I don’t think anybody really needs those dictionary definitions to clarify because one of the attractions of the term is its loose association of energy and sensuality. And freedom. And release. And intricacy. All that. All of it backgrounded by a recognizable music black people originated and shaped. I don’t myself usually think of music first. But of the many images that might surface, one would be a sort of recent history period, the twenties, the period known as the Jazz Age. And attached to that term may be the sound of the music as it affected or backgrounded an era or generation of people whom we associate with that period. “Jazz Age” elicits more detailed imagery—Prohibition, a change in fashion that was alarming and sort of exciting in some places, short hair and skirts in which women could actually walk and work and move. And dance. But it also suggested a kind of recklessness and license and sexuality.
But if you bend the Jazz Age the way I’ve just described it to suit more literary interests, then we make the association with writers who reached their maturity or started out and did something wonderful or had some influence or fame during the twenties and early thirties, and we begin to think of that wonderful poetry and drama and the novels of a whole group of post–World War I American artists: Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein and Pound, and well, you know that list and it’s a familiar one, but familiar too is the whole constellation of things and people, the tone, the music, and the history that the word “jazz” evokes, and all of it is understood to be uniquely American. It’s a uniquely American posture. And it suggests an American modernism that lingered on and on and on until there was something after modernism, and then of course something after that, and then something after that.
It is an American cultural phenomenon, and as such, it’s more than any of the definitions or connotations that I have mentioned. It’s really a concept. And it’s interesting to me as a writer because it’s so full of contradictions. It’s American, indisputably American, and ethnically marginal. It’s black and free. It’s intricate and wild. It’s spontaneous and practiced. It’s exaggerated and simple. It’s constantly invented, always brand-new, but somehow familiar and known. Wherever you go in the world, if you say, “Jazz,” people say, “Oh yes, yes. I remember.” Or “I understand.” Or “I know.” And I don’t know if they’re thinking about Josephine Baker or what, but it’s “Oh yes, yes. Jazz. I know.” It’s immediately understood and all explanations become redundant.
Now these contradictions have been very much on my mind because I was trying to think through some other concepts that had to do with this very, very important transition, I think, and transformation in the history of African Americans and very much a transformation in the history of this country. So my attempt then was to take not the history but the culture of jazz, which is much more ineffable and vaporous, and I wanted to demystify and revalorize the jazz idea. And to do that from a viewpoint that precedes its appropriation—you know, when it becomes anybody’s and everybody’s—and that reculturizes and deculturizes this idea.
It is a part, this view, looking at that period in black life, of a rather sustained investigation I began with Beloved, which was that I’m really looking at self-regard in both racial and gendered terms, and how that self-regard evolves or is distorted or flourishes or collapses, and under what circumstances. In Beloved, I was interested in what contributed most significantly to a slave woman’s self-regard. What was her self-esteem? What value did she place on herself? And I became convinced, and research supported my hunch, my intuition, that it was her identity as a mother, her ability to be and to remain exactly what the institution said she was not, that was important to her. Moving into Reconstruction and beyond it, as difficult as it was to function as a mother with control over the destiny of one’s children, it still became then, certainly, a legal responsibility after slavery. So this is where the sources of self-regard came for Margaret Garner or Sethe. And it is exaggerated because it’s that important and that alien and that strange and that vital. But when Sethe asks, “Me? Me?” at the end of Beloved, it’s a real movement toward a recognition of self-regard.
But the answer to her question seemed to me to come or be available a generation or two later, when the possibility of personal freedom, and interior, imaginative freedom—not political or economic freedom, those were still distant, although there had been some changes—could be engaged. So it seemed to me that while the history, the data of traditional historians, both documented and denied this change in black life and in the culture, the information available to me in the cultural signs suggested there were alterations in the formulations and the sources of self-regard. Music, its lyrics, its performers held the first signs, for me, of this change in the culture. Movement, migration from rural areas to urban ones, held other kinds of information. The literature, the language, the custom, the posture, all of this was what I would look at.
