Scoring Race: Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa (African Articulations, 3) 1847011551, 9781847011558

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Scoring Race: Music, Writing, and Difference in a French Context
Armstrong Plays Kinshasa
The Philosophical Genealogy of the Racial Score
Music, Language, and Scientific Racism
France, Jazz, and the Racial Score
1 Jazz Fictions and the French Novel: Four Cases
Believing the Score: Soupault’s Le Nègre
Jean-Paul Sartre and Existential Blackness
Boris Vian and the Inescapable Score
Abject Whiteness: Jazz Fiction Today
2 Querying Jazz: Early Francophone African Engagements with the
Racial Score
Jazz Nightmares: Mirages de Paris
Absolute Music: Emmanuel Dongala’s ‘Jazz et vin de palme’ and
‘A Love Supreme’
Trop de soleil tue l’amour: Jazz and the End of Time
3 Challenging the Score: Francophone African Reconfigurations of
Jazz Today
Kangni Alem: Mirages d’Afrique
Coltrane’s in the (Whore-)House: Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83
and the Rewriting of Emmanuel Dongala
Vultures at the Crossroads: Abdourahman Waberi’s
La Divine Chanson
Jazz Ain’t Nothing But a Sandwich
Conclusion
4 Black Bodies, Black Sounds: Film and the Racial Score
Incarnating the Score: Josephine Baker and Princesse Tam-Tam
Exploding/Exploring the Score: Karmen Geï and the Many
Modalities of African Jazz
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Pim Higginson is Professor of Global French Studies at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

‘This is a marvelous book, full of meticulous, inspired yet concise closereadings. A fine addition to the new diaspora studies, tracing ties between Africa and its US and French diasporas, Higginson beautifully parses music’s complex place within aesthetics, revealing the centrality of race to this branch of philosophy. Such interdisciplinary work will be a game-changer.’ Tsitsi Jaji, Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies, Duke University

SCORING RACE  

Explores in depth how Francophone African authors and filmmakers have negotiated the French construction of jazz as the medium of an exoticized and radical alterity.

Pim Higginson

Pim Higginson draws on race theory, aesthetics, cultural studies, musicology, and postcolonial studies to examine how jazz became in France what the author calls a ‘racial score:’ simultaneously an archive and script that has had far-reaching effects on the French avant-garde and on 20th and 21st century Francophone African writers and filmmakers for whom the idea of their own essential musicality represents an epistemological conundrum. Despite this obstacle, because of jazz’s profound importance to diaspora aesthetics, as well as its crucial role in the French imaginary, many African writers have chosen to make it a structuring principle of their literary projects. How and why, Pim Higginson asks, do these writers and filmmakers approach jazz despite its participation in and formalization of a particularly problematic kind of difference? To what extent do they reproduce the terms of their own systematic expulsion into music and to what extent, in their quest for writing (or film-making), do they arrive at tactically efficacious means of working through, around, or beyond the strictures of the racial score?

SCORING RACE

Series Editors Stephanie Newell & Ranka Primorac

Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa Pim Higginson www.jamescurrey.com

Scoring race jkt aw01.indd 1

Jacket front: Louis Armstrong, the famed jazz trumpeter, is borne aloft on a tipoye making its way towards Baudouin stadium in Leopoldville Congo, on Oct. 28, 1960 (AP Photo/Horst Faas)

10/05/2017 15:02

SCORING RACE Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 1

10/05/2017 09:09

ISSN 2054–5673 s e r i e s e d i to r s

Stephanie Newell and Ranka Primorac e d i to r i a l a d v i s o r y b o a r d

David Attwell (University of York) Jane Bryce (University of the West Indies) James Ferguson (Stanford University) Simon Gikandi (Princeton University) Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University) Isabel Hofmeyr (University of the Witwatersrand) Thomas Kirsch (University of Konstanz) Lydie Moudileno (University of Pennsylvania) Mbugua wa Mungai (Kenyatta University) David Murphy (University of Stirling) Derek Peterson (University of Michigan) Caroline Rooney (University of Kent) Meg Samuelson (University of Cape Town) Jennifer Wenzel (University of Michigan) The series is open to submissions from the disciplines related to literature, cultural history, cultural studies, music and the arts. African Articulations showcases cutting-edge research into Africa’s cultural texts and practices, broadly understood to include written and oral literatures, visual arts, music, and public discourse and media of all kinds. Building on the idea of ‘articulation’ as a series of cultural connections, as a clearly voiced argument and as a dynamic social encounter, the series features monographs that open up innovative perspectives on the richness of African locations and networks. Refusing to concentrate solely on the internationally visible above the supposedly ephemeral local cultural spaces and networks, African Articulations provides indispensable resources for students and teachers of contemporary culture. Please contact the series editors with an outline, or download the proposal form www.jamescurrey.com. Only send a full manuscript if requested to do so. Stephanie Newell, Professor of English, Yale University [email protected] Ranka Primorac, Lecturer in English, University of Southampton [email protected]

Previously published Achebe & Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite, Terri Ochiagha, 2015 A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder, Grace A. Musila, 2015

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 2

10/05/2017 09:09

SCORING RACE Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa

Pim Higginson

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 3

10/05/2017 09:09

James Currey is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) www.jamescurrey.com and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com © Pim Higginson 2017 First published 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. The right of Pim Higginson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84701-155-8 (James Currey cloth) ISBN 978-1-84701-177-0 (James Currey Africa-only paperback) The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 4

10/05/2017 09:09

L.E.M. Always to Josephine Baker, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 5

10/05/2017 09:09

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 6

10/05/2017 09:09

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Scoring Race: Music, Writing, and Difference in a French Context Armstrong Plays Kinshasa The Philosophical Genealogy of the Racial Score Music, Language, and Scientific Racism France, Jazz, and the Racial Score

1 6 13 26 35

1

51 52 64 73 82

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel: Four Cases Believing the Score: Soupault’s Le Nègre Jean-Paul Sartre and Existential Blackness Boris Vian and the Inescapable Score Abject Whiteness: Jazz Fiction Today

2 Querying Jazz: Early Francophone African Engagements with the Racial Score Jazz Nightmares: Mirages de Paris Absolute Music: Emmanuel Dongala’s ‘Jazz et vin de palme’ and ‘A Love Supreme’ Trop de soleil tue l’amour: Jazz and the End of Time 3 Challenging the Score: Francophone African Reconfigurations of Jazz Today Kangni Alem: Mirages d’Afrique Coltrane’s in the (Whore-)House: Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 and the Rewriting of Emmanuel Dongala Vultures at the Crossroads: Abdourahman Waberi’s La Divine Chanson Jazz Ain’t Nothing But a Sandwich Conclusion

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 7

97 101 119 134 147 147 154 159 171 182

10/05/2017 09:09

4 Black Bodies, Black Sounds: Film and the Racial Score Incarnating the Score: Josephine Baker and Princesse Tam-Tam Exploding/Exploring the Score: Karmen Geï and the Many Modalities of African Jazz

203

Bibliography

221

Index

233

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 8

185 187

10/05/2017 09:09

Acknowledgments

To those at Berklee College of Music who showed the difficulty of the path toward musicianship; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe for those fraught conversations about jazz … and race; Katherine Aid, editor extraordinaire, without whom this project would never have achieved its final form – although, as the saying goes, any and all flaws are my responsibility alone; Ranka Primorac for believing in this project; and Stephanie Newell for her encouragements (and to both for their god-like patience). In no particular order, I also wish to thank Yannick Séité, Tsitsi Jaji, Olivier Bourderionnet, Eric Prieto, Edwin Hill, Jean-Louis Pautrot, Pierre Fargeton, Philippe Gumplowicz, Alexandre Pierrepont, Jedediah Sklower, Martin Guerpin, Jeremy Lane, Rodolphe Burger, and Raphaëlle Tchamitchian. Whether you know it or not, you contributed to my thinking, through conversations, conferences, and in your writings. And to all those unnamed here who have pushed my ideas about music and race forward over the last twenty-five years. I also must express my deepest gratitude to the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, most notably my French colleagues, Pamela Cheek, Raji Valluri, Stephen Bishop, and Marina Peters-Newell. Thank you for your warm welcome. In addition to the institutions and individuals who have meant so much, I would also like to thank Yale French Studies for granting me permission to republish materials drawn from my article ‘Into the Jungle: Jazz, Writing, and Francophone African Transnationalism,’ published in Yale French Studies 120 (2011): 88–99.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 9

10/05/2017 09:09

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 10

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction Scoring Race: Music, Writing, and Difference in a French Context From Senegalese author Ousmane Socé’s early novel Mirages de Paris (1937) to contemporary works such as Léonora Miano’s Tel des astres éteints (2009) and Blues pour Élise (2010), and Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 (2014), Francophone African novels repeatedly return to jazz as an idea, a contested site, a formation, through and around which these authors negotiate notions of race and identity. Indeed, no other musical form has so consistently appeared in this literary tradition. At the same time, these writers’ relationship to the music has, with few exceptions, never been merely celebratory or simple. Though attitudes have changed over time, Francophone African texts contending with jazz repeatedly treat the music with equal measures of awed respect and notable suspicion. To understand why this is the case, one has to examine the very specific circumstances of jazz’s reception in France, particularly between the interwar period, and how that reception in a sense produced a particular – and particularly French – iteration of this diaspora musical form that has impacted every Francophone African author wishing to engage with music – while also making the music an important waypoint on the path towards a fully constituted Francophone African subjectivity. The almost unavoidable negotiation with jazz stems from its particular intersection with writing and race during the interwar period, the very time when Francophone African subjects began their most sustained push towards emancipation. Thus, what they were fighting and also being trained by was a racialized universe, at the heart of which lay a musical genre that the French avant-garde fetishized as the exemplary expression of blackness. That which Francophone authors are contending with is the manner in which, through a long series of processes that this study will examine in some detail, jazz became a trope in French writing, overdetermined by historically and epistemologically established ideas of music, writing, and race. The historical moment between the wars, when jazz took on its outsized function in the French intellectual and artistic world, has generated a rapidly growing critical library. Indeed, the self-reflexive awareness of jazz as a phenomenon began almost as soon as what Paul Colin, the famous illustrator of Josephine Baker’s Revue nègre, called the tumulte noir started to take hold: French intellectuals from Jean Cocteau to Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille began to ask precisely what it was about this music that attracted such passionate

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 1

10/05/2017 09:09

2

Scoring Race

attention from a certain avant-garde elite. More recently, beginning perhaps with Chris Godard’s Jazz Away from Home (1979) and moving through important texts such as Jeremy F. Lane’s Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, ‘Race,’ and Intellectuals in France, 1918–1945 (2013) and Tsitsi Jaji’s Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (2014), new works commenting on this particular historical moment are appearing at an astonishing pace. Further, almost without exception, these studies identify race as the prime mover in jazz’s explosive popularity in the French capital. Though the present volume will spend less time on the reception of jazz in France, it clearly grows out of this important critical movement. Instead, the following focuses on how that reception was prepared by a long intellectual history that constituted what this study will call a ‘scoring of race’ with which Francophone African authors subsequently had to contend. The idea of ‘scoring’ hopes to capture the multiple ways in which jazz was made by its white consumers to become the essential expression and guarantee of a racial essence. But just as importantly, it shows how Francophone African authors simultaneously staked their own claims to jazz while contending with the conscious and unconscious forces at work in and around the music – the ways in which its French reception modified this musical field, transforming it into a race-producing apparatus in which they, as Francophone Africans, were always already implicated. Francophone African intellectuals and authors were not, of course, the first to engage with the racializing legacy of black music’s reception. Indeed, diaspora thinkers from W. E. B. Du Bois’s discussion of the ‘sorrow songs’ in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1995) have meditated intensely on the connection between music and blackness. That the particular musical form or genre varies across the diaspora is clear as well. For Du Bois, proto-blues and proto-gospel music are emblematic and ‘the greatest gift of the Negro people’ to America and to the world;1 in Gilroy it is the vast array of musical practices emerging from the experience of the triangular trade that both materially and metaphorically articulate the syncretic subjectivities of African diaspora identity. Indeed, the ‘sorrow songs’ in Du Bois are an important enough legacy of slavery that he ‘set a phrase’ before each chapter: ‘a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men.’2 Having noted this structuring role, he is likewise deeply wary of these songs because they represent for him a timelessness, a kind of pre-historical subjectivity, that renders them impractical, not to say dangerous, as the vehicle through which a claim to humanity might be made – which is one of the principal goals of his book. Du Bois’s memory of this music dates back to his childhood, when these songs ‘stirred’ him ‘greatly,’ for out of them ‘rose … bursts of wonderful 1 W.

2 Du

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 2

E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 537. Bois, Souls, 536.

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

3

melody … full of the voices of the past.’3 But this ‘past-ness’ is also why the sorrow songs remain outside the text, visibly and epistemologically separate, not so much pointing to the text but away from it as a sign of the newly born subject’s departure from this timeless musical origin. Of the prismatic array of chapters in Paul Gilroy’s now equally canonical work The Black Atlantic, the third, ‘“Jewels Brought from Bondage”: Black Music and the Politics of Authenticity,’which explores diaspora music, is the most relevant to the present study. Here, the author follows Du Bois in underscoring the importance of music. The difference is that Gilroy makes music the privileged trope and medium around which discursive black modernity is organized. His examination of what he calls the ‘sayability’ of black music and the questions he raises are particularly pressing. As he notes, music conceived as a vehicle for historicized meaning ‘can be used to challenge the privileged conceptions of both language and writing as preeminent expressions of human consciousness.’4 This is relevant within the context of diaspora because ‘[t]he power and significance of music within the black Atlantic have grown in inverse proportion to the limited expressive power of language,’ resulting from the reality that ‘the slave’s access to literacy was often denied on pain of death and only a few cultural opportunities,’ among which, most importantly perhaps, was music, ‘were offered as a surrogate for the forms of individual autonomy denied by life on the plantations.’5 Thinking music differently as a legible form of diasporic existence in its endless ebbs and flows is therefore essential for a black historicity to be recognized and incorporated critically into modernity’s archive – or again to begin a credible and effective critique of that archive. Thus, in a sense, Gilroy responds to Du Bois by underscoring the source of the fear of the musical evident in Souls, while simultaneously positing music’s essential function in providing a basis for black historicity – and music’s longstanding role as a signifier of difference. That is, as Gilroy understands it, providing music with an ontological function is daunting because of the ahistoric and metaphysically mute role that Western thought has given it – the very reason slaves were permitted to indulge in this activity in the first place was that it was deemed harmless (that is, ontologically inexpressive/ineffective) by the white master. The Black Atlantic brilliantly exposes this tension and the need to overcome it. At the same time, it falters in one telling way: the untheorized foundational rupture that Gilroy variously terms the ‘terror,’ the ‘catastrophe,’ or the ‘tragedy’ of slavery ultimately sanctions sub-Saharan Africa’s disappearance from his paradigmatic mapping. While these terms aptly describe the Middle Passage 3 Du

Bois, Souls, 537. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 74. 5 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 74. 4 Paul

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 3

10/05/2017 09:09

4

Scoring Race

and its aftermath, having them stand for an epistemological break problematically displaces and repeats the erasure it seeks to dismantle by identifying diaspora music as a palimpsest where, through the traces embedded in it, the historical specificity of the passage emerges. The erasure of Africa, though displaced, once again implies two human groups. The first experienced slavery or is descended from those who did. It was born beyond the break, began navigating the turbulent currents of history and thereby (or therefore) produced a legitimate archive. The second, stranded before this chasm, was not enslaved, never made it onto the ships alive, or worse still, participated in the trade. It remains unmarked by this (or any such) history. It continues to reside on Hegel’s dark and ahistorical continent. Yet, in omitting Africa, the author’s attempt to privilege music is diminished precisely because of how the medium operates cryptically in Western thought as a racial signifier: as an absolutely distinct art form, an unmiscegenated expression that ignores the way, in practice, media merge into each other and blur the boundaries intended to separate them. That is, there is, as we will see, an immediate and longstanding symbiosis between the idea of distinct media and the insistence on race as a transcendental order; the principle of racial purity and a hierarchy of delineated media converge, mapping onto each other in cooperative functions that remain unacknowledged. Thus, just as the West has maintained the binaries of music/writing, black/white, and Africa/Europe, the peoples and places most negatively impacted by their effects have also actively resisted in ways that underscore the seams in this fabric(ation). Music in general and black music in particular resists a subdivision of the arts and the attendant racial differences they structure. However, to fully recognize this, as Tsitsi Jaji rightly notes, it is essential to recognize the necessity for including ‘Africa as a constitutive locus rather than viewing it as a “source” for diasporic populations and practices but not an active participant.’6 The present turn to Francophone African writers deliberately aims at an important part of this project: to mitigate a flaw in the otherwise brilliantly conceptualized imaginary space that is the Black Atlantic. First, however, understanding black Francophone writers’ and filmmakers’ relation to jazz demands an explanation of the vexed role that music plays in Western aesthetics, a history that neither Du Bois nor Gilroy provides. This long history, captured in the idea of ‘scoring,’ explains how voices, in the rules of classical harmony, are made, dynamically, to perform certain roles; how Western ‘authorities’ have over time ‘scripted’ musical performance as a specifically racial phenomenon; and how race itself emerges from this process as (newly or further) essentialized. Rather than occupying disciplined and static spaces, 6 Tsitsi

Jaji, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 4

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

5

the idea of ‘scoring’ envisions these various voices instantiating particular functions.7 Significantly, jazz stresses improvisation rather than ‘scoring’; performance practices and traditions, not a written and printed document, dictate the structures and forms of the piece. Nevertheless, because the West not only scores its own musical practice, but scores it historically as an aesthetic category, performers’ abilities to emancipate themselves from the Western ear’s trained hearing are questionable. Thus, the notion of ‘scoring’ stresses how Western aesthetics has compelled music as a delimited medium to play a foundational role. Scoring also provides a useful tool in understanding how music has become, particularly since the nineteenth century, a means of producing race.8 That is, the specific manner, terms, aesthetic function, repeated definitions, associations, commentary, and placement of music have all facilitated a naturalization not only of the medium itself as neatly delineated, but also of how Western aesthetics locks performers into a racial score which – and within which – they perform. Initially, this score eschews improvisation, as it undermines the compositional a priori and the whiteness it empowers. Yet the jazz musician’s departure from the score is recuperated via the idea of a racialized ‘natural’ musicianship: the jazz musician doesn’t need the dictatorship of writing, of scoring, to show the way, and thus is absorbed into a racial ‘super-score’ in which differentiation is no longer ‘merely’ aesthetic, but existential as well. The process by which the West cathects music to race begins to achieve its ‘modern’ shape during the Enlightenment and, most dramatically, in Romanticism, which refined the longstanding identification of musicality with difference and distilled Greek notions of barbarity into modern conceptions of race. Thus, the history of Western thought makes music a constitutive element in a series of differential operations that create the ‘other.’ What begins with the vague notion of the musical barbarian and the dangerously unbounded seductiveness of music in Plato’s Republic thus morphs into Arthur, Comte de Gobineau’s race-producing machine in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines [Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races]. This telescoping and spidering critical lens that is the idea of scoring will then turn to the medium most empowered by music’s racialization: writing. Further, since music’s location with respect to writing in Western aesthetics contributes 7 This

idea underscores the tension within the discourse on Western music between composer and performer already evident in the seventeenth century, where the composer-conductor leads the creatively passive performer through the score. In this score, the various instrumental roles are distributed and musicians are given minimal tactical space within which to express their artistic independence. Musicians become scored presences, their voices performing parts in and from which subjectivity and will have been eliminated. 8 My thinking here and throughout is heavily indebted to the tradition begun by Susan M ­ cClary in her seminal 1991 book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (­Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), which engages with the relationship between the classical music tradition and the production of difference – in her case, that of gender.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 5

10/05/2017 09:09

6

Scoring Race

significantly to the constitution of the idea of race, fictional representations of black music, and specifically jazz, are rich grounds for investigation. Studying works of literature that explore jazz offers a material map of the various forces at play. In particular, France provides a unique laboratory for this thesis because of a negrophilia (and racism) that is particularly evident in its reception of African-American music and its abundance of jazz-focused fiction.9 In addition, France’s complex colonial enterprise has motivated an extensive African and diasporic engagement with what in France has become what can only be called a jazz trope. Indeed, as Martinican intellectual Edouard Glissant suggests in Poétique de la relation, jazz is particularly powerful because its evolution makes it very different from other ‘popular’ or ‘folk’ idioms.10 It is true that, as Edwin C. Hill rightly reminds us, France has been marked by ‘a long history of “exotic” musical performances and expatriate musical scenes’ including ‘rumbas, tangos, merengues, boleros, and sones, along with waltzes and Creole mazurkas.’11 While it would be a mistake to ignore these other diaspora musical forms, jazz played – and continues to play – a unique, and evolving, role. Whereas folk forms are static artifacts outside modernity, jazz was given the unique opportunity to evolve, to become art. This temporal evolution was carefully charted by its knowing (white) critics, the holders of what I will call the jazz shibboleth: the keys of a history (read through race) where the critic retains sole guardianship over the form’s parameters. Indeed, traditional (mostly white) critics have (whether consciously or not) retained a uniquely powerful role in assuring the coherence and stability of the music’s racial boundaries; Francophone African writers have in turn sought to redefine the music in order to trouble those same parameters. In other words, the ability of jazz (as a practice and as a defined idea) to break (free of) Western racial epistemes is always in tension with an essentializing racial containment which it facilitates.

Armstrong Plays Kinshasa What, materially – that is, historically – does it mean for a Francophone African to contend with jazz as a vector for the scoring of race? In particular, how does an African wishing to celebrate the creatively disruptive potentialities of jazz, or again recognize it as a French literary trope that facilitated racial formations, tease apart the music from its French reception and conceptualization? To better understand what this means in historical terms, it is useful to examine a 9 Petrine

Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 10 Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris: NRF, 1990). 11 Edwin C. Hill, Black Soundscapes, White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 66.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 6

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

7

particularly evocative case of jazz’s vexed valence in a Francophone context and the multiple forces that act to produce this troubling object. Inasmuch as Louis Armstrong is one of the emblematic figures of France’s interwar reception of jazz, the unique historical case of his October 29, 1960 concert in Leopoldville (today, Kinshasa), Congo vividly illustrates the complexity of the challenge the Francophone African writer faces. It shows how the music becomes refracted for its African participants through an American cultural apparatus that promoted jazz as a product of the culture industry, just as the music’s consumption was also already mediated by its earlier French reception (here, doubly mediated through Francophone Belgium), a critical discourse that privileged certain of the music’s performers and created a unique metaphysical apparatus around it. There is little doubt that Armstrong’s grinning face is among the most iconic (and most problematic) in jazz. It is not surprising, then, that he should become the nucleus to which French discourses on black musicality most effectively adhered.12 It turned out that, in France, the American’s stage persona played directly into a series of racial stereotypes that defined French interwar negrophilia. Even the perception of colonial subjects was altered by the jazz lens that the Parisian avant-garde, jet-set, and intelligentsia were increasingly applying to ‘blackness.’ It is against this back story that Armstrong’s performance in Leopoldville becomes significant. Additionally, the vast media archive covering it suggests a signal event; this abundance of data also provides precious insight into the Western media’s construction of Louis Armstrong as a raced musical figure in the equally raced context of the Congo – a country residing in the Western imaginary as and at the ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Armstrong’s early encounter in Kinshasa with Albert Mongita (1916–85), a journalist, teacher, and radio personality, but perhaps most importantly one of the founders of Congolese theater, provides an important measure of the triangulated relationship between the American jazz musician, Francophone African writing, and the Western score, as well as Africa’s attempts to rewrite it. The disseminated wire photograph underscores how, on the one hand, the press ‘dressed jazz up’ (as evident in Armstrong’s tuxedoed body) and on the other reduced Africa (and its writing) to a blatant caricature of blackness: the grass skirt. At the same time, a kinesic reading of this photograph suggests a 12

As Matthew F. Jordan notes in Le Jazz, to which I will refer again below, ‘Panassié made Armstrong’s jazz the ideal against which all jazz would be judged. Indeed, he raised up Louis by raising the level of his own hyperbole … The blood of his soul comes to us from each of his solos.’ Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010). Hugues Panassié, who quickly became the leading French jazz authority of the 1930s, is now known for his reactionary politics and aesthetics, his ideas of hot and straight jazz, and the degree to which he relied on essentialist racial notions to posit swing as the defining feature of the music. He is also famous for introducing Louis Armstrong to Paris in the early 1930s.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 7

10/05/2017 09:09

8

Scoring Race

The American jazz musician Louis Armstrong is greeted by Bolela, the Akuku tribal chief in costume, on the beach on his arrival in Leopoldville, Congo, on October 28, 1960. Armstrong and his orchestra were to give a gala performance at the Baudouin stadium on their one-day visit. Behind Armstrong is his wife, Lucille. (AP Photo/Horst Faas)

meeting of peers: they beam at each other and the handshake crosses multiple boundaries: between media, between cultures, across time, and from the Congo Square, New Orleans diaspora to the Congolese homeland. Mongita’s expression in particular suggests that traditional dress represents an important cultural performance. Thus, the Western frame scores jazz and writing’s relationship to race while the actors resist that score and propose others. However, another even more powerful series of images has come to represent Armstrong’s visit. The cover image of the present volume shows the American being carried through the streets of Kinshasa on his way to the stadium. Where Mongita and Armstrong challenged the inherent iconography of the image in which they appeared, the porters, grim-faced and likewise traditionally garbed, no longer suggest a beneficent closing of the Black Atlantic circuit. Rather, they and the image carry a terrible symbolic load. What the American press of the day referred to as a ‘throne’ was, in the French and Belgian African colonial

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 8

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

9

context, a symbol of racial segregation, abuse, and privilege, the tipoye. Thus, the jazzman elicits the oddly juxtaposed evocations of Congolese royalty on the one hand, and the famously racist Belgian comic strip hero Tintin on the other.13 If the tipoye creates a visual disturbance, the contrast in dress between the American and the porters is also problematic. With Mongita, the theatricality of the encounter between playwright and musician generates a prophylactic irony and kinship. Conversely, here, the formal wear suggests culture’s presence and the grass skirts its absence, an unbridgeable distance between carriers and passenger: what Armstrong, as black, once was and what, as American, he now is. Or does it? These photographs of Armstrong in the tipoye also play on stereotypes of blackness dating to the nineteenth-century American minstrel tradition replicated in French and Belgian racist representations of Africans: specifically, the sartorial misappropriations attributed to blacks – of which Tintin provides once again predictably grotesque examples. Thus, while there is a spatial difference between the American and his African porters, that distance is collapsed in its inscription within a racist Western symbolic economy in which the porters are garbed ‘naturally,’ and the childish Armstrong plays dress-up. But why have Louis Armstrong fill this role, and who exactly is conducting (and keeping) the racial score? That is, to the extent that a monumental media apparatus disseminated the Leopoldville concert to the world, who was pulling the strings and why? Several critics, most notably Penny Von Eschen, have suggested one chilling answer: the concert coincided with a CIA plot, directed remotely by the American president Dwight D. Eisenhower, to assassinate newly elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba.14 In a word, October 29, 1960 was not a random date; Satchmo’s presence in Leopoldville was not a historical accident. His passage was a diversionary tactic, concealed as a propaganda coup, masked in turn as a cultural goodwill tour. Armstrong’s concerts throughout Africa were conducted under the auspices of the State Department. As Fred Kaplan tells us, ‘the idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United States as culturally barbaric.’15 Thus, what was ostensibly a cultural event was, as the newsreel clip of the tour makes immediately apparent, anti-Soviet propaganda designed to counter communist 13

A multitude of images of colonial administrators being carried on tipoyes is available online. The racist images to which I am referring, of Tintin being carried in similar fashion, can easily be found as well. 14 Lumumba was a powerful speaker and adept politician, unfazed by Western neocolonial threats. His adherence to non-alliance principles, which implied a healthy distrust of colonial powers and American imperial ambition, was a direct challenge to U.S. Cold War tactics in the region. See Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 15 Fred Kaplan, ‘When Ambassadors Had Rhythm,’ New York Times, June 29, 2008, http://www. nytimes.com/2008/06/29/arts/music/29kapl.html.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 9

10/05/2017 09:09

10

Scoring Race

rhetoric. In sum, Armstrong’s integrated band was to give the lie to Soviet claims of American racial injustice.16 More importantly, at the same moment, the democratically elected Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba was under house arrest following a coup d’état spearheaded by CIA-supported Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.17 A few weeks later, with Lumumba now on the run, Armstrong would give another concert on December 4, 1960 in Elizabethville, Katanga Province, at Prime Minister Moïse Tshombé’s palace. Tshombé’s secessionist regime was also entirely subsidized by the CIA and by French and Belgian mining interests, and would help carry out Lumumba’s assassination on January 17, 1961. In sum, the State Department’s tours were not only propaganda, but also cover for CIA operations and directives. Thus, the coincidence of the leisurely and the political was no accident: Armstrong’s performances and Lumumba’s detention and assassination were orchestrated from the same place.18 This point was made by the Soviet press and picked up by Le Monde in its own reports on Armstrong’s arrival: [I]l ne fait pas de doute que Louis Armstrong a été envoyé au Congo ‘pour détourner l’attention du peuple congolais des événements extrêmement importants qui se déroulent dans leur pays.’19 [There is no doubt that Louis Armstrong was sent to the Congo ‘to turn the Congolese people’s attention from the very important events that are taking place in their country.’]20 16

See ‘Louis Armstrong au Congo en 1960,’ DailyMotion video, 0:47, posted by ‘www.eburnia. com’, June 26, 2008, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5x6r0_louis-armstrong-au-congoen-1960_music. 17 Lumumba had, in a fatal strategic error, made Mobutu chief of staff of the army, despite rumors circulating (now confirmed) that he was a CIA informant. 18 Only two weeks after Patrice Lumumba had been put under house arrest on October 10, 1960, Armstrong played Baudouin Stadium. Further adding to this haunting coincidence of events was the subsequent concert at Moïse Tshombé’s palace in Elizabethville, the capital of the breakaway province of Katanga. As Von Eschen notes about this latter event, Armstrong ‘liked to comment that he had stopped a war when a truce was called for a day so both sides could hear him perform’ (Satchmo, 1968). The reality was quite the opposite. The same interests that had brought him to the continent had armed Tshombé in order to precipitate Lumumba’s downfall and protect Western interests. Indeed, a few days after this concert, Lumumba fled Leopoldville, was recaptured on December 1, and returned by force to the capital, from where he was later flown to Elizabethville on January 17, 1961 and executed. In a sense, then, the trumpet player’s passage was instead immediately linked to the very existence of the civil war and its desired result. Indeed, once Lumumba had been murdered on direct orders from, among others, Dwight Eisenhower, the forces of France, Belgium, and the United States abandoned Tshombé, paving the way for American puppet Mobutu’s thirtyyear kleptocratic dictatorship. 19 ‘Louis Armstrong à Léopoldville,’ Le Monde, October 31, 1960, http://www.lemonde.fr/ archives/article/1960/10/31/louis-armstrong-a-leopoldville_2109038_1819218. html#LTpgylv4LhEehkoT.99. 20 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French are the author’s.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 10

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

11

In addition, this Western and neocolonial imperial machine’s outrageous dismissal of millions of black subjects was the continuation of a historical disregard for Congolese humanity feeding into and fed by a racial score out of which Armstrong also emerged, and to which he was likewise made to contribute. While the particulars of race vary from country to country, including within the West, the coordination involved in bringing Armstrong to Kinshasa suggests that, in practical terms, the Anglophone and Francophone worlds (in this case, Belgium and the United States) were largely on the same page, and that Armstrong exemplifies the manner in which the score is performed across national and linguistic boundaries. Understanding Armstrong’s performance also means ascertaining the degree of his conscious participation in a concert that served as a soundtrack to Mobutu’s rise to power.21 This question in fact evokes Armstrong’s place in French critic Hugues Panassié’s theory of jazz, which relied heavily on nineteenth-century racial theories of uninhibited blackness for its definition of swing – for Panassié, the singular feature of authentic African-American music. Armstrong’s stage manner, his laughing, eye-rolling, and mugging, made him a Platonic ideal of the jazz musician.22 That these behaviors were not natural at all but part of an elaborate series of negotiations between white audiences and black performer did not occur to the French critic. Armstrong was in fact also an agent of this racialized image and, particularly as he advanced in his career, a well-trained musician who could both read and write music: as such, he negotiated (with) the score; rectified it where possible; surreptitiously ironized it; and self-interestedly embraced it.23 One could consider 21

Indeed, one might wonder about the carry-over of Armstrong’s so-called authentic black musicality and Mobutu’s own use of the idea of Congolese authenticity as a tool for consolidating his power. What is certain is that, as Le Monde also noted, ‘[L]’arrivée providentielle de Louis Armstrong à Léopoldville a suffi pour faire passer à l’arrière-plan le colonel Mobutu et son différend avec les Nations unies’ [Louis Armstrong’s providential arrival in Leopoldville was all it took to put Colonel Mobutu’s differences with the UN on the back burner]. ‘Anarchie Croissante au Katanga,’ Le Monde, October 31, 1960, http://www. lemonde.fr/archives/article/1960/10/31/anarchie-croissante-au-katanga_2109987_1819218. html#veLFZu1Zp0eVk7BH.99. 22 As Jeremy F. Lane describes it, ‘Adopting the role of the simple, instinctive black musician, whose performances rely on heart rather than head, Armstrong indulged [in the] “mugging” that … established an ethnically overdetermined division of intellectual labor between black performer and white critic. This division of intellectual labor was ultimately rooted in the founding opposition between the activity of writing about jazz and what was figured here as the spontaneous, unreflected activity of playing or performing.’ Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, ‘Race,’ and Intellectuals in France, 1918–1945 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 95. 23 Nevertheless, Satchmo had lent his image to racist representations derived from the minstrel tradition, such as the famous Betty Boop cartoon, ‘I’ll be glad when you’re dead,’ as well as a version of the same song in the 1932 short film Rhapsodies in Black and Blue. See ‘Rhapsody in Black and Blue,’ in Rhapsodies in Black and Blue, DVD, 3:00–8:22, Kino International: a

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 11

10/05/2017 09:09

12

Scoring Race

Armstrong through the lens of Henry Louis Gates’s concept of African-American ‘signifyin(g)’; however, what this does not explain is the evolving climate in which Armstrong played and how Africans became targets of his performance. That is, the focus on Armstrong’s toying with the minstrel tradition ignores the degree to which Africans (rather than African-Americans) so often paid the price of a diminished or even denied humanity. Just as importantly, while historical circumstances forced Armstrong into many of the roles that he chose, it would be highly problematic to grant him agency at one point – by suggesting that he is signifyin(g) on racist stereotypes – while denying him any degree of agency (i.e., responsibility) when, for example, he played Kinshasa. Thus, while Von Eschen argues that ‘Armstrong … didn’t know, at the time … that the new Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was being held by Belgian authorities, with … CIA assistance,’ he had to recognize the state of crisis in which he landed.24 The striking number of white – most likely Belgian – faces in the most expensive seats in the stadium, despite this now being an independent African nation, the Belgian soldiers evident throughout the film of Armstrong’s performance, and the overwhelming military and police presence, a protection that he would see nowhere else on the African continent, testify to the political climate at that moment. Further, the intense media coverage, absent from the rest of the tour, should also have tipped him off. He was a willing ‘military asset’ in the battleground between Western, ­Soviet, and non-aligned forces – or rather, he played the racial score he had been assigned, thereby contributing to Belgian and American interests. These facts did not escape the global press, as the Le Monde articles on his travels amply demonstrate. In sum, the most recognizable figure in jazz had a unique and vexed role and illustrates why jazz, particularly in a French and Francophone context, is never simply music, as well as why African authors, while sharing Mongita’s appreciation for the powerful potentialities of the music, have also remained wary of it: in sum, they have recognized that to engage with jazz is necessarily and materially to engage with the racial score that the present volume proposes to explore.

Paramount Picture, 1932. If, as Gary Giddins insists, Armstrong ‘transcends these racist trappings by his indifference to every sling and arrow,’ that is, by taking what the director is trying to do and saying something entirely different, there was nevertheless a reason why, in the 1940s, Billie Holiday would famously state, ‘Of course Pops toms, but he toms from the heart.’ Or as fellow trumpet player Miles Davis later noted along similar lines, ‘I loved Satchmo, but I couldn’t stand all that grinning.’ 24 Von Eschen, Satchmo.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 12

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

13

The Philosophical Genealogy of the Racial Score Understanding what Armstrong represents demands an exploration of the intellectual history that informs his place and function. The racial score, I wish to propose, is the product of a long philosophical tradition that coalesced in nineteenth-century theories of race and finally broke on the shore of the twentieth century as the Parisian jazz craze. Without understanding the embededness of Armstrong’s performance within an aesthetics that itself serves the West’s broad epistemological project, it would be too easy to assign to it an isolated meaning. Taking the long view, Armstrong’s performance in fact begins with Western philosophy’s treatment of music, which French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe describes in the following manner: [I]l n’est exagéré de poser qu’entre philosophie et musique … il ne se sera pas passé grand-chose en plus de deux mille ans, et que l’histoire de leurs rapports est en definitive assez terne … [L]’on pourrait facilement soupçonner … qu’il s’agit là de l’objet rebelle à la prise philosophique et peut-être, pour cette raison, ne cessant d’indiquer sourdement une limite de la philosophie, un obstacle secret à son plein déploiement (à l’arraisonnement), voire, ce n’est pas impossible, une menace.25 It would not be an exaggeration to propose that, by most reckonings, nothing really has happened in more than two thousand years between music and philosophy, and that the history of their relations is, in a word, quite dull … One could easily suspect, especially today, that it is a question of the rebel object par excellence, rebelling against philosophy’s takeover and perhaps, for this reason, continuously and silently indicating a limit to philosophy, a secret obstacle to its full deployment (to reasoning), even, possibly, a menace.26

In sum, music would represent a limit case, a threateningly proximate marker of philosophy’s outside or beyond, a ‘rebellious object’ that stands as an obstacle between thought and the absolute. That claim is, of course, not entirely true. In addition, and equally important in the context of jazz’s reception in France, the above quotation establishes a pattern. Discussing the Mallarméan ‘book,’ Lacoue-Labarthe expands this pattern into the beginning of a genealogy by posing the following question: Si c’est une telle onto-typologie qui soutient le projet mallarméen, quelle en est la conséquence quant à la conception de la musique? C’est-à-dire, on s’en doute, quant

25

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures de Wagner (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991), 165. 26 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner, trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 85–6.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 13

10/05/2017 09:09

14

Scoring Race

à la question du rapport entre ‘la Musique et les lettres’? Quelle musique, quelle écriture suppose un tel ‘théâtre’? Et que faut-il entendre par ‘musique’?27 If it is such an onto-typology that supports the Mallarméan project, what is its consequence as to the conception of music? That is to say, one suspects, as to the question of the rapport between ‘Music and letters’? What music, what writing does such a ‘theater’ imply? And what should we understand by ‘music’?28

The ‘onto-typology’ in question is an inaugural mark, or writing: a score. Further, Western thought scores the relationship between music and letters as a theater, an orchestrated enterprise. Yet, despite posing the fundamental question of what music is, any substantial attempt at an answer is absent. Instead, Lacoue-Labarthe slips, as does the entire philosophical tradition, into an assumed ‘music’ with overdetermined contours and placed always before or after but never within philosophy’s discourse. This particular omission is important because it informs – indeed legitimates – the history and logic of the stereotype of ‘black musicality’ as it pertains to jazz (and particularly to its reception in France). The score is the means by which philosophy makes music achieve this through a series of concatenated relationships or orders.29 That is, ‘race’ and ‘music,’ respectively, are scored categories, molded to Western ontological needs and reinforcing each other chiasmatically through a series of analogical coincidences assured by the structural specificity of each medium. To say that race is a construct – one possible definition of being ‘scored’ – has become a truism. Music’s assumption as a contained and stable, that is, essentialized, aesthetic medium has received far less attention. Yet investigating music in this manner reveals how and why the idea of ‘black musicality’ emerges and how it latently persists long after the debunking of race as a stable signifier. Stated differently, blackness, beyond its debunking, has been preserved by, among other things, the scored idea of music. Music, in this and other regards, is a constructed (aesthetic) category, the stability of which is contingent, despite philosophy’s refusal or inability to contend with it as such. Thus, music subtends the racial paradigm far beyond the latter’s debunking. Significantly, one of the ways in which the reification of music – the essentialization of music as idea – occurs is through its increased subordination

27

Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, 147. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, trans. McCarren, 75. 29 What I mean here will become clearer as I proceed, particularly in my discussion of Schopenhauer. Suffice it to say that the Western conception of music, the construction of music as that which is most intimately connected to the emotions, depends on a cultivated ignorance of musical language except among its practitioners. Might this be why there is in philosophy the recurring theme of the simple-mindedness of musicians? 28

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 14

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

15

to the score – to notation.30 The differential function philosophy attributes to what it defines as music surreptitiously contributes to the naturalization of racial attributes, carrying through essentialized racist paradigms into the social conception of race.31 The following section therefore first challenges the notion that philosophy refuses to discuss music; and second argues that one can locate the origin of much of the West’s differential thinking in precisely that discussion: for if music is never the ‘subject’ of philosophy, 2,500 years of aesthetics certainly makes music its object. Further, the form this treatment takes makes music the privileged differential aesthetic medium which writing will be increasingly inclined to discipline. This relationship between writing and music that philosophy has scored over millennia will have a foundational role in the naturalization of, among other things, racial paradigms in a manner that will profoundly impact the French reception of jazz. The recognizable ideological-metaphysical function of music already gains its countours in Plato, where the medium measures and orders ‘the movement of the soul.’32 Ideally, poetry would dictate proper behavior. Ultimately, however, the role of deciding the contents of the stories told is incumbent upon the philosophers.33 The Republic’s focus on verbal forms (poetry versus philosophy) apparently relegates music to a secondary role. Indeed, the famous exclusion of the poets from the Republic recognizes poetry’s relevance and power.34 In contrast, whereas music is ‘composed of … words, harmonic mode, and rhythm,’35 the ‘mode and rhythm must follow from the words,’36 thereby establishing the fundamental hierarchical relationship between the verbal and the musical. This is reflected in the instruments The Republic allows: none that can play multiple 30

Indeed, musica ficta (the title of Lacoue-Labarthe’s book) was, among other things, the Renaissance’s effort to move towards greater compositional control over the musical performance – that is, musica ficta sought to control and contain the musical, the slippage it always seems to undergo in the hands of the musician, by taking it away from the uncertainties of performance towards the ostensible permanence of writing. 31 Critiqued by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Idenitities (New York: Verso, 2011). 32 Mary B. Schoen-Nazzaro, ‘Plato and Aristotle at the Ends of Music,’ Laval théologique et philosophique 34.3 (1978): 262. 33 To understand how close poetry and philosophy remain one only needs to examine the closing lines of The Republic, in which the fate of man after death ironically morphs into a demonstration of a fundamentally poetic nature. This ‘squabble’ between poetry and philosophy remains alive to this day, as, for example, Giorgio Agamben’s engagement with this very question shows. See Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 34 A relevance with which philosophy will continue to engage to the present day, perhaps most evidently in the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century and Heidegger’s radical rehabilitation of poetry. 35 Plato, The Republic, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 398d, 88. 36 Plato, The Republic, 398d, 88.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 15

10/05/2017 09:09

16

Scoring Race

modes, starting with the reed pipe (the aulos), closely associated with the Dionysian rites and a barbarian import. This latter point already intimates music’s formal connection to difference through the barbarian other.37 This connection also suggests that music – and not poetry – is the true threat to philosophy. Indeed, ‘if you give music the chance to play upon your soul, and pour into the funnel of your ears … the first effect … is to soften [the spirit]’ and ‘if you press on regardless, and are seduced by it, the next stage is melting and turning to liquid – the complete dissolution of the spirit [cutting the] sinews out of you and [turning you] into a “feeble warrior.”’38 The ear, that organ which, as so many thinkers and poets from Plato to Pascal Quignard remind us cannot be closed to the outside world as can the mouth or eyes, is the point of ingress of a powerful solvent that liquefies the soul.39 Music pours, unopposed, into the ‘funnel of your ears,’ casting the subject back to a Kristevan semiotic/amniotic state,40 a process mimetically rendered in the poetic – not to say musical – language of this strange passage. Music therefore challenges the discourse of philosophy, which here teeters on the edge of incoherence. The rational soul is in danger of being rendered ‘feeble.’ Further, music’s assumed attractiveness and foreignness generate a paranoid fantasy: it is not music that acts here – this is a purely textual artifact – but language creating the musical seductiveness to which it succumbs: the slowly forming Western idea of music as a distinct medium outside of and away from language, and particularly distant from writing – the medium in which philosophy accumulates and archives its truths. In short, (the) text makes music liminal while falling prey to its own fantasy of an alien medium (that writing has created). This logic defines music as the boundary designating a difference that is simultaneously excluded and preserved as a boundless resource for the same’s renewal: a dynamic that will find perhaps its most vivid expression in the negrophilia of the Paris interwar years. Plato’s disciple Aristotle, in his Politics, attributes to music instead a role as a frivolous accompaniment to the important work of writing.41 Whereas writing 37

Most notably, the aulos has two significant and related flaws: it encourages virtuosity, thereby taking away from the role of music as accompaniment; and it renders speech (song or poetry) impossible. Hence Plato’s choice to preserve the lyre and cithara, two simple stringed instruments principally devoted to accompanying the singing or reciting voice, whose tonal fixity keeps them modally consistent. 38 Plato, The Republic, 3, 411 a–b, 103. 39 See Pascal Quignard, La Haine de la musique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1996). 40 In Birgit Schippers’s 2011 book Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), the semiotic is a realm associated with the musical, the poetic, the rhythmic, and that which lacks structure and meaning. It is closely tied to the ‘feminine’ and represents the undifferentiated state of the pre-mirror-stage infant. 41 ‘[O]ur fathers admitted music into education, not on the ground either of its necessity or utility, for it is not necessary, nor indeed useful in the same manner as reading and writing,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 16

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

17

and speech are immediately useful for everything from business to politics, music becomes the antithesis of work, the contrary of real mental activity. That is, music is immediately associated with leisure.42 As such it prepares the ground for the connection between difference and the frivolous, the contrast between the work of writing and the playing of music. This idea of frivolity becomes magnified in the musician’s exclusive focus on virtuosity.43 Like Plato, Aristotle does not exclude music, recognizing its function in leisure. At the same time, he erects a firewall against the profoundly dangerous music of a debased ‘slave’ caste of performers and listeners, in which, as he says in the Politics, the ‘vulgarity of the spectator tends to lower the character of the music and therefore of the performers.’44 This slave music is characterized by its extreme virtuosity and is directly identified with the differentiated body, the vulgar and sensual slave. The majority of the thinking on music from Plato through the Renaissance largely follows this pattern: with respect to the function of music and its placement in relation to poetry, whether secular or profane, the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of music carry through the Middle Ages and beyond. As which are useful in money-making, in the management of a household, in the acquisition of knowledge and in political life, … the use of music for intellectual enjoyment in leisure.’ Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Ontario: Batoche Books, 1999), Part 3, Book 8. 42 Robert Hawkins convincingly demonstrates how ideas of labor play into notions of racial difference and particularly blackness in his discussions of the assumed frivolity of AfricanAmericans under Jim Crow: ‘In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cultural associations of black men with economic dependence were widespread, and in many popular representations, black musicality went hand in hand with black dependency. The practice of tipping, which conflated the labor of the porter with that of the itinerant musician, reinforced such perspectives. Ubiquitous caricatures maligning the work ethic, intelligence, and humanity of black musicians were specific to a particular form of labor: musical entertainment. However, they were also part of a larger archive of racist misrepresentations that derided African-Americans, regardless of their occupations. Besides being associated with acceptance of tips, black musicians were also stock characters that whites deployed to assert black laziness, immaturity, primitivism, and lack of manliness. Indeed, the prevalence of such depictions prompted author and activist James Weldon Johnson to complain in 1912 that popular culture had established the black man as a “shuffling, banjo-picking being.” Given the prominent place of musicality among black stereotypes, slanderous representations of black musicians were also smears directed at the race as a whole.’ Robert Hawkins, ‘Brotherhood Men and Singing Slackers: A. Philip Randolph’s Rhetoric of Music and Manhood,’ in Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph, ed. Andrew E. Kersten and Clarence Lang (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 104. 43 On frivolity in the context of Francophone African crime fiction, see my The Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). Regarding virtuosity, reiterating Plato’s injunction against the aulos (or double-reed ‘flute’), Aristotle argues that it is ‘intended only to give pleasure to the hearer, and requires extraordinary skill of hand,’ adding ‘Athene invented the [aulos] and then threw it away … because the acquirement of [it] contributes nothing to the mind.’ Aristotle, Politics, trans. Jowett, Chapter 8, Book 6, 189. 44 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Jowett, 190.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 17

10/05/2017 09:09

18

Scoring Race

Augustine recounts in The Confessions (AD 398), following up on his largely neglected youthful work De Musica, music is both a gift and a danger. ‘Thus do I waver,’ he famously tells us in Chapter 33, Book 10, ‘between the danger of sensual pleasure and wholesome experience.’45 Indeed, Augustine describes his battles with musical seduction in Platonic terms: ‘The delights of the ear,’ he begins his confession on music, ‘had more firmly entangled and subdued me.’46 Nevertheless, like Plato and Aristotle before him, but now in the name of the Christian God, he accepts the benefits of music within reason, ‘so that through the pleasure afforded the ears of the weaker mind may rise to feelings of devotion.’ Like Plato and Aristotle, Augustine recognizes that music can make the listener more receptive to the word of God – that it eases the reception of the ‘poetry’ of biblical language because it works through an affective economy. Nevertheless, music remains in the domain of the emotional (rather than the rational) and continues to accompany the verbal, to which it must remain beholden at the risk of dislodging the truth of language from its throne. It is also explicitly associated with a lesser human category, ‘the weaker mind.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) provides a renewed philosophical interest in music and a potential shift in its function. As Downing A. Thomas notes in his essay ‘Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment,’ Rousseau ‘[f]irst conceived of [music] as a natural sign of the passions.’ For Rousseau, ‘music predates all conventional language.’ For this reason, ‘it constitutes a natural model for all representation – representation being the ability for one thing to stand for another – and thus paves the way for the subsequent elaboration of conventional sign systems and signifying practices.’47 Rousseau in fact argues that music is the ‘missing link’ between nature and culture, ‘paving the way,’ as Thomas argues, for the advent of culture, ‘sign systems and signifying practices.’ Of interest to the present study is that for Rousseau, those countries most proximate to that originary state – those located in a relative ‘south’ – are the most musical.48 Yet, where it appeared that 45

Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 261. 46 Augustine, Confessions, 261. 47 Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9–10 48 Rousseau does not, in sum, explicitly connect musicality to blackness; still, he hints at this logic in several of his theoretical texts on music, notably in Lettre sur la musique française [Letter on French Music] and his Dictionnaire de la musique [Dictionary of Music]. Both publications speak of particular nations’ affinity for music. His exemplary opposition is between France and Italy. His principal argument is that there is no truly beautiful French music because the language itself is not suited to it. But inasmuch as language is the product of the musical origin, it is clear that the lack of French music stems from the distance that (the) French – as a language, a culture, a people – have covered since their origin. That is, French is a mannered language, and its people plagued by the artifice of (courtly) culture. Conversely,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 18

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

19

Rousseau would celebrate the un(self)-conscious performance of the musical, his biting criticism of ‘celui qui pratique seulement la Musique par le ministère servile des doigts & de la Voix’ [he who practices music only through the servile means of the fingers and the voice] instead demands an intellectual quotient that he further (and once again) posits that only philosophy can provide.49 Indeed, reiterating a philosophical cliché, Rousseau rather suggests of musicians, ‘[qu’] on ne les tiendra pas pour de grands Philosophes’ [we won’t count them great philosophers].50 Musicians are not thinkers, and music in this model is a prelapsarian state whose faint echoes only appear in writing. Further, its association with geographically-located ethnic others begins to prepare the way for a formal racialization. Rousseau conflates what is south with musicality. Ultimately, musicality’s connection to alterity begins with a positive difference that upon further examination becomes a weakness: musical performance is relegated to the thoughtless bodily activity of ‘playing.’ The seriousness of thought demands the ‘work’ of philosophy.51 If philosophy has to this point ordered the arts hierarchically, no philosopher does so more systematically than Kant, most notably in The Critique of Judgment. The Critique connects music to what he labels ‘pulchritude vaga’ (free beauty) by contrast with ‘pulchritude adhaerans’ (dependent beauty).52 Free beauties ‘are self-subsisting beauties.’ Conversely, poetry is a ‘dependent beauty’ as it is ‘attached to a concept’ and ‘is ascribed to Objects which come under the concept of a particular end.’ In sum, free beauty is ‘nature’ or what in its independence from meaning and purpose most approximates it: ‘all music without words’ (72). ‘Pulchrituda vaga’ is the beauty most devoid of conceptual Italian is a language closer to its origin that therefore is perfectly suited to musical settings. Just as tellingly, Italian composers don’t find it necessary to laden their compositions with harmonic complications, instead focusing on the natural simplicity of the melodic line. 49 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de la musique (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1768), 308. 50 Rousseau, Dictionnaire, 308. 51 Matthew Jordan’s Le Jazz, discussed below, outlines Rousseau’s importance to my own discussion in the following manner: ‘Many of the ideas about improvisation used in debates on jazz date back at least to the eighteenth century in France, when Rameau and Rousseau battled over whether harmony or melody was the basis of music. While Rameau insisted that music was based on physical and cosmological laws, Rousseau felt that music originated in melodic expression of heartfelt sentiment. Whereas Rameau followed the traditional Pythagorean notion that music was better when it was a product of the rational, detached intellect, Rousseau believed good music was possible only when one unleashed passions. Rameau argued that musicians should study and obey physical laws and social conventions, but Rousseau felt that the best musicians were natural, unschooled and free to express themselves in their own way’ (32). It should be clear that Rousseau’s ‘emotionalist’ approach largely won the day, and heavily impacted the manner in which black music would be heard in France 175 years later. 52 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 19

10/05/2017 09:09

20

Scoring Race

attachments and would appear to be the condition of the most beautiful forms of art. And yet it is precisely in this ‘vagueness,’ the disconnection from the concept, that the ‘vague’ arts lose status within the aesthetic ranks. Instead, ‘Poetry … holds the first rank among the arts’ because it ‘expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination and by offering form among the boundless multiplicity of possible forms accordant with a given concept’ (192). Poetry finds the perfectly adequate equilibrium between the free play of ideas (pulchritude vaga) and the necessary dependence, or ‘adherence,’ to the concept. Poetry ‘invigorates the mind by letting it feel its faculty – free, spontaneous, and independent of determination by nature – of regarding and estimating nature as phenomenon in the light of aspects which nature itself does not afford us in experience, either for sense or understanding’ (192). Music, on the other hand, ‘speaks by means of mere sensations without concepts and so does not, like poetry, leave behind it any food for reflection’ (192). This in turn means that music’s value, to the extent that it has any, is dependent on its enthrallment to poetry. Kant makes this subaltern status absolutely clear in several ways. For one, if ‘we estimate the worth of the fine arts by the culture they supply to the mind … music then since it plays merely with sensations has the lowest place among the fine arts – just as it has the highest for those valued for their agreeableness’ (195). Reiterating Aristotle’s idea of leisure, music ‘is,’ finally, ‘more a matter of enjoyment than of culture.’ Thus, if there were any doubts, ‘it possesses less worth in the eyes of reason than any other of the fine arts.’ In sum, and here made absolutely explicit, music is entertainment, which, on its own, is completely devoid of conceptual content: it is entirely frivolous. At the same time, as a ‘universal language of sensations intelligible to every man [music] wields the full force of this language wholly on its own account, namely as a language of the affections’ (194).53 Music is principally beneficial because of its ability to literally move us bodily, to quicken our metabolism, and to make active.54 But in the process, as Kant repeatedly stresses, ‘nothing is thought.’ This association of the musical with the physical is one of the principal means by which music and blackness, or again ‘black musicality,’ would gain credence in the following century. 53

In a sense, music supplements the parochial nature of language by transcending linguistic barriers. What this most obviously chooses to ignore (as it is consistently ignored by all the thinkers I have cited to this point) is the equally contingent nature of the musical: what constitutes music (to the extent that such an ‘object’ exists at all) is culturally determined. Someone brought up with Javanese gamelan or Indian classical music is unlikely to appreciate Mahler, just as the West’s consumption of ‘other’ musical traditions (e.g., ‘World Music’) reduces these forms to ‘exotic sounds’ rather than recognizing them as complex systems of meaning. 54 This is precisely the function music supposedly fulfilled on the slave ships when slaves were brought on deck to dance.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 20

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

21

Paving the way towards this racialization is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Like Kant, Hegel sees art as free of any perceived end. But Hegel also makes his aesthetics merge into his historical phenomenology, which breaks each element down into an evolutionary progression. The essential feature of music, for example, is what Hegel calls ‘spiritual subjectivity in its immediate subjective inherent unity, the human heart, feeling as such.’55 Continuing the well-established practice of associating music with the ‘soul’ and with ‘sensations,’ music expresses sentiment, the irrational world of emotions. Poetry, ‘the absolute and true art of the spirit’ (626), is where mind or spirit in the Hegelian sense resides: because poetry is the art of speech, only it can communicate immediately with the world of ideas. At the same time, ‘what it wins in this way on the spiritual side it all the same loses again on the sensuous … For this reason the material through which it manifests itself retains for it only the value of a means (even if an artistically treated means) for the expression of spirit to spirit’ (626–7). In other words, the cost of poetry, of the ‘life of the mind,’ is the loss of the sensible world of which music is the signal signifier. Using his famous master–slave paradigm, the equation master-poetry/ slave-music begins to coalesce. Further underscoring this equation, music lacks permanence in the face of the idea. It is an evanescent medium whose principal quality is its ability to be ‘the first and more ideal breath of the soul’ (890), and as such is the best adapted to express: ‘[o]n this account what alone is fitted for expression in music is the object-free inner life, abstract subjectivity as such. This is our entirely empty self, the self without any further content’ (891). Thus, the connection of music to Africa, the continent without a history, makes sense. As we have seen to this point, music’s inability to signify is an essential ingredient of the aesthetic hierarchy and a critical component of the scoring of race. The inherently circular logic this demands is evident in the fact that music is declared as the art of sound in which the end-in-itself of the medium is that sound.56 Music is made the privileged medium of emotion, of the ‘soul,’ but its lack of connection to ideas renders it a debased form fit only to accompany what is important: poetry or thought. Having established the singularly unthinking quality of music, its status as a source of entertainment can finally be reaffirmed. As it had been in Plato (though still viewed with significant skepticism), and

55

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel: The Oxford University Press Translations, Electronic Edition, trans. T. M. Knox (Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corp, 2000), 626. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 56 A claim that will extend into contemporary discussions of music such as Vladimir Jankélévich’s Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), which continues to invest in the idea of music as incapable of signification – which, of course, demands a precise idea of what music is – that which, like the other, cannot signify.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 21

10/05/2017 09:09

22

Scoring Race

certainly in Aristotle, music slowly evolves towards a leisurely accompaniment to the activity of day-to-day life, as a soundtrack: For the same sort of reason, the disorderly restlessness of a lot of people in a restaurant and the unsatisfying excitement it causes is burdensome; this walking to and fro, this clattering and chattering should be regulated, and since in the intervals of eating and drinking we have to do with empty time, this emptiness should be filled. This is an occasion, like so many others, when music comes to the rescue and in addition wards off other thoughts, distractions, and ideas. (907)

Any apparent fear that remained in Kant (the invasive music of youth) is now made the counterpoint to the sound of dishes while dining out.57 Musicians have been neatly relegated to the role of entertainers and music itself a distraction from the graver thoughts of profound minds.58 Indeed, to invest music with any degree of force indicates a retrogression that is anathema to the dialectical principle of historical progress, and musicians themselves are unlikely to contribute much of substance because, once again, musicians ‘are frequently the most unintelligent of men’ (930). The point of departure of music is the representation of the most basic – pre-linguistic – emotional phenomena: ‘the natural cry of feeling, e.g., the scream of horror, the sobbing of grief, the triumphal shout and thrills of exultant pleasure and joyfulness, etc.’ (938). Music is the artistic representation of the emotional realm before language intervenes, and is tempered for consumption in symbolic fashion but without any signification. For this reason, every nation that has produced art of any value has produced poetry. Africa, as famously ‘outside of history,’ has not produced poetry, but nothing in Hegel’s Aesthetics suggests it cannot have produced music. It would be difficult to speak of music and philosophy without discussing Arthur Schopenhauer’s rejection of the Hegelian model. For Schopenhauer,

57

‘Over and above all this, music has a certain lack of urbanity about it. For owing chiefly to the character of its instruments, it scatters its influence abroad to an uncalled for extent (through the neighborhood) and thus as it were becomes obtrusive and deprives others outside the musical circle of their freedom. This is a thing that the arts that address themselves to the eye do not do, for if one is not disposed to give admittance to their impressions, one has only to look the other way. The case is almost on a par with the practice of regaling oneself with a perfume that exhales its odors far and wide.’ Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 196. 58 ‘I recall, for instance, that in my youth a virtuoso on the guitar had composed great battle music in a tasteless way for this trivial instrument. By trade he was, I think, a linen-weaver; if you addressed him, he was an ignorant man of few words. But when he started to play, you forgot the tastelessness of the composition, just as he forgot himself and produced marvellous effects because he put into his instrument his whole soul which, as it were, knew no higher execution than the one that made these notes resound on this instrument’ (Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel, 957). Here the difference Hegel evokes is of class, yet the instrument, the guitar, hints at the foreign (southern) influence that is latent throughout his text in terms of musicality.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 22

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

23

poetry is once again the ‘revelation of the Idea’59 and through language delivers self-consciousness: in creating, the poet ‘becomes conscious of himself as the subject of pure, will-less knowing’ (323). Where Schopenhauer differs from his predecessors is regarding poetry’s function. The self-reflection at the heart of Hegel’s triumphant phenomenology is instead pessimistically confronted with a perennially frustrated will: the poet’s ‘will-less knowing’ ‘appears, in contrast to the stress of desire which is always restricted and always needy’ (323).60 The will’s desire for boundless expansion always runs headlong into its finitude, and in this, poetry is a perennially frustrated and frustrating art. Thus, in a significant reversal of values, whereas for previous thinkers poetry could salvage music from its nomadic wanderings, here it is music which can, in a limited sense, salvage the stymied willfulness of poetry. Whereas for previous thinkers the addition of poetry proved only a partial solution to music’s deficiencies (an inadequate compromise in which one or the other medium sacrificed its autonomy), here music can only temporarily calm the restless will but it is poetry that needs salvation. As a result, music now represents the culmination of the arts: [Music] stands alone, quite cut off from the other arts. In it we do not recognise the copy or repetition of any Idea of existence in the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly noble art, its effect on the inmost nature of man is so powerful, and it is so entirely and deeply understood by him in his inmost consciousness as a perfectly universal language, the distinctness of which surpasses even that of the perceptible world itself…. (330)

Its unique status is due not to its approach to the Idea but rather in its emancipation from it. What had made it weak in previous aesthetic systems now sets it apart from and above the other arts. Indeed, precisely because of its appeal to the sentiments, the affective sphere, it gains in clarity as ‘universal language’ that is equal to intuition.61 This reversal of values might represent a significant shift. At the same time, the problematic assumption of music’s inability to ‘think’ remains. Music is a universal language, as it were, before there is language which itself produces 59

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1910), 315. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 60 The original translation has been modified. 61 ‘Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as they are related to the particular things. Its universality, however, is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but quite of a different kind, and is united with thorough and distinct definiteness. In this respect it resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all a priori, and yet are not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly determined’ (339).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 23

10/05/2017 09:09

24

Scoring Race

and is the product of the principium individuationis, the principle of individuation. All the other arts function as a representation through the Idea of the prelapsarian will. Music returns us to the totality that precedes individuation, the universal will to which we have lost access and to which we tragically and unsuccessfully attempt to return.62 Music in this sense is the perfect analogy for being: Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself. (333)

The mystification by which music has been shaped, and the mystery in which it has been shrouded by the manner in which it has been scored throughout the history of Western aesthetics, is here used no longer to debase the medium, to subordinate it to poetry, but rather to elevate it beyond all other forms. Schopenhauer therefore anticipates how the elevation of music as a universal aesthetic medium (beyond or before language) still depends on Western aesthetics’ work of locating, of scoring music, which precedes it. In the final analysis, whether conceived as positive or negative, what is implicit from Plato through Schopenhauer is the association of music with primitive, pre-linguistic nature, for which and in which music speaks in terms that defy rationality. It is this 2,500-year-old history that, in the nineteenth century, made the essentialization of black musicality possible, with music already clearly and distinctly defined as a medium entirely subject to (rather than a subject of) a rational discourse – most explicitly, written language, the medium in which, for over two thousand years, philosophy has scored music. The ultimate move towards music’s racialization happens with Friedrich Nietzsche. From The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music onward, Nietzsche’s thought engages with music as a constructed site of alterity, beginning with the Greeks. Famously, he sees this dynamic process ‘through Apollo and Dionysus,’ the ‘two art deities of the Greeks.’63 With these two figures he first posits a ‘tremendous opposition in origin and aims between the Apollonian art of sculpture, and the nonimagistic, Dionysian art of music’ (33). The first conception of the Dionysian is, nevertheless, the tamed Greek version already mediated through Apollo – it can only hint at the barbaric origin. It is, in a word, only a ritual return, shielded from a horrific precedent. There is an ‘immense gap which separates the Dionysian Greek from the Dionysian barbarian’ (39). 62

‘This relation may be very well expressed in the language of the schoolmen by saying the concepts are the universalia post rem, but music gives the universalia ante rem, and the real world the universalia in re’ (340). 63 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 33. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 24

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

25

Indeed, across the ancient world, ‘Dionysian’ festivals, ‘raw’ Bacchic festivals, or Dionysian rites persisted throughout the Greek period, always identified with the barbarians, lower castes (who were often barbarian slaves), with women (and the dangers of the feminine), with unbridled sexuality of the most perverse nature, drunkenness, trancelike dance, and with the aulos or flutes so reviled by Plato. At the heart of the ritual was music. But what makes Nietzsche’s reading unique is that he slowly deconstructs the otherwise dialectical absorption, elevation, and taming of the Dionysian by the Apollonian Greek. First, the conflict or ‘chasm’ is, as we have already seen, never bridged over. The constitutive components remain distinct precisely because their differences cannot be erased. More powerful still is the ‘astonishment that was all the greater the more it was mingled with the shuddering suspicion that all this actually was not so very alien to him after all, in fact, that it was only his Apollonian consciousness which, like a veil, hid this Dionysian world from his vision’ (41). The Dionysian was, this suggests, not something absorbed from the outside but always present within, a constructed difference that allowed the Greeks to exclude the ‘alien’ within the ‘self ’ from themselves and then return (to) it in tamed form.64 The Birth of Tragedy continually falls prey to the demons it uncovers: the figure of Wagner and his nationalist, anti-Semitic, protofascism; Hegel’s phenomenological force; Schopehauer’s mysticism; or again, Herder’s National Aesthetic rooted in the idea of the ‘folk song.’ Nevertheless, what sets Nietzsche apart is that he moves from the local, the parochial, the ‘national’ toward a pan-human conception in which the musical reaches down within the same rather than over borders to the other. At the same time, the 64

While here we see a germinal recognition that a genealogy more effectively explains the origin of this difference than a metaphysics, it is in later works that Nietzsche will finally fully emancipate himself from the Hegelianism (and the Schopenhauerian vagaries) that continue to muddy his thinking here. Throughout The Birth of Tragedy, as if tempted by his own narrative, the author moves back and forth between a metaphysical Will to Power and the postmetaphysical Eternal Return to the primordial All that cannot be excluded, cast out, or again assigned to some putative difference, but that is always already emerging from within. The ‘horror,’ or ‘nature’s excess in pleasure, grief, and knowledge’ is not something external but rooted deep in the process of Western meaning-making, in its relentless adherence to the illusory world of rationality: ‘here penetrated, in tones ever more bewitching and alluring, the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian festival … [T]he strains [of] all of nature’s excess in pleasure, grief, and knowledge became audible, even in piercing shrieks.’ In the face of this power rising from within, ‘what [could] the psalmodizing artist of Apollo, with his phantom harpsound … mean in the face of this demonic folk-song!’ (46). The rational and irrational, the inside and outside, the construction of this binary or dialectical dynamic are the product of a particular Apollonian reflex of which the West has made itself the heir. ‘The plastic artist’ and ‘the epic poet’ are ‘absorbed in the pure contemplation of images’ whereas ‘the Dionysian musician is, without any images, himself pure primordial pain and its primordial re-echoing.’ But these figures are just that: the imposition of an Apollonian legibility, the parsing of the arts into an ‘Aesthetic’ which the Dionysian unity refuses and refutes.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 25

10/05/2017 09:09

26

Scoring Race

forces attributable to the other are clearly spelled out, culled from a history of their association with music: nature and all of the barbaric ‘orgiastic’ impulses connected to it. Where Nietzsche departs significantly is therefore in the infinite regress he operates at each point and articulation of his analysis. Thus, within categories, new categories that step over or beyond previous categories, arise: thus, he tells us that ‘we may discriminate between two main currents in the history of the language of the Greek people, according to whether their language imitated the world of image and phenomenon or the world of music’ (54). The musical is therefore no more excluded from language than Dionysus is excluded from – or alien to – the Greeks. The mystery of music as distinct is preserved. For this same reason, the ‘musical’ is not an identity-specific art but rather the reminder that life is, at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable – this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations. (58)

The agon that the history of metaphysics has constructed over the millennia is therefore ‘the veils of illusion’ that ‘action requires.’ The Greeks first, and then subsequent Western projects, have created an art ‘as a saving sorceress, expert at healing’ who ‘alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live’ (59). The problem is that the Western score that Nietzsche so effectively uncovers has its other: the African musician for whom the rationality of Apollo is systematically denied in order that the West may be free of its existential malaise.

