to change to a place up in the hills. Living is cheap, you get the best meat for 8-10 Francs a kilo, which is a little more than two pounds.” No place in the world had satisfied McKay since he left his native Jamaica, as much as Morocco. He often compared Moroccans to Jamaicans, claiming that there were many resemblances in their customs and superstitions.[xxxvi]
According to many of McKay’s friends, Eastman included, McKay was at his happiest during those early months in Morocco. He settled into life in the country, donned traditional dress—a tarbosh or fez, and the burnous or long cloak. He was well on his way to “going native,” as he claimed. He threw parties, at which he invited American expats, Moroccan musicians, and dancers, and served food as well as plenty of good hashish.[xxxvii] American writer Paul Bowles and American literary agent John Trounstine visited McKay at his house in 1932. “We all went out to see McKay,” remembered Bowles, “he was plump and jolly, with a red fez on his head, and he was living exactly like a Moroccan. At one point with a clap of his hands he summoned his Moroccan dancing girl, not yet twelve, and had her perform for us.”[xxxviii] A few weeks later, Bowles and McKay got into a fight—the details of which are unclear. To patch things over, McKay visited Bowles in his supposedly bed-bug infested hotel. Again, Bowles noticed, McKay was wearing a fez.[xxxix]
What delighted McKay the most in Morocco was the inexpensive cost of living. It was in Morocco, at the age of 38, that he was finally able to rent his own house for the first time.[xl] This allowed him to live in relative luxury and to hire servants. McKay employed a boy to run his errands and a girl to cook for him. “I have a nice little Fatma taking care of me,” he confided in a July 1931 letter to Eastman, “She is dumb and can’t pretend to be intellectual and that is best.”[xli]
The term “Fatma” comes up regularly in McKay’s writings about Morocco. In French colonial society, colonists, particularly those of modest means, used the name “Fatma” to designate all women who worked as domestic servants.[xlii] My own maternal grandparents, who lived in Agadir, Morocco, as French settlers, from 1950 to 1957, had someone they called a “Fatma” to clean and cook. My grandparents were of modest means, both of Polish origin, and, like McKay, Morocco’s cheaper cost of living afforded them certain luxuries, including hiring personnel. Colonists used the word amongst themselves, both because, in a mix of disorientation and condescension they could not remember or refused to learn the correct pronunciation of their employees’ names, and because the “Fatma” came to represent a trope in the colonial imagination—that of a servile, quiet, native woman. The term eventually morphed to designate all Arab women of lower classes and in situation of servitude vis a vis the French colonialists, be it as maids, as dancers, or as prostitutes. French colonial cartoons, like those by French artist Charles Brouty, portray the Fatma as clumsy and stubborn and as a petty thief (Figure 3).[xliii] One 2019 interpretation of a early 20th century pied-noir song by French singer Marc Sinté entitled “Mohammed Couscous” begins: “We called him Mohammed Couscous, he was the nicest of them all, as soon as he saw his Fatima he would sing her these words: ‘yata-alla Fatma come, come roll around in the couscous… come turn around the pot…’”[xliv] To French colonizers in the Maghreb, Mohammed and Fatima were the indistinguishable Muslim couple, with well-defined gendered roles and lascivious tendencies. The term was so insulting and ubiquitous that in 1956 Moroccan cleaning ladies demanded to be called Les Bonnes instead of Les Fatmas.[xlv]
Figure 3 Charles Brouty’s caricatures of “La Fatma,” L’Afrique du Nord, December 5th, 1931.Scholars have not paid attention to McKay’s use of this loaded colonial term. In his notes to McKay’s poem “A Farewell to Morocco,” scholar William J. Maxwell interprets the term as one that McKay himself would have created for women dancers, in homage to the Prophet Muhammed’s daughter, Fatima—a term that McKay would have meant as endearing. [xlvi] But far from showing reverence, McKay’s account of his domestic servant stays within the colonial (racial and gender) power dynamics. To McKay, as to many French colonists in Morocco, this “Fatma” was good enough to wash his dishes, or to dance for him and his friends, but not much more; she certainly was not an intellectual match to McKay himself.