It seemed to me that the twenties, with its sort of nascent and overwhelming jazz idiom, was as distinct as it was because, precisely, of this change. That period, the Jazz Age, was a period when black people placed an indelible hand of agency on the cultural scene. And this agency—unremarked in economic and political terms—informs my project. And all the terms I cited earlier—“defiance,” “violence,” “sensuality,” “freedom,” “intricacy,” “invention,” and “improvisation”—were intimated in the major figuration of that term. Subjective, demanding, deeply personal love relationships. The one place African Americans could command and surrender by choice. Where they did not marry who was chosen for them, or who lived down the road, or who was next door. Where they could effect the widest possible choice—by deciding to fall in love. Claiming another as the beloved. Not because of filial blood relationships or proximity, but precisely because it was ad hoc and accidental and fated but not predictable.
And this assertiveness, this creative agency, seemed to be most clear in the music, the style, the language of this—that post-Reconstruction era that represented both transition and transformation. You know, like life lived in flour sacking or plain, dull cotton gives you a hunger, a desperation for color and patterns and powerful, primary colors, in the same way that hundreds of years of being mated off or ordered whom to marry, of needing permission to join with another, of having to take these extraordinary, drastic measures to keep a family together and to behave like a family, and all of this under the greatest stress, with so little evidence that anything would ever change. You could get slaves to do anything at all, bear anything, if you gave them any hope that they could keep their children. They’d do anything. Every impulse, every gesture, everything they did was to maintain their families.
Well, under those historical pressures, the desire for choice in partners, the desire for romantic love, operate as a place, a space, away, for individual reclamation of the self. That is a part, maybe the largest part, certainly an important part, of the reconstruction of identity. Part of the “me” so tentatively articulated in Beloved. That’s what she needs to discover. It will account for the satisfaction in the blues lyric and the blues phrase whether or not, and mostly not, the relationship flourishes. They’re usually, you know, somebody’s gone and not coming back or some terrible thing has happened and you’ll never see this person again. Whether or not the affection is returned, whether or not the loved one reciprocated the ardor, the lover, the singer, has achieved something, accomplished something in the act of being in love. It’s impossible to hear that sort of blues cry without acknowledging in it the defiance, the grandeur, the agency that frequently belies the wail of disappointed love.
It may be through that agency, and the even more powerful assertiveness of what we call “jazz,” which uses those gestures, that compromise becomes reconciliation. It’s also the way in which imagination fosters real possibilities: you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it. And a third thing grows, where despair may have been, or even where the past lay whole and wouldn’t let go. And it is this third thing that jazz
creates and that creates itself in these spaces and intersections of race and gender that interest me and that informed and propel the writing of this book called Jazz. I want to read just a page or two, which is kind of an illustration of that gesture of choice and love:
It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together, nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore; there is no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.
But there’s another part, not so secret. The part that touches fingers when one passes the cup and saucer to the other. The part that closes her neckline snap while waiting for the trolley; and brushes lint from his blue serge suit when they come out of the movie house into the sunlight.
I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it—to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer—that’s the kick.
But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
Rememory
I suspect my dependency on memory as trustworthy ignition is more anxious than it is for most fiction writers—not because I write (or want to) autobiographically, but because I am keenly aware of the fact that I write in a wholly racialized society that can and does hobble the imagination. Labels about centrality, marginality, minority, gestures of appropriated and appropriating cultures and literary heritages, pressures to take a position—all these surface when I am read or critiqued and when I compose. It is both an intolerable and inevitable condition. I am asked bizarre questions inconceivable if put to other writers: Do you think you will ever write about white people? Isn’t it awful to be called a black writer?
I wanted my imagination as unencumbered as possible and as responsible as possible. I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and “race-free.” All of which presented itself to me as a project full of paradox and contradiction. Western or European writers believe or can choose to believe their work is naturally “race-free” or “race transcendent.” Whether it is or not is another question—the fact is the problem has not worried them. They can take it for granted that it is because Others are “raced”—whites are not. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. The truth, of course, is that we are all “raced.” Wanting that same sovereignty, I had to originate my own fictional projects in a manner I hoped would liberate me, the work, and my ability to do it. I had three choices: to ignore race or try to altogether and write about World War II or domestic strife without referencing race. But that would erase one, although not the only, most impinging fact of my existence and my intelligence. Two, I could become a cool “objective” observer writing about race conflict and/or harmony. There, however, I would be forced to surrender the center of the stage to received ideas of centrality and the subject would always and forever be race. Or, three, I could strike out for new territory: to find a way to free my imagination of the impositions and limitations of race and explore the consequences of its centrality in the world and in the lives of the people I was hungry to write about.