Music, Language, and Scientific Racism If the history of philosophy has had, despite Lacoue-Labarthe’s claims to the contrary, a considerable amount to say about music (and surreptitiously, race), the ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences have as well. An extraordinary amount of work, in some cases connected to ethnomusicology, and in others to paleoanthropology (or paleomusicology), has speculated on the origins of music. Answers to the question of music’s role as an evolutionary mechanism dates back to at least Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and no doubt earlier. Most recently, texts such as Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body,65 Steven Brown’s idea of ‘Musilanguage’ (used to signify the co-evolutionary model for music), Joseph Jordania’s AVID model, 65

See Mithen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) as well as Edward H. Hagen and Peter Hammerstein, ‘Did Neanderthals and Other Early Humans Sing? Seeking the

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 26

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

27

or ‘Audio-Visual Intimidating Display,’66 or again, John Blacking’s groundbreaking How Musical is Man have all proposed various reasons for why and how music may have become such an important part of human behavior and what role it still plays today because of that original purpose. These more recent approaches to the topic, while hinting at earlier theories grounded in racialist thinking, have nevertheless avoided any suggestion that situating music on an evolutionary scale could or should be associated with a primitive racialized man. Conversely, earlier thinkers did just that. Indeed, in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin, echoing even earlier philosophical comments on the frivolity of music, noted that ‘neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of procuring musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man’ and for that reason he ranked them ‘amongst the most mysterious with which [man] is endowed.’ Music is present, he adds, ‘in men of all ages, even the most savage.’67 Darwin also underscores the connection between musicality and the lowest order of human development: ‘The musical faculties, which are not wholly deficient in any race, are capable of prompt and high development, as we see with Hottentots and Negroes, who have readily become excellent musicians.’68 Finally, closing the loop, and echoing the claims of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, among other philosophers, music is intimately bound, not with the intellect, but with emotions: musical tones and rhythms were used by the half-human progenitors of man, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited by the strongest passions. In this case, from the deeply-laid principle of inherited associations, musical tones would be likely to excite in us, in a vague and indefinite manner, the strong emotions of a long-past age.69

It is noteworthy that, contrary to the work that Darwin had done to establish the theory of natural selection, where he derived his conclusions from personally gathered samples, he instead based this aesthetic ordering in The Descent of Man on the thinking of earlier racial theorists as well as on the journals of ‘explorers’ and the writings of philosophers (such as Kant and Hegel).70 Such was the power of race, and significant in constituting this idea was the principle of music as a racially determined attribute: a component of the evolutionary Biological Roots of Music in the Territorial Advertisements of Primates, Lions, Hyenas, and Wolves,’ Musicae Scientiae 13.2 (2009): 291–320. 66 Joseph Jordania, ‘Times to Fight and Times to Relax: Singing and Humming at the Beginning of Human Evolutionary History,’ Kadmos 1 (2009): 272–7. 67 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to the Sexes (London: Clowes and Sons, 1871), 333. 68 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 334. 69 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 336–7. 70 The racial theorists on whose work Darwin drew assumed a priori the superiority of the white race and then proved the premise through various dubious methodologies such as craniometry, phrenology, etc. – methodologies similarly used to classify women as inferior.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 27

10/05/2017 09:09

28

Scoring Race

movement toward written language in which higher thought could find its permanent seat. The inspiration for such thinking did not even have to come from antipathy toward blackness: the Saint-Simonian thinkers Gustav d’Eichthal and Ismayl Urbain in their Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche [Letters on the black race and on the white race] believed in the necessary merging of the races in order to arrive at an ideal métisse culture. They nevertheless began with the idea that blacks have ‘une humanité différente de celle des blancs’ [a humanity different from that of whites].71 Further, and showing the degree to which racial and sexual orders run in tandem, in their thinking ‘la race blanche représentait le male et la race noire la femelle’ [the white race represented the male and the black race the female]. In this way, ‘l’humanité reproduisait la loi de dualité des sexes à laquelle obéissent tous les êtres organiques’ [humanity reproduced the law of the duality of sexes which all organic beings obey] (15). Accordingly, the empowerment of blackness is dependent on the idea that whites rely on the ‘développement excessif de la puissance intellectuelle’ [the excessive development of intellectual power], which needs the counterweight of ‘les vertus des noirs, leur calme, leur naïveté, leur bonté, la fraîcheur même et la délicatesse’ [the virtues of blacks, their calm, their naivety, their goodness, their innocence and delicacy]. In other words, ‘[l]a race noire c’est le monde sauvage de Rousseau, mais dépouillé de sa barbarie, et non plus substitué, mais associé au monde civilisé’ [the black race is Rousseau’s savage world, but stripped of its barbarity, and no longer substituted for, but associated with the civilized world] (16). In this scenario, therefore, ‘le noir,’ though not endowed with higher intelligence or the ability to create a technologically advanced culture, ‘possède au plus haut degré les qualités du cœur, les affections et les sentiments domestiques; il est homme d’intérieur’ [possesses to the highest degree the qualities of the heart, the affects and domestic sentiments; he is a domestic man]. And, most importantly for my own purposes, ‘il aime aussi avec passion la parure, la danse, le chant’ [he loves with passion dressing up, dancing, singing] (22). Anchoring his own thinking in ancient texts, d’Eichthal recalls that the ‘Carthaginois Hannon, dans la relation qu’il nous a laissée de sa navigation le long des côtes de l’Afrique, racontait qu’il entendait toutes les nuits des chants, et apercevait des danses sur le rivage et il en est encore de même aujourd’hui’ [the Carthaginian Hannon, in the account that he has left us of his navigations along the coast of Africa, recounted that all night he would hear songs and perceive dances on the shore, and it is still the same today]. Even in the ‘colonies, les noirs ont conservé cette passion; dès qu’ils entendent le son du tamtam, rien ne peut les retenir, et, 71

Gustav d’Eichthal and Ismayl Urbain, Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (Paris: Paulin Editeur, 1839), 14. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 28

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

29

sauf à être le lendemain meurtris de coups de fouet, ils courent danser jusqu’au matin’ [the colonies, the blacks have preserved this passion; as soon as they hear the sound of the tom-tom, nothing can hold them back, and unless they face blows from the lash the next day, they will go on dancing until morning] (28). Lest there be any doubt as to the superiority of blacks in the musical realm, d’Eichthal recounts the anecdote that ‘il faudrait faire arriver des danseurs noirs sur la scène de l’Opéra … Toutefois, je ne sais si c’est sur un théâtre fermé que les noirs doivent danser, et si un amphithéâtre ouvert, avec la perspective des champs par derrière ne conviendrait pas beaucoup mieux’ [we should have blacks on the stage of the Opera … That being said, I’m not sure it’s on a closed stage that blacks should dance, or whether an open amphitheater, with a view of the fields behind, would not be more appropriate] (29). Thus, anticipating the success that black musicians would have only a few decades later based on their ‘natural’ proclivity for the musical, Gustav d’Eichthal already imagines black performers on the French stage. There were many other texts arguing a similar position, though one less radically utopian. An early translation of Richard Burton’s The Lake Regions of Central Africa provided an equally salient description very much in keeping with this same logic: Africans … soon become too tired to work, but not too tired to play and amuse themselves. Their style of saltation is remarkable only for the excessive gravity which it induces; at no other time does the East African look so serious, so full of earnest purpose. Sometimes a single dancer, the village buffoon, foots a pas seul, featly, with head, arms, and legs, bearing strips of hair-garnished cow-skin, which are waved, jerked, and contorted, as if dislocation had occurred to his members. At other times, a line or a circle of boys and men is formed near the fire, and one standing in the centre, intones the song solo, the rest humming a chorus in an undertone. The dancers plumbing and tramping to the measure with alternate feet, simultaneously perform a tread mill exercise with a heavier stamp at the end of every period: they are such timists, that a hundred pair of heels sound like one. [T]hey bend and recover themselves, and they stoop and rise to the redoubled sound of the song and the heel-music … The performance often closes with a grand promenade; all the dancers being jammed in a rushing mass, a galop infernal, with the features of satyrs, and gestures resembling aught but the human. [T]he song dies, and the performers, with loud shouts of laughter, throw themselves on the ground.72 72

Sir Richard Francis Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, A Picture of Exploration (New York: Harper, 1860), 248–9. There are numerous passages throughout the text on musical practices. Indeed, it is one of the most singular cultural expressions of African ‘natives’ of which he makes any real detailed note. Excerpts of the complete text (including the passages cited) appeared in translation in the collection of travel texts Le tour du monde: Nouveau journal des voyages (Paris: Hachette, 1860) as Voyages aux grands lacs de l’Afrique occidentale.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 29

10/05/2017 09:09

30

Scoring Race

The mention of the satyrical frenzy is one more reminder of the logical threads that assure the coherence and resiliency of musical blackness. The entire scene is grounded in the Greek conception of the musical, of its origins in the barbarian Bacchic rituals. The substitution of the black other for the barbarian is evident and seamlessly applied to the black subject. Contemporaneously with Darwin, Louis Figuier in Les Races humaines follows a very similar line of reasoning: Yet this imitative faculty, inherent to blacks, does not go so far as to endow them with any artistic talents. Drawing, painting, and sculpture are unknown to Negroes, and it is impossible to infuse into them the smallest capacity for such subjects, either by lesson or advice. Their temples and dwellings are, in fact, only decorated with shapeless scratches. Africans of the present day are utterly unskilled in drawing and sculpture.73

First, as has now been reiterated in myriad ways, across several centuries, though with increasing precision and vehemence in the nineteenth century, he holds that black people are incapable of great accomplishments, whether intellectual, technological, or artistic. Nevertheless, there is one domain in which they retain a relative degree of success, prowess even: Negroes, if thus obtuse to the plastic arts, are, on the contrary, very easily affected by music and poetry. They sing odd and expressive recitatives at their festivals and sports, and in some Negro kingdoms a caste of singers is even to be met with, which is alleged to be hereditary, and whose members are also at the same time the chroniclers of the tribe.74

The notion of poetry is, it should be clear, intimately connected to the musical and is entirely separate from the work of reason. Should there be any doubt, the rest of this passage focuses on the purely musical aspect of the performances being depicted, without any mention of the role as historian that the griot – the obvious reference – might play. Thus, Musical instruments are rather plentiful among the Africans. In addition to the drum, which holds so prominent a place in the music of the Arabs, they use flutes, triangles, bells, and even stringed instruments, with from eight to seventeen strings, the latter being supplied from the tail of the elephant. They also possess instruments, fashioned from the rind of cucumbers, forming a sort of rude harp. The Madigoes, who live on the banks of the Senegal, about the middle of its course, have a species of clarionet [sic], from four to five yards long.75 73

Louis Figuier, The Human Races, ed. Robert Wilson (Paris, New York, and London: Cassell and Co., 1875), 582. 74 Figuier, Human Races, 582. 75 Figuier, Human Races, 582.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 30

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

31

In this case, what is striking is that the musical development of the black subject surpasses even the exemplary Greek model – though this concession only comes with the assumption of music’s ultimately secondary status: The music of the Negroes is not confined, it may be remarked, to simple melody. They are not satisfied with merely playing the notes sung by the voice, but have some principles of harmony. They perform accompaniments in fourths, sixths, and octaves, the other musical intervals being less familiar to them, except when sometimes employed to express irony or censure. The advanced state of music amidst the Negro tribes is all the more noticeable from the fact that among ancient European races, among the ancient Greeks, at the most brilliant epoch of their history, for instance, no idea whatever prevailed of harmony in music.76

Explorers’ comments on the musicality of blacks is further supported by the voices of missionaries. Fathers Baur and Alfred le Roy, in their A travers le Zanguebar, repeating a now familiar saw, commented that Chez les noirs, la musique est en honneur. D’abord on chante, et, chose curieuse, du sud au nord, de l’est à l’ouest, l’air est partout toujours le même, partout et toujours plaintif, nasillard, languissant, mélancolique et monotone. On dirait un peuple qui soupire, et qui attend, qui soupire après sa liberté, qui attend sa délivrance.77 [Among the blacks, music is held in high esteem. First one sings, and strangely enough, from south to north, from east to west, the melody is always the same, always and again plaintive, nasal, languid, melancholy, and monotononous. It feels like a people who are sighing, and that waits, that yearns for its liberty, that awaits deliverance.]

Returning us to the deeper implications of the aesthetic order, the reverend Fathers posit the inferiority of blacks with respect to the visual and plastic arts (the art of writing is here not considered at all, so obvious is their deficiency in this respect) while underscoring the deeper implications of the aesthetic order within which they are speculating: Par ailleurs, les arts de la sculpture et du dessin sont tout à fait dans l’enfance, capables seulement de quelques enjolivements grossiers; il est très rare de trouver un noir qui soit en état de tracer une ligne droite. Faut-il conclure de là que, dans l’échelle de la civilisation, la musique, au-dessous, est l’art le plus naturel, et la peinture, au-dessus, l’art le plus difficile?78

76

Figuier, Human Races, 583. Père Baur and Père Alfred le Roy, A travers le Zanguebar (Paris: Mame et Fils, 1899). 78 Baur and le Roy, A travers le Zanguebar, 315–16. 77

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 31

10/05/2017 09:09

32

Scoring Race

[Other than that, the arts of sculpture and drawing are in their absolute infancy, only capable of a few rudimentary decorations; it is very rare to find a black person who is capable of drawing a straight line. Should we conclude from that that, on the ladder of civilization, music, at the bottom, is the most natural art and painting, at the top, is the most difficult among the arts?]

By definition, because it is the art of blackness, the art in which blacks excel, it must be the most primitive of arts. The circularity of the logic undergirding the racial paradigm and the role that music plays in it could not be more eloquently expressed. While each of these texts is representative of a particular modality or strand of the scoring of race, that is, the marshaling of black musicality in the name of economic, spiritual, or ethnographic interests, one thinker in particular, perhaps more than any other, theorizes and formalizes this epistemological link between music and blackness. Sarga Moussa, in ‘Le langage des Noirs dans l’“Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines” de Gobineau: Sensation et création’ [‘The language of the blacks’ in the “Essay on the Inequality among the Human Races” by Gobineau: Sensation and creation’] provides a deeply nuanced picture of the infamous Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s racial theory and the place of music within it.79 Gobineau, according to Moussa, is not simply the extreme racial ideologist that history has made him. First, Gobineau’s views ‘pouvait prendre appui sur un discours “scientifique”’ [could rely on a ‘scientific’ discourse] such as that of Virey, who in his Histoire naturelle du genre humain [Natural history of the human genus] (1824) ‘explique que le Noir constitue une sorte d’intermédiaire entre l’orang-outang et le Blanc’ [explains that the black man constitutes a kind of intermediary between the orangutan and the white man]. More specifically, Virey argues that ‘les nègres sont de grands enfants’ [negroes are just big children]. The specificity of this term is of particular interest: ‘Entendons le terme dans son sens étymologique: in-fans, qui ne parle pas. Ou plus exactement: qui n’a pas les mêmes capacités linguistiques que les Blancs’ [Let us understand the term in its etymological sense: in-fans, who doesn’t speak. Or more precisely, who doesn’t have the same linguistic capacity as the whites].80 Yet there is an important difference in the two approaches: where Virey ‘reconnaissait que les Noirs étaient sensibles à la musique, c’était pour dévaloriser aussitôt celle-ci’ [recognized that blacks were sensitive to music, he was just as quick to devalorize it] and to ‘affirmer, pour faire bonne mesure, qu’ils n’ont “point d’art, point d’invention”’ [affirm, just to round things out, that they have ‘no art or invention’]. For Gobineau, on the other hand, ‘le talent musical qu’il leur attribue est 79

Sarga Moussa, ‘Le langage des Noirs dans l’“Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines” de Gobineau: Sensation et création,’ in Wort Macht Stamm: Rassismus und Determinismus in der Philologie, ed. Markus Messling and Ottmar Ette (Munich: Fink, 2013): 227–38. 80 Moussa, ‘Le langage’, 228.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 32

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

33

la contrepartie de leur faiblesse cognitive supposée’ [the musical talent that he attributes to them is the counterpart to their supposed cognitive deficiencies]. That is, the ‘in-fantile’ state of blackness that prevents speech makes music the (pre-adult) ‘speech’ of blackness. In making these remarks, Moussa is referring to the passage in Gobineau’s text when the ‘Comte’ remarks: Parmi tous les arts que la créature mélanienne préfère, la musique tient la première place, en tant qu’elle caresse son oreille par une succession de sons, et qu’elle ne demande rien à la partie pensante de son cerveau. Le nègre l’aime beaucoup, il en jouit avec excès; pourtant, combien il reste étranger à ces conventions délicates par lesquelles l’imagination européenne a appris à ennoblir les sensations!81 [Among all the arts that the Melanian creature prefers, music is the most important, insofar as it caresses his ear with a succession of sounds and that it demands nothing of the thinking part of his brain. The Negro loves it, partakes of it excessively; yet, how distant he remains from the delicate conventions through which the European imagination has learned to ennoble sensations.]

In sum, contrary to today’s general reception of Gobineau, particularly because of his recuperation by the Nazis, he in fact allowed for an important contribution on the part of blackness: music. Nevertheless, the manifestation of this musical force, and its Apollonian appearance – to borrow Nietzschean imagery – could only take form with the assistance of the white intellect, without which the pre-linguistic musical genius of blackness could, like the resources of the African continent itself, never be exploited. Robert Dreyfus, in his 1905 La Vie et les prophéties du comte de Gobineau, identified this feature of the thinker’s system and brought the logic into the twentieth century. Citing Paul Adam, for whom ‘[p]resque tout les nègres ont l’oreille juste’ [almost all negroes possess a good ear], Dreyfus tells us: Rien n’étonne plus que d’entendre une matrone adipeuse assise sur la marche d’un humble seuil, chanter en épluchant des légumes. De cette masse informe couleur de gourdon, une voix délicieuse, cristalline, s’échappe, enchante. Les chœurs de noirs exécutent des symphonies avec un ensemble parfait. Et cela leur est naturel, spontané. M. Booker Washington, ses émules prépareraient certainement à leurs congénères des fonctions sortables, s’ils fondaient, par toute l’Amérique, des écoles spéciales de musique. Bien plus, en cultivant ce don évident et presque unanime, des pédagogues adroits inculqueraient vite à ce peuple le goût d’un art subtil, très

81

Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Paris: Éditions Pierre Belfond, 1967), vol. I, 474.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 33

10/05/2017 09:09

34

Scoring Race

éducateur de la mentalité. Le sensualisme de la race aiderait fort le développement du goût musical.82 [Nothing is more astonishing than to hear an adipose matron sitting at the door of a humble threshold singing and peeling vegetables. From this shapeless mass, the color of pitch, rises a delicate, crystalline voice that enchants. Black choruses perform symphonies in perfect unity. And, for them it’s natural, spontaneous. Booker Washington and his acolytes would do well by their fellow men if they founded special musical schools in America. Moreover, in cultivating this evident and most universal gift, adroit pedagogues would quickly inculcate in this people the taste for a subtle art that also educates the mind. The sensualism of the race would be a great help in developing musical taste.]

‘N’est-ce pas là du pur Gobineau’ [Isn’t that pure Gobineau], Dreyfus asks. Aside from the building refinement of the black musical stereotype, what is also noteworthy is how its genealogy becomes accordingly complex. That is, for Dreyfus, Gobineau impacts the thinking of a broad range of thinkers, from such early twentieth-century writers as Paul Adam, cited here, to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose predecessors also clearly impacted Gobineau’s thinking – thus demonstrating the movement of ideas on the topic across disciplines. Having turned his back on Wagner (and commenting on Bizet’s Carmen – to which I will return in my final chapter), Dreyfus cites Nietzsche (The Case of Wagner), stating: Ici, s’exprime une sensualité différente, une autre gaieté. Cette musique est gaie; mais non pas d’une gaieté française ou allemande. Sa gaieté est vraiment africaine … Bizet est enviable pour avoir eu le courage de cette sensibilité qui n’avait pas jusqu’alors trouvé d’expression dans la musique de l’Europe civilisée, – je peux dire cette sensibilité méridionale, cuivrée, ardente.83 [Here, a different kind of sensuality expresses itself, another kind of gaiety. This music is gay; but not a French or German gaiety. Its gaiety is truly African … Bizet is enviable for having had the courage of this sensibility which had not previously found expression in the music of civilized Europe – I can say, this southern, brassy, ardent sensibility.]

Dreyfus finishes this citation of Nietzsche by adding, ‘pour un peu, Nietzsche eût ajouté: cette sensibilité nègre’ [a little more, and Nietzsche would have added, 82

Paul Adam in Le Temps, September 21, 1904, cited by Robert Dreyfus, La Vie et les prophéties du comte de Gobineau (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1905), 123–4. This translation comes from an anthologized fragment of this essay in Jack D. Flam and Miriam Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2003), 157–8. 83 Dreyfus, La Vie, 158.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 34

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

35

this negro sensibility]. Thus, Dreyfus works Gobineau into Nietzsche, thickening the racial discourse of music, settling the score in an ever increasingly complex manner that merges sciences including philosophy, ethnology, and others. In sum, the entire apparatus of Western thought from the Greeks onward fed this racial machine that scored the musicality of blackness in a manner that determined in the most precise terms how black jazz musicians would be received by French intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. As Moussa concludes, anticipating my own argument: Même inférieurs aux Blancs, les Noirs de ‘l’Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines’ restent dotés d’une irréductible spécificité, sans laquelle il n’y aurait tout simplement pas d’art possible. Ce raisonnement est sans doute fortement dérangeant, car il part de prémisses racistes (les Noirs seraient des êtres de pure sensation) pour aboutir à une intuition opposée – comme si Gobineau anticipait imaginairement la découverte de l’«art nègre», ou, pour rester dans le domaine de la musique, le blues, le jazz, dont les cultures occidentales du 20ème siècle vont être innervées.84 [Even while inferior to whites, the blacks of The Inequality of the Human Races retain an irreducible specificity without which no art would be possible. There is no doubt that this reasoning is profoundly disturbing, for it departs from a racist premise (blacks are beings of pure sensation) to arrive at the completely opposite intuition – as if Gobineau had already imagined the discovery of ‘negro art’ or, to remain in the realm of music, the blues and jazz, by which the cultures of the twentieth century would be invigorated.]

Moussa’s comment clearly sees nineteenth-century scientific racism as writing (or arranging) the score that the twentieth-century French reception of jazz would follow. As the brief history of philosophy’s engagement with music showed, nineteenth-century racist theories that connected music with blackness were prepared by Western aesthetics’ persistent merging of music and difference.

France, Jazz, and the Racial Score That France was the site of a massive jazz craze between the wars is common knowledge. That this reception of jazz was also fueled by a particular historical moment – following the First World War – is likewise well known. Indeed, an ever-growing number of studies has emerged commenting on this particular period and the role that jazz played in it. Not surprisingly, these studies identify – and to varying degrees seek to explain – the central role of jazz in the Parisian phenomenon of the ‘tumulte noir.’ That France provided a warm welcome to 84

Moussa, ‘Le langage,’ 10–11.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 35

10/05/2017 09:09

36

Scoring Race

jazz from the First World War onward is undeniable. Indeed, one of the very first serious jazz critics was the Frenchman Hugues Panassié (1912–74).85 Many other critics, such as Charles Delaunay (1911–88), André Hodeir (1921–2011), and Boris Vian (1920–59), followed, and there was, throughout the twentieth century, a rich line of communication between jazz and the intellectual classes. The process of jazz’s definition or capture by this intellectual class involved the creation of a field of knowledge, a series of carefully guarded terms that would define the music. What these precise terms were was subject to serious debate. But their existence, that is, the possibility of defining the music as a series of practices and practitioners, was not. This field of knowledge shared by those white critics and fans in the know constitute(d) what, throughout this study, I will be developing as the jazz shibboleth: a secret agreement by which the terms of jazz’s orthodoxy, its boundaries, are determined, always in a manner in which race – its importance as a central condition for the music’s authenticity – plays a central role. But before turning to the central role of critics in constituting the jazz shibboleth, it should be noted that two important texts have recently focused attention on the experience of the musicians – French and African-American alike – who made the music. Tom Perchard’s After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France (2015) performs the important task of departing from the extensive archive of critical texts on jazz, and looking to the musicians themselves and their experience of the music. Perchard’s book looks most closely at French musicians and how they transformed jazz, molding it to better suit their own performance needs and traditions. Equally significant is Rashida Braggs’s Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris (2016), which culls information from interviews, archives, and correspondence to create a powerful picture of the experience of African-American jazz musicians in Paris after the war. What is most striking (and important) in this latter book is that it demonstrates how performers understood the score they had to follow, and documents the various ways in which they resisted, played along, and/or tactically bent it – or (rarely) remained ignorant of it. In this sense, it is the agency of the musician, so consistently denied throughout the critical history on music (and its treatment by philosophy), that comes across. Having acknowledged the importance of these two works in this regard, it should also be noted that the present study focuses on the specifically literary response to jazz – first by French authors, and subsequently, by African authors and filmmakers. For that reason, they will remain peripheral references while retaining their roles as healthy reminders of the difference between the musicians who were engaged in the various musical practices that came under the rubric ‘jazz,’ and the critical 85

Most notably with his famous Jazz Hot (Paris: Corrêa, 1934).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 36

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

37

apparatus, the exclusionary shibboleth, that was generated by the intellectual class to circumscribe or delimit these practices. What will be most relevant are the many studies that have looked at the intellectual reception of jazz among authors and critics throughout the twentieth century, across the political spectrum, and from a vast array of disciplines. Among the very first to systematically track that evolution was Ludovic Tournès in his 1999 study New Orleans sur Seine: Histoire du jazz en France.86 Tournès here establishes the broad historical parameters and important players on the Parisian jazz scene. He breaks this history into distinct periods and each phase is, in turn, punctuated by important moments and critical interventions: for example, Jean Cocteau’s famous Le Coq et l’arlequin, which contrasted this new music to the heavy-handedness of the Wagnerian tradition then in vogue.87 Jazz thus gained traction as the avant-garde increasingly welcomed it. Josephine Baker’s 1925 Revue nègre began the popularization of the music, its passage from an elite plaything into a widely consumed product. Further, Ce qui fait le succès de la Revue nègre, c’est son caractère nègre justement : première revue entièrement noire à se produire à Paris, elle est un évènement important dans l’histoire de l’acculturation du jazz en France car elle met en avant, pour la première fois de manière aussi nette, le lien entre le jazz et la négritude.88 [What assures the success of the Revue nègre is precisely its ‘nègre’ character: the first entirely black review to be staged in Paris, it is an important event in the acculturation of jazz in France, for it puts forward, for the first time in a clear manner, the link between jazz and blackness.]

Thus, with the Revue nègre, jazz becomes the focal point of racializing, of a scoring, that gains further momentum in the discussions of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ jazz, particularly in the hands of Hugues Panassié, against whom Tournès expends considerable critical energy. It could be said that Panassié is the first critic to clearly articulate the conditions and contours of the jazz shibboleth. His organization, le Hot Club de France, was a means of differentiating those in the know from the heathen or uninitiated in a manner that resembled a cult or, again, a political movement. Indeed, speaking of Panassié’s seminal Hot Jazz (1934), which posited black improvised music as the only authentic jazz, Tournès says: outre son climat religieux, certains des thèmes développés rejoignent tout à fait, par un chemin détourné, le discours pétainiste. Panassié fait notamment l’éloge de 86

Ludovic Tournès, New Orleans sur Seine: Histoire du jazz en France (Paris: Fayard, 1999). See also Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 87 Tournès, New Orleans sur Seine, 118. 88 Tournès, New Orleans sur Seine, 25.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 37

10/05/2017 09:09

38

Scoring Race

la culture orale qui s’est perdue en Occident à l’époque moderne, mais que les musiciens de jazz remettent à l’honneur en se transmettant de génération en génération cette musique non écrite.89 [Aside from its religious undertone, certain of the themes that are developed recall without a doubt, through an obscure logic, the Pétainiste discourse. Most notably, Panassié celebrates the oral culture that had been lost in Europe during the modern period, but which jazz musicians celebrate by transmitting this unwritten music from generation to generation.]

That is, in different terms, Panassié systematically deploys the constitutive elements of racial scoring identified in the philosophical tradition and distilled in nineteenth-century race theory while using this to bring together a particular group of (white) fans. Tournès in turn, quite rightly, identifies this as a cryptofascist current running through Panassié’s thinking – though jazz’s racial scoring was hardly the exclusive property of France’s radical right. The major move against Panassié’s overtly racialist – not to say racist – score occurred after the Second World War with the emergence of critics such as Charles Delaunay, André Hodeir, Boris Vian, and Lucien Malson (1926–), who moved away from an essential racialization of the music: ‘A la culture catholique et maurrassienne de Panassié s’opposent l’existentialisme et surtout l’anthropologie culturelle américaine qui nourrissent la réflexion du jeune Malson.’ [To Panassié’s Catholic and Maurrassian culture are opposed existentialism and in particular the American cultural anthropology that nourishes the young Malson’s thinking].90 Malson, in particular, attempts to de-racialize the music by showing how social conditions dictated the production of jazz. Others, such André Hodeir, argue that jazz is not a vulgar genre but has preserved the elements that, since Beethoven and the increasing rigidity of the classical score, Western music has lost. In sum, ‘Hodeir dresse un parallèle entre l’évolution musicale de la musique noire américaine et les stades successifs de la musique européenne depuis le polyphone médiévale.’ [Hodeir establishes a parallel between the evolution of black American music and the various stages of European music since medieval polyphony].91 Importantly, despite the shifting motivation, Tournès identifies a persistent primitivism that crosses the boundary between Panassié’s quasi-racial biologism to existentialist explanations for jazz’s conflation with ‘natural performance.’ For example, painter Jacques Doucet (1924–74), recalling the CoBrA movement created in Saint-Germain-des-Près in 1948, writes:

89

Tournès, New Orleans sur Seine, 79. Tournès, New Orleans sur Seine, 114. 91 Tournès, New Orleans sur Seine, 265. 90

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 38

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

39

Durant l’époque Cobra … j’ai peint des œuvres concernant le monde du jazz. Cette musique intuitive jouant sur les sens était proche de mes recherches et participait beaucoup plus aux options instinctives et anti-intellectualistes de notre mouvement … Elle correspondait à mes préoccupations picturales, enfin mes besoins d’homme: une espèce de virulence et d’archaïsme populaire.92 [During the Cobra period … I painted works that concerned the jazz world. This intuitive music that played on the senses was close to my own research and participated far more in the instinctive and anti-intellectual options of our movement … It corresponded to my own pictorial preoccupations, well, my human needs: a kind of virulence and popular archaism.]

Thus, despite the racial score’s apparent abandonment, a persistent, though newly ‘existential,’ racialism continues to haunt the reception of jazz. Indeed, whereas more reactionary traditions ground race in a biological determinism whose explanation ultimately demands little beyond the ‘fact’ of difference, the sociological turn invites an active process of scoring, since the explanation of jazz’s ‘intuitiveness,’ ‘anti-intellectualism,’ ‘virulence,’ and ‘popular archaism,’ all terms that carry over from the philosophical considerations of music, demand an ongoing narrative justification. Finally, in the 1960s, the discourse surrounding jazz began to reflect the increasing political radicalization of the era. Yet as Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli’s Free Jazz/Black Power shows, there continues to be an underlying investment in a black authenticity, now ideological rather than existential (or previously, biologically/racial) that troubles the function of jazz in the French imaginary – that is, that continues to adhere to an ever-evolving and endlessly insidious racial score. In the process, while some of the boundaries are shifted (making way, for example, for newer experimental forms, first bebop, then free jazz), the principle of a jazz shibboleth remains: there are those (white artists, critics, and fans) who know and appreciate the ‘true’ music; and there are those who do not. That this shibboleth should become increasingly defined in overtly ideological terms does little to change its existence; nor does it ultimately diminish its investment in racialist principles. Tournés’s New Orleans sur Seine is likewise preoccupied with the function of race in the French reception of jazz. Nevertheless, his book is principally a historiography of the phenomenon that notes important names and dates without going into extensive discussions about the social context of reception or the intellectual history behind it. Subsequent books increasingly try to rectify this by teasing out the particular mechanisms, the ideological and intellectual conditions, that made jazz so appealing. Picking up on the thesis proposed by 92

Tournès, New Orleans sur Seine, 315, citing Jacques Doucet, ‘Jazz in Co.br.a.,’ Jazz Hot 407 (January/February 1984): 22–5.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 39

10/05/2017 09:09

40

Scoring Race

William H. Kenny in his article ‘Le Hot: The Assimilation of American Jazz in France, 1917–1940,’ Jeffrey Jackson’s 2003 Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris does just that.93 He follows first how ‘jazz music symbolized the influence that mobile “foreigners” were thought to be having on France in the years after World War I.’94 The ‘making French’ of jazz was, according to Jackson, therefore simultaneously an aesthetic incorporation but also a debate, with resonances to this day, about the degree to which the ‘other’ could be incorporated into the national ‘self.’ Further, the specificity of jazz as an American export dominated by African-Americans and identified with ‘primitivism’ also left it as a site for France’s negotiations with a particular conception of modernity: ‘jazz was an American music and simultaneously, as the French called it, une musique nègre.’95 The Swiss composer Ernest Ansermet (1883–1969) makes clear that, from the earliest discussions of the music, jazz was perceived as ‘somehow ancient, and its black essence … present long before the 1920s.’ In addition, ‘a truly authentic jazz band was, in most cases, presumed to consist only of musicians with dark skin.’96 Nevertheless, according to Jackson, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the music became increasingly absorbed into the musical practices of white musicians, thereby becoming a ‘French’ music. In the process, as more French musicians absorbed the idiom, jazz also became the privileged musical expression of an intellectual and artistic elite. This artistic and intellectual class often continued to claim the primacy or authenticity of the black performers while also seeing in the music an immediate vehicle or cipher for American industrial might. From the earliest moments of ‘contact’ during and immediately after the First World War, jazz became a touchstone for a particular conception of modernity such as that expressed by those like the Surrealist Philippe Soupault, who ‘saw in American films and jazz a celebration of life.’97 For them, jazz in particular was ‘a crucial part of American culture and a way to get at the more authentic essence of the United States.’98 These same intellectuals often saw a ‘pronounced emotionalism within jazz along with a kind of sadness and melancholy in the music due to the history of black Americans.’99 In a word, jazz was identified with ‘négritude,’ or racial blackness. Thus, Jackson cites musicologist Julien Tiersot’s claim that ‘Les peuples nègres [black 93

See William H. Kenny, ‘Le Hot: The Assimilation of American Jazz in France, 1917–1940,’ American Studies 25.1 (1984): 5–24, and Jeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 94 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 4. 95 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 72. 96 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 26. See also Ernest Ansermet, ‘Sur un orchestre nègre’, La Revue Normande 10 (1919): 10–13. 97 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 80. 98 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 81. 99 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 87.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 40

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

41

peoples] are particularly known for being endowed with a musical aptitude.’100 Indeed, ‘many commentators made the music an emanation of the black soul – “l’âme nègre,” in the words of music critic René Dumesnil and others.’101 They also frequently thought jazz was ‘the music of exiles whose real home was Africa, and depicting jazz as nostalgic emphasized the essential racial nature of the music.’102 Likewise, for many, ‘jazz was about feeling rather than reason’ and ‘black American musicians were in touch with the more emotional side of human experience.’103 Another famous intellectual and Surrealist artist of the period, Michel Leiris, thought that ‘cultures outside Europe’ and jazz in particular, ‘offered the hope of regenerating a seemingly dead Western imagination.’104 Leiris ‘coupled the search for new artistic inspiration in the postwar years with the belief that jazz drew from a timeless and transcendent culture of black people.’105 For his part, Jean Cocteau ‘invoked the animal, wild, and noisy side of the music.’106 Others, less inclined to the music, thought that ‘playing jazz as the black musicians did … constituted a step backward and away from civilization toward the jungles.’107 In sum, ‘observers of jazz perceived blackness as a biological category that produced cultural manifestations.’ Further, ‘musical qualities like rhythm emanated from supposedly inborn traits, even though the unique history of African-Americans had played a role shaping how jazz developed and sounded.’108 Finally, Jackson concludes, ‘the actual portrait of jazz’ as primitive, racially other, noisy, and rhythmically barbaric was ‘not nearly as contested as its potential consequences and the larger issues for which jazz became a symbol.’109 If the ‘avant-garde’ began to lose interest as they perceived the music to be working its way into the mainstream, the discussion was taken up by others who claimed to be concerned with what constituted the authentic form of jazz. The racialist traditionalist critic Hugues Panassié was among the first to argue that the only true jazz was the improvised or ‘hot’ jazz whose roots could be traced to New Orleans. Those who came to love ‘hot’ jazz were especially impressed with its supposed blackness, and ‘reemphasized the African-American origins of jazz music at a time when white musicians were more clearly in vogue.’110 100

Quoted from the introduction to Julien Tiersot’s collection Chanson nègres (1933), which brought together music of old tunes from black America, Africa, and Oceania. Jackson, Making Jazz French, 89. 101 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 89. 102 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 90. 103 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 93. 104 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 94. 105 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 100. 106 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 103. 107 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 96. 108 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 97. 109 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 103. 110 Jackson, Making Jazz French, 155.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 41

10/05/2017 09:09

42

Scoring Race

­ anassié, in particular, ‘depicted real jazz as something transcendent and spirP itual precisely because of its origins with black Americans.’ The problem was that ‘his explanation of why black people were so good at making music were rarely more concrete than an insistence on innate racial qualities.’111 Matthew F. Jordan, in Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (2010), continuing Jackson’s critical focus, locates particular constitutive tropes in jazz’s reception and follows them historically, through the intellectual and critical tradition. Beginning with the premise ‘that there is an analogous relationship between the ritualized utterances about French popular culture and the underlying ideologies of that culture,’ Jordan posits three standard themes in French discourse on jazz: how it feeds an imaginary conception of what France really is; the idea of black primitiveness used to either justify the elimination or construction of an ‘other’ to French identity; and a fascination with all things American and their potential threat to French tradition.112 Jordan therefore sees jazz as participating in an ‘epideictic discourse’ in which jazz is used to locate and consolidate a range of French values. This is a particularly useful idea because it underscores the verbal proliferation that takes place around jazz: to the extent that jazz has importance within the French imaginary, it is because of its ability to generate critical language in which French subjectivity emerges in direct proportion to the evanescence of black subjectivity. Just as importantly, this discursive amplification can happen within both positive and negative discourses on jazz and blackness. In all cases, it revolves around a certain kind of discursive mastery of, or knowledge about, the music that constitutes the jazz shibboleth. Ernest Ansermet, for example, becomes one of the important touchstones for Jordan’s vectoring of discourses on French identity and jazz. In contrast with many conservative music critics who placed European music on a pedestal, Ansermet saw jazz as equaling European music in its sincerity, nobility, and courage without being dominated by the ‘idea’ of music. As such, jazz did not strictly follow musical logic: these ‘authentic musicians of the nègre race’ never used scores and ‘never played a song the same way twice.’113 Further, the appropriative ‘spirit’ of black musicians, he believed, was an extension of an original ‘African’ musical taste that manifested itself as a kind of nostalgic force.114 At the same time, as Jordan makes clear, Ansermet’s enthusiastic embrace of jazz can only occur within an equation in which his linguistic (that is, critical) support pushes the ‘nègre’ musician away from language and toward an innate or atavistic musicality. In a similarly positive vein, the Surrealist Belgian poet 111

Jackson, Making Jazz French, 175. Jordan, Le Jazz, 6. 113 Jordan, Le Jazz, 50; Ansermet, ‘Sur un orchestre nègre’. 114 Jordan, Le Jazz, 51; Ansermet, ‘Sur un orchestre nègre’. 112

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 42

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

43

Robert Goffin (1898–1984) viewed ‘the simplicity of jazz, in contrast to intellectualized high culture music,’ as ‘a cure for what ailed post-war European art and culture.’115 Once again, as had been posited more or less overtly throughout the history of philosophy’s treatment of music, the musician’s genius demands that it remain entirely unselfconscious, not ‘intellectualized.’ As such, the jazz shibboleth is, in principle at least, a fundamentally white disciplinary instrument. At the center of Jordan’s thesis is ultimately what he productively calls the ‘discursive dissonance’ surrounding the Revue nègre. ‘By far,’ he tells us, ‘La revue nègre has inspired more written accounts, both in its time and since, than any other group of Jazz Age performers.’ In the media reaction, ‘one sees the manifestation of a kind of strange attraction on a cultural level that could be characterized as a deep ambivalence about jazz.’ In sum, there remained a ‘discursive dissonance, as previously separate characteristics or linguistic signifiers were mixed together in public debates.’ ‘In short,’ Jordan concludes, ‘one can see that the cultural ambivalence surrounding the reception of La revue nègre and their jazz forced critics to confront the hybridity of Jazz and French culture.’116 The conservative anti-jazz critic René Bizet, for example, argued ‘that La revue nègre’s kinetic music was directly related to racial physiognomy: the jazz was in their “legs” and their “skin,” and the nègres had an “instinctive fear” and an innate ability to express their sorrow.’117 The critic from the equally conservative Le Figaro, Jacques Patin, ‘described how jazz sounded to him like a longvanished state of nature.’118 Finally, Gustave Fréjaville, much more sympathetic to the form, ‘perceived and described the tragic intensity of the “obscure force of desire” at work on the face of Joe Alex … because he identified with him; Josephine Baker was, for Fréjaville and any others, the exotic object of desire.’119 According to Jordan, these various perspectives are in tension or are discursively dissonant because, ultimately, some view jazz as negative while others view it as positive. At the same time, what is most striking is the similarity in metaphorical registers, the shared racial score to which all these voices adhere. Jeremy F. Lane’s Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, ‘Race,’ and Intellectuals in France, 1918–1945 (2013) follows Matthew Jordan while focusing on how jazz became linked to an emerging industrialized economy that endangered French identity. The closing of the circle between, on the one hand, primitivity and, on the other, the hypermodern is where Lane does his most important work. For example, Lane argues that for author Georges Duhamel (1884–1966), ‘jazz became a peculiar overdetermined figure for the evils of an American 115

Cited in Jordan, Le Jazz, 70. Jordan, Le Jazz, 102–3. 117 Jordan, Le Jazz, 105. 118 Jordan, Le Jazz, 106. 119 Jordan, Le Jazz, 107. 116

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 43

10/05/2017 09:09

44

Scoring Race

machine age,’ while also implying ‘that these most modern of … evils somehow corresponded to a return to a more primitive state.’120 For Le Corbusier, jazz represented a musical form in which natural and modern rhythms were perfectly combined; the sounds of jazz expressed primitive Africa as well as ‘the grinding of tramways, the unbridled madness of the subway, the hammering of machines in factories.’121 While artists such as Le Corbusier, Michel Leiris, and Philippe Soupault enthusiastically supported jazz both as primitive and connected to the American machine age, their accounting of jazz rehearsed all the tropes contained in Duhamel’s negative account of jazz and contemporary America.122 Thus, Lane principally uses jazz to decode what he calls ‘machine-age imperialism,’ while underscoring the continuity in the racial score on both sides of the jazz debate. That is, the symbolic registers used by voices in support of and against jazz are identical. Importantly, Lane also considers the reactions of diaspora intellectuals to France’s racing of jazz. As Lane rightly notes, ‘[n]one of the existing studies’ recognizes its ‘reception among France’s African and Afro-Caribbean citizens or subjects.’ This is all the more striking given that ‘intellectuals and writers such as [Léon-Gontran] Damas, [René] Ménil, and [Léopold Sédar] Senghor elaborated jazz aesthetics at least as sophisticated and significant as those found in the work of white French-speaking jazz critics of the period.’123 The failure to consider the responses of French intellectuals of color assumes national cultures to be clearly bounded entities and consequently understands the arrival of jazz on the French-speaking continent to constitute a moment of ‘cultural contact,’ in which the integrity of a previously discrete French cultural identity is taken to be challenged by an encounter with an essentially foreign ‘other,’ American or African-American cultural form.124 The complexity of jazz’s reception by these intellectuals is made evident by the tensions evident in their responses. ‘Césaire’s rather lukewarm response to jazz’ is ‘conditioned by his own sense of his specific identity as French’ and his being hence ‘imbued with … superior cultural values … that distinguished him from the primitive simplicity of his African-American peers.’ Conversely, Léon-Gontran Damas, Césaire’s partner in Négritude, gave somewhat breathless support to jazz. However, like Césaire, René Depestre’s response to the music is also conditioned by his Frenchness.125 Indeed, ‘Damas’s encounters with jazz in interwar Paris had … only been made possible by … the French imperial system.’ In addition, ‘the jazz he first encountered in Paris was itself a by-product of an earlier history of imperialism and colonialism, of Western expansion into 120

Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 4. Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 4. 122 Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 5. 123 Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 23. 124 Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 23. 125 Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 29. 121

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 44

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

45

the New World, of the slave trade, and of the mixing of cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities this provoked.’ To what degree, then, was Damas ‘able to exploit the opportunities opened up by the imperial system’ and to ‘construct a jazz aesthetic that might challenge that imperial system,’ and/or to what extent has ‘his thinking about jazz ultimately remained constrained by the … essentialism and primitivism … manifest in the jazz criticism of Shaeffner and Goffin?’126 The linking of jazz to the racial score is not simply a system outside which one might step. Rather, it is what Foucault would call a discourse that draws into its wake everything and everyone, making escape in the traditional sense impossible. It may or may not permit tactical maneuvering – but to the extent that one chooses to speak within and to jazz qua jazz (that is, jazz whose parameters are delineated by the critical history of its identification and reception as a distinct musical form), one necessarily is bound or conditioned by the score. At the same time, to the extent that the score is never settled, what matters is what one ultimately contributes to it. Thus, Damas’s responses to jazz need to be understood [in the context of his] specific identity as a male, French, colonial subject, an identity, that is to say, defined by his relations to French colonial society in a manner that surely conditioned but did not absolutely determine his reactions to the music.127

Hence, ‘Damas evokes both the status of jazz as expression of a shared history of racial oppression and jazz’s role in indulging the primitivist fantasies of the white audience, in playing up to their stereotypical assumptions.’ In the process, ‘these two apparently contradictory assessments of jazz’s cultural and political significance are allowed simply to coexist.’128 In closing, Lane summarizes the essential points of his argument and the degree to which it extends into the present, underscoring that ‘early writing on jazz in French is best understood as having been decisively conditioned, without being wholly determined, by the nature of … machine-age imperialism.’ Further, the work of early jazz critics ‘is marked by an unresolved tension between, on the one hand, [an openness to] other cultures … and, on the other, a drive to fix one’s own sense of self in opposition to the supposedly primitive Other.’ Finally, ‘[t]hese early works of jazz criticism also manifest an analogous tension between the desire to understand the music on its own terms and a tendency to exploit jazz as a means for resolving a series of primarily European anxieties and preoccupations.’129 126

Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 68. Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 69. 128 Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 86. 129 Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 193. In this sense, jazz is, at least as Lane describes it, an object constructed by the discourses that circumscribe it. 127

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 45

10/05/2017 09:09

46

Scoring Race

The gap in Lane’s argument that the present study proposes to fill is the historical component that embeds the thinking on jazz and its co-optation within French discourse (or its creation by French discourse) in a much longer tradition than the relatively brief industrial era: the racial score whose origins extend back to the Greeks. This score explains why jazz became a privileged vehicle for the Western critics Lane identifies: the racial score had proleptically created jazz before its appearance. The long history the present study proposes also better situates the ‘early reactions of French-speaking intellectuals of color, such as Damas, Ménil, and Senghor,’ who, according to Lane, ‘obeyed a subtly different logic’ in their reaction to jazz, which ‘was itself the product of the accelerated movement of peoples and cultural forms between and among the imperial powers in the interwar years.’130 While this is undoubtedly true, it is also true that the reception apparatus French intellectuals and artists deployed mediated in complex ways not only the experience of movements of bodies and capital within Empire; the coming to words (as opposed to music) of colonial subjects was itself impacted by their penetration by and mediation of the racial score – a score in and by which the colonial subject was also indoctrinated. Lane’s closing point, that the ‘primitivist tropes and assumptions first established in the interwar years … return in postwar French jazz criticism’ in such works as Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli’s study Free Jazz/Black Power, recognizes how what I call the ‘racial score’ cannot simply be swapped out or ignored. That ‘Carles and Comolli’s account of the evolution of jazz was … based on the same assumptions as was Panassié’s Le Jazz hot,’ that they ‘embraced a kind of counter-ethnocentrism, according to which African-American musicians were romanticized as the embodiments of some kind of unmediated authenticity,’ makes clear how far the racial score extends and how little, ultimately, the discourse on jazz can or does depart from it; the discourse is always forced to engage with it tactically precisely because the two are mutually constitutive.131 Indeed, to the extent that the often contested ‘jazz’ label remains current, the racial score will continue to dictate the particular African-American musical practice it has increasingly problematically come to designate. It should now be clear that this growing critical library, to which new contributions are being added yearly, provides a broad context in which the present study proposes to participate. At the same time, I hope this introduction has shown, through its telescoping critical lens, the long and complex history that has established the racial score as an accumulation of assumptions and practices that have informed what jazz is and does, not only in its reception but also in its production: as Armstrong’s concert in Kinshasa showed, the performance practices of jazz artists always function in an immanent relationship to the 130 131

Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 193. Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 197.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 46

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

47

racial score’s unrelenting strategic production. Just as importantly, in what follows I hope to demonstrate through a diachronic analysis the evolving ways in which a select group of writers (and filmmakers), both French and African, have engaged with jazz and the racial score. Chapter 1 explores briefly the French production of and engagement with the racial score from a literary perspective. As I have argued throughout this introduction, the sedimentation of two thousand years of thinking on the relationship between music and writing, consolidated in nineteenth-century scientific racial theories, produced a score according to which jazz would be identified and increasingly deployed by French writers. Exemplary of this, in its most naive form, is Philippe Soupault’s Le Nègre, with which I begin my discussion. For Soupault, the score is integrated largely uncritically. The musicality – the jazziness – of blackness is assumed and celebrated and the various racial stereotypes around jazz follow the racial score closely in its most basic elements. Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, and its famous ‘négresse’ singer, follows a similar pattern. At the same time, in Sartre, music is contained within its specific diegetic moments of appearance. We ‘hear’ the music at precise moments in the novel when the particular form of difference race represents becomes useful to the existentialist project. In Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours, we see perhaps the first attempt to think of jazz as an intellectual and sociological project. At the same time, despite the ‘good will’ of the text’s engagement, the power of the racial score is apparent throughout the novel. Finally, my examination of contemporary authors Christian Gailly (Be-bop), Tanguy Viel (Le Black Note), and Enzo Cormann (Vita Nova Jazz), shows how the sustained power of the racial score increasingly appears as what I call ‘abject whiteness’ – the practical exclusion of white musician characters from a racialized space of their own making. Chapter 2 turns to African authors and their engagement with the complex phenomenon that is jazz and the racial score in which jazz is embroiled. Beginning with the Senegalese author Ousmane Socé’s 1937 novel Mirages de Paris, this chapter shows how, from the very inception of the Francophone African literary canon, jazz plays a structuring role – and elicits an ambivalent response. Socé recognizes the power that jazz has as a cultural phenomenon and a radical expression of modernity, but also remains wary of the music’s connection to racial stereotypes. His engagement shows an acute awareness of the racial score and jazz’s role in constituting it. Emmanuel Dongala’s two short stories, ‘Jazz et vin de palme’ and ‘A Love Supreme,’ both contend with jazz in a new era: the 1960s, with its accompanying shift from jazz as aesthetic experience (already a shift from jazz as dance music) to jazz as revolutionary statement. These two short stories show how jazz itself becomes a site for questioning the efficacy of music as a revolutionary instrument. While they express doubt about the power of art to precipitate change, these stories also invest deeply in jazz

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 47

10/05/2017 09:09

48

Scoring Race

as a uniquely positive aesthetic phenomenon. Dongala’s texts appear in many ways the most utopian with respect to jazz’s participation in the racial score. Finally, another significant shift occurs in the Cameroonian Mongo Beti’s final novels, most notably Trop de soleil tue l’amour. Beti’s last writings show his deep appreciation for jazz, but also an awareness about how the music has, since the 1970s, been increasingly curated as an art form whose creative moment has long past. Jazz in Trop de soleil tue l’amour becomes the static symbol of a racial paradigm that refuses to disappear. To the extent that jazz survives in this novel, it is through a character, Eddie, whose relationship to the music is more existential than aesthetic. Jazz, for him, maps forms of engagement with an unpredictable postcolonial universe far more than it represents an aesthetic object to be collected. Despite – or perhaps, because of – Beti’s conclusion that jazz is dead, the novel also registers a nostalgia for the music that, to a certain extent, further threatens to turn jazz into an embalmed aesthetic corpse. Chapter 3 turns to a series of contemporary authors who show where the racial score is today. These authors refuse Socé’s skepticism, Dongala’s hagiography, and even Beti’s ironic nostalgia. Instead, they develop various creative tactics for decomposing and recomposing jazz in a manner that underscores the complex ways in which the music has been enlisted by and produced the racial score, while also showing how the music has resisted that process or can be made to do so. In Cola Cola Jazz, the Togolese author Kangni Alem stresses the semantic slippage within the term ‘jazz’ itself by showing how various African musicians have co-opted the word. In parallel with this, he also does the important work of historicizing jazz, detaching it from the kind of timeless essential work that its contribution to the racial score demands. The Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 stresses the ways jazz has become a symbolic commodity that signals, through the ‘jazz shibboleth’ (the intimate knowledge of the music’s history and players that gains one entry into the privileged circle of the cognoscenti), participation in a particular social class. His text simultaneously demonstrates a deep appreciation for jazz’s seminal texts and performances and a keen awareness of how the vast enterprise of the racial score endlessly recuperates them. The Djiboutian author Abdourahman Waberi’s La Divine Chanson narrates a fictionalized version of the life of African-American jazz singer and poet Gil Scott-Heron. Waberi’s novel is significant for its choice of a musician whose work blurred the boundary of music and text, thereby resisting the fundamental terms of the racial score (which insist on their absolute separation). Further, in focusing on Scott-Heron, he also celebrates an artist whom the jazz field has always found difficult to integrate into its foundational narrative, thereby further disrupting the necessary legibility and/or critical capture by writing that is at the heart of the racial score. Finally, Cameroonian author Léonora Miano further engages with the racial score by undermining the hierarchical relationship between jazz (as high art) and popular music (as

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 48

10/05/2017 09:09

Introduction

49

merely the product of the culture industry). In so doing, Miano points to the investment that the racial score makes in having jazz be a ‘serious’ genre from which its literary-critical glossing can gain a vital thrust. In the process, she also demonstrates the degree to which gender is (and has always been) a key component of the racial score and the various ways in which jazz maps (onto) race’s essential gendering. Finally, in Chapter 4, I turn to an aesthetic form in which the literary (as script) and music (as diegetic or as soundtrack) finally truly encounter each other. If in the novel the appearance of jazz is always only a literary device, a series of tropes and points of reference by which the music is evoked but never heard, in film, jazz is finally experienced as sound and as the sight of musicians and dancers practicing their art. While this chapter could be a separate book, I here begin to sketch out how film stages the terms of the racial score. Josephine Baker’s appearance in Princesse Tam-Tam exemplifies this process: in this film the iconic jazz singer and dancer becomes the embodiment of jazz, a kinetic cipher of the racial score, immanently available to the viewer whose consumption of her performance is both conditioned by the racial score and productive of it simultaneously. To the extent that Baker resists this process through a unique persona that demands recognition as ‘La Baker,’ the overwhelming concatenation of clichés and stereotypes, and the monumental vehicle in which they are conveyed, turn the film into an archetype of the process of scoring. In sharp contrast to Princesse Tam-Tam, Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï, a rewriting of the Prosper Mérimée novella and Georges Bizet opera Carmen, rewrites the score, confusing the registers of racialization, sexualization, and aesthetic hierarchy. Most significantly, Gaï Ramaka chose for his score the work of the famous avant-garde jazz saxophonist, composer, and arranger David Murray. The result is a carefully constructed engagement with and deconstruction of the terms by which, for example, Baker’s raced body is transformed into an essential expression of jazz in Princesse Tam-Tam. Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen (with its deliberate re-spelling of the name) borrows, recomposes, and finally breaks apart the terms of the racial score. That this performance only lasts for the duration of the movie, and like its model (Carmen) leads to the death of the protagonist, expresses fully the deadly resilience of the racial score, and the heroic work done by artists to dismantle it piece by piece.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 49

10/05/2017 09:09

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 50

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel: Four Cases

1

As we saw in the introduction, the manner in which jazz became ‘black,’ what is here called the scoring of race, cannot be understood merely as a ­twentiethor even a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Indeed, the mechanisms by which music in general became the aesthetic category in which and through which difference would be articulated and naturalized find their origins at the very inception of Western thought as Western. To the extent that the West lays claims to Greek philosophy as its epistemological origin and the origin of its epistemology, we can already locate there the construction of an aesthetics in which media of expression are categorized and located hierarchically in relation to each other. This formal order gains strength and precision throughout the history of philosophy and is finally consolidated in the nineteenth century where it is recuperated and redeployed in a now overtly racialist, not to say racist, project by the racial scientists – anthropologists, historians, ethnologists, and biologists – for whom dividing humanity into categories of merit becomes the central preoccupation. While the vast majority of these thinkers were white supremacists for whom science was an instrument justifying various oppressive projects, the language they developed and the constitutive tropes to which they repeatedly returned remain with us to this day and became the principal lens through which jazz would be comprehended in the twentieth century. That jazz was largely given positive valence by those most interested in understanding it has made any kind of recuperation or counterdiscourse all the more difficult. In a sense, because jazz was circumscribed by white critics through the revalorization as positive of what were originally negative racist tropes, these terms were seen as somehow less offensive and therefore worked their way into the very understanding of what the music is and what makes it important. One of the most radical and vexing ways in which this happened was in a French literary tradition in which jazz played (and continues to play) a significant symbolic role. This chapter therefore traces some of the ways in which French novelists have treated jazz in order to better understand precisely how, in writing, jazz’s origins in the white imaginary as an essentially black phenomenon has so firmly taken root. While hardly exhaustive, it seeks to provide a diachronic map of jazz’s evolving function in literature throughout the twentieth century, and

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 51

10/05/2017 09:09

52

Scoring Race

ultimately to demonstrate that the racial score remained unalterably ensconced within the seams of each textual performance – and indeed, became ever more elaborately established within it. Whereas a certain naivety is evident regarding the racialized treatment of jazz in Philippe Soupault’s Le Nègre (1927) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (1938), even in later cases of ‘good faith’ attempts to escape jazz’s racialization, as in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947), ultimately the score carries on. Indeed, the idea of jazz itself – its circumscription as a musical genre – assumes a history of racial construction and differentiation with which the music immediately communicates. In sum, the literary act serves a fundamental epistemological function in the construction of Western identity that is inherently positioned – by the entire history of metaphysics – in opposition to the absolute musicality that French jazz cfriticism – and its literary avatars – has made jazz become. Thus, even in the best efforts of truly dedicated ‘jazz thinkers’ such as Boris Vian or Christian Gailly, both of whom will be addressed in the second half of this chapter, the underlying assumption of black musicality remains with jazz as its proof. The goal here is to explicate how the (unintended) racist assumptions of these authors come about; to explore, rather than dismiss their work on and with jazz; to see places where they have, to a lesser or greater degree, evinced a desire to grant subjectivity and language to black music, characters, or musicians, yet have been drawn into and by the racial score that they ultimately reproduce.

Believing the Score: Soupault’s Le Nègre Philippe Soupault, one of the founders of Surrealism and a prolific poet, novelist, autobiographer, journalist, and essayist, was also among the earliest French authors to see in jazz a revitalizing reservoir for a drained and decadent West.1 He is the first of the four authors this chapter discusses because, as Myriam Mallart-Brussosa notes in ‘Autophone malgré lui? Chansons de Soupault au Club d’Essai,’ his ‘Rag-Time’ (1917) may be the first literary work to have (proto-)

1 Soupault’s

investment in jazz reflects the broader identification of jazz with an escape from the decay of Western culture. As Matthew F. Jordan notes in Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity, ‘[T]he Surrealists [believed] that the problem with individuals – and by extension civilization – was that too many innate desires were repressed by restrictive rules, they glorified jazz for being analogous to the unleashing of unconscious instinct that they thought of as necessary for the return of psychological health. Jazz, they believed was good medicine for the discontents of civilization … Jazz (surrealist writing) with its “spontaneous brutish sexuality and polyphonic perspiration of animality” had an inverse relation to the old usedup forms. Jazz improvisation and surrealist automatic writing were manifestations of thought liberated from intellect and guided by emotion and affect, allowing for an expressive freedom directly related to sexuality … especially in nègre jazz’ (70–1).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 52

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

53

jazz as its principal focus.2 Further, with his short novel Le Nègre (1927), Soupault confirmed his active engagement with race and music, particularly in his role as a kind of reluctant ethnographer.3 This latter text gathers together vividly and systematically the factors that contributed to making jazz such a powerful vector for the forces of Parisian modernism in the 1920s.4 It also reveals how and why that history, well documented by a growing number of critical assessments, 2 In

contrast to what Mallart-Brussosa says, the only reference in ‘Rag-Time’ to jazz occurs in the opening lines: ‘Le nègre danse électriquement / As-tu donc oublié ton pays natal et la ville de Galveston / Que le banjo ricane’ (no page numbers in the original edition). Nevertheless, despite the scant nature of this reference, that Soupault was clearly a fan of the music became evident in his later writing. Myriam Mallart-Brussosa, ‘Autophone malgré lui? Chansons de Soupault au Club d’Essai,’ in ‘Les radios de Philippe Soupault,’ Komodo21 2 (2015), special issue, ed. Pierre-Marie Héron, http://komodo21.fr/autophone-malgre-lui-chansons-de-soupault-au-club-dessai. 3 James Clifford discusses the important role played by ethnography in the Surrealist avantgarde in his ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 23.4 (1981): 539–64. In particular, the section entitled ‘Mauss, Bataille, Métraux’ posits the importance in 1925 of three simultaneous occurrences. The first was the success of Josephine Baker and the Revue nègre, ‘following on the heels of W.H. Wellmon’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra’ (discussed below). ‘Spirituals and le jazz,’ Clifford tells us, ‘sweep the avant-garde bourgeoisie, which haunts negro bars, sways to new rhythms in search of something primitive, sauvage … and completely modern. Stylish Paris is transported by the pulsing of banjos’ (543). At the same time, ‘a nucleus of University scholars – Paul Rivet, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Marcel Mauss – establishe[d] the Paris Institut d’Ethnologie.’ And the third occurrence: ‘In the wake of the First Surrealist Manifesto, the movement begins to make itself notorious. France is engaged in a minor war with anticolonial rebels in Morocco; Breton and company sympathize with the insurgents’ (543). These three events, the author tells us, are tightly interconnected. That is, ethnology, most notably through the profound influence of Marcel Mauss, was one of the motivating forces behind Surrealism’s engagement with racial alterity and, broadly, with anticolonialism. Thus, the local fascination with jazz was connected, through Mauss and the growing field of ethnography, to a critical resistance to France’s colonial enterprise. Matthew Jordan, in Le Jazz, makes a similar claim: ‘Like the general public, the teachers and students at the Institut d’Ethnologie de Paris were extremely susceptible to the pull of La revue nègre’s Josephine Bakerized jazz on their imagination. It satisfied many of their interests. Many of the scholars, along with embracing surrealism, were active participants in the modernist quest for an authentic experience of the self through intoxication, which they sought in Montmartre jazz bars like Le Grand Duc and – a favorite with Leiris – Bricktop’s, whose owner and namesake served up whiskey cocktails and smoky blues … So it was that jazz, a form that could evoke both the primitive and the modern, both the nègre and the American, came to provide a perfect example of the “irreducible strangeness” of modern cultural production that Marcel Mauss stressed in his teaching. Like jazz musicians and surrealists, Mauss relied on improvisation and free association during his lectures, riveting his students with “flashes of intuition” and “unforeseen comparisons.”’ (118) 4 While she doesn’t mention him specifically, there is no question that Philippe Soupault is one of the central players in the craze around blackness, the virus noir described by Petrine Archer-Straw in her important Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. Archer-Straw shows in detail how a combination of racist stereotypes and a celebratory attitude towards blackness merged in the thinking of the avant-garde, most notably, the Surrealists and the commercial iconography of advertising, fashion, entertainment, etc. In other

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 53

10/05/2017 09:09

54

Scoring Race

subsequently impacted generations of Francophone African authors who were and are simultaneously influenced by – not to say, part of – this French tradition. These African authors that I will discuss in my second and third chapter have wanted to use jazz without the historical and epistemological baggage that accumulated in its Parisian iteration(s). That is, they have want(ed) to engage with jazz outside of its foundational role in the French scoring of race. Philippe Soupault’s character Edgar Manning, the eponymous ‘nègre’ of the novel, is a particularly potent reminder of the ‘natural’ connection constructed between blackness and musical activity in general and jazz in particular. That is, Soupault, though sympathetic to blacks, and to the music most identified with them in his 1927 novel, nevertheless substantiates the link between musicality and race in a manner that impacts the African authors wishing to explore/exploit jazz in their fiction who followed in his wake, beginning with Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris (discussed in Chapter 2) and all the way through to contemporary authors (addressed in Chapter 3). Le Nègre begins with the odd first chapter ‘Le nègre blanc ou le mauvais exemple’ that recounts, in nominally fictionalized terms, the life of Solouque, who became president of Haiti in 1847 and named himself emperor in 1849.5 Against this initial historical example of a failed ‘négritude’ (that is, a black man who ultimately tried to be white by, for example, attributing to himself a ‘European’ imperial status), the first-person narrator introduces Edgar Manning, ‘le nègre’ of the title, who, we may presume, represents the counter-example to Solouque’s failure as a black man.6 The ‘real’ story begins with one of the first uses of the ‘jazz shibboleth’: the names, places, artists, and performances immediately recognizable to the aficionado of this particularly privileged form, and which act as the secret handshake of its fans: Un grand ronflement roulait dans la rue : vomissement de Montmartre … J’entrais: c’était le Tempo-Club. Mon ami Welmom [sic], le chef d’orchestre de ce prodigieux Syncopated Orchestra, était assis devant le piano, et dès que j’arrivais, en signe de bienvenue, me saluait d’un sourire et jouait Saint-Louis, cette étrange et familière mélodie que je préférais. Le Tempo-Club était le lieu de rendez-vous de tous les musiciens nègres de Paris. (21) [A great rumbling rolled through the street: Montmartre vomiting … I entered: it was the Tempo-Club. My friend Welmom [sic], the band leader of this prodigious words, for her, blackness was ‘packaged,’ in a manner that made it not only palatable but enticing, for a white public in search of excitement and a way out of its post-war malaise. 5 Philippe Soupault, Le Nègre (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 6 We can take this to be one of the potential interpretations of the chapter title: ‘Le nègre, il vit.’ This in contrast to Solouque, who did not live in the revolutionary sense demanded by Surrealist thought.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 54

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

55

Syncopated Orchestra, was sitting at the piano, and as soon as I arrived, as a sign of welcome, he smiled at me and played Saint-Louis, that strange and familiar melody that was my favorite. The Tempo-Club was the meeting-place for all the negro musicians of Paris.]

The inaugural setting is the jazz scene, the hangout of musicians and those in the know: an iconic spot, famous for attracting artists, writers, and the ‘mondain’ avant-garde. Indeed, the Syncopated Orchestra played there and pianist Wellmon was one of Soupault’s friends.7 The framing of blackness in the novel begins and takes shape here. Thus, it is important to note that in this context, the narrator has ‘connu beaucoup [de] nègres’ [has known many negroes] and that what he retains of these encounters is that all ‘savaient rire’ [knew how to laugh], that when they laughed, ‘on voyait lorsque leurs lèvres s’écartaient, des gencives mauves’ [that when they laughed and their lips parted, you could see their purple gums], and that, at as they laughed, ‘leur regard était si lointain qu’il me donnait une sorte d’effroi’ [their gaze was so far off that they instilled in me a kind of dread]. From this he concludes that ‘ils voyaient ce que je ne pouvais pas voir, ce que je ne pourrais jamais voir’ [they could see what I could not see, what I would never be able to see] (22). The childish joviality, the physical alterity, and the sense that somehow these men are ‘free,’ that they live a pre-lapsarian existence (or at least are closer to that origin) such that they ‘see things,’ all define a difference to which the white narrator will never have access, from which he excludes himself. Nevertheless, whereas the ‘negrophile’ narrator has learned about black people in Paris, it is instead in London that he encounters Edgar Manning. The true meeting with difference demands that the narrator step away from ‘home’ into a space that will stand in for the barbaric modernity of the United States, and in which an anthropological inquiry can begin to take shape: ‘Il voulait apprendre ma langue maternelle, et moi, je désirais savoir ce qu’il faisait “dans la vie,” où il était né et où il allait toutes les nuits’ [He wanted to learn my native tongue, and I, for my part, wanted to know what he did in life, where he was born, and where he went each night] (22). We can summarize this early encounter with Manning from two important and merging perspectives: the first is, once again, the a priori, almost mystical ‘naturalness’ of ‘nègres,’ as exemplified by the vulgarly stereotyped ‘black laugh’ cited earlier. Indeed, the narrative captures this 7 As

Jody Blake tells us in Le Tumulte Noir, ‘During the formative phase of the movement, the surrealists favored above all two small clubs where African-American entertainers gathered. The first of the surrealists’ “finds” was the Tempo Club in the rue Fontaine. This club, one of the earliest of its kind in Montmartre, was established sometime before 1920 by Louis Mitchell, leader of the Jazz Kings. A semi-private establishment, the Tempo Club was the unofficial headquarters of Paris’s African-American entertainers, including members of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra’ (113).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 55

10/05/2017 09:09

56

Scoring Race

laughter as an extension of the jazz that opens the scene and that becomes a kind of cipher for the uninhibitedness of blackness. The other is a proto-ethnographic fascination with (and desire for) the black other that the white gaze seeks – and fails – to explain, evident here and in the earlier opening passage. As Michel de Certeau so brilliantly explained in ‘Ethno-Graphy’: Four concepts appear to organize a scientific field whose status was established in the eighteenth century and which Ampère entitled ‘ethnology’: orality (communication within a primitive, savage or traditional society), spatiality (the synchronic picture of a system that has no history), alterity (the difference which a cultural break put forward), and unconsciousness (the status of a collective phenomena, referring to a significance foreign to them and given only to knowledge originating elsewhere).8

Further: In order to be spoken, oral language waits for a writing to circumscribe it and to recognize what it is expressing … History is homogeneous to the document of Western activity … History is developed in the continuity of signs left by scriptural activities: it is satisfied with arranging them, composing a single text from the thousands of written fragments in which already expressed is that labor which constructs time, which creates consciousness of time through self-reflection.9

The nameless narrator of Le Nègre posits this very relationship, one in which jazz itself becomes the counterpart of the writing within this ethnographic operation – a kind of hyper-orality in which the last rudiments of comprehensible speech are reduced to mere noise.10 While the contact is initiated through speech (‘Il voulait apprendre ma langue maternelle’ [He wanted to learn my native tongue]), the goal is to document literally the behavior of the other (‘je désirais savoir ce qu’il faisait’ [I wanted to know what he did]). The narrator’s obsessive ethnographic fixation becomes immediately evident when, after the initial meeting, another acquaintance, a young pastor, warns the narrator away from Manning, telling him that he is a criminal. Interestingly, Eddie Manning was, in fact, like Solouque, a historical figure who had 8 Michel

de Certeau, ‘Ethno-Graphy,’ in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 209. 9 de Certeau, ‘Ethno-Graphy,’ 210. 10 For one of the most extraordinary version of this phenomenon, see http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=0TomBTF9BWE. This astonishing video represents one of the first sound recordings ever made. What is particularly striking is the manner in which the Khoisan man being recorded is captured by the technology, his half-naked body standing in stark contrast to the recording equipment in front of which he stands. Further, his linguistic performance is turned into pure music – the clicks inherent to the language are not captured and all that is left is something vaguely human but hardly linguistic.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 56

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

57

been written up in the British tabloids for his illicit activities as a drug dealer and pimp. In fact, the news clipping that the pastor sends the narrator four years later, concerning Manning’s condemnation to three years in prison for his crimes, appears to be the very story that gave Soupault the idea for his book. In it we learn that since the narrator last saw him, Edgar Manning, nègre d’origine inconnue, était devenu une figure célèbre de ce monde interlope de … Londre … Il se prétendait musicien de jazz-band et, de temps en temps, pour conserver les apparences, on le voyait, dans quelques dancings à la mode, frapper à coups de baguettes de tambours sur des objets plus ou moins sonores, et pousser ces cris gutturaux dont s’accompagnent les danses ultramodernes. (24) [Edgar Manning, a negro of unknown origin, had become a famous figure in London’s demi-monde … He claimed to be a musician in a jazz-band and, from time to time, in order to keep up appearances, one could find him in a fashionable ballroom, hitting more or less sonorous objects with drumsticks while emitting the kind of guttural screams that tend to accompany ultramodern dances.]

Most striking about this passage is its evident distaste for jazz and thus its inability to recognize that Manning is in fact a capable musician, at least according to what the narrator will suggest shortly. Rather, the tabloid piece reduces Manning’s skills to flailing away with sticks at unidentified objects and emitting inhuman cries. In other words, the performance of jazz for the reactionary press is a logical continuum with guttural, that is, non-verbal or animal, sounds; and further, with the implicit hypersexualization of ‘ultramodern’ (i.e., lascivious) dances. What is particularly interesting here, however, is that, despite the radical reversal of values that Soupault executes throughout the novel (jazz, the black contribution to ‘ultramodern’ dances, is seen as positive), this initial logical cluster constituting black difference remains intact. What follows this initial description is a damning enumeration of the crimes Manning has committed: his abuse of women, and his responsibility for the deaths by overdose of at least two famous actresses. This paraphrase of the newspaper article covers three entire pages. Yet at its conclusion, rather than noting the gravity of the accusations, the narrator concludes: ‘Il ne me suffisait pas d’écouter cette leçon. Je me souvins d’Edgar Manning et de son inaltérable mélancolie. Je nomme mélancolie ce qui est indéfini et indéfinissable’ [It wasn’t enough to listen to this lesson. I remembered Edgar Manning and his undefin­ able melancholy. I call melancholy that which is indefinite and undefinable] (28). This is furthered with the belief ‘qu’il voyait très loin, derrière l’horizon’ [he could see far beyond the horizon], and that ‘le centre de la vie était le présent, la minute même qu’il vivait’ [the center of life was the present, the precise minute though which he was living] (28). These racially inflected assumptions about

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 57

10/05/2017 09:09

58

Scoring Race

Manning’s subjectivity will persist throughout the novel, all proceeding from the source of an atavistically preserved African origin: Edgar Manning dans sa prison écoute l’écho lointain des cris de charmeurs de fleuves et de dompteurs de lianes. Il les oublie, il se laisse doucement guider par son ignorance, par sa joie des jours non fériés et par ce lent troupeau des minutes où l’on risque sa mort, mais qui sont devant lui, comme ses mains. (29) [Edgar Manning in his prison listens to the faraway cries of the charmers of rivers and the tamers of vines. He forgets them, he lets himself be softly guided by his ignorance, by his joy in non-holidays and this slow herd of minutes where one risks death, but that are in front of him, like his hands.]

The passage underscores the (somewhat paradoxical) connection between a perennial existential present devoid of Western historical consciousness and the latent African past, symbolically rendered by the rivers and vines of the opening imagery. As the novel progresses, these attributes, molded through a distinctly Surrealist analogical frame, take over the narrative: ‘Je reconnais mon ami Manning parce qu’il est vivant comme la couleur rouge’ [I recognize my friend Manning because he is alive like the color red] (30). At the same time, this imagery, underscoring what Donna Jones aptly describes as the ‘vitalism’ of philosophical discourses around Négritude, quickly gives way to more immediately recognizable racist tropes (even if they remain articulated as positive attributes): thus, for example, ‘la vulgaire tapisserie des cerveaux ne lui seront jamais attribués’ [the vulgar tapestry of minds will never be attributed to him] (30). That this amalgam of racial fantasies, projections, and constructions is conceived of positively is perhaps most evident when the narrator goes so far as to literally identify with Manning: ‘Ce n’est pas en vain,’ he famously declares at the conclusion of Chapter 2, ‘que mes cheveux sont frisés. Que mes pommettes sont saillantes, que mes lèvres sont épaisses et mes épaules trop larges’ [It isn’t in vain that my hair is curly. That my cheeks are protruding, that my lips are thick, that my shoulders are too wide.] ‘J’ose,’ he concludes, ‘vous ressembler quand je vis’ [I dare to resemble you when I live] (32). The counter-image is those ‘visages des blancs’ [faces of the whites] which always have ‘cette angoisse dans les yeux, ce calcul sous les paupières, toujours ces lèvres qui remuent et ces rides sans fin, toujours ce mouvement du nez pour renifler, supputer et comprendre, toujours comprendre’ [that anguish in their eyes, that calculation on their brow, always those lips that move and those endless wrinkles, always that twitching of the nose to smell, assume, and understand, always to understand] (39). This movement between the starkly Surrealist images of freedom associated with blackness (and their simultaneous abuse of well-worn racial stereotypes) and the anxious cerebral reason of whiteness (that needs to ‘understand, always to understand’) structures everything that follows, through perhaps the most

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 58

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

59

famous scene when Manning first sleeps with and then subsequently murders the prostitute named Europe. But what most interests me throughout this novel is the precise relationship between musicality and blackness and the way in which jazz in particular becomes the vector through which the unnamed narrator repeatedly interacts with his friend. Thus, after having lost sight of him for several years, he catches sight of Manning at a Place Clichy café. Manning is clearly engaged in criminal activity and the narrator waits until the various suspicious transactions are over before reaching out: ‘Ah mon cher, que je suis content de vous revoir !’ Il parlait aussi bien français qu’anglais, avec cet accent nègre qui adoucit toutes les gutturales et toutes les nasales. Il parlait du bout des dents magnifiques, éclatantes comme du verre. (44–5) [‘Ah my dear man, how happy I am to see you!’ He spoke French as well as he spoke English, with that negro accent that softens all the guttural and nasal notes. He spoke from the edge of his beautiful teeth, sparkling like glass.]