The “Fathma,” in a somewhat different transliteration, reappears in McKay’s poem “A Farewell to Morocco,” printed in his autobiography. Here the “Fatma” is no longer merely the domestic servant, but also the dancer or the prostitute. The poem evokes the end of Ramadan and the feast at the breaking of the fast, with music, honey, and “fathmas shaking their flamenco feet.” With these lines McKay fully surrendered to European colonial objectifications of Morocco, linking Morocco to El-Andalus.[xlvii] While McKay claimed, to his friends and editors, that in Morocco he had “gone native” in reality he had all but “gone colonial,” treating Moroccan women like servants and sex objects.
McKay’s archives contain other, unpublished, traces of Morocco, all of which point to McKay’s fascination with questions of gender and race in North Africa. In 1933, McKay attempted without success to secure a Guggenheim fellowship. In his application he proposed a novel about racial relations in Morocco, one that would require him to travel across the country to “compare data and gather fresh material.” “The main motif will be the Negro element,” he explained, “as an integral part of Moorish society.”[xlviii] McKay’s archives contain two short, impressionistic essays, that he may have wanted to include in this novel, “Lalla Shellah” and “Miss Allah.” Though the purported intent of these essays was to write about the circulation of ideas of race in Morocco, both pieces linger on intimate and furtive gatherings between young Moroccan men and “fatmas.” Reflecting on the celebration of Lalla Shellah, the European wife of the Black Sultan of Morocco Abu Al-Hassan, McKay wrote of sex between young Moroccan men and “fatmas.” According to McKay, if, when the candles were burning low, and one heard the “fatmas’ shrill yo-yo! yo-yo!” it meant that “down in a shadowy place a young gallant [was] worming along on his belly through the grass to the spot where a Fatma lies awaiting him.”[xlix] McKay was fascinated by such moments when, in a society that he saw as sexually conservative, young men could satisfy illicit pleasures.
A significant portion of McKay’s piece “Miss Allah” is dedicated to describing a party organized by two young Moroccan men. A “woman-and-wine party,” as McKay called it. The two young men invited two unnamed "fatmas” to dance, pour wine, and clean up after the party. “Moorish parties,” explained McKay, “may appear dull on the surface” to an outsider from the Western World, “but the underlying motif of intensity and ultimate desire are dominantly evident and the interplay of simplicity and formal ceremonial is in itself exciting.”[l]
McKay wrote extensively about interracial sex between men and women. He was fascinated by the appeal he believed Black women had for white men. He was delighted when, for a short time, he managed to draw his Black American friend, Carmina, away from her little “mouse of a white man,” to live with him in Morocco.[li] Again and again in his travels he met Black women traveling with white men, and was slightly nauseated by these relationships, which to him seemed like “white lice crawling on black bodies.”[lii] His provocative and at times celebratory relationship to sex complicated his stay in Morocco. On the one hand, he believed that Moroccans were right to hide their women away from European men in their harems. To some extent, he explained, it was precisely this “native fanaticism in sex and religion which [made] North Africa a little more wholesome than the rest of that fatal continent.”[liii] On the other hand, he explained in a letter to Eastman, that he felt sorry for “the women wrapped up in yards and yards of cotton and flannel.” Apparently, he had brought a few of the “girls of the street” to the beach where they had been swimming in bathing suits, when they were arrested and imprisoned by the Muslim authorities.[liv] McKay does not tell Eastman what happened to the women, nor whether he helped in any way. “The Moors are some of the most sensual and sex-crazy people I know with very reactionary and fixed ideas of outward form,” McKay concluded in a letter to Eastman.[lv] Again, McKay understood why Moroccan men would keep their women hidden away—after all he also did not like seeing white men hanging on the arm of Brown or Black women—but McKay did not like these conventions interfering with his own sea-side merriments or sexual escapades.