First was my effort to substitute and rely on memory rather than history because I knew I could not, should not, trust recorded history to give me the insight into the cultural specificity I wanted. Second, I determined to diminish, exclude, even freeze any (overt) debt to Western literary history. Neither effort has been entirely successful, nor should I be congratulated if it had been. Yet it seemed to me extremely important to try. You will understand how reckless it would have been for me to rely on Conrad or Twain or Melville or Stowe or Whitman or Henry James or James Fenimore Cooper, or Saul Bellow for that matter, or Flannery O’Connor or Ernest Hemingway for insights into my own culture. It would have been equally dim-witted, as well as devastating, for me to rely on Kenneth Stampp or Lewis Mumford, or Herbert Gutman, or Eugene Genovese or Moynihan, or Emerson, or Jefferson or any of those sages in the history of the United States for research that would enlighten me on these matters. There was and is another source that I have at my disposal, however: my own literary heritage of slave narratives.
For imaginative entrance into that territory I urged memory to metamorphose itself into the kind of metaphorical and imagistic associations I described at the beginning of this talk with Hannah Peace.
But writing is not simply recollecting or reminiscing or even epiphany. It is doing; creating a narrative infused (in my case) with legitimate and authentic characteristics of the culture.
Mindful of and rebellious toward the cultural and racial expectations and impositions my fiction would encourage, it was important for me not to reveal, that is, reinforce, already established reality (literary or historical) that the reader and I agree upon beforehand. I could not, without engaging in another kind of cultural totalizing process, assume or exercise that kind of authority.
It was in Beloved, however, that all of these matters coalesced for me in new and major ways. History versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative. The effort to both remember and not know became the structure of the text. Nobody in the book can bear too long to dwell on the past; nobody can avoid it. There is no reliable literary or journalistic or scholarly history available to them, to help them, because they are living in a society and a system in which the conquerors write the narrative of their lives. They are spoken of and written about—objects of history, not subjects within it. Therefore not only is the major preoccupation of the central characters that of reconstituting and recollecting a usable past (Sethe to know what happened to her and to not know in order to justify her violent action; Paul D to stand still and remember what has helped to construct his self; Denver to demystify her own birth and enter the contemporary world that she is reluctant to engage) but also the narrative strategy the plot formation turns on the stress of remembering, its inevitability, the chances for liberation that lie within the process.
[Read]
The final pages in which memory is insistent yet becomes the mutation of fact into fiction then folklore and then into nothing.
The novel I worked on following the completion of Beloved presented a different set of circumstances in this regard. Some of the circumstances surrounding the writing of Song of Solomon included access I believed the contemplation of m
y father made available to me. This project is dependent on the grabbing hold of another parent—my mother. It takes place in 1926, which is the time of my mother’s girlhood. That is, her memory of that time as told to me is both a veil secreting certain parts and a rend her narrative tore into it. I believe this short section is to me the essence of memory turned to nostalgia and regret and moving forward finally toward a very thin, but not so frail, possibility of hope for the present.
Memory, Creation, and Fiction
It is not enough for a work of art to have ordered planes and lines. If a stone is tossed at a group of children, they hasten to scatter. A regrouping, an action, has been accomplished. This is composition. This regrouping, presented by means of color, lines, and planes is an artistic and painterly motif.
—EDVARD MUNCH
I like that quotation, as I do many of the remarks painters make about their work, because it clarifies for me an aspect of creation that engages me as a writer. It suggests how that interior part of the growth of a writer (the part that is both separate and indistinguishable from craft) is connected not only to some purely local and localized sets of stimuli but also to memory: the painter can copy or reinterpret the stone—its lines, planes, or curves—but the stone that causes something to happen among children he must remember, because it is done and gone. As he sits before his sketchbook he remembers how the scene looked, but most importantly he remembers the specific milieu that accompanies the scene.
Along with the stone and the scattered children is an entire galaxy of feeling and impression—the motion and content of which may seem arbitrary, even incoherent, at first.
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