The initial verbal transaction marked by apparent linguistic prowess (he speaks French as well as he does English) just as quickly becomes no longer a linguistic so much as a musical performance: his speech is not semantically meaningful but musically, that is tonally, pleasing (‘cet accent nègre qui adoucit toutes les gutturales et toutes les nasales’ [that negro accent that softens all the guttural and nasal notes]). Not surprisingly then, we again learn (though the narrator suggests it may just be a cover) that Manning is ‘de nouveau drummer … Maintenant je suis célèbre’ [Again a drummer… Now I am famous] (45). Paris’s welcoming attitude toward jazz and its expectation that a black man should perform leads to Manning’s fame. That is, even where the narrator notes that ‘je compris une fois de plus que son tambour n’était qu’un alibi’ [I understood once more that his drum was only an alibi], nevertheless, ‘il en jouait parfaitement’ [he played it perfectly] (47). In other words, his innate musicality escapes intentionality; it is an extension of his being as a racially black subject. The narrator repeats these clusters of racial stereotypes structured around jazz throughout the novel, the following scene being another telling example: ‘J’attendis à la sortie l’un des musiciens … Il roula les yeux comme seuls savent le faire les nègres … Certains airs que les jazz-bands lancent périodiquement faisaient voltiger quelques secondes son regard’ [I waited for one of the musicians at the exit … He rolled his eyes the way only negroes can… One of those tunes that jazz-bands strike up occasionally made his gaze hover for a second] (49). The most obvious connection here is between the stereotype (so often played upon by Louis Armstrong) of the rolling-eyed ‘negro’ so popular in the minstrel tradition, and the underlying musicality of the character being

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 59

10/05/2017 09:09

60

Scoring Race

described.11 That is, the ‘rolling of eyes’ immediately links to the music that ‘faisaient voltiger … son regard’ (49). Having noted this connection, what is equally significant, and lies at the heart of the present project, is the manner in which these connections score race: that is, these seemingly singularly located moments extend into an epistemological articulation in which blackness simultaneously has access to the ontological source, the meaning behind words, but does not have access to the words with which to express this privileged information. Thus, that ‘hovering gaze’ that jazz precipitates in Manning is not simply a state into which he slips, but is his very essence. And from that essence, the narrator adduces that ‘[s]es gestes, ses paroles et son regard semblaient déchirer les voiles que patiemment et depuis toujours l’on avait tissés autour de moi’ [his gestures, his words and his gaze seemed to rip away the veils that patiently and forever had been woven around me] (49). The dynamic is subtle and noteworthy: everything Manning does and sees rips away what Schopenhauer calls the ‘veil of maya.’12 Behind it lies the truth, ‘the real.’ Yet this same veil is what gives this ‘real’ its visibility, its accessibility to mind. And the veil itself is the linguistic apparatus the narrator unfurls, the ‘vieilles mécaniques’ [the old mechanisms], as the narrator calls them. These are the ‘tekne’ of language, and most powerfully of (Western) writing and its archive. Throughout the rest of the novel, Manning will fulfill this symbolic function as protean signifier of difference in a variety of ways: as a worker in a ‘Fordist’ factory in Chapter 4, as the embodiment of barbaric violence and the murderer of the prostitute Europe,13 and as a revolutionary fighting against the military junta in Portugal. In each case, he represents the other of the narrator, a racialized wormhole into the beyond, or the ‘before’ of the written text of which the novel itself represents the materialization. At the same time, while the narrator quite literally sees the black musician as a force of nature, this nature is, as Manning’s encounter with ‘Europe’ makes clear, vulnerable. That is, it can be ‘tamed,’ a risk that is spelled out toward the end of the novel. In one of the last encounters between Manning and the narrator, the ‘nègre’ becomes tellingly self-conscious. ‘Je pense à moi’ [I think of myself/I’m thinking about myself], he 11 One

of the most astute and scathing meditations on these stereotypes and their deployment (always with music as a structuring principle) is Spike Lee’s underappreciated 2000 film Bamboozled. 12 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 13 This scene represents one of the most discussed moments in the novel, with its metaphorical juxtaposition of Manning’s barbaric hypermasculinity against the mercantile and mendacious Europe, whom Manning, with little subtlety as to the symbolic register, stabs to death. Indeed, this represents the active carrying out of a crime, a continental murder, that Europe had always wanted to accomplish herself: ‘Je ne t’ai jamais fait ce que tu n’as pas voulu me faire,’ Manning says in his letter to the woman he has killed (86). In other words, he has only done to her what she had tried to do, in more insidious fashion, to him.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 60

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

61

tells the narrator. The narrator immediately connects this nascent self-awareness with ‘Europeanization,’ or ‘civilization’: ‘Son ombre sur le mur de la taverne et lui-même n’étaient plus qu’une caricature. Il ne parlait plus pour lui-même mais il mâchait les vieux mots d’Europe’ [His shadow on the wall of the bar and he himself were now nothing but a caricature. He was no longer speaking for himself, but was chewing on Europe’s old words] (108). This decadence, or movement away from his natural nègre essence, is tellingly marked by a move toward words, toward language. This gesture is entirely paradoxical since the more he acquires the language of the master, as it were, the less he speaks for himself. Thus, the self-reflexive act of thinking about the self in reality precipitates a departure from the self, precisely because the language being used is necessarily old and tired, the language of Europe. Just as importantly for the present study, this move toward the signifying, self-constituting utilitarianism of language is also a radical departure from his own musical essence as a black man: ‘Je cherchais dans sa voix la vraie melodie, celle qui s’élevait au-dessus de nous tous’ [I sought in his voice the true melody, the one that rose above us all] (108). Still, we will later learn in the final chapter, ‘Afrique,’ that this moment of weakness represents in fact a kind of prophylactic inoculation against the force of Europe. His black essence remains intact: ‘Le nègre qu’il demeure malgré ses beaux habits n’attend rien de l’avenir parce qu’il connaît son passé tout neuf ’ [The negro that he still is, despite his fancy clothes, awaits nothing from the future because he knows his brand new past] (121). Thus, the essentially Manichean relationship between black and white, nature and civilized man, music and writing, remains intact here and throughout Soupault’s text. It should be clear that I am not staking out new turf in this discussion. As one of the founding members of Surrealism (as, for example, the author of Champs magnétiques with André Breton), Soupault is the object of a broad critical canon. Nor, for that matter, is his interest in jazz, or again this particular text, unexplored. What the present reading has stressed is the epistemological obstacle course facing Francophone African writers wishing to integrate jazz into their own œuvre. Whereas writing (as a medium) conditions subjectivity, and whereas that same (white writing) ascribes music (as opposed to writing) to blackness, the naturalization of black musicality in the French avant-garde’s obsessions with jazz virtually eliminates black access to writing – and by extension, to fully constituted subjectivity as defined by the West. Indeed, as Mallart-Brussosa points out, Soupault saw music (particularly song) as something immediate and primordial. Thus, there is a historically determined (i.e., evolutionary) aesthetic hierarchy in which music occupies a determinate – albeit essential – place (as an origin) that is posited a priori and ready to be racialized.14 This idea of a 14

As we will see, the repeated references to ‘le nègre’ living in an unreflected ever-present corresponds perfectly to this ‘musical’ space for which the entire history of philosophy had amply prepared it.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 61

10/05/2017 09:09

62

Scoring Race

primordial musical origin also supports the notion, discussed in the introduction of the present volume, of a radical alterity or rift between music and poetry where poetry is, in a sense, what breaks away from this timeless origin, this ‘aesthetic’ Hegelian Africa out of and from which Western consciousness or mind is made to emerge. It should be noted that a number of critics have tried to situate the various ways in which Soupault is drawn into a racial discourse without stressing the importance and place of music in scoring this relationship. Among these, Jonathan Eburne’s Surrealism and the Art of Crime shows how the ubiquitous violence and criminality that the Surrealists perceived as characteristic of the twentieth century became a guiding trope of their aesthetic. In this context, Eburne informs us that Le Nègre was ‘written largely during [Soupault’s] Surrealist period but published after his exclusion from the group radicalized his notion of American blackness as a form of life antithetical to Occidental, European decay.’15 Thus, when Soupault took a ‘real crime’ character and transformed him into an existential ideal, Eburne sees Manning as legitimating (or modeling) a radical departure from tired Western norms of behavior. Indeed, Unlike a number of similar contemporary novels and accounts cataloguing white people’s fascination for and romaticization of blackness – from Blaise Cendrars’s Anthologie nègre (1921) to Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926) and Paul Morand’s Magie noire (1928) – Soupault’s novel documents the narrator’s encounters with a singular figure.16

According to Eburne, Manning is endowed with individual subjectivity rather than simply representing a type, and in this the novel represents a radical departure from predictable racial stereotypes: Soupault’s true crime hero epitomizes the spirit of rupture Soupault admired in surrealist precursors such as Lautréamont, Apollinaire, and Rimbaud, each of whom Soupault wrote about in 1926 and 1927 as similarly fugitive and lawless figures. Like Rimbaud … Edgar Manning both rejects and reveals the moribund state of white European life. Manning though can actually smell the decay.17

Manning therefore represents a kind of distillation of Lautréamont/Rimbaud’s quest for an absolute escape from the shackles of a tired Western subjectivity. Whereas Rimbaud and Lautréamont had to seek this escape from themselves in their writing, Manning (always) already has it within him, naturally. In sum,

15 Jonathan

Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 113. 16 Eburne, Surrealism, 116. 17 Eburne, Surrealism, 117.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 62

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

63

Manning’s sensitivity to this stench of decay derives, Soupault suggests, from his total distinction from Europeanness, as an ontological function of his blackness, at once mythical and bodily. Manning consciously and physically rejects the ‘putrescence’ of Soupault’s Occident, even though, as Soupault later declares, Manning has at least learned to understand Europeans.18

Or again, as Sophie Leclercq puts it slightly more skeptically, ‘les surréalistes utilisent largement la figure du Primitif, du Sauvage, avec les préjugés de leur époque qu’elle comporte’ [the Surrealists largely use the figure of the primitive savage with the prejudices of the moment that it assumes].19 Having noted this, she also adds that ‘ils idéalisent ce Primitif, catégorie vague qui, tantôt Indien, tantôt Papou, tantôt Nègre, est l’antithèse du civilisé et devient alors instrument de contestation’ [they idealize the primitive, a vague category that, sometimes Indian, sometimes Papuan, sometimes Negro, is the antithesis of the civilized man and thus becomes an instrument of contestation], concluding that their ‘primitivisme bien connu a effectivement une vocation esthétique, mais il rejoint aussi des préoccupations politiques évidentes’ [their well-known primitivism indeed has an aesthetic purpose, but it also joins up with obvious political preoccupations].20 Among the artists most commonly identified with this primitivist interest is Soupault: Pour Philippe Soupault, qui, comme Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos et de nombreux surréalistes, a témoigné de sa fréquentation assidue des boîtes de jazz où se produisent des Noirs-Américains, le Nègre est celui qui prend sa revanche sur un Occident déclinant. D’Horace Pirouelle au Grand Homme, en passant bien sûr par Le Nègre, Edgar Manning, les Nègres de Soupault ne sont ni drôles, ni ridicules, ni soumis. Ils ne sont pas non plus une caricature de l’Africain, mais plus souvent des descendants d’esclaves qui connaissent autant la civilisation qu’ils jouent avec elle; ils n’ont de sauvage que leurs mœurs de malfrat, de noceur, d’artistes ou d’explorateurs, qui forcent l’admiration de l’auteur.21 [For Philippe Soupalt, who, like Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos, and numerous Surrealists, testified to his assiduous attendance of nightclubs where black Americans performed, the Negro is the one who avenges himself on a declining West. From Horace Pirouelle to Grand Homme, through of course, The Negro, Edgar Manning, Soupault’s Negroes are neither funny, nor ridiculous, nor submissive. Nor are they caricatures of the African, but more often descendants of slaves who know civilization and play with it; the only thing savage about them is their propensity for 18 Eburne,

Surrealism, 117. Leclercq, ‘Le Colonialisme mis à nu: Les surréalists démythifiaient la France colonial (1919–1962),’ Revue historique 646 (2008/2): 315–36. 20 Leclercq, ‘Le Colonialisme,’ 4. 21 Leclercq, ‘Le Colonialisme,’ 6. 19 Sophie

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 63

10/05/2017 09:09

64

Scoring Race

thuggery, partying, artistry, or exploration, which compels the admiration of the author.]

Thus, it would be reductive to assume that Soupault’s ‘nègres’ are only stereotypes. Nevertheless, as I have tried to show in my own reading of Manning, they retain many of the characteristics, now tamed through their contact with the West, of their ‘natural’, unfettered origins. They are, in a sense, the figure of the Medusa reflected in the shield of writing. Further, in the final analysis, their ‘discours anticolonial ne se situe donc pas vraiment dans l’action politique concrète mais bien plus dans ce retournement des valeurs, ce parti pris du minoritaire qui s’articule avec la mise en exergue de représentations symboliques’ [anticolonial discourse therefore isn’t really located in concrete political action, but rather in this reversal of values, this rooting for the underdog that takes shape within an emphasis on symbolic representations].22 In Soupault, therefore, blackness and jazz are used as vehicles for an exploration of the relationship between subjectivity and the aesthetic, or again, as Eburne argues, the articulation between the aesthetic and the political. What should be apparent is that Soupault contributes an important and lasting, not to say archetypal movement and moment in the scoring of race that I am exploring throughout this study. As one of the founding figures of the French avant-garde’s fascination with blackness in general and jazz in particular, he contributes substantially to the apparatus, the episteme, by and through which jazz and blackness become inexorably intertwined in the Western (and particularly French) imaginary. For this reason, it already becomes clear where and why Francophone African writers would consider jazz, following its French reception, with considerable trepidation, not to say skepticism.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Existential Blackness While Edgar Manning is unquestionably a force of nature, a masculine energy in Le Nègre, the appearance of another famous ‘black’ musician, the singer of ‘Some of These Days’ in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée [Nausea], shifts the tenor of music’s place without, ultimately, changing its critical structuring function in the quest for meaningful ontology: black music in general, and jazz in particular, remains a vital, unselfconscious origin out of which, for better or worse, the white subject emerges. Soupault’s naive and Manichean binary is, to a large degree, gone. The story does not focus on a black protagonist. Rather, the negotiation occurs through a broader range of mediating devices: blacks, women, the poor, the insane, and the cold hard material world variably function as the contingent other around which the self will (or won’t) gain substance and stability. In 22 Leclercq,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 64

‘Le Colonialisme,’ 17.

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

65

addition, the existentialist creed Sartre begins to sketch in his first novel dictates a far more skeptical engagement with the order of things than was evident in Soupault – though both authors overtly critique their own bourgeois origins in their respective works. Nevertheless, despite Sartre’s questioning of a certain (bourgeois) order, and a skepticism that Soupault appears not to share about (radical) art’s ability to situate the subject, jazz remains resolutely ensconced in the racial score in a manner that merits closer examination – particularly given Sartre’s own later function as a promoter of Francophone African writing and his longstanding concern for the ‘colonial question.’ Indeed, as Jeremy Lane comments concerning Sartre’s now-famous ‘Orphée noir,’ the introduction to Négritude poet Léopold Sédar Senghor’s groundbreaking edited volume, ­Anthologie de la poésie nègre et malgache: In Sartre’s account of négritude poetry as a ‘dance of the soul,’ in which ‘the poet whirls like a dervish until he faints,’ we find the same troubling mixture of political radicalism and enduring primitivism as characterized the earlier accounts of black culture offered by the likes of Goffin or Schaeffner. In short, Sartre’s ‘Orphée noir’ would seem to attest to the enduring nature of certain of the assumptions and interpretative tropes applied by French commentators to black cultural forms, highlighting the ability of such assumptions and tropes to survive the passage of the decades unchanged.23

Lane, in short, rightly understands Sartre as preserving racial tropes and clichés of which La Nausée serves up a significant number – among which is the novel’s fetishization of black musicality (and, specifically, the black female voice). At the same time, it would appear that Sartre, as early as La Nausée, attempts to engage these stereotypes, to question their origin and function within a larger philosophical system. Or at least it might be worth considering this possibility, as it demonstrates the tension between the (potential) desire to undermine the racial score and the possibility of actually doing so. La Nausée (1938) recounts a few months in the life of Antoine Roquentin, a thirty-year-old man living in Bouville after having spent several years traveling the world. He has settled in this port city to write a biography of the Marquis de Rollebon, but his writing project loses focus as he becomes increasingly drawn into a quest for unalloyed being without which his sense of disgust, his ‘nausea’ in the face of the real, will further take over his life. Among the few things that appear to clear this existential fog in the face of the ‘thereness’ of the material world is the record of ‘Some of These Days,’ sung (ostensibly) by a ‘négresse’: Quelques secondes encore et la Négresse va chanter. Ça semble inévitable, si forte est la nécessité de cette musique: rien ne peut l’interrompre … 23 Lane,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 65

Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 181.

10/05/2017 09:09

66

Scoring Race

Le dernier accord c’est anéanti. Dans le bref silence qui suit, je sens fortement que ça y est, que quelque chose est arrivé. Silence. Some of these days You’ll miss me honey! Ce qui vient d’arriver, c’est que la Nausée a disparu. Quand la voix s’est élevée, dans le silence, j’ai senti mon corps se durcir et la Nausée s’est évanouie.24 [A couple more seconds and the Negress will sing. It seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can interrupt it … The last chord has died away. In the brief silence which follows I feel strongly that here we go, that something has happened. Silence Some of these days You’ll miss me honey! What has happened is that the Nausea has disappeared. When the voice was heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish.]25

For Roquentin, music is the vehicle for a clearing away of the existential clutter that separates the subject (for-himself) from a contact, albeit evanescent, with being-in-itself. Equally clear is that the necessary source of this aesthetically mediated magical instant, what Roquentin will, borrowing his ex-lover Anny’s expression, call a ‘perfect moment,’ is a raced (and gendered) voice: blackness becomes the human instrument for the expression of music’s fundamental aesthetic function. Further underscoring the importance of the tune, before leaving Bouville at the end of the novel, Roquentin returns to the Rendez-vous des cheminots bar to hear the record one last time (or rather, twice). The exact meaning of the song ‘Some of These Days’ in the novel has been discussed by a great number of scholars and its presence signaled almost from the novel’s first publication. Robert G. Cohn, for example, wryly noted in his 1948 commentary on the book that ‘a hopeful sign appears early in the form of a jazz song from’ what Cohn calls ‘America’s rag-bag.’26 Henry A. Grubbs’s ‘Recapturing of Lost Time’ offers a Proustian reading, equating the effect of Vinteuil’s ‘petite phrase’ on Swann in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past to Sartre’s use of ‘Some of These Days,’ thereby underscoring the importance

24 Jean-Paul

Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 41. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 25 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), 22. The original translation has been modified. 26 Robert G. Cohn, ‘Sartre’s First Novel: La Nausée,’ Yale French Studies 1 (1948): 64, special issue, ‘Existentialism.’

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 66

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

67

of the music while naively ignoring the significant role of race.27 Along similar lines, but ignoring the intertextual reference, Ben Obumselu remarks that ‘when Roquentin briefly turns his attention to the jazz musician whose impure existence has been transmuted into the gemlike hardness of the song, he immediately returns to himself with the realization that art could be his own pass to a perfected identity.’28 Roby A. Bantel’s 1981 phenomenological reading of the novel locates music as the form most aptly capturing the Sartrean urge to aesthetically express the capturing of being-in-itself by being-for-itself: The jazz tune exists for itself and has a separate life of its own. It is an event – not frozen in time but an active process in time. This process, Roquentin realizes, can only be comprehended as a whole. This sense of perceiving a whole abolishes the Nausea, and with it his sense of separateness. His being seems to have merged with the music.29

This phenomenological reading again chooses to ignore the novel’s insistent racialization of this voice, as well as the complex ways in which the voice’s valence is manipulated by the text: if nothing else, this is, as the text makes clear on more than one occasion, not a live performance, but an early recording whose scratchiness underscores the technological component that makes this ‘négresse’ voice available to Roquentin. He can, in sum, call up the tune at will. In one of the most extensive and theoretically sophisticated readings of the novel, Jean-Louis Pautrot’s La Musique oubliée, spends three chapters discussing the various ways in which Sartre uses music – and most notably, jazz – in the novel. As Pautrot shows, there is a multifaceted philosophical component that prepares the way for Sartre’s formal thinking, as it will appear, for example, in his first great philosophical tome, L’Être et le néant (1943). Music, according to Pautrot, represents for Sartre variously an engagement with time,30 the confrontation of death,31 the realization of the other’s presence,32 and a Kristevan return 27 Henry

A. Grubb, ‘Sartre’s Recapturing of Lost Time,’ Modern Language Notes 73.7 (1958): 515–22. 28 Ben Obumselu, ‘Iris Murdoch and Sartre,’ ELH 42.2 (1975): 297. 29 Robyn A. Bantel, ‘The Experiences of Nausea and Adventure: An Analysis of the Opposition of Existence and Being in Sartre’s Nausea,’ Research in Phenomenology 11 (1981): 33. 30 ‘Dans La Nausée, la chanson … permet [à Roquentin] de percevoir l’historicité au niveau individuel.’ [In Nausea, the song … allows Roquentin to perceive historicity at the individual level]. Jean-Louis Pautrot, La Musique oubliée: ‘La Nausée,’ ‘L’Écume des jours,’ ‘A la recherche du temps perdu,’ ‘Moderato cantabile’ (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 45. 31 ‘Une pulsion de mort sous-tend la relation de Roquentin à cette venue sonore.’ [A death drive underpins Roquentin’s relationship to this sonorous arrival]. Pautrot, La Musique oubliée, 58. 32 ‘De la puissante capacité musicale à figurer la trajectoire irréversible découle la timide émergence, dans La Nausée, de la conscience d’autrui qui sera théorisée plus tard dans L’Être et le néant [From the musical capacity to figure the irreversible trajectory comes the timid emergence, in Nausea, of the conscience of the other that will be theorized in Being and Nothingness]. Pautrot, La Musique oubliée, 42.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 67

10/05/2017 09:09

68

Scoring Race

to the maternal, the choric, the womb.33 In this sense, Pautrot’s analysis gathers together a widely diverse series of critical perspectives on literary representations of the musical and shows the ways in which Sartre’s narrative is, finally, exemplary. Oddly, what Pautrot ignores is the specifically racial component inherent to jazz and so obviously present in the novel. That is, as the present study argues, music itself, by the very manner in which it has been constructed as a particular aesthetic medium, necessarily constitutes and participates in the racial score – that the singer of ‘Some of These Days’ is a ‘négresse’ would appear to underscore how the ideas of race and music are, in the final analysis, mutually constitutive. Where Pautrot misses the racial score,34 Bettina L. Knapp, for her part, just as strangely doubles down on it, seeing in the famous song what she calls ‘archetypal music,’ of which jazz, ‘so instinctual and emotional an expressive form,’ becomes the essence.35 Thus, ‘like the primitive and the child, Roquentin reacts to archetypal music viscerally; senses and feelings predominate over the thinking function.’36 Most discussions of jazz in the novel are, to the extent that they engage with the racial component, far more sensitive to the problematic nature of that field. Colin Nettelbeck, for example, spells out clearly that while jazz remains ‘a significant point of reference for Sartre throughout his whole career,’ it is always ‘connected to sex and the exotic … a form of release, of emotional freedom, and as such, powerfully attractive.’37 Nettelbeck thus connects the component themes, tropes, or voices of the racial score to Sartre’s thinking: exoticism, sexuality, freedom (from ‘culture’), etc. As was already evident in Le Nègre, La Nausée uses blackness as the legitimating vector for the various negations of the rational constricting effects of Western subjectivity: it serves as the pre-lapsarian nature from which the Western subject emerges and to which he so desperately wishes to return. In the case of La Nausée, this happens through the ‘black’ woman’s voice on the record. 33 ‘[“Some

of These Days” est] la survivance esthétisée qui, tout en retraçant à elle seule le parcours vers le dépassement, entretient aussi la survivance du lien avec le monde maternel’ [‘Some of these days’ is the aestheticized remainder that, even while it alone retraces the path to its overcoming, also maintains the survival of the connection to the maternal world]. Pautrot, La Musique oubliée, 70. 34 His only mention of race is to note in passing that, ‘Hormis qu’elle soit à elle seule un mythe – puisque la vraie chanteuse est en réalité blanche – elle assure par la voix, le fonctionnement mythique de la chanson’ [Aside from the fact that on its own is myth – since the real singer was in fact white – it assures through voice, the mythical function of the song]. Pautrot, La Musique oubliée, 58. 35 Bettina L. Knapp, ‘Sartre’s Nausée: Archetypal Jazz,’ Dalhousie French Studies 10 (Spring– Summer 1986): 48. 36 Knapp, ‘Sartre’s Nausée,’ 50. In fact, there are significant signs that the novel itself does not adhere as closely to the racial score as does Knapp’s reading. 37 Colin Nettelbeck, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the Paris Jazz Scene,’ Modern & Contemporary France 9.2 (2001): 172.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 68

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

69

Having noted this, one of the stranger aspects of this recording is that it isn’t a black woman at all. Indeed, very early on and also addressed critically in a number of essays is the odd racial swap that happens in the novel. Eugenia Noik Zimmerman’s ‘“Some of These Days”: Sartre’s “Petite Phrase”’ was among the first to trace back the singer and composer in the novel to Sophie Tucker and Shelton Brooks, respectively.38 As she notes concerning these two important names in the early years of popular ragtime/jazz: In a curious manner, Sartre’s composer and singer simultaneously reproduce and distort the reality of ‘Some of These Days.’ It is true that both in La Nausée and in the genesis and subsequent history of the song in question, a Jew and a Negro are involved. However, in the course of their transferal from life to novel, their identities have become interchanged. Sartre’s Jewish composer is a Negro composer and Sartre’s Negro singer is, in all probability, a Jewish singer.39

Thus, the novel’s treatment of music and race is apparently further complicated by its racial transfer between singer and composer: Sophie Tucker, a Jewish woman, provided the voice in the recording to which the novel refers, and composer Shelton Brooks, described as a Jew in the novel, was in fact AfricanCanadian. What remains less clear is the reason for this exchange, the misidentification of both the singer and the songwriter, and the manner in which it adheres to or amplifies the racial score. Mark Carroll states that Sartre, ‘through Roquentin[,] mistook Tucker … to be an African-American and the composer of “Some of these Days” to be a “Jew with coal-black eyebrows,”’ while adding that ‘Sartre’s misunderstanding as to the genesis of “Some of these Days” is neither as culturally naive nor as problematic as it first appears.’ For Carroll, ‘Sartre’s intuition that it was created by an alienated composer struggling in a material world over which he had little control mirrors not only Roquentin’s plight but, as Sartre would have us believe, our own.’40 Yet Carroll’s own collapsing of black and Jewish identities under the rubric of difference (or an unparsed subaltern status) may be problematic in its own right. It also raises two important questions: was Sartre, an avid jazz fan, aware of this reversal? And more importantly perhaps, what exactly does this reversal imply? On the latter point, it is clear that the swap is tremendously important, and to conflate Jewishness 38 Zimmerman

proposes an almost identical thesis to that of Grubbs, though she does not cite him. Nevertheless, her analysis of Sophie Tucker and Shelton Brooks, the singer and composer, respectively, of ‘Some of These Days,’ is an important moment in discussions of the novel. Eugenia Noik Zimmerman, ‘“Some of These Days”: Sartre’s “Petite Phrase,”’ Contemporary Literature 11.3 (1970): 375–81. 39 Zimmerman, ‘“Some of These Days,”’ 377. 40 Mark Carroll, ‘“It Is”: Reflections on the Role of Music in Sartre’s “La Nausée,”’ Music & Letters 87.3 (2006): 401.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 69

10/05/2017 09:09

70

Scoring Race

and blackness under the oversimplifying banner of alterity would be to ignore how finely tuned the racial score actually is. As Stephen J. Whitfield argues in ‘Black Like Us,’ the ‘advantages accruing to Jewish immigrants and their progeny (in comparison to African-Americans) have rightly been underscored in recent scholarship, which has noted the contrast with those who were cursed by confinement on the wrong side of the color line.’41 In the context of popular music, Jewish composers recuperated the techniques, tropes, and indeed, often the songs of jazz and transformed them into an industry. Facilitating this was their access as white-in-becoming to musical writing (as a technique) and, more broadly, to the publishing industry through which materials could be copyrighted, mass-produced, and distributed. Thus, Sartre’s choice to have a black woman jazz singer and a Jewish composer adheres perfectly to the historical record in which (according to Whitfield) Jews, like other ethnicities, ‘whitened’ themselves through their exploitation of black culture. But it also, and just as importantly, adheres to the racial score in which ‘whiteness’ (as Jewishness) has access to the means of production, the critical instrument of writing (and publication), whereas blackness is relegated to the naive or unselfconscious performance of that score. That is, that performers were black and composers white was not an accident or the result of racial ‘gifts’ or ‘proclivities,’ but the effect of the racial score in which blackness was the body to the spirit or mind of whiteness. And indeed, it is precisely this that Sartre re-imposes in exchanging the racial identities of the historical personalities he evokes in the novel – whether he does so on purpose or not. On this latter point, the question of Sartre’s awareness of the ‘racial swap’ has not been answered. In fact, there appears to be no indication that Sartre was aware of it, either in his correspondence around the novel or in subsequent commentary by those close to him, such as Simone de Beauvoir. Indeed, the very fact that this remains a conundrum may be part of the power of the book in the first place. Some, such as Deborah Evans, insist that the move is deliberate: ‘Jazz music,’ she argues, ‘is used throughout La Nausée by Roquentin as a point of entry into an ideal, necessary world which can never be contaminated by the real,’ and which ‘uncovers the radical separation of life and literature, the “real” and the “ideal.”’42 That, she concludes, is why the Jewess Sophie Tucker becomes transformed into the Negress singer and why the original sound recording of ‘Some Of These Days’ appears to bear slight resemblance to Roquentin’s description of it. Art is always artifice. But it is also

41 Stephen

J. Whitfield, ‘Black Like Us,’ Jewish History 22 (2008): 353. Evans, ‘“Some of These Days”: Roquentin’s “American” Adventure,’ Sartre Studies International 8.1 (2002): 60.

42 Deborah

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 70

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

71

beauty. The ‘real’ song, perhaps even unconsciously for Sartre, becomes a beautiful ‘ideal.’43

Indeed, this disruption of any sense of the real would be in keeping with what, in one of his multiple experimental readings (proving that none is exclusively ‘right’), Gerald Prince playfully points to as the open-ended nature of the novel. That is, Prince argues that the novel itself begins at its end (it is a found journal, thus already written), and ends with a beginning (Roquentin proposes to write a novel at the end of La Nausée). In the meantime, in the broader context of the story, Roquentin himself appears to simply disappear from the scene of writing and the final status of his crisis is never resolved, any more than what happens to him when he goes to Paris. While this may be true in terms of narrative logic, other forms of logic continue to pertain such that the overall effect of the novel is far less unsettling than Prince’s recounting might suggest. Indeed, it is precisely in such details as the racial score that a metaphysical real, as it were, continues to pertain. The compass points of Roquentin’s universe remain in the sustained racial score to which he returns at significant moments. In that sense, the world described in the novel is much less open-ended than it would appear.44 From a different perspective, beyond the context of the story, it is certainly documented that Sartre enjoyed jazz and was a regular listener. Indeed, one of Sartre’s famously pithy articles on the topic, ‘Nick’s Bar: New York City,’ famously began with the statement: ‘La musique de jazz, c’est comme les bananes, ça se consomme sur place’ [Jazz music is like bananas, one should consume it on the spot].45 The article then proceeds to present jazz as a kind of visceral, bodily – not to say sexual – experience from which one emerges, as the closing lines describe it, ‘un peu usé, un peu ivre, mais dans une sorte de calme abattu, comme après les grandes dépenses nerveuses’ [a little worn out, a little drunk, but in a kind of drained calm, as after a great expenditure of nervous energy].46 This post-coital exhaustion replicates almost identically the experience of jazz described in La Nausée. Thus, while ten years have elapsed between this article and the novel, the essential assumptions about the music remain. Clearly, nothing definitive can be said about whether Sartre deliberately or mistakenly turned Sophie Tucker black. Prince’s reading draws larger conclusions about the inability of any reading to exhaust textual meaning. Indeed, there is no question that, in one sense, Sartre’s text is very much the open-ended 43 Evans,

‘“Some of These Days,”’ 61. Prince, ‘La Nausée and the Question of Closure,’ in Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 58–65. 45 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Nick’s Bar: New York City,’ Jazz America (1947): 13. Reprinted in We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), 126–8. 46 Sartre, ‘Nick’s Bar,’ 13. 44 Gerald

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 71

10/05/2017 09:09

72

Scoring Race

narrative that both Prince (ironically) and Evans (much more earnestly) propose. Nevertheless, what is striking is that this ‘open-endedness’ nevertheless gets structured within a very closed system of meaning: the racial score on which it relies and within which it is composed. The ‘exotic’ Khmer statue that is one of the early triggers of Roquentin’s nausea, the ‘comic’ scene of a black man and woman running into each other,47 and, of course, the singer of ‘Some of These Days’ and its composer, all adhere to the racial score and appear at key moments in the novel to impel the protagonist forward in his ontological quest. The ontological map the racial score provides therefore prevents – or protects from – any meaningful or truly unsettling open-endedness. Though Roquentin is allowed to feel the extravagant and vile weight of the real, the boundaries of this outside to which he is given access are cryptically maintained through the differential status of race. And this race is itself contained and instrumentalized by the recording which allows Roquentin not only to hear it once, but to call up the ‘black voice’ on demand – just as the racial score itself remains reified within Western metaphysics.48 His departure from Bouville is, in a sense, made possible by the knowledge that the freedom that the singer and her song represent remains ensconced within the grooves of the old record to which, should he need to, he could always return. Thus, if, as Evans reminds us, the name ‘rocantin’ refers to ‘a song composed of fragments of other song forms,’ and that this in turn suggests that La Nausée is a kind of ‘literary montage’ consisting of ‘an amalgamation of fragments of other literary texts’ and that ‘the aim is to transform these literary fragments into a musical metaphor,’49 then the ultimate coherence of the project is maintained by the voice that bookends the story and against which any radical departure can, in the final analysis, be mapped (and therefore contained). In sum, albeit with more significant forays away from the ‘home’ of racialized jazz than in Soupault, Sartre’s novel ultimately and not surprisingly follows the score, adding another movement rather than substantially challenging it. That is, if a distinct suspicion of race might be supposed in, for example, the exchange of races between singer and songwriter, ultimately the racial order is preserved: Roquentin, no matter how scattered and fragmented he may be, retains his coherence as the inevitable textual being of the story – the only being that ultimately has any epistemological substance. The black voice is merely a marker of the beyond that absolutely provides Roquentin with an ultimate purpose and place.

47 Described,

predictably, as the encounter of ‘visages d’enfants’ (22). all three cases when it appears he literally demands that the record be played. 49 Evans, ‘“Some of These Days,”’ 64. 48 In

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 72

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

73

Boris Vian and the Inescapable Score It would be difficult to discuss French jazz fiction without addressing Boris Vian (1920–59). Vian was an amateur trumpet player, engineer, novelist, poet, essayist, jazz critic, singer, and all-round gadfly who produced an astonishingly rich body of work before dying of heart failure at the age of thirty-nine. Perhaps the most famous of Vian’s novels, and the one where jazz plays the most obvious role, is L’Écume des jours (1947). Though published only nine years after Sartre’s La Nausée, L’Écume nevertheless represents a radically different world. For one, the intervening years had seen the German occupation.50 But perhaps most importantly, whereas in Sartre and Soupault jazz remains a vague signifier, principally evoking the tropes of the racial score and demonstrating relatively limited knowledge of the actual music, Vian’s incorporation of jazz into his text relies on the ‘jazz shibboleth’ already alluded to: the overt demonstration of extensive knowledge of jazz, against which Alexandre Pierrepont proposes the far less essentializing idea of a ‘champ jazzistique.’51 Again, the jazz shibboleth consists of the biographical details of musicians’ lives, recording dates, repertoire, musical styles, and various esoteric details that distinguish the ‘true connoisseur’ from the ‘vulgar fan.’ In other words, there is no chance that Boris Vian, one of the great jazz critics of the postwar era, would ever have taken Sophie Tucker for a black woman – or for a jazz musician. In this sense, it might be tempting to identify L’Écume des jours as a rewriting of Sartre’s first novel.52 Indeed, the framing device of jazz remains, as does an existential quest, though in Vian the movement is, at least at first glance, from a utopian state to one of abjection and loss, whereas in Sartre, the novel begins in a state of aimless wandering only to (apparently) open up the possibility of salvation through engaged art by the end.53 50

Partly in response to his experiences during the war, Sartre himself had largely given up writing fiction by this time in order to concentrate on his philosophical work. 51 Alexandre Pierrepont, Le Champ jazzistique (Marseille: Parenthèses, 2002). Indeed, Pierrepont’s term aims to break away from a circumscribed object defined as jazz (and therefore from the racialized history the present study sets out to critique). In Vian’s case in particular, there appears to be a similar impulse: the desire to historicize not just the music but also the social motivations for its production. 52 Just as so many critics have read Sartre’s novel as an ironic rewriting of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. 53 In La Musique oubliée, Pautrot follows the chapter on Sartre’s La Nausée with a lengthy discussion of L’Écume des jours. As with his discussion of Sartre, Pautrot introduces a largely psychoanalytic reading of music in the novel, focusing on sexuality and desire. There is, of course, relatively little distance between racial and sexual scores, as Susan McClary demonstrates in Feminine Endings. To a degree, for Pautrot, the musical as evocative of the feminine functions similarly to the way race functions in the present analysis. At the same time, Pautrot remains within an analytical abstraction where the feminine is merely the (metonymic) reflection of a narcissistic form of (male) desire. This seems to overlook the parallels between

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 73

10/05/2017 09:09

74

Scoring Race

Whether Vian is parodying and correcting Sartre’s novel or not, the latter’s appearance in L’Écume des jours as the character Jean-Sol Partre confirms his role in its conceptualization. As such, is it worth considering what Vian does that differs from Sartre (and Soupault before that) and the role music plays in the shift away from the philosopher’s approach to writing music and race. In making this comparison, two important features are evident. The first is how manifesting an intimate knowledge of the jazz ‘field,’ the jazz shibboleth, becomes a motor for the narrative; the second is how this same field simultaneously facilitates a critique of race – and demonstrates such a critique’s limits. In Sartre, race remains an unproblematized touchstone around which Roquentin situates himself, whether in the form of the childish black man or the ‘négresse’ vocalist. Little suggests irony beyond the vague intuition that the novel remains deliberately and systematically open-ended, thereby denying any stable ‘truth,’ and, by extension (perhaps), challenging the essences (such as race) that might guarantee such a truth. As Gerald Prince notes, ‘[f]rom uncertain beginning to hesitant end, in fact, Roquentin’s diary abounds in paradoxes and contradictions.’54 Conversely, L’Écume des jours, while surreal in its representations, nevertheless overtly and systematically initiates its engagement with the converging ideas of race and music that will become the hallmark of Vian’s critical writings on jazz. In this sense, though deeply pessimistic, the values and conditions the novel represents are confronted far more directly than in Sartre. The use of jazz as narrative frame begins, as Viviane Smith notes, with the bracketing dates of the novel.55 The preface to L’Écume des jours signs off with: La Nouvelle-Orléans 10 mars 194656 [New Orleans March 10th, 1946]57

The end of the novel reads: Memphis, 8 mars, 1946 Davenport, 10 mars 1946 (335)

an apparent abstraction and, for example, Vian’s systematic and lifelong misogyny. Thus, it needs to be stressed that the racial score, though an abstraction in one sense, like constructions of ‘the feminine,’ impacts the material world in ways that are of immediate concern to the African writers and filmmakers discussed in the next three chapters. 54 Prince, ‘La Nausée and the Question of Closure,’ 61. 55 Viviane Smith, ‘La Musique et L’Écume des jours,’ Australian Journal of French Studies 19.2 (1982): 204–22. 56 Boris Vian, L’Écume des jours (Paris: Poche, 1996), 20. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 57 Boris Vian, Mood Indigo, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Grove, 1968), 7.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 74

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

75

New Orleans, Memphis, and Davenport are mythical place names in jazz’s birth and migration. The story goes that jazz famously took shape in the red-light district of New Orleans, Storyville, and then traveled up the Mississippi River to places like Memphis, Tennessee, and Davenport, Iowa.58 At the same time, as others have noted,59 the dates Vian attaches to these cities are not connected to the history of jazz, which had long since moved to New York by 1946. Rather, they work through an evocation of jazz’s history while also underscoring the fantastic – the fictional – nature of the entire contents of this famously surreal novel.60 In the process, African-American improvised music becomes a potentiality – a symbol of all that could be right with the world. But it also reminds the reader of its problematic mythical status as a constructed form, a genre whose coherence-as-genre – as jazz – depends on a history that is (re)constituted by a narrative intention that would lead the music over time from south to north, from New Orleans to New York (and thus, perhaps, even from the United States to France). In a sense, these impossible places and dates also imply the impossibility of two narratives: the one constituting jazz with its own origin myth, and the one of which the novel consists. Neither could be ‘realistically’ composed in the space and time implied by these dates; they are, in the truest sense, heterotopias: imagined/bracketed spaces in which others are located and by and outside which certain forms of knowledge are legitimated. The places are rendered all the more fictional in that, as has been repeatedly noted by critics, despite his fascination with the country and lifelong love of jazz, Vian never actually visited the United States. Not only is Vian’s jazz a fiction, but the geographical and material context of its production is as well. If the evocations of the story’s bracketing paratext clearly identify and deconstruct jazz as a Western idea, the same kind of work continues within the narrative. Again, jazz appears in a variety of ways, most notably in Duke Ellington’s ubiquitous presence throughout the novel: Ellington’s standards ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ (32),61 ‘Loveless Love’ (33), ‘Chloé’ (54),62 the faux Ellington tune

58 Home

of the famous trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, who heavily influenced Vian’s own playing style as an amateur trumpet player. 59 See Smith, ‘La Musique et L’Écume des jours,’ and especially Gilbert Pestureau, Boris Vian, les amerlauds et les godons (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1978). 60 This is a novel in which rooms shrink, rabbits excrete pills, faucets produce eels (which are subsequently turned into pâtés), mice play with balls of sunlight, and the four protagonists die in more or less extraordinary fashion: from a water-lily in the lung (Chloé), to being shot by an ‘equalizer’ (Chick), volatized in a bookstore fire (Alise), and presumed drowned ­(Colin). 61 Colin famously plays this song on one of Vian’s great literary inventions, the pianocktail – an instrument that mixes cocktails based on what is played on it. 62 Variations on ‘Chloé’ reappear throughout the narrative at key moments, and return in the form of the character Chloé, with whom Colin falls in love. The tune appears shortly after Chloé and Colin meet, and during their wedding. Chloé’s death from a water-lily in the lung

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 75

10/05/2017 09:09

76

Scoring Race

‘Concerto for Johnny Hodges’ (55),63 ‘Mood to be Wooed’ (175), ‘Slap Happy’ (181), ‘Blues of the Vagabond’ (243), ‘Misty Mornin’’ (245), and ‘Blue Bubbles’ (245) all make an appearance. These various titles represent important musical moments in the American bandleader and composer’s career up to the time of the writing of the novel. In addition, they underscore the various ideas and moods the novel explores – from the underlying question of race to the role of women, the relationship between pleasure and being, sexual fantasy and freedom, and of course, the ambiguous relationship between music – most notably jazz – and the literary work. Vian’s invocation of Duke Ellington is particularly effective as the latter is a powerful metonym for the complex questions that jazz history poses about race. Ellington (who became one of Vian’s close friends) is emblematic of jazz’s glamorous big band era of the late 1920s and 1930s and thus, in a sense, encapsulates the height of jazz’s tactical racialization by whiteness.64 Tellingly, Ellington learned to play with audiences’ raced expectations of his music as skillfully as he directed his musicians.65 Most notably, the long residency of his orchestra as the Harlem Cotton Club house band (playing to predominantly white audiences) led to what became known as the ‘jungle style,’ or ‘jungle music.’ That the ‘jungle style’ was itself a highly constructed racial illusion – the very irony of which is perhaps best exemplified by ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ (the first tune mentioned in the novel) – never occurred to white audiences who wished to indulge their own ‘black and tan fantasies’ as they trekked up to Harlem to ‘slum it.’66 The irony was not only that the music itself was a complex arrangeat the end of the novel also speaks to the novel’s simultaneous celebration of jazz and skepticism concerning its idealization as a musical genre. 63 As Jean-Louis Pautrot points out, ‘Concerto for Johnny Hodges’ (a variation on Ellington’s ‘Concerto for Cootie’) is an invention of the author for the sake of the story. 64 Jazz was tactically racialized by the culture industry that recorded and distributed Ellington’s music, the (white) audiences that went to hear him play, and the (white) critical apparatus – in the United States and in France – that arose around the music, definitively circumscribing it in the process as a racially inflected genre. 65 It should first be noted that he never accepted the jazz label as applying to his music, preferring instead the idea of ‘American music.’ 66 It should be noted that ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ is the title of a 1927 Ellington tune as well as a famous 1929 short film starring Ellington and his band. The latter uses, on the one hand, some of the worst (but also most common) racist tropes from the minstrel tradition (the two illiterate, dark-skinned fools who come to repossess the piano at the beginning of the movie) and, on the other, the carefully detailed representation of the complexity of composing and arranging the titular song that occupies the opening of the film. Further complicating the film’s stereotypes, the quick verbal wit of the men sent to repossess the piano – ‘Please remove your anatomy from the mahogany,’ says one to Ellington as he sits at the piano; or again, to Ellington’s ‘You aren’t going to take my piano, are you?’ the answer, ‘Well, I’m not gonna take your ice-box’ – suggests a resistance to the extreme stereotype (most notably stupidity) the two men appear so unquestioningly to represent. On the other hand, the fact that the simple offer of alcohol dissuades them from taking the piano away immediately suggests otherwise.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 76

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

77

ment of contrived tropes tactically playing on previously established clichés of ‘barbaric’ or ‘jungle’ sounds, but also that Ellington himself played with and on racial expectations in terms of speech, dress, and the performance of male sexuality. He spoke in elegant sentences, was a dandy, was racially and sexually ambiguous, and changed his musical identity constantly (moving from the raced clichés of the 1920 and 1930s to his orchestral pieces of the 1950s and 1960s). All this suggests that Vian’s choice of Ellington to structure and nourish his narrative underscores his own ambivalence about jazz and fiction – or rather, his understanding that the idea of jazz as a stable signifier is itself a fiction, that the relationship between the two media, music and writing, is unstable, and that the white writer’s invocation of jazz necessarily feeds the racial score. Indeed, naming Ellington gives jazz a particular kind of authority that the history of Western thought has, as we have seen, denied to music generally and, more recently, to jazz in particular. Significantly, Ellington is, first and foremost, a composer of jazz standards rather than a ‘mere’ performer. Thus, for the nameless ‘négresse’ singer of Sartre’s novel, Vian substitutes a named black man who is master – composer for and conductor of – his band. Further, Ellington gives his star musicians (most notably altoist Johnny Hodges) equal responsibility for the musical genius of the orchestra, thereby breaking down the binary of composer and performer. The brilliance of the music is no longer dependent on a Manichean relationship between music and writing, black and white, or again critic and musician. Rather, these categories are allowed to slip into each other. Of course, Ellington is not the only jazz reference in the novel. The entire mythical urban locale of the novel is threaded through with famous jazz names: Colin’s apartment looks out onto ‘Louis Armstrong Ave’ (27).67 There’s also a Sidney Bechet Street (165),68 as well as a Jimmy Noone Street (221).69 In addition, jazz permeates many of the important scenes in the novel: the dance lesson between Nicolas and Colin; the party where Chloé and Colin meet; during the dinner between Chick and Colin when Colin learns he will have a second date Racialized sexual tension also emerges in the form of the dancer with heart trouble, whose very light skin plays with fantasies of miscegenation against Ellington’s more obvious blackness. 67 Trumpeter and singer Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong, discussed at some length in the introduction, represents another touchstone figure of the present study. 68 Sidney Bechet (1897–1959) was a clarinetist and soprano saxophonist who first traveled to France with Will Marion Cook’s Syncopated Orchestra (mentioned in Soupault) in 1919, and later returned as a band member for the Revue nègre. As such, he was one of the first ‘true’ jazz musicians with whom the French became familiar. He emigrated to France after the Second World War and gained stardom, particularly in Paris, where he lived until his death. 69 Jimmy Noone (1895–1944) is one of the more obscure names in the novel, but he is familiar to those in jazz’s inner circle: he is part of the jazz shibboleth. Noone, a clarinetist, played with almost all the early New Orleans musicians and followed the migration of jazz up the Mississippi to Chicago and then over to New York, finally ending up in Los Angeles.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 77

10/05/2017 09:09

78

Scoring Race

with Chloé; during Colin and Chloé’s wedding; when they return from their honeymoon; and when the antique dealer tests the pianocktail. Further references to musical techniques – slap-bass versus bowed bass, wa-wa trumpet, and details about the musicians’ lives (for example, that club owners consistently rob their bands) – fill out the register of references. Taken as a whole, this array of details turns jazz into the heartbeat of the narrative universe. This does not, however, liberate the text from race. First, though the explicit references are few, virtually all the jazz musicians either mentioned or alluded to are African-American.70 So, though it is not immediately apparent as a concern that the music structuring the novel is jazz, this choice of references suggests that race is never far beneath the surreal veneer. Further, while it would demand a far longer analysis to account for it fully, the other work that Vian wrote while completing L’Écume des jours, the racial revenge novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes [I Shall Spit on your Graves] (1946), penned under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, supposedly an African-American author, confirms the French author’s deep preoccupation with race and how closely he associated racial oppression and the production of jazz as a musical form.71 Indeed, much of the commentary on the racial politics of jazz that remains occluded in L’Écume des jours is loudly proclaimed by Lee Anderson, the black protagonist of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes.72 Nevertheless, if L’Écume des jours rarely mentions race, when it does, it vividly illustrates the problems inhering to any reference or allusion to jazz by the white novelist. The most important example surrounds the famous dance, the ‘biglemoi.’ Upon learning that he has been invited to a dance party, Colin asks his butler Nicolas to teach him how to dance this fictional step. Nicolas goes on to describe it in the following way: – Il convient d’éviter les erreurs grossières et les fautes de goût: l’une d’elle consisterait à danser le biglemoi sur un rythme de boogie-woogie … Je conseille à Monsieur un tempo d’atmosphère, dans le style de Chloé, arrangé par Duke El-

70 Rare

exceptions are the mention of Davenport, Iowa, the birthplace of white trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke and the later mention of composer George Gershwin. 71 The history of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes is a novel in its own right. The story, which Vian claimed (in the introduction) to have merely translated from English, recounts the story of the protagonist, Lee Anderson, a light-skinned black man who can pass – in other words, who is ‘black’ according to America’s ‘one drop rule’ – and who avenges the lynching of his younger brother by first seducing and then murdering the two daughters of the town sheriff. Boris Vian [Vernon Sullivan, pseud.], J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1997). 72 For a longer discussion of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes and the manner in which it works through the relationship of writing and race (and implicitly, music), see Pim Higginson, ‘The Rantings of Vian/Sullivan: Race Undercover,’ Cincinnati Romance Review 17 (1998): 49–57.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 78

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

79

lington, ou du Concerto pour Johny Hodges … Ce qu’outre-Atlantique on désigne par moody ou sultry tune. – Mais pourquoi … prend-on un air si lent ? … – Il y a une raison, dit Nicolas. En principe le danseur et la danseuse se tiennent à une distance moyenne l’un de l’autre. Avec un air lent, on peut arriver à régler l’ondulation de telle sorte que le foyer fixe se trouve à mi-hauteur des deux partenaires: la tête et les pieds sont alors mobiles … Il est, et c’est regrettable, advenue que des personnes peu scrupuleuses se sont mises à danser le biglemoi à la façon des Noirs, sur tempo rapide… C’est à dire avec un foyer mobile aux pieds, un à la tête et, malheureusement, un intermédiaire mobile à la hauteur des reins, les points fixes, ou pseudo-articulations, étant le sternum et les genoux. Colin rougit. – Je comprends! dit-il. – Sur un boogie, conclut Nicolas, l’effet est, disons le mot, d’autant plus obscène que l’air est obsédant en général. (54–9) [‘One only need to avoid gross error and lack of taste. Like dancing the ogleme to a boogie-woogie … I advise a mood number, sir, something in the style of “Chloe” arranged by Duke Ellington, or the “Concerto for Johnny Hodges” … What on the other side of the Atlantic they call a moody or sultry tune.’ ‘But why … use a slow tune?’ ‘There is a reason,’ said Nicolas. ‘In theory the dancer and his partner stand a reasonable distance apart. With a slow tune one can manage to control the waves in such a way that the source is halfway up each partner: the head and feet are in unison … It has, regrettably, happened that unscrupulous people have started to dance the ogle-me in the Negro style, to a quick tempo … And so, with one source of motion at the head, another at the feet and, unfortunately, a middle one, level with the small of the back, the fixed points or pseudo-articulations are at the sternum and the knees.’ Colin blushed. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘In a boogie,’ Nicolas ended, ‘the effect is, it must be admitted, all the more obscene because one gets so engrossed in the music.’]73

Jazz, dance, and the black body merge in Nicolas’s dance lesson. Whatever the tempo, the dance itself is implicitly black in origin – the music Nicolas suggests is clearly jazz – a ‘moody ou sultry tune’ – and reference to the English terms further suggests the association of jazz with an African-American origin. But what exactly is the textual attitude toward race here? In other words, where does this passage fit in relation to the racial score? In a sense, dance serves as the perfect metaphor: it is the quintessential site of blackness; the black body 73 Vian,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 79

Mood Indigo, 25–7.

10/05/2017 09:09

80

Scoring Race

as spectacle and as incarnation of the natural (in) man, set in motion by the rhythms of jazz, sexually.74 But it also hints at the narrative’s calculated relation to this racial equation: the entire story metaphorically dances around this central racial point while, at this rare moment in the text, actually revealing that preoccupation and the manner in which it contends with it. That is, behind the vaguely vapid story of a boy and a girl, barely unsettled by the surreal techniques involved, is another narrative striving to speak (of) jazz in terms that acknowledge the racial score, while not contributing to or being captured by it. Nicolas, the chef and butler, who is part of a running gag – his haughtiness belies his ostensible servitude – plays a central role in this ‘dance’ around race. His apparent subaltern status is contradicted by the multitude of skills he possesses (he is a classically trained chef, a great dancer, and, as the only consistently mature voice in the novel, a wise elder). In a sense, then, he surreptitiously fills the role of blackness in the novel.75 He is called upon to teach a black dance which he knows intimately, and, as might be the case with a black character, his status is contradicted by his aristocratic bearing. Just as importantly, in this passage Vian makes sure that it is Nicolas who pronounces the jazz shibboleth of name-dropping and highly technical style-naming – which largely escapes the understanding of Colin, his young white interlocutor and ‘master.’ The result is a reversal of the racial score such that the ‘stand-in’ for blackness shows that there is something in jazz that black practitioners cannot only perform as dance – which would return us to the parameters of the racial score – but that they recognize and communicate narratively as a form of cultural knowledge with its own highly coded aesthetic standards. In fact, the textual dance lives between the space of Nicolas’s stereotypical points of reference concerning the ‘biglemoi’ – its origins in jazz, the superiority and mastery of the black dancer, the provocative sexuality it unleashes when performed by its best (a.k.a., black) practitioners – and the irony with which these various stereotypes are used by the narrative. That is, the racing of jazz-as-dance immediately evokes Dionysian excess, the barbaric sensuality of Nietzsche’s ‘witches’ brew.’76 But, as with the German philosopher’s intuition that ‘this barbarian other was not so alien after all,’ what is evident is the process of racial projection involved and the ways in which categories are forced together through the evocation of a particular semantic field. The ‘provocativeness’ in black dance, as Vian himself appears to acknowledge in his sly use of Nicolas, is how the music is made into the materialization of a particular desire that marks 74 Chapter 4 will investigate further the staging of the black body, in this case in film, with Jose-

phine Baker as the principal example. 75 These character traits in the novel clearly led director Michel Gondry to cast Franco-Senegalese/Mauritian actor Omar Sy as the Nicolas in his remake of the film adaptation of L’Écume des jours. 76 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 39.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 80

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

81

the history of jazz’s reception in France. That is, jazz as a knowable object (of pleasure, of study) is the product of white consumers (young zazou or hipsters, the intellectual class, the artistic avant-garde) whose racialized expectations have exploited (and been exploited by) black performers. Thus, the meaning that remains suspended is whether the dancing of a black couple is in fact sensuous, or whether it is the white couple, incapable of sustaining the tempo (thus throwing the ‘torsos’ out of sync) who become obscene. In either case, and regardless of the degree to which Vian actively constructs this dialogical reading, the white performer assumes in the musical object a sexuality that is not an inherent part of the music. Instead, the sexuality of black dance derives from the concatenation of meanings embedded in the Western construction of the musical that the black dancer is made to distil: jazz, as the essence of music, made flesh. If boogie-woogie as performed by someone like Fats Waller makes these connections clear to the point of caricature77 – precisely what Nicolas is dealing in – then Ellington, the reference point of the novel and the composer of the ‘sultry tunes’ to which Nicolas also refers, most effectively dances around this connection and turns it in on itself. Like the novel itself, Ellington acknowledges the fiction within which he operates while also understanding the impossibility of escaping it. To a large degree, while the novel has generally been read as concerning a loss of innocence – Chloé’s ‘malady’ announces itself in her cough as soon as Colin and she marry – this appears to be one of the story’s more banal elements. For one, it chooses to ignore the ubiquitous violence that permeates the narrative from one end to another – the decapitation of the eel, the hecatomb at the ice-rink – all events that take place well before the marriage. The only difference is that they all either contribute or are irrelevant to Colin’s happiness. It is only after the wedding that Colin becomes engaged with material concerns: money, his wife’s wellbeing. This same double reading is productively applicable to the novel’s concern with music. The novel certainly could be interpreted as associating jazz with ‘good times.’ Much of the data in the text leaves such a conclusion available. Nevertheless, if it is understood that in fact the movement from innocence to responsibility, adolescence to adulthood, is arbitrary, an ironic smokescreen, then instead the novel can be read as seeking out ways to escape the effects of the racial score while continuing to talk about jazz. To the extent that the end of the novel represents a catastrophic failure – all four protagonists either die violent deaths or are destined to do so shortly – the true 77

See, for example, his performance of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ from the film Stormy Weather, screenplay by Frederick Jackson and Ted Koehler, produced by William Le Baron, directed by Andrew Stone (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1943); ‘Fats Waller – Ain’t Misbehavin’ – Stormy Weather (1943),’ YouTube video, 2:46, posted by ‘bessjazz,’ November 6, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNPpssruFY.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 81

10/05/2017 09:09

82

Scoring Race

failure is the novel’s inability to break free from the racial score. Nicolas’s dance lesson ironizes the stereotype of the sexualized dancing black body but, in doing so, inevitably reiterates the impossibility of giving that body a voice of its own. There are no black voices in this novel: only bodies, names, music. The white voice continues to speak in the name of jazz. Even Nicolas ultimately becomes a white figure in blackface. Though Boris Vian is among the most sensitive of critics in the French literary tradition to the racial score and to jazz’s role in consolidating it, he, perhaps better than anybody, demonstrates the impossibility of escaping it – literally. At the same time, what differentiates him from the group of writers to be addressed next is a residual utopianism – the persistent faith that a possibility remains for jazz to be celebrated without becoming embroiled in the exploitive history of its constitution as an object of desire and admiration.

Abject Whiteness: Jazz Fiction Today Boris Vian represents a signal ‘paradigm shift’ in the French novel’s treatment of jazz, and by extension, jazz’s position with respect to and within the racial score. Having established this, it is worth examining, as a means of concluding this chapter, some more recent French jazz fiction. The jazz literature of the last twenty years summarizes well what has grown on the foundations laid by Soupault, Sartre, and Vian, and that carried through the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s in an author such as Georges Perec, whose approach to the music is structural and ideological. Of the vast array of works published since the 1990s,78 three books stand out as exemplary: Christian Gailly’s Be-bop (1996), Tanguy Viel’s Le Black Note (1998), and Enzo Cormann’s Vita Nova Jazz (2011). While written decades after Vian’s jazz novel L’Écume des jours, each bears the mark of Vian’s evident preoccupation with the actual music and its practitioners, and claims legitimacy through various expressions of the jazz shibboleth – the first signs of which appeared in Soupault, but which was formalized and expanded upon in Vian.79 In all three novels, the author has clearly spent time around musicians – or in the case of Gailly, was one – thereby gaining a deep

78 See

Michel Le Bourhis, Il y a des nuits entières (2006), Christophe Lambert, Swing à Berlin (2012), and Marcus Malte, Les Harmoniques: Beau Danube Blues (2011), among many. 79 Indeed, what Soupault claims as a knowledge of jazz hardly passes muster, though the moment of his writing – and the limited access of the French to ‘real’ jazz at the time – needs to be taken into account. Georges Perec’s famous essay on free jazz, ‘La chose,’ published in Le Magazine littéraire 316 (December 1993), but no doubt written in 1967, shows Vian’s adherence to the jazz shibboleth in his denying any real knowledge of the music and then demonstrating his keen awareness of the music’s practitioners – as well as very strong opinions about their activities. Perec’s analysis is historicized and located materially within a series of cultural practices, but it too ultimately remains embedded in the racial score.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 82

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

83

familiarity that the narrator catalogs and transforms into a secret handshake between reader and writer. At the same time, though much of Vian’s perspective remains in these novels, an additional element is present. In L’Écume des jours, to the extent that it appeared at all, it did so ironically – for example, in Nicolas’s dance lesson. That is, given the absolute whiteness of Vian’s characters (Colin is a redhead) and the blackness of the musicians in the novel, the story never deals directly with the inherent paradox of its own engagement with jazz and the racial score. While celebrating jazz as freedom, the text is parasitic upon it, reducing music to a textual presence that, in essence, perpetuates the exploitation it condemns. Further, the violence that saturates the novel is ultimately connected to a Western form of production, writing, and this technology itself is intimately, if cryptically, tied to the inability of the story to transcend its own literary condition. Nevertheless, much of the above remains latent in the novel, and gains clarity principally if read intertextually with, among other things, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes and Vian’s critical essays on jazz.80 The novels of the last twenty years amplify the ironic distance between white authors and a music, the centerpiece of the logic that drives the narrative, that they racialize more or less overtly as black. This new approach could usefully be called ‘abject whiteness.’ The phenomenon is not entirely new: in a sense, Soupault’s Le Nègre (particularly when coupled with the aptly named, autobiographical Histoire d’un blanc of the same year) already expresses a kind of racial abjection in the face of blackness: a fundamentally decadent Western subjectivity confronted with the ontological vitality of its other (even as this vitality is captured and exploited by white writing). Indeed, within the realm of philosophical discourse this is precisely what Donna V. Jones has so brilliantly explored in her underappreciated and fascinating The Racial Discourse of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. In particular, she shows how, on the one hand, a series of (‘white’) philosophical and literary discourses such as those of Nietzsche and Bergson relied heavily on vitalistic principles attached to difference, while on the other, African and diaspora authors tried (Césaire) or did not try (Senghor) to shed this vitalist association in order to claim a humanity that was not limited to a purely material existence.81 Soupault very much follows the logic Jones proposes. That Soupault wishes he were black is expressed in any number of ways throughout the novel. Nevertheless, this desire for the pre-lapsarian or vital ‘authenticity’ of blackness remains couched in the basic terms of the racial score as sketched in detail during the nineteenth century by Western race theorists. 80 Collected

in Boris Vian, Écrits sur le jazz (Paris: Poche, 1999). V. Jones, The Racial Discourse of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

81 Donna

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 83

10/05/2017 09:09

84

Scoring Race

More recent works address race from a new vantage point. The narrative is no longer from the perspective of a writer (whether in first-person or third-person omniscient discourse), but rather focuses on the emotional and creative struggles of a musician; and because the main characters are now all musicians, the relationship to that medium is, at least in appearance, metamorphosed. That is, the accumulated history of a series of musical practices appears to take center stage. The result, among other things, is that the jazz shibboleth, and particularly the sacred pantheon of names (Ellington, Wellman, Armstrong, Webb, etc.) is now gifted with a privileged and unique aesthetic voice that haunts the text as uncannily close (and familiar) yet impossibly far (and foreign). Or rather, the technical requirements of the music are rendered accessible (transcribable) – these musicians can, at least in some cases, play like their idols – but the creative spirit that drove the originators of the music remains as inaccessible as ever – these (white) musicians are, in a sense, condemned to imitation, to providing a faint echo of the (black) spirit of the music. In each case, musical creation is a form of absolute self-alienation. In the process, what had been references to black sexual energy, playfulness, childishness, and general lack of inhibition are now replaced by names that begin to represent the racial score metonymically: (famous tenor saxophonist) John Coltrane, (famous altoist) Charlie Parker, (famous trumpet player) Miles Davis, etc. In all three novels – though in differing ways and to differing degrees – the white writer now represents a white musician desperately trying to reproduce the authenticity of an iconic black musician – or to break away from that musician’s influence (and failing absolutely to do so). Whereas earlier (including in Vian), musicality had been conceded to blackness, now the white musician strives for musicality but runs up against the blackness he has created as music(al) and, in particular, against the iconic names he has placed upon the throne of an ever more sacred musical sphere.82 The West has produced an ontology dependent on a paradigm that delegates writing to whiteness exclusively. As a counterpart, as Arthur Comte de Gobineau forcefully posited, musicality is the exclusive domain of blackness. This black musicality, according to the reception it was given in Paris between the wars and subsequently, finds its most developed expression in jazz. At the same time, and again evocative of Jones’s idea of blackness as associated by whiteness with a vital energy, the inherent power of jazz as a vital or Nietzschean force becomes practically instrumentalized through its critical capture in writing. The price that whiteness pays for this, in a manner identical to the price paid by the master in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, is a lost contact with the material world, an inability to return to the 82 It

should be noted that this ‘desire to be black’ had been evident among musicians far earlier than among their fictional counterparts. One need only read Mezz Mezzro’s Really the Blues (1946) for confirmation (New York: NYRB Classics, 2016).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 84

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

85

origin – or in the context of these novels, to play jazz. That is, the white musician, already an oxymoron within this system, runs blindly into the parameters of his own racially configured episteme. The result is what can aptly be called a white abjection in the face of jazz: the perennial perception of oneself as a pale or debased copy of an original.

Le Black Note

Tanguy Viel’s Le Black Note (1998) tells the story of four friends, all amateur jazz musicians and drug addicts, who take up residence on an island off the coast of France. Their new home, the eponymous ‘Black Note,’ is where they hole up, purportedly to become the greatest jazz band in history. Their story, narrated by the unnamed trumpet player, quickly becomes a psychodrama when we learn that one character, Paul, has died in a mysterious fire and that two others, the narrator and Christian, are in an asylum and under suspicion of having started it. We also learn that each ‘musician’ (except the narrator) had a nickname relating to tenor saxophonist John Coltrane’s famous quartet from the early sixties: thus, Christian the drummer became Elvin (Jones), Georges the bass player became Jimmy (Garrison), and Paul the tenor player became John (Coltrane).83 For all these characters, this identification with the late, great tenor player and his rhythm section precipitates a drug-abetted group psychosis. Paul/John fantasizes himself slowly merging with the iconic African-American musician – to the point where he tells everyone that his tenor saxophone was the last one that Coltrane played before he died. This fantasy becomes the driver for his unhealthy transformation, one of the highlights of which is the following scene: Un soir, je suis rentré, j’ai vu John dormant sur le canapé, les jambes toujours tendues sur les accoudoirs, mais cette fois c’est son visage que j’ai regardé, et sa peau : il l’avait peinte en noir. Il avait pris le cirage de mes chaussures, et il en avait mis, et fermait les yeux, respirait lentement, comme pour laisser le noir de la cire s’infiltrer plus profond, avancer vers son cœur, et il souriait, il laissait éclater ses dents jaunies, sur ses lèvres peintes aussi, et coulantes de pâtes noires. J’ai pensé: il y a des limites dans le respect de ses idoles, tu n’as pas le droit, ai-je pensé.84 [One night, I came home and I saw John sleeping on the sofa, his legs still stretched out over the armrests, but this time it’s his face that I looked at, and his skin: he had painted it black. He had taken my shoe polish and he had put some on, and his eyes were closed, and he was breathing slowly, as if he were letting the blackness 83 The

narrator is never given a nickname (or a name, for that matter) because as a trumpet player he doesn’t fit into this fantasy: the group needed a piano player who could have become ‘McCoy’ (Tyner) – though interestingly, Tyner’s name is never mentioned in the novel. We are just supposed to know who is missing. 84 Tanguy Viel, Le Black Note (Paris: Minuit, 1998), 29–30.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 85

10/05/2017 09:09

86

Scoring Race

of the polish go deeper, move towards his heart, and he smiled, he let his yellowed teeth shine, his lips painted also, and dripping with black paste. I thought: there are limits to the respect one can show one’s idols, you don’t have the right, I thought to myself.]

This moment relatively early in the novel captures the great sense of despair these lost souls experience in the face of an impossible ambition: to actually be their idols, African-American musicians of thirty-five years earlier. What becomes evident as the narrative develops is the degree to which the racialized ideal of jazz music, and its identification with iconic figures, creates an impermeable boundary around the object of desire. The desire of abject white subject Paul actually to become John Coltrane leads him to the ultimate paradox: the replication of the minstrel tradition’s dehumanization of blackness (in the form of blackface) as an absolute symbol of white abjection in the face of a subject position it has radically denied itself through the very mechanisms by which it created the circumscribed idea of jazz in the first place. Just as importantly, the four men’s fixation on Coltrane’s quartet from the early sixties tellingly ignores Coltrane’s own desire to move beyond jazz into a wider musical sphere – the ‘free’ improvisation of his late work before his death in 1967. Thus, the four Frenchmen’s psychosis proceeds from the fossilization of a single moment in their revered artist’s process of creation, which they have preserved in the amber of the jazz label; but in the process they have also created an identity to which they have no access precisely because, following the racial score, they have walled themselves off from it, mistaking their own fantasmatic faith in an absolute racial gift (black musicality) for a material reality beyond its generation in the service of a particular Western epistemological project. The white Frenchman cannot be Coltrane because Paul has created an imaginary negation of himself across an impenetrable boundary of difference ironically reified by jazz.

Be-bop

Christian Gailly’s Be-bop (1995), written at virtually the same time as Le Black Note, operates along similar though far more whimsical lines. The story consists of two converging narratives. A young and talented alto player is trapped by his indebtedness to one of the major figures of jazz, famous altoist Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker. Separately, an older man, a talented tenor player indebted to the sound of John Coltrane, has given up his ambitions as a musician and has become a successful businessman. The decadent pathos and self-destruction evident in Tanguy becomes a gauzier consideration of the relationship between a white (French, male) jazz musician and his idealized African-American model. Whereas little is known of Le Black Note’s characters’ ability to actually play – they talk a lot and perform not at all – the two main characters of Be-bop, Basile

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 86

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

87

Lorettu and Paul Saint-Sabin, are accomplished musicians. In both cases, they are bounced from the music by the racial score – this is all the more ironic in that music represents a need for them, a ‘soul,’ an organic and affective relationship to the material word that they, by the definition of their own subjective self-determination (within and by the writing of the narrative that gives them shape), cannot have. It now becomes absolutely clear that in composing the racial score, whiteness failed to anticipate its own proportionally exponential investment in the space of alterity to which it relegated its black other. In Be-bop, whiteness no longer suffers from musicality as a merely drug-fueled (or attenuated) desire, but from an inability to achieve authenticity within a medium that, in a sense, it has all but mastered. That is, for the first time, the discourse of literary authenticity to which blackness has been subjected as the counterpart of its musicality finds its musical counterpart. The dynamic process of making blackness music(ality), of writing the racial score, depends on refusing writing to blackness. Early on, this meant literally preventing Africans or (largely enslaved) members of the diaspora from accessing the technology of writing, sometimes under penalty of death. Later, it was achieved more subtly by denying the authenticity, the originality of black writing: the persistent accusation of black writing as derivative, as merely parroting or ventriloquizing the white master so evident, for example, in the reception of the first African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley.85 Now, in the context of Be-bop, roles are reversed and the privileged aesthetic medium becomes the music in which the white jazz musicians cannot authentically speak – they are doomed to operate quotationally. The problem of authenticity (and concomitantly, of artistic creativity) is evident when Basile Lorettu, the young alto player, describes his own physique in indirect third-person discourse: Il [Lorettu] a les cheveux blonds, en brosse comme Mulligan, il ressemble à Gerry Mulligan, il le sait, on lui a déjà dit, il sait aussi que Mulligan maintenant a les cheveux longs, la barbe, il ressemble donc au Mulligan du temps où Mulligan était tout jeune, imberbe, en tee-shirt et en jean.

85

For a lengthy discussion of this fascinating theatricalization of writing’s exclusion from blackness, see Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s exploration of Wheatley’s appearance before the founding fathers, where she was asked to demonstrate her ability to have written the poems attributed to her by her master. Once it had been determined that indeed she had written them, it quickly followed that, per her readers, these were merely imitative and of poor poetic quality – not writing at all, but a series of learned motions that resembled writing. See The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2003). For a fascinating analysis of this in an African context, see Koffi Anyinefa’s discussion of the persistent accusations of plagiarism that accompany African writing to this day. ‘Postcolonial Postmodernity in Henri Lopes’s Le pleurer-rire,’ Research in African Literatures 29.3 (1998): 8–20.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 87

10/05/2017 09:09

88

Scoring Race

J’aurais dû jouer du baryton, se dit-il, c’est bien, le baryton, enfin c’est bien quand c’est Mulligan qui en joue et moi, si j’avais joué du baryton, j’aurais sûrement essayé de jouer comme Mulligan, alors si c’est pour jouer du baryton comme Mulligan, se dit-il, je préfère continuer à jouer de l’alto comme Charlie [Parker], se corrige, se dit, je préfère continuer à essayer de jouer de l’alto comme Charlie [Parker], de sonner comme, de phraser comme, jusqu’à ce que j’en ai marre.86 [He (Lorettu) has blond hair, in a brush-cut like Mulligan, he looks like Gerry Mulligan, he knows it, he’s been told that, he also knows that Mulligan now has long hair, and a beard, he therefore looks like Mulligan when Mulligan was really young, baby-faced, in a tee-shirt and jeans. I should have played the baritone, he tells himself, baritone is nice, well, it’s nice when Mulligan plays it, and if I had played baritone, there’s no doubt I would have tried to play like Mulligan, so if the idea is to play baritone like Mulligan, he tells himself, I prefer to continue to play alto like Charlie [Parker], he corrects himself, he says, I prefer to continue trying to play alto like Charlie [Parker], to have his sonority, to phrase like him, to the point of being sick of it.]

This early moment in the novel sets up a complex dynamic in which written language, jazz, and the elaborate and impermeable boundary between the two are constructed and acknowledged. Adding another layer to the jazz shibboleth, the novel evokes one of the great debates within the jazz community: the importance of so-called West Coast or ‘cool’ jazz, the velvety laid-back tone and technique of such players as Stan Getz (tenor), Art Pepper (alto), and Gerry Mulligan (baritone), to name a few. While these white musicians arguably stand as major figures in the jazz canon, for a number of critics they represent a derivative, technically inferior, and even soulless response to the incredible virtuosity and rhythmic drive of the jazz style called bebop – of which Charlie Parker is widely recognized as one of the founders. Thus, Lorettu’s consideration of his own imitative or derivative improvisational musical discourse is reflected immediately in his physical appearance. His feeling about Mulligan, mild admiration, suggests an acknowledged adequacy in the baritonist’s playing that doesn’t remotely measure up to Charlie Parker’s mythical status as an improvisational genius. Thus, in a sense, rather than imitate Mulligan – or even, perhaps, arrive at his own mediocre voice – Lorettu prefers to continue to skillfully imitate his African-American idol, Parker. Shortly thereafter, Lorettu notes that he ‘aurait préféré être noir, pas très grand, un peu bedonnant, alcoolique, drogué, malade à crever, américain’ [would have preferred to be black, not very tall, a little pudgy, alcoholic,

86 Christian

Gailly, Be-bop (Paris: Minuit, 1995), 18. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 88

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

89

an addict, deathly ill, American] (as Parker was), thereby removing any doubt about the function of the earlier discussion of Mulligan (19). Later, when Paul and his wife Jeanne attend a jazz concert, Paul’s reaction to the tenor player’s solo expands on this dynamic, once again underscoring the impossibility of an authentic white musical creativity in the face of the assumed genius of black musicality: Le tenor joue bien. Oh, bien sûr, c’est pas Coltrane, mais quand même, il joue bien, même très bien, d’un style plutôt classique que Trane, rappelant plutôt à Paul Johny Griffin, en moins bien, parce que Griffin, question invention, dans le genre improvisateur sans limites, on n’a jamais fait mieux, et on fera jamais mieux. (143) [The tenor player is pretty good. Of course, he’s not Coltrane, but still, he plays well, very well even, in a more classical style than Trane, more reminiscent of Paul Johnny Griffin, except not as good, because Griffin, in terms of inventiveness, the type who can improvise forever, nobody has been better and nobody will ever be better.]

