Back-to-Africa
The Back-to-Africa is movement espoused by several of the character is representative of differing opinions on the best course of action for black society to deal with white oppression. Over the course of the novel, recurring references to it begin to act as imagery which defines those characters while placing the concept in juxtaposition to opposition focus on assimilation:
“Taloufa maintained that the Back-to-Africa propaganda had worked wonders among the African natives. He told Ray that all throughout West Africa the natives were meeting to discuss their future, and in the ports they were no longer docile, but restive, forming groups, and waiting for the Black Deliverer”
Ray and Racism
Banjo is seemingly resistant to the effects of system racism occupying his every thought and motivation. Not so with Ray. Ray, the intellectual writer, internalizes a preoccupation with racism that Banjo has managed to either escape or is not intellectually keen enough to appreciate. The presence of racism as a constant threat penetrates to the very soul of Ray, however:
“He hated civilization because its general attitude toward the colored man was such as to rob him of his warm human instincts and make him inhuman. Under it the thinking colored man could not function normally like his white brother, responsive and reacting spontaneously to the emotions of pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow, kindness or hardness, charity, anger, and forgiveness. Only within the confines of his own world of color could he be his true self.”
Dark on Dark Racism
The setting of the novel transplants the focus of racism from white on black to dark on dark. It is the shades of difference existing between various nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures which become a greater emphasis. The irony being, of course, that white America would reject all these shades as simply a manifestation of simple blackness:
“The Martiniquans and Guadeloupans, regarding themselves as constituting the dark flower of all Marianne's blacks, make a little aristocracy of themselves. The Madagascans with their cousins from the little dots of islands around their big island and the North African Negroes, whom the pure Arabs despise, fall somewhere between the Martiniquans and the Senegalese, who are the savages. Senegalese is the geographically inaccurate term generally used to designate all the Negroes from the different parts of French West Africa.”
The Banjo
The title of the book refers to the nickname of its main character. And the nickname derives from fact that this main character plays a banjo. But the banjo is more than mere musical instrument. It is packed with symbolic meaning and metaphorical significance. This is true of other characters as well, but it is what defines Banjo:
“The banjo dominates the other instruments…the banjo is preeminently the musical instrument of the American Negro. The sharp, noisy notes of the banjo belong to the American Negro's loud music of life—an affirmation of his hardy existence in the midst of the biggest, the most tumultuous civilization of modern life.”