Early on in his time in Morocco, while visiting the city of Fez, McKay had had the opportunity to see first-hand the black-market economy for sexual and domestic slaves. He visited an old medieval house with a beautiful courtyard where, McKay wrote to his literary agent William Bradley, “young girls—blacks and Arabs are sold—secretly.” This discovery didn’t seem to upset McKay, who reassured Bradley not to worry: this was not “the white-slavery traffic, nor the old time Negro slavery. It is rather a way of getting a domestic servant or a slave wife.”[lvi] Perhaps McKay’s complacency stemmed from his reading of this situation as merely one more example of North African men’s control over women. Like many white Europeans before him, McKay saw slavery in North Africa, and particularly women’s enslavement, as a relatively benign institution, one that fit neatly into his assumptions about North African gender roles. In fact, according to Paul Bowles, McKay was living in Morocco “like a Maharajah. It was incredible. He had a house full of slaves and he just clapped his hands and in they came. It was marvelous. Dancing girls.”[lvii]
McKay’s relationships to the women of Morocco, or the “fatmas” he frequently mentions in his texts, are unclear. American actress Anita Thompson Dickinson Reynolds, who stayed with McKay in Morocco, claimed that McKay was living in Morocco not out of desire to make a home on the African continent, but rather out of an interest in Arab boys.[lviii] Arab “youths,” as he calls them, also appear frequently in McKay’s tales of Morocco, often accompanying the “fatmas” on whatever merriments McKay was organizing. Many of the American friends who visited McKay, Bowles included, had moved to Morocco in part because of the country’s reputation as a relative haven for men who enjoyed sex with men, and as a place where, if you were rich, you could buy sex with a variety of people.[lix] The appeal of Tangier and its surrounding areas, to many American men, was threefold. First, Morocco was cheap and thus a good place to pursue commercial, academic, artistic or even missionary goals. Second, sex between men was less policed in Morocco than in the US, in fact American nationals enjoyed complete diplomatic immunity in Tangier, an appealing prospect for young transgressers of all sorts. Third, the appeal of the “young Berber” or “young Moor,” eroticized by Orientalist literature, drew many an American man to North African shores.
While some of his friends hinted at his homosexual desires, McKay rarely wrote of his attraction to men. But during the three years he lived in Morocco, he spent much of his time in Tangier and the surrounding areas, where he threw parties for young “natives,” as he called them, buying alcohol and hashish, and watching them dance. These young Moroccans seemed to take advantage of McKay’s ability to buy alcohol and perhaps also of his relatively open-minded attitude toward sex. They came to play music and party, bringing with them fatmas to dance and cook. “I have a few Arabs who come in sometimes and sing and play music,” wrote McKay to Eastman in July 1931, “I give them a little drink, but I never touch the stuff myself-except for a little beer once in a while.”[lx] Hard to tell whether McKay’s relationship to these “young Moors” and “fatmas” was sexual or that of a doting voyeur looking for titillating company among “the magical and barbaric people” of Morocco.[lxi]
In McKay’s texts the “fatmas” rarely have names, personalities, or memorable characteristics other than their seductiveness. But McKay never seems completely seduced. Perhaps it is because, as his friend Anita Thompson Dickson Reynolds hinted, he preferred the young Moroccan men he met to the “fatmas.” Still, these unnamed Moroccan women serve as setting for McKay’s stories, ways to give his writing an authentic North African flavor—a place where despite his best efforts he was perhaps not able to go completely “native.” After all, in Morocco, as an educated American, McKay could become a member of the elite. He used his ability to circulate freely, to buy alcohol, and the relative wealth living in Morocco afforded him, to establish himself as a member of the colonizing class, with the staff of “Fatmas” that that position guaranteed. To many modern readers McKay seems ahead of his times. McKay’s inclusion of lesbian and cross-dressing characters in his descriptions of the boisterous and multiracial 1920s Marseille seduces modern readers, including myself, eager to find traces of our queer pasts. But, in ways that may be invisible to many of his contemporary American readership, McKay also belonged to the racist French colonial world, as a colonisateur not a colonisé.