Whether in comparison to a universal jazz icon such as John Coltrane or a more obscure name from the jazz shibboleth, such as African-American hard-bop saxophonist Johnny Griffin, the terms attached in the above passage to white playing suggest aptitude, proficiency, but never genius – never Art. The tenor player ‘joue bien, même très bien’ [plays well, very well even], but not like ‘Trane’ or Johnny Griffin, both of whom represent the musical genius of blackness, the very absolute that this textual critical synopsis formulates and to which the white tenor player, despite being skilled, has no access. Lorettu’s reaction to Paul’s playing, when the older ex-musician finally agrees to sit in for one piece, is identical to his feelings about his own style and that of Paul about the other tenor player: [I]l joue plutôt pas mal le vieux, il joue même bien, et comment qu’il joue bien, un peu trop coltranien mais bon, ça fait rien, ça fait rien, ça fait plaisir, c’est vrai qu’on dirait Coltrane, le même phrasé, merci. Paul, merci pour John [Coltrane], c’est formidable de le retrouver, la même sonorité dure, rageuse, coléreuse, exaspérée, et qui pourtant se retient. (153) [The old guy doesn’t play too badly, he’s even pretty good, yes he plays well, a little Coltranian but, well, that doesn’t matter, it’s a pleasure, really he does sound like Coltrane, the same phrasing, thank you. Paul, thanks for John [Coltrane], it’s wonderful finding him again, the same hard, raging, angry, exasperated sound, that despite all that still holds back.]

Again, the best that can be hoped for, expected, is a kind of perfect mimicry that allows for the vicarious and perhaps even uncanny pleasure of hearing a tenor player who died thirty years earlier than the time of the story. In other words, at no moment in Be-bop do any of the musicians escape the long shadow of

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 89

10/05/2017 09:09

90

Scoring Race

their black idols – these have been created as insurmountable obstacles barring the way to jazz, to the freedom of expression on which the music is premised in the white imagination. Though obviously less violent than Le Black Note, the persistence of abject whiteness in the face of a musical blackness of its own making is no less absolute. Lorettu and Paul’s inability to escape the racial score, to gain an authentic and originally creative artistic voice despite their absolute dedication to the music, again shows the racial shield that whiteness erects and the directly proportional increase in its impermeability as black genius is further personalized, defined, and deified. Additionally, Lorettu’s turn to emptying septic tanks in order to make a living only further confirms this raced abjectness. Rather than arriving at artistic achievement, Lorettu is, in an ironic reversal, finally (like so many black men and women before him) condemned to deal in excrement.87 Finally, while it is dangerous to draw parallels between diagetic narrative content and the ‘life of the writer,’ Gailly’s biography invites such a move. If, as the argument has been to this point, whiteness expels blackness into music through the writing it claims for itself, the result is also that whiteness, in a sense, is prevented from entering the restricted racial ‘reservation’ of music. Gailly himself having been a talented jazz musician who was never able to ‘make it’ in music, it becomes all the more tempting to consider his writing as an ironic and abject literary documentary of the very differential energy at work in the racial score: the novel documents the damage the idea of raced aesthetics inflicts on white protagonists who pursue a musicality they must – but cannot – have. Thus, the text testifies to an abject whiteness drawn in by the centripetal pull of a literary narrative it is compelled to endlessly (re)produce.

Vita Nova Jazz

Enzo Cormann’s 2011 Vita Nova Jazz, one of the most recent works of French jazz fiction, shows the increasingly elaborate ways in which the racial score precipitates abjectness in the white jazz musician. Interestingly, how race is evoked is far less apparent than in Be-bop and Le Black Note. Whereas it was explicitly a factor in the failure to achieve musical authenticity in both these earlier novels, Vita Nova Jazz’s pathos comes from its far more elaborate relationship to the score. The earlier novels rely on a relatively binary structure in which jazz refuses itself to whiteness in order to retain the mysterium at its core. This process of perpetual purification is the source of white abjection – abjection resulting from being excluded from an ideal pre-lapsarian aesthetic medium concocted in the laboratory of whiteness. Cormann’s novel instead spends considerably more time navigating across the musical–literary boundary. Yet, despite this 87 It

is hard not to think of the long history of black men and women working as maids, dishwashers, and ‘sanitation’ workers of various kinds.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 90

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

91

apparent shift, white abjection remains – though less from jazz’s refusal to accept whiteness than from the inaugural violence that creates jazz (as white) in the first place – a violence that is at the core of the novel’s narrative. It would appear at first that Cormann’s protagonist is the perfect counterexample to the cases of Le Black Note and Be-bop. We learn very quickly from him that ‘[j]e me suis contenté d’être ce que je suis et ce que je serai jusqu’à ma mort … figure majeure de la scène jazzistique contemporaine’ [I have contented myself with being what I will be until the day I die: a major figure on the contemporary jazz scene].88 James Erris (who is Franco-Irish) is indeed one of the major figures of the jazz scene, a uniquely talented baritone player who has transposed to this instrument the elaborate athletic technique famously applied to the alto and tenor by Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. In other words, the mention of Gerry Mulligan as a decent but hardly brilliant baritone player in Be-bop becomes the means through which, in Vita Nova Jazz, Erris establishes his own uniquely personal creative space. Whereas it would be impossible to speak of the alto or tenor without mentioning Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, no such sublime genius of the baritone sax exists, thereby leaving (racial) space for his daemonic talent. Erris’s genius is further confirmed by his abilities as a composer and arranger – he is a true leader and the Italian concert at the beginning of the novel is recognition of this status, as he has been paid a large sum to draw him out his self-imposed exile. The protagonist’s musical ability therefore suggests a fading racial score, at least as it might affect white musicians. Nevertheless, something is broken that gradually brings it back, in pieces, in writing. The aging Erris, now sixty, has been through a long period of absence from the scene after a catastrophic event. As the novel progresses, we learn in increasing detail that ten years earlier he nearly beat his wife to death. He has spent five years in jail, and another five years in self-imposed exile. When we meet him at the beginning of the novel, he is about to play in a reunion concert with his bandmates, all of whom abandoned him on principle after his conviction. Now, the band, Vita Nova, is together again for one concert (principally, it would appear, for money) – until, at the last minute, Erris refuses to play and leaves the audience and the band in the lurch. The rest of the novel moves between three moments: the height of Vita Nova’s success; the moment surrounding his crime; and the moments leading up to and following his departure from the concert, as well as the legal aftermath of his refusal to perform. It is, finally, in this particularly vexing combination of psychosis, jazz, and violence, bound together by excess (in the form of drugs, alcohol, and serial infidelity), that the racial score resides as a

88 Enzo

Cormann, Vita Nova Jazz (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 21. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 91

10/05/2017 09:09

92

Scoring Race

kind of fermenting residue that attaches to the protagonist despite the absence of any overt commentary on race. Erris’s relation to jazz follows much of the previously described pattern. The jazz shibboleth occupies a central position, and indeed is more significant here, perhaps, than in the previous novels: not only are the usual names (Coltrane, Parker, Holiday, Dolphy, Mingus, Ayler, etc.) cited, but the narrative invents a whole fictional universe of jazz festivals, performers, and movements that follows a recognizable path set forth in countless jazz biographies, histories, and analyses: the ‘information’ shared by generations of those in the know. That is, jazz increasingly appears as less a musical phenomenon than the very ‘literary’ or mythical capture (the capture as myth) of its African-American stars. Thus, while Erris himself is not black, his way toward (and through) jazz is paved with the familiar (black) names and fictions of jazz. His entry into the profession begins with Charlie Parker: ‘L’audition consistait à interpréter le thème de “Moose the Mooch” de Charlie Parker, et à prendre deux grilles de chorus, en compagnie de la section rythmique du big band’ [The audition consisted in the interpretation of Charlie Parker’s ‘Moose the Mooch’, and taking two choruses accompanied by the big band’s rhythm section] (102). One of his principal inspirations as a bandleader is bassist Charles Mingus, for ‘[c]ette façon d’engueuler l’orchestre, de presser le pas, d’aiguillonner les chorus, leçon tôt reçue, dont j’ai fait mon profit’ [his way of chewing out the band, of pushing the tempo, of directing the choruses, a lesson acquired early and from which I have benefited] (119). Or again, when he begins his own return to music, Erris inserts himself into another mythical jazz scene: the famous tenor player Sonny Rollins’s habit of practicing for hours on the Williamsburg bridge in Manhattan during his three year hiatus from the scene. ‘J’ai tenu le coup en dépit de tout, et j’ai continué de souffler. Et tel Rollins quittant pour de bon le pont de Brooklyn [sic], j’en suis sorti vainqueur – un son gros comme ça’ [I survived despite everything, and I continued to blow. And like Rollins leaving the Brooklyn Bridge [sic] for good, I came away victorious, with a sound this fat] (37). In this and many other cases throughout the novel, the ‘event’ that is jazz, according to the myth that frames and follows it, becomes literature through its relationship not so much with the music as with the great myths attached to it. By the end of the novel, despite numerous moments when jazz appears to resist, writing ultimately wins out: Je sens bien que je ne vais pas pouvoir indéfiniment repousser le moment de mettre des mots sur ce que j’ai jusqu’à présent laissé le soin à autrui de nommer à ma place flics, avocats, juge, psys, journalistes, connaissances, collègues – toi. Je me dis qu’il n’y a pas d’innommable, qu’innommable est le nom de ce qui est tu, pas de ce qui est muet. Avant que j’entreprenne cet écrit, je n’apercevais pas que le

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 92

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

93

vécu perd toute substance sans le souvenir, et n’est donc seulement pas regardable, inexaminable (donc inexaminé), faute de mots pour en fixer la matérialité. Bien sûr, les mots sont faillibles, partiaux, inadéquats. Traîtres. Les mots sont à la peine. Ils viennent à manquer. Ou bien ils trébuchent, ils s’égarent, ils louvoient. Mais ils marquent; ils disent et ils se disent; trahissent, oui, mais se trahissent. Nommer est un travail – un travail d’inscription. S’inscrire au réel comme à un examen. S’inscrire et concourir. Concourir au réel. (145) [I can tell all too well that I’m not going to be able to put off indefinitely the moment when I have to put words to what I have up until now left to others to name in my place, cops, lawyers, judge, shrink, journalists, acquaintances, colleagues – you. I tell myself that nothing is unnamable, the unnamable is the name of what is silenced, not what is mute. Before I started to write this, I didn’t notice that life loses all substance without memory, and is therefore not watchable, unexaminable (and therefore unexamined) for a lack of words to fix its materiality. Of course, words are fallible, partial, inadequate. Treacherous. Words strain. They run out. Or they trip, they get lost, they evade. But they mark: they say and resay; betray, yes, but betray themselves. Naming is labor – a labor of inscription. To sign up for the real as in an exam. To sign up and compete. To compete for [or assist] the real.]

Finally, the project of this book takes shape: writing is at its core. The jazz narrative is, first and foremost, a literary device for the creation and consolidation of the subject, and this subject, unlike the many famous names that adorn the jazz gallery (that constitute the jazz shibboleth), is white. The first-person narrator, James Erris, ostensibly a jazz musician, turns out to be, before anything else, a writer: the importance of the first-person narrator takes on its full meaning in the lines cited above. The meaning of writing within the Western episteme lies in its instrumental power to inscribe, to give presence meaning, to re-present. To be (white), to pass the exam, demands the act of ‘s’inscrire,’ the perfect term in that it captures simultaneously the act of marking, the inaugural blow of presence, but also the proleptic gesture of writing oneself in, of ‘signing up’ (‘s’inscrire’) within the circular, self-determining logic of white subjectivity and in facilitating (assisting) the process by which it happens (for others, for example). Further, Erris describes himself in almost Derridean terms, as triply alienated from language, since his ‘langue maternelle’ should be French, as his mother is French; he learned English instead, from his Irish father, but would have learned Gaelic had he pursued his father’s native tongue. Finally, it would appear that instead of returning to the ‘womb’ language of French, he reaches beyond, to an earlier stage still, the choric language of music. From there he proceeds back into language, ironically this time, with the novel – in French. The entire project of the novel therefore becomes this process of inscription, of making oneself visible, of ‘being.’

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 93

10/05/2017 09:09

94

Scoring Race

The tragedy, and the absolute abjection, lies in the violence that takes the protagonist from his unconscious, pre-linguistic state as a musician to his newly found awareness as the writing ‘I,’ the author of the autobiographical, testimonial text that is the novel itself. The physical violence of race, represented by the vicious blows Erris delivers to the body of his (then) wife – who, significantly, sings like the mythical symbol of feminine jazz martyrdom, Billie Holiday – mirrors and accompanies the epistemological violence that writing deploys in order to achieve its self-same status as the exclusive instrument of representation. The novel therefore charts the movement from one instrument to another, from saxophone to pen. Thus, the potential optimism at the end of the novel, when Erris prepares to return to Italy in order to make up for the lost concert by playing a solo, instead underscores the solipsism of writing, its claim to and over communication, communion, and community, when in fact it precipitates an end to precisely that: it takes the place of music, mutes it, turns it, finally, into a book – the book of the lonely white subject playing (in/on) the ruins of his own creation. In sum, the narrative duplicates a series of familiar mythical tales around iconic African-American jazz musicians: Parker’s appetites, Coltrane’s spiritual quests, Rollins’s return from the wilderness of the bridge, Billie Holiday’s martyrdom, etc. The myths in turn take over the place of the music: they become odes to a music that they quietly replace. Vita Nova Jazz ultimately maps the process by which the textual creation of the musician as myth through the white literary instrument serves to consolidate the racial score without race itself needing to be referenced. The grotesque scene of blackface in The Black Note gives way to the literary laboratory in which, over the course of the entire narrative, the process of mythification, of making jazz textual, happens invisibly, ‘naturally.’ The result is what, more overtly, Philippe Gumplowicz dramatically demonstrates in his three-volume Le Roman du jazz (1991–2008). Gumplowicz’s lengthy literary-critical project shows how the ‘jazz life’ is overdetermined by a white literary imagination that transforms that life into ‘a novel,’ into an instrumentalized fiction.89 The specificity of music, of ‘jazz’ as an aesthetic practice, gives way to a series of clichés about the life and struggles of the (black) musician. Jazz becomes those clichés – or rather, becomes those clichés that it has always been. That is, jazz was and remains a fiction through which the white subject defines himself. This objectification, this writing, constitutes the score to which jazz is the soundtrack. The abjectness of whiteness now resides in the lie it tells itself about the ineffability of jazz, its inability to speak for itself:

89 Philippe

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 94

Gumplowicz, Le Roman du jazz, 3 vols (Paris: Fayard, 1991–2008).

10/05/2017 09:09

Jazz Fictions and the French Novel

95

Et ça ne demande qu’à casser. La musique est poursuivie par le chaos dont elle s’est extraite à grand-peine. La musique court, court, l’informe à ces trousses – bruit magma matriciel en fusion, fluant comme la lave. Le musicien est un dévaleur de pente, à demi nu, chaussé de tongs, appelant à son aide le dieu du silence. (31) [And it’s just asking to break. Music is pursued by the chaos from which it extracted itself with great difficulty. Music runs, runs, shapelessness at its heels – a noise that is a matrix of hot magma, flowing like lava. The musician is someone who runs downhill, half-naked, in flip-flops, calling out to the god of silence for help.]

The definition Erris gives of music provides it with a unique set of dynamic, not to say Promethean, powers. But ultimately, as the end of the story suggests, writing is the necessary medium through which a lasting and meaningful truth finally makes its way from the protean, quasi-animal state of music (that razorthin distance between itself and ‘chaos’) to the fully civilizational state of writing – of the novel itself into which Erris transforms himself. To conclude, from Philippe Soupault’s Le Nègre to more recent works such as Enzo Cormann’s Vita Nova Jazz, French authors repeatedly invest in jazz as a site of aesthetic grace: jazz is seen as, to varying degrees and in varying ways, an absolute expression of unmediated expressive freedom. While in Soupault and Jean-Paul Sartre this largely remained premised on some of the cruder stereotypes characteristic of the racial score, from Boris Vian there emerges a more conscious effort to negotiate what authors increasingly recognize as the potentially instable and dangerous effects of the jazz myth and its role in assuring the durability of the racial score. Nevertheless, even with this growing hesitancy, the racial score proves its endless and unwitting iterability: jazz itself is the vehicle through and in which the racial score is carried forward – even when it is radically problematized. It is this observation, this evidence, that has impacted Francophone African authors, and has made them wary of jazz, even as they have recognized that its force – not necessarily as it has been narrowly defined by white critics, artists, and authors, but as performers of a uniquely protean agglomeration of musical practices – also represents a critical opportunity that they refuse to deny themselves. The chapters that follow reflect on this complex process of negotiation: the ability of authors to invoke jazz while tactically outmaneuvering the racial score; or again, the ways in which they too may unwittingly or inevitably amplify its problematic ontological effects.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 95

10/05/2017 09:09

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 96

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz: Early Francophone African Engagements with the Racial Score

2

In the previous chapter I discussed representative works of French literature from the years of jazz’s heyday in the French capital to the present. In each, African-American music offered, with varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of naivety, a site of racial consolidation and expression. We saw that, though the attitude toward the relationship between jazz and race evolved over time, from the 1920s to the present jazz remained a vehicle for the idea of race to a degree that none of these novels was entirely able to deconstruct or dismiss. In sum, these Euro-French authors, following a score that was 2,500 years in the making, privilege jazz as the signifier of blackness. For Soupault and Sartre, the adequacy of this new art form lay in its ability to preserve and/or tame the compound unit of African primitivity and American industrial modernity, what Jean Cocteau called a ‘catastrophe apprivoisée’ [domesticated catastrophe]: the primitive rhythmic subtext to the sounds of the factory that is jazz.1 Subsequent authors, beginning with Boris Vian, engaged with the music’s racialization in far more self-conscious fashion, trying at various junctures and in various ways to disentangle jazz from the history of its discursive formation as a distinctively racialized aesthetic artifact. What we saw in these later writers was that, despite such attempts, the scoring of race through jazz, and jazz’s construction as a fundamentally racialized idea within the white French imaginary, has rendered it an unalterably racialized phenomenon. Thus, even much more recent French authors who recognize the racial history I have traced nevertheless fall prey to its endlessly and uncontainably reverberating effects. Because producing race was, in a sense, the principal motivation behind the music’s consolidation as ‘jazz,’ and because this was in turn the effect of a long Western tradition’s association of all music with difference, there is no way to remain within any discussion of jazz and yet be unfettered by its essential racialization. For this simple reason, (white) French writers have not been the only authors to grapple with this new music, the nature of that engagement is not identical. Because the foreignness of jazz was also national – jazz was very specifically an American product – the difference it offered was not only racial but national as well. Thus, the non-white Francophone authors who have used jazz as a reference in their 1 Jean

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 97

Cocteau, Le Coq et l’arlequin: notes autour de la musique 1918 (Paris: Stock, 1979), 22 n.1.

10/05/2017 09:09

98

Scoring Race

writing have carefully parsed the various ingredients of the music: these include racial components; a linguistic element (frequently lacking in the works of their French counterparts); and an understanding of the creative possibilities of jazz that is reflected not from the vantage point of existential fatigue (as in the white literary tradition), but as a potential (or failed) model for creative expression that is foreclosed precisely by the racial boundaries that exclude blackness (as a category) and black subjects (as individual subjects) from writing. Jeremy Lane in Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism first underscores that those who were exposed to jazz during the interwar years were not only the French, but French colonial subjects as well. Accordingly, one must complicate the reception of jazz in France to include these colonial subjects for whom the racialization of the music by white critics was experienced as deeply problematic. For this reason, according to Lane, to ‘employ a model of culture contact followed by gradual acculturation to or assimilation of jazz’s essentially foreign forms,’ as is the case in most discussions of jazz’s reception in Paris, assumes ‘that all those who first heard jazz in France in the interwar years were Europeans.’2 As Lane intimates, many of those drawn to this music for the first time were subjects of France’s vast colonial empire, residing in the capital for various reasons whether political, economic, or educational. Significantly for this study, according to Lane, what Francophone African and Caribbean authors such as ‘Damas, Senghor, and Ménil found in jazz was not an exotic otherness but rather an expression of something familiar, of their own black or Creole identity.’ For this reason, ‘[t]heir responses to jazz cannot be accommodated within a narrative of culture contact and acculturation to the disturbingly exotic, strange, or foreign sounds of jazz.’3 This chapter therefore aims further to remedy the lack of attention paid to Francophone diaspora authors addressing jazz by closely reading three canonical African authors: Ousmane Socé, Emmanuel Dongala, and Mongo Beti, all of whom produced texts particularly germane to my argument. At the same time, this reading suggests that Lane’s contention that jazz represented for these authors ‘an expression of something familiar’ does not quite hold up to scrutiny: one might instead speak of alternate differences. Jazz was already a cipher of difference within the French discourse from which these authors inevitably borrowed – thus the music could never escape this initial epistemological frame that did in fact precede the first African and Caribbean writings on the subject. But just as importantly, jazz also resulted from an experience of exclusion in many respects similar to, but also different from their own. Despite – if also because of – this difference, jazz was attractive and/or tactically useful in the authors’ struggles for recognition as creative subjects rather than as objects of 2 Lane, 3 Lane,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 98

Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 24. Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 24.

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

99

a totalizing colonial force. It served as an example of an accomplished aesthetic phenomenon, and it mapped a form of discursive engagement with the very racial score that it served to consolidate. Thus, jazz could be a positive force, or again, it could problematically serve in the white imaginary as ‘la transition entre la passé et le present, la soudure entre la forêt vierge et le modernisme’ [the transition between the past and the present, the welding of the virgin forest and modernism].4 For each of these authors, the tension resides in jazz as a reified cipher of otherness and as a dynamic site against which or in which the conditions of Frenchness, blackness, gender, and the possibilities of a fully constituted postcolonial imaginary are actively played out. This latter reading follows Thorsten Schüller’s ‘Le Jazz dans la literature francophone de l’Afrique subsaharienne: développement d’un symbole littéraire’ [‘Jazz in the Francophone literature of sub-Saharan Africa: development of a literary symbol’], in which he posits the multivalent significance of jazz as simultaneously a symbol of pain and hope (in Léopold Sédar Senghor), of subversion of dominant paradigms (in Emmanuel Dongala), as a way of being (Mongo Beti), or as a symbol of freedom (Alem).5 Cumulatively, le jazz se présente comme la forme musicale la mieux adaptée pour illustrer le contact des cultures dans un texte écrit … [L]e potentiel du jazz offre la possibilité d’exprimer les conflits entre les cultures mais laisse tout autant la possibilité de voir dans la confrontation des cultures une chance pour un dialogue interculturel au lieu d’y voir un clash of civilisations.6 [Jazz presents itself as the musical form best adapted to illustrate the contact of cultures in a written text … Jazz’s potential offers the possibility of expressing the conflicts between cultures, but leaves also the possibility of seeing in this confrontation between cultures the opportunity for an intercultural dialogue instead of a clash of civilizations.]

What Schüller most interestingly and powerfully proposes is that: Le Jazz devient ainsi dans les littératures africaines un vecteur de sens; citer des musiciens ou des pièces de musique signifie d’autres sphères géographiques. Il devint donc un signe littéraire capable de véhiculer les différentes facettes d’une communication interculturelle; il a alors le potentiel de devenir un symbole pour le contact des cultures – conflictuel ou profitable.7

4 Jane

Nardal, ‘Pantins exotiques,’ La Dépêche africaine, October 15, 1928, 2. Schüller, ‘Le Jazz dans la littérature francophone de l’Afrique subsaharienne: développement d’un symbole littéraire,’ in L’imaginaire musical dans les littératures africaines, ed. Robert Fotsing Mangoua (Yaoundé /Paris: Harmattan, 2009), 59–71. 6 Schüller, ‘Le Jazz dans la littérature francophone’, 70. 7 Schüller, ‘Le Jazz dans la littérature francophone’, 58. 5 Thorsten

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 99

10/05/2017 09:09

100

Scoring Race

[Jazz therefore becomes a vector of meaning in African literature; citing musicians or musical works signifies other geographical spheres. It becomes a literary sign capable of carrying the different facets of an intercultural communication; it then has the potential to become a symbol for the contact of cultures – whether conflictual or profitable.]

This argument’s strength is its recognition of the multiplicity of readings of jazz in the African novel; here, the genre’s meaning shifts much more from author to author than it does in the work of white French writers – for whom, ultimately, jazz remains a stable mythical origin (structured around and structuring of race). Of equal importance is his (somewhat implicit) insight that these instances of jazz tactically shift the focal point of cultural contact from France to the United States. This shift in turn disrupts the binary Western/ French narrative of presence/absence (of culture, of rationality, of humanity) in a manner that revitalizes the African continent and its people by insisting on their ongoing historicity. The United States as an always-already heterogeneous space potentially neutralizes Africa’s relegation to what Christopher Miller dubs a ‘blank darkness.’8 At the same time, as is the case in the handful of other critical works focusing explicitly on this question of jazz and the African novel, Schüller assumes a fundamentally positive or celebratory attitude toward the music that ignores the striking ambivalence of these Francophone African authors. In the rare cases where it is less apparent that such ambivalence is present, he ignores the problematic erasures and occlusions that are necessary to maintain this singularly positive posture. My own readings instead propose that it is precisely in this ambivalence that the complex meaning and power of jazz, as literary object and as performance practice, becomes apparent. As a precursor to the works I will discuss at length in this chapter, it is worth noting at least two important authors who, one might say, represent the two extremes regarding jazz that one encounters in Francophone diaspora writing. The first example is the few lines dedicated to the topic in Aimé Césaire’s seminal Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land]. In the Cahier, this African-American music confirms white prejudice, making blacks ‘tout simplement comme on nous aime ! / Obscènes gaiment, très doudous de jazz sur leur excès d’ennui. / Je sais le tracking, le Lindy-hop et les claquettes’9 [‘simply as they like to think of us! / Cheerfully obscene,
completely nuts about jazz to cover their extreme boredom / I can boogie-woogie, do the Lindy-hop and tap-dance].10 Music and excessive libido, according to 8 Christopher

Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 9 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 36. 10 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. and ed. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 25–6.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 100

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

101

Césaire, converge seamlessly in the white imaginary to conceal blackness as it abjectly strains against its bonds behind the veil. In this sense, he follows Jane Nardal’s resistance to jazz, expressed most eloquently in her famous broadside against the music, ‘Les pantins exotiques’ [‘The exotic puppets’] (1928). In contrast, the African author, poet, politician, and founding figure of the Négritude movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor, made extensive use of jazz in his poetry. For him it served as a touchstone that expressed and represented the essential shared traits of cultural blackness across Africa and the diaspora. As Sylvie Kandé effectively describes it, [Senghor] inscrit répétivement la nostalgie qui embrume son exil à Paris dans le cadre immense et tragique de l’exil collectif des Africains déportés puis mis en esclavage sur un sol étranger, double désastre dont témoigne indirectement le blues.11 [Senghor repeatedly inscribes the nostalgia that clouds his exile in Paris in the immense and tragic frame of the collective exile of those Africans who were deported and then enslaved on foreign soil, a compounded disaster to which the blues testifies indirectly.]

Jazz Nightmares: Mirages de Paris The inaugural example of jazz serving as a complex site of subjective negotiation occurs in one of the first novels by a Francophone African author. Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris (1937) tells the story of Fara, an educated young Senegalese man who goes to Paris to participate in the 1931 Exposition Coloniale. There he meets a white woman, Jacqueline, takes her out to experience ‘Paris noir,’ and falls in love with her. Against her father’s wishes, Jacqueline moves in with Fara, becomes pregnant, and dies during childbirth. The novel closes with a distraught Fara jumping into the Seine to his death. For obvious reasons, the text has experienced an evolving critical reception. If at first it was largely overlooked for its melodramatic writing, more recent studies, particularly since Christopher Miller’s extensive treatment of the novel in Nationalists and Nomads (1998), recognize it as a pivotal moment in the creation of Francophone African literature and an invaluable archive – produced from an African perspective – of a key historical event, the Paris Exposition Coloniale of 1931. Following Miller, several studies argue that the text constitutes a ‘reverse’ ethnography in which Paris becomes the exotic object of desire – the mirage of the title. These all recognize in varying ways the degree to which the (f)act of

11 Sylvie

Kandé, ‘Jazz et littérature francophone,’ Mots pluriels 13 (2000), http://motspluriels. arts.uwa.edu.au/MP1300syk.html.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 101

10/05/2017 09:09

102

Scoring Race

writing resides at the heart of Socé’s project.12 Interestingly however, given how prominent a role it plays, few critics, including Miller, truly acknowledge the narrative’s constant and structuring corollary preoccupation with music. Music constitutes a foundational limit with which the novel (like its protagonist) is constantly contending, and a subjective marker and threshold that must – and yet cannot – be crossed. In the broadest sense, Socé’s return to the musical illustrates how the Western episteme makes music writing’s supplement, as what one might call in Derridean terms the absolute logos – a musical foundational presence nostalgically invoked in writing.13 Stated differently, if Socé does not fundamentally undermine the scoring of race, what he contributes beyond what French authors do is that he begins to map its dynamic and architecture. That is, unlike for his contemporary white French counterparts (particularly Soupault and Sartre), for Socé jazz is not an unproblematic signifier of difference on which writing can begin to build. Rather, it is an evolving and differentiated site for subjective negotiation, where Socé parses the massive convergence of forces that score blackness – and that are blackness’s score – and that also potentially invest this particular musical practice with a new subjective potentiality within the script of Western modernity. Though published in 1937, the story takes place during and following the famous Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931: a few years after Josephine Baker’s Revue nègre (1925), and within the context of a signal colonial and postcolonial lieu de mémoire [site of memory]. The Colonial Exposition was simultaneously one of the last great public rituals of French colonial might, and the swan song 12 Despite

his participation in the early years of the L’Étudiant Noir, Socé’s more famous literary peers – Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas – have largely overshadowed his work. Following Christopher Miller’s dense and meticulously contextualized reading of Mirages in Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Socé has garnered significant attention. Miller argues that the author’s use of the Exposition Coloniale reveals the hallucinatory reverberations produced by and within the colonial enterprise. Dominic Thomas subsequently argues that the protagonist’s entire journey represents a movement towards (French) writing. See Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 69. Aedín Ní Loingsigh’s Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009) instead reads Mirages de Paris through the lens of the travel narrative (28). Gary Wilder (The French Imperial Nation State: Négritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005]) believes the novel ‘may be read as a meditation on the … dilemmas that the Negritude students grappled with during their metropolitan sojourn’ (198). 13 I am referring here to Derrida’s argument in Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). This sense of music as part of a primordial scene has been increasingly theorized by the work of biomusicologists. See, for example, Hagen and Hammerstein’s ‘Did Neanderthals and Other Early Humans Sing?’ In this work, the musical becomes a protolinguistic phenomenon in which vocal performance is increasingly trained for specific biological purposes that become increasingly elaborate: tending/trending towards language.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 102

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

103

of an imperial project inaugurated four centuries earlier. Over thirty million people from throughout the West descended on the Parc de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris, which had been transformed into a Disneyesque fantasy of exotic locales and people.14 At the same time, while the Exposition reflected Gallic power, increasing numbers of colonial subjects who made their way to the métropole were challenging the right and might of Empire. Important figures such as Ousmane Socé, the Nardal sisters, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire contributed to a community of colonial subjects that had gained critical mass after the First World War, when decommissioned colonial troops decided to stay in the French capital rather than return home.15 As Margret A. Majumdar describes in some detail in Postcoloniality: The French Dimension, Paris became the fulcrum for a new and increasingly radicalized form of anticolonial activity.16 Indeed, the critical mass of colonized people from all over the French Empire substantially impacted subsequent movements for independence that took shape after the Second World War. At the same time, as Nationalists and Nomads reminds us, despite the appearance of a common cause, there remained friction between those who advocated a cultural solution, aligned to varying degrees with assimilation, and those who advocated a revolutionary solution: immediate independence. Socé’s novel falls into the former category and his early participation in the culturally oriented journal L’Étudiant Noir (started by Senghor and Césaire) further confirms his ideological leanings. At the same time, while L’Étudiant Noir clearly advocated for cultural assimilation (or, more broadly defined, the gradual path toward emancipation), Mirages de Paris treats African-American music and its practitioners as proof that such assimilation is an epistemological impossibility: while it represents the encounter of Europe and Africa, it also imposes and instantiates a score which cannot be transcended. For Socé, France’s fetishization of jazz makes it an impediment to 14

Dozens if not hundreds of works have been written on this event. Video footage of the Exposition includes ‘L’exposition coloniale de Paris (1931),’ YouTube video, 2:16, posted by ‘HistoireTube,’ histoire-fr.com, September 10, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54tkAKLy_pg. 15 The degree to which participants in the Exposition Coloniale were able to actually interact with colonial subjects residing in Paris remains to be seen, as Christopher Miller suggests in Nationalists and Nomads and as Brigitta Kuster shows quite elaborately in her discussion of the French secret service’s surveillance of the colonial actors who animated the Exposition Coloniale, which prevented them from ever leaving the premises. See Brigitta Kuster, ‘Sous les yeux vigilants / Under the Watchful Eyes: On the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris 1931,’ trans. Aileen Derieg, Transversal (May 2007), special issue, ‘Art and Police,’ http:// transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1007/kuster/en. 16 ‘These processes of exposure to and dissemination of European ideologies of struggle were reinforced by the increased migration of workers, students, and intellectuals from the colonies to metropolitan France, which was given such a boost by the First World War. The coming together of people from Indochina, Africa, and the Caribbean provided fertile conditions for the development of an anticolonial movement with an international dimension.’ Margaret A. Majumdar, Postcoloniality: The French Dimension (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 61.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 103

10/05/2017 09:09

104

Scoring Race

emancipation just as it also represents an undeniable symbol of black creativity within the parameters of Western modernity. Further complicating matters, the French critical reception of jazz during the interwar years heavily impacted the terms in which Socé receives this American music. The question he poses then, is: how can the black author work through this foundational conundrum? The question that remains for the critic to explore is: what traces of France’s fetishization of jazz remain embedded within the author’s discourse, despite his own willingness to confront its place and meaning?

Scoring Mirages

Despite some important insights, studies of Mirages have mostly glossed over or entirely ignored the central component of the musical, this despite the medium’s unique and striking presence, from the introduction (in the form of drums) through repeated scenes of diaspora performance, to the conclusion (in the form of jazz and then drums again). It is true that select critics have acknowledged this aspect of the novel without pursuing the subject at any great length. Sylvie Kandé signals in ‘Jazz et littérature francophone’ the significant role jazz plays across Francophone diaspora and African literatures, specifically noting that it is ‘probablement dans Mirages de Paris, le roman d’Ousmane Socé (1937) que l’on trouve l’une des premières mentions littéraires du jazz et de la musique afro-cubaine dans le contexte de cette fameuse vogue nègre’ [it is probably in Mirages de Paris, Ousmane Socé’s novel, that one finds one of the first mentions of jazz and Afro-Cuban music in the context of this famous negro craze], and thereby identifying the musical as one of the novel’s distinctive features and underscoring its foundational role in this regard. Tsitsi Jaji’s essay ‘Music and Modernism in Africa’ provides a more elaborate discussion of music in Socé. Following rather closely Paul Gilroy’s argument concerning the relationship between black music and Western modernity in his seminal book The Black Atlantic, Jaji’s freewheeling exploration of Africa and musicality explains the latter’s importance to diasporic identity. She begins with the premise that it is ‘exceedingly difficult and yet essential to set aside such frames of reference [of Western modernism] and to reckon with what Africa’s own definitions and contributions to modernism entail.’17 Jaji’s most important addition to the critical canon on Socé is her complete engagement with the musical component of the text.18 Noting Fara’s assessment of the ‘array of nationalities and skin-tones 17 Tsitsi

Jaji, ‘Music and Modernism in Africa,’ in The Modernist World, ed. Allana C. Lindgren and Stephen Ross (New York: Routledge, 2015), 197. 18 Jaji does take some liberties with the plot of the novel when she suggests that the story is about ‘what colonial subjects who were hired to perform in the Paris Colonial Exhibition’s African village tableaux did to entertain themselves in the evening’ (‘Music and Modernism,’ 201) – a reading largely disproved by Miller, who shows that the exact relationship of Fara and his friends to the Colonial Exhibition isn’t clear and that, by definition, they could

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 104

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

105

circulating through [the] space [of a nightclub, the Cabane Cubaine] – Africans, Haitians, Mauritians, and Martinicans,’ Jaji identifies the different musical forms being presented, and stresses that for Fara, ‘jazz stands in for a technologically overwhelming present and the rumba for a more affectively dynamic, humancentric elsewhere.’19 Having underscored the unique specificity of musical genre in the novel, she unfortunately forsakes the opportunity for a more refined analysis of Socé’s carefully calibrated musical taxonomy by collapsing these differentiated musical traditions back into each other when she concludes that: [c]onsuming popular diasporic music like jazz and rumba was not merely a way to critique the Colonial Exhibition’s farcical demands upon the colonial subjects to perform an anachronistic primitive in the heart of the French empire … [I]t elicited musical taste and critical discernment, making the Cabane Cubaine an important scene for enacting modern subjecthood.20

As the cited passage suggests, her larger claim concerns the role of music in constituting a modernist discourse – what she calls, in a double echo of Gilroy’s idea of counter-modernity and Du Bois’s double-consciousness, a ‘stereomodernity’ within diaspora.21 And there is little question that the scene from which Jaji draws most extensively is a – if not the – central moment in the novel. It is also true that this moment acknowledges an emergent parallel or counter-modernity in which the ability – indeed, the desire – to gloss music in a differentially nuanced manner demands recognition as a full-fledged aesthetic system with its attendant critical discourse. Nevertheless, her assessment appears to overlook or at least significantly and problematically soft-pedal the overwhelming ambivalence with which Socé treats music in general. Further, she neglects the careful parsing to which the narrative subjects different musical traditions and diaspora characters – a degree of detail she initially acknowledges on one level (as is evident in the passage cited above on jazz and rumba) but then chooses to ignore in order to maintain the coherence of her broader argument. That is, Socé’s novel is, as Gilroy himself stressed in what he called a ‘counter-culture

not have been part of the ‘tableaux’ since those ‘actors’ were in fact restricted at all hours to the grounds of the Exhibition. All we know is that, from the outset, ‘Fara et une vingtaine d’autre Sénégalais se rendaient à l’Exposition Coloniale’ [Fara and twenty other Senegalese traveled to the Colonial Exposition] (Ousmane Socé, Mirages de Paris [Paris: Nouvelles éditions latines, 1964], 16). This detail is also important because much of the novel is about Fara setting out as, and ultimately failing to become, a free and independent assimilated subject. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 19 Jaji, ‘Music and Modernism,’ 201. 20 Jaji, ‘Music and Modernism,’ 201. 21 By ‘stereomodernity’ Jaji means the alternate diasporic modernity that serves within and against the conception of modernity as an exclusively Western phenomenon. See her book Africa in Stereo.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 105

10/05/2017 09:09

106

Scoring Race

to modernity,’ simultaneously a resistance to, a claim to, and a manifestation of, modernity.22 The musical taxonomy of the novel mentioned above is in fact particularly noteworthy in its focalization on American musicians: they embody the double oscillation between music and literature on the one hand and between the primordial ‘tom-tom’ and ‘jazz-as-hypermodernity’ on the other. Clearly this ambivalence concerning jazz is not accidental or accessory. Fara fails to achieve a subject status that his assimilationist project should provide, despite his practically seamless acculturation into French society (he is well read, has no apparent accent, and knows the rules of etiquette). Jazz in particular maps this failure as it figures the unrelenting pull of an epistemological score against which he is, ultimately, powerless, despite his evident acculturation. Further, jazz in the novel cannot and does not stand independently of writing; and its unique role in reading the racial score in Mirages de Paris demands that we respect the regimented manner in which it appears. In this sense, Jaji’s insistence on the importance of a musicological practice within diaspora is particularly apt but needs to recognize the numerous ambivalent or even highly negative connotations hovering around music in general and jazz in particular throughout this story.23 The narrative therefore invites us to establish how Mirages de Paris treats jazz, and to assess this relationship through a range of musical scenes, genres, pieces, and performers.

Music and Writing

In an overarching sense, the juxtaposition between the two media, writing and music, is sketched out from the outset when we learn of Fara’s childhood that, ‘Le petit noir aimait les tams-tams et les artistes chanteurs’ [The little black boy loved drums and singing artists] (10). Music is thus established as a structuring trope from the very beginning – indeed, it introduces the child’s cognitive relationship to the material world and to the symbolic order. Accordingly, material sound and meaning merge in the beloved musicians from childhood, who are poets as well.24 This merging of the literary and musical universes is 22 Gilroy,

The Black Atlantic. other words, to assume a singular unchallenged valence or meaning for jazz is to ignore the resistance to it expressed by such seminal figures as the Nardal sisters and, more famously, Aimé Césaire in his Cahier. 24 Their performance includes an improvised poem with a translation provided in a footnote. In one sense, this footnote is an insistent reminder of the lexical meaning of this poetry – that it is language and not music. One of the important projects of Socé’s book is to establish African writing. On the other, it also underscores the at best asymptotic relationship between music and language and the boundary that would separate them, as well as the violence that language does to music if it is regarded as contained within assumed boundaries. What language, and particularly writing, appears not to capture here is the very musicality of these verses to which Socé nostalgically refers. Yet this could be a metaphysical decision in that it 23 In

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 106

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

107

further confirmed shortly thereafter, when the indirect narrative voice of the boy speaks of the ‘musique merveilleuse du Coran!’ [the marvelous music of the Quran] (10), thereby making the word of God a song. In both early instances, the ‘word,’ whether secular or religious, merges into music (and music into the word), forming a mystical whole that the rest of the passage associates with the timeless cycle of life which the novel presents as characteristic of African existence. Childishness, ahistorical/cyclical time, oral culture: all find their essence in a pre-literary and organic totality that the narrative itself nevertheless is forced to classify: the text has thus already taken over, since the story is being told/sold as literature, and what it describes resides in a pre-lapsarian musical past, which the novel mourns as dead and lost.25 Thus, the entire text as a form and in its content will recount and represent the movement away from this innocent musical origin, what André Hodeir in his Le jazz, cet inconnu [‘Jazz, that unknown’] referred to as ‘cette poésie initiale’ [this initial poetry], and that origin’s loss is already anticipated by the passing comment that the young boy’s eyes were ‘expressifs, intelligents, et déjà malheureux’ [expressive, intelligent, and already sad]. In other words, the departure from this holistic aesthetics, in which music and language are not enforced categories, is already anticipated by a proleptic (postcolonial) melancholia expressed in the child’s sad eyes. This nostalgia poses an important question about Socé’s reluctance to embrace jazz. The problem, for Socé, is twofold. First, jazz represents an ersatz inasmuch as he sees it as a fundamentally hybrid form. It is the result of a métissage in which he doesn’t believe. In addition, and just as importantly, he rightly sees in it the result of the West’s insistent aesthetic separation of music and language – a separation that, as he argues, was not operative at the African origin. Much later, Fara describes the music of his homeland to Jacqueline in terms that make this compounding of music and language, or more importantly, music and thinking, abundantly clear: Le joueur de guitare ne reproduit pas une musique écrite, car la musique n’est pas écrite en pays noir, pas plus que l’histoire et la littérature, et n’importe qui n’est pas musicien ou littérateur; ce sont des castes bien définies qui exercent ces arts … Dans les vibrations des cordes de la guitare, il revoit toute l’histoire du pays noir: conquérants fameux, cataclysmes symboliques, actions d’éclat des héros … La philosophie du monde noir devient intelligible. (84) [The guitar player doesn’t reproduce a written music, for music is not written in black countries, any more than history or literature is, and not just anybody is a assumes that there is no musicality to writing, that words moving across a page do not in fact produce music. 25 In this sense it anticipates the tension in Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir, published some twenty years later, which constantly runs up against its own textual existence.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 107

10/05/2017 09:09

108

Scoring Race

musician or writer; well-defined castes practice these arts. In the vibrations of the guitar strings, he sees once again the entire history of the black country: famous conquerors, symbolic cataclysms, the bold actions of heroes… The philosophy of the black world becomes intelligible.]

What Fara posits is not music and language (or literature) as epistemologically opposed categories, but rather music as a form of history in which thought occurs and which contributes to an (oral) archive. At the same time, the passage also shows the limits of the novel’s literary project. What Fara strives for here, at least in appearance, is an equivalency: he provides an anthropological translation of his world in the terms of Western perception in order for Jacqueline to understand. The price paid in the process and the structure and meaning of this musical-literary universe are perhaps best spelled out a few pages later, in a conversation between Fara’s friends, Sidi the philosopher and Medoune the literature student: ‘Ne crois tu pas,’ Sidi asks Medoune, ‘que les dictons de la sagesse populaire africaine vaillent les fables de La Fontaine et que la philosophie que nos ancêtres nous ont léguée par la tradition orale soit aussi instructive que la philosophie de Pascal et de Spencer?’ [Don’t you think that the sayings of popular African wisdom are worth the fables of La Fontaine and that the philosophy our ancestors bequeathed to us through the oral tradition is as instructive as the philosophies of Pascal or Spencer?] (110). To this provocative proto-Négritude proposal, Medoune replies: Les dictons de notre littérature et de notre philosophie orales ne possèdent pas la perfection que la technique et l’écriture donnent à la pensée européenne. Peux-tu comparer une rumba et une pastorale de berger nigérien soufflé dans une antique flute de bois avec les œuvres de Chopin ou de Beethoven? On pourrait discuter peut-être équivalence des inspirations mais non comparer les résultats de cette inspiration. (111) [The sayings of our literature and oral philosophy don’t have the perfection that technique and writing give to European thought. Can you compare a rumba and a Nigerian shepherd’s field-song played on a wooden flute with the works of Chopin or Beethoven? We might be able to discuss the equivalence of the inspirations, but we couldn’t compare the results of that inspiration.]

In Sidi’s opinion, African oral culture is of comparable value to European culture, just as Fara had implied in speaking to Jacqueline. But, from Medoune’s Eurocentric ‘évolué’ [evolved or educated African] perspective, this wisdom is diminished precisely by the absence of technique and writing that make Western thought great. The original idea of a presumably literary practice also leads to a more concrete notion of technology in the next sentence where Medoune extends Western superiority to music. One of the two things that differentiate African from Western music is instrumentation, that is, technology. The primitive

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 108

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

109

‘flute de bois,’ a mere wooden cylinder into which one blows, is implicitly contrasted with the pianoforte, one of the great musical-technological achievements of the nineteenth century, and an instrument at which both Chopin and Beethoven excelled. The other technology, more abstract but more powerful still in its broader implications, is the musical notation that guarantees Chopin and Beethoven permanent residence in the canon of bourgeois ‘classical’ music. Medoune assumes that writing is the absolute instrument of conquest against which ‘primitive’ media cannot resist.26 The other who does not write and is written of thereby becomes an artifact in the West’s anthropological museum – an intermediary moment on the evolutionary ladder to Spirit relegated to the inchoateness of the not-yet-entirely-human. Jazz is the virtual manifestation of this: a ‘quai Branly’ in which the other’s music is sedimented, contained by the critical apparatus of the French author who can score the jumble of collected objects to suit.27 Following this logic, Medoune collapses the ‘dictons’ [sayings] and the ‘philosophie de nos ancêtres’ [our ancestors’ philosophy] of Sidi’s original statement (and of Fara before him) into the ‘rumba’ and the ‘pastorale.’ That is, Medoune accomplishes this through his reference to instrumentation, but even more powerfully because he hails the power to score – Western music is thereby drawn into the orbit of writing-as-technology. Thus, the oral universe of the diaspora (tales, philosophy, music) falls into the conceptually musical realm of an undifferentiated non-written – orality – whereas the Western is subdivided into aesthetic categories marshaled by writing. That this binary is racially hierarchical should now be evident. The problem for Medoune is that, as a black man, he is not part of the archive that writing guarantees and thus it is the possibility of a historically grounded self, precisely what Fara and Sidi variously try to preserve, that he forsakes. Unfortunately, the Western episteme 26 In

this sense, he follows Michel de Certeau’s analysis of writing’s function in the founding of the Western archive. This is the same writing that ‘goes to the end of the world, toward those destined to receive it according to the objectives that it desires’ – and ‘without budging an inch,’ ‘without having the center of its action being moved, without any change in it through its progress.’ With this writing the Westerner indeed has ‘a sword in his hand which will extend its gesture but never modify its subject. In this respect, it repeats and diffuses its prototypes.’ de Certeau, ‘Ethno-Graphy’, 216. 27 By this I mean to evoke the manner in which objects are stolen from their context of origin and from their often sacred function, only to be reclassified as uniquely aesthetic objects meant for a particular mode of Western consumption – modes in which the assumption of Western superiority (of which the exhibit itself becomes the proof) remains embedded. A powerful example of this point lies in the glass tower of ‘musical instruments’ exhibit at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, where hundreds if not thousands of instruments are stacked against each other, immediately visible as you enter the museum. It is a kind of inaugural symbolic gesture in which all specificity is lost: these are merely the silent geological layers of a human past. It is no accident that in this exhibit, difference is made musical, and music itself becomes an undifferentiated and absolute category, here reduced to silence by the force of the archival process.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 109

10/05/2017 09:09

110

Scoring Race

assures that for an African to choose writing in the manner proposed by Medoune (who abandons music) is to walk forth empty of any content – of a past, that archive, which fills the Western subject and gives him historicity – moving forward only in and as (black) form.

The Many Musics of Diaspora … and Jazz

The only plausible solution to the double jeopardy described above resides, it would appear, in methodically returning to an African/oral ontology through music. Or at least so Fara seems to believe. Of course, whereas Medoune conflates ‘une rumba et une pastorale de berger nigérien’ while naming specific European composers, Mirages de Paris itself refuses this undifferentiated conflation of diaspora musics. There appears rather to be a variegated arc that extends from the traditional drum to jazz. As we have seen, the novel begins with a musicological sketch of a practice in the Senegalese village, locating music as/at the place of origin. From this point of departure, it follows a multitude of musical styles, describing concerts and popular songs, as well as presenting lengthy dissertations on music and its practitioners. Musical genres mentioned include jazz, rumba, tango, beguine, bourgeois classical music, and traditional Senegalese music. The songs cited or evoked range from a notorious old ‘doudouist’ Martinican piece to ‘Blue Moon’ played by the Duke Ellington Orchestra.28 Among the performers, each mentioned or evoked by a song title or lyrics, are Francisco Canaro,29 Tino Rossi,30 Josephine Baker,31 Los Peninsulares [?],32 and Ray Ventura.33 Additionally, music serves immediately to set a tone, provide a context, or serve as a point of reference in numerous scenes. In all these cases, the novel disavows the undifferentiated collapsing of the musical onto blackness that Medoune’s ventriloquizing of Western thought proposes. That is, there is a sustained effort to document and differentiate between forms that refuses a singular definition of the musical, particularly of black music – and its affiliated racial essence.34 This process of documentation is evident early on in the novel when Fara first takes Jacqueline to the Coliseum club. There follows a sequence that begins a musical taxonomy. First, ‘un garçon leur trouva une table tout près de 28 The

Martinican song is ‘Adieu foulard, adieu madras.’ songs are either mentioned directly or were made famous during this period by the artists listed here. Canaro is evoked by ‘Poema’ with the lyrics ‘Cuando las flores de tu rosal.’ 30 ‘J’ai rêvé d’une fleur.’ 31 ‘You Are Driving Me Crazy.’ 32 ‘Negra, Negra Consentida.’ 33 ‘Je suis mordu de la biguine.’ 34 One might imagine that this is another reason why Mirages de Paris may not have entirely pleased the founders of the Négritude movement, as the novel does not appear to believe that an essential blackness exists. 29 The

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 110

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

111

l’orchestre de rumba’ [a waiter found them a table next to the rumba orchestra] (44). Without any warning, a few lines later, there is an ‘orchestre de jazz’ [a jazz orchestra] and only a few lines after that ‘la douceur et l’amertume filtrée’ [the sweetness and filtered bitterness] of an ‘orchestre-tango’ [tango orchestra](45). The apparently seamless movement from one genre to another, one orchestra to another, gives way to precise classification: tango is characterized by its ‘sensualité orientale tempérée du romantisme latin’ [oriental sensuality tempered by Latin romanticism] (45).35 Jazz is ‘brutal’ (45). In sum, music is clearly essential and musical genre determining, but we do not yet entirely understand how or why. Rather, what is most striking is the degree to which the musical already undergirds the ‘illusion,’ the ‘mirage’ of Paris: Les musiques, les couleurs des projecteurs, les toilettes et les bijoux avaient formé un ensemble vivant, équilibré; il était difficile de sentir, dans leur ambiance, ce qu’ils avaient d’illusoire. Dégagé de leur emprise, Fara en perçu le leurre savant. La mer [painted on one of the walls of the club] qu’il avait vu était trop verte pour être véritable. Ce semblant de mouvement qui l’animait, n’était qu’un effet de carton colorié agité par un mécanisme d’horlogerie; aucune écume ne panachait les vagues; les falaises étaient un simulacre de carton. Certaines danseuses n’étaient pas aussi belles qu’elles le paraissaient; la rondeur et la plénitude de leurs hanches étaient l’effet de corsets-ceintures … On était ici au pôle opposé de l’Afrique où tout était rude, élémentaire, mais naturel. (47) [The different kinds of music, the colors of the projectors, the outfits and jewels had created a living and balanced tableau; it was difficult to capture, in their midst, what was illusory about them. Removed from their hold, Fara understood their savvy allure. The sea [painted on one of the walls of the club] that he had seen was too green to be real. That semblance of motion that animated it was simply the effect of colored cardboard agitated by a clockwork mechanism; no foam frosted the waves; the cliffs were a cardboard simulacrum. Certain of the dancers weren’t as beautiful as they appeared; the roundness and fullness of their hips was the product of belted corsets … This was the absolute opposite of Africa where everything was rough, elementary, but natural.]

With the help of technology, music, most notably jazz, justifies and sustains an illusion, an ersatz: it becomes the focal point, the privileged medium of the racial score. This fake world is explicitly contrasted with Africa, where everything is ‘rough, elementary, but natural.’ Further, there is a continuum between these 35 It

is interesting to note that in this passage, in which classifying musical forms is so important, Socé appears to ignore the fact that the Argentinian tango also has important African components.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 111

10/05/2017 09:09

112

Scoring Race

articulated registers: the musical, the mechanical, the sexual (as symbolized by the women’s bodies), all contribute to the same grand scene, which reveals its shabbiness in the light of day (for this, in contrast to the ‘soleil de midi’ [the noonday sun] of Africa [45], is a nocturnal affair). There already appears a suspicion of (and unhealthy attraction to) diaspora music; it becomes the key component of a manufactured racialized theater, itself part of a greater miseen-scène of which the Exposition Coloniale is the culmination – a place where blackness is ultimately dehumanized, transformed into the radical opposite of the traditional African poets and musicians whose creativity sustained community instead of consuming (and being consumed by) it. In sum, music is both a privileged medium of diaspora subjectivity and one whose scoring by a white critical and consumerist apparatus most radically threatens it. The question is whether or not an adequate métisse musical form can be located in which the inaugural essence of music is preserved without the pernicious effects of racialization. Thus, if the initial contrast is between African and Western and/or diaspora musical forms,36 this opposition leads to a quest to find the same innocence and transparency as is portrayed in Fara’s childhood apprehension of African music within the broader category of diaspora music. Ultimately the novel’s search for a viable model of cultural and biological métissage not only extends to music, but also makes music the domain in which this experiment is most dramatically tested. Various genres are scrutinized for their adequacy to the challenges of accompanying a nascent hybrid humanity, the ‘stereomodern’ black subject theorized by Jaji. This quest stretches the length of the narrative, and from it two musical traditions emerge: rumba and jazz. Socé sets the exploration of the difference between the two most dramatically in the famous Parisian nightclub, the Cabane Cubaine. To the extent that, following Miller, most critics read the novel as a cooptation of the Western anthropological enterprise, this scene serves as eloquent proof: the black subject is now parsed not as the pure ‘tribal’ object of the Western gaze but broken down into a multitude of black identities directly resulting from Africa’s active participation in global modernity. Accordingly, in response to Jacqueline’s claim that she can’t distinguish one black person from another, Fara passes in review Americans, Senegalese, Martinicans, British subjects, Haitians, and Mauritians: ‘on eut dit,’ the narrator tells us, ‘que la “Cabane Cubaine” était un musée d’ethnographie noire où chaque peuple avait envoyé un spécimen’ [one could have said that the Cabane Cubaine was a museum of black ethnography to which every people had sent a representative].37 36 Chopin

and Beethoven are ultimately set aside as symbols of an idea within the Western episteme rather than as actual musical practices. 37 It is worth stressing that this is precisely what the Exposition Coloniale had been designed to accomplish. It is therefore noteworthy that the Cabane Cubaine serves as a kind of decadent double for the more ordered official representation of racial diversity.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 112

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

113

Yet despite the mention of ethnography, what has changed is that the ‘specimens’ in question are no longer the idealized untainted primitive of ethnographic desire but Westernized subjects who have been through and are of the grist-mill of history. Fara dwells on three groups in particular: the Americans ‘se distinguent à leur couleur pitchpin, à leurs traits où transparaissent des origins anglo-saxones, juives, voire même germaniques’ [are distinguishable by their pitch-pine complexion, their features that reveal Anglo-Saxon, Jewish, or again even Germanic traits] (54). These American musicians have ‘beaucoup de prestige ici, car ils sont, dans le monde des Blancs, les grands maîtres de la musique et de la danse nègre’ [a lot of prestige here, for in the white world they are the grand masters of negro music and dance] (54). At the same time, there is evident tension between the various terms: Americans are the ‘grand masters’ of dance music – and by extension the leaders of the hippest Parisian scene – but they also ‘look resigned’ (54), seriously devaluing that apparent mastery. The text also denigrates them as diluted versions of an African original. ‘Pitchpin,’ a vernacular deformation of the wood/tree ‘pitch pine,’ transforms them into an industrial product.38 The reference to their light tan color necessarily recalls the euphemism ‘ebony wood’ used for slave cargo among the French slavers, now corrupted by ‘Anglo-Saxon, Jewish, or again even Germanic traits.’ Despite their status as the fashion brokers of the day, the pitch-pine complexion and resigned air of the American musicians suggests enslavement to the American industrial machine they symbolize.39 In stark contrast, the Senegalese are ‘reconnaissables à leurs teints toujours très foncés: jais, goudron, cacao; à leur port de tête altier, à leur assurance dans le geste’ [recognizable by their always dark complexion: jet, tar, cacao; by their regal bearing, in the assurance of their movements] (55). What comes across immediately is undiluted nobility. At the same time, this purity has, by the logic of the novel, also been deposed by a modernity that the Americans most radically 38 Pitch-pine,

a tree native to the United States that has the noteworthy capacity for forming hybrids with other types of trees, has had various industrial uses, among which were the making of turpentine, and various naval uses, because the wood’s high resin content makes it resistant to decay. 39 Adorno’s suspicion of jazz and the reasons for his opinion – most notably that it was a musical form entirely in thrall to the culture industry – are pertinent here. Despite his tenuous grasp on the music (a lack that is evident in the manner in which he refers to musical practices), the evolving and always complex relationship throughout the music’s history between jazz, the marketplace, and the (potential) racial self-exploitation at its source merits considerable attention. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Jazz (1936),’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2002), 470–95. On the development of this marketplace and African-Americans’ active participation in its creation, it is worth consulting David Gilbert’s The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and the Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 113

10/05/2017 09:09

114

Scoring Race

substantiate. Thus, despite the apparent purity of the Senegalese, they are also, in a sense, relics of an obsolete past – the drums at the beginning of the novel that the young Fara’s sad expression told us were the fleeting echoes of a lost paradise. The Martinicans, finally, hold themselves ‘avec une raideur bourgeoise’ [with bourgeois stiffness], and they ‘toise d’un air protecteur les autres Noirs’ [survey the other blacks with a protective air] (55).40 While less biting than his comments on the Americans, Fara’s assessment of the Martinicans also treats them with suspicion: their education becomes ‘raideur bourgeoise’ (in contrast to the Senegalese’s aristocratic bearing) and their ‘protective surveillance’ of the other blacks suggests interested paternalism: if the Americans sell their bodies and art to the highest bidder, Martinicans mimic their white masters in a manner that reminds us of Medoune’s oddly ventriloquized speech. Confirming once again the pivotal role of music in the novel, Fara then folds this gallery of ethnicities (and values) within ‘blackness’ onto corresponding musical genres. Most striking, perhaps, are the scene’s comments on jazz. As Jeremy Lane argues, the most obvious feature of jazz is its connection to machine-age industrialism: ‘le jazz, déchainé,’ the narrator tells us, ‘évoquait les avions bolides, la ronde frénétique d’une hélice de transat’ [jazz, unleashed, evoked roaring planes, the frenetic spinning of an ocean liner’s propeller] (62). Likewise, jazz is stretched here between its ‘primitive’ African roots and its American place of development, where it becomes an almost nightmarish reminder of technology run amok. Just as striking, however, is the novel’s assessment of the Josephine Baker phenomenon, first evoked through a song she made famous during this period,41 and then with the appearance of a dancer evidently modeled after her.42 The latter emerges to the sound of the orchestra and performs suggestively for an increasingly aroused white audience. This racialized prostitution shows jazz as deeply attractive (at least to white men) yet also as a profoundly problematic form where the fundamental contradictions of métissage are critically mapped as a mercantile transaction. In the novel, it is clear that musically and sexually, Baker incarnates the troubling economy 40 There

also follows a monocle-wearing English gentleman who comes to Paris with his white wife because of the implicit freedom Paris’s racial tolerance affords. 41 Socé includes the lyrics: ‘You are driving me crazy/ What did I do?’ 42 This connection is perhaps most firmly established by the fact that Ketty (the name given to the dancer in the novel) is dubbed the ‘Vénus bronze,’ one of Baker’s nicknames (along with ‘la Perle noire’ [black pearl], ‘la vénus noire’ [black Venus], etc.). The presence of Baker here is perhaps also a surreptitious comment on the problematic role that she played in the advertising and promotion for the Exposition Coloniale (she was at first named ‘la reine des colonies’ [the queen of the colonies], a title that was later rescinded because as an American she clearly was not a colonial subject), around which Mirages de Paris is based. While the dance is somewhat anachronous as a nightclub act, since Baker no longer performed in this way (having become a star performer as a singer), the films she was making during this period, which I will discuss at some length in the final chapter, continued to perpetuate this image.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 114

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

115

of racial and ethnic admixture; with jazz as the medium through which she serves this intoxicating brew, she pushes even further the powerful pitch-pine metaphor. Thus, for Socé, jazz is a deeply vexed form performed by a diluted métisse cast of American musicians and dancers who sell themselves body and soul to their white audience. ‘La rumba,’ on the other hand, ‘était plus douce que le jazz’ [was softer than jazz]. Where jazz ‘avait un charme et une fascination qui se mesuraient en “kilowatts”’ [had a charm and a fascination that one measured in kilowatts], it is also problematic in that its ‘vertige contagieux agissait directement sur les nerfs à la manière d’un circuit électrique’ [contagious vertigo acted directly on the nerves like an electrical circuit]. In contrast, ‘la rumba trouvait des échos dans le cœurs. [Elle] évoquait une fille noire se balançant, dans son hamac, à la tombée des soirs, bercée par la complainte de la guitare’ [Rumba found its echoes in the heart. It evoked a black girl swinging, in her hammock, at nightfall, cradled by the guitar’s lament] (62). If the constellation of terms adhering to jazz evokes industrial modernity, the immediate and deadly thrill of an electrical current, rumba, while not the origin described at the beginning of the novel, nevertheless looks backward to the African origin. It isn’t that origin: it is already a métisse musical form; nevertheless, it pays tribute to an African origin. Indeed, the emphasis on the guitars anticipates the moment cited earlier when Fara, describing life back in Senegal, tells Jacqueline: J’aimais la musique des coras et des Khalams … Les Khalams sont des guitares et les coras sont des genres de contre-basses … Le joueur de guitare ne reproduit pas une musique écrite, car la musique n’est pas écrite en pays noir. (84) [I loved the music of the coras and the Khalams … The Khalams are guitars and the coras are a kind of stand-up bass … The guitar player doesn’t reproduce written music, for music isn’t written in black countries.]

Thus, one might think that the rumba would serve as the appropriate score for the novel since its instrumentation and feel nostalgically remind Fara of this past. Several scenes would suggest just such an interpretation. Among Jacqueline’s white friends, ‘Robert, Christiane et Jacqueline qui dansaient la rumba, connaissaient quelques phrases de langue indigène et dissertaient sur l’art nègre’ [Robert, Christiane, and Jacqueline, who danced the rumba, knew a few sentences of indigenous language and extemporized on negro art] (91). Though the passage hints at a dilettantish negrophilia, these youths’ love of rumba also follows Fara’s own investment in it as the most African of diaspora musical genres.43 Even among his African friends, ‘la biguine et la rumba étaient en vogue’ 43 Their

attitude contrasts sharply with that of Jacqueline’s father, whose idea that ‘[n]ous avons fait du merveilleux dressage en Afrique’ [we have done some wonderful training in Africa]

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 115

10/05/2017 09:09

116

Scoring Race

[the beguine and the rumba were in vogue] (115). They too prefer the beguine and the rumba, a music where transracial identity is tested: ‘chaque couple dansait selon son mouvement à lui, propre à son talent et à sa compréhension de la musique: ainsi leurs vies journalières qui, elles-mêmes, tournaient autour d’un même cercle illusoire plein de musique et de rêves’ [each couple danced according to their own movement, according to their own talent and their understanding of the music: like their daily lives that, themselves, turned around the same illusory circle full of music and dreams] (117). While there is an evident lack of movement here (the scene is characterized by a paradoxical kinetic stasis), the innocent coupling of black and white, the possible merging of the races, would nevertheless appear, for better or worse, to be set to the mellow sounds of Caribbean music. Yet despite the hope rumba dimly proposes (with the occasional intervention of the beguine or the tango), jazz ultimately returns as the touchstone, the score that requires negotiation, the real challenge for an emergent black identity. The inevitability of this return is anticipated by (or conflated with) Fara’s love of Jacqueline. In a sense, the racial divide is most radically defined and determined in sexual terms. As, among many others, Joane Nagel shows in Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers, that the West has always sexualized race by establishing borders that it violently enforces and fantasmatically (and literally) transgresses. Fara’s encounter with Jacqueline is the embodiment of this (feature of the) score: if the rumba reminded Fara of a black woman in a hammock, jazz, as the scene with the Josephine Baker lookalike illustrates, points to this fantasmatic sexual encounter of black and white. In, with, and to the soundtrack of jazz, sexual attraction transgresses the racial law, rendered metaphorically in the precise instrumentation of Fara’s desire: having successfully begun his courtship of Jacqueline, Fara’s ‘banjo vibrait et lançait dans les airs des hymnes d’allégresses’ [banjo vibrated and sent into the air hymns of joy] (87). This erotic, ejaculatory imagery immediately cathects an instrument, the banjo, associated with the jazz of the period, to transracial mating. Thus it would appear, at least, that while on a rational level Fara and Jacqueline are more comfortable with the ‘civilized’ sounds of the rumba, on an instinctive level, the one that is absolutely transgressive, they turn to jazz. Once they have merged emotionally, the taboo sexual encounter between white and black plays out to the ruckus of jazz’s cataclysmic score, in which the ‘absolute primitiveness’ of blackness returns as art. The longest and most elaborate description of any musical event in the novel occurs toward the end, when Fara’s friends, trying to distract him from his unshakable sorrow over Jacqueline’s death, take him to a Duke Ellington concert. There, past and present, modernity distances him from Fara through an animalization of blackness (91). ‘Dressage,’ or ‘training,’ applies exclusively to animals.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 116

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

117

and savagery, black and white, are finally brought together in a manner equally seductive and destructive. The (re)turn to rhythm at the conclusion of the passage anticipates the tom-toms that accompany Fara’s suicidal leap into the Seine. The culminating Ellington scene is worth dissecting at some length. The music begins with a ‘silence d’attente’ [a silence of anticipation], ‘balayé par la pétarade d’une batterie de cuivre’ [swept away by the gunshots of copper drums] (164). This returns us to the opening of the novel, with the village drums. Indeed, the rhythmic (African) component of jazz is at the heart of this passage. Fara and the novel remain suspicious of the musicians, the ‘musiciens noirs … en smokings blancs’ [the black musicians in white tuxes], and even more so of Duke Ellington himself, who ‘avait l’air très prince’ [looked very princely] (164). The entire scene that follows moves between a series of now-familiar terms: on the one hand, jazz is industrial, intimately connected to the United States and its voracious capitalism, and its musicians prostitute themselves and their music;44 at the same time, the music now cannot be ignored, as it represents perhaps the most brilliantly developed expression of diaspora music, one in which the history of ‘the race’ is played out discursively. Particularly intriguing is how this rejection–acceptance of jazz occurs: it moves dialectically between evocative brilliance and frightening simulacra. In the first case, Ellington whips the orchestra into a frenzy, demonstrating his mastery. Under his baton, trompettes, saxophone, clarinette, banjo s’ébranlèrent en une débandade de chevaux sauvages, une galopade échevelée, tourbillonnante sur des pistes de sable mou. En pleine course, à un tournant, la galopade se brisa contre une forêt sans chemin. (164–5) [Trumpets, saxophone, clarinet, banjo lurched into a stampede of wild horses, a frenzied gallop, spinning on trails of soft sand. In the middle of this rush, at a turn, the gallop crashed into a roadless forest.]

But just as quickly, the authenticity of the performance comes under scrutiny: ‘Après un instant de repos, le jazz se mit à parodier les nasillements, des boitillements grotesques et expressifs comme les masques des sculpteurs noirs’ [After a moment of rest, the jazz started to parody the quacks, the grotesque and expressive limping of the masks of black sculptors] (165). The descriptions used – parody, the quack, grotesque limps as expressive as the black sculptors’ masks – communicate with the aesthetic terms so familiar to the modernist negrophilia of the 1920s and 1930s (particularly the fetishization of the mask), but here the entire performance occurs under the suspicion of parody, of simulacrum. In sum, again, jazz looks back to the African origin yet also forward to 44 In

this sense, Socé again adheres closely to Theodor Adorno’s scathing commentary on jazz.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 117

10/05/2017 09:09

118

Scoring Race

the artificial world of modernity first stressed by Fara in his realization that the erotic appeal of the Cabane Cubaine was dependent on a flimsy décor. The lyrics of ‘Blue Moon’ are directly cited in English in the text: ‘Blue moon / You saw me standing alone / Without a dream in my heart / Without a love of my own.’ The song now tilts from an anthem for the lovelorn toward something infinitely more vexing: the acknowledgment that the ‘nasillements, des boitillements grotesques et expressifs comme les masques des sculpteurs noirs’ all follow a score imposed from elsewhere. One travels forward, ‘without a love of one’s own,’ but always that of another. As this lengthy scene unfolds, it proceeds along these lines, offering hope and obliterating it, acknowledging an expressive diasporic (and métisse) aesthetic and expressing frustration that it is a manufactured subjectivity neither faithful to its past nor adequate to its future. Nevertheless, what is clear by the end of this extensive meditation is that jazz can neither be ignored nor entirely trusted: it is ‘divers comme la vie’ [as diverse as life], a music ‘qui se moque, exulte, se plaint et rêve!’ [that mocks, exults, complains, and dreams]. It is capable of transporting Fara ‘dans un autre monde, fait d’harmonie sonore où n’existait rien qui rappelât ce qui avait fait son malheur’ [into another world, made of sonorous harmony, where nothing existed that reminded him of what had caused his sorrow] (166). Again, for Fara, the crucial link between the original sounds of Africa and this hypermodern African-American sound is rhythm. ‘Le talent des musiciens noir,’ Fara muses, is ‘dans leur art des rythmes de la vie’ [the talent of black musicians is in their artistry in the rhythms of life] (164–6). Yet what this conclusion does not account for, indeed leaves no room for, is the text that gives him existence. That is, what is absent from Fara’s final assessment is the possibility of writing. If indeed jazz continues to carry with it the assumed rhythmic essence of blackness, it does so at the expense of any subjective plenitude – it leaves, in a word, the black subject trapped in the mute animal cries and bellows (re)produced so skillfully by Ellington’s musicians and hinted at so powerfully by Jacqueline’s father’s reference to the ‘domestication’ of blackness. But even here, this return to a primordial state is diminished by the commodification and artificiality of the performance. For Mirages de Paris, there is, in sum, no going forward toward a transracial modernity; nor is there any possibility of moving backward, of returning to the blissful state of precolonial innocence, a state whose loss was already evident in the young boy’s sad eyes. The solution is real or symbolic death as an escape from the forces of past and future closing in inexorably and inescapably on the present: as such, Fara’s suicidal leap into the Seine is the only possible conclusion to the novel.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 118

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

119

Absolute Music: Emmanuel Dongala’s ‘Jazz et vin de palme’ and ‘A Love Supreme’ Jazz is not a major preoccupation in most of Emmanuel Dongala’s writing. Nevertheless, of all his works, his collection of short stories, Jazz et vin de palme [Jazz and Palm Wine] (1982) is probably the best known and jazz plays a pivotal role in it.45 While first published in the early 1980s, the two short stories in which jazz plays an important role, ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ and ‘A Love Supreme,’ harken back to an ethos characteristic of the 1960s and early 1970s. ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ was actually originally published in the journal Présence Africaine in 1970 as a rewriting of an Amiri Baraka tale, ‘Answers in Progress.’ Indeed, ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ has garnered the most critical interest. In it, as in Baraka’s original, aliens invade the world. What differentiates ‘Jazz’ from ‘Answers’ is that Dongala shifts the setting from Newark, New Jersey to the Congo. In addition, the overall tone of the story is far less violent – indeed, only the first two Martians of the story actually bleed.46 In Dongala, the entire world (and not just the black world) is saved when it is discovered that palm wine gets them high and jazz (particularly more avant-garde jazz) makes them vanish into thin air. The story concludes with the drunk Martians mesmerized by John Coltrane’s saxophone and then pulverized by Sun Ra’s famous Intergalactic Research Arkestra. The second story, ‘A Love Supreme,’ is very different, describing instead the despair felt by a group of friends at the passing of J.C. (a barely disguised John Coltrane, who died in 1967). This more somber narrative configures Coltrane as a spiritual guide and philosopher whose musical genius accesses forms of sociality and knowledge language cannot articulate. Together, ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ and ‘A Love Supreme’ offer a stark contrast to Socé’s early skepticism regarding jazz. Rather, in these two stories, jazz is a miraculous form, an expression of global blackness and the merging of the singular with the universal. Gone are the fears of its hybrid or métisse nature, its prostituted identity; jazz is now, potentially at least, unfettered freedom, its positive valence unquestioned the moment it flees reification. This uniquely dynamic celebratory conception is expressed in two ways: as a universal antidote 45 Emmanuel

Dongala, Jazz et vin de palme et autres nouvelles (Paris: Hatier, 1982). Virginie Brinker writes: ‘Jazz et vin de palme (1982) de l’écrivain congolais Emmanuel Boundzeki Dongala est un des recueils de nouvelles les plus lus et connus d’Afrique francophone. Il figure ainsi dans les programmes de nombreux lycées africains’ [Jazz and Palm Wine by the Congolese writer Emmanuel Boundzeki Dongala is one of the most read collections of short stories from Francophone Africa. It thus appears on the curricula of numerous African high schools]. ‘“La Musique qui marche au pas cela ne m’intéresse pas”: Musique et liberté dans Jazz et vin de palme d’Emmanuel Dongala,’ La Plume francophone, September 16, 2007, http:// la-plume-francophone.over-blog.com/article-12423423.html. 46 It turns out that they are literally blue-blooded, which emphasizes the slightly slapstick humor of the story rather than the overt bloodshed of Baraka’s original.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 119

10/05/2017 09:09

120

Scoring Race

to the West’s hypocritical and (literally) deadly seriousness;47 and as the most apt instrument for returning humanity to the power of the spiritual ‘one’ (as explained in ‘A Love Supreme’). In both cases, (true) jazz is no longer bound to the marketplace and is radically and programmatically detached from the expectations – prurient or otherwise – of the listening audience.48 It operates in and for a disinterested Kantian transcendental aesthetic order that demands an immediate appreciation of the power of art to enable the subject to fathom itself. Significantly, and in contrast with the hierarchy proposed by Kantian aesthetics in which music is marginalized, Dongala rather privileges music’s ability to mediate the truth over a language that instead obscures the path to a higher understanding.

