Together, these two speeches consolidate the operative historical, cultural, and racial contexts at the heart of Jazz, and also seem to echo the ethical charge set before us by both Morrison in her novel and Jackie Kay in hers. "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives," instructs Morrison's old griot; we think here, perhaps, even of someone like Bernard in The Waves, as he seeks words and phrases and narratives to shore against his ruins. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive," Morrison's blind woman continues, "but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands." Recall here the last two sentences of Jazz, when the narrator calls attention to the book that is in our hands, and implicitly to the necessity that we remember our responsibility to help make the world more humane and more tolerant. "What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it" (208) ponders Violet Trace, and don't we feel the ache of this? Like jazz musicians who wander within and beyond their core material to seek freedom and new possibilities, we, too, must move outside of ourselves, accept difference and uncertainty, promote empathy and tolerance. Like Joss Moody and as promoted in Kay's Trumpet, we must be willing to reject absolute categories and definitions, whether they be racial, sexual, national, etc.
All of this returns me to Obama's speech and that very familiar but yet, in his usage, somehow defamiliarized and exciting appeal to a "more perfect union." Jazz -- and music generally -- no doubt help us find and follow the path to that union, and it makes what we're exploring in this course all the more important. It's interesting to move that phrase "more perfect union" outside of its political and social connotations and think about its connotative value more broadly in terms of our course. If we do, we might begin to realize how often music has been used in our texts to seek more meaningful connections and unions (although we know from the lyrics to Springsteen's "The River" and Cohen's "Hallelujah" that it doesn't always work out): there's the narrator of Woolf's "The String Quartet" realizing a sort of communion forged by the chamber music; there's Keats's speaker seeking that union with the nightingale; there's Gretta Conroy being carried across space and time to meet again with Michael Furey; there's Gretta and Gabriel being moved closer together (we hope) by virtue of the music; there are the six friends of The Waves joining together like six interdependent notes; there are those down-on-their-luck Irish youths finding meaning and self-respect in their commitments to each other in Alan Parker's film; there's the wounded ballet of Joe and Violet Trace as they slowly, through the healing power of music, find their way back to each other; there's Joss and Millie Moody and their faces "with the lines of dreams on them." As we look ahead to our next readings, I guess we'll have yet another example in this regard with Sheffield's tender and sad Love is a Mixtape. Wounded seekers. Music. More perfect unions.
Well, I know I still feel full of ideas, passages, emotions after Jazz and Trumpet, and perhaps a couple of you will feel inclined to deposit a stray thought or two here in this location (I wonder, for example, what your responses are to the lovely, affecting scenes involving Colman and Edith Moore). Do try to check out those speeches, too, when you get a chance, as they will no doubt be richly rewarding.
ReplyDeleteThere is a topic that I wanted to continue from our discussion about Trumpet, as always the class period slipped away without us being able to discuss everything. Of all the characters we discussed from the novel I don’t recall anyone introducing Mohammad Nassar Sharif from the chapter entitled The Registrar (73). What I found particularly intriguing about this character was the parallels between him and Joss. Sharif wields his marble pen with such passion and authority. The experience of signing his own name and then watching somebody else do the same seems an art form, strikingly parallel to Joss and his trumpet. Similar to a jazz composition that would come from the lips and lungs of Joss Moody, Sharif engages in moments of joy, sorrow, relief, passion, anger.
Consider the other officials Kay presents to us in this text. Both Holding and Doctor Krishnamurty were quick(and in the case of Holding excited) to pull out their bright red pen and correct something. A biological woman has improperly identified herself as a man? No problem, I can find comfort in this taboo topic with the use of my red pen. Not Sharif. We see in one passage from this chapter how unsettling the sight of the red pen on a sheet of composition is to him. “ Compared to his beautiful black Indian ink, the red biro was a brash, loudmouthed, insensitive cousin who ought not to have received anything in the family fortune [...] the red biro should never have been born. It was a cheap impostor, an embarrassment to the fine quality paper used on such certificates” (77). Here Kay shows us a man that views the written record as a piece of art. As the notes of the trumpet are to Joss, so the writing on a page is to Mohammad Sharif. By crossing out something written in black and replacing it with impassioned red writing, Sharif feels offended and, in the case of Joss’ death certificate, frustrated.
Along with the parallels between Joss and Sharif in regards to artistry, another is found with the character Millie. When Sharif encounters Millie, he is dumbfounded, taken into a dreamworld where he wants to spend the rest of his life with this woman (who was married to a woman pretending to be a man) not doing anything but merely sitting there, together and enjoying the “artistry” that one another respect. Unlike Holding and the other “authorities”, there is a personal aspect presented in the interaction between Sharif and Millie that is present because of the parallels between the Registrar and the Trumpeter..