A) What are the implications of McKay's use of dialect? How does it influence the plot? How does it affect the reader?
B) How do the detailed descriptions of music and dance found repeatedly throughout the novel shed light on the characters therein?
C) How are women depicted in Banjo? What do the characters of Banjo and Latnah suggest about women?
The music and the dance speak volumes as to the power and the frenetic energy of not only the musicians who are playing, primarilly Banjo, but also of the cultures from which they are playing from. They are joined together by their love for music and dance. Depsite their diverse backgrounds, there is something universal to the rhythms and melodies that cause them all "to shake, shake, shake......" On some levels i feel it all has to do with their common African background and then there are levels where i feel it is all about just being human. Not for nothing, I can actually see Jack Kerouac shaking right along Banjo and and his friends. All of them screaming out their souls to the world!
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I think the music and dance is their universal language. I think it is their way of celebrating and relishing in the joy they find amongst themselves without any pretenses. I think the dialect also connects them. The term nigger is used freely not to self-denigrate or glorify the word but to say we are cut from the same painful cloth of racism and colonialism. As I was reading the text I did not think of them as uneducated but people who learned to speak a foreign language to the best of their ability.
ReplyDeleteSimilar to what Joan has mentioned, I think that if the dialect was different or written in standard English then it would take away from the novel as well as the experience for the characters and the readers. McKay's purpose for writing the way he does, I believe, is to fully draw his audience into another world. It is so that the reader can truly get a feel for what it is like to be in these mens (and one womans) shoes. As a reader, it took me a couple readings of certain sentences to grasp what was being said but I think that this is where the beauty of the text also lies. The reader does not only get to picture the world that Banjo lives in but he gets to hear and see how these men on the waterfront express themselves.
ReplyDeleteLatnah, in my opinion, serves the role a mother figure. All the men are struggling with their identities and lives. Latnah balances them all out. She is oftentimes there when they need money, food, entertainment, etc. Furthermore, she provides advices to them and nurtures their needs (even sexually, which is not mother-like, but Oedipal complex would be a useful way of explain this attachment). As for other female figures, we do get a lot of women who are not in control of their sexual desires like Latnah. These women are usually causing a disruption among the men. Their actions are less lady-like. The interesting part is that most of them (if I'm not mistaken) are French or of another culture. Strong commentary.
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