‘Jazz et vin de palme’

A significant number of critics have turned their attention to Emmanuel Dongala in recent years,49 and many of these have considered Jazz et vin de 47 This

is most evident in ‘Jazz and Palm Wine,’ which is peppered with ironic descriptions, sly commentary, and absurdist references. 48 Or, as Virginie Brinker argues,‘Le jazz est donc le médium privilégié de l’émancipation et c’est lui qui donne sa profonde unité au recueil’ [Jazz is therefore the privileged medium of emancipation, and it is this that gives the collection its profound unity], to which she adds: ‘[c]’est ce souffle libérateur qui parcourt toute la nouvelle de Dongala dont la musicalité transmue le récit en poème lyrique. Au-delà du politique, on peut ainsi percevoir à la lecture de l’ensemble du recueil, la liberté de l’artiste-écrivain lui-même, qui laisse se déployer la musicalité de la langue, capable de franchir les frontières, territoriales, idéologiques et génériques, toujours en quête d’absolu’ [It is the liberating wind that runs through the entirety of Dongala’s short story whose musicality transforms this story into a lyrical poem. Beyond the political, one can make out upon reading the collection the liberty of the writer-artist himself, who lets unfurl the musicality of language, capable of going beyond the territorial, ideological, and generic boundaries, always seeking the absolute]. Brinker, ‘La Musique qui marche.’ 49 Much, though certainly not all, of the interest in Dongala resulted from the publication of Johnny Chien Méchant and focused on the phenomenon of child soldiers and the culture of violence in Africa. Such was the case in the following: Koffi Anyinefa, ‘Les Enfants de la guerre: adolescence et violence postcoloniale chez Badjoko, Dongala, Kourouma et Monénembo,’ Présence Francophone: Revue Internationale de Langue et de Littérature 66 (2006): 81–110; Corinne Blanchaud, ‘Dongala et Mabanckou entre la violence et la norme: le legs d’un territoire symbolique,’ in Littératures africaines et territoires, ed. Christiane Albert, RoseMarie Abomo-Maurin, Xavier Garnier, and Gisèle Prignitz (Paris: Karthala, 2011); George MacLeod, ‘The Spoils of War: Money and Humanism in Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Chien Méchant,’ Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 19.5 (2015): 525–32; Mamadou Kalidou Ba, ‘La Sexualité juvénile: une forme d’expression de la violence dans le roman africain contemporain,’ Ethiopiques 88 (2012), http://ethiopiques.refer.sn/spip.php?article1825; Stephen Gray, ‘Two African Child Soldiers: The Kourouma and Dongala Contretemps,’ Research in African Literatures 44.3 (2013): 152–9; Armelle Crouzières-Ingenthron, ‘Pour une dialogique de l’humain: Les Enfants-victimes dans Johnny chien méchant d’Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala,’ Nouvelles Études Francophones 24.2 (2009): 89–97; Odile M. Cazenave, ‘Writing the Child, Youth, and Violence into the Francophone Novel from Sub-Saharan Africa: The Impact of Age and Gender,’ Research in African Literatures 36.2 (2005): 59–71; and

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 120

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

121

palme.50 Yet, as with Mirages de Paris, very few have focused on the role of jazz in these short stories, despite the obvious attention drawn to music in the title. Ann Willey’s ‘A Bridge over Troubled Waters: Jazz, Diaspora Discourse, and E. B. Dongala’s “Jazz and Palm Wine” as Response to Amiri Baraka’s “Answers in Progress,”’ represents the most substantial essay dedicated exclusively to the question. As her title suggests, she reads ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ through its rewriting of Baraka. Her claim is that the Congolese author simultaneously pays homage to the American poet, critic, and theorist while assuring that jazz ‘arrives back on African shores with a political difference.’51 That Baraka heavily impacted Dongala’s thinking makes sense; the author had, only a few years before the story’s original publication, spent considerable time in New York City soaking in the avant-garde jazz scene. Further, in the early 1960s, Baraka (writing under his birth name of LeRoi Jones) had published his influential Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) and the collected essays in Black Music (written between 1959 and 1967 but published in 1968) on the place of blues and jazz in African-American (and more broadly, in American) culture. If the earlier works showed a certain critical distance, by the late 1960s Baraka had radicalized his aesthetic ideology and in this movement jazz played a pivotal role. Willey identifies this increasingly art-focused black internationalism as key to understanding the collection Tales, of which ‘Answers’ is for her a key component. In Dongala’s case, ‘[t]he act of rewriting Baraka’s cosmically inflected, jazz inspired, revolutionary fable indicates [the Congolese author’s] investment in AfricanAmerican music and the complexities of trans-diasporic identity formation.’52 At the same time, Dongala’s ‘intertextual use of, and emendations to, Baraka’s story’ also ‘suggests his discomfort with articulations of diaspora identity that were increasingly defined by cultural symbols.’ Her principal point is Eleni Coundouriotis, ‘The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization,’ Journal of Human Rights 9.2 (2010): 191–206. Others have focused on another earlier work (such as Un fusil dans la main, un poème dans la poche or Les feux des origines), as is the case of Rony Yala’s Mythes et histoire dans ‘Le feu des origines’ d’Emmanuel Dongala (Paris: Harmattan, 2014). 50 Among the studies that have touched on Jazz et vin de palme are Olivia Kabongo, ‘“Une journée dans la vie d’Augustine Amaya” d’Emmanuel Dongala: l’identité de la femme africaine et du peuple congolais,’ Voix plurielles 3.1 (2006); Dominic Thomas, Nation-building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002); Séwanou Jean-Jacques Dabla, ‘Jazz et vin de palme’ de Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala: étude critique (Paris: Nathan, 1986); Abel Kouvouama, ‘Identité et langue chez quelques romanciers congolais,’ in Francophonie et identités culturelles, ed. Christiane Albert (Paris: Karthala, 1999); Schüller, ‘Le Jazz dans la littérature francophone.’ 51 Ann Willey, ‘A Bridge over Troubled Waters: Jazz, Diaspora Discourse, and E. B. Dongala’s “Jazz and Palm Wine” as Response to Amiri Baraka’s “Answers in Progress,”’ Research in African Literatures 44.3 (2013): 140. 52 Willey, ‘A Bridge over Troubled Waters,’ 145.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 121

10/05/2017 09:09

122

Scoring Race

that ‘Dongala challenges the understanding of jazz and diaspora identity as necessarily revolutionary.’53 This reading effectively identifies how ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ riffs on Baraka’s ‘Answers in Progress’ and it convincingly locates a suspicion of the ideological that is manifest to varying degrees throughout Dongala’s œuvre. What remains to be examined in more detail is the specificity of jazz. Further, while Willey rightly chides others for writing on the collection without addressing music, and particularly for not speaking about the titular story, it is also necessary to link ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ to the other story on jazz in the collection, ‘A Love Supreme,’ a connection that ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ explicitly asks us to pursue. Dongala’s writing – from Un fusil dans la main, un poème dans la poche [‘A rifle in the hand, a poem in the pocket’] (1974) to Photo de groupe au bord du fleuve [‘Group photo at the edge of the river’] (2010), and including the short stories of Jazz et vin de palme (1982) – is suspicious of institutionalized politics in general. Little in his fiction (or his interviews) suggests that he believes that any political ideology is adequate to the conditions facing modern Africa(ns) – other than (perhaps) grassroots resistance.54 Thus, it is no doubt true that ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ challenges Baraka’s militantism; nevertheless, both ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ and ‘A Love Supreme’ give jazz transcendental and transnational – one might even say messianic – functions that in some sense go beyond a suspect ideological communitarianism toward an affective cooperative individualism. Thus, the claim that ‘Dongala questions the transparency of transatlantic deployment of identity effects through discourses of diaspora, Négritude, or New World formulations of Pan-Africanism’ needs to be amended to recognize that, while he may be suspicious of the revolutionary claims of Pan-Africanism,55 jazz remains for him a uniquely positive diasporic phenomenon invested with tremendous power when it comes to spiritual self-actualization. Dongala ironically pushes the range of jazz’s influence to the extreme by making it pan-galactic: the aliens are so moved by the music that they disintegrate. In this sense, the idea of a weaponized music is debunked by its extension ad absurdum. But despite an ironic iconoclasm directed at political orthodoxies and the notion of jazz as a revolutionary weapon, the names of the artists remain significant. On the one hand, as the narrator tells us in ‘A Love Supreme,’ “[l’]Art ne pouvait remplacer une révolution politique et sociale.’ [Art could not replace a real political and social revolution].56 On the other, the resonance of the names Art Blakey (in the prologue), Sun Ra, and John Coltrane as privileged members of the great jazz 53 Willey,

‘A Bridge over Troubled Waters,’ 144. effective grassroots efforts really only appear in Photo de groupe. 55 This was also the case with the Négritude poets who ultimately proved to be far more invested in the aesthetic than in the revolutionary aspects of diaspora. 56 Emmanuel Dongala, Jazz et vin de palme, 151; Emmanuel Dongala, Jazz and Palm Wine, trans. Dominic Thomas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017), 116. Subsequent 54 Even

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 122

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

123

pantheon (and the jazz shibboleth) suggest that something of value precipitates out from this ironic brew. To figure out what that is requires closer analysis and will become particularly clear in ‘A Love Supreme.’ Throughout ‘Jazz and Palm Wine,’ the miracle of jazz’s appearance and effectiveness is ultimately ludicrous – without any real preparation or explanation. There appears to be no stopping the invasion (the precise nature of which is itself hard to decipher – the aliens just seem to be there and to have conquered). At the conclusion of the third section, with the earth now firmly under Martian rule, the Kenyan delegate proposes a palaver under the great tree with the leader of the invaders. The world’s heads of state universally accept the proposal. Section four begins: Absolument! Jazz et vin de palme. Le vin de palme les mettait dans un état réceptif … La musique de John Coltrane les jetait dans un état catatonique d’abord, puis dans une sorte de nirvâna … ce qui permettait à la musique cosmique de Sun Râ de les volatiser. (122) [Absolutely! Jazz and palm wine. Palm wine made them very receptive … John Coltrane’s music … initially threw them into a state of stupor that gradually eased toward a kind of nirvana …, which made them all the more receptive to the cosmic music and mesmerizing sound of Sun Ra.] (92)

Thus, just as the Martians’ appearance and victory simply happens, the jazz salvation arrives unannounced and unexplained as well, as if beyond the scope of Western rationality. In this sense, despite the obviously sarcastic humor of ‘Jazz and Palm Wine,’ where everyone – including Soviet Russia, the United States, France, South Africa, China, Viet Nam, North Korea, Cuba, and various African nations including Kenya, Burkina Fasso, and the two Congos – gets roundly roasted, jazz retains a core seriousness that elevates the story beyond a mere spoof of Baraka or a simple vehicle for Dongala’s withering criticism of all institutionalized power. Yes, Sun Ra’s sacralization is meant as a joke: Le chef d’état d’Afrique du Sud fut autorisé à assister à la célébration à condition de ne pas sérer la main de Sun Râ que tout le monde idolâtrait alors. (123) [The South African Head of State was given permission to attend the festivities so long as he promised he wouldn’t attempt to shake hands with Sun Ra, a man everyone idolized at the time.] (92)

Even the conclusion of the story, in which Coltrane’s saxophone sends the aliens into a trance and Sun Ra’s orchestra volatilizes them, is inflected with irony:

citations from this work appear parenthetically in the text, with the page number of the original French edition given first.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 123

10/05/2017 09:09

124

Scoring Race

Tout d’un coup, de partout … éclatèrent les sonorités envoûtantes du saxophone de John Coltrane. Et les créatures de balancer la tête, les yeux comme figés … Alors Sun Râ mit sa fusée-orchestre en marche. Lorsqu’elle atteignit la vitesse de la lumière, tout ce qui n’était pas humain se volatisa et disparut dans l’Espace. … Et c’est ainsi que Sun Râ fut le premier homme musicien de jazz noir à devenir président des Etats-Unis. C’est également ainsi que le meilleur buveur de vin de palme chaque année est nommé secrétaire des Nations Unies. C’est ainsi, enfin, que le jazz conquit le monde. (125) [All of a sudden, from everywhere around … the enchanting sounds of John Coltrane’s saxophone reverberated. And the creatures started bobbing their heads, their eyes seemingly frozen … That’s when Sun Ra’s rocket orchestra started playing. By the time he’d reached the speed of light, all that was not human had evaporated and vanished into Space. This is how Sun Ra became the first black man and jazz musician to become President of the United States. This is also why the best palm wine drinker of the year is appointed Secretary General of the United Nations. And that’s also how, when it came down to it, jazz conquered the world.] (94)

This sly humor is evident throughout the story, and particularly in the cited passage: the odds of a black man – let alone an avant-garde black jazz musician such as Sun Ra – becoming president of the United States seemed fairly remote in 1970. Despite this biting sarcasm, the story’s faith in jazz is nevertheless real. That is, the artists the story celebrates, their music’s redemptive quality, and the racial terms that define jazz suggest that the Congolese author’s understanding of this genre is not so far from Baraka’s after all. Indeed, perhaps because of developments in the music since the swing era, most notably the advent of bebop, and the subsequent avant-garde experimentations of free jazz, Dongala seems less wary of jazz’s racial score than many African authors before and after him. This may simply be that, while a Josephine Baker or a Louis Armstrong adheres to extreme stereotypes in obvious fashion, it is, perhaps, less clear how a Max Roach or a Charlie Parker does so. And again, the irony with which Dongala always writes offers a buffer against the excesses of Socé’s categorical thinking.

‘A Love Supreme’

This buy-in becomes all the more apparent if one reads the second story. As already noted, it is difficult not to connect the two. ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ ends with the epilogue: ‘Un an après cette aventure, John Coltrane fut canonisé par le pape sous le nom de Saint Trane. Le premier volet de son œuvre A LOVE SUPREME remplaça le GLORIA dans la messe catholique’ (125). [A year after this adventure, John Coltrane was canonized by the Pope as Saint Trane. The first movement of his work A Love Supreme thus came to replace the Gloria in the Catholic Mass] (94).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 124

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

125

The four hallucinatory pages of ‘Mon métro fantôme’ [‘My Ghost Train’] effect the transition from the surreal afro-futurist world of ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ to the recognizable reality of New York in ‘A Love Supreme,’ from the science fiction of an alien attack to the autofictional telling of a small group of devoted followers stunned by the news of the great John Coltrane’s death.57 Clearly, an investment in jazz holds the two worlds together, gives them coherence and continuity. However, if the first story is marked by its biting irony, ‘A Love Supreme’ is a passionate and earnest paean to the music. Indeed, as fellow Congolese author Henri Lopes noted on jazz in his own writing: [Dans les années 60], c’était une des expressions de ce que Senghor aurait appelé la négritude. Donc … nous nous sommes reconnus dans le jazz, on voyait dans le jazz une exportation de l’Afrique, mais d’une Afrique qui avait oublié d’où elle venait et qui était un produit que les Africains ne connaissaient pas … Et quant à Dongala, évidemment, je ne veux pas expliquer à sa place, mais Dongala c’est parce qu’il est l’un des premiers Congolais [à] avoir autant vécu aux États‐Unis. D’où son contact, d’où son très beau texte qu’il a écrit par exemple sur John Coltrane qui s’appelle ‘A Love Supreme.’58 [In the 1960s it was one of the expressions of what Senghor would have called Négritude. Therefore … we identified with jazz because we saw in it an African export, but an Africa that had forgotten where it came from and which was a product Africans themselves didn’t know … And as for Dongala, and obviously I can’t speak for him, it’s because Dongala is one of the first Congolese to have lived in the United States. Which explains his knowledge, for example his gorgeous piece on Coltrane titled, ‘A Love Supreme.’]

57

The autobiographical elements are numerous. Aside from the fact that we know that Dongala was in the United States for most of the 1960s, the references to the author’s birthday (July 14) and the fact that Coltrane’s death followed immediately afterward (July 17) are among the many clues that tell us the story is built on authorial recollections. As Dongala notes: ‘Oui, j’ai rencontré Coltrane brièvement lors de l’un de ses concerts à New York. Malheureusement, elle n’a pas été suivie d’autres. Par contre, à sa mort, le 17 juillet 1967, j’étais présent à la veillée mortuaire à St. Peter Lutheran Church de Manhattan. C’est d’ailleurs durant cette veillée que m’est venue l’idée d’écrire cet hommage.’ [Yes, I met Coltrane briefly during one of his concerts in New York. Unfortunately, it wasn’t followed by any other meetings. On the other hand, when he died on July 17, 1967, I attended the wake at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan. It was in fact during the wake that the idea of writing this homage came to me.] Emmanuel Dongala, ‘E. Dongala, A Love Supreme,’ interview by Bernard Magnier, CitizenJazz, conducted June 6 and 7, 2006, http://www.citizenjazz.com/E-Dongala-A-Love-Supreme.html. These comments also suggest that the story was imagined – if not written – in 1967. 58 Henri Lopes, ‘La Musique, c’est la bande sonore de mes livres’ [‘Music is the soundtrack of my books’], interview by Viola Prüschenk, conducted September 15, 2006, Stichproben: Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 17.9 (2009): 127–35.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 125

10/05/2017 09:09

126

Scoring Race

Noticeable here is Lopes’s insight that the appreciation of jazz is largely restricted to an educated African elite.59 In a sense, the very roots of Négritude as Lopes sees them, and the subsequently more radical forms that it took in the sixties, were based on a particularly Western notion of culture. For Lopes, jazz is clearly not a singularly positive force, but resides at the crossroads of multiple historical, cultural, and material trajectories that make the music uniquely and necessarily, problematically, and essentially, African-American (rather than ‘pan-African’). Just as significantly, for Lopes the singular example of jazz’s appropriation by an African intellectual is Dongala’s ‘A Love Supreme.’60 Indeed, Dongala transforms jazz into a religious medium of which Coltrane is the high priest. As the narrator of ‘A Love Supreme’ puts it: Depuis que j’avais perdu la foi en Dieu, j’avais traîné mon esprit un peu partout pour trouver la voie qui me mènerait à la connaissance, à la signification des choses. C’est ainsi que j’ai découvert la musique; non pas vraiment, on ne découvre pas la musique chez nous, on naît avec. Mais je veux dire que grâce à J.C., la musique était devenue autre chose, un moyen, un médium; elle était une passion, elle avait un sens. (137) [Since I’d lost my faith in God, I’d pretty much dragged my spirit all over the place in search of the path that would lead me to knowledge, to some kind of greater meaning. That was how I’d discovered music. Well, actually, that’s not completely accurate since where I come from, you’re born with it. What I mean to say is that, thanks to J.C., music became something else, a means, a medium. It was more of a passion – it now had meaning.] (105) 59 ‘Je

dirais d’ailleurs que mes personnages connaissent mieux le jazz que moi-même. Nous ne sommes pas représentatifs du goût des habitants de notre pays, parce que peu d’Africains s’intéressent au jazz. Moi, je m’intéresse au jazz parce qu’étant venu très jeune en France, dans cette quête d’identité que nous avions, tout ce qui appartenait au patrimoine des Noirs, qu’ils soient d’Amérique, des Antilles, etc., nous nous en saisissions. Et le jazz à cette époque-là, c’était une des expressions de ce que Senghor aurait appelé la négritude.’ [I’d even say that my characters know jazz better than I do. We aren’t representative of the tastes of the inhabitants of our country, because few Africans are interested in jazz. I’m interested in jazz, because having come to France at a young age, with that search for identity that we were all undertaking, everything that belonged to the Black tradition, whether it was from America, the Caribbean, etc., we grabbed onto it. And jazz, at that time, was what Senghor would have called Négritude.] Lopes, ‘La Musique,’ 131. 60 Lopes has said: ‘En fait, on s’apercevrait vite que je ne suis pas un musicologue, même pas un amateur de musique. Quel que soit le type de musique que j’évoque – africaine, rumba ou high-life, jazz, classique, opéra – , je tente de faire des romans qui expriment la réalité, qui, une fois encore, “mentent vrai.”’ [In fact, one would notice pretty quickly that I’m not a musicologist, or even a music fan. Whatever type of music I evoke – African, rumba or high-life, jazz, classical, opera – I try to write novels that express reality, that, once again, ‘lie truthfully.’] Henri Lopes, ‘Henri Lopes: “La critique n’est pas une agression,”’ interview by Lydie Moudileno, Genesis 33 (2011): 93–100, https://genesis.revues.org/609.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 126

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

127

J.C. (i.e., John Coltrane) therefore becomes the ‘medium’ providing a certain access to truth, ‘la voie menant à la connaissance, à la signification des choses’ [the path that would lead me to knowledge, to some kind of greater meaning]. That this path is affective, that it runs through the emotional rather than the rational, is taken for granted and never problematized. What matters is that Coltrane seeks an absolute, that ‘il allait toujours de l’avant’ (144) [he always endeavored to forge ahead] (111). Few if any can follow him in this quest, certainly not ‘tous ces musiciens à qui il manquait une foi’ (144) [all those musicians who lacked faith] (111), or ‘les auditeurs calfeutrés dans leurs habitudes et leurs clichés’ (144) [all those audiences stuck in their ways and content with empty clichés] (111). The experience of J.C. at the height of his powers, at the moment when this quest seems to be bearing fruit, leads to what (particularly given the title of the song during which it occurs) can only be interpreted as an ecstatic religious experience: J.C. était là au milieu de son quartet comme un grand prêtre illuminé … cette ferveur transforma l’homme et la musique confus dans un tourbillon de sons à l’état pur: une nébuleuse qui éclate dans l’univers, hors du temps des horloges des hommes, dans un univers où toutes choses sont passionnées et brûlantes … Nous n’existions plus; nous aussi, nous faisions le voyage avec le Maître, le sorcier: grande fête païenne, festin démoniaque, enfer et damnation, soufre et sel, l’amour, le salut … Nous baignions dans un monde d’amour suprême. ‘A love supreme,’ criait-il. (145–6) [J.C. was standing there in the middle of the quartet like a possessed high priest … The notes chased one another, caught up, blended, ran on ahead, such that one had the impression of listening to clusters of sounds sliding against each other, elementary particles escaping from an inner core in fusion! In this fervor, the man and the music became one in a vortex of sound at its purest: a nebula that explodes in the universe, outside of the realm of time and the clocks of mankind, in a universe in which all things become passionate and burning … We no longer existed. We too were transported on this journey along with the Master, the witch doctor: a great pagan feast, a Dionysian feast, hell and damnation, sulfur and salt, love, salvation … We bathed in a world of sublime supreme love. ‘A love supreme,’ he bellowed.] (112)

The ritual nature of the performance is evident throughout this passage. The musical transformation listeners undergo brings them outside of the time-space dimension of the quotidian, of the mundanely political concerns of human interaction. In a sense, Sun Ra’s Arkestra’s absurdist mise-en-scène depicted in ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ metamorphoses into a real trans-galactic journey of love. What remains to be seen is whether the affective power of jazz evident throughout this story and particularly in the passage cited above is potentially

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 127

10/05/2017 09:09

128

Scoring Race

problematic for its adherence to one of the principal component’s of race’s score: the binding of blackness (or difference in general) to the emotional – which is to say, irrational – dimension of being. In this regard, Dongala appears to persist in following Senghor’s infamous pronouncement that ‘l’émotion est nègre et la raison est héllène’ [emotion is black and reason is Greek].61 In fact, Dongala never explicitly acknowledges that a Senghorian black musicality (‘on ne découvre pas la musique chez nous’ [‘among us, no one discovers music’], i.e. one is born with it in one’s blood) might be problematic. Where Dongala does differ from his Senegalese predecessor, however, is in his insistence on music’s historicity. His attachment to jazz is resolutely invested in an evolutionary model; his substitution of Coltrane and Sun Ra (and references to avant-garde saxophonists Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman in ‘A Love Supreme’) underscores the importance of change, of a striving forward such as Samuel A. Floyd describes. For Floyd, black music in general (and jazz in particular) must be understood in this way: [T]he ‘willful play’ of … black signifiers became more important than the given melodies they played as they created call-and-response figures, cross-rhythms, elisions, smears, breaks, and stop-time figures, ‘telling a story’ with musically dialogical, rhetorical tropes that asserted, assented, implied, mocked, and critically evaluated the possibilities of the new music with which they had made contact.62

What Floyd describes here is a meaningful musicality that discursively works on the environment in which it exists and the history in which participates. For Dongala, it is clear that jazz intervenes historically in this meaningful manner. Further, its principal actors are named and given a fully constituted subjectivity. Thus, John Coltrane arrives dialectically at a historically logical moment in jazz’s unique telos and is himself driven by the need to improve, to find something that is always just beyond his reach as he ‘critically evaluated the possibilities of the new music with which’ he ‘had made contact.’ The story’s relation to this temporality is underscored by its treatment of jazz musicians from the past: Quand j’arrivai de mon Afrique natale, je ne connaissais que vaguement la musique classique d’Armstrong, d’Ellington ou encore de Bessie Smith et Scott Joplin entre autres … Je trouvais cette musique émouvante parce que nostalgique, et chaque fois que j’écoutais ces vieux morceaux, inévitablement, se dessinaient dans ma mémoire

61 Léopold

Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ [‘What the man of color brings’], in L’Homme de couleur (Paris: Plon, 1939), 24. For an extensive discussion of this famous phrase, see Xavier Garnier, ‘“L’émotion est nègre, la raison est hellène”: Histoire d’une formule’ [‘Emotion is black and reason is Greek’: the history of an epigram], reprinted as ‘La notion de raison intuitive’ [‘The idea of intuitive reason’], in Léopold Sédar Senghor: Africanité-Universalité, Itinéraires et contacts de cultures, vol. 31 (Paris: Harmattan, 2002), 115–20. 62 Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 98.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 128

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

129

les grandes plantations de coton, les bateaux à aubes qui remontaient le Mississippi … En fait pour moi cette musique était un peu un musée où je retrouvais une partie de l’histoire de notre peuple, mais aussi une impasse. (137–8) [When I first arrived in America from my native Africa, I had only a fragmentary knowledge of the classic music of Armstrong, Ellington, or even Bessie Smith, Scott Joplin, and a smattering of others … I found this music moving because it was nostalgic, and whenever I listened to these old tracks, invariably, images formed in my mind of large cotton plantations, steamboats at dawn making their way back up the Mississippi … When it came down to it, this music was a kind of museum which I liked to delve into and discover the history of our people, but also an impasse.] (106)

The insistence on the historicity of the music is an essential feature of this passage and of the manner in which the narrative subsequently processes J.C. The narrator clearly acknowledges the importance of ‘classical’ musicians such as Armstrong, Ellington, and Bessie Smith. But their value is retrospective; they represent a nostalgic echo of a past whose relevance to the present – particularly for an African author – is to a large extent diminished by their transformation into clichés (cotton, Mississippi steamboats). Consequently, this music ‘était un peu un musée où je retrouvais une partie de l’histoire de notre people, mais aussi une impasse’ (138) [a kind of museum which I liked to delve into and discover the history of our people, but also an impasse] (106). It is, in a word, a dead end, a ‘musée des structures figées’ [a museum of frozen structures].63 In stark contrast, Coltrane’s meaning and value is determined by his conclusive role in a process of musical exploration whose relevance is immediately bound to the material history in which it is embedded and that it serves to mediate. Jazz in the hands of J.C. takes on a new, more powerful function: unlike the intoxicating effect it creates in Socé’s suspicious description, it here produces meaning in and through the exchange between creative artist and listening public: ‘Sans le public,’ J.C. tells the narrator, ‘je ne suis rien car ma musique est une musique populaire. Je veux bien prendre en considération le goût du public si lui de son côté me laisse chercher ce qui me satisfait’ (141) [I’m nothing without the public because my music is for the people. I’m willing to take into consideration their tastes so long as they’re prepared to give me the space to explore what satisfies me] (109). The initial inability to achieve this compromise forces J.C. to retire from the public scene for six months in a musical quest for the desired alloy of scientific, metaphysical, and theological elements. This is J.C.’s uniquely holistic approach to the ontological question. Or again, as the narrator describes it: ‘J.C. pensait qu’il existait une relation profonde entre la musique et le reste de l’univers, un peu dans le genre de la relation entre matière et énergie dans la physique einsteinienne’ (144) [He felt very strongly that 63 Schüller,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 129

‘Le Jazz dans la littérature francophone,’ 65.

10/05/2017 09:09

130

Scoring Race

music, like any living art, has a duty to constantly go beyond what was already there, to surpass itself. A deep connection existed between music and the rest of the universe, the kind of relationship one finds between energy and matter in Einsteinian physics] (111). This also rewrites how, in Mirages de Paris, all elements of African culture can be collapsed into a music that is despised or at least mistrusted. Here, rather, music unites everything but is valued for it instead. J.C.’s music is thus uniquely suited to accomplish what writing cannot: to unite all the components and planes of the human. Coltrane’s musical intervention offers a way out of the Western episteme’s aporia. Again, much of this success depends on its emphatic modernity, evident in the endless feverish search for new sounds and the artists and thinkers with whom the great tenor player is connected: on J.C.’s death, the narrator (unsuccessfully) attempts to contact avant-garde saxophonist Archie Shepp and Imamu (Amiri) Baraka.64 On this final count, perhaps the narrator’s inability to contact these other famous figures of the Black Arts movement (and its allied musicians) implies that the avantgardist impulse is ultimately doomed to fail as well. After all, the narrator’s last encounter with J.C. describes him as a beaten man: Notre dernière rencontre ? Non je n’en parlerai pas, c’était trop triste; un J.C. abattu, expulsé de son appartement, sans argent; émeutes, le frère de Splivie tué. Non vraiment, pas la peine d’en parler. (152)65 Our last meeting? No, I won’t say anything about it, it’s just too sad. A J.C despondent, penniless, who’d been evicted from his apartment. Riots, Splivie’s brother murdered. No, really, I don’t see the point of talking about it. (117)

In sum, ‘A Love Supreme’ does confirm Ann Willey’s insight concerning Dongala’s skepticism of Baraka: the narrator begins by noting that ‘quand nous devinmes des … partisans du Black Power … cette musique devait prendre un sens nouveau, elle [devenait] l’avant garde artistique de notre combat’ (150) [Later, when we became political militants and supporters of Black Power, this music took on a new meaning for us, becoming the artistic avant-garde of our struggle] (115).66 But he quickly follows this with the comment that ‘Aujourd’hui je reconnais que nous [exploitions J.C.] … Nous l’avions même surnommé le 64 Toward

the end of the story, the narrator also receives a phone call from the great free-jazz saxophonist, Ornette Coleman. 65 It is worth noting that this conclusion demands a significant rewriting of the Coltrane biography. By the end of his life Coltrane was not the poor ‘artiste maudit’ described by Dongala. Rather, he had garnered considerable success, such that throughout the 1960s and until his death Coltrane made a substantial living, famously driving around in an E-type Jaguar coupe and living a comfortable upper-middle-class existence. This was particularly true after the tremendous success (in jazz terms) of ‘A Love Supreme.’ 66 Translation modified.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 130

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

131

Malcolm X du jazz’ (150) [Today, I’m the first to recognize that we took a little advantage of J.C. … We’d even nicknamed him the Malcolm X of jazz] (115). However, ultimately art (or more precisely, jazz) is more powerful than ideology: C’est là le triomphe de l’artiste sur les militants politiques, il ne cherche pas à persuader ni à faire le bonheur des gens, parfois même contre eux; il laisse à chaque individu le plaisir de se découvrir et découvrir en même temps que lui ces choses merveilleuses et extraordinaires qui doivent exister quelques part dans l’univers. (152) That’s the artist’s triumph over political militants, neither trying to persuade nor to bring happiness, at times even against their will. The artist allows each individual the pleasure of self-discovery as well as the discovery of those marvelous and extraordinary things that must exist somewhere out there in the universe … (116–17)

J.C. was at first a symbol and ideological motor for the sentiment of the day. Retrospectively, however, what the narrator comes to call ‘ces mots, ces cris grandiloquents et usés jetés à la face du monde’ (151) [these words and bombastic principles used and then tossed in the face of the world] (116), that is, the slogans and political manifestos of the 1960s, become far less believable. Instead, the power of Coltrane’s improvisation resides in its ability to help the individual explore him-/her-/itself. Interestingly, the language in which this exploration is described evokes the earlier story of the Martians volatized by Coltrane’s saxophone. In a sense, that earlier irony is recycled here into something more serious yet equally transcendental, as if, somewhere between the irony of the first story and the deep seriousness of the second, the chant of ‘A Love Supreme’ sutured these two seemingly incompatible attitudes. What clearly remains once the chaff of these two stories has been blown away is a musical form that, even where it fails to achieve the absolute, nevertheless makes J.C. ‘le plus sincère de nous tous’ [the most sincere of all of us] because ‘tu avais une foi désintéressée’ [your faith was of a disinterested kind] where ‘ta musique était une source de vie, un moyen d’élever les hommes pour qu’ils réalisent ce qu’ils souhaitent dans la vie, ce qui n’étaient pas des clauses de rhétorique’ (151) [your music was a source of life, a means of elevating men to greater heights so that they might achieve what they really wanted in life, and those weren’t just empty words] (115–16). This turn to the idea of the rhetorical finally reveals Dongala’s perhaps problematic understanding of jazz. For the Congolese author, jazz ultimately communicates most powerfully through the affective sphere (of love). As Schüller argues, ‘C’était dans les yeux du narrateur, la musique de Coltrane qui permettait de sortir de l’“impasse.”’ [It was, in the narrator’s eyes, Coltrane who allowed an escape from the ‘impasse’].67 In the process, jazz moves beyond or outside the 67 Schüller,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 131

‘Le Jazz dans la littérature francophone,’ 65.

10/05/2017 09:09

132

Scoring Race

linguistic in a manner that ejects it from the rational. In so doing, however, it follows the Western aesthetic’s traditional placement of music as the medium that faces outward into the nothingness of the non-human or pre-human space of the not-yet-being: of difference; of blackness. Thus, despite his rejection of a certain racialized revolutionary discourse that he identifies with the Black Arts movement, Dongala still gets caught up (elsewhere) in the scoring of race that his own manner of receiving jazz risks reiterating. Further, Dongala relies on a Kantian conception of art by which J.C.’s particular iteration of avant-garde jazz would be entirely disinterested. For example, it banishes commercial interests or an interest in fame as might be produced by J.C.’s renowned virtuosity. Indeed, on this latter front, the sinuous horn lines honed over a lifetime of relentless practicing give way to the haunting chant of ‘A Love Supreme,’ as if that had been J.C.’s final word, having returned from the instrumental technology of the saxophone to the most basic musical mode of expression – the human voice vacillating between the musical and the poetic.68 At the same time, relegating Coltrane to this uniquely messianic role requires that the author – and in this respect he is not alone – choose to ignore the conditions under which Coltrane performed during the closing years of his life. Indeed, the Coltrane to whom Dongala refers owes much to a culturally produced phenomenon discussed at length in Ben Ratliff ’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound.69 Instead of the poète maudit playing in half-empty bars as Dongala describes, the tenor player was in fact hugely popular (by jazz standards) and relatively wealthy. While the 1950s and 1960s saw jazz lose popularity to rock, there remained a steadfast interest in the music among a particular urban coalition bringing together various streams of black radicalism (both aesthetic and political), and a certain ‘bohemian’ collective of artists, intellectuals, and politically progressive consumers. There were, in any case, enough people interested in the music to populate jazz clubs from Harlem to Tokyo and to nourish a small but vibrant market in records. Thus, Dongala’s faith in jazz as the symbol of a disinterested and transcendental art form requires him to ignore the explicit material conditions under which Coltrane lived at the end of his life – thereby abiding by a mythical narrative that has participated and continues to participate, albeit discretely, in the racial score. This reiteration of the (racial) score is problematic precisely because, in the final analysis, it is not so far from Hugues Panassié’s naturalized musicality. That is, Dongala ultimately fabricates (or reproduces) an idealized figure whose musical genius 68 The

saxophone is literally a product of the early industrial revolution. Invented by Adolphe Sax in 1840 as a staple for the newly popular marching bands, the instrument was among the first signs of an emerging ‘culture’ industry. Its emergence as the privileged melodic instrument of jazz cannot be detached from this history. 69 Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 132

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

133

transcends the mundane material conditions on which text, that is, prose, is so routinely brought to bear. He is, in a sense, outside of the material concerns and conditions of history. In this sense, music is once again given a unique aesthetic power, a power that literally goes beyond understanding. But this tradition is also dependent upon the process by which language and writing, once again and always, provide the conditions under which the score must be conceived and received – both because the narrator is producing the story, and because it draws on a mythology that, as the previous chapter demonstrated, reifies the actors of jazz into specific epistemological categories and functions. The fact that Coltrane’s music is explicitly racialized throughout the short story only further emphasizes the extent to which Dongala, in ‘A Love Supreme,’ inevitably gets caught in the racial score jazz has been enlisted to perform from its inception. If irony had potentially unsettled that score in ‘Jazz and Palm Wine,’ the deadly earnestness and purposeful manipulation of John Coltrane’s arc as an artist in ‘A Love Supreme’ remains problematic. Indeed, aside from the erroneous claim that Coltrane ended his life in poverty, what also gets elided is the very music that Coltrane was playing right before he died: a profoundly raucous and deliberately disturbing form of free jazz. The scenes in which the various characters sit around meditating to Coltrane’s last record do not square with what the artist himself was actually playing in his final years – a music that challenged the listener and refused all notions of aesthetic pleasure, and that disrupted the very notion of musicality itself.70 To ignore this last phase is, in a sense, to reiterate the process by which an artist becomes enrolled in the racial score. Or rather, it reveals how the narrative capture of jazz creates – or duplicates – a mythological structure that risks contributing to the racial score. The Coltrane that Dongala creates is the (re)iteration of a reified myth whose function within the racial score has been predetermined by the countless similar stories surrounding him.71 This construction, precisely as Ratliff points out in 70 In

making this move, Dongala anticipates by a couple of decades the same elision by Ken Burns in his far more problematic PBS series Jazz, and the equally disturbing narrative provided by one of his advisers (and one of the series’ narrators), the profoundly reactionary ‘Jazz at Lincoln Center’ artistic director and trumpet player Wynton Marsalis. As Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli’s radical Marxist reading amply demonstrates, even the refusal to be captured by the white critic does not prevent such an instrumentalization from taking place. See Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, Free Jazz/Black Power, trans. Grégory Pierrot (Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, 2016). Significantly, a photograph of John Coltrane serves as the cover illustration. 71 Indeed, a whole hagiographic industry has risen around John Coltrane. See, in English, J. C. Thomas, Chasin’ the Trane: The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane (New York: Doubleday, 1975); Bill Cole, John Coltrane (New York: Macmillan, 1976); Eric Nisenson, Ascension: John Coltrane and his Quest (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995); Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1998); Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Ashley Kahn and Elvin Jones, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (New

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 133

10/05/2017 09:09

134

Scoring Race

his Coltrane, is always already overdetermined by race, a point that Dongala’s story ultimately seems to acknowledge: in a frightening reminder of the ongoing murderousness of the racial score, the story ends with the narrator going out onto the street to be confronted by a scene of a white cop, who, having gunned down a thirteen-year-old black boy, is claiming self-defense. Coltrane’s music and that crime are thereby absolutely intertwined.

Trop de soleil tue l’amour: Jazz and the End of Time The last two novels that Cameroonian author Mongo Beti wrote before his untimely death in 2001 reassess his earlier idealism.72 Of importance to the present study is the unique role jazz plays in the first of these final books, Trop de soleil tue l’amour (1999). As I have argued elsewhere, Trop de soleil tue l’amour and Branle-bas en noir et blanc [Set-to in black and white] (2000) represent a turn away from the ‘protest fiction’ that characterized Beti from his 1954 novel Ville cruelle to the 1994 L’histoire du fou.73 While Beti (like Dongala) was always noteworthy for his irony, a feature that only increased over time, this element was particularly evident at the end of his career, less in the depictions of the anarchy of his homeland than in his tactically diminishing the ambitions of his literary project.74 York: Penguin, 2003); Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound; Leonard Brown, John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Jamie Howison, God’s Mind in That Music: Theological Explorations through the Music of John Coltrane (Eugene, OR: Widf & Stock, 2012); and Lewis Porter and Chris DeVito, The John Coltrane Reference (New York: Routledge, 2013). There are even several children’s books: Chris Raschka, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002); Carole Boston Weatherford, Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane (New York: Henry Holt, 2008); and Gary Golio and Rudy Gutierrez, Spirit Seeker: John Coltrane’s Musical Journey (New York: Clarion Books, 2012). In France a selection of titles includes Alain Gerber, Le Cas Coltrane (Paris: Parenthèses, 2000); Michel Arcens, John Coltrane, la musique sans raison (Paris: Alter Ego, 2012); Zéno Bianu and Yves Buin, John Coltrane (Méditation) (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 2012); and Xavier Daverat, Tombeau de John Coltrane (Paris: Parenthèses, 2012). 72 Both Beti and Dongala made extensive use of irony in their writing. Nevertheless, in both cases, this irony expresses the authors’ disappointment at the failure of the newly independent African states (whether Cameroon in the case of Beti or the Congo in the case of Dongala) to live up to an imagined ideal. Irony becomes the mark of a series of failures. 73 As the title suggests, one could argue that the rationale behind ‘serious’ literature was already beginning to fade. Indeed, as I argued in The Noir Atlantic, Beti’s move away from the ‘high literary’ to popular culture was already present in germinal form at the very beginning: Ville cruelle can very easily be read as a novel flirting with various popular genres, from the crime novel to romance fiction. Higginson, The Noir Atlantic. 74 As he noted himself in one of his final interviews, with these two works he wished, first and foremost, to entertain – hence the choice to publish in a local opposition newspaper in serial form and to write in the popular genre of crime fiction. Mongo Beti, Mongo Beti parle (Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 2002).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 134

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

135

If Beti’s increasing use of irony plays itself out in the paraliterary dimension of genre, publication venue, and in his own comments about his work, the choice of characters in the story reflect this as well. Most noteworthy is the stark contrast between the two main protagonists in Trop de soleil tue l’amour that effectively marks the transition between the before and after of this major ideological and stylistic turn: Zamakwe is an alcoholic journalist whose selfpitying ramblings are only matched by his total inability to navigate a corrupt and changing world. He clearly represents the past, the now debunked idea of a ‘littérature engagée.’ Eddie is the future: this culturally illiterate (at least in the bourgeois sense) character is a jazz musician/lawyer/thief whose protean identity perfectly conforms to the contours of the absurdly lawless Cameroonian state that Achille Mbembe describes as a world organized around ‘the mouth, the belly, and the phallus.’75 While I discussed these two characters at some length in The Noir Atlantic in the context of Beti’s move to crime fiction, what interests me here is instead how jazz specifically maps this shift from Zam (whom the novel identifies with the past) toward Eddie (who represents the future), from ‘engagement’ to something else entirely.76 The way that Zam and Eddie relate to the music illustrates their relationship to the African state they inhabit: at critical distance in the case of the former who cannot escape the past; and as a series of challenging but always negotiable obstacles for Eddie, who lives in a kind of ontological immanence. In the broader context of the present study, the shift from Zam’s to Eddie’s conception of jazz also effectively closes the ‘classical’ period of the music’s representation in the Francophone African novel. Mirages de Paris positioned jazz as a uniquely American example of métissage in which the musical retained an essentially structuring role. Indeed, in Mirages, it was the shining example of racial hybridity and a warning against it. Dongala’s return to the music at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s in Jazz et vin de palme instead gave avant-garde black music a universal spiritual function. It stayed true to the racial score – as a gathering place for a shared experience of blackness and through its continued adherence to an affective model of the black musical genius – while sharing it with the world.77 In Trop de soleil tue l’amour, jazz instead begins as a commodity within the discourse of African intellectual revolt, only, it would appear, to shift into a model of ‘débrouillardise,’ or coping, in which the specificity of race as a subjective marker is far less significant than an ability to navigate – to improvise – in the face of the perennially unexpected. The specificity of music in Trop de 75 The

exact country is never identified, but the target of Beti’s acerbic wit is pretty clear. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. Janet Roitman and Murray Last (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 107. 76 Indeed, in the second volume of what was supposed, had Beti not died, to have been a trilogy, Zam disappears entirely from the story. Eddie becomes the active figure in the story. 77 Just as that New York setting was, paradoxically, of the utmost importance.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 135

10/05/2017 09:09

136

Scoring Race

soleil therefore seems to have less to do with race (as purity or in an economy of métissage) or as affective expressiveness (as ‘a love supreme’) than as a metaphor for the ways in which one might productively engage with an absurdly random present: while it is literally the common ground between Zam and Eddie just as it changes in the movement from one to the other, it also comes to represent two radically different things. Indeed, in the process of linking past and future, jazz metamorphoses from an idealized or mythical abstraction produced within a French intellectual tradition into a practical model for survival where what constitutes the music is far more diffuse and less motivated by racial fantasm. This movement from Zam to Eddie is in sum largely expressed as a shift away from race. That is, to the extent that jazz has, historically, and particularly within the French-language cultural sphere, been made to perform and maintain the racial score, the novel looks to shift it toward an existential attitude and away from a particular historicized aesthetic phenomenon with its attendant critical apparatus. In an interview with Boniface Mongo-Mboussa, conducted in 1999, the author emphasized this racial component and its relationship to jazz as captured by his title, Trop de soleil tue l’amour, and the jazz standard that inspired it: Il s’agit d’un standard de jazz très connu. On the sunny side of the street (Sur le côté ensoleillé de la rue). Le vers tout entier est: Life can be so sweet (La vie peutêtre si belle). Vous savez, au sud des États-Unis, les Noirs n’avaient pas le droit de marcher à l’ombre. Le côté ombragé était réservé aux maîtres … Les Noirs, par goût de subversion, retournent ce qui était au départ une punition par quelque chose d’agréable. A mon tour, je les contredis un peu en leur disant que la vie n’est pas aussi belle que ça; c’est un mensonge. La vie n’est pas si belle sur le côté ensoleillé du monde. En Afrique par exemple.78 [The title references a well-known jazz standard. ‘On the sunny side of the street.’ The entire verse says: Life can be so sweet … You know, in the American South, blacks weren’t allowed to walk in the shade. The shaded side was reserved for the masters … blacks, out of a taste for subversion, turn something meant to be a punishment into something pleasurable. I in turn contradict them a little by telling them that life isn’t as great as all that: that’s a lie. Life isn’t all that great on the sunny side of the world. In Africa, for example.]

While Beti’s theory concerning the origins of the title of ‘The Sunny Side of the Street’ may be apocryphal, that he wanted to put race in play is clear. Further, his comment underscores how jazz (titles) subverted the existing racial hierarchy by ironizing a subaltern position as beneficial. Finally, he ‘reverses this reversal’ 78 This

was Beti’s response when asked why he had chosen this title for his book. Mongo Beti, ‘À propos de Trop de soleil tue l’amour: Entretien de Boniface Mongo-Mboussa avec Mongo Beti,’ Africultures, January 3, 1999, http://www.africultures.com/php/?nav=article&no=752.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 136

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

137

in his own title, reminding the reader that jazz’s tactical subversiveness leaves intact the oppressive reality it inhabits. Indeed, jazz becomes a kind of musical ‘safety valve,’ a permissible venting of dismay that, rather than resisting the dominant paradigm, confirms the racial stereotype of the black subject who joyfully brushes off the slings and arrows of life in a manner best expressed in the harmless wordlessness of music. In so doing, the Cameroonian author acknowledges surreptitiously that the fetishization of jazz characteristic of a French-influenced intelligentsia risks reifying the racial paradigm that is at the heart of its construction as a meaningful aesthetic category. In sum, though it isn’t clear that it succeeds (or even that it has such a goal), one of the novel’s many (and often confusing) gestures is to try to shrug off jazz’s racial score by emphasizing as an ontologically meaningful process one of its most compelling and noteworthy features: improvisation. Summarizing the plot of Trop de soleil tue l’amour is a challenge. It begins with the alcoholic journalist, Zam, cursing the theft of his jazz CDs. Some moments later, he learns that a dead body has been found in his apartment. When he is brought in for questioning and possible arrest, his friend Eddie, the erstwhile attorney, comes in to defend him.79 We then learn that Zam’s girlfriend, Élisabeth (a.k.a. Bébète) has been leading a double life, having borne a child to Georges, a quasi-pedophile Frenchman and spy (for the ill-defined ‘ANDENCONINI’). Zam, increasingly under pressure from unidentified enemies, goes into hiding with Bébète. After a heavy bout of drinking, Zam insults Bébète and she disappears. Georges, who has now discovered the liaison between Zam and Bébète, sets out to find her with the help of a corrupt cop. Georges winds up at the ‘Bluebeard’s castle’ of a strange politician where young girls are used as prostitutes, political opponents are tortured, and where the West finds a taker for the illegal disposal of toxic waste. The conclusion of the story is not a conclusion: Zam disappears, kidnapped by an illegitimate son of whom he was unaware, Bébète is not rescued, and little more is learned about Georges or Eddie. The story simply arbitrarily ends – only to be picked up just as randomly in the next volume, Branle-bas en noir et blanc. As already noted, this oddly plotless narrative begins with the loss of Zam’s jazz CDs and the hypocritical journalist grumbling his way through the first few pages.80 In one striking recitation he enumerates the performers on the CDs he has lost: Charlie Christian, Illinois Jacquet, Duke Ellington, Ivy Anderson, Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Buddy Tate, Johnny Garnieri, Billie Holiday, 79 Eddie

has fake diplomas allowing him to practice any number of professions, all of which he does extremely well – in the second book, Branle-bas en noir et blanc, Eddie becomes a detective. 80 Not the least of his sins is that, as we discover toward the end of the story, he was a government informant as a young man.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 137

10/05/2017 09:09

138

Scoring Race

Clifford Brown, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Art Blakey, King Oliver, and Lester Young. In other words, he provides a veritable encyclopedic entry of jazz greats (noting in passing some of their most famous solos). These facts immediately inform us that he is a connoisseur whose knowledge of the music only finds its (negative) counterpart in his inability to recognize the world around him – something that is not helped by his excessive drinking. Perhaps most striking is the emphasis on this music as a commodity and as cultural capital. These are less great artists than an inventory of a museum’s holdings.81 So while these musicians cumulatively spell out the classical period of jazz, their presence in the text is ultimately reduced to a bourgeois archive, such as a collection of rare books or wine. In the process, Zam’s knowledge indicates less the mark of membership in the diaspora than a kind of middleclass participation in a global cultural phenomenon that is jazz: jazz becomes a reified museum piece whose artistic merit is directly proportional to its ability to confirm the racialized expectations projected through it. The fact that Zam limits his knowledge and listening preference to the classical period, ignoring the more challenging avant-garde free jazz that followed, further suggests that he is guided by fundamentally reactionary instincts: jazz is for him more a comforting social self-affirmation than a radical ideological model for action.82 Though there are similarities between Zam’s understanding of jazz and that of the protagonist in Dongala’s ‘A Love Supreme,’ the former is far more problematic. In Dongala, that idea of jazz remains deeply invested in potentially emancipatory principles – even if those principles have been largely co-opted by the racial score. Jazz for Zam instead represents a nostalgic and ultimately antiquarian ethos, which is at the same time his attitude toward the world in which he lives. He remains convinced that it can and should be confronted within the parameters of an ideology where lines are drawn, and social and material forces are distinct. As a ‘journaliste engagé,’ he also believes (or he tells himself) that the word (his writing) effectively locates and defines its object and sets the terms by which it can be affirmed or dislodged, even when every aspect of his life should remind him of his growing insignificance in political matters. The fact that the world in which he lives no longer remotely conforms to this ideal of an effective literary engagement – an engagement that was in reality always comfortably parasitic upon the dictatorship – escapes him. The entire dynamic of Zam’s relationship 81

Indeed, a single jazz CD in the late 1990s cost the equivalent of $20, or a month’s wages for the average Cameroonian. 82 For a particularly scathing critique of this type of thinking, see Jeffrey St. Clair, ‘How Ken Burns Murdered Jazz,’ Counterpunch, October 31, 2014, http://www.counterpunch. org/2014/10/31/how-ken-burns-murdered-jazz. ‘Watching his “Jazz,”’ St. Clair concludes, ‘is equivalent to listening to a coroner speak into a dictaphone as he dissects a corpse.’

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 138

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

139

to music reflects this self-delusion. It is perfectly summarized when he asks a friend to ship back a particular CD to him from France: ‘Cher vieux,’ he begins, ‘est-ce qu’il t’arrive par les temps qui courent d’aller baguenauder du côté d’un supermarché rayon musique, sous-rayon CD de jazz ?’ [Hey old man, do you occasionally find yourself ambling through a supermarket music section, subsection jazz CDs?].83 First, jazz is for him one more item in the supermarket, next to cheap sweatpants and sixty varieties of yoghurt. Just as importantly, his plea that the CD be sent by ‘le premier copain qui prend l’avion à Roissy’ [the first friend taking a plane at Charles de Gaulle airport] suggests that he lives obliviously among the privileged few who can navigate back and forth between Africa and the métropole. Finally, his comment that ‘tu m’auras sauvé la vie. Je suis ô combien accro du Président, comme tu sais, et ça fait des semaines que suis privé de ma drogue’ [you will have saved my life. I’m totally addicted to the President, as you know, and I’ve been deprived of my fix for weeks] (10) stresses his lack of perspective and the telling (albeit unconscious) slippage in his mind between his need for a famous Lester Young (dubbed ‘Prez’ or ‘the President’ by Billie Holiday) recording, and the president of the country on whom he depends for his livelihood as an opposition journalist (and to whom he is, in a sense, quite literally ‘addicted’). There is, finally, a logical continuum that connects the Western – and particularly French – consumption of jazz and the colonial enterprise. They entered the French imaginary in parallel (as Socé made clear in the descriptions in Mirages de Paris of the Colonial Exposition and the Paris jazz scene) and they continue to live on, in increasingly abstract and embedded form, as the commodity that Zam consumes. Zam’s turn toward alcoholism, self-loathing, evergreater hypocrisy, and emotional violence against his girlfriend, Bébète (whose own complete ignorance of and lack of interest in jazz is equally telling)84 are revealed to be the result of his adherence, on a grand scale, to the racial score. His consumption of jazz therefore becomes a kind of auto-anthropophagy in which a particular Western aesthetic tradition has trained him to revel in the taste of his own racialized and exploited (musical) flesh. That the narrative pushes him into oblivion (and ultimately out of the narrative) is, in a sense, set to these ‘classical’ jazz recordings which he has mentally archived and mothballed, much as he has his existential attitude. Despite their obvious differences in character and attitude, at first glance, at least, Eddie’s relationship to jazz appears to be identical to Zam’s. After all, the two characters’ friendship takes shape through their shared appreciation for, 83 Mongo

Beti, Trop de soleil tue l’amour (Paris: Julliard, 1999), 10. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 84 In this sense, she reminds us of the masculinist undercurrent of jazz ‘fandom,’ as well as that its practitioners are overwhelmingly male.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 139

10/05/2017 09:09

140

Scoring Race

and knowledge of, the music. Indeed, Eddie is, as Zam refers to him, his ‘vieux complice en jazzomanie’ [my old accomplice in jazzomania] (32). Their entire relationship is shaped by an identical appreciation for the classics. But the similarity appears to end just as quickly. Whereas Zam is a well-read, albeit drunken, sophisticate, Eddie has been trained by the streets: in this sense, though it is ostensibly the same object, Eddie and Zam take the music they listen to from (and to) very different places. Whereas Zam’s relationship to jazz is the immediate result of its commodification and distribution through merging economic and ideological networks in which race plays a key role, Eddie’s introduction to the music remains far more organic and less mediated by its critical French construction. As we learn in a long introduction to the character, L’avocat, qui n’en était pas vraiment un, s’appelait communément Eddie, bien qu’Eddie ne fut pas vraiment son nom … Réfugié successivement dans les quartiers trop accueillant de la Goutte-d’Or, Belleville, Ménilmontant, Pigalle, Rochechouart, Mouffetard … Comme beaucoup de jeunes paumés africains immigrés en Europe à l’époque, Eddie avait un moment tâté de la musique de jazz à Saint-Germain-desPrès, convaincu, comme les racistes, ô paradoxe, qu’il suffisait d’être noir dans cette spécialité pour y briller. D’échec en échec, il s’était retrouvé aux États-Unis, où il s’était découvert une idole en la personne de Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis. S’émerveillant de son jeu de scène, de ses gestes à la fois amples et brusques, de sa trituration sauvage de l’instrument, de son visage buté de voyou … [I]l s’était tellement identifié à son héros qu’il en avais pris le nom, le sobriquet et même le patronyme, faute de pouvoir acquérir son génie. (42–3) [The lawyer, who wasn’t really a lawyer, was commonly known as Eddie, even though Eddie wasn’t his real name … He had taken refuge successively in the overly welcoming neighborhoods of the Goute-d’Or, Belleville, Ménilmontant, Pigalle, Rochechouart, Mouffetard … Like many lost young Africans who had emigrated to Europe at that time, Eddie had for a time tried his hand at jazz in Saint-Germaindes-Près, convinced, as so many racists are, oh what a paradox, that all you had to do was be black to be great at it. From failure to failure, he had found himself in the United States, where he found an idol in Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis. Amazed by his stage persona, by his simultaneously ample and yet jerky movements, by his savage manipulation of the instrument, by his thuggishly bull-headed expression … he had so identified with his hero that, for lack of being able to share his musical genius, he had taken his first name, his nickname, and even his last name.]

This lengthy citation only provides a glimpse into a strange character who seems to be able to endlessly transform himself – except when it comes to being a jazz musician. But this last failing is crucial, as it is very clearly and explicitly bound to the racial score. As the narrator notes, Eddie was initially ‘convaincu comme les racistes … qu’il suffisait d’être noir dans cette spécialité pour y briller’

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 140

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

141

[convinced, as so many racists are … that all you had to do was be black to be great at it] (42). Despite his racial identification with ‘[the] music,’ he is incapable of playing it. In this incapacity, he turns the racial score on its head – while at the same time emphasizing its currency in the French capital – at the very heart of the Parisian jazz myth, Saint-Germain-des-Près.85 Indeed, the list of places where Eddie has lived – ‘la Goutte-d’Or, Belleville, Ménilmontant, Pigalle, Rochechouart, Mouffetard’ – map where one might catch a jazz show in the French capital. Thus, in a sense, Eddie is sketched according to the familiar terms of the ‘Paris noir’ of the last eighty years. The problem (unlike Soupault’s Edgar Manning) is that he can’t play. Significantly, what Eddie does take away from the music is a certain existential praxis. That is, what interests him in his namesake, the tenor saxophonist Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, is his attitude, how he holds the instrument, his facial expressions. And though he appreciates his playing, the ‘chorus à la fois fougueux et attendrissant’ [chorus at once fiery yet touching], he can’t reproduce it. Rather, what he can do – in fact do brilliantly – is live as he perceives Davis to exist on stage. Eddie does not imitate Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis musically, but instead follows the principle of improvisation as a metaphor for the only viable approach to a world where the unexpected and life-threatening are the quotidian experience of every citizen. A good ear, practice, and an ability to think in the moment are key to survival. And Eddie does more than survive in this environment: he thrives, and he does so in a manner that begins to find a way through the racial score, a way of tactically evading its outdated rigidity in favor of modes of engagement with the real that construct their rules in the moment. The periods during which Socé and Dongala wrote their texts were synchronous with the music they were integrating into their novels. This meant that they had little distance from the active production of the racial score toward which white critics and various aesthetic judges were actively leading the music. Significantly, in both cases, the writers speak from positions of immediate ‘live’ exposure to the artists in question. Despite this purportedly unmediated access to the music, what is evident is how the music is already proleptically constituted: the filter through which they listen is overdetermined by the racial score following which jazz already gains its defining contours. In other words, both Socé and Dongala deploy modalities of reception that – though they recognize important aspects of the musical map within which they are thinking – nevertheless retrace important features of the racial score discussed in the 85 This

is, of course, where jazz, with the help of the ‘existentialist’ zazous and the likes of JeanPaul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and, most importantly, Boris Vian, really gained its letters of nobility as a privileged site of African-American art. While, as we saw in the first chapter, Vian questioned the essentialization of jazz as a black art form, he nevertheless served to authenticate the music and, unwittingly or not, participated in the production and dissemination of jazz as a site of racial construction.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 141

10/05/2017 09:09

142

Scoring Race

introduction. Beti’s departure from this endless feedback loop begins from a different historical vantage point: the mythical figures of jazz, the jazz giants, are now all dead or very aged. ‘Jazz’ as a meaningful category is therefore increasingly used as a curatorial term: the careful embalming of jazz’s history. Instead, Eddie now turns to what Amiri Baraka had asked for in ‘Jazz and the White Critic’: We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As western people, the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a history legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as a continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any intelligent critical speculation about the music that came out of it.86

Trop de soleil tue l’amour’s rewriting of the racial score marks an important moment for jazz in the Francophone African novel because it begins to rehistoricize the music. Indeed, through the character of Eddie and in its own meandering structure, the very absence of a score that is at the heart of jazz as an improvised vernacular form, jazz becomes an immanent phenomenological practice that models forms of adaptation to the necessities of the present. In this sense, it represents a radical turn for the music toward something new that I will explore at greater length in the next chapter. However, despite what is an inaugural move away from the aesthetic and ideological ideal of what, in his early broadside ‘Romancing Africa,’ Mongo Beti defined as ‘realist fiction,’87 there remains embedded in his construction of jazz within the novel a nostalgic investment – largely taking up the terms by which the French intelligentsia processed jazz – that is impossible to ignore. In fact, the residue of literary romanticism, that is, the turn to crime fiction as a kind of resignation, in sum, the loss of an ideal, remains evident in the novel’s jazz aesthetics. This is particularly evident in how Zam and Eddie are bound together by jazz. In their shared loved for the form they ultimately refuse to give up on a romantically constructed ideal of the music that uncritically reiterates a narrative familiar to any lover of the music – and that, unfortunately, also necessarily remains wedded to the racial score. In the closing pages of the long description of Eddie’s training as a man of the world, the narrative informs the reader that his literary knowledge is limited to ‘les œuvres complètes de feu Coluche, son idole’ [the complete works of Coluche (may he rest in peace), his idol], noting ‘ce qui n’est pas si mal’ [which isn’t a bad thing] (43). This is entirely in keeping with the novel’s movement 86 Amiri

Baraka, ‘Jazz and the White Critic,’ in Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 14. 87 Mongo Beti, Cruel City: A Novel, trans. Pim Higginson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 142

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

143

away from the high literary, or ‘litérature engagée,’ toward what, in The Noir Atlantic, I proposed we call the ‘frivolous literary,’ a writing tactically detached from Western standards of aesthetic and ideological achievement. Yet this same aesthetic criterion returns, in musical form, as jazz: Eddie ne connait-il pas mieux que personne au monde le jazz, son histoire, ses acteurs? Dans cette spécialité, il aurait pu passer un doctorat les doigts dans le nez. C’est cette érudition qui attache indéfectiblement à lui Zamakwé, autre fanatique d’une musique peu connue ici, bien qu’elle y remonte – comme l’homme remonte au singe, a coutume de dire Eddie, chez qui le sarcasme est une seconde nature. (43–4) [Doesn’t Eddie know the history of jazz better than anybody, its history, its main actors? He could have gotten a doctorate in this field with his eyes closed. It is this particular knowledge that permanently attaches him to Zamakwé, another fanatic of a musical form very little known in these parts, even though it traces its origins back here – as man descends from the apes, Eddie likes to say, being someone for whom sarcasm is second nature.]

Eddie has knowledge, indeed is a jazz intellectual – despite the fact that Zam appears to demonstrate throughout the novel the defunct value of such categories. Thus, rather than disappearing, the archive returns in the realm of the musical. Jazz becomes a form of popular black knowledge: what is not challenged is the premise of a particular form of intellectualism as a source of power and the idea that jazz is, ultimately (despite the disclaimers and occasional exceptions – e.g., Stan Getz), the domain of a particularly privileged black creative force. And this substitution ultimately reminds us of the degree to which Mongo Beti, despite his newfound understanding of the inherent – indeed, epistemological – limitations of his literary project, was not finally entirely able to escape the racial score against which he fought throughout his entire career. He remains bound to and invested in an idea of ‘fiction as function’ – more Zam than Eddie, in whom he recognizes a future that he cannot entirely embrace. This model ultimately comes from a French cultural moment that extends from the early 1920s to the present, and that has jazz play a particular structuring role in revitalizing what French culture thought of as its lagging vitality under the weight of cerebral excess. Thus, the narrative’s own recognizable jazz fandom still feeds the idea of a black aesthetic that is endlessly recuperable by writing (as epistemologically white), and thus the epistemological double-bind that made (an inevitably raced) black writing impossible – an impossibility that, though seemingly attenuated, continues to reside in the endless forms of differential categorization to which ‘black’ writing is subjected.88 Thus, that Eddie’s 88 I

am thinking here in particular about the endless ways in which Francophone African fiction has been displayed at France’s equivalent of Barnes and Noble, the FNAC. There remains

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 143

10/05/2017 09:09

144

Scoring Race

knowledge of jazz is unrivaled is simultaneously a proof of his diasporic bona fides, but also drags him back into the French sphere he wants to escape: no surprise then that we should be told that Eddie is ‘l’homme le plus francisé ici, d’une certaine manière, et aussi l’Africain le plus hostile au Français, n’en soit un’ [the most Frenchified man here, in a way, and also the African who is most hostile to the French] (43). He becomes, instead, like Beti himself (though without the intellectual apparatus), a fundamental contradiction, an impossible midpoint between France and Cameroon that has haunted the author’s work since his very first publication, Ville cruelle.89 As Beti notes by way of a conclusion: Oui, c’est toujours calamiteux, un destin dans une république bananière, parce que le malheur n’y a jamais de fin. Que le lecteur ne s’étonne point si jamais des épisodes à venir ressemblaient comme deux goutes d’eau à celui qui vient de lui être conté, sans oublier que bien des drames, esquissés, ici, ont pu le laisser sur sa faim. Rien n’irrite tant certains lecteurs qu’un destin romanesque apparemment inachevé. Il s’en trouve pourtant parmi les mêmes, quand tout ce beau monde surgi des limbes d’une imagination se sera marié, aura fait des dizaines d’enfants, sera décédé – car c’est toujours ainsi que ça se passe – pour s’écrier: ‘Ce n’est pas comme ça que j’imaginais la suite, moi…’ Alors? (239) [Yes, life in a banana republic is always calamitous, because the bad luck never ends. Thus, the reader should not be surprised if episodes to come should be almost identical, like drops of water, to those that they have already heard, without forgetting that many of the dramas that have been sketched out here may have left them wanting. Nothing irritates certain readers more than a hero whose life appears unfinished. Yet one finds among these same readers, when this whole world that has emerged from the shadows of someone’s imagination has gotten married, has had dozens of children, has died – because that is always the way things turn out – that they will cry out, ‘That’s not how I imagined the rest of the story…’ So?]

In a word, this meandering narrative is an apt representation of a world where logic has lost its hold, where events unfold as a chain of non sequiturs, each more unlikely than the next, where the mundane and the fantastic are the same thing. Interestingly, jazz becomes the perfect metaphor for this unchartable postcolonial universe. Or rather, jazz serves to connect an idealized diaspora aesthetic to its radical unrooting. Jazz functions in the story as a degraded form of commodity culture while at the same time suggesting a lingering echo of an a striking reticence simply to include African and diaspora novels in the broad category of French-language fiction. 89 In Ville cruelle, the protagonist Banda is left in a state of permanent suspension between the past and the future, the village and the city. In a sense, though the problem is located elsewhere, Beti’s final novel remains similarly inconclusive.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 144

10/05/2017 09:09

Querying Jazz

145

idealized origin to which it tethers the narrative. In one sense, it is a musical representation of the improvisatory skills required of the Cameroonian quotidian. Knowledge of jazz thus moves from aesthetic esoterica to real-world savoir-faire. At the same time the narrative preserves, as a kind of conservative reflex from which it cannot detach itself, the idea of a musical essence to jazz. To conclude, jazz has been present from the very first in the Francophone African novel, from Socé’s early positing of jazz as a problematic site of racial negotiation to Mongo Beti’s return to this diasporic musical genre in Trop de soleil tue l’amour. Further, the manner in which the music has been treated over time has evolved substantially. In Mirages de Paris, jazz represented a problematic – not to say impossible – site of métissage, the kind of racial and cultural blending that Cheik Amidou Kane so dramatically diagnosed (and rejected) some twenty-five years later in Ambiguous Adventure. Fara, in Mirages de Paris, loses his bearings in a modern Parisian world where racial boundaries and points of reference fade. Jazz becomes the symbol for this blurring – at once a cultural accomplishment, but also the sign of a price too high, perhaps because it has become impossible to locate the component parts that constitute it, that would give it a viable ‘identity.’ Indeed, the American jazz musician is, for Socé, the most absolutely alienated human type possible: she or he is a blend of cultural forms and racial origins, a cultural hybrid and prostitute in a world in which illusions, the ‘mirages’ of the title, have been substituted for meaning and substance – in musical terms, for the fundamental rhythmic and tonal consistency of the drums that punctuate the beginning and ending of the novel. Emmanuel Dongala’s two short stories on jazz in Jazz et vin de palme represent a radically different, post-Négritude conception of jazz in which, in contrast to Amiri Baraka’s idea of radical black art, something like an individual communion with the spirit can be achieved in the music. The first story reflected in parodic fashion on the radical Black Arts movement and transformed its notion of an aesthetic revolution into a reality, as avant-garde jazz saved the world from aliens. In ‘A Love Supreme,’ a group of young people faced the passing of a thinly disguised John Coltrane, as the departure of a musical prophet who conveyed through music the infinite language of love. In both stories, it is clear that, for Dongala, in contrast to Socé’s suspect hybrid medium, jazz becomes a symbol of the individuated experience of diaspora. That is, while clearly African in origin, it is less this particular feature of the music that makes it so valuable but rather its radical individualism as an antidote to coercive and dictatorial ways of thinking and being. It does not carry the power to effect change – unlike Baraka, Dongala does not believe that Art can be instrumentalized – but rather serves as an example of the higher purpose of the human. Finally, Mongo Beti returned to a more skeptical conception of jazz, questioning its relevance in an increasingly incoherent modern world. Zam, a character associated with outmoded thought and ideology, illustrates first how jazz

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 145

10/05/2017 09:09

146

Scoring Race

has become a pure commodity and secondly how it no longer resonates with the climate of the times – unless conceived in a radically different manner. While through the character of Eddie (named after American tenor player Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis) jazz retains some relevance, it does so in a manner that loses its sacred status. Indeed, Eddie’s approach to the world leaves no room for the sacred, for an investment in the aesthetic. With the advent of Beti’s last two novels, it is clear that the idea of jazz in Africa has entered a new phase. Just as interestingly, while Zam’s reception of jazz happens through the French marketplace (of CDs and ideas), Eddie’s contact with the music comes first from the United States, where he lives for a while, and as a (failed) musician who has used the music cynically to exploit the racial expectations of a Parisian audience. In other words, Eddie begins to inaugurate – or serves as a moment of transition toward – the growing role of jazz in the African novel in the last fifteen years. Since Beti’s death in 2001, the Francophone African novels that have thematized jazz have, to a large extent, contended with the lingering problem of jazz’s imbrication in the postcolonial discourse of Francophonie. Indeed, what this chapter hopes to have demonstrated is the degree to which it is difficult (or perhaps impossible) for the Francophone African author to invoke jazz without getting mired in the discursive sedimentation of its reception by the Parisian intellectual class – particularly as it relates to jazz’s epistemological function as a dialectical negation of writing.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 146

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score: Francophone African Reconfigurations of Jazz Today

3

As we saw in the previous chapter, the works of authors such as Socé, Dongala, and Beti approached jazz in a manner that evolved over time and that reflected these authors’ particular place and form of engagement with the racial score articulated through jazz. Ousmane Socé viewed the music with suspicion; Emmanuel Dongala invested it with a profound spiritual power that nevertheless found its limit in the material world of social and ideological engagements; and Mongo Beti began to look at it from a vantage point that combined nostalgia, idealism, and pragmatism. Indeed, in Beti, we already began to see the turn toward an entirely different relationship to jazz. The Cameroonian author made it work in a manner that simultaneously deconstructed the racial score and posited new modalities of reception, deploying jazz not as a ‘thing’ or idea, but as a heterogeneous series of diaspora aesthetics and performative practices.

Kangni Alem: Mirages d’Afrique Kangni Alem, in his short stories (collected in La Gazelle s’agenouille pour pleurer) and his two ‘Ti-Brava’ novels (set in a mythical place recognizable as Togo), shows a persistent interest in music generally and jazz in particular. Indeed, various musicians from the jazz tradition appear, and meditations on the field occur repeatedly in his writing. Likewise, as is evident if one consults his blog, the author is an avid jazz fan and at one time hosted a jazz program on the radio in his hometown of Lomé. There is therefore no question that Alem is committed to the music. However, his understanding of it is not linear, nor is his approach to its practitioners hagiographic. Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of his writing is his simultaneously laudatory and critical approach. As the title indicates, one novel in particular offers a full-length meditation on this African-American import: Cola Cola Jazz (2002). In a sense, Cola Cola Jazz, the first of the two ‘Ti-brava’ novels, offers a counter-narrative meditation on Socé’s text, which I discussed in Chapter 2. Thus, it does not describe a young African man’s journey to France and his tragic realization that métissage is impossible; rather, it follows a métisse woman, the young Héloïse, as she travels ‘back’ to Africa to find her ‘Ti-Bravan’ father, a ‘skirt chaser and hymen

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 147

10/05/2017 09:09

148

Scoring Race

breaker with a turtle-dove’s charm.’1 From this point, any parallel to the inevitable tragedy of the conclusion of Mirages de Paris is completely abandoned. Upon arriving on the continent, Héloïse meets a half-sister. Together, the siblings have a series of somewhat picaresque adventures that ultimately return them to France. Though the entire story consists of a patchwork of references to high and popular cultures, jazz plays an important role, particularly inasmuch as it constitutes a sustained meditation on the racial score. The author demonstrates a keen understanding of the ways in which the naive introduction of the musical in an African text risks reiterating essentializing stereotypes, yet he does not share Socé’s fear of jazz hybridity. The playfully disconcerting title, Cola Cola Jazz, acknowledges the imperialism lurking in any American export product (which represents his own interpretation of the racial score) while remaining respectful of the artistry of this aesthetic form. Cola Cola plays with the ur-signifier of American economic imperialism, Coca Cola, and shows how American marketing functions in the realm of a global consumer unconscious. It also reminds us that the quintessentially American beverage weds two ingredients discovered during Western expansion: the coca leaf from South America and the cola nut from Africa. The neologism Cola Cola thus visually underscores the continuous double exploitation in which culturally meaningful products (not unexploited raw materials) are removed from their context of production/consumption and returned as pure signifiers of a victorious and voracious capitalism. Alem’s expression Cola Cola reverses this process, thereby returning the cola nut to its rightful owners. Associating this (re-)Africanized product with jazz suggests the need to extricate the music from what Theodor Adorno, in his controversial comments in ‘On Jazz’ (1936), saw as this American form’s association with the global culture industry. Thus, aside from its critical evocation of American consumerism, the expression Cola Cola opens other interpretive possibilities that expand the meaning and potentialities of jazz, the musical idiom it modifies in the title. What, then, does Cola Cola Jazz mean? A short way into the novel, the ironically named Parisette, the African sister, describes her biracial Parisian sibling, and subsequently herself, in the following manner: Blanche et négresse à la fois, mais plus blanche que négresse, même si … Peau de pêche, soutient Koké. Peau de cola, je lui réponds. De cola blanche. À côté d’elle, la couleur de ma peau figure plutôt celle de la cola rouge, élémentaire et passepartout. (52)

1 Kangni

Alem, Cola Cola Jazz (Paris: Daper, 2002), 52. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 148

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

149

[White and black at the same time, but whiter than black, even if … Peach skin, claimed Koké. Cola skin, I respond. White cola skin. Next to her, my own skin looks like red cola skin, basic and acceptable anywhere.]

Parisette plays on the cola nut, one of the most powerful elements of West African culture. Rather than allowing this African product to be co-opted by a Western meaning, she draws her sister toward Africa, refusing the Western cliché of peach skin and making sure that the specificity of cola, with its red and white varieties, remains in an African signifying field, refusing to write or describe herself within a Western hermeneutic. Thus, on this latter point, she rejects a normative reading of whiteness in which an absence of race would remain a white/European attribute, taking her own redness as the unmarked norm in an African context. This strategic iteration in turn signals how we should understand the title of the novel. While Cola Cola Jazz riffs on and along multiple cultural threads, the relationship between Africa and music or again between racial identity and expressive medium are accorded the central role. Indeed, jazz and race are intimately and elaborately bound together throughout the narrative. Dozens of references to dance forms, bands, and individual pieces of music saturate the novel, and few pages pass without some aside or play on words that reminds the reader of the story’s multiple musical themes. In this sense, Alem provides one of the most sustained meditations on music by a Francophone African since Socé. As the narrator reminds us concerning the game of blind ‘chicken’ that children play on the train tracks, ‘si tu rates le tempo t’es porridge’ [if you miss the tempo, you’re porridge] (39). Music and rhythm become a transnational mediator between French and English – ‘you are’ and ‘porridge’ – between the colonial past (the train) and its present postcolonial literary incarnation, between life and death, and finally, with the literary work itself, between writing and music. Elsewhere, Alem spells out this mediatic (and mediating) role explicitly in a reference to American saxophonist Branford Marsalis’s album ‘The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,’ itself a musical tribute to Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah’s famous 1968 novel by the same title.2 As with the scene on the train track, jazz is, as the ‘narrateur sans qualités’ [narrator without qualities] tells us (10), ‘cette musique suspendue comme un pressentiment entre la vie et une certaine idée de la mort’ [this music suspended like a premonition between life and a certain idea of death] (41). Still, if there are more or less oblique references to jazz and its great practitioners throughout the story, one musician in particular holds the position of honor. After the dedication to family and friends, the author includes the following in the epigraph: ‘“Now into the jungle,” Duke Ellington, Togo Brava Suite.’ Sixty-five years after Mirages de Paris, Alem’s novel returns 2 Ayi

Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 149

10/05/2017 09:09

150

Scoring Race

to an American musical figure whose importance had been established in the first few years of Francophone African writing, in a novel that ended with Fara mesmerized but also horrified by the sound of Ellington’s orchestra. We have already explored the complex historical, social, and racial parameters mediated through the appearance of Ellington in Socé’s novel. But what does Ellington – or, more broadly, the jazz idiom – become in Alem’s work? As with Socé, the answer lies in one of the final scenes of the novel. At a formal ball held by a corrupt apparatchik of the Ti-Bravan régime, the sisters recognize (and are recognized by) the evil colonel Narcisse. The situation appears dire when, all of a sudden, Ellington’s voice announces, ‘And now into the Jungle,’ and the ‘Togo Brava Suite’ begins on the sound system (166). At this moment, the pieces of the puzzle – the parodies of magical realism, the complex references to music, the grim irony concerning the politics of Togo – merge in the hyperkinetic slapstick scene of Baba, the dead uncle, returning to haunt the living with an army of trained cockroaches. The mayhem that follows allows the sisters to flee to the sounds of Ellington’s orchestra. If the reader has not recognized the connection before, it now becomes clear that Ti-Brava, the name Alem gives his fictional setting, plays on the jazz piece’s title. If we consider the epigraph, the name of the country, and Ellington’s intervention, the novel apparently falls under the American’s tutelage through a compounded spatial and mediatic transposition: an English-speaking voice recorded in America now introduces a piece of music that is then transcribed in a Francophone novel set in Africa. Because of the importance of Duke Ellington in Socé, the final framing device we find in Cola Cola Jazz, in which the musician comes to the rescue, cannot be read as a simple or naive celebration of jazz or of Ellington as its privileged practitioner. Rather, it situates this notable performer historically in order to provide a context in which to evaluate American jazz and its role as a long-lived and effective transcultural genre – one that, as we have noted, has affected African writing from its earliest works. Ellington was one of the first jazz musicians to consider himself an aesthete, a fact that he expressed in his adopted name, ‘Duke,’ his aristocratic demeanor, and the grandiose titles he often gave orchestral pieces, ‘Togo Brava Suite’ among them. Taken in this manner, we could read Ellington/jazz as a successful penetration of the elite ‘high aesthetic’ domain historically reserved for whiteness. By this standard, whereas the native produces folk arts (i.e., crafts), the European is a Promethean creator contributing to the timeless and ethereal realm of the Kantian beautiful, the universal. Of course, as Stefano Zenni has shown in ‘The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington’s Suites: The Case of Togo Brava,’ despite his efforts, Ellington was not accepted as a great composer by most classical musical critics. Generations of musicologists have denigrated him for his lofty ambitions; according to them, his orchestral works ‘have no structural unity, no coherence of motive, and are

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 150

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

151

weakened by the composer’s inability to control large forms.’3 The accusation is that Ellington does not master classical musical architectures and that his long pieces are a string of disparate ditties with no logical unity. The underlying racist assumptions in such interpretations of Ellington’s work remind us that jazz, despite its success among a certain white elite, remains contained within very specific aesthetic parameters beyond which it is, in various ways, accused of being uppity. It also shows the tremendous creative risks taken by its most radical practitioners and the critical rebukes they continue to face from (most often white) ‘purists.’ Claiming an affiliation with Ellington therefore appears to authorize Alem’s own ambitious composition, the hybrid qualities of his own transnational influences, his historical and cultural fragments, all held together by a singular creative will. Such a reading is in close alignment with the utopian role Nick Nesbitt reserves for jazz. Nesbitt, contrasting traditional Mande music and American jazz in ‘African Music, Ideology, and Utopia,’ suggests that analyses of traditional African musical idioms often ignore the ideologically conservative social function of such music and the ways in which it has been recuperated and put to the service of repressive regimes. In contrast, Nesbitt suggests that jazz’s ‘greatest practitioners constructed a vernacular modernism that precariously balanced the competing demands of immanent critique and intersubjective communication’; he tellingly cites Duke Ellington as exploring ‘the possibility of a productive musical subject capable of recovering autonomy and truth in the objective products of its creation.’4 Nevertheless, despite the obvious attractiveness of this reading, I want to temper its ideological enthusiasm somewhat. While Alem clearly respects American jazz in general (and Ellington in particular), as with Socé, and as we saw in my introductory anecdote regarding Louis Armstrong in Kinshasa, no appeal to American culture can be treated in isolation from the imperial ballast with which such cultural material is necessarily burdened. Ellington as a character in the novel and as a historical figure (to whom this character evidently refers) demonstrates very clearly what some of those limitations might be. Indeed, the context of production of the ‘Togo Brava Suite’ is an integral part of its meaning. Ellington created the suite in 1971, four years after the composer and bandleader had been commemorated on a Togolese stamp (issued in May 1967) with his likeness. One would have to wait until 1986 for the first such stamp to appear in the United States.5 These dates are important because the Togolese dictator for life, Gnassingbé Eyadéma 3

Stefano Zenni, ‘The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington’s Suites: The Case of Togo Brava,’ Black Music Research Journal 21.1 (2001): 1. 4 Nick Nesbitt, ‘African Music, Ideology, and Utopia,’ Research in African Literatures 32 (Summer 2001): 183. 5 It should be noted that a person has to be dead to appear on a U.S. stamp.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 151

10/05/2017 09:09

152

Scoring Race

(who died in 2005, only to be replaced by his son), came to power in April 1967 in a bloody coup d’état. Thus, the appearance of the Ellington stamp coincided with the Eyadéma takeover. The stamp had most likely been commissioned (in honor of UNESCO’s twentieth anniversary) before Eyadéma came to power, but when Ellington composed the piece in 1971 to thank the Togolese, he did so without investigating the leader he was thereby legitimating – someone who, at his death, had been the longest serving dictator in Africa, and certainly one of its most vicious. In short, Alem’s reference to Ellington, while admiring in some respects, is clearly articulated in a manner that the irony surrounding the potentially racist ‘And now, into the jungle’ eloquently conveys.6 Ellington could not, in a sense, see Togo as much more than a blank spot of rainforest on the map; though he did research on the country as he was composing the piece, it clearly remained an abstraction, much as Mobutu’s Congo did first for Louis Armstrong and subsequently for Muhammad Ali when he fought George Foreman in 1974. Given the vexed history of the ‘Togo Brava Suite’ and the troubling circumstances of its production, how are we to read its use in the novel? If American jazz haunts much of the narrative, it is also important to note that Alem (re)locates it. Indeed, we have seen how Coca Cola becomes Cola Cola, a transformation which retrieves an African ingredient from its identification with American consumerism. As the title already suggests, the author does the same with jazz as well; or rather, in a mise-en-abîme of reversals of influence and naming, jazz is taken (and taken back) from its American origin. Stated slightly differently, though Ellington is a central figure, another kind of jazz plays an equally important role – one in which Africans occupy the genre, exploiting it in a counter-discursive reversal of the movement from Coca Cola to Cola Cola. In one of the central scenes in the novel, while trying to discover the identity of her father’s Parisian lover, Parisette discovers: une photo collée qui souriait pour l’éternité j’imagine, aux Bantous, aux Maravillas du Mali, à tous les orchestres et compositeurs mythiques qui avaient noms Bembeya Jazz, African Jazz, O.K., T.P. Jazz, Cola Jazz, Amédée Pierre, Le Grand Kallé, Franco, et dont se servait encore le père pour maintenir, de loin dans les filets tyranniques de l’amour, sa capture (ou était-ce elle qui l’enchaînait, déesse ?) aux cheveux couleur barbe de maïs. (27)

6 For

a particularly compelling and extensive elaboration of the particular manner in which spatial metaphors and images (and particularly the idea of the jungle) converge to produce an ecology of race, see the unpublished Ph.D. dissertation ‘Inventing the Desert and the Jungle: Creating Identity through Landscape in African and European Culture’ by Margaret Greer Furniss Weisberg, completed at Yale University in 2014.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 152

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

153

[a photo stuck there that smiled for eternity, I imagine, at the Bantus, the Maravillas of Mali, at all the mythical orchestras and composers who were named Bembeya Jazz, African Jazz, O.K. [Jazz], T.P. Jazz, Cola Jazz, Amédée Pierre, Le Grand Kallé, Franco, which served father as a means to maintain from a distance, in the tyrannical mesh of love, his prey (or was she the goddess who had him in chains?) with her hair the color of corn silk.]

Jazz, then, far from being an American form, ends up being (re)located as an African form, a seductive musical medium, metonymically (and ironically) representing the sexual allure of the continent. In each case, however, the connection between these popular African musicians and jazz is ironic. The groups and musicians cited (all of whom existed, except the namesake Cola Jazz) exploited the jazz label as a fashionable gesture, a way of borrowing some of the fame associated with the American practitioners already identified by Socé: a symbol of industrial modernity and the consumer culture that accompanied it. In doing so, they shifted the myth from an American genre to an African tradition of popular music that continues to reverberate throughout the continent. This influence functioned like the rumba Socé mentioned as a possible connection between an African past and a transnational future – a diasporic music far more popular and democratic than the American form whose entry into the realm of high art Ellington so aggressively tried to negotiate. At the same time, jazz represents a foray into the high-art world that merits inclusion, even a privileged place, in the cultural habitus that is the musical – disengaged through an endless series of feints from the racial score in Alem and the black essence it scripts. Thus, coming full circle, Alem suggests music’s complex global engagements, displacements, and continuous transnational trajectories through an elaborate shell game of references, levels of discourse, displaced and replaced modal moves between earnest dissent and ironic critique. This process also allows him to highlight how music before writing anticipates by decades some of the questions explored in this and other recent Francophone African novels. That is, Cola Cola Jazz sends us back to the very beginning of the African canon and Socé’s recognition of Ellington’s accumulation of musical influences whose distinct Americanness prevent them from offering Fara a convincing model of successful hybridity. Rather, the obscure and perhaps less aesthetically ambitious ebbs and flows of the rumba and the various modalities of contemporary African music recall multiple lines of flight extending out over the globe. In this diasporic tradition that implicates Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and the United States as well, Alem sees new possibilities for decentered transnational networks in which Africa might finally have a chance to posit its own terms of aesthetic and ontological existence. In short, Alem asks that we recognize the extent to which music, long before literature, was able to etch the

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 153

10/05/2017 09:09

154

Scoring Race

patterns and possibilities of transnational diasporic aesthetic expression in ways that continue to work globally and democratically – though never unproblematically – to this day. The evident movement of musical influences across borders, despite, through, and at cross-purposes with music’s commodification, speaks to this democratic impulse in musical exchange, particularly among its practitioners. At the same time, he also runs a continuous, parallel critique that reminds the reader that at every turn and in every way, capital captures the aesthetic product. It is only within the dialectical confrontation between the reality of this capture – this ideological and aesthetic interpolation – and the critical labor used to continuously weaken that capture that new liberated forms of expression emerge, if only on the horizon of hope.

Coltrane’s in the (Whore-)House: Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 and the Rewriting of Emmanuel Dongala One of the most powerful examples of this finely tuned negotiation of the racial score characteristic of recent Francophone African novels is also the most recent: Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 (2014). In Mujila’s novel, which has received almost no critical attention despite being a significant recent Francophone African novel by a gifted young author, jazz becomes a kind of simulacrum, one more reverberation in a hall of echoes, where names of artists and tunes remain as degraded lieux de mémoire, vague evocations, and strangely familiar and unsettling ghosts, rather than the iconographic superstars erected by the Parisian racialized mythmaking machine. On the back page of the 2015 translation of the novel, we read the following description of this work: Two friends, one a budding writer home from Europe, the other an ambitious racketeer, meet in the only nightclub, the Tram 83, in a war-torn city-state in secession, surrounded by profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities. Tram 83 plunges the reader into the modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic, using jazz rhythms to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village.7

Leaving aside the idea that what the novel describes is in any way ‘colorfully exotic’ (rather than frighteningly familiar), it is on this last point, the idea that the novel uses jazz rhythms to ‘weave a tale of human relationships,’ that I want to dwell. While jazz is certainly present in the novel in ways that I will illustrate shortly, it is nevertheless not done in quite the way the above quotation suggests. Rather, following the tradition I have evoked of African authors 7 Fiston

2015).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 154

Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83, trans. Roland Glasser (Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum Publishing,

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

155

incorporating jazz into their narratives while also taking a critical view of this African-American import, Tram 83 is, to say the least, deeply ambivalent, not least concerning the idea or even possibility of ‘human relationships’ in a postapocalyptic world. The first time jazz appears sets the scene for what will follow: Dans les labyrinthes de la Ville-Pays, on n’écoute pas le jazz pour renifler l’odeur de cannes à sucre ou retrouver la conscience nègre ou savourer la beauté des notes: on écoute le jazz parce qu’il faut écouter du jazz quand on dort sur des billets de banque, qu’on livre quotidiennement sa marchandise, qu’on s’occupe d’une usine d’extraction, qu’on est cousin du Général dissident, qu’on entretient une petite maîtresse qui vous cloue au lit dans des vapes impossibles. Le jazz est un signe de noblesse, c’est la musique des riches et des nouveaux riches, de ceux qui construisent ce beau monde cassé … Le jazz c’est avant tout un terrain abrubt, une falaise qu’on ne peut gravir … Le jazz est le seul levier dont se sert toute la racaille du Tram 83 pour changer de classe sociale comme on changerait de métro. [In the labyrinths of the City-Nation, one doesn’t listen to jazz for its smell of sugar cane or to rediscover a nègre conscience, or to savor the beauty of oral tales: One listens to jazz because one has to listen to jazz when one sleeps on bank notes, when one regularly delivers one’s merchandise, when one is the boss of a mine-pit, when one is the cousin of the dissident general, when one is taking care of a little mistress who leaves you lying on your bed in a daze. Jazz is a sign of nobility, it’s the music of the rich and the nouveaux riches, of those who are building this beautifully broken world … Jazz is first and foremost rough terrain, a cliff that can’t be scaled … Jazz is the only lever used by all the riffraff of the Tram 83 to change social classes as one would change subways.]8

I cite this long passage because it shows immediately and quite clearly that Tram 83 does not use ‘jazz rhythms to weave a tale of human relationships,’ but rather, that jazz becomes the complex signifier of the global economic and cultural relationships that a blindly exploitative capitalism leaves in its wake – a signifier of elitism, but different from its European, artistic, avant-garde equivalent – perfectly adapted perhaps, to a dystopian, militarized state. It is simultaneously the effect of global capital and its product. That is, at the unnamed postcolonial present of the novel, any utopian consumption of jazz would demonstrate a naivety that ignores the degree to which it has, through its evolution and commodification, become a mere product like any other. This leaves it as closely aligned with the forces of neocolonial exploitation and abuse as it does with the forces of marronage and liberation. In fact, the author’s birthplace and a 8

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83 (Paris: Éditions Métalié, 2014), 18–19; Tram 83, trans. Glasser, 11–12. Subsequent citations from this work appear parenthetically in the text, with the page number of the original French edition given first.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 155

10/05/2017 09:09

156

Scoring Race

place frequently mentioned throughout the novel, Congo-DRC, is tragically connected to this problematic range of values and functions: as I discussed at some length in my introduction, the CIA was preparing for and subsequently carrying out the capture and subsequent murder of the country’s first elected post-independence prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, just as they were also funding, through the state department, a tour for jazz’s most recognizable figurehead, Louis Armstrong. In what was clearly a coordinated effort, Armstrong played Leopoldville and Elizabethville at the same time as the United States was participating in an assassination, the echoes of which are felt to this day throughout Africa. Thus, the quote evokes the connections between jazz and the Western forces of capital that assassinated Lumumba in order to maintain control of the vast mineral riches of the region, unconcerned with the millions of lives destroyed in the process. These minerals are the very same that the bedraggled miners are busily trying to extract throughout Tram 83 for the benefit of the slyly named ‘touristes à but lucratif ’ [tourists with pecuniary ambitions] (24). It is the latter, the perennial white exploiters, who are the true listeners of jazz: those who listen to jazz ‘sleep on bank notes,’ ‘regularly deliver [their] merchandise’, are bosses of diamond mines, are part of the corrupt regime in power. In other words, as the narrator goes on to say, ‘Jazz is the music of the rich and the nouveaux riches, of those who are building this beautifully broken world.’ Because of how it has been transformed from a local form into an intellectualized bourgeois cultural asset, into a Bourdieusian marker of cultural achievement and sophistication, jazz cannot simply be assumed to enable resistance and revolution. In fact, to a significant extent, the existence of jazz in this context suggests rather the very impossibility of any such revolutionary activity. Instead, ‘Jazz [becomes] the only lever used by all the riffraff of the Tram 83 to change social classes as one would change subways’ (11–12). Within the completely commodified postapocalyptic universe of Tram 83 – a temporal dystopia recognizable as a hallucinatory present day – jazz is an oddly preserved relic, detached from its place of production and its subsequent aesthetic and discursive ambitions: it is, in other words, precisely what jazz has become under the effects of the racial score. Much of this is expressed through the multiple derivations and dilutions to which the novel subjects this music. Significantly, in Tram 83 it appears to have arrived at a kind of terminal stage. In Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris, the protagonist’s downward spiral into oblivion is accompanied every step of the way by jazz: at the beginning he attends a concert at which a thinly disguised Josephine Baker performs, and at the end he attends a Duke Ellington concert. At the outset of Mongo Beti’s Trop de soleil tue l’amour, the bumbling protagonist Zam has his collection of jazz CDs stolen. In Alem, jazz is riffed upon and ironized, but it retains some of its ‘aura,’ nonetheless. In Tram 83 the two protagonists, Requiem and Lucien, are greeted by the sounds of a combo, ‘[qui]

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 156

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

157

massacrait, et sans gêne, un morceau de Coltrane, sans doute Summertime’ (17) [shamelessly massacring a Coltrane number, ‘Summertime’ no doubt] (9). Thus, we progress diachronically from the immediacy of Ellington’s live performance in Socé, to Zam’s commodified mausoleum that is the CD collection in Trop de soleil tue l’amour, to finally a performance in which aesthetic value and authenticity have left only the vaguest shadow in their place. We don’t even know if this is ‘Summertime’ or not, though it probably is. In fact, all that is left of this long and vaunted musical tradition is the miserable inadequacy of the musicians performing and the irony of a title, ‘Summertime,’ in a place where the very idea of ‘summertime’ makes no sense: Congo has a dry season and a wet season, except, perhaps, in the Western imaginary.9 The artistic integrity of jazz that justified its elevation within a particular bourgeois intellectual class gives way to an altogether different scale of values. In fact, the three most evident features of the Tram 83 are the alcohol and drugs that are consumed, the constant intervention and commentary of the prostitutes, and the music played by a parade of musicians, jazzmen who, the narrator tells us, ‘continuaient à prostituer la musique’ (17) [continue to prostitute the music] (9). Thus, the music, the land, women and men all become endlessly and equally exploitable, part of the endless transactions that define this space and in which the ‘touristes à but lucratif ’ are rewarded: the endless parade of European ‘expats’ whose presence simply indicates that Western plundering continues unabated. At the same time, having evoked the dystopian climate of the novel, it is worth noting that, despite the mocking manner with which Lucien’s idealism is treated and Requiem’s debauchery and corruption ironically celebrated, jazz also retains a certain dignity through its insistent cataloging. In the process, the narrative walks a delicate line between dismissing jazz as one more commodity and underscoring its importance. In other words, while the novel insists that, from the very outset, the music has been co-opted by the forces of capital, it also intimates that it retains at its heart a notable integrity. This is suggested by the degree to which the musicians who perform at the Tram 83 deviate from jazz’s ‘true’ course: thus, the notion that the music might be blithely prostituted, as the quotation above suggests, reminds us that there are circumstances, elsewhere, no doubt, where the music remains true (or might have) to some (perhaps forgotten) idea. There is, in sum, an ideal that the text surreptitiously maintains:

9 This

also suggests an interesting progression in the evolution of African writers’ engagement with jazz – from Socé’s anthropological observation of detail (down to the lyrics), to the encyclopedic list of names provided by Beti, to a complete inability or refusal to definitively name a single song in Mujila … though, as we will see shortly, this is combined with a cataloging impulse.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 157

10/05/2017 09:09

158

Scoring Race

the Tram 83 is obscene because of what it represents – a world destroyed by the unfathomable greed of the West.10 Just as importantly, the novel also insistently demonstrates its own deep schooling in jazz history, a jazzophilia that remains a constant in all the novels considered in this study. The fact that the musicians are butchering Coltrane’s ‘Summertime’ reminds us that one of the most iconic performances of the tune appears on the cult classic John Coltrane album My Favorite Things. Similarly, the band closes out its set with an equally poor performance of the Dizzy Gillespie standard ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ While the irony of both titles is inescapable, what is most striking (particularly given the overall tone of the novel) is that the narrative does not simply critique the jazz ethos: it celebrates it. That is, throughout this hallucinatory story, the narrative demonstrates its intimate familiarity with the touchstones of the music. It is, in a word, riddled with references, tunes, performances, etc. that all signal the jazz lover’s knowledge of and appreciation for the music: the jazz shibboleth. At the same time, the veneer of irony and the performance setting remind the reader that the music must be considered in its historical context, that it both is and is not the sediment of a particular history: guided by the particular creative impulses of the musicians that created it but also molded and disseminated by the forces of capital that made it a global phenomenon. Thus, Tram 83 recognizes that, though profoundly attractive as an exemplary diasporic expressive form, the uses to which the music has been put foreclose any naive celebration. The same forces that bring the ‘tourists with pecuniary ambitions’ to the city-state saturate the music. It is only through the multiple detours of irony and analysis that the novel returns to the music in a kind of compounded listening. Just as with everything else in the strange and gloomy world, jazz comes to represent a kind of hope beyond hope: the dying light of a distant day which is only the reflection of the reflection of the sun of multiple moons; only to this extent is this a world in which art is survival and where jazz is ultimately returned within a kind of Deleuzian fold.

10

This dignity is mirrored in important ways by the women in the novel, all of whom are prostitutes. Indeed, it could easily be argued the women are the only truly human characters in the story. The fact that they sell their bodies and how they do so seems to suggest the difference they establish between their bodies and their minds. Thus, necessity drives them to sacrifice their bodies, but it is the men who buy them who are sullied in the process, since they are the ones producing the conditions in which the women must sacrifice themselves in this manner to stay alive.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 158

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

159

Vultures at the Crossroads: Abdourahman Waberi’s La Divine Chanson If Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 represents a kind of surreal atopia with only vaguely recognizable contours, Djiboutian author Abdourahman Waberi’s fictionalization of jazz singer and poet Gil Scott-Heron (1949–2011), though also making use of surreal elements, is a meticulously documented biographical novel in which virtually every instance can be traced to an actual event. It dissects the multiple ways that the philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of jazz cumulatively contribute to a particular construction of difference and the unique role that France plays in this process. Indeed, whereas Cola Cola Jazz and Tram 83 explore the music’s function and transformation within selected dystopian African spaces both as a revered aesthetic tradition and as a recycled component of Western commodity culture, La Divine Chanson instead returns to the root question of jazz’s relationship to race: what structuring principles does the epistemically forced antagonism between music and language (and poetry and/or philosophy in particular) contribute to the constitution of the racial score? The novel tracks (down) the articulated relationship between the bare life of the human in a state only marginally distinct from nature (as imposed by the Western episteme), as against self-defined cultured or Western man. Or, stated slightly differently, as the novel’s title – La Divine Chanson – suggests, the narrative returns to the ontological instant, to the origin itself from which song/word emerges, from the very moment when the foundational criterion of the human, the instance of differentiation, takes place. Further, it questions the divisive premise imposed by the Western episteme traceable to at least Plato. Waberi’s novel walks this episteme back through an elaborate syncretic mysticism merging Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and traditional animistic African and African diasporic elements. In a variation on Du Boisian double-consciousness, Sammy Kamau-Williams simultaneously fights the dark and solitary battle for Western identity from which he is systematically excluded and, through the voice of the narrator, also merges himself into the infinite diversity, the all and/in one. Thus, at the very heart of this project is the undoing of the differentiation between what Giorgio Agamben might call zoē on the one hand and bios on the other: mere life or bare life, zoē, as the human reduced to (or left in) its ‘natural’ or undifferentiated form, and Western man, emancipated through the word – brought into bios, the engaged existence in which speech acquires or becomes power (though Agamben defines this new state as its own higher form of imprisonment). Agamben’s concept of zoē, inasmuch as it might be said to define (through exclusion) the sub-Saharan African man, shorn of speech, and thus any claim to being, legitimates the slave trade and all the subsequent forms of racial objectification that followed. This explains why all the African was authorized to keep as a half-symbol of humanity, a mitigated and distant belonging, was the music that promoted dancing, the most physical and therefore ‘natural’

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 159

10/05/2017 09:09

160

Scoring Race

of human aesthetic media.11 It is my argument throughout this study that this dynamic persists in the racial score of jazz’s reception in particular, and that of ‘black music’ more broadly. ‘Paris,’ the first person cat-narrator of the novel, follows, tongue-in-cheek, the logic that connects the ‘black’ Sammy Kamau-Williams to the French permutation of the racial score at play throughout the present study. Indeed, the choice of narrator alone is ingenious for a number of reasons. First, and most obviously, it plays with the notion of zoē, forcing the story into Edgar Allan Poe’s fantastic world of monstrous and accusatory felines.12 It literalizes the black vernacular expression for a jazz musician (a ‘cat’). It produces a verbal etymology, a linguistic history, of the jazz musician, in the process embedding the musical practice within a historiography, a material history of a particular aesthetic practice – the very archival enterprise to which the white critic has historically contributed and to which he has laid claim. In the cat’s hands, jazz becomes an inchoate sign, a mere energy or melody crossing over the divide between nature and man, a trough to which a febrile West repeatedly returns to feed. Just as importantly for the present examination, the cat’s name reminds us of one of the places where this ‘state of nature’ was first and most effectively theorized: ‘Paris’ recalls the contained primitivism that subtended the French craze for African-American music, and to a large degree continues to do so. The French capital thus establishes a trans-Atlantic monochord sonically connecting New and Old Worlds, along which the racial score was strung and sung and against which the novel will contrast the infinite complexity of life. In so doing it makes the case for an alternate historiography, a different kind of map, and a music that doesn’t keep score. The cat begins by presenting itself and then introduces us to Sammy

11 As

has been well documented, during the Middle Passage, slaves were encouraged to dance in order to maintain their physical form. One famous tune made explicit reference to this practice (and the coercive violence behind it): ‘At the savage Captain’s beck / Now like brutes they make us prance / Smack the cat about the deck / And in scorn they bid us dance.’ Quoted in Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 189. Once on the plantations, music was one of the few ways that slaves were encouraged to express themselves – though drums always represented a kind of return of the repressed in which the rhythmic foundation of language and music would cross over into each other, thus making music once again a linguistic medium. 12 I am referring to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Black Cat,’ in which the eponymous cat leads the police to the murdered wife’s body. ‘Poe,’ Betsy Erkilla reminds us, ‘makes recurrent use of animals in racially inflected contexts in his writings’; cats are among the most frequent targets of this anthropomorphic transfer. Betsy Erkilla, ‘The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary,’ in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 73.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 160

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

161

Kamau-Williams, who is dying in a hospital bed.13 Paris then proceeds from the imperative: ‘Je dois prendre la parole, rameuter mes souvenirs, livrer mon témoignage. Raconter la biographie du poète, ses premiers vers, ses premières ivresses.’ [I must speak up, gather my memories, deliver my testimony. Tell the biography of the poet, his first verses, his first moments of drunkenness].14 This process of ‘prendre la parole,’ quite literally the ‘taking of speech,’ an otherwise idiomatic expression for ‘to speak’ or ‘to speak up’ in French, takes on additional meaning. This loquacious cat, echoing Chester Himes’s talking dog,15 plays on the reduction to animal muteness historically imposed on blackness by the racialized Western episteme. The cat therefore stands for Sammy Kamau-Williams’s voice, but rather than the traditional white frame narrative or preface,16 the novel doubly empowers the speech of difference ‘en donnant la langue au chat’ [literally, giving one’s tongue to the cat] – that is, giving up, or giving over speech, the right to the narrative, to the zoē, the absolute other, the subaltern who cannot, or should not speak. This other, the cat, in turn, tells the story of an artist who, throughout his entire life, struggled with speech, indeed, stuttered, yet had so much to say as a musician, poet, and novelist. The story therefore begins with Paris telling us that he is on the last of the seven lives attributed to cats in the Muslim tradition. Indeed, that Paris has seven lives (rather than the more commonly assumed nine of the Western tradition) is explained by and allows for the introduction of a strain of Sufism that reappears throughout the novel as one of the principal mystical currents that dictate the narrative flow: before being Paris, the cat has been Farid and belonged to Mawlânâ, also known as Rumi, one of the great Persian mystical poets of the Sufi tradition.17 Thus, Farid/Paris reincarnates from one mystical master to another. In sum, the universe toward which the novel strives in the divine song is not one built on the ethnically bounded notion of diaspora (whose origins would be explicitly sub-Saharan African), but rather a global and 13 While

certain details (such as the dates of his last Paris concerts) are slightly modified, for the most part the broad details and well-known anecdotes regarding Gil Scott-Heron’s life are adhered to throughout the novel. I will nevertheless persist in referring to the protagonist as Sammy Kamau-Williams. 14 Abdourahman Waberi, La Divine Chanson (Paris: Zulma, 2015), 17. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 15 Himes’s narrator describes the ‘look on white people’s faces when you asked them about a job … As if some friendly dog had come in through the door and said, “I can talk.”’ If He Hollers Let Him Go (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1995), 3. 16 This device is analyzed with particular eloquence by Richard Watts in Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). 17 Mawlânâ is a term signifying respect and high intellectual attainment that has circulated (and whose meaning has shifted slightly over time) throughout the Middle East as well as the Islamic portions of the African continent.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 161

10/05/2017 09:09

162

Scoring Race

protean patchwork of great poets and musicians, artists who, like Rumi himself, traveled widely and whose influence likewise crossed (or ignored) borders. This reincarnation across ethnic, national, temporal, and linguistic boundaries leads forward to Sammy Kamau-Williams as the final avatar of the whole, but also allows for the return to another origin than the violent meaning imposed by the West, and it is into this other conception of the origin, of the absolute, that Sammy is born: Et les chansons tournoient sans cesse, décrivant des mouvements circulaires, se fondant dans les feux stellaires pour renaître aux anneaux stellaires. Sur la terre des hommes, on narre mille histoires sur l’origine et les bienfaits de leurs paroles. On dit que les chansons sont comme un collier de perles reliées par le fil de l’infini. On dit qu’elles meurent et renaissent pour tourner encore comme les atomes ou comme les derviches tourneurs. Sammy est tombée tout petit dans cette mer cosmique et ses profondeurs étranges et merveilleuses. (12) [And the songs whirl endlessly, tracing circular motions, melting into the stellar fire in order to be reborn in the stellar rings. On man’s earth, thousands of stories are told of the origin and the benefits of their speech. They say that songs are like a necklace whose pearls are connected by the thread of the infinite. They say that they die and are reborn to turn again like atoms, or like the whirling dervishes. Sammy fell into this cosmic sea and its strange and marvelous depths at a young age.]

The song becomes the primordial fire from which the all begins and in which Sammy is born. The novel continuously runs the biographical elements of the artist’s life through this double filter: one dominated by the Western, linear, artistic, internalized death drive embedded in the will to power; and the other in which all things merge, where the great circle remains unbroken, each life, each poem one pearl on the strand of the infinite, where the universe and the dervishes whirl in timeless synchrony. Thus, when Paris says, ‘[n]ous tourbillonnons ensemble le jour et la nuit’ [we whirl together day and night] (31), he evokes this refusal to adhere to the petty local science of differentiation, stressing instead the absolute communion – exemplified by his merging with Sammy during a serendipitous encounter in Times Square – and the eternal return.18 Yet this absolute is under perennial assault from the forces that make jazz – for first and foremost, Sammy Kamau-Williams has made his mark (or perhaps has only ever been allowed to make his mark) as a musician. As a musician 18 In this respect, the novel explores, albeit in very different fashion, many of the issues touched

upon in Cheik Hamidou Kane’s famous novel L’Aventure ambigüe (Paris: Julliard, 1961).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 162

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

163

he is boxed in by the need to perform, to be packaged, consumed by his fans, though he loves them and lives for them. Nevertheless, his concerts form a kind of cannibalistic ritual in which he is consumed and from which he always emerges further drained of his vital fluids. Thus, Sammy’s tour of France, ‘de festival en festival’ [from festival to festival] (33), as well as his lengthy stay in Paris are simultaneously a paean to the country (and particularly the capital) and an opportunity to underscore its destructive self-constitution as a site of reifying impulses: while the poet-singer loves the city, his partner Sappho declares it ‘une momie, un musée à ciel ouvert’ [a mummy, a museum open to the elements] (36). It also becomes a site of death as the cat-narrator goes to visit Jim Morrison’s tomb in the Père-Lachaise cemetery (37). Thus, as we learn in more detail later, Sammy’s love of Paris, like Fara’s in Mirages de Paris, is also the impulse that drives him toward death, as he wrestles with the expectations of his audience and the essential tensions between his role as a poet – the ‘black Bob Dylan’ as lazy critics (unable to think of him as anything but derivative) called him – and a jazz musician.

#GueuleOuverteAuNewMorning

Perhaps one of the most striking instances of Kamau-Williams’s struggle with jazz’s racial score occurs during his return to the stage in Paris after a long hiatus. Having disappeared from public view and into a haze of drugs and alcohol, Sammy has, as happens to addicts, lost all his teeth. During a particularly poignant passage, Paris-the-cat describes the moment when ‘le virtuose a perdu son dentier en public’ [the virtuoso lost his dentures in public] (43). The audience doesn’t notice but the cat does: Je vous jure que j’ai tout vu. Sur le moment, j’ai eu un pincement dans la poitrine mais aussi la force d’enregistrer chaque mouvement, fraction de seconde par fraction de seconde … Dès que Sammy a compris qu’il venait de perdre son dentier, son corps s’est raidi dans toute sa longueur, le temps c’est arrêté. L’espace d’une seconde qui m’a semblé une éternité en ce dernier jour d’avril 2011. (43–4) [I swear I saw it all. At the time, I cringed, but also had the strength to record every moment, a fraction of a second at a time … As soon as Sammy had understood that he had lost his dentures, his body stiffened in all its length, and time stopped. A mere second that felt like an eternity on this last day of April, 2011.]

The power of this moment lies in how it vectors the forces that locate Sammy Kamau-Williams at that particular place and time. Addiction obviously plays a significant role – as a singer who has disappeared from the scene and has now, only a couple of weeks before his death, returned to the stage to perform songs from his final album I’m New Here (2010), and particularly the tragically prescient ‘New York is Killing Me.’ The place where this occurs is the famous New

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 163

10/05/2017 09:09

164

Scoring Race

Morning jazz club in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, whose opening concert was given by the hard-bop drummer Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers on April 16, 1981, or almost exactly thirty years earlier.19 Kamau-Williams’s performance is thus part of the great cyclical time evoked earlier.20 That is, the moment is a magical communion between artist and audience: Bien qu’affaibli, Sammy était beau comme un prince de l’Égypte antique. Son rire était contagieux, son sourire lumineux. Sa voix: la musique noire tout entière. On le sentait, à cet instant-là, libre. Il était là, vivant. Visible et libre. Un homme libre est toujours intrigant pour les autres humains, il leur fait peur au plus profond d’eux. Sammy irradiait la grâce. Il tenait à distance la danse macabre du vautour. Le socle de Paris le soutenait, balayant ses doutes et ses angoisses. (47) [Though weakened, Sammy was as handsome as a prince from ancient Egypt. His laugh was contagious, his smile luminous. His voice: all of black music. You could feel that at that instant he was free. He was there, alive. Visible and alive. A free man is always intriguing to other humans, in the deepest part of themselves he scares them. Sammy radiated grace. He kept the macabre dance of the vulture at a distance. The base of Paris held him up, sweeping away his doubts and fears.]

Thus Paris is a place that allows Kamau-Williams to stop the mad rush of Western time, the macabre dance of the vulture.21 He is freed of the weight of expectations and this freedom is what makes him so attractive. But this mystical circular notion of time is under assault by the very forces the dentures come to exemplify. The moment is mitigated, as the loss of the dentures illustrates. First, as the passage notes, the attraction is, at least to a degree, motivated by fear – the fear of the person who has lost interest in the constraints that have been placed upon him – perhaps because, at this moment, he is already at the threshold of death. Second, this freedom 19 Symbolically,

this date is more significant perhaps even than the narrative is aware. Blakey’s Jazz Messengers were famous, among other things, for being a training ground for a veritable parade of great musicians. The particular iteration of the Messengers in 1981 included, among others, Wynton and Branford Marsalis. The former in particular would become one of the most controversial and conservative forces in the music, turning it into the same ossified museum that Sappho sees Paris to be. Thus, these concerts, Blakey’s and Kamau-Williams’s, bracket simultaneously the music’s resilience and vital energy but also its constant corralling into static form by the Western impulse to score race – including by black racial essentialists such as Marsalis. 20 Indeed, the author changed the date of the actual concert in order to create this sense of cyclical time, since the Gil Scott-Heron performance at the New Morning actually occurred on May 10, 2010. 21 This is a recurring reference throughout the book to Kamau-Williams’s/Scott-Heron’s crime novel The Vulture, which he published in 1970 at the age of twenty and drew upon for his final album and the subsequent song/poem, ‘The Vulture’ (also 1970).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 164

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

165

is relative or contained by the space in which it occurs. The dentures appear to remind us of this. If the audience doesn’t notice, a particularly insidious form of textuality – the new media – does: Les chroniqueurs se firent excellents tisseurs de rumeurs. Les uns dessinant des ailes au dentier, les autres multipliant les variations sur le thème de la chute. Et pourtant aucun d’eux n’était directement présent dans la salle de concert. La toile s’est enflammée, répandant des flots de racontars. Des milliers de courriels: ‘Bouche édentée’ ont circulé de Tokyo à San Francisco. Sur Twitter, le fil de la discussion ‘#GueuleOuverteAuNewMorning’ a recueilli le plus de commentaires. (44) [Chroniclers became excellent weavers of rumors. Some drew wings on the dentures, others multiplied variations on the theme of the fall. Yet not one of them was actually present during the concert. The canvas caught fire, spreading out waves of rumormongers. Thousands of emails: ‘A toothless mouth’ circulated from Tokyo to San Francisco. On Twitter, the thread, ‘#Openjawatthenewmorning’ got the most comments.]

The connecting of Tokyo to San Francisco, to Paris (the locale of the concert) provides an alternative spatiality, a cosmopolitanism of capital, in which ‘the word’ gets out, travels at the speed of light, only to peddle a commodified and inane verbal violence that vacates the ethical in the name of an immediate and narcissistic self-gratification. In this case, the violence directly targets the very conditions of black speech. For, as the passage cited earlier noted, the white public’s fear of free (black) expression demands that this voice be muzzled, and the emphasis on the teeth suggests one way in which this occurs. The false teeth become the symbol of a prosthetic speech,22 of a parroted or borrowed poetry authorized by whiteness. The symbolic castration of lost teeth is compensated by a substitution, a diminished power implicit in the toothless ‘#GueuleOuverteAuNewMorning.’ Or again, the teeth metaphorically signal that black speech only occurs in the contained and abject context of a concession: the New Morning, despite its illustrious past, becomes the museum in which the music, now defanged, is allowed to exist as the echo of a feared origin that is, itself, the immediate result of the foundational Western ontological myth of difference. It is despite this relentless differential and reifying impulse that Sammy KamauWilliams succeeds in performing freely, transforming the New Morning into the transcendent location for the performance of the song-poems of I Am New Here. Unfortunately, the cost of that freedom is his life, for immediately afterwards he

22 I

am thinking here of Jacques Derrida’s Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996), and his idea of the ‘prosthesis of origin,’ in which the ‘given’ or ‘native’ language as native, as home, always comes from an elsewhere.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 165

10/05/2017 09:09

166

Scoring Race

disappears back into the world of drugs: the expected path of which the ‘teeth’ are the unrelenting mark. And days later, upon his return to New York, he dies.

Paris and ‘la Chose’

Paris serves as a fulcrum for meditations on jazz throughout the novel. Its role is particularly important in explaining how the music represents simultaneously a utopian promise and a site of symbolic violence. The singular term that captures this dynamic is the cryptic and never defined ‘la Chose.’ The expression appears repeatedly and is a key to the story’s structure and logic. Asked about this in a rare interview on his book, the author simply stated that ‘la Chose’ is jazz (or more broadly, black music): ‘C’est l’esprit vivant de la musique’ [the living spirit of the music], he tells us, ‘qu’on appelle funky, blues ou jazz, et qui circule dans les Amériques noires, pas seulement aux Etats-Unis, et qui passe par Paris avec les musiciens’ [that we call funky, blues or jazz, and that circulates in the black Americas, not only in the United States, and that moves to Paris with the musicians]. ‘Le jazz,’ he continues, ‘est, au fond, une chose obscure que même les spécialistes n’arrivent pas à définir, donc c’est “la Chose”’ [Jazz is at bottom an obscure thing that not even specialists are able to define, thus it is ‘the Thing’].23 This seemingly simple answer nevertheless conceals the role that the expression ‘la Chose’ performs in his narrative. It certainly isn’t as neutral or whimsical as this explanation implies. Rather, ‘la Chose’ represents a series of expectations, often destructive, that haunt its performers as well as a utopian ideal or force that motivates its practitioners: an iteration of the racial score. The term first appears as follows: La voix caverneuse de Sammy envoûtait son public, des connaisseurs pour la plupart. Des mordus ayant tété du jazz depuis leur prime enfance. Ce sont ces genslà qui ont fait de Paris une des plus grande capitales de la new thing, la Chose dont on ne parle qu’entre initiés et dont on prononce jamais le nom. Si Sammy n’était pas en tournée à Paris, il n’aurait sans doute pas couru le risque de croiser la new thing, ou à tous le moins de souffrir de ces effets … Les gazettes bruissent de rumeurs sur son compte … Qu’il a été rattrapé par le danger. Qu’il est reparti à la chasse aux fantômes du passé dans les clubs d’antan, de La Chapelle des Lombards au Bœuf sur le toit. (57) [Sammy’s cavernous voice mesmerized his public, mostly people in the know. Fans who had suckled at the nipple of jazz from their tenderest childhood. Those are the people who made of Paris one of the greatest capitals of the new thing, the Thing about which one speaks only among the initiated and whose name is never pronounced. 23 Pierre

Maury, ‘Le Prix Louis Guilloux à Abdourahman A. Waberi,’ Journal d’un lecteur, May 5, 2015, journallecteur.blogspot.com.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 166

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

167

If Sammy hadn’t been on tour in Paris, he no doubt would not have risked crossing paths with the new thing, or at least of suffering its effects … The rumor mill was buzzing on his account … That the danger had caught up with him. That he had gone off again on a hunt for ghosts of the past in the clubs of yesteryear, from the Chapelle des Lombards to the Bœuf sur le toit.]

Whereas the interview with the author cited earlier suggests a benign, or even glorious, musical tradition, the mentions in the book of ‘la Chose’ can be far more ominous and difficult to situate, as the above passage amply demonstrates.24 ‘La Chose’ represents a ‘risk,’ something of which one may ‘souffrir les effets’ [suffer the effects]. And it also might precipitate a psychotic breakdown, leading the singer-poet to track down old haunts (famous names of Parisian nightlife, past and present – the ‘Chapelle’ and the ‘Bœuf ’). Indeed, Paris is a city that ‘a le secret de nous rendre fous dingues, nous autres Américains. Et surtout nos artistes. Particulièrement les musiciens en quête de la Chose innomée et innommable’ [has the knack for driving us crazy, us Americans. And especially our artists. Particularly those musicians on the hunt for the nameless and unnamable Thing] (59). Again, there appears to be more to ‘la Chose’ than at first appears.25 And this ambiguous valence is evident from the very start, where jazz, at least for some, truly begins as an art form: La Chose serait partie de New York où elle avait ses habitudes dans le milieu interlope de Greenwich Village. On l’a vue pour la dernière fois siroter un bière au Five Spot Café, celui des frères Termini sur la 3e Avenue. Puis elle s’est volatilisée sans crier gare. Évanouie. Disparue des écrans. Avalée par la grande nuit. (59) [The Thing would have started in New York where it inhabited the shady milieus of Greenwich Village. It was last seen nursing a beer at the Five Spot Café, the Termini brothers’ place on 3rd Avenue. Then it disappeared without warning. Vanished. Gone from the screen. Swallowed by the great night.]

Again, what exactly ‘la Chose’ is remains something a mystery. There is one trail of breadcrumbs: as in France with the Chapelle des Lombards and the Bœuf sur le toit, the Five Spot is a mythical jazz venue.26 In a sense, these mythical locations again represent the customary jazz fan’s shibboleth: references to recordings, clubs, musicians, events, only familiar to the cognoscenti. Yet why does the music (or at least, ‘la Chose’) disappear, ‘swallowed by the great night’? What is clear is that ‘quelques décennies plus tard, on la retrouve à Paris’ [a few decades later it reappears in Paris] and that its effects are immediate: the ‘initiés 24 This

also explains why the interviewer asked what it means. of the many mysteries of ‘la chose’ is when and why it does or does not get capitalized. 26 The Five Spot was home to famous sessions by Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Ornette Coleman, to name only a few. 25 One

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 167

10/05/2017 09:09

168

Scoring Race

remettent leurs pas sur ses traces contre leur gré, happés par la Chose’ [the initiates pick up the trail once again, against their will, sucked in by the Thing] (59). And then, just as quickly, it disappears again. Since then, ‘rien de solide à se mettre sous la dent. Tout juste des rumeurs, des chimères, des hypothèses’ [nothing concrete to go by. Just rumors, mirages, hypotheses] (59). The search is on: Et pourtant, rien ne remonte à la surface. La Chose se cache pour une raison inconnue. Dans la patrie du ‘nouveau roman’, de la ‘nouvelle vague’ et de la ‘nouvelle cuisine’, ses apparitions étonnaient. Intriguaient. Les écrivains, Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian et tous leurs confrères de Saint-Germain-des-Près guettaient le retour de la Chose. (60) [Yet nothing surfaces. The Thing is hiding for some unknown reason. In the land of the ‘nouveau roman,’ the ‘nouvelle vague,’ and ‘nouvelle cuisine,’ its appearances were astonishing. Intriguing. The writers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian and their kin in Saint-Germain-des-Près, were on the lookout for the return of the Thing.]

Paris is therefore, at least momentarily, the resting place for ‘la Chose,’ though it is not clear whether this was only during the period immediately after the war, a high moment for the reception of jazz in Paris as demonstrated by both Sartre and Vian, both of whom I discussed in Chapter 1. What is also evident is the degree to which fashion has something to do with the movement of the music: but does the term exclusively apply to it or is it simultaneously the music and the network of processes through (and by) which it is received? In any case, whatever logic might have been coming into focus just as quickly breaks down. There follows an increasingly absurdist, not to say surreal description of where ‘la Chose’ may have gone and who might have spotted it: On a pensé un temps qu’elle s’était éclipsée dans les catacombes de Lutèce, non loin du Jardin des Plantes. La chronique rapporte qu’un Haïtien de Paris, un connaisseur qui prétend avoir rencontré la Chose pour la première fois, sur le balcon de l’hôtel des Orchidées à Pétionville, l’aurait vue se glisser dans la cave d’un club d’entre deux guerres, au 666 boulevard de Montparnasse. De là on perd encore une fois sa trace. On suppute qu’elle se terre dans un de ces clubs par lesquels les Parisiens découvrirent les faits suivants dans cet ordre:   a) que les sauveurs étatsuniens avaient le teint ébène   b) qu’ils avaient souvent la science du swing   c) que certains d’entre eux avaient élu domicile dans la capitale à l’instar de Joséphine Baker. (60) [It was thought for a while that it had hidden itself in the Lutecean catacombs, not far from the Jardin des Plantes. The story has it that a Haitian from Paris, a connoisseur who claims to have encountered the Thing for the first time, on the balcony of the Hotel des Orchidées in Pétionville, had seen it make its way into a basement

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 168

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

169

club from the interwar period, at 666 boulevard de Montparnasse. From there, it again disappeared. It has been theorized that it is hiding in one of those nightclubs through which Parisians discover these facts in the following order:   a) That the American saviors had an ebony tint   b) That they often had the science of swing   c) That some of them had taken up residence in the capital following in the footsteps of Josephine Baker.]

What we are left with following this absurdist digression is that ‘la Chose’ is untraceable because, as jazz, it is a multivalent signifier. Any attempt to find a logic is confronted with a discontinuous amalgam of anecdotal truisms familiar to the ‘real’ fan – biographical details and sacred lieux de mémoire that give jazz a mythical aura (particularly to its white consumers) – that become increasingly confusing for their lack of historical and spatial logic. The places mentioned (Le Bœuf sur le toit, La Chapelle des Lombards, the Five Spot), the musicians named (Dizzy, Monk, Coltrane, Josephine Baker), and even the white French intellectuals who famously listened to them (Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian) are familiar but assembled in almost random fashion. This is particularly true with respect to two of the most important concerns of critics, namely the timeline along which the music evolved and the clear distinction between styles and genres. Le Bœuf sur le toit was one of the most famous post-First World War ‘jazz’ venues, though it is not at all clear that what was being played there had much to do with what today would be called jazz; La Chapelle des Lombards, which has existed since the early 1980s, though certainly famous, is better known for ‘world’ music than jazz; the Five Spot (1957–67) was among the most famous jazz venues in New York, but why choose it over, say, Minton’s Playhouse (1938–74), where bebop was said to have seen the light of day? Or why stop with the Five Spot, when many other places (the Village Gate, the Village Vanguard) saw increasing numbers of free jazz performances in the sixties, therefore bringing us closer to the present? In other words, while each of these places makes sense at one level, they don’t when strung together in this random manner. Instead, ‘la Chose’ functions like a kind of epistemological and lexical bomb that continuously explodes at the precise sites of jazz’s co-optation by the forces of a particular Western logic. It disrupts the internal self-justifying coherence of the terms by which it is made to perform the racial score. Thus, the story of a cat telling the story of a ‘cat’ simultaneously denounces the forces that reduce the black poet to music, demonstrates where and how this logic fails to measure how Sammy Kamau-Williams transcends these categories, and shows the tremendous price that he ultimately pays for attempting to outrun the terms of the label ‘black jazz musician.’ Thus, the protagonist refuses the orthodoxies of the critic, of the fan, the music’s overdetermination by a particular critical reception

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 169

10/05/2017 09:09

170

Scoring Race

that demanded a disciplined rendition of jazz that fell neatly within the scored categories prepared for it. As we learn a little later, ‘[l]es critiques de jazz le considèrent comme un bluesman, les spécialistes de blues le rangent dans les sphères du jazz’ [jazz critics consider him a bluesman, and blues specialists place him among jazz musicians] and ‘[p]our les poètes, il reste d’abord un musicien et pour les musiciens il est reconnu comme un authentique poète’ [for the poets he is first and foremost a musician and among musicians he is recognized as an authentic poet] (75). What is most striking in this enumeration is that if the first three ‘authorities’ (critics, blues specialists, and poets) perceive him negatively, only the musicians recognize him as an ‘authentique poète’. In sum, they do not deny him a claim to signification. At the same time, the syntax of the sentence suggests that they are ‘experts’ on poetry as well, that their recognition comes from knowledge. The logic therefore is that they assume a continuity between poetry and music that Western aesthetics categorically denies: for them, being a musician is being a poet (and vice-versa). The narrative therefore labors to free jazz from the shackles of an epistemologically determined racial identification. But as I noted earlier, with respect to the scene of his false teeth, like the African god of the crossroads Eshu Elegba (who appears in various guises throughout the novel),27 Sammy himself abides at the crossroads: of freedom and slavery, of music and poetry, of a racial score and a timeless one before-beyond race. This encounter, this struggle at the crossroads, cannot arrive at some utopian place in which the music is finally freed of the historical terms of its production and dissemination. Sammy Kamau-Williams confronts the demons of race encapsulated in the racial score but he cannot transcend them. Indeed, his encounter is deadly, and Sammy’s music is ultimately one more sacrifice at the altar of jazz: a desperate cry for recognition and, at least to some degree, a failure. The closing lines of the chapter ‘Du Mississippi à Montmartre,’ in which ‘la Chose’ is discussed at great length, conclude with this dilemma: ‘Le monde est suspendu à un fil les nuits de pleine lune. Il a la nostalgie de la Chose. Il désire son retour. Mieux, il l’attend comme un messie’ [The world is suspended by a thread on nights with a full moon. It is nostalgic for the Thing. It wants its return. Better yet, it awaits it like a messiah] (61). The pronoun ‘il’ here is entirely slippery. It refers both to ‘le monde suspendu à un fil’ as well as to the singer-poet. Both await the return of ‘la Chose.’ At the same time, to the extent that, for his public, ‘la Chose’ is Sammy himself, the artist is devoured by art, turned into a ‘messiah’ 27 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discusses Eshu Elegba at length in his now famous book The Signifying

Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Eshu Elegba was, according to Gates, the trickster figure carried across the Middle Passage from African Yoruba mythology. He was able to use his intelligence to countervail his lack of strength, but also fell victim to hubris.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 170

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

171

(note the absence of capitalization) whose singular responsibility is to be the dehumanized and endlessly replaceable vehicle for the music: the object of what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in Musica Ficta, dismissively referred to as a ‘Musicolâtrie.’28 What the novel makes clear is the extent to which the racial score of jazz is subject to a continuous process of resistance that is at the very heart of the music itself. That is, as we have seen, the entire history of jazz’s critical reception has attempted to bring the music into the service of the millennial epistemological Western project that places music as subordinate to the word. At the same time, inherent to the music is a discursivity that refuses the aesthetic hierarchy, and the racial hierarchy that it legitimates. That is, jazz is a hybrid form that has historically drawn in every possible influence available to its practitioners. While throughout its history the majority of its most accomplished players have been African-Americans, there are historical, ideological, and epistemological reasons for this particular racialized genius. Jazz is the conditioned and tactical response to an overwhelming, strategically determined social condition in which a particular group identified by its skin color is reduced to the animal, to the zoē against which white bios is determined. Jazz thereby becomes, for a whiteness assuring its own stability as an ontological signifier, the proof of this construction; and for the resulting blackness, it becomes an enforced domain that is turned against the logic that attempts to capture it – there, a music made to signify difference strives toward a transcendental poetics without difference. On the one hand, Sammy Kamau-Williams’s story would appear to suggest that this is a quixotic quest. On the other, a Sufi cat says otherwise.

Jazz Ain’t Nothing But a Sandwich Léonora Miano’s novels represent an important shift in perspective on jazz. Miano is a new and sometimes controversial voice in Francophone writing and she has been discussed extensively in recent years. Among the principal areas that have drawn attention are her meditations on violence and testimony,29 28 Lacoue-Labarthe

refers specifically to a kind of mystification of the musical that I see as equally relevant to the manner in which jazz has been historically constructed in the Western imaginary by its most ardent defenders. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, trans. McCarren. 29 Irena Trujic, ‘Faire parler les ombres: Les Victimes de la Traite négrière et des guerres contemporaines chez Léonora Miano,’ Nouvelles Etudes Francophones 30.1 (2015): 54–65; Pierre Soubias, ‘Maïssa Bey et Léonora Miano: Deux romancières face à l’inhumain,’ Horizons Maghrébins: Le Droit à la Mémoire 60 (2009): 42–7; Maria Benedetta Collini, ‘Le Cri, le silence, la parole: La Trilogie africaine de Léonora Miano,’ Ponts 12 (2012): 29–49; Marie-Rose Abomo-Maurin, ‘Les Romans de Léonora Miano: une écriture de la complexité sociale dans une Afrique en mal d’elle-même,’ in Dire le social dans le roman francophone contemporain, ed. Justin Kalulu Bisanswa and Kasereka Kavwahirehi (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), 303–18; and Magali Compan, ‘Writers, Rebels, and Cannibals: Léonora Miano’s Rendering of

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 171

10/05/2017 09:09

172

Scoring Race

the convergence of gender and race,30 and blended or hybrid diasporic identities.31 The research on African identities as well as the merging roles of gender and violence (women as witnesses, as victims, as vehicles of and to violence) largely homes in on her African trilogy.32 More recently, however, there has been a closer examination of her elaborate development of hybrid AfricanEuropean identities. This research tends to focus on what are now considered her ‘Afropean’ novels.33 It is among the latter category of works that a small number of researchers have begun to pick up on Miano’s unique deployment of music.34 Catherine Mazauric’s notion of transmédialité, which she explains as ‘l’interaction et la transaction entre différents médias, concourant à la production du sens’ [the interaction and transaction between different media, producing meaning together], is a notably useful idea. In particular, Mazauric focuses on ‘[l]’œuvre de mots’ [the work of words], which ‘entretient un étroit dialogue avec différentes formes musicales, qui ne sont nullement là pour simplement l’agrémenter ou l’accompagner’ [that maintains a close dialogue with different forms of music which are certainly not there merely to decorate or accompany it].35 Not surprisingly, jazz becomes the model for this musical-literary hybrid where the written text can be ‘appréhendé à l’image d’une partition, lors Africa in L’Intérieur de la nuit,’ Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature 34.1 (2010): 81–102. 30 Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, ‘Rethinking Paradox: Performing the Politics of Gender, Race, and Belonging in Léonora Miano’s Écrits pour la parole,’ Journal of Romance Studies 14.1 (2014): 73–89. 31 Nicki Hitchcott, ‘Sex and the Afropean City: Léonora Miano’s Blues pour Élise,’ and Kathryn Kleppinger, ‘Relighting Stars and Bazars of Voices: Exchange and Dialogue in Léonora Miano’s Tels des astres éteints and Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar,’ in Francophone Afropean Literatures, ed. Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 124–37 and 110–23; Etienne-Marie Lassi, ‘Léonora Miano et la terre natale: Territoires, frontières écologiques et identités dans L’Intérieur de la nuit et Les Aubes écarlates,’ Nouvelles Etudes Francophones 27.2 (2012): 136–50; and Sylie Brodziak, ‘Communauté et patchwork de la mémoire dans l’œuvre de Léonora Miano,’ in Pluri-Culture et écrits migratoires/PluriCulture and Migrant Writings, ed. Elizabeth Sabiston and Robert Drummond (Sudbury, ON: Laurentian University Press, 2014), 195–207. 32 Attention has focused on the trilogy, L’Intérieur de la nuit (2006), Contours du jour qui vient (2006), and Les Aubes écarlates (2009), as well as on her most recent work, La Saison de l’ombre (2013), on the slave trade. 33 In particular, Tels des astres éteints (2008), the short stories in Afropean Soul (2008) and Soulfood équatoriale (2009), Blues pour Élise (2010), Ces âmes chagrines (2011), and her play Écrits pour la parole (2012). 34 See, among others, Daniel Sébastien Larangé, ‘Pour un discours social postmoderne: Phénomène de media(tisa)tion et d’intermédia(lisa)tion dans l’écriture franco-camerounaise: Les Exemples de Calixthe Beyala et Léonora Miano,’ Dialogues francophones 17 (2011): 127–49, and Catherine Mazauric, ‘Débords musicaux du texte: Vers des pratiques transartistiques de la désappartenance (Léonora Miano, Dieudonné Niangouna),’ Nouvelles Etudes Francophones 27.1 (2012): 99–114. 35 Mazauric, ‘Débords musicaux du texte,’ 103.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 172

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

173

de l’exécution de laquelle, comme dans un concert de jazz, c’est tantôt la voix d’un instrument, tantôt l’autre’ [understood like a score, during the execution of which, as in a jazz concert, it is first one instrument and then another that is heard]. Mazauric further reminds us that the musical elements of the story are very deliberately set up to send us back to ‘l’histoire des Noirs américains’ [the history of black Americans]. Just as importantly, ‘ces références érudites soulignent que chaque thème est l’objet d’un passage: d’un compositeur à un interprète’ [these erudite references underscore that each theme is the object of a passage: from a composer to a performer].36 This ‘transmediatic’ hybrid is most evident in Tels des astres éteints [Like extinguished stars] (2008) and Blues pour Élise [Blues for Elise] (2010). What will interest me in what follows is the evolution from the first of these two texts to the second. Tels des astres éteints is, as Mazauric also tells us, an extensive meditation on music, and particularly jazz, woven through the story of the three protagonists: ‘Tels des astres éteints … affiche d’emblée un lien étroit avec le phénomène musical … Les cinq grandes parties du roman … ont pour premier titre un thème classique du jazz.’ [Tels des astres éteints … immediately establishes a close affiliation with music … The five major sections of the novel … have as the first part of their title a jazz standard].37 She goes on to argue that through the idea of the ‘thème,’ the French word for what is called the head or standard (melody) in English, ‘le dessin mélodique d’une composition musicale’ [the melodic image of a musical composition], each character elaborates his or her ‘propres variations’ [proper variations]. Further, in order to educate the reader, ‘l’auteure livre quelques références relevant de l’érudition jazzistique’ [the author delivers a few references drawn from jazz erudition].38 Miano’s Tels des astres éteints is therefore structured around canonical jazz works and is likewise set, as it were, to a jazz soundtrack in which a jazz standard becomes the basis for a kind of literary improvisation. Nevertheless, it is particularly on the last point, the idea of an ‘erudition jazzistique’ [jazzistic erudition] (a notably French expression for the jazz fan), that I want to dwell briefly because it explains the significant evolution that occurs between Tels des astres éteints and Blues pour Élise. Mazauric notes a shift in tone from the first to the second of these texts, but she does not really explain it. I would like to claim that this shift is significant and marks an important moment of change in the treatment of jazz by the Francophone African text. First, Tels des astres éteints follows to the letter the long history of Francophone African engagements with 36 Mazauric,

‘Débords musicaux du texte,’ 106. ‘Débords musicaux du texte,’ 105. 38 Mazauric, ‘Débords musicaux du texte,’ 105. Mazauric goes on to note the importance of Duke Ellington in the novel, a figure who, along with Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane, reappears constantly in the Francophone African literary canon. 37 Mazauric,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 173

10/05/2017 09:09

174

Scoring Race

jazz – replete with the expectation of a certain knowledge, the jazz shibboleth, which Miano shows she masters perfectly. Conversely, Blues pour Élise shifts away significantly from this initial jazzophilia. That is, in the evolution from one novel to the other, jazz’s role changes as it is dissolved into a broader concern for the convergence of the global African diaspora’s musical materials upon the French capital. What is important here is the immediate correlation between the development of a particular Afropean or Afro-Parisian subjectivity, and escaping the score of a discourse on jazz that, as I have tried to show throughout this study, is entangled with the history of its reception by a particular white French intelligentsia. Stated simply, while jazz serves as a structuring principle in the first text, it almost entirely disappears from the second. The reason for this fading importance is clear: jazz does not properly account for what Miano and others have called an emerging ‘Afropean’ community of people of African (and sometimes Caribbean) origin who were either born in France or have grown up there – what from a different (material and ideological) perspective Dominic Thomas has called ‘Black France.’39 The centrality of jazz’s role so evident in Waberi wanes in Miano as she strives to define the parameters of a new form of French, not to say Parisian, middle-class, ‘Afrodescendent’ identity. That is, there has always been an overt or covert fascination in the diaspora with African-American culture as the symbol of a uniquely black hypermodernity. Jazz in a sense has been the historical vehicle and synecdoche for that New World African subjectivity and this is entirely evident in Tels des astres éteints. At the same time, the cost of this fascination is the suspension or abandonment of any potential European blackness that would define its own parameters and would contribute in its own meaningful way to Global Blackness.40 Further, the language of jazz fandom that Miano uses in Tel des astres éteints draws heavily on the critical discourse of the French jazz-loving intelligentsia that has made of the music a touchstone

39 Léonora

Miano disseminated the term ‘Afropean’ in France in 2010, noting that the ‘terme “afropéen” cherche à décrire ces personnes d’ascendance subsaharienne ou caribéenne et de culture européenne: des individus qui mangent certes des plantains frits mais dont les particularismes ne sont pas tellement différents de ceux qu’on peut trouver dans les régions de France [the term ‘afropéen’ seeks to describe people of sub-Saharan or Caribbean descent and of European culture: people who admittedly eat fried plantains, but who in their particularities are not so different from those whom one finds in the regions of France]. Léonora Miano, ‘Léonora Miano: “Il faut formuler le concept d’afropéanisme,’ interview by Camille Thomine, Magazine Littéraire, June 11, 2013, accessed August 1, 2016. For a more extensive discussion of the concept and its origins with the pop group Zap Mama’s album ‘Adventures in Afropea,’ see Sonya Faure, ‘Afropéen [adj.]: qualifie le fait d’être noir et né en Europe,’ Libération, April 9, 2015, liberation.fr. See also Dominic Thomas, Black France. 40 For a particularly apt critique of the notion of Global Blackness, see Silvio Torres-Saillant, ‘One and Divisible: Meditations on Global Blackness,’ Small Axe 29.13.2 (2009): 4–25.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 174

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

175

of race throughout the twentieth century.41 As a countermeasure, Miano turns in Blues pour Élise to a multitude of different sources: French, Caribbean, South American, American, African, etc. This highly personalized patchwork proposes a new Afropean (or, again, to be more specific, Afro-Parisian) subjectivity. In the process, she turns away from jazz as an elite musical form tainted by its reception by a white intellectual elite and instead embraces a multitude of diaspora musical traditions and performers. Thus, the diminished role of jazz in Miano reminds us of several important factors concerning the genre’s participation in the racial score and the evolving historical response this has garnered from Francophone African authors. The first is that, despite Pierre Bourdieu’s claim in La Distinction about jazz’s middle-brow status,42 the concerted energies of generations of French intellectuals and artists on this particular American music has located it as a high-art form with origins uniquely traceable to folk forms (most notably the blues). This folk origin makes it a medium in and through which a particular white (and in the case of the present study, French) intellectual class sheds the starched suit of Western ‘civilization,’ and, as Toni Morrison has phrased it, ‘plays in the dark.’43 Further, the French intellectual class’s interest (now a century old) has been constructed to give the listener the privilege of consuming intellectually while positing the music’s principal practitioners as ‘idiot savants.’ On this latter point, these ‘experts’ on the music who have written its history and placed it within the high-art pantheon have merely transposed and (further) racialized the trope of the dim-witted musician that we saw in the introduction as being threaded through the history of Western aesthetics. The Francophone African authors I have discussed up to this point either critique this particular appropriation of the music (and underscore the dangers such an appropriation might represent); reproduce the reification of jazz, with varying degrees of naivety, as the product of a discursive history; and/or deconstruct and reconstruct a ‘jazz history’ in which the form is liberated from the strictures of the intellectual history that has made it keep the racial score. In this latter case, the authors turn the musicians themselves, as was particularly the case in Waberi, into active agents of their own intellectual enterprise – whatever the risks, existential or otherwise. Ultimately, authors from Socé to Waberi have engaged in their writing with this push and pull between the primitive and high modernity, constructed within the confines of a racial binary. In each case, the struggle was to a large extent articulated around two racialized figures: the black man in his own element as a musician, and the denaturalized, 41 Léonora

Miano, Tels des astres éteints (Paris: Plon, 2008). Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979). 43 See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993). 42 Pierre

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 175

10/05/2017 09:09

176

Scoring Race

frightening hybridity that is the black writer who has turned his or her back on the role whiteness has assigned him or her – the role of musician. Those Francophone African writers who have focused on jazz have therefore always worked either to demonstrate how the music has been used to substantiate the racial score and/or have tried to fill it with a different content, thereby disrupting the Western episteme’s conception of the musical and the racial binary it supports. In contrast, Miano is much less interested by the time she reaches Blues pour Élise in the details of this epic epistemological struggle because of her interest in creating another basis for diaspora identity than one that would necessarily or exclusively pass through the American cultural hub. But this desire to recreate an Afropean or Afro-Parisian subjectivity is not the only thing motivating her. That is, aside from its association with an American model of diaspora modernity, and its absorption into the racial score, she also sees jazz as plagued by another – but intimately related – issue: its troubling relation to gender. As Laura Pellegrinelli describes it vividly in ‘Separated at Birth: Singing and the History of Jazz,’ jazz has until very recently, and with very few exceptions, always been perceived by historiographers as a distinctly masculine genre, with the notable exception of vocals.44 There have been recent attempts to show where and how women did in fact participate in the production and dissemination of (instrumental) jazz,45 but it is principally with vocals that traditional historiographies associate them, and singing itself is given a very narrow role: despite its symbolic and practical importance in jazz’s parentage, Pellegrinelli tells us that ‘singing is dropped from historical 44 Lara

Pellegrinelli, ‘Separated at Birth: Singing and the History of Jazz,’ in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, ed. Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 31–47. 45 Following in the wake of Susan McClary’s groundbreaking work, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, on the historical and material function of the feminine in the Western classical music tradition, an ever-increasing number of studies have looked at the role of gender in jazz. Robin D. G. Kelley examines how gender informed the reception of avant-garde jazz forms in the 1950s in Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009); see also Monique Guillory, ‘Black Bodies Swinging: Race, Gender, and Jazz,’ in Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Susan Cavin, ‘Missing Women on the Voodoo Trail to Jazz,’ Journal of Jazz Studies 3.1 (1975): 4–27; Valerie Wilmer, ‘You Sound Good for a Woman,’ in As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (London: Pluto, 1977); Sherrie Tucker, ‘Bordering on Community: Improvising Women Improvising Women-in-Jazz,’ in The Other Side of Nowhere, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 244–67, and Swing Shift: ‘All-Girl’ Bands of the 1940s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); David Ake, ‘Re-Gendering Jazz: Ornette Coleman and the New York Scene in the Late 1950s,’ in Jazz Cultures (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Angela Y. Davis, ‘When a Woman Loves a Man: Social Implications of Billie Holiday’s Love Songs,’ in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York, Pantheon, 1998); and Linda F. Williams, ‘Black Women, Jazz, and Feminism,’ in Black Women and Music: More than the Blues, ed. Eileen M. Hayes and Linda F. Williams (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 119–33.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 176

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

177

narratives soon after the music’s birth.’ That is, ‘[h]aving waited for her to deliver her offspring, historians cut the umbilical cord, separating mother from child and enabling the yowling infant to toddle off on his own down the streets of New Orleans.’46 Indeed, whereas diaspora women have appeared here and there as visual artists, as poets and novelists, and as actors, to the extent that women appear in history books on jazz at all, it is as singers (e.g., Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter) and these women are largely marginalized in the grand narratives of the music. In a sense, this role represents the uber-condition of the music: jazz is first and foremost associated with the physical, the natural, the irrational. To the extent that difference is not only raced, but gendered, it comes as no surprise then that the most ‘immediate’ or ‘natural’ instrument, the human voice, should largely be given over to women as their almost exclusive domain.47 Indeed, if Louis Armstrong was one of the first musicians to use scatting as a musical technique, this was also entirely in keeping with his stage persona, in which any hint of the ‘black masculine threat’ was ‘castrated’: his mugging was a means of deliberate self-feminization that made him palatable to white audiences. In the more ‘macho’ and deliberately threatening genre of bebop, Dizzy Gillespie similarly softened his image by mugging and scatting, both of which seemed to go hand in hand. In sum, vocals are presumed to feminize the musical text. In the case of the female singer, the body of the performer confirms the immediacy and absolute corporeality of the jazz musician: jazz is nature only nominally domesticated, and her blackness exemplifies this liminal racial status within the gender dynamic to which the concept of race cathects

46 Pellegrinelli,

‘Separated at Birth,’ 32. Jessica Bissett Perea spells out clearly, ‘an instrumental bias in jazz originated in the 1940s with the development of modernist aesthetics that invested deeply in notions of virtuosity, complexity, exclusivity, and anticommercialism. By contrast, conventional histories of the modern jazz era have deemed vocalists as inherently commercial or popular, and therefore not ‘real jazz,’ which is evidenced through the calculated inclusion of vocalists in the swing era (alternatively described as the ‘mainstream’ or ‘entertainment’ era) followed by the overt exclusion of vocalists beyond the 1940s. Yet closer examination of the jazz canons exalted within these same narratives reveals that previous instrumental–vocal relations were not as separate as modernist ideology would have one believe. Jazz vocalists (and vocal groups) developed alongside big bands of the swing era, bebop players of the postwar years, and so forth. Even just a cursory look at the lives and careers of the few singers accorded space throughout jazz historiography – Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan – illustrates the point that vocalists thrived and survived within the major jazz scenes. Despite this fact, most textbooks used for undergraduate jazz survey courses… mirror the near-exclusion of vocalists and women’. Jessica Bissett Perea, ‘Voices from the Jazz Wilderness: Locating Pacific Northwest Vocal Ensembles within Jazz Education,’ in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and its Boundaries, ed. David Andrew Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 230.

47 As

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 177

10/05/2017 09:09

178

Scoring Race

it. In the case of the male performer, something slightly different happens. His black body becomes feminized, castrated, and thereby less threatening. The most evident pushback against this longstanding relationship between vocals and women in jazz is what can only be described as an instrumental machismo that gained its greatest traction in bebop and that retroactively rewrote the previous history of the music in order to emphasize the instrumental masters of the music from Louis Armstrong onward. This machismo has a long history, exemplified by an article that appeared in the February 1938 issue of Downbeat Magazine, ‘Why Women Musicians Are Inferior.’ The misogyny of the title (and the article) may be stunning, but the general tenor captures a longstanding attitude toward women instrumentalists that persists to this day. Indeed, the hyper-competitive ‘cutting contests’ that served as initiation rites until fairly recently were essentially masculine duels that speak to the ritualistic and highly phallic masculinity at the heart of the music.48 In sum, to the extent that jazz is a contentious site of identity formation that serves the racial score, it does so in a hyper-masculine, heteronormative arena where the (male) ego and the (symbolic) penis/horn are among the principal stakes. It is no surprise, then, that a younger generation of women writers would challenge the terms of jazz’s appearance as a signifier of blackness or the necessity to mention it at all. If, as Waberi’s Sammy Kamau-Williams proclaims, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,’ it may be that there remains an underlying sentiment among women that not only will the revolution not be televised, but they won’t be invited either. Every novel discussed to this point has, whether explicitly or implicitly, abided by what I referred to earlier as the jazz shibboleth: the wink and nod, the key references that demonstrate a keen awareness of the important figures, concerts, events, and dramas of jazz history. Whether it is Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Branford Marsalis, or Gil Scott-Heron, every writer from Socé to Waberi has shown that he knows the canon. Miano replicates this gesture in Tels des astres éteints and abandons it almost entirely in Blues pour Élise. In the latter, rather than being mediated through a jazz ideal that provides the deep structure of the narrative, music becomes a hybrid diaspora cultural mix. That is, as Katelyne Elizabeth Knox writes with respect to blues, ‘many of the artists found in these genealogies (such as Millie Jackson or Francis Bebey) are associated with specific geographical contexts (the United States and 48 For

an extensive discussion of the particular role these cutting sessions served and the ways they were perceived by the musicians and by their white audiences, see Katherine Walker, ‘Cut, Carved, and Served: Competitive Jamming in the 1930s and 1940s,’ Jazz Perspectives 4.2 (2010): 183–208. What is particularly striking is the degree to which the white consumption of jazz represents a kind of symbolic castration (in its racially grounded dehumanization) to which the musical practice responds, in a kind of perpetual feedback loop, by ever-increasing symbolic performances of phallic potency.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 178

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

179

Cameroon, respectively in these examples),’ while others, ‘such as Baloji – born in the Congo, but who has lived in France since the age of three – resist such national or regional affiliations.’ Further, ‘many of the musical works are both placed and placeless; musical analysis of the works reveals connections and borrowings that testify to the history of circulation within and beyond African diasporic spaces.’49 The merging of these diverse musicians in this one text constitutes what Knox calls a process of rememberment, or a reconstitution of a particular kind of cosmopolitan diasporic identity: Afropeanism. At the same time, what is perhaps most striking, particularly given the historical importance of jazz to the African novel and Miano’s commitment to the form in Tels des astres éteints, is the text’s very deliberate avoidance of any overt discussion of ‘classical jazz.’ After Tels des astres éteints, Miano explicitly speaks of it in one of the food essays in Soulfood équatoriale (2009). In the chapter titled ‘Jazz’ we learn that in her native Cameroon, the term now refers less to the music than to food. That is, whereas one could have just a piece of bread, jazz – the name for red beans with or without meat – is what fills it.50 Playing on the term for African-American improvised music and transforming it into a full-fledged metaphor, the merging of bread and jazz is called a ‘saxophone’ and speaks to a particular perception of Americanness. Having something to put in your bread connotes abundance, something few can afford: ‘C’est que le jazz est précieux’ [it’s that jazz is precious], Miano tells us. ‘Quelques bouchées,’ she goes on, ‘vous remplissent l’estomac, et … la satiété vaut son pesant d’or’ [a few mouthfuls fill your stomach and … being full is worth its weight in gold].51 The chapter becomes a meditation on the ways in which an aesthetic abstraction that might be the luxury of a privileged few metamorphoses through a creative linguistic displacement into a necessity. At the same time, how creative signification happens, the activity at the very heart of the music, is nevertheless preserved. Playing on the signifier, the Cameroonian vernacular performs a kind of de Certeauean tactical maneuver on an inaccessibly high-art musical form and transforms it into the quotidian preoccupation of sustenance. This ability to make do, to improvise, in even the most trying circumstances, becomes for Miano the meaning of diaspora – and, to the extent that the term persists, of jazz. Miano’s Blues pour Élise is therefore noteworthy for several reasons. For one, it proposes in most dramatic and public fashion the neologism ‘Afropean’ with which Miano has increasingly become associated. Just as importantly, it 49

Katelyne Elizabeth Knox, ‘Display on Display: Migrating Identities in Contemporary Francophone Literature and Music,’ Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2013. 50 The American equivalent would be the old expression, ‘a wish-sandwich’ (picked up by the doo-wop group The Chips in their song ‘Rubber Biscuit’), where you have the bread and you wish you had something to put in it. 51 Léonora Miano, Soulfood équatoriale (Paris: NIL, 2009), 19.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 179

10/05/2017 09:09

180

Scoring Race

refutes the masculinist musicality implicit in the works of the authors I have discussed to this point. Finally, it claims a new literary space in which women find a voice. While this claim in and of itself would not necessarily be an original proposition, what gives her novel its unique character is its careful scoring: to the extent that jazz participates in the racial score, Miano’s Blues pour Élise complicates this process by refusing to adhere to the linear logic that insists on the blackness of jazz or, just as importantly, on the primacy of jazz itself as a genre. Or again, she challenges the boundaries of jazz and who can perform it. All of this is done in a multi-character series of vignettes accompanied quite literally by music: at the end of each chapter, the author provides a rubric she calls ‘ambiance sonore’ [sonic mood]: a list of songs and their performers that have been mentioned throughout the preceding chapter. As in Tels des astres éteints before it, a virtual soundtrack accompanies the novel, but now the artists are drawn from broader and far more popular genres. However, this disappearance of jazz happens through a very deliberate and articulated occlusion. In the very first chapter, in which she introduces us to the soul-searching figure of Akasha, we immediately encounter two artists. The first is the polyvalent and irreverent Millie Jackson, who serves as a tacit guide for Akasha’s aspirations as a black woman: Jackson is a strong and brilliant woman who can sing, dance, rap, and act. At the same time, she is really the prototype for a long line of such artists who appear throughout the book. More important is the passage that evokes Louis Armstrong without ever naming him: Lorsque les historiens achèveraient d’écrire l’histoire de ces femmes admirables, inimitables, imbattables, lorsqu’ils en auraient établi la liste aussi longue que la distance séparant l’Afrique des Amériques qu’ils oublient son nom. When the saints go marching in, se disait-elle, I don’t want to be in their number. C’était sur terre qu’elle attendait la félicité.52 [Should historians finish writing the history of those admirable, inimitable, unbeatable women, when they have established such a list that would be as long as the distance separating Africa from America, let them forget its name. When the saints go marching in, she told herself, I don’t want to be in their number. It was on earth that she was waiting for happiness.]

The passage is noteworthy for many reasons. It refers to a canonical piece from the jazz repertoire, one most famously performed by Louis Armstrong who, as we have already seen, is one of – if not the – most recognizable figures in the history of the music.53 Thus, Miano’s ‘détournement,’ her diversion of the 52 Léonora

Miano, Blues pour Élise: Séquences afropéennes, Saison 1 (Paris: Plon, 2010), 14. Subsequent citations from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 53 A ‘classic,’ Louis Armstrong’s version of the song is the first hit that comes up on both YouTube and on Google.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 180

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

181

meaning of this jazz standard (changing ‘I want to be in that number’ to ‘I don’t want to be in their number’), stands also as a rejection of the orthodox jazz history into which Satchmo’s music falls – and the particular way in which his singing played into all of the elements that constituted the racial score. Just as interestingly, this rejection of jazz is done in the context of another rejection: the categorical refusal to be among the ‘femmes admirables,’ the black women who become martyrs for their men, who fulfill an idealized image of the feminine as what she calls, citing the song ‘Fanm’ by the Martinican poet Joby Bernabé, ‘poteau mitan’ or the central column that holds up the house. In sum, she intimates that there is a parallel between the musical sacrifice demanded in jazz in which a social or even epistemological function is prescribed, and the role of black women who are consumed, likewise enrolled as a double negative, in the composition of the racial score. If it appears that she rejects ‘classical’ jazz (and indeed, the only evocation of the musical tradition which has preoccupied all the other authors mentioned to this point is Louis Armstrong), the list of other artists among whose number the novel does want to be is impressive: Joby Bernabé, Polo Rosine, Jean-Michel Rotin, Anick et Janclod, Pascal Vallot, Bams, Cae, Oxmo Puccino, Valéry Boston, Sandra Nkaké, Miriam Makéba, the Isley brothers, Zap Mama, Marvin Gaye, Maxwell, Casey, Anthony Hamilton, Meshell Ndegeocello, Leopold Nord et Vous, Jean Louis Murat, Soft, Arthur H., Bill Loko, Francis Bebey, Alain Jean-Marie, Keyko Nimsay, Womack and Womack, Donny Hathaway, Bill Withers, Curtis Mayfield. The musical styles of these musicians cover zouk, folk-jazz, rap, jazz-funk, Motown, Afro-pop, chanson, French pop, Musette, and Makossa. The great majority of these musicians are from Africa and the diaspora. What makes the broad selection particularly intriguing is that the choices are extremely e­ clectic and draw on a multitude of different traditions. Significantly, while every single one of these artists could, to a greater or lesser degree, be connected to jazz as a primary influence, not one of them is a jazz musician in the traditional sense – that is, the orthodox sense established by jazz’s white critics dating back to at least Hugues Panassié. Rather, they have all chosen to incorporate it in a manner that speaks to a broader audience: these are not the musicians that the French intellectual elite has processed for the last century. They represent the soundtrack of diaspora youth creating communities for themselves, whether in France, the United States, Africa, South America, or the Caribbean. While not all overtly creating dance music, these musicians don’t strive for the hushed reverence of the jazz concert nor have they been experienced in that way. The result is that, although they continue to fall under the perennially problematic rubric of ‘black entertainers,’ they are less clearly trapped by the history of jazz’s critical reception. In other words, rather than being contained within the peculiar aesthetic universe of ‘high art’ in which performance strives for a particular kind of transcendental achievement, these

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 181

10/05/2017 09:09

182

Scoring Race

artists contribute to the construction of a habitus. It is this latter point that Miano clearly appreciates about this music and through which she strives to provide a kind of musical home for the Afropean subject. Just as important as the music in Blues pour Élise, and clearly working as a textual counterpart, is Miano’s literary language. With respect to the music, the common ground these musicians share is the theme of ‘love,’ a diaspora origin (that is reflected not as ‘jazz’ per se but as a generally ‘jazz-influenced’ style), and a desire to remain outside of a high-art aesthetic (none of the artists mentioned is either a straightforward jazz musician, nor is there any mention of ‘classical’ music). Language in the novel in fact functions in much the same manner. That is, where Miano accumulates a series of musical styles and artists, she simultaneously draws on numerous literary and linguistic sources as well. This improvisatory linguistic amalgam mirrors what she is doing with her musical choices: it creates a new and hybrid space that acknowledges simultaneously the French language in which the women of the novel circulate but also Creole, English, and Duala. The inclusion of languages besides French reminds us, just as the musical choices do, that while the women characters are all now Parisian, they also have diverse origins that necessarily complicate the notion of (French/Parisian) blackness. Indeed, these various components speak simultaneously to the numerous possible diaspora origins while also showing the kind of braided identities that constitute diaspora. Akasha, whose chapters begin and end the book, is the most dramatic example of this hybridity: her mother is from Martinique and her father is of Cameroonian origin. The result is that, though the indirect discourse of the narrative is predominantly in French here as elsewhere, her chapters are also punctuated with Creole (poto mitan, tambouyés, etc.), English, and pidgin English (driveurs, speed dating, sound systems, etc.). This merging of musical and linguistic considerations, and the seamless way in which the novel travels between these categories, emphasizes the creative ways in which the novel evades the racial score, creating exponential subdivisions of each category, breaking up (and down) musical styles and recombining them in unexpected ways, refusing orthodox or scored readings of identity and the music to which they are attached – Miano deploys all of these tactics as she navigates through, around and beyond the racial score.

Conclusion It should by now be clear that the racial score is not simply a series of forces permitting escape. Rather, precisely because it constitutes the conditions of being in a Western context, an epistemology, it must, for better or worse, be negotiated. Each of the authors in this chapter has found new and creative ways of doing precisely that, by disrupting the linear consistency of the racial score, subjecting it to a variety of critical engagements that do not ignore it,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 182

10/05/2017 09:09

Challenging the Score

183

but rather subject it to a process of diffusion and complication. In the case of Kangni Alem this takes place through the double gesture of a deliberate historicization of one of jazz’s principal actors, Duke Ellington, and by showing the ways in which popular African music has desacralized jazz, taking on the title without the sacred shibboleth. Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 instead focused on the various ways in which jazz is used as a social commodity, and through the bleak irony of his setting shows what a once radical musical form looks like once it has been co-opted, prostituted, and redeployed as a distant and decadent shadow of its original purpose and form. Abdourahman Waberi’s La Divine Chanson offers a very different reading of jazz, choosing to disrupt the racial score by showing where and how the narrative that constitutes it fails to account for figures who refuse to conform to its rigid parameters. The main character navigates unrepentantly across the linguistic-musical boundary, dissolving the differential equation, while transforming the jazz medium into a powerful poetic process at the center of which is a radical refusal to accept a reifying principle. Finally, Léonora Miano presents a gendered critique of jazz as the vehicle for an overdetermined black masculinity while thinking beyond the hierarchical division of high and low art(s). Her blending of musical styles and her insistent focus on the musical tastes of her female protagonists add another important chapter to the counter-discursive projects that have emerged in the last two decades. In all of these texts, what becomes apparent is the deep awareness that jazz continues to offer important ideological and existential instruments for the diaspora artist. At the same time, these artists have become increasingly adept at teasing apart the terms of the racial score from another history of the music: one in which other narratives, other ways of considering the musical and the literary, become possible.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 183

10/05/2017 09:09

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 184

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds: Film and the Racial Score

4

Up to this point we have seen how the reception of jazz in France – and the subsequent role of jazz in Francophone African fiction – can be traced back to the tension in Western thought between music and literature. Moreover, the argument has addressed how the gerrymandered boundary between these two media has naturalized, among other things, the idea of race. The argument has been that the critical apparatus that creates jazz is the sediment of aesthetic contouring which, over more than two millennia, has been directed toward race’s naturalization – a process by which Africa, to cite V. Y. Mudimbe, is transformed into a ‘place of “primitiveness” and “disorder.”’1 The orchestrated, that is, scored, tension between music as the exemplary black medium (and indeed, the proof of blackness) and writing as white (and the ontological guarantee of whiteness) has a long history that, in its French incarnation, culminated in the ‘tumulte noir’ of the interwar years and was most dramatically distilled in a French idea of jazz that largely still pertains. This construction/reception of jazz in turn produced a series of distinct responses in the work of French ‘continental’ authors as well as those commonly referred to as ‘Francophone African.’ Among this latter group, the response evolved from Ousmane Socé’s very early Mirages de Paris to recent jazz fiction by authors such as Léonora Miano and Fiston Mwanza Mujila. Each case examined has revealed a rich yet strained negotiation between the writer’s narrative and the persistent jazz trope. Consistent across the decades is the fact that all these African authors sense in the music something that is both familiar and potentially foreign; beneficial yet fraught. Yet despite the evident usefulness of distinguishing between white (French) and black (Francophone) texts, what unites these works, whether ‘white’ or ‘black,’ is the notable absence of actual music – at least according to their own expressed or implicit assumptions about what music is.2 That is, while the evocations and invocations of jazz constitute a veritable library of names, places, 1 See

V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985; London: James Currey, 1990), 20. 2 To maintain that music physically reverberates while writing signifies only in being read denies the blurring of categories, the necessary reverberations of signification, the silent signifying of music within text.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 185

10/05/2017 09:09

186

Scoring Race

concerts, events, anecdotes, and signal components of what this study has defined collectively as the ‘jazz shibboleth,’ none has achieved the miracle of making prose musical – that is, of making prose physically sound out its existence.3 While there have been various attempts by poets (Philippe Soupault’s ‘Rag-Time’ comes to mind) to achieve a blending of the written and the sonic in ‘jazz’ poetry, there is, as Yannick Séité warns, little chance of actually achieving such a convergence: Dans cet ordre des équivalences formelles, des adéquations recherchées sur le plan du signifiant, la prudence est donc de mise et l’on comprend assez vite que même les exemples de trans-sémiotisme probable ou avéré sont toujours menacés par l’anecdote.4 [In this order of formal equivalencies, parallels sought on the level of the signifier, prudence is in order, and one understands rather quickly that even probable or claimed trans-semiotic examples are always threatened by the anecdotal.]

Séité underscores here that attempts to create a kind of jazz effect within the linguistic sphere are threatened by the trap of the anecdotal – by which, if one reads through the understatement, he means that they are inevitably anecdotal. Jazz in poetry devolves into a series of analogies that never escape the mundanity of the cliché, reflecting the classificatory impulse on which the score depends. Because music is, according to the racial score, literally radically other – the radical other of the literary – jazz remains a signifier in which the precipitate of centuries of fantasies and counter-fantasies settles into a protean and astonishingly resilient idea of race, one where, within the very ‘demusified’ logic – a logic in which, as we saw in the opening chapter, music is expressly excluded from the (white) literary (as white) – nothing can resonate. That is, borrowing from the double meaning of the word ‘résonner’ [resonate/reason] in French, nothing can think – or be thought.5 At the same time, as Gilroy so astutely noted, it is also in music – most strikingly in jazz, perhaps – that blackness finds its violent reification as an ontological ‘fact.’ For that same reason, it is there, in music, that blackness has perhaps most eloquently negotiated a place for itself in Western modernity – a modernity that it has helped construct, not only in music, but in 3 This

is particularly true since the very terms by which Western aesthetics has defined the musical have radically cleaved it from the originary poeisis in which, in Greek thought, music and language were merged media. 4 Yannick Séité, Le jazz, à la lettre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), 134. 5 Thinkers from Stéphane Mallarmé to André Meschonnic (particularly the latter’s Critique du rythme, Anthropologie historique du langage [1982]) have tried to return the musical to language, yet in both cases, the attempt is to give precedence to language, denying an ontological primacy to music. That is, in both cases, the (idea of a) primal rhythm is posited as captured by poetic language rather than as music. Rhythm is, according to Mallarmé and Meschonnic, poetic first. Thus, being is poetic (rather than musical).

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 186

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

187

modernity’s every constitutive feature. Music in general and jazz in particular therefore stands in for, or constitutes, a kind of myth of origin to which diaspora thinkers regularly return, even as they recognize its epistemological inability to constitute the Western archival requirement that would grant authorship (and subjectivity) – which is to say the same grounding status as origin attributed to (and by) (white) writing.6 That, in sum, is the racial score. Because it includes sound, the case of film – which this study addresses here as a coda with room for much future study – represents a fascinating complication in the argument developed to this point: jazz is now actually heard. As with its appearances in fiction, it remains a fantasy invested with the idea of race. Because it is actually present, either non-diagetically as soundtrack, or diagetically in the form of performers within the filmic narrative, music now demands to be addressed as a material presence in a way it could never achieve in the novel. The black body literally and/or sonically demands to be confronted as more than a floating signifier within the literary text: the material existence of the musical subject stands before the viewer demanding to be recognized as embodied – even if only that. The difference between film and written fiction is therefore the degree to which the musical voice is empowered actively to transact its relation to the racial score being constructed around and through it, in what Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus call a delirious ‘global field of coexistence.’7 Adding a further twist, whereas what is commonly defined in the West as jazz is directly addressed in a number of both French and Francophone African literary works, the same is much less true of film. Or rather, if jazz becomes one of French film’s iconic musical genres, it is far less common in African film – to the point that one might speculate that there exists a suspicion among African filmmakers regarding jazz. Why might that be exactly? What follows will examine two films – the Josephine Baker vehicle Princesse Tam-Tam (1935), and Senegalese filmmaker Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s remake of the Carmen myth, Karmen Geï (2001) – as case studies that speak to this larger context, with the understanding that a fully fleshed-out analysis would require an entirely different book.

Incarnating the Score: Josephine Baker and Princesse Tam-Tam The first film that will be addressed is the Josephine Baker vehicle Princesse Tam-Tam, the third of the films that the American dancer, singer, and actress made following her era-defining run in the Revue nègre, which transformed her into a cultural icon in France and around the world. This film followed her turn 6 V.

Y. Mudimbe argues this in The Invention of Africa. Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Continuum, 2004), 302.

7 Gilles

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 187

10/05/2017 09:09

188

Scoring Race

in the silent-era La Sirène des tropiques (1927) and her role in Zouzou (1934).8 With growing degrees of subtlety and precision, all three films construct Baker as an exotic other, caught up by rhythm and music, close to nature, sensuous and sultry – yet a child at heart. Baker represents an archetypal (and inaugural) instance of the racial score in that she became, in a sense, the incarnation of jazz. There is a certain irony to this for, as Jeremy Lane notes, Baker today might not be considered a jazz performer at all.9 Still, as Matthew Jordan underscores in Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity, ‘no event in the history of jazz in France captured the collective imagination of the nation as much as did Josephine Baker and La revue nègre.’ This initial éclat has not faded, as evidenced by the fact that ‘La revue nègre has inspired more written accounts, both in its time and since, than any other group of Jazz Age performers.’ Just as significantly, ‘an innovative group of cultural theorists … sought to develop a mode of writing about jazz that would account for the strangeness of its cultural reception.’10 Thus, this writing that defined the music at and immediately following its moment of reception has continued to accumulate around Baker, further conditioning her as the essence of jazz itself – and indeed positing her as the first name (just as the Revue nègre becomes the first place) in the ever expanding index of the jazz shibboleth. In sum, the appearance of Baker on the French stage, as both a real and phantasmagorical phenomenon, was finally mediated through a critical reception in which jazz itself was given shape. At the heart of this definition, and within the circular logic of Baker’s performance, these authors decided what was going to define the music just as she anticipated the racialized needs and expectations of her audience. At the same time, as Kaiama L. Glover notes in her introduction to the special issue of Scholar & Feminist Online dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Baker’s birth, Baker is not only jazz. Or rather: Josephine Baker is in many ways problematic: she is postmodern and postcolonial, and she is as controversial and difficult to define as these terms themselves. To comprehensively account for her initial and enduring celebrity means looking closely at the many facets of her artistic and political identity while also addressing larger questions concerning the French and American social, cultural, and political parameters that have so determined relations between Whites and Blacks, France and the United States, Europe and its colonies, and ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ over the course of the twentieth century.11 8 In

which she played opposite another rising icon of the era, French star Jean Gabin. Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 59. 10 Jordan, Le Jazz, 102–3. 11 Kaiama L. Glover, ‘Introduction: Why Josephine Baker?’, The Scholar & Feminist Online 6.1–2 (2007–08), http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/glover_01.htm. 9 Lane,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 188

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

189

Indeed, Baker has garnered increasingly robust attention in the last twenty-five years as at least two generations of scholars have tried to recuperate her from the stereotypes of the banana dance and the mugging of her early performances. The readings of these films in turn appear, as Anne Anlin Cheng notes, to ‘remain tethered to the vexed poles of vilification and veneration,’12 though these two views often merge. For some, she is, as Elizabeth Ezra puts it, ‘a floating signifier of cultural difference’13 who signals France’s inability or unwillingness to assimilate its racially different colonial subjects. Baker’s raced body is, in Ezra’s and many similar readings, captured within the material conditions of its moment and place of production. Thus, beyond Baker herself, she becomes a prism through which the two decades before the war are refracted, in which we can see the clockwork of empire, race, gender, sexuality, and industrial modernity. Conversely, other readings focus more on her counter-hegemonic practices of resistance – that is, on Baker as an empowered actress in her own fictionalized narrative. In this interpretative mode, Baker becomes an agent of new and subversive models of subjectivity: a gay icon,14 a civil rights activist,15 an international humanist,16 or an anticipation of the postmodern in her ‘stage authenticity.’17 More recent criticism, sensing an affective overinvestment in rehabilitating Baker, has sought to achieve a critical balance. Terri Francis, for example, notes that the ‘fact that Baker was a celebrity means that her life, body, and words, once made public, circulated as consumable signs in an orbit beyond her ultimate control[,] but,’ she adds, they ‘were nonetheless generated by her.’18 Implicit in Francis’s claim is that it would be naive to think that Baker simply resisted unilateral forces bearing down on her. Part of the process of negotiation meant sometimes collaborating with some of the worst features of, for example, the French colonial enterprise – as when she accepted the

12 Anne

Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3. 13 Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 99. 14 Lester Strong, ‘Josephine Baker’s Hungry Heart,’ The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 13.5 (2006): 16–19. 15 Mary L. Dudziak, ‘Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War,’ The Journal of American History 81.2 (1994): 543–70. 16 Jonathan P. Eburne, ‘Adoptive Affinities: Josephine Baker’s Humanist International,’ The Scholar & Feminist Online 6.1–2 (2007–08), http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/eburne_01. htm. 17 Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 18 Terri Francis, ‘Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Celebrity,’ in Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora, ed. Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan Eburne (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 128.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 189

10/05/2017 09:09

190

Scoring Race

title ‘Queen of the colonies’ for the 1931 Exposition Coloniale.19 In other words, according to this approach, Baker agreed to participate in the construction of black alterity as much as she suffered from its consequences. This was something for which she was widely resented at the time by other members of the African diaspora – as was made evident in Jane Nardal’s identification of Baker with ‘pantins exotiques,’ the dancing puppets of a colonial master’s desire. This same Baker makes her unflattering appearance in Socé’s Mirages de Paris, which I addressed in Chapter 2. Jeanne Schepper sees in the cumulative Baker criticism a process of what, borrowing from José Esteban Muños, she calls ‘disidentification’: ‘a performative recitation’ that ‘critically recycles tired images or racist, sexist, and homophobic stereotypes.’20 As Scheper wryly points out, [h]olding onto Baker as an icon of African American feminism can be unsettling since she made her living through the spectacle of the black female body on stage, deploying racist tropes and perpetuating ‘Black Venus’ narratives of primitivist exotic sexuality, while also pursuing the trappings of white stardom.

At the same time, it is important for Scheper to construct a politics of performance in which Baker moves through various locations and identities in order to carve out a habitable space for modernism’s Others, for those bodies classified and contained through scientific racism’s pervasive and gendered ideology as primitive or deviant and then rigorously excluded and exploited under European colonialism and Jim Crow segregation.21

This effort to find a median path, to identify a process by which to ‘carve out’ a ‘habitable space for modernism’s Others,’ is an important gesture that finds an echo in Katherine Groo’s reframing of Baker’s films using the concept of métissage. For Groo, the origins of instability, uncertainty, and incoherence in Baker’s films exceed reflexive narrative play. Baker’s films are themselves grounded in and born of geographic, generic, and ontological mixture. Indeed, one cannot keep track of the interstices that constitute these films.22

Again, Groo, like Scheper before her, tries to find a middle ground. Like so many 19 The

offer was later rescinded. Nevertheless, her relationship to this fraught event was always problematic inasmuch as she accepted it as well as continuing to serve as a major focus for advertising (for Pernod, for example) that exploited the Exposition Coloniale as a theme. 20 Jeanne Scheper, ‘Of La Baker, I am a Disciple: the Diva Politics of Reception,’ Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 22.65[2] (2007): 75. 21 Scheper, ‘Of La Baker, I am a Disciple,’ 76. 22 Katherine Groo, ‘Shadow Lives: Josephine Baker and the Body of Cinema,’ Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 54.1 (2013): 35.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 190

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

191

other recent critics, they try to negotiate the patently problematic aspect of what, borrowing from Huston Baker, we might call Josephine Baker’s own manner of ‘mastery of form’ (by which she would live up to, or correspond to, the stereotyped expressions expected of her) by also locating within her performances instances of ‘deformation of mastery’ (where she would turn those stereotypes on their head through various tactical forms of engagement).23 Nevertheless, what has been missing in these otherwise intricate re-readings of the American star is, perhaps, the actual function of music in her various performances and the way in which she engages with it. Or rather, the way in which it defines her and how she assists and resists that frame. One of the recent scholars to begin the engagement with the specifically musical dimension of Baker’s (film) performances is Edwin Hill, in his description of her in Black Soundscapes, White Stages. Hill’s analysis represents a noteworthy and important intervention that informs my own analysis, in that it recognizes the musical medium as a site of contention where the diaspora will to subjectivity encounters the white resistance to and exploitation of black demands for recognition. In this study, speaking specifically of the American artist, Hill describes eloquently, through a musical prism, Baker’s complex function as a cultural symbol: Josephine Baker’s real and imaginary life are inscribed in partitions: soundtexts, musical transcripts, and filmic scripts that function as so many screens for projecting fantasies of the other and the elsewhere, even as they also serve as so many walls of separation and exclusion, papering over histories of border-crossing and the possibility of authentic love across the line.24

In other words, the fictions, films, and musical numbers Baker animates constitute echo chambers and halls of mirrors for the hereditary fantasies of men unable to perceive how paradoxically resistant her body is to this reductive gaze. Of particular interest in Hill’s commentary is his focus on what he calls ‘soundtexts’ and ‘musical transcripts.’ At the heart of the Baker phenomenon, therefore, is the manner in which she is framed by music. Because there is an abundance both of music and of the visual presence of Josephine Baker’s dancing body, her films represent a particularly potent example of how music, most notably jazz, scores her body as racial. Perhaps no single performance available to us better demonstrates this double process of framing and being framed, creating and being created by jazz better than Princesse Tam-Tam. In the film, Baker plays what Andy Fry describes as a ‘tragic mulatto’ role in which ‘a journey from Africa leads to a scandalous 23 Houston

Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 24 Hill, Black Soundscapes, White Stages, 76.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 191

10/05/2017 09:09

192

Scoring Race

performance despite her attempt to be “civilized.”’25 The African half returns as an inescapable atavism: a reversion ‘to “authentic” racial characteristics (especially in dancing) [that] prevent her from achieving a full transformation, belying her “Frenchness.”’26 Baker’s ‘“authentic” racial characteristics’ are, of course, intimately connected to a whole grammar of performance at the heart of which lie music and dance. As virtually every critic who discusses Baker notes, there is a collapse between the character and the actress playing the part across her film career. In addition to the powerful parallels between the filmic narrative and Baker’s own gutter-to-glory life story, there is simply the immediate recognition of ‘La Baker,’ the famous nightclub performer of La Revue nègre and, subsequently, of the Folies Bergère (where she donned the notorious banana skirt). This recognition meant that what was perceived of her was not the narrative arc of a script so much as the celluloid incarnation of everything Baker stood for: the material instantiation of race through jazz. In all her films, and in Princesse Tam-Tam in particular, the racial score was reflected in her attachment to animals, her communication with children, and her lack of culture (evident in her dress, eating habits, naivety, etc.). What makes Princesse Tam-Tam unique is not only that Baker has reached the height of her fame but that it shows the degree to which she came to incarnate the musical mechanisms of the racial score. While many have noted how, within the movie, Baker serves as a muse who is returned to her place of origin as an unassimilable other of French identity, what is just as striking is how this also becomes the story of the racial score: music is given a foundational role through the figure of Baker, but it is ultimately writing that gathers up this powerful musical medium and transforms it into the manageable coherence of a literary narrative. Or at least so it would appear. That is, to the extent that Baker appears in the film, or indeed, as the sole purpose of the film, it is as embodied musicality (itself, a concatenation of associated features cathected to race). As soon as that function has been fulfilled, her performance, radically divorced from the rational force of writing, is returned to the inexpressive natural world from which it came. Writing would appear, in the final analysis, to order its universe and the hierarchy of subjectivities that inhabit it. Indeed, writing seems to bracket the narrative, appearing as it does at both the beginning and the end of the film. The story begins with author Max de Mirecourt (Albert Préjean), who is suffering from writer’s block and is hectored by his shrewish wife, Lucie (Germaine

25 Andy

Fry, Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 156. 26 Fry, Paris Blues, 156.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 192

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

193

Aussey).27 His ghostwriter Coton suggests that he travel to escape the pressures of home and Max decides to go to Tunisia. There, he discovers the street urchin Aouïna (Josephine Baker),28 and with the help of his faithful manservant Dar, who captures her, he is able to introduce her into his home. He brings Aouïna back with him to Paris where, Pygmalion-like, he seeks to transform her into a civilized society woman (with the intention of making his wife jealous and winning her back from the ‘Maharaja’).29 Ultimately, the force of nature proves too powerful, and during the grand gala organized by the Maharaja (by whom Lucie has pretended to be seduced to make her husband jealous), Aouïna can’t help herself. Shedding the veneer of ‘culture’ Max has imposed on her, she begins to dance to the ‘exotic’ rhythms of the tam-tam and the jazz with which it is conflated. This moment of sympathetic resonance between body and music is where and when it becomes absolutely clear that Baker/Aouïna is, at her very core, essentially musical. The story ends with Aouïna back in Tunisia, now living a simple and happy life with Dar in Max’s old villa, which has been turned into a menagerie. The cleaving of humanity into racial categories, most radically expressed by Max the writer and Aouïna the incarnation of music, is established from the opening scenes. Indeed, Max’s ‘African adventure’ begins with his declaration to Coton, who accompanies him throughout the story,30 that ‘on va partir chez les sauvages, les vrai sauvages. Oui, en Afrique, en Afrique’ [We are going to go among the savages, the real savages. Yes, in Africa, in Africa’].31 The scene then fades from a ‘fake,’ that is, painted, palm tree on one of the walls of Max and Lucie’s apartment to a ‘real’ palm swaying in the wind. The camera pans across a clump of prickly pear cactus until we see, crouched down among them, 27 Princesse

Tam-Tam, directed by Edmond Gréville (New York: Kino International, 2005 [1935]). 28 Throughout the story, her name is pronounced Aouïna and this is the name in the press clipping at the end of the film. Nevertheless, the subtitles render her name as Alwina and a number of critics use this name for her. 29 The Maharajah serves as the third term in the racial equation here. That is, the ‘Maharajah’ is located in a manner that Edward Saïd never addressed in his canonical Orientalism: the alterity of the ‘East’ could never exist in the absence of the ‘African,’ the static (a-historical) pre-human starting point from which the Oriental, already embedded within history, if historically ‘retarded,’ can exist in its defining relationship to the West. The ‘Maharajah’ is the decadent extreme, a surfeit of culture (without the ‘science,’ Western technological progress, that might temper it). He, ironically, serves as the ‘passeur,’ the translator between African and European worlds. 30 Coton’s name perversely evokes the history of slavery also implicit in his function as Max’s ‘nègre,’ or ghostwriter. 31 Significantly, Max’s emphasis on the word ‘vrai’ or ‘real’ undermines his wife (whom we have just heard insulting him through the door). Lucie de Mirecourt’s role as a kind of ersatz ‘savage’ thereby draws an important line between race and gender that, in the context of this film, would merit further investigation.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 193

10/05/2017 09:09

194

Scoring Race

Aouïna’s face framed by these exotic plants. She thus becomes the breathing symbol of the savagery of Africa that has just been verbally articulated by Max.32 If there had been any doubt about where the African woman is located on the evolutionary scale, from her hideout she spots a donkey and a herd of sheep that she immediately joins in comfortable communion; this is followed by a cut to her running across desert sand with a sheep draped around her shoulders. Indeed, her breezy ‘naturalness’ in garb and behavior stands in stark and deliberate contrast to the other (white) women in the film, who all incarnate varying degrees of snobbish excess connected to a kind of (implicitly aristocratic) hyper-whiteness or excessive civilization. Every subsequent scene in the movie reiterates this logic: there is a clear dichotomy between (African) nature as good (fresh, free, childlike yet sensuous) and (French) culture as bad (shackled, decadent, unimaginative, castrating). Aouïna’s entire performance is captured in Max’s explanation about her behavior: ‘c’est nature.’ Thus, the contrasting metaphors of nature and culture, vitality and decadence, quickly become the heavy-handed symbolic drumbeat of the entire movie, beginning with the literal presentation of the (naturally!) uncredited African drummer during the opening sequence (the same musician who will reappear during the final dance scene). This leaden symbolism has been amply commented on by critics and does not require further glossing. What I wish to emphasize instead is the important role of music, and especially of jazz, in this equation. Indeed, because Josephine Baker plays Aouïna, and because, unlike any other actor or actress before her (or since), Baker was jazz in the white imagination, Aouïna synecdochically incarnates the racial score, the contours of which I have been developing throughout this study. Every move she makes – from the opening credits when she runs down the steps of the Roman ruins at Dougga, to the film’s conclusion in which the colonial house has been taken over by a menagerie of animals – outlines and reiterates what this study has argued is the function of jazz in the production of the racial paradigm. As already noted, Baker-as-Aouïna conveys the racial score: she is jazz (as blackness, as sex, as savagery – all of the racial stereotypes that were deployed in the Revue nègre and in her subsequent turn in La Folie du jour). What is particularly striking, however, is the manner in which jazz and Baker’s jazzed body subsume a broad palette of ‘exotic’ musical styles, from the orientalist compositions that accompany the scenes in Tunisia (such as the scene set in the market), to the schmaltzy French show music that accompanies the scenes set in Paris. While most critical examinations of the film emphasize the various ways in which Baker performs race/difference/the feminine, what interests me here is the manner in which jazz, in a sense, performs Baker – that 32

Significantly, she also represents the natural authenticity of an absolute femininity that stands in stark contrast to Lucie’s petulant and decadent shrewishness.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 194

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

195

is, how jazz overdetermines the categories into which she is slotted as a performer – categories that she simultaneously is fit into by the racial score and that she likewise produces. Indeed, jazz becomes the invisible referent that absorbs everything in the movie, as does Baker herself. A notable example of this occurs when, in one of the first ‘musical’ scenes in the film, Baker meets up with a crowd of children among the ruins of Dougga. Another orientalist melody plays and Baker begins to dance. But what she performs is not the corresponding Orientalist ‘belly dance,’ or something similarly racially and ethnically coded, but rather a recognizably Bakerian sequence of dance moves: cartwheels, a chicken walk, and a shimmy.33 The evident difference inscribed in the setting, the children’s faces, and the musical score all get reduced to, or absorbed into, jazz, in which all difference can ultimately be contained and performed as unambiguously ‘other’ according to a precise and unalterable dictum. It should nevertheless be clear that the racial score, at the center of which lies Josephine Baker, can be, and in its French context most often is, articulated in positive terms: Aouïna, like Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘négresse’ in La Nausée, is consistently the antidote to Max’s creative and existential exhaustion, and her dancing a kinetic reminder of her absolute freedom – freedom on which Max wishes to draw. The scene where he first tries to ‘civilize’ his new plaything swipes to the Maharajah’s French palace. There, the regal owner tells Lucie, ‘c’est admirable, l’Orient. Tout le monde vit en pleine nature. Je sais bien que vous nous appelez des sauvages. Mais la plus misérable chez nous à une indépendance que vous ne soupçonnerez pas’ [The Orient is admirable. Everybody lives in a state of nature. I know that you call us savages. But the most lowly among us has an independence that you can’t even imagine].34 This scene is followed by an immediate cut to French couples ballroom dancing. Their rigid and carefully choreographed gestures (and the saccharine orchestration) stand in stark contrast to the jazzy moves Baker executed a few minutes earlier. Of course, and this is key to her performance, Baker’s ostensibly ‘natural’ moves are just as orchestrated as those of her white counterparts: the seams marking nature’s construction are disguised – papered over, as Edwin Hill would say – by the myth of jazz itself. In the process, we see how film constitutes a compounding, an exponential multiplication of the 33 On

the question of Baker’s unique dance style (and indeed, on whether it was unique), see Anthea Kraut, ‘Whose Choreography? Josephine Baker and the Question of (Dance) Authorship,’ The Scholar & Feminist Online 6.1–2 (2007–08), http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/ kraut_02.htm. 34 The endless slippage between various forms of difference is one of the most fascinating features of Princesse Tam-Tam. Baker’s métissé African-American body is endlessly transposable. At the beginning of the movie, Max declares he is going to ‘savage Africa.’ Now, because of the editing, the Maharajah seems to be commenting on Tunisia, thereby conflating Orient and Africa in an unnuanced state of radical difference.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 195

10/05/2017 09:09

196

Scoring Race

score – in which every medium (visual, literary, musical, plastic, etc.) is carefully brought together to create a uniquely powerful reality effect.35 Nevertheless, the most striking feature of the film remains the complex relationship it stages between music and writing and the manner in which these are mapped onto nature and culture. One of the many moments in the film that stresses this divide occurs when, having just tried and failed to wear high-heeled shoes, Aouïna runs off to join Dar, Max’s ‘native’ manservant, on his sailboat.36 As they sail across the bay, Dar suggests that when wild birds (by which he means Aouïna herself) feed from the hand of man, they lose their freedom. Transforming the culinary metaphor, Aouïna responds: ‘Si tu savais comme il est gentil, l’étranger. Il parle si bien. Ses paroles sont comme du miel’ [If you only knew how nice the stranger is. He speaks so well. His words are like honey]. The immediate cut to Max yelling, ‘les salauds!’ [the bastards!] quickly gives the lie to Max’s supposedly honeyed speech. Nevertheless, what is more important is that for Aouïna, speech is an immediate and natural form of communication, a fact highlighted by the soft-focus shot and the whimsical expression on Baker’s face. The scene implies her faith in a degree zero of language. In contrast, we know that Max’s speech is entirely artificial, that it is always-already literary, (in) representation: we know, for example, that everything he tells Aouïna is being transcribed verbatim by Coton for his book. Just as significantly, if Max’s speech is already literature, moving toward the printed page and detached from any ‘real’ subjective investment by the entirely mercantile nature of his literary enterprise, his writing is evidently also formulaic, and much if not most of it is in fact produced by Coton, to whom we will return shortly. Aouïna’s speech, on the other hand, tends toward what the film conceives as the absolute authenticity of the musical. Immediately after Max has raged over the newspaper reports of his wife’s doings with the Maharajah, there is a cut back to Aouïna singing ‘Rêves’ [Dreams] as she sails along with her future husband, Dar. While the song is anything but jazz, because it is Baker, 35 The

idea of a score at work continues in the subsequent scene, in which the Majarajah ‘performs’ the ritual of seduction (in the shadow image of him kissing Lucie’s hand), which then cuts back to Max having (falsely) declared to Aouïna that he loves her. The purportedly spontaneous realm of the affective is likewise caught up in the racial score: Aouïna, for whom love would simply be without the declaration, asks: ‘Pourquoi vous dites que vous m’aimez?’ [Why do you say you love me?] The absolute artifice (and manipulativeness) of Max’s performance becomes all the more evident when we learn that Coton, hidden behind a curtain, is copying down every word of their exchange for the novel Max is ostensibly writing. The closest Max can get to sentiment is when he says of Aouïna, ‘je suis ému par ce petit animal’ [I’m touched by this little creature]. The racial frontier could not be more starkly established. 36 One of the more perverse details of the film is that, having discovered her trespassing on Max’s property, Dar had tied Aouïna to a tree and was preparing to beat her – until Max stops him, thereby confirming Gayatri Spivak’s claim in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ that white men construct themselves as saving ‘native’ women from ‘native’ men.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 196

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

197

and because of the way in which it is contrasted to the literary dimension Max inhabits, it begins actively to prepare the ground for the climactic dance scene at the end of the film in which jazz finally, quite literally, enters what Edwin Hill refers to as the ‘white stage.’ Before that final act, the film presents several musical modalities to us as alternatives to everything Baker/Aouïna stands for. Aside from the ballroom scene, the moment when Max and Aouïna go to the opera is likewise a telling instance of the musical’s relation to race and mastery. The deeply ritualized procedures of spectatorship (where as much attention is paid to those attending as to what is happening on stage), the careful social parsing accomplished by the seating pattern (floor versus balcony, for example), the extreme artifice of the trained voices and stylized storylines of the libretto, all contribute to a sense that this musical practice is firmly aligned with the literary, that is, the ‘white,’ part of the score. And indeed, knowing the score is an integral part of this social practice. It is no accident that, at the end of the first act, Aouïna begins to applaud long before anybody else, thereby indicating her incompatibility with the performance she witnesses, despite the training she has just undergone to ‘civilize’ her. Such an intuition finds confirmation in the bracketing of this first act, which begins and ends with a close-up of the conductor’s hands marking the rhythm over the pages of the music. This emphasis on the conductor and the writing – the score – from which he works follows a movement that I discussed in the first chapter. Control over the Dionysian forces of music have been given over, since the nineteenth century, to a master, the conductor, who follows the score from on high while directing the players beneath him. Interestingly, when Aouïna breaks out in premature applause just before the closing notes, the audience turns to her (and not to the stage), making it appear as if it were she they were applauding rather than the performance. In this sense, beyond the sterile world of opera, Baker once again seems to draw the forces of musicality towards her centripetally as a kind of essence of the medium – the heart of which, ultimately, is jazz. Through her, everything becomes jazz, returns to its natural state as jazz, returns to jazz as nature.37 In this scene, Baker doesn’t actually have to perform in order to become music. She, rather than the opera, is what is applauded, as if she had been performing, were always performing, were always Josephine Baker. Shortly thereafter, another scene reminds the viewer once again that yes, indeed, it is Baker. A lengthy montage of paintings and caricatures of Aouïna sutures the two scenes together. Indeed, confirming my argument to this point, these images 37 Nevertheless,

to the extent that the context here is the ritual world of opera, it remains r­eassuringly contained by those same conducting hands and the score that returns at the beginning and ending of the second act, as they had in the first, without Aouïna’s interruption this time.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 197

10/05/2017 09:09

198

Scoring Race

underscore Aouïna’s conflation with Josephine Baker, since they are immediately recognizable formulaic representations of the famous African-American artist (with her smile, hair, posture, etc.) being used as props for the film. Further, in doing this, the gallery also confirms the intuition established during the opera that Aouïna is jazz for the very simple reason that this character is Baker herself – the essence of jazz in the French imaginary.38 The visual capture of her form in these various visual and plastic representations (there is also a sculpture) underscores Aouïna/Baker’s imprisonment within cultural parameters that first explicitly define her as an animal and then designate her for domestication, the very artistic frame in which Baker’s iconic figure is developed and preserved.39 Shortly thereafter, confirming this carceral metaphor, the camera shoots through the crisscrossing bars at the back of a chair or settee, panning over Baker/Aouïna’s supine body, further emphasizing the idea of her imprisonment within civilization’s disciplinary and desiring gaze. Responding to this imprisonment so emphatically rendered by the shot through the chair, Aouïna tells Max that she cannot go out to the ambassador’s house that night. Pushing back against the social chains in which Max has wrapped her, she escapes for a night on the town among the working-class folk, ostensibly returning to her own kind (or the closest there is in France). Having amused herself (accompanied by Dar) with the ‘natural’ working class at the carnival, she discovers a small bar where she is, finally, free to be herself in an oasis of alterity within the grimness of the French ‘same.’ First, an American (three-quarter) shot shows Aouïna and Dar walking down the stairs. This cuts to a medium shot (through a row of liquor bottles) that follows her across the bar as she sits down. At this point, a black saxophone player appears in the foreground. The angle at this moment has Aouïna literally coming out of the bell of the instrument, thereby becoming the music he and the rest of the band are playing: a jazzed dance tune that will serve as the introduction to the song ‘Sous le soleil d’Afrique,’ which Baker soon takes over. The song itself begins in a laconic ‘chanson française’ style, but quickly picks up tempo and transitions into a swinging jazz piece in which Aouïna once again merges unmistakably with Josephine Baker. As in the scene at Dougga, Baker deploys her black body, strutting and swinging – ‘une danse de sauvage dans une boite à matelot’ [a savage dance in a sailor’s joint] as it is later described – in a way that fascinates

38 The

very same thing happens in more condensed form in the earlier Zouzou (1934). At the end the film, we see a poster for Zouzou’s cabaret act on which a worker places a sign that says: 100th performance. The poster in question is signed ‘Paul Colin,’ the artist responsible for all of the most famous posters of Baker during her heyday. 39 Indeed, this metaphor provides the most memorable scene in her previous film, Zouzou, in which she famously sings the song ‘Haïti’ in a giant birdcage.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 198

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

199

the other patrons at the bar and of course satisfies the movie-going audience for whom this was the principal expectation.40 Aouïna is never entirely free, however, as long as she is in this Western prison. The apparent ‘freedom’ of the underground bar is interrupted by the arrival of high-class partiers, slumming it. They immediately recognize Aouïna, and shortly thereafter, one of the young women informs Lucie about Aouïna’s performance. This leads to Lucie’s decision to out Aouïna as a ‘savage’ by having the Maharajah throw a grand party where the ‘African’s’ (true) nature will be revealed. In setting her trap, Lucie assumes that Aouïna’s atavistic urge to dance will be triggered by the music (and the help of a little alcohol). This extravagant scene at the ‘party’ (styled after music hall spectaculars such as those at the Folies Bergère) goes from ‘orientalist’ clichés to ‘classical’ orchestration, and finally to ‘jazz.’ It is when the band starts to ‘swing’ that Aouïna begins to wiggle in her seat, soon overtaken by the rhythm. The final trigger is the African ‘tom tom’ player (whom we had seen in the opening credits of the film) initiating a frenetic rhythm. Aouïna finally leaps onto the stage and begins, once again, to dance. The most dramatic and frenetic moment of this climactic scene is when the camera pans back and forth between her and the shirtless African drummer.41 Yet despite Lucie’s wish to humiliate Aouïna, at the end of the number, rather than being laughed off the stage, Aouïna is carried aloft as the star (she evidently is). Again, the coding is very clear here. Aouïna is Josephine Baker (not the unknown quantity behind the name, but the name itself – the star). That star, in turn, is jazz incarnate. It is expected, assumed, that she will dance, and that her dancing, regardless of the music, will replicate the bodily grammar – the jazz performance – for which she is known. The three scenes closely abide by the racial score, and in all three cases, whatever the relationship to ‘jazz’ of the actual music, it becomes jazz, is made jazz, precisely because Baker herself is the incarnation of that music, just as jazz makes her who she is: the exotic, erotic other of the desiring white male gaze evoked in Socé’s Mirages de Paris. That is, jazz is not, as defined by this film, a historically, socially, and artistically determined collection of practices expressed through individual artists, but a 40 Interestingly,

the music moves back to a more classical French ‘musette’ or folk sound at the end of the tune. Baker continues to dance, now with one of the working-class white customers, underscoring her ability to cross musical boundaries as long as they retain their authentic attachment to the unmediated simplicity of difference (whether working-class, black, or other). 41 The fact that the music, though ‘jazzy,’ also brings in pseudo-Spanish elements connects the film’s logic to another powerful ‘racial’ tradition in the French imaginary: the ‘flamenco’ exoticism exemplified by Carmen. Once again, all nuance within the racial score is eliminated – something that happens to an astonishing degree throughout this film, in which African, Indian, Caribbean, North African, and Chinese characters all blur into a racial other that Baker globally comes to represent.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 199

10/05/2017 09:09

200

Scoring Race

concatenation of dialectical negations, which taken together confirm the racial assumptions of those who deploy them. Baker spent her career negotiating her relationship to those assumptions, taking advantage of them when she could and pushing back when they became too burdensome, but never entirely escaping them nor necessarily avoiding self-exploitation. The film comes to illustrate how she functions within the score: the degree to which her powerful stage persona resists and colludes with it. Indeed, her overwhelming nominal presence – it is not Aouïna who is dancing but Baker – escapes the subjective erasure the racial score imposes. She is as recognizable as, say, Marilyn Monroe in these films. At the same time, as with Monroe, what is recognizable is a series of clichés, of stereotypes, that she actively fulfills.42 And indeed, the precise manner in which the film constructs her also reveals the complex mechanisms, indeed the technological basis for jazz’s creation. That is, returning to Ousmane Socé’s inaugural Mirages de Paris,43 his focus on the extreme artifice of the nightclub, its fake oceans, emotions, and people (particularly African-Americans), speaks to the merging that takes place between what Jeremy Lane posits as the complex relationship in the French imaginary between jazz and machine-age imperialism. The cinematic enterprise itself becomes the imperial machine,44 in and through which jazz is constructed, and through which it is confirmed as a reified cipher of difference, brought to life by Baker’s unique physical negotiation of that score. The opposition between the jazzed body and the writing that contains it has been the principal dialectic driving my argument to this point. Indeed, the film would appear to adhere closely to this script. On the one hand, Aouïna is returned (or returns of her own accord) to Tunisia. On the other, lest the viewer think for a second that the white master has somehow lost control of his creation, the story reassuringly ends with Max telling the viewer that the entire story s/he has witnessed has been a lengthy scene from the novel Civilization, the very narrative that he has been attempting to produce throughout the film. 42 Indeed,

a considerable amount of work as been produced of late focusing on the ways that Hollywood (in particular) produced, packaged, and disseminated its stars within the visual marketplace. There are, of course, considerable differences between the way Baker was created in France as a racialized exotic object and how, for example, some years later Marilyn Monroe was created in the United States in the 1950s – though what we might call Monroe’s ‘radical blondness’ might be worth investigating as a racialized identity. For discussions on the star system, see, for example, Paul McDonald, Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities (New York: Wallflower Press, 2000); Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 2001). 43 Which, it is worth recalling, was only published two years after the release of Princesse TamTam. 44 Indeed, this was precisely Benjamin’s point in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Film, before its co-optation by the proletariat, is the absolute medium of alienation.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 200

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

201

Aouïna, it would appear, had never been to France after all – remaining instead safely ensconced in her natural African habitat, far from the pernicious effects of ‘civilization,’ but also contained within the parameters of a stereotypical colonial fantasy. This apparent recapture of Aouïna/Baker/jazz through writing is, at least in appearance, an archetypal performance of the racial score. That is, musicality, incarnated in Baker, retains a vitalizing function – her animal nature allows Max to free himself of his inhibiting civilization – but music-asjazz is ultimately and always captured within and by the disciplinary power of the scriptural. At the same time, the film appears to tell us (in anticipation of Sartre’s famous quip about jazz and bananas) that to really appreciate ‘jazz,’ one must consume it in its natural (African) setting, at its most real and most primitive: at its place of origin. This reading, however, ignores the last scene of the film. Indeed, the closing shot complicates things: it involves a close-up of a donkey eating the cover of Max’s book, in which the viewer can clearly read the title, Civilization. This would appear to reverse or contradict the previous statement suggesting that writing ultimately gets the upper hand, circumscribes the musical. Instead, writing here literally succumbs to, is consumed by, the natural world. This final scene involves first a shot of Aouïna smiling as she sees what the donkey is doing. It cuts to the actual animal as it bites off the cover and calmly begins to chew. The scene then fades to black. The animal impulse, and the musical realm to which it is attached, appear to have gained the upper hand: the Dionysian, unrepresentable force of nature vanquishes its historical foe, language, and particularly writing, and drives the Apollonian light of meaning from the stage. Of course, no such thing has happened. There has, rather, quite literally been a changing of the guard: film has taken over the scriptural responsibility – and this in most dramatic fashion. That is, it is no longer the two covers of a book that frame the musical, but rather the technological achievement of sound film. The image of the donkey fades to black as music – and strikingly, not jazz – continues to play on. Yet the screen itself, or the projected image, and the rolling credits – writing in turn inscribed on celluloid – now controls ordering and meaning’s dissemination. Writing has taken on a more radically powerful purpose as the West’s ability to capture and shape ‘the real’ is expanded exponentially by the new technology of film. Indeed, this shift is already anticipated by a little commented yet dramatic precursor. In 1908, Rodolph Pöch (1870–1921), an influential and controversial German anthropologist, made one of the first ever anthropological sound films combining phonograph equipment and film.45 Pöch filmed a Khoisan man speaking into the horn of his recording phonograph. The astonishing sequence 45 ‘Rudolf

Pöch, Discours d’un Bushman enregistré par phonographe, Vienne, 1908,’ YouTube video, 1:26, posted by ‘Vincent Meyer,’ March 5, 2010, https://youtu.be/0TomBTF9BWE.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 201

10/05/2017 09:09

202

Scoring Race

is, for a European listener, of an absolutely alien other – a difference immediately evident in the physique and dress of the African anthropological ‘subject.’ More astonishing still is how the technology erases any semblance of specificity: the limitations of the equipment render it incapable of reproducing the ‘clicks’ characteristic of Khoisan. At the same time, the film’s objective is clearly not to accurately represent its subject’s speech, but rather to demonstrate its own domination over the naturalized human. To again quote V. Y. Mudimbe, the idea here is to speak ‘neither about Africa nor Africans, but rather [to] justify the process of inventing and conquering a continent and naming its “primitiveness” and “disorder,” as well as the subsequent means of its exploitation.’46 Strikingly, this process of containing the other within the technological parameters of moving image and sound reduces linguistic alterity to a musical hum in which the barely human is the only residue that the filmic medium allows to escape. The man, his face buried in the horn of the phonograph, is absorbed into the machine that processes him for consumption by the Western viewer. Some twenty-five years later, and though the technology had advanced considerably, Baker is, I want to suggest, transformed in very similar fashion, drawn into the metaphorical horn of the filmic medium. While much of what I have analyzed in Princesse Tam-Tam has been discussed in various forms by other critics, it has been my goal here to read it through the lens of music, and particularly jazz, while emphasizing the important convergence of musical and racial scores in the film. What becomes clear is that the entirety of Princesse Tam-Tam is overdetermined by Josephine Baker as the incarnation of the musical form with which she is most identified; and that film as a medium takes over the scoring function of the literary. There is, in other words, no space, no mediation, between her racial blackness, her dancing body, the jazz music that makes her body move, and the audience’s consumption of that raced body. This seamless movement from one category to the next, from producer to consumer, assures that the entire metonymical system of difference assumed by the racial signifier remains stably attached to its signified body. She serves as the point of suture between terms, Hill’s ‘papering over’ of the multiple and complex histories of Africans and their diverse diasporas, that is also a ‘papering over’ of the work performed to create race as a transcendental category. Significantly, throughout this film, jazz fulfills this papering function. Through Baker, it absorbs and reflects the terms of difference, erasing the jagged and violent contours of race’s creation and effects. As Amiri Baraka argues, jazz becomes a refuge for blackness, ‘because it was one of those few areas of human expression available to them.’47 Just as importantly for my own argument here, with jazz, ‘there were fewer social or non-expressive considerations that could 46 Mudimbe, 47 Baraka,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 202

The Invention of Africa, 20. ‘Jazz and the White Critic,’ 12.

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

203

possibly disqualify any prospective Negro jazz musician than existed, say, for a Negro who thought he might like to become a writer.’48 Music becomes the ‘natural’ home of blackness because it is the only aesthetic space not violently preserved for an exclusive whiteness (which music helps construct). In addition, this unique preserve (or prison) of the musical has been prepared by a history of Western thought that has always projected its difference into the musical sphere. Princesse Tam-Tam spells out in exquisite detail (as well as in broad unrefined strokes) the parameters of the racial score and the essential role that jazz plays in assuring its persistent functionality – this despite the obvious proliferation of black writers and white jazz musicians over the last century. Or again, despite the evident breakdown in the score in the face of writers and musicians who refuse to adhere to it and are impossible to situate within a violent racial binary. Jazz therefore spells out the naturalizing mechanisms and impulses, the relentless forces that Josephine Baker so brilliantly and problematically reflects in Princesse Tam-Tam, and to which, as we will see in what follows, Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï responds. Once again, music, and a consideration of jazz, guide the story being told.

Exploding/Exploring the Score: Karmen Geï and the Many Modalities of African Jazz While there is no immediate evidence that Senegalese director Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s controversial 2001 film Karmen Geï is a response to Princesse TamTam, it addresses, virtually point by point, the same questions. First, though, Gaï Ramaka’s film is a new and challenging take on Prosper Mérimée’s famous novella Carmen, and takes its place among dozens of other operatic and cinematographic interpretations of this famous story. Thus, before beginning, it is worth recalling the origins of the Carmen story and its subsequent evolution, as this history is deeply invested in the racial score to which it contributes in complex ways. Though it first appeared under Mérimée’s pen (1845), the tale is far more famous for the Georges Bizet opera (1875) and its earworm theme song, the aria ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebel’ [Love is a rebellious bird], popularly known as the ‘habanera.’ Karmen Geï is in turn a hybrid of the novella and the opera, though it departs in significant ways from both. The most important difference between the novella and opera is that Mérimée’s Carmen character is doubly mediated through the narrator’s proto-anthropological lens (he is a Frenchman studying ruins in Spain but spends far more time studying the ‘gypsy’ woman) and the voice of Don José, who tells the narrator how he became fatally attracted to Carmen. Here, the already biased reader only ever has access to her through the compounded male gaze as the narrator subjectively transcribes 48 Baraka,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 203

‘Jazz and the White Critic,’ 12.

10/05/2017 09:09

204

Scoring Race

Don José’s equally subjective testimony. That the narrator is driven by a perverse voyeurism and an impulse to reductive classification, or that Don José is a serially murdering coward, is clear to the keen observer, but such suspicions are easily overwhelmed by the persona that these narrative devices configure. Carmen is, in sum, a frightening and daemonic alterity constructed to attract blame (and desire) within the reader’s epistemically determined expectations. Viewed in this way, she becomes a force driven by her appetites rather than a person or victim. While this describes the novella, the opera somewhat shifts the emphasis away from this gross stereotype. As Geoffrey and Ryan Edwards tell us, if, in Mérimée’s version, ‘Carmen cannot dispute this role’ assigned to her, ‘for José stands between her and the reader, imposing his own interpretations on her behaviour,’49 the opera presents a very different relationship to the titular character. ‘From the beginning,’ Edwards and Edwards go on to say, Bizet’s ‘Carmen manipulates the image she is expected to fulfill, playing the part of the siren while simultaneously subverting her own performance by subtly revealing to the audience … her struggle for freedom from the oppressive dictates of the male gaze.’50 Or again, as Cheryl Stobie frames it, Bizet’s ‘operatic Carmen acquires a mythic force through songs and dance, although she is still a figure whose sexuality provokes extreme masculine anxiety.’51 While the degree to which her song and dance release this emancipatory energy depends considerably on the director and performer(s), Bizet’s Carmen is less mediated than the character in Mérimée’s layered narrative. Thus Bizet does release some of the subversive energy Edwards and Edwards describe. Nevertheless, what remains is the exotic erotic implied in Stobie’s reading, a feature expressed in Carmen’s alien identity as a Roma woman. This difference is very deliberately underscored in the habanera, the style and name of which fix her within her ethnic and gendered alterity. Indeed, the habanera, with which Carmen is conflated, underscores the degree to which, in every version, music and the feminine are intimately bound.52 In a sense, the success of Bizet’s opera has been largely predicated upon, and determined by, the inherent musicality of Carmen as a character as she already appears in Mérimée’s story. Thus, returning to Stobie’s idea, the fact that the ‘operatic Carmen acquires a mythic force through songs and dance’ is not in tension with the fact that she is ‘still a figure whose sexuality provokes 49 Geoffrey

Edwards and Ryan Edwards, ‘Carmen’s Transfiguration from Mérimée to Bizet: Beyond the Image of the Femme Fatale,’ Nottingham French Studies 32.2 (1993): 49. 50 Edwards and Edwards, ‘Carmen’s Transfiguration,’ 50. 51 Cheryl Stobie, ‘She Who Creates Havoc Is Here: A Queer Bisexual Reading of Sexuality, Dance, and Social Critique in Karmen Geï,’ Research in African Literatures 47.2 (Summer 2016): 90. 52 This includes the novella, where Carmen punctuates her declarations with the rhythm of her castanets, even in her final rejection of Don José as he prepares to kill her.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 204

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

205

extreme masculine anxiety,’ but, rather, is immediately bound to it. Her racial difference and her musicality are coextensive within the racial (and sexual) score. Her musicality assures her racialization just as her racial difference anticipates her musicality. Returning to Bizet, if the opera gave Carmen its popular appeal, that reputation has only been further amplified by its astounding number of film adaptations. Phil Powrie tells us that as of 2004, there had been at least eighty versions, with new ones coming out virtually every year.53 Among these it is important to note that, taking advantage of the ethnic and racial themes already identified as important features of the source materials, a number of African and African diaspora Carmens have been made: most famously, the 1954 version with Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge; more recently, the 2001 Carmen: A Hip-Hopera, with Beyoncé as Carmen; and in 2005, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, a version entirely in Xhosa staring Pauline Melafane. Karmen Geï therefore finds its place on a long list of Carmens that have found useful elements to develop in Mérimée’s novella and, especially, in Bizet’s opera. Latent in the African and diaspora stagings is the understanding not only that this heroine is a vector for the converging essentialisms defining music and the feminine, but that these differential circuits map onto each other within their assigned aesthetic sphere in ways that immediately implicate the racial as well. That Carmen is a ‘Gipsy,’ a ‘femme fatale,’ and music incarnate, results from Western aesthetics’ systematic marshaling of artistic media. Indeed, Karmen Geï explores film’s parallels with opera as the medium capable of orchestrating music, poetry, set, costume, etc. while questioning the coherence of its own will to power and its totalizing impulse. In this sense it addresses directly what the famously racist Richard Wagner defined as the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art in which and from which the geist, or spirit of the German people, would emerge (again). Particularly important is the manner in which Karmen Geï resists the racial score that lay at the core of Wagner’s project. This particular iteration begins with Karmen in a women’s prison, dancing for the warden Angélique. She later joins Angélique in bed and subsequently is released. The next time we see her, she is again dancing, this time at Corporal Lamine’s wedding.54 She insults the future father-in-law, a local politician, and gets into a dance-off and subsequent fight with Majigue, Lamine’s bride-to-be. Lamine is demoted for letting things get out of hand and is ordered to take Karmen to prison, but he allows her to escape and is himself thrown in prison for his ineptitude. She and her gang of thieves and smugglers break him out of jail and he subsequently joins them. Several of Karmen’s lovers past and present 53 Phil

Powrie, ‘Politics and Embodiment in Karmen Geï,’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.4 (2004): 283. 54 Lamine replaces the role held by Don José in the original Mérimée and Bizet versions.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 205

10/05/2017 09:09

206

Scoring Race

appear – including Massigi, the singer-playboy, and old Samba (who has gone from lover to father figure and criminal associate). She and her gang engage in ever more daring operations (some successful, some not) as Lamine becomes increasingly obsessive and possessive. In the meantime, Angélique the warden pines for her lover, and ultimately ends her own life out of despair. After a particularly successful caper, Karmen finally breaks off her relationship with Lamine. In the dramatic conclusion (shared by the novella and opera), Lamine kills Karmen because he cannot own her. In contrast to the Mérimée version in which Don José buries her, and the opera where Don José falls on her body, in the final shot, old Samba carries Karmen’s shrouded corpse to her tomb. Not surprisingly, given its visual complexity, its challenging content, and its roots in a long tradition of Carmen operas and films, Karmen Geï has received considerable critical attention since its release in 2001. As Anjali Prabhu notes, this interest comes in part from the fact that it is ‘a provocative interrogation of the notion of freedom in a form that defies recuperation via feminist or postcolonial theory; it is a utopian reflection that challenges our interpretive methods.’55 Indeed, the hybrid nature of the film, with its Western and Senegalese sources and themes, and deeply textured considerations of gender, sexuality, freedom, and musical and linguistic identity complicate analysis and present, for the same reason, a tempting subject. Nevertheless, while resistant, the film has still generated important critical responses. Of these, virtually all discuss the initial ‘lesbian’ relationship between Karmen and Angélique.56 Indeed, this represents one of Gaï Ramaka’s most substantial additions to the story. As Sheila Petty notes, in introducing the homoerotic element, ‘Ramaka radically reconfigures the original story’s essence, transforming it into a critique of oppressive social authority, particularly because Karmen chooses to ignore the boundaries constricting “proper” female sexuality.’57 Significantly, these theoretical abstractions have had concrete effects. As Steven Nelson explains in considerable detail, the film’s erotic ‘deviance’ was perceived ‘by the Mouride brotherhood as a visible sign of a culture in decay.’ For them, the appearance of homosexuality, 55 Anjali

Prabhu, ‘Aesthetics in Postcolonial Reading: Cinematic Challenges from Karmen Geï,’ The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2.1 (2015): 132, special issue, ‘Literature and Law.’ 56 In her reading, Cheryl Stobie likewise emphasizes the importance of the opening homoerotic scene but views it in continuity with the rest of Karmen’s sexual encounters (whether explicitly represented or not). Like others, Stobie believes that the ‘opening scene of Karmen Geï suggests the potential of Karmen to subvert social norms.’ But rather than reading this as an exclusively homoerotic moment, she stresses that ‘bisexuality is accorded the status of a valid queer experience’ that multiplies the lines of sight, the libidinal and affective reverberations and refractions that disrupt normative positionality. Stobie, ‘She Who Creates Havoc Is Here,’ 92, 93. 57 Sheila Petty, ‘The Rise of the African Musical: Postcolonial Disjunction in Karmen Geï and Madame Brouette,’ Journal of African Cinemas 1.1 (2009): 101.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 206

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

207

particularly combined with the recitation of the Khassaïdes in the film, was understood as a threat to the social order.58 The Khassaïdes – poems by the father of the Senegalese Islamic Mouride movement, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba – accompany the pallbearers who carry the casket of lesbian suicide Angélique into the church for a Catholic service. This compounding of apparent insults to Islam resulted in a fatwa and, subsequently, a violent reaction in certain factions of the Mouride community, ultimately compelling the government to ban the film. It has not played in Senegal since.59 In sum, Karmen’s ‘deviant’ sexuality has garnered considerable attention and the opening moments of the film represent a radical challenge to certain conservative tendencies in Senegalese society. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that, despite this fascination with the deliberately provocative encounter between Karmen and Angélique, the film does not in fact begin with the first manifestation of Karmen’s open-ended desire, but rather with her immediate identification with music and dance. Or rather, to the extent that her character is deeply eroticized, it is so first and foremost through the media of music and dance: before we ever see whom she is seducing, Karmen Geï opens with the music that defines the film. It is only then, from the black screen and its opening credits, that we cut to Karmen looking straight at the spectator: the ultimate (and absolutely heterogeneous) object of her seductive gaze. Thus, if the main character’s sexuality is important, as it is in all versions of Carmen, the film’s treatment of music and the musical body is just as important – if not more so. Everything in this film (eros, power, freedom, race, etc.) is finally the result of music embodied and vitalized in Karmen’s elaborately racialized body. In other words, the film resists the empty and brute equivalency of music with blackness – the founding principle of the racial score – by proposing instead an aesthetically grounded and elaborately structured series of communicating yet carefully differentiated musical, racial, and bodily practices. Karmen Geï is a profoundly intelligent, that is, reflective and historical cinematic event in which diasporic forms speak to each other through and with the assistance of a character who, like the music to which she regularly dances, simultaneously 58 Steven

Nelson, ‘Karmen Geï: Sex, the State, and Censorship in Dakar,’ African Arts 44.1 (Spring 2011): 81. 59 As Babacar M’Baye frames it, Karmen Geï was ‘bold enough to explore the notions of bisexuality and lesbianism in a contemporary Senegalese society in which certain forces of African modernity unavoidably clash with those of tradition.’ Just as importantly, in ‘opposition to narratives that emphasize the alien nature of alternative gender expressions and sexualities in African cultures,’ M’Baye sees Gaï Ramaka denouncing ‘the hypocrisy of such facile assessments by representing Senegalese society as a community that both accommodates and rejects unconventional identities,’ while also resisting ‘limiting African and Western epistemologies.’ See ‘Variant Sexualities and African Modernity in Joseph Gaye Ramaka’s Karmen Geï,’ Black Camera 2.2 (2011): 114, 115, 116, special issue, ‘Beyond Normative: Sexuality and Eroticism in Black Film, Cinema, and Video.’

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 207

10/05/2017 09:09

208

Scoring Race

embodies and sheds the score(s) within which she is embedded and that would define her. In short, Karmen is an open invitation to ‘more inclusive and humane modes of social organization.’60 Again, while critics have tended to focus considerable attention on the opening scene, it is introduced by, and, one can effectively argue, is about music as much as it is about desire or (homo)eroticism.61 Indeed, the score and its intricate relation to Karmen is perhaps the film’s richest feature. In an interview conducted shortly after the film came out, Gaï Ramaka made clear how much he had thought about the relationship between sound and gesture: Nous avons choisi de travailler en son direct. C’était une des choses auxquelles je tenais le plus dès le départ … Dans ma culture africaine, il y a une telle association entre le geste et le son qu’il me fallait réussir à tourner avec des sons sur le vif. Cette Karmen, ce n’est pas du chant pur, mais du chant incarné, il n’y a pas de dissociation entre le geste, le chant, l’action. Le direct était pour moi une première couche sonore. Ensuite, à partir du film monté et de la bande-son du tournage, nous avons, en studio à Dakar, renforcé, doublé le son direct. Puis c’est à Montréal que nous avons fait toute la postproduction, montage, mixage, laboratoire pour l’étalonnage. Au niveau sonore, nous avons travaillé à partir des deux couches, le direct et le studio … On discutait chaque son, un à un. On ne travaille pas le son à Montréal de la même manière qu’en France. Ici, on aborde le son de front, à plusieurs, on échange. À Paris, tout se passe plutôt de manière chronologique, métier après métier; ici, c’est ensemble que l’équipe fait son travaille, et d’une manière communautaire qui rappelle l’Afrique et sa façon de gérer la vie. J’ai trouvé à Montréal, dans l’organisation du cinéma, ce que je suis en tant qu’Africain.62 [We chose to work in direct sound. It was one of the things that was particularly important to me from the outset … In my African culture, there is such a profound connection between sound and gesture that I had to succeed in recording with live sound. This Karmen isn’t pure song but song incarnated, there is no dissociation between the gesture, the song, the action. Having direct sound recording established a first sonic layer. Then, based on the edited film and the sound recording from our filming, in the studio in Dakar we reinforced, doubled the direct sound. Then in Montreal we did all the postproduction work, editing, mixing, calibrating in the lab. At the level of sound, we worked based on the two layers, the direct sound and the studio 60 Stobie,

‘She Who Creates Havoc Is Here,’ 99. can at least recognize that in this scene the two are, inevitably, connected through the Dionysian, that is, musical, principle of absolute excess and difference. 62 Joseph Gaï Ramaka, ‘Entretien avec Joseph Gaï Ramaka and Djeïnaba Diop Gaï,’ interview by Réal La Rochelle, 24 images 110 (Spring 2002): 49. 61 One

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 208

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

209

sound … We talked about each sound one by one. They don’t work with sound in Montreal in the same way as they do in France. Here sound is confronted directly, with many participants, there are exchanges. In Paris, everything happens in a more chronological fashion, each specialist in turn; here people work together, in a communal fashion that is reminiscent of Africa and its way of dealing with life. I found in Montreal, in the way that film is organized, what I am as an African.]

The first important detail in this lengthy citation is Gaï Ramaka’s insistence on recording ambient noise while shooting. He obliquely justifies this choice by the relationship he sees in ‘African culture’ between sound and gesture, and goes on to posit that Karmen is not pure song, but song given body, underscoring that there is no division between gesture and music (or song and dance). This insistence on the embodiment of music might appear to naturalize Karmen’s raced body as essentially musical. But Gaï Ramaka’s refusal of the idea of ‘pure’ song, of a conflation of music and character, rather than a continuity in which the body expresses itself spatially through song, through ‘action’ – and ultimately, socially, in the space of the film’s production and reception – moves away from the racial score’s project of essentialization. His rejection of the racial score becomes even clearer in the next paragraph. While ambient sound, that is, ‘live recording,’ is key to capturing Karmen as she is, the film does not transparently represent the racial real, but constructs its characters through a layering process in which music plays a critical function. Thus, Gaï Ramaka stresses the importance of the live sound taken during shooting but immediately adds that, in Dakar, the filmmaker and his team ‘reinforce’ the live sound taken during filming. To this already complicated sound–image relationship is then added a third layer of intervention, the studio work done in Montreal. On this later point, the filmmaker insists on the difference between Montreal and France: in Montreal, according to Gaï Ramaka, creating sound is viewed as a collaborative process, in contrast to Paris, where filmmaking is divided into neat categories and specializations. This contrast, whether true or not, illustrates vividly how, for Gaï Ramaka, ‘scoring’ quite literally establishes and maintains – and is maintained by – categories of difference. The formalization of these categories – sound, script, filming, editing, scoring, etc. – speaks immediately to the manner in which the racial score, so important historically to the French understanding of diaspora music (most notably jazz), keeps those categories independent of each other in the final object. That is, for Gaï Ramaka, Parisian filmmaking adheres to the idea (as we saw in my introduction, harkening back to Plato, but equally evident in the Kantian aesthetic) of a professionalization of the artistic categories where each creator remains contained within a medium, only to be drawn together in the theoretical seine of philosophy’s writing. In contrast, in producing Karmen Geï, Gaï Ramaka adopted a mode of artistic creation that purposefully departs from the traditional methods of inscribing

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 209

10/05/2017 09:09

210

Scoring Race

the racial score. By ‘writing’ his film, and especially its musical components, collaboratively and in layers, Gaï Ramaka invites the technology of sound film to do something other than simply adapt racial scoring to a new medium, as Princesse Tam-Tam did in 1935. Montreal, with its linguistic alterity within Canada, and its vexed relationship to France and its Francophone empire, offers a potential antidote to the colonial relationship and to the racial instrument that has historically assured its stability. The ‘cooperation’ that Gaï Ramaka speaks of in Montreal should be read here in direct contrast to the paternalistic (read imperial or neocolonial) relationship that African filmmakers experience in making their films under the watchful eye of the French master for whom order (and hierarchy) are insistently and self-interestedly maintained. Montréalais communitarianism contrasts with the authoritarianism of the French attitude to the Francophone African films coming through their labs. In this contrast, Gaï Ramaka offers a sharp critique of the problematic French influence on Francophone African film.63 He also advocates for an organic and egalitarian practice in which music clearly plays a central role. Finally, underscoring the significance of sound to his conception, Gaï Ramaka stresses that each element must be worked out individually, ‘un à un’ [one by one], in such a way that the ambient sounds of life (speech, steps, cars, waves, etc.) and of music blur into each other. Gaï Ramaka’s layering of diagetic and non-diagetic sound, and merging and/ or crossing of the boundary separating them, invites us to consider music in this film at length. Many critics have done just that. Phil Powrie’s 2004 essay, ‘Politics and Embodiment in Karmen Geï,’ for example, deemed it important that ‘American … jazz tenor saxophonist David Murray’ scored the film.64 It is notable not only that Gaï Ramaka chose a jazz musician for this key task, but that he chose a particularly iconoclastic figure who draws heavily on the blues, the popular core of jazz. This choice thus already imports Murray’s own systematic refusal of jazz’s fossilization as a ‘high art,’ to which we can also add his extensive and career-long collaboration with musicians from numerous performance traditions (thus also distancing from the potential reification implicit in the jazz shibboleth). Thus, Murray’s already composite aesthetic compounds the complex synthesis for which Gaï Ramaka is striving. It is in following this logic that the American chose to include in the score the ‘heady rhythm of 40 sabar drummers, led by Doudou N’Diaye Rose, Professor of Rhythm at Dakar’s Arts Institute, Chief of the National Ballet, and composer of Senegal’s national anthem.’65 This decision was likewise not neutral: just as the American tenor 63 On

this topic, see Manthia Diawara’s extensive discussion in African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992). 64 Powrie, ‘Politics and Embodiment in Karmen Geï,’ 283. 65 Powrie, ‘Politics and Embodiment in Karmen Geï,’ 283.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 210

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

211

player had practiced across a number of genres, cooperating with musicians from all over the world, merging ‘high’ and ‘low’ musical traditions, the Senegalese drummer and his ‘Rosette’ orchestra had been similarly open-minded in their collaborations. Each component of the score is therefore already multiple and synthetic, global and radically democratic before even being taken up by its equally collaborative incorporation into the final object. This elaborately textured weaving occurs not only within the fabric of each sonic layer or sheet but between them as well, creating modalities of sonic perception beyond the traditionally musical. To this crisscrossing, non-diagetic jazz score and the diagetic drumming the film adds the diagetic crooning of El Hadg Ndiaye and the songs of Yandé Codou Sène. The former is a famous Senegalese musician, poet, and activist who also acted in Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane’s Guelwaar (1992) and Camp de Thiaroye (1988). The other, Yandé Codou Sène, was Léopold Sédar Senghor’s griotte, referred to by Laurence Gavron as the ‘Diva Sérère.’66 She influenced the famous pop star Youssou N’Dour as well as providing the musical soundtrack for the first film by a Francophone African woman filmmaker, Safi Faye’s Mossane (1996). To these two vocalists, Karmen Geï adds a third, the Québécoise Stéphanie Biddle, who plays the character of Angélique. Significantly, though she never sings, Biddle’s principal professional activity is as a jazz singer and she is the daughter of the well-known jazz bassist Charlie Biddle. This compendium of important names, and the ways each is associated, in multiple ways and on multiple levels, with diverse aesthetic practices and media, speaks eloquently to the cooperative work that Gaï Ramaka describes happening in the sound studio and seals the relationship between the soundtrack of the film and its principal actor(s). As Gaï Ramaka stated in a 2001 interview with Olivier Barlet, ‘Dans l’écriture, je pars toujours de sons, de rythmes, de syncopes, qui me viennent avec des textures, des couleurs, des gestes, des mouvements, des dialogues.’ [In writing, I always start out from sounds, rhythms, syncopations, which come to me with textures, colors, gestures, movements, dialogs].67 Thus, for Gaï Ramaka, multiple media emerge in his creative process, with none taking precedence – nor is it clear whether the final category, ‘dialogs’, takes place in the literary or in the musical, or again even in the physical realm. Concerning the film’s elaborate understanding of sound, we have already seen the ways that Murray layers musical traditions. Furthermore, the boundary between diagetic and non-diagetic sounds is porous, allowing music to 66 See Yandé

Coudou Sène, La Diva Sérère (2008) by Franco-Senegalese documentary filmmaker Laurence Gavron. 67 Joseph Gaï [Gaye] Ramaka, ‘Entretien d’Olivier Barlet avec Joseph Gaye Ramaka,’ Africultures, published by Babacar Ndiaye Soda, June 8, 2010, http://www.africultures.com/php/ index.php?nav=article&no=2371&texte_recherche=Ramaka.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 211

10/05/2017 09:09

212

Scoring Race

simultaneously add to the meaning of the film as a separate sensory component and to participate in the action constituting the narrative progression of the story. This boundary crossing is made possible by important Senegalese performers – particularly El Hadg Ndiaye and Yandé Codou Sène – who act and sing in the film – who simultaneously, therefore, play themselves and others.68 The same could be said of the diagetic non-musical sounds which, at key moments, merge with the musical score. Important examples of this are when the women tap against the bars of the prison and when Old Samba sculpts a rock on the beach. In both cases, the actors’ interactions with the material world become part of a musically inflected soundscape. Perhaps the clearest example of this occurs when Samba beats out a simple rhythm with two rocks as Karmen dances. This joyful moment suggests a degree zero of music and language in which the body performs itself communally – even if this space is nevertheless cleared by the cinematographic apparatus that surrounds it. Significantly, as Lamine’s uncomprehending stare demonstrates, his possessiveness renders him incapable of participating in – or even understanding – this non-competitive aesthetic. Music clearly plays a fundamental role, from the very beginning of the film, in giving life to Karmen’s embodied performance. Indeed, like Aouïna in Princesse Tam-Tam, Karmen is animated by sounds. There is a significant difference, however, between the two characters. Whereas music sets Aouïna in motion as an unconscious reflex, Karmen’s body is an instrument of her will, an extension of her ability to control the space around her. She is made present bodily by music but she can both resist it – as she does with Massigi, the perfect symbol of music’s seductiveness – and produce it, as she does on multiple occasions – when, for example, she sings for her cellmates. The particular songs with which Aouïna and Karmen are identified are also significant. Aouïna sings ‘Rêves (La brise au loin se lève)’ and ‘Sous le ciel d’Afrique,’ both of which tie her to the natural world through their invocations of the elements – the ocean and the sky – and their passive relation to (white) power. In the first song, her ‘rêve’ is to travel to Europe, and in the second it is to return to Africa, where, Chaque instant semble meilleur qu’ailleurs Et pour nous tout est desir, plaisir, au pays ensorceleur. [Each moment seems better than elsewhere And for us, everything is desire, pleasure, in this enchanting country.]

In both cases, her movement is entirely dependent on where, when, and whether Max chooses to write her into the score. 68 Ndiaye

plays Missigi, and Yandé Codou Sène plays the blind woman on the beach. The latter also performs at the concert at the end of the film.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 212

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

213

Karmen, on the other hand, sings the words to the famous habanera of Bizet’s opera, reset to a Senegalese melody: L’amour est un oiseau rebelle Que nul ne peut apprivoiser. [Love is a rebellious bird That nobody can tame.]

The contrast between Aouïna’s laments and Karmen’s willful declaration of affective independence is stark. Indeed, one might think about this song in relation to Baker’s Zouzou, where she sings in her birdcage, pining for Haiti as a kind of return to a natural racial origin that will free her from her apparently unnatural love for the Frenchman Jean. In Baker’s songs ‘Haïti’ and ‘Sous le ciel d’Afrique,’ the racial score overwhelms everything in the scene and ultimately, the act of singing, of being music creates the singer as also being racially black and by extension African (or its equivalent within the Western hemisphere, Haitian). The lines are clearly drawn, by the cage in Zouzou, but also by the medium shot that in both Princesse Tam-Tam and Zouzou further frames Baker, effectively imprisoning her within the post-auratic technological mode of racial reproduction that is cinema. In Karmen Geï, in the climactic scene, Karmen’s song (again, using the words of the habanera) are the opposite of Aouïna’s resignation. Following the lead of every Carmen before her, she defiantly refuses Lamine’s claims on her autonomy. As with Zouzou and Princesse Tam-Tam, the singing is principally captured with a medium shot. While the frame is the same, however, where the scenes occur is tellingly different. The deadly encounter between Karmen and Lamine takes place on the catwalk above the theater where Yandé Codou Sène is singing Karmen’s praises. Significantly, the iconic stability of the locations in which Baker performs – the cage (in Zouzou), the boat, the sailor’s bar – helps consolidate the racial score by providing a disciplinary white interpretative grid over the scene. The boat-ride with Dar is a symbol of her desire at that moment for travel but also anticipates the restricted space (with her future husband) that is reserved for her. The bar represents a natural space of performance in which to sing her nostalgia for her ‘natural’ African origin (or again, the return to the symbolic space of the boat provided in the earlier ‘Rêves’). Karmen’s song instead takes place behind the scenes, in the space from which the illusion of stability is produced. The catwalk reveals the multiple ropes and lights that allow for the creation of the theatrical illusion in which Zouzou/Aouïna/Baker performs. Karmen’s refusal is thus simultaneously the rejection of the frame of the film in which she performs and of the possessiveness of Lamine, who likewise seeks to impose his frame. The question remains: to the extent that the racial score pertains in

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 213

10/05/2017 09:09

214

Scoring Race

Karmen Geï, where exactly can we locate it? That is, if the relationship between music, dance, and the body are relatively evident, does the film in fact engage with race at all? For Anjali Prabhu, if race is present in the film it is as what she critically names a ‘monument,’ a vast, de-historicized idea, not far from an essence. In particular, pointing to Angélique’s lighter skin, Prabhu argues that the idea of race developed in the film is designed ‘to implicate the “globalized” spectator’ but that it fails to address the local specificity of race, thereby losing an opportunity to intervene in an ideologically effective manner.69 In short, Prabhu identifies Karmen Geï (as have others, in less critically refined terms) as aiming at the global culture industry’s unquenchable thirst for what Graham Huggan provocatively (and productively) labeled the ‘postcolonial exotic.’70 There is no question that the economics of film production forces African filmmakers to operate dialogically, such that the potential reception of a Euro-American audience will, under most circumstances, be necessarily taken into account when making a relatively high-budget film such as this one. Nevertheless, this ignores the fact that the film was first released to a Senegalese audience, and that it was very well attended before being shut down by the government. Just as importantly, Prabhu seems to ignore that Angélique’s racial difference is not a European fixation, but a factor a Senegalese audience would also have been keenly aware of. By Senegalese standards, she is métisse. Indeed, her role as the warden is striking, and the irony of choosing her for the role might not be lost on a Senegalese spectator, as the prison she serves is on Gorée, a notorious lieu de memoire where many captives were imprisoned before being loaded onto slave ships headed for the New World. It is, therefore, not impossible that one of Stéphanie Biddle’s ancestors could have left the African continent from that very spot.71 But, if one needs to justify diagetically the presence of a métisse woman in a position of power, it is worth noting that the French maintained an administrative presence in Senegal for nearly three hundred years (1673–1960), and have continued to provide ‘coopérants’ and various forms of ‘technical aid’ since independence, thereby providing ample opportunity for and instances of ‘mixing.’ Biddle therefore provides an entry point for understanding the film’s complication of the racial score in a manner that very specifically embeds it in a

69 Anjali Prabhu, ‘The “Monumental” Heroine: Female Agency in Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen

Geï,’ Cinema Journal 51.4 (2012): 81–2. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic (New York: Routledge, 2001). 71 It should be added that Gorée’s identification with slavery also means that it has become an odd place of pilgrimage, eliciting deep emotions from African-American visitors but met with a mixture of exploitation, shame, and perplexity by the Senegalese who never departed the continent and who see these often lighter-skinned Americans as desperately needed sources of income as much as long-lost brothers and sisters. 70 Graham

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 214

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

215

long historical narrative. Indeed, as the daughter of a jazz musician,72 but most notably when playing a clearly métisse character, she provides the bodily, diagetic continuation to David Murray’s musical score. The presence of these two powerful New World influences indicates the extent to which a deep awareness of the Black Atlantic circuit informs the entire project. If the immediate presence of two New World artists situates Gaï Ramaka’s film within the diasporic web of the Black Atlantic, Kenneth Harrow, in his provocative book on African film, Trash, provides a finely nuanced explanation that fills in this somewhat abstract void. First, while Harrow rightly warns against reading Karmen Geï from a utopian perspective, he also sees in the film an important artistic intervention in which the terms of freedom, including its limits, are sketched out. Most importantly, he does this by anchoring this particular version of the Carmen story in the history of performances that have preceded it. Thus, he reminds us that Karmen’s strength of character is hardly unique to Karmen Geï, that her ‘willfulness is promoted in virtually all versions.’ Further, if ‘she is an outlaw, it is not fate or circumstance [as a “tsigane”] but her choice to be “rebelle” and refusal to be subjugated.’ Equally important, and here Harrow shows Karmen’s limits as a revolutionary figure, ‘her perverseness cannot help but be perversion since she can only define her transgressive acts’ according to the ‘rules they insist on breaking.’ She is, therefore, necessarily ‘included within the very system she seeks to rebel’ against, without which she would have ‘no other frame of action.’73 From this initial caveat, Harrow goes on to situate Karmen Geï’s rebellion within two categories of analysis. The first is that it is predictable and ‘tame.’ In this sense the film fits in a broader aesthetic history of Senegal in which the particular vision of modernism promoted by Négritude founder and Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor was recycled in order to create an ostensibly ‘African’ aesthetic that in reality was as dependent on racist recuperations of blackness as on any necessarily continental creative expressive impulse. The Senghorian aesthetic became, in other words, a kind of perversely disguised tourist art. What Harrow calls an aesthetic ‘bohemianism’ in the 1970s and 1980s was the reaction to this state-sponsored ‘Afro-modernism’ of the earlier decades, in which free forms for jazz, paintings liberated from representational constraints, free compositions, with a range of found objects and materials that could evoke difference, insubordination, ultimately created receptivity to tendencies in installation and

72 And indeed, in this, Biddle’s presence is a complex reminder of Socé’s apprehension of jazz as

a fundamentally (and problematically) hybrid musical form. W. Harrow, Trash: African Cinema from Below (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 108.

73 Kenneth

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 215

10/05/2017 09:09

216

Scoring Race

conceptual art being developed abroad – a sensibility freed from the need to be called Senegalese, in art, in music.74

Where might this film fit in this description? That is, does it operate within the parameters of Négritude or does it, in (post)modern fashion, integrate critically that essentializing impulse? One answer to this aesthetic question may lie in the opening scene of the film. Although no critic has immediately addressed this, Angélique’s relationship with Karmen is problematic not because it is homosexual but because it is never clear whether it is exploitative or not. While Karmen quite obviously seduces her, we don’t know whether she does so out of love, or out of a desire to be free. That is, does Karmen’s relationship with Angélique represent a moment of liberation or one in which she is further imprisoned? The expression on Karmen’s face while walking down the hall toward Angélique’s room does not indicate enthusiasm. She has been beckoned by the guard, but this suggests as much a demand for sex as it does the consummation of love. In both cases, one can legitimately ask whether Angélique’s attraction to Karmen is free of its own exoticizing impulses or whether she falls for her prisoner precisely because she satisfies certain preconceived notions of an absolute Négritude that might find its appeal (even) within diaspora. Reading the film as Angélique might read Karmen’s visit would actually relegate it to what Harrow loosely identifies as Senghor’s problematically racialist conception of Négritude, itself closely aligned with the ‘tumulte noir.’ This would draw a direct line of influence between Josephine Baker’s nude (or, on film, semi-nude and singing) body and, for example, the famous Senghorian paean to African womanhood, ‘femme nue, femme noire’ [naked woman, black woman]: Femme nue, femme obscure Fruit mûr à la chair ferme, sombres extases du vin noir, bouche qui fais lyrique ma bouche Savane aux horizons purs, savane qui frémis aux caresses ferventes du Vent d’Est Tamtam sculpté, tamtam tendu qui grondes sous les doigts du Vainqueur Ta voix grave de contre-alto est le chant spirituel de l’Aimée.75 [Naked woman, dark woman, Firm-fleshed black fruit, obscure ecstasies of the black wine, mouth that renders lyrical my mouth Savanna of the pure horizons that trembles with the fervent caresses of the East Wind Sculpted tam-tam, taut tam-tam, that growls under the fingers of the Victor Your deep contralto voice is the spiritual song of the Beloved].

74 Harrow,

Trash, 109. Sédar Senghor, ‘Femme noire,’ in Chants d’ombre suivis de Hosties noires (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1945), 21–2.

75 Léopold

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 216

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

217

This song, dedicated to the black woman and the land of Senegal, and, more broadly, to the African continent, reiterates the tropes and clichés that had become common currency in the writing and thinking of such authors as Philippe Soupault – writing in which blackness becomes unmediated sensuality. Tellingly, the terms of desirability, of unfettered eros, are drawn from earlier Romantic tropes – the decidedly un-African inebriation by red wine and the explicitly operatic and by extension (again) Romantic designation of ‘contralto’ for the voice of this African woman. To the extent that her body is a ‘tamtam sculpté, tamtam tendu’ being played by the fingers of the white victor/viewer, these same aesthetic parameters already (over)determined Josephine Baker’s endlessly proliferating images. Indeed, the title of this poem could just as easily be ‘Princesse Tam-Tam.’ Having thus indicated the limit against which the film runs, I also want to suggest that it is precisely in its carefully calibrated response to Senegal’s aesthetic history and its vexed relationship to the racial score that Gaï Ramaka’s film is most effective – precisely because it is not utopian. The film simultaneously acknowledges its necessary affiliation to this history while risking itself within the parameters defining its status as a simultaneously local and global aesthetic object. Harrow defines the performer (or work of art) acting within these parameters as what he calls ‘trash,’ that is, a kind of residue that operates within and as a disruptive byproduct of global capital. In other words, Harrow’s ‘trash’ functions like an explicitly ideological iteration of the Derridean supplement – in a sense, trash is what is left over, what the machine of capital cannot process or account for, and which sheds light on capital’s logic, thereby opening up a discursive space of resistance, if not revolution. That resistance, that claim to subjective valence and expressive agency, no matter how limited it may finally be, introduces a grain of sand into the gears of the racial score in a manner all the more striking in that music is finally given the opportunity to defend itself against its historical exploitation as the medium most effectively productive of difference. Gaï Ramaka’s film returns precisely to the rivets that hold the entire edifice together. His choice of Murray (and the ambiguous presence of Stéphanie Biddle) very powerfully evokes the history of jazz’s function within the racial score and its important influence on Senegal’s own aesthetic and racial history through Léopold Sédar Senghor’s complex, deeply problematic, and deeply essentialist version of Négritude. It is within and against this historically inflected frame that Djeïnaba Diop Gaï’s Karmen engages in the kind of dance-off that she performs with Lamine’s fiancée. In a sense, the multiple versions of dance – calculatingly seductive (with Véronique), mockingly seductive (with Lamine), confrontational (with Lamine’s fiancée), and liberating (with Old Samba) – all represent her variegated responses to and within the racial score that she inhabits and resists simultaneously at every turn.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 217

10/05/2017 09:09

218

Scoring Race

This performative resistance in fact proceeds beyond Karmen’s death and subsequent burial precisely because, while she engages with the score on its own terms, the film also gives music a legitimate critical function that stakes its own claims to specificity beyond its generic function as a universal medium – in which, for example, all music would become jazz. Certainly, within the visual plane of the film – that is, within the action of the characters – Karmen’s death suggests a certain failure: the (re-)imposition of the law of the white father. But just as the film did not begin with Karmen’s dancing seduction of Angélique but with the sound of Murray’s ensemble improvising, the film’s performance carries beyond the scopocentric parameters of the narrative into a musical realm where the literary naming of the credits and the music merge to critically address the racial score. This is not simply a continuation of music, but a careful parsing of the musical legacies that contribute to the film’s sound. It is particularly important that Yandé Codou Sène’s diagetic song accompanying Karmen to her death continues into the credits, where it slowly merges with Murray’s group playing a bluesy free-jazz piece. The singer and jazz ensemble continue for a couple of minutes with the singer fading out and the band taking over. Finally, Yandé Codou Sène returns alone to finish the soundtrack. This movement in and out of traditional vocal music and Murray’s hybrid improvisatory practice continues Karmen’s challenge to the masculine gaze, to normative sexualities, and most importantly, to the racial score, precisely because, like Karmen herself, it refuses a reductive singularity or simplifying objectification. Accomplishing this within one of the signal registers of the filmic object’s aesthetic represents in turn a fundamental disruption of the Western episteme – and particularly of the naturalized order which Western aesthetics helps to structure and legitimate. In this sense, the opposition of writing and music, and the subsequent dialectical subsumation of that Manichean binary (between white and black, music and literature) into the overarching total work of art that is film, gets turned on its head, as the film finally gives over its investment in the visual/literary dimension to the musical sphere in which models of exchange and encounter are ultimately tested out and performed. This is not a utopian process. It is produced in a counter-discursive performance that very explicitly articulates the dangers and limitations of its own immanent practice. Nevertheless, there is an important historical element that implicates the ideological dimension that Harrow, invoking Benjamin, underscores. The seemingly mummified form of Karmen’s shrouded body that Old Samba carries at the end of the film, as well as the musical ‘wrapping’ with which she is taken to her grave, transform Karmen into a kind of cadavre exquis. Regarding this ending, Anjali Prabhu argues that although ‘Karmen’s death can be seen as inevitable because of the film’s dependence on the myth of Carmen … [,] adherence to this part of the myth neutralizes what could have been her most

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 218

10/05/2017 09:09

Black Bodies, Black Sounds

219

revolutionary moments.’76 Yet rather than understanding Karmen’s death at the end of the film as a slavish – and rigid – adherence to the traditional story, the notably improvisational engagement with the story becomes a kind of visual jazz standard upon which the film improvises. Thus, if Carmen was first penned by Mérimée and then reimagined by Bizet, Gaï Ramaka’s unique use of music, and his elaborate mixing of genres, a mixture in which jazz plays a – but not the only – foundational role, reminds us that Carmen does not only die at the end of each version of the story. She is resurrected for each new iteration of the story as well. In addition, here for the first time among the works I have discussed, music itself, beyond the restrictive confines of a problematic label (jazz), succeeds in positing its own historicity as a performance practice. In a sense, I hew closely to Phil Powrie’s analysis of jazz’s role in the film: ‘Jazz,’ he tells us, does not simply reroot the Carmen story, it reroutes it; the music is, quite literally, a diversion. The Carmen narrative is diverted from its Western trajectory [and] … rerouted to … a radically non-European embodiment. [W]e could argue, at the risk of falling into a teleological trap, that Karmen Geï, the last in a long line of Carmens, is the most radical, and perhaps the most authentic, because … it recognizes that the Carmen story is above all political, and multiply so.77

This is, of course, very similar to my own analysis of this film. I wish, however, to challenge the linear nature of the trajectory Powrie envisions as the film’s counter-hegemonic gesture. My claim is instead that jazz itself has been produced ideologically as a structuring part of the ‘Western trajectory’ that Powrie identifies as key to previous iterations of Carmen. I want to suggest that the film finally uses the heterogeneous reality of jazz practices, as embodied in Murray’s work, to challenge jazz itself as a stable signifier (because of its co-optation by ‘Western trajectories’) from and in which race can be consolidated. In this sense, by ignoring the multiple musicalities at work in the film, Powrie does indeed risk falling into the teleological trap the end-point of which is the racial score. In Karmen Geï, by contrast, each of the musicians involved is a canonical figure from a different musical tradition, yet relating to that tradition in historical terms which complicate it. Indeed, the interweaving of David Murray and Yandé Codou Sène in the final moments of Karmen Geï might remind the viewer that the American musician’s performances are predicated on a deep affiliation with the blues tradition and the broad sound of saxophonists Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins, as well as the equally throaty avant-garde sounds of Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp. These influences converge in his horn playing, which in turn merges with the sound of the other band members. Finally, at the conclusion of the film, Murray’s improvisations move in and out of – and finally give way 76 Prabhu, 77 Powrie,

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 219

‘The “Monumental” Heroine,’ 85. ‘Politics and Embodiment in Karmen Geï,’ 289.

10/05/2017 09:09

220

Scoring Race

to – the voice of Yandé Codou Sène, and it is at this moment that the remnants of the jazz shibboleth implicit in the naming of influences (Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Albert Ayler, and Archie Shepp) and the reinforcement of a particular orthodoxy from which jazz emerges as an idea (or score). Codou Sène, as a griotte (as Senghor’s griotte, no less), by definition also represents musical historicity since that is precisely the social function of the griot. But she is also, at the time of filming, an increasingly recognized global performer whose unique vocal sound speaks deeply to Senegalese musical, poetic, and ideological traditions (griots are figures of power), but also to the elaborate ways in which all histories negotiate their own specificity and importance in relation to other histories within the global economy. In merging with and crossing over with Murray, she demands attention for both of their musical voices as unique phenomena emerging from vastly complex temporal networks of influence and feeding equally complex musical descendancies. In this way, these musicians, and the film in which they participate, engage in ideologically meaningful ways with the manner in which music has been exploited to create difference. The film does not, nor could it, dismantle the racial score; but what it does is allow music itself, finally, to draw in brilliant colors the seams holding it together, such that its epistemic assumptions may finally begin to be questioned.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 220

10/05/2017 09:09

Bibliography

Abomo-Maurin, Marie-Rose. ‘Les Romans de Léonora Miano: une écriture de la complexité sociale dans une Afrique en mal d’elle-même.’ In Dire le social dans le roman francophone contemporain, 303–18. Ed. Justin Kalulu Bisanswa and Kasereka Kavwahirehi. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011. Adorno, Theodor W. ‘On Jazz (1936).’ In Essays on Music, 470–95. Ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Ake, David. ‘Re-Gendering Jazz: Ornette Coleman and the New York Scene in the Late 1950s.’ In Jazz Cultures. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Alem, Kangni. Cola Cola Jazz. Paris: Daper, 2002. ‘Anarchie Croissante au Katanga.’ Le Monde. October 31, 1960. http://www.lemonde. fr/archives/article/1960/10/31/anarchie-croissante-au-katanga_2109987_1819218. html#veLFZu1Zp0eVk7BH.99. Ansermet, Ernest. ‘Sur un orchestre nègre.’ La Revue Normande 10 (1919): 10–13. Anyinefa, Koffi. ‘Les Enfants de la guerre: adolescence et violence postcoloniale chez Badjoko, Dongala, Kourouma et Monénembo.’ Présence Francophone: Revue Internationale de Langue et de Littérature 66 (2006): 81–110. Anyinefa, Koffi. ‘Postcolonial Postmodernity in Henri Lopes’s Le pleurer-rire.’ Research in African Literatures 29.3 (1998): 8–20. Arcens, Michel. John Coltrane, la musique sans raison. Paris: Alter Ego, 2012. Archer-Straw, Petrine. Negrophilia: Avant-garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Aristotle, Politics. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Ontario: Batoche Books, 1999. Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. John K. Ryan. New York: Doubleday, 1960. Ba, Mamadou Kalidou. ‘La sexualité juvénile: une forme d’expression de la violence dans le roman africain contemporain.’ Ethiopiques 88 (2012). http://ethiopiques.refer.sn/ spip.php?article1825. Baker, Houston. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. New York: Verso, 2011. Bantel, Robyn A. ‘The Experiences of Nausea and Adventure: An Analysis of the

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 221

10/05/2017 09:09

222

Bibliography

Opposition of Existence and Being in Sartre’s Nausea.’ Research in Phenomenology 11 (1981): 25–40. Baraka, Amiri. ‘Jazz and the White Critic.’ In Black Music. New York: William Morrow, 1968. Baur, Père, and Père Alfred le Roy. A travers le Zanguebar. Paris: Mame et Fils, 1899. Berry, Stephen R. A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Beti, Mongo. ‘À propos de Trop de soleil tue l’amour: Entretien de Boniface MongoMboussa avec Mongo Beti.’ Africultures (January 3, 1999). http://www.africultures. com/php/?nav=article&no=752. Beti, Mongo. Cruel City: A Novel. Trans. Pim Higginson. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. Beti, Mongo. Mongo Beti parle. Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 2002. Beti, Mongo. Trop de soleil tue l’amour. Paris: Julliard, 1999. Bianu, Zéno, and Yves Buin. John Coltrane (Méditation). Paris: Le Castor Astral, 2012. Blake, Jody. Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Blanchaud, Corinne. ‘Dongala et Mabanckou entre la violence et la norme: le legs d’un territoire symbolique.’ In Littératures africaines et territoires. Ed. Christiane Albert, Rose-Marie Abomo-Maurin, Xavier Garnier, and Gisèle Prignitz. Paris: Karthala, 2011. Bourdieu, Pierre. La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit, 1979. Braggs, Rashida. Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016. Brinker, Virginie. ‘“La Musique qui marche au pas cela ne m’intéresse pas”: Musique et liberté dans Jazz et vin de palme d’Emmanuel Dongala.’ La Plume francophone (September 16, 2007). http://la-plume-francophone.over-blog.com/article-12423423.html. Brodziak, Sylie. ‘Communauté et patchwork de la mémoire dans l’œuvre de Léonora Miano.’ In Pluri-Culture et écrits migratoires/Pluri-Culture and Migrant Writings, 195–207. Ed. Elizabeth Sabiston and Robert Drummond. Sudbury, ON: Laurentian University Press, 2014. Brown, Leonard. John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Burton, Richard Francis. The Lake Regions of Central Africa, A Picture of Exploration. New York: Harper, 1860. Carles, Philippe, and Jean-Louis Comolli. Free Jazz/Black Power. Trans. Grégory Pierrot. Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, 2016. Carroll, Mark. ‘“It Is”: Reflections on the Role of Music in Sartre’s “La Nausée”.’ Music & Letters 87.3 (2006): 398–407. Cavin, Susan. ‘Missing Women on the Voodoo Trail to Jazz.’ Journal of Jazz Studies 3.1 (1975): 4–27. Cazenave, Odile M. ‘Writing the Child, Youth, and Violence into the Francophone Novel from Sub-Saharan Africa: The Impact of Age and Gender.’ Research in African Literatures 36.2 (2005): 59–71. Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 222

10/05/2017 09:09

Bibliography

223

Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Trans. and ed. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979. Cheng, Anne Anlin. Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Clifford, James. ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 23.4 (1981): 539–64. Cocteau, Jean. Le Coq et l’arlequin: notes autour de la musique 1918. Paris: Stock, 1979. Cohn, Robert G. ‘Sartre’s First Novel: La Nausée.’ Yale French Studies 1 (1948): 62–5. Special issue, ‘Existentialism.’ Cole, Bill. John Coltrane. New York: Macmillan, 1976. Collini, Maria Benedetta. ‘Le Cri, le silence, la parole: La Trilogie africaine de Léonora Miano.’ Ponts 12 (2012): 29–49. Compan, Magali. ‘Writers, Rebels, and Cannibals: Léonora Miano’s Rendering of Africa in L’Intérieur de la nuit.’ Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature 34.1 (2010): 81–102. Cormann, Enzo. Vita Nova Jazz. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Coundouriotis, Eleni. ‘The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization.’ Journal of Human Rights 9.2 (2010): 191–206. Crouzières-Ingenthron, Armelle. ‘Pour une dialogique de l’humain: Les Enfants-victimes dans Johnny chien méchant d’Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala.’ Nouvelles Études Francophones 24.2 (2009): 89–97. Dabla, Séwanou Jean-Jacques. ‘Jazz et vin de palme’ de Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala: Étude critique. Paris: Nathan, 1986. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to the Sexes. London: Clowes and Sons, 1871. Daverat, Xavier. Tombeau de John Coltrane. Paris: Parenthèses, 2012. Davis, Angela Y. ‘When a Woman Loves a Man: Social Implications of Billie Holiday’s Love Songs.’ In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. New York, Pantheon, 1998. de Certeau, Michel. ‘Ethno-Graphy’ in The Writing of History, 209–43.Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. deCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Continuum, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Diawara, Manthia. African Cinema: Politics and Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992. Dongala, Emmanuel. ‘E. Dongala, A Love Supreme.’ Interview by Bernard Magnier. CitizenJazz. June 6 and 7, 2006. http://www.citizenjazz.com/E-Dongala-A-LoveSupreme.html. Dongala, Emmanuel. Jazz et vin de palme et autres nouvelles. Paris: Hatier, 1982.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 223

10/05/2017 09:09

224

Bibliography

Dongala, Emmanuel. Jazz and Palm Wine. Trans. Dominic Thomas. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017. Doucet, Jacques. ‘Jazz in Co.br.a.’ Jazz Hot 407 (January/February 1984): 22–5. Dreyfus, Robert. La vie et les prophéties du comte de Gobineau. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1905. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Library of America, 1986. Dudziak, Mary L. ‘Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War.’ The Journal of American History 81.2 (1994): 543–70. Eburne, Jonathan P. ‘Adoptive Affinities: Josephine Baker’s Humanist International.’ The Scholar & Feminist Online 6.1–2 (2007–08). http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/ eburne_01.htm. Eburne, Jonathan. Surrealism and the Art of Crime. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Edwards, Geoffrey, and Ryan Edwards. ‘Carmen’s Transfiguration from Mérimée to Bizet: Beyond the Image of the Femme Fatale.’ Nottingham French Studies 32.2 (1993): 48–54. d’Eichthal, Gustav, and Ismayl Urbain. Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche. Paris: Paulin Editeur, 1839. Erkilla, Betsy. ‘The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary.’ In Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race. Ed. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Evans, Deborah. ‘“Some of These Days”: Roquentin’s “American” Adventure.’ Sartre Studies International 8.1 (2002): 58–72. Ezra, Elizabeth. The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Faure, Sonya. ‘Afropéen [adj.]: qualifie le fait d’être noir et né en Europe.’ Libération (April 9, 2015). liberation.fr. Figuier, Louis. Les Races humaines. Paris: Hachette, 1872. Figuier, Louis. The Human Races. Ed. Robert Wilson. Paris, New York, and London: Cassell and Co., 1875. Flam, Jack D. and Miriam Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: A Documentary History. Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2003. Floyd, Jr., Samuel A. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Francis, Terri. ‘Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Celebrity.’ In Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora, 124–46. Ed. Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan Eburne. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Fry, Andy. Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Gailly, Christian. Be-bop. Paris: Minuit, 1995. Gaï [Gaye] Ramaka, Joseph. ‘Entretien d’Olivier Barlet avec Joseph Gaye Ramaka,’ Africultures, June 8, 2010. http://www.africultures.com/php/index. php?nav=article&no=2371&texte_recherche=Ramaka. Gaï Ramaka, Joseph. ‘Entretien avec Joseph Gaï Ramaka et Djeïnaba Diop Gaï.’ Interview by Réal La Rochelle. 24 images 110 (Spring 2002): 46–9.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 224

10/05/2017 09:09

Bibliography

225

Garnier, Xavier. ‘“L’émotion est nègre, la raison est hellène”: Histoire d’une formule.’ Printed as ‘La notion de raison intuitive.’ In Léopold Sédar Senghor: Africanité-Universalité, Itinéraires et contacts de cultures, vol. 31, 115–20. Paris: Harmattan, 2002. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2003. Gerber, Alain. Le Cas Coltrane. Paris: Parenthèses, 2000. Gilbert, David. The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and the Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Glissant, Edouard. Poétique de la relation. Paris: NRF, 1990. Glover, Kaiama L. ‘Introduction: Why Josephine Baker?’ The Scholar & Feminist Online 6.1–2 (2007–08). http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/glover_01.htm. Gobineau, Arthur, Comte de. Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. Paris: Éditions Pierre Belfond, 1967. Gobineau, Arthur, Comte de. The Inequality of the Human Races. Trans. Adrian Collins. London: William Heinemann, 1915. Godard, Chris. Jazz Away from Home. New York: Paddington Press, 1979. Golio, Gary, and Rudy Gutierrez. Spirit Seeker: John Coltrane’s Musical Journey. New York: Clarion Books, 2012. Gray, Stephen. ‘Two African Child Soldiers: The Kourouma and Dongala Contretemps.’ Research in African Literatures 44.3 (2013): 152–9. Groo, Katherine. ‘Shadow Lives: Josephine Baker and the Body of Cinema.’ Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 54.1 (2013): 7–39. Grubb, Henry A. ‘Sartre’s Recapturing of Lost Time.’ Modern Language Notes 73.7 (1958): 515–22. Guillory, Monique. ‘Black Bodies Swinging: Race, Gender, and Jazz.’ In Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Gumplowicz, Philippe. Le Roman du jazz. 3 vols. Paris: Fayard, 1991–2008. Hagen, Edward H., and Peter Hammerstein. ‘Did Neanderthals and Other Early Humans Sing? Seeking the Biological Roots of Music in the Territorial Advertisements of Primates, Lions, Hyenas, and Wolves.’ Musicae Scientiae 13.2 (2009): 291–320. Harrow, Kenneth W. Trash: African Cinema from Below. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. Hawkins, Robert. ‘Brotherhood Men and Singing Slackers: A. Philip Randolph’s Rhetoric of Music and Manhood.’ In Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph. Ed. Andrew E. Kersten and Clarence Lang, 101–27. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. G. W. F. Hegel: The Oxford University Press Translations. Electronic Edition. Trans. T. M. Knox. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corp, 2000. Higginson, Pim. ‘The Rantings of Vian/Sullivan: Race Undercover.’ Cincinnati Romance Review 17 (1998): 49–57.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 225

10/05/2017 09:09

226

Bibliography

Higginson, Pim. The Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. Hill, Edwin C. Black Soundscapes, White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Himes, Chester. If He Hollers Let Him Go. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1995. Hitchcott, Nicki. ‘Sex and the Afropean City: Léonora Miano’s Blues pour Elise.’ In Francophone Afropean Literatures. Ed. Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas, 124–37. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014. Hodeir, André. Le Jazz, cet inconnu. Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1945. Howison, Jamie. God’s Mind in That Music: Theological Explorations through the Music of John Coltrane. Eugene, OR: Widf & Stock, 2012. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic. New York: Routledge, 2001. Jackson, Jeffrey. Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Jaji, Tsitsi. Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Jaji, Tsitsi. ‘Music and Modernism in Africa.’ In The Modernist World. Ed. Allana C. Lindgren and Stephen Ross. New York: Routledge, 2015. Jankélévich, Vladimir. Music and the Ineffable. Trans. Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Jankélévich, Vladimir. La musique et l’ineffable. Paris: A. Colin, 1961. Jean-Charles, Régine Michelle. ‘Rethinking Paradox: Performing the Politics of Gender, Race, and Belonging in Léonora Miano’s Écrits pour la parole.’ Journal of Romance Studies 14.1 (2014): 73–89. Jones, Donna V. The Racial Discourse of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Jordan, Matthew F. Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Jordania, Joseph. ‘Times to Fight and Times to Relax: Singing and Humming at the Beginning of Human Evolutionary History.’ Kadmos 1 (2009): 272–7. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Kabongo, Olivia. ‘“Une journée dans la vie d’Augustine Amaya” d’Emmanuel Dongala: l’identité de la femme africaine et du peuple congolais.’ Voix plurielles 3.1 (2006). Kahn, Ashley, and Elvin Jones. A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album. New York: Penguin, 2003. Kandé, Sylvie. ‘Jazz et littérature francophone.’ Mots pluriels 13 (2000). http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/MP1300syk.html. Kane, Cheik Hamidou. L’Aventure ambigüe. Paris: Julliard, 1961. Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgment. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Kaplan, Fred. ‘When Ambassadors Had Rhythm.’ New York Times, June 29, 2008. http:// www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/arts/music/29kapl.html. Kelley, Robin D. G. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. New York: Free Press, 2009.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 226

10/05/2017 09:09

Bibliography

227

Kenny, William H. ‘Le Hot: The Assimilation of American Jazz in France, 1917–1940.’ American Studies 25.1 (1984): 5–24. Kleppinger, Kathryn. ‘Relighting Stars and Bazars of Voices: Exchange and Dialogue in Léonora Miano’s Tels des astres éteints and Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar.’ In Francophone Afropean Literatures. Ed. Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas, 110–23. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014. Knapp, Bettina L. ‘Sartre’s Nausée: Archetypal Jazz.’ Dalhousie French Studies 10 (Spring– Summer 1986): 44–55. Knox, Katelyne Elizabeth. ‘Display on Display: Migrating Identities in Contemporary Francophone Literature and Music.’ Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2013. Kofsky, Frank. John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1998. Kouvouama, Abel. ‘Identité et langue chez quelques romanciers congolais.’ In Francophonie et identités culturelles. Ed. Christiane Albert. Paris: Karthala, 1999. Kraut, Anthea. ‘Whose Choreography? Josephine Baker and the Question of (Dance) Authorship.’ The Scholar & Feminist Online 6.1–2 (2007–08). http://sfonline.barnard. edu/baker/kraut_02.htm. Kuster, Brigitta. ‘Sous les yeux vigilants / Under the Watchful Eyes: On the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris 1931.’ Trans. Aileen Derieg. Transversal (May 2007). Special issue, ‘Art and Police.’ http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1007/kuster/en. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Musica Ficta: Figures de Wagner. Paris: Christian Bourgois. 1991. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner. Trans. Felicia McCarren. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lane, Jeremy F. Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, ‘Race,’ and Intellectuals in France, 1918–1945. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Larangé, Daniel Sébastien. ‘Pour un discours social postmoderne: Phénomène de media(tisa)tion et d’intermédia(lisa)tion dans l’écriture franco-camerounaiese: Les Exemples de Calixthe Beyala et Léonora Miano.’ Dialogues francophones 17 (2011): 127–49. Lassi, Etienne-Marie. ‘Léonora Miano et la terre natale: Territoires, frontières écologiques et identités dans L’Intérieur de la nuit et Les Aubes écarlates.’ Nouvelles Etudes Francophones 27.2 (2012): 136–50. Leclercq, Sophie. ‘Le Colonialism mis à nu: Les surréalists démythifiaient la France colonial (1919–1962).’ Revue historique 646 (2008/2): 315–36. Lopes, Henri. ‘Henri Lopes: “La critique n’est pas une agression.”’ Interview by Lydie Moudileno. Genesis 33 (2011): 93–100. https://genesis.revues.org/609. Lopes, Henri. ‘La Musique, c’est la bande sonore de mes livres.’ Interview by Viola Prüschenk. Stichproben: Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 17.9 (2009): 127–35. ‘Louis Armstrong à Léopoldville.’ Le Monde. October 31, 1960. http://www.lemonde. fr/archives/article/1960/10/31/louis-armstrong-a-leopoldville_2109038_1819218. html#LTpgylv4LhEehkoT.99. ‘Louis Armstrong au Congo en 1960.’ DailyMotion video, 0:47. Posted by ‘www.eburnia.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 227

10/05/2017 09:09

228

Bibliography

com’, June 26, 2008. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5x6r0_louis-armstrongau-congo-en-1960_music. MacLeod, George. ‘The Spoils of War: Money and Humanism in Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Chien Méchant.’ Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 19.5 (2015): 525–32. Majumdar, Margaret A. Postcoloniality: The French Dimension. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. Mallart-Brussosa, Myriam. ‘Autophone malgré lui? Chansons de Soupault au Club d’Essai.’ Komodo21 2 (2015). Special issue, ‘Les radios de Philippe Soupault.’ Ed. Pierre-Marie Héron. http://komodo21.fr/autophone-malgre-lui-chansons-de-soupault-au-club-dessai. Maury, Pierre. ‘Le Prix Louis Guilloux à Abdourahman A. Waberi.’ Journal d’un lecteur, May 5, 2015. journallecteur.blogspot.com. Mazauric, Catherine. ‘Débords musicaux du texte: Vers des pratiques transartistiques de la désappartenance (Léonora Miano, Dieudonné Niangouna).’ Nouvelles Etudes Francophones 27.1 (2012): 99–114. M’Baye, Babacar. ‘Variant Sexualities and African Modernity in Joseph Gaye Ramaka’s Karmen Geï.’ Black Camera 2.2 (2011), 114–129. Special issue, ‘Beyond Normative: Sexuality and Eroticism in Black Film, Cinema, and Video.’ Mbembe, Achille. De la postcolonie: Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine. Paris: Karthala, 2000. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Trans. Janet Roitman and Murray Last. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. McDonald, Paul. Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. New York: Wallflower Press, 2000. Mezzrow, Mezz. Really the Blues. New York: NYRB Classics, 2016. Miano, Léonora. Blues pour Élise: Séquences afropéennes, Saison 1. Paris: Plon, 2010. Miano, Léonora. ‘Léonora Miano: “Il faut formuler le concept d’afropéanisme.”’ Interview by Camille Thomine. Magazine Littéraire (June 11, 2013). Accessed August 1, 2016. Miano, Léonora. Soulfood équatoriale. Paris: NIL, 2009. Miano, Léonora. Tels des astres éteints. Paris: Plon, 2008. Miller, Christopher. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Miller, Christopher. Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Mithen, Steven. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993. Moussa, Sarga. ‘Le langage des Noirs dans l’“Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines” de Gobineau: Sensation et création.’ In Wort Macht Stamm: Rassismus und

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 228

10/05/2017 09:09

Bibliography

229

Determinismus in der Philologie, 227–38. Ed. Markus Messling and Ottmar Ette. Munich: Fink, 2013. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985; London: James Currey, 1990. Mujila, Fiston Mwanza. Tram 83. Paris: Éditions Métalié, 2014. Mujila, Fiston Mwanza. Tram 83. Trans. Roland Glasser. Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015. Nardal, Jane. ‘Pantins exotiques.’ La Dépêche africaine, October 15, 1928: 2. Nelson, Steven. ‘Karmen Geï: Sex, the State, and Censorship in Dakar.’ African Arts 44.1 (Spring 2011): 74–81. Nesbitt, Nick. ‘African Music, Ideology, and Utopia.’ Research in African Literatures 32 (Summer 2001): 175–86. Nettelbeck, Colin. ‘Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the Paris Jazz Scene.’ Modern & Contemporary France 9.2 (2001): 171–81. Ní Loingsigh, Aedín. Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Nisenson, Eric. Ascension: John Coltrane and his Quest. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995. Obumselu, Ben. ‘Iris Murdoch and Sartre.’ ELH 42.2 (1975): 296–317. Panassié, Hugues. Le Jazz Hot. Paris: Corrêa. 1934. Panassié, Hugues. Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music. Trans. Lyle and Eleanor Dowling. New York: M. Witmark & Sons, 1936. Pautrot, Jean-Louis. La Musique oubliée: ‘La Nausée,’ ‘L’écume des jours,’ ‘A la recherche du temps perdu,’ ‘Moderato cantabile’. Geneva: Droz, 1994. Pellegrinelli, Lara. ‘Separated at Birth: Singing and the History of Jazz.’ In Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, 31–47. Ed. Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Perchard, Tom. After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Perea, Jessica Bissett. ‘Voices from the Jazz Wilderness: Locating Pacific Northwest Vocal Ensembles within Jazz Education.’ Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and its Boundaries. Ed. David Andrew Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark, 219–36. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Perec, Georges. ‘La chose.’ Le Magazine littéraire 316 (December 1993). Pestureau, Gilbert. Boris Vian, les amerlauds et les godons. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1978. Petty, Sheila. ‘The Rise of the African Musical: Postcolonial Disjunction in Karmen Geï and Madame Brouette.’ Journal of African Cinemas 1.1 (2009): 95–112. Pierrepont, Alexandre. Le Champ jazzistique. Marseille: Parenthèses, 2002. Plato, The Republic. Trans. Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Porter, Lewis. John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Porter, Lewis, and Chris DeVito. The John Coltrane Reference. New York: Routledge, 2013.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 229

10/05/2017 09:09

230

Bibliography

Powrie, Phil. ‘Politics and Embodiment in Karmen Geï.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.4 (2004): 283–91. Prabhu, Anjali. ‘Aesthetics in Postcolonial Reading: Cinematic Challenges from Karmen Geï.’ The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2.1 (2015): 131–40. Special issue, ‘Literature and Law.’ Prabhu, Anjali. ‘The “Monumental” Heroine: Female Agency in Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karen Geï.’ Cinema Journal 51.4 (2012): 66–87. Prince, Gerald. ‘La Nausée and the Question of Closure.’ In Sartre, 58–65. Ed. Christina Howells. London and New York: Longman, 1995. Quignard, Pascal. La Haine de la musique. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1996. Raschka, Chris. John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Ratliff, Ben. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Dictionnaire de la musique. Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1768. Sartre, Jean-Paul. La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1964. Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘Nick’s Bar: New York City.’ Jazz America (1947): 13. Reprinted in We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975, 126–8. Ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven. New York: New York Review Books, 2013. Scheper, Jeanne. ‘Of La Baker, I am a Disciple: the Diva Politics of Reception.’ Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 22.65[2] (2007): 72–101. Schippers, Birgit. Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Schoen-Nazzaro, Mary B. ‘Plato and Aristotle at the Ends of Music.’ Laval théologique et philosophique 34.3 (1978): 261–73. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp. Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1910. Schüller, Thorsten. ‘Le Jazz dans la littérature francophone de l’Afrique subsaharienne: développement d’un symbole littéraire.’ In L’imaginaire musical dans les littératures africaines, 59–71. Ed. Robert Fotsing Mangoua. Yaoundé/Paris: Harmattan, 2009. Séité, Yannick. Le jazz, à la lettre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte.’ L’Homme de couleur. Paris: Plon, 1939. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Chants d’ombre suivis de Hosties noires. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1945. Smith, Viviane. ‘La Musique et L’écume des jours.’ Australian Journal of French Studies 19.2 (1982): 204–22. Socé, Ousmane. Mirages de Paris. Paris: Nouvelles éditions latines, 1964. Soubias, Pierre. ‘Maïssa Bey et Léonora Miano: Deux romancières face à l’inhumain.’ Horizons Maghrébins: Le Droit à la Mémoire 60 (2009): 42–7. Soupault, Philippe. Le Nègre. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. St. Clair, Jeffrey. ‘How Ken Burns Murdered Jazz.’ Counterpunch, October 31, 2014. http:// www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/31/how-ken-burns-murdered-jazz.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 230

10/05/2017 09:09

Bibliography

231

Stobie, Cheryl. ‘She Who Creates Havoc Is Here: A Queer Bisexual Reading of Sexuality, Dance, and Social Critique in Karmen Geï.’ Research in African Literatures 47.2 (Summer 2016): 84–103. Strong, Lester. ‘Josephine Baker’s Hungry Heart.’ The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 13.5 (2006): 16–19. Thomas, Dominic. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. Thomas, Dominic. Nation-building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002. Thomas, Downing A. Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Thomas, J. C. Chasin’ the Trane: The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. ‘One and Divisible: Meditations on Global Blackness.’ Small Axe 29.13.2 (2009): 4–25. Tournès, Ludovic. New Orleans sur Seine: Histoire du jazz en France. Paris: Fayard, 1999. Trujic, Irena. ‘Faire parler les ombres: Les Victimes de la Traite négrière et des guerres contemporaines chez Léonora Miano.’ Nouvelles Etudes Francophones 30.1 (2015): 54–65. Tucker, Sherrie. ‘Bordering on Community: Improvising Women Improvising Womenin-Jazz.’ In The Other Side of Nowhere, 244–67. Ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift: ‘All-Girl’ Bands of the 1940s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Vian, Boris. Écrits sur le jazz. Paris: Poche, 1999. Vian, Boris. L’Écume des jours. Paris: Poche, 1996. Vian, Boris [Vernon Sullivan pseud.], J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1997. Vian, Boris. Mood Indigo. Trans. John Sturrock. New York: Grove, 1968. Viel, Tanguy. Le Black Note. Paris: Minuit, 1998. Von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Waberi, Abdourahman. La Divine Chanson. Paris: Zulma, 2015. Walker, Katherine. ‘Cut, Carved, and Served: Competitive Jamming in the 1930s and 1940s.’ Jazz Perspectives 4.2 (2010): 183–208. Watts, Richard. Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Weatherford, Carole Boston. Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane. New York: Henry Holt, 2008. Weisberg, Margaret Greer Furniss. ‘Inventing the Desert and the Jungle: Creating Identity through Landscape in African and European Culture.’ Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2014. ProQuest, Order No. 3580898. Whitfield, Stephen J. ‘Black Like Us.’ Jewish History 22 (2008): 353–71. Wilder, Gary. The French Imperial Nation State: Négritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 231

10/05/2017 09:09

232

Bibliography

Willey, Ann. ‘A Bridge over Troubled Waters: Jazz, Diaspora Discourse, and E. B. Dongala’s “Jazz and Palm Wine” as Response to Amiri Baraka’s “Answers in Progress.”’ Research in African Literatures 44.3 (2013): 138–51. Williams, Linda F. ‘Black Women, Jazz, and Feminism.’ In Black Women and Music: More than the Blues, 119–33. Ed. Eileen M. Hayes and Linda F. Williams. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Wilmer, Valerie. ‘You Sound Good for a Woman.’ In As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. London: Pluto, 1977. Yala, Rony. Mythes et histoire dans ‘Le feu des origines’ d’Emmanuel Dongala. Paris: Harmattan, 2014. Zenni, Stefano. ‘The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington’s Suites: The Case of Togo Brava.’ Black Music Research Journal 21.1 (2001): 1–28. Zimmerman, Eugenia Noik. ‘“Some of These Days”: Sartre’s “Petite Phrase.”’ Contemporary Literature 11.3 (1970): 375–81.

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 232

10/05/2017 09:09

Index

Adorno, Theodor  113 no.40, 117 n.45, 148 Africa as culture producer  4, 100, 104, 108–9, 112, 148–9, 153–4 associated with dance and music  28–32, 34, 194, 199, 208–9 as natural  111–12, 212–13 as primordial and ahistorical  21, 22, 62, 107, 185, 193–4 , 202 as source of jazz  41, 42, 44, 117, 125–6, 145 Afropeanism 172–82 Agamben, Giorgio  15 n.33, 159 Alem, Kangni  99 Cola Cola Jazz  48, 147–54, 156, 159, 183 America see jazz: as African-American; modernity: industrial Ansermet, Ernest  40, 42 anthropology  see ethnography Antilles  see Caribbean Aristotle  16–18, 20, 22, 27 Armstrong, Louis  6–12, 13, 59, 84, 152, 177 in fiction  77, 129, 173 n.38, 180–1 assimilation  103, 105 n.19, 106, 189 Augustine 18 Baker, Josephine  177 critical interpretations  187–92 in fiction La Divine Chanson 168–9 Mirages de Paris  110, 114–15, 116, 156 in Princesse Tam-Tam  49, 187–8, 191–203, 212–13, 216–17 and La Revue Nègre  1, 37, 43, 53 n.3, 187–8, 192, 194 Baraka, Amiri  119, 121–2, 123, 130, 142, 145, 202 in fiction  130 de Beauvoir, Simone  70, 141 n.85 Be-bop  (Gailly), 47, 82–3, 86–90

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 233

Bechet, Sidney  77 Belgium 7 Belgian Congo  8–12 Bernabé, Joby  181 Beti, Mongo  98, 99, 147 Trop de soleil tue l’amour  48, 134–46, 156, 157 n.9 Biddle, Charlie  211 Biddle, Stéphanie  211, 214–15, 217 Bizet, Georges Carmen  34, 49, 203–5, 213 Black Atlantic  3–4, 9, 215 black musicality  5, 14, 17 n.42, 20, 24, 27, 29–34, 35, 42 in French fiction  54, 61–2, 65, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90 see also jazz: as African-American; writing: opposed to music Baur, Father  31 Black Note, Le  (Viel), 47, 82, 85–6 blues  2, 170, 175, 178–9, 210, 218, 220 as American  101, 121 as black art  35, 166 Blues pour Élise  (Miano), 1, 173–5, 176, 178–82 Bœuf sur le toit, Le  166–7, 169 Bourdieu, Pierre  175 Bricktop’s  53 n.3 Brooks, Shelton  69 Burton, Richard  29–30 Cabane Cubaine  105, 112–16, 118 Cameroon  135, 138 n.81, 144–5, 179, 182 Cameroonian novelists see Beti, Mongo; Miano, Léonora Caribbean  126 n.60, 116, 153, 174, 175, 181, 199 n.41 authors  98, 103 n.16 Haiti  54, 113, 168, 198 n.39, 213

10/05/2017 09:09

234

Index Martinique  110, 113, 114, 182 Carter, Betty  177 de Certeau, Michel  56, 109 n.27, 179 Césaire, Aimé  44, 83, 100–1, 102 n.12, 103, 106 n.24 CIA 9–12 Cocteau, Jean  1, 37, 41, 97 Cola Cola Jazz  (Alem), 48, 147–54, 156, 159, 183 Colonial Exposition  101, 102–3, 105 n.19, 112, 112 n.37, 114 n.42, 190 Coltrane, John  84 in fiction  173 n.38 Be-bop 89 Le Black Note 85–6 La Divine Chanson 169 ‘Jazz et vin de palme’  119, 123–4 ‘A Love Supreme’  119, 124–34 Tram 83 157–8 Trop de soleil tue l’amour 138 Vita Nova Jazz  91, 92, 94 Congo, Democratic Republic  6–12, 155–6, 157 Belgian Congo  8–12 Congolese novelists see Dongala, Emmanuel; Mujila, Fiston Mwanza Cormann, Enzo Vita Nova Jazz  47, 82, 90–5 Cotton Club  76 Creole 182 Dakar 208–9 Damas, Léon Gautran  44–6, 98, 102 n.12 dance imperialist descriptions  28–32 in Karmen Geï  207, 212, 217 linking jazz to blackness  49, 57, 78–81, 100 in Mirages de Paris  113-14, 116 in Princesse Tam-Tam  193, 195, 198–99 and slavery  20 n.54, 160 n.11 see also sexuality Darwin, Charles  27 Davenport, Iowa  75, 78 n.70 Davis, Miles  12 n.23, 84, 138 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari  158, 187 Derrida, Jacques  93, 102, 165 n.22, 217 Diop Gaï, Djeïnaba  217 Divine Chanson, La  (Waberi), 48, 159–171, 174, 175, 183

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 234

Djibouti Djiboutian novelists see Waberi, Abdourahman Dongala, Emmanuel  47–8, 98–9, 135–6, 141–2, 145–6, 154 ‘Jazz et vin de palme’  119–24 ‘A Love Supreme’  119–20, 124–34, 138 Dreyfus, Robert  33–5 Du Bois, W. E. B.  2–4, 105, 159 Écume des jours, L’  (Vian), 47, 52, 73–82, 83, 84 d’Eichthal, Gustav  28–9 Eisenhower, Dwight D.  9–10 Ellington, Duke  84, 173 n.38 in Cola Cola Jazz  149–53, 183 in L’Écume des jours  75–7, 79, 81 in ‘A Love Supreme’  129 in Mirages de Paris  110, 116–18 in Trop de soleil tue l’amour 137 Enlightenment  5, 18–22, 120, 150 ethnography  32–3, 51, 53, 56, 202 reverse ethnography  101, 108, 112–13 Étudiant Noir, L’  102 n.12, 103 Exposition Coloniale  see Colonial Exposition Eyadéma, Gnassingbé  151–2 Figuier, Louis  30–1 Fitzgerald, Ella  138, 177 Five Spot  167, 169 folk music  25, 150, 181, 199 n.40 contrasted with jazz  6 jazz origin  175 frivolous music  16–17, 20, 27 see also writing: frivolous literary Gaï Ramaka, Joseph Karmen Geï  49, 187, 203–20 Gailly, Christian  52 Be-bop  47, 82–3, 86–90 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis  12, 87 n.85, 170 n.27 gender  see under difference; jazz Gillespie, Dizzy  158, 177 Gilroy, Paul  2–4, 104–6, 186 Glissant, Edouard  6 de Gobineau, Arthur, Comte  5, 32–5, 84 Gorée 214 Grand Duc, Le  53 n.3 Griffin, Johnny  89

10/05/2017 09:09

Index Haiti  54, 112, 168, 198 n.39, 213 Harlem  76, 132, 201 n.45 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  4, 21–3, 27, 62, 84 Hill, Edwin  6, 191, 195, 197, 202–3 Himes, Chester  161 Hodeir, André  36, 38, 107 Holiday, Billie  12 n.23, 94, 137, 139, 177 hybridity  43, 113 n.39, 151, 206 genre  204, 219 identity  2, 112, 145, 172–3, 176 jazz form  44–5, 107, 115, 117, 120, 135, 153, 171, 178, 183, 218 linguistic 182 racial  28, 115, 190–191, 195 n.34, 214-15 see also assimilation; métissage improvisation  5, 19 n.51, 52 n.1, 88–9, 131 as coping strategy  135–7, 141–2, 145, 179 free jazz  39, 82 n.79, 86, 124, 130 n.64, 133, 138, 169, 215, 218–20 hot jazz  7 n.12, 37–8, 41 literary  173, 182 independence  12, 103, 134 n.72, 156, 214 Islam  107, 159, 161, 207 Jackson, Millie  178, 180 Jaji, Tsitsi  2, 4, 104–6, 112 jazz African and diaspora reception  44–5, 54, 99–101, 126, 145 as African-American  40–2, 53 n.3, 76 n.65, 88–9, 114, 145 as black music  78, 88–9, 104 French critical reception  1–2, 6, 35–47 and gender  139 n.84, 176–8, 183 as sexual  52 n.1, 68, 71, 84, 194 see also improvisation ‘Jazz et vin de palme’  (Dongala), 119–24 jazz shibboleth  6, 36–7, 39, 42, 43, 82–3, 178 Jones, LeRoi  see Baraka, Amiri Jordan, Matthew F.  7 n.12, 19 n.51, 42–3, 52 n.1, 53 n.3, 188 Kane, Cheik Amidou  145, 162 n.18 Kant, Immanuel  19–20, 22, 27, 120, 132, 150 Karmen Geï  (Gaï Ramaka), 49, 187, 203–20 Kinshasa 6–12 Kristeva, Julia  16, 67–8

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 235

235

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe  13–15, 26, 171 Lane, Jeremy  2, 43–6, 98, 114, 188, 11 n.22, 65 Leiris, Michel  1, 41, 44, 53 n.3, 63 Leopoldville  see Kinshasa le Roy, Father Alfred  31 Lopes, Henri  125–6 ‘Love Supreme, A’  (Dongala), 119–20, 124–34, 138 Lumumba, Patrice  9–12, 156 Mallarmé, Stéphane  13–14, 186 n.5 Malson, Lucien  38 Martinique  110, 112, 114, 182 McClary, Susan  73 n.53, 176 n.45 Memphis, Tennessee  75 Ménil, René  44, 46, 98 Mérimée, Prosper  49, 203–6 métissage  28, 107, 112, 114, 135, 145, 190–1, 195 n.34, 214–15 see also hybridity Miano, Léonora  1, 48–9, 171–3, 183 Blues pour Élise  1, 173–5, 176, 178–82 Tels des astres éteints  173–5, 178, 179, 180 Middle Passage  3–4, 113, 160 n.11, 170 n.27 Miller, Christopher  100, 101–2, 103 n.15, 105 n.19, 112 Mingus, Charles  92, 138, 167 n.26 minstrelsy  9, 12, 59–60, 76 n.66, 86 Mirages de Paris  (Socé), 1, 47, 101–19, 139, 145, 185, 200 Mobutu, Joseph-Désiré  10–11, 152 modernism Parisian 53 and primitivism  53 n.3, 63 Afro-modernism 215–16 see also negrophilia; Surrealism modernity African  104, 112 black  3, 174 counter-modernity 105–6 industrial  40, 43–4, 115 and primitivism  40–2, 43–5, 53 n.3 stereomodernity  105, 112 Montmartre  53 n.3, 54–5, 170 see also Paris Montreal 208–10 Mongita, Albert  7–9, 12 Mujila, Fiston Mwanza Tram 83  1, 48, 154–8, 159, 183 Mulligan, Gerry  87–9, 91 Murray, David  49, 210–11, 212, 215, 218, 219

10/05/2017 09:09

236

Index Nardal, Jane  99, 101, 103, 106 n.24, 190 natural musicality  see under blackness Nausée, La  (Sartre), 47, 52, 64–72, 73–4, 77, 82, 95, 97, 195 Ndiaye, El Hadg  211, 212 N’Diaye Rose, Doudou  210 Nègre, Le  (Soupault), 47, 52–64, 65, 72, 73, 74, 82, 83, 95, 141 Négritude  44, 54, 58, 65, 83, 101, 102 n.12, 108, 110 n.34, 122, 125–6, 215–18 negrophilia  6, 7, 16, 53–4 n.4, 55, 115, 117 see also modernism New Orleans  8, 41, 74–5, 77–8, n.69, 177 New York City  75, 92, 121, 125, 136 n.77, 166, 167, 169 Harlem  76, 132, 201 n.45 Times Square  162 Nietzsche, Friedrich  24–6, 33, 34–5, 80, 83, 84 Noone, Jimmy  77–8 orality  38, 56, 107, 108–9 Paris  101, 103, 146, 154, 164, 166–9, 174, 209–10 and character names  148, 160–2 jazz center  2, 7, 36–7, 44–5, 53, 59, 141 nightclubs  53 n.3, 105, 112–16, 118, 164–5, 166–7, 169 Pan-Africanism  122, 126 Panassié, Hugues  7 n.12, 11, 36, 37–8, 41, 46, 132, 181 Parker, Charlie  84, 86, 88–9, 91, 92, 94, 137 Perec, Georges  82–3 Plato  5, 11, 15–18, 25 Pöch, Rodolphe  201 popular music  6, 37, 126 n.60, 129–30, 153, 181 contemporary  174 n.39, 181–2, 183, 211 in jazz-age Paris  105, 110–12, 115–17 jazz as  69, 70, 132–3, 177 n.47, 210 primitivism  17 n.42, 63–4, 160, 185 and modernity  40–2, 43–5, 53 n.3 and music  24, 27, 32–4, 38–9, 46, 68, 116 and sexuality  190 Princesse Tam-Tam  49, 187–8, 191–203, 212–13, 217 racial score  2, 5, 14–15, 26, 70, 185–7 see also black musicality

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 236

Revue nègre, La  1, 37, 43, 53 n.3, 77 n.68, 187–8, 192, 194 Rollins, Sonny  92, 94, 138 Romanticism  5, 217 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  18–19, 28 Sartre, Jean-Paul  141 n.85, 168–9, 201 La Nausée  47, 52, 64–72, 73–4, 77, 82, 95, 97, 195 ‘Orphée noir’  65 Schopenhauer, Arthur  22–4, 60 Scott-Heron, Gil  48, 159, 161 n.13, 164 nn.20–1 Senegal  101, 105 n.19, 106–7, 115, 206–7, 210, 214, 215–17, 220 Dakar 208–9 Senegalese filmmakers see Gaï Ramaka Senegalese novelists see Socé Senegalese musicians see Ndiaye, El Hadg; Sène, Yandé Codou Sène, Yandé Codou  211, 212, 213, 218, 219–20 Senghor, Léopold Sédar  44, 46, 83, 98, 99, 102 n.12, 125–6, 128, 211 Afro-modernism  215–18, 220 Anthologie de la poésie négre et malgache 65 L’Étudiant Noir 103 poetry 101 sexuality  25, 77, 116, 206–7, 216–17 jazz as sexual  52 n.1, 68, 71, 84, 194 and dance  57, 80–1, 112, 114–15 and the exotic  190, 204, 205 and racial difference  116–17 signifyin(g)  12, 170 n.27 slavery  2–4, 45, 63–4, 101, 159, 193 n.30, 214 and dance  20 n.54, 160 n.11 Middle Passage  3–4, 113, 160 n.11, 170 n.27 and Western philosophy  17, 21, 25, 85 and writing  87 Smith, Bessie  128–9, 138 Socé, Ousmane  98, 141–2, 145, 215 n.72 and Alem  147–8, 149, 150, 151, 153 and Beti  156, 157 and Dongala  120, 124, 129 Josephine Baker  190, 199 Mirages de Paris  1, 47, 101–19, 139, 145, 185, 200

10/05/2017 09:09

Index Soupault, Philippe  40, 44, 97, 186, 217 Le Nègre  47, 52–64, 65, 72, 73, 74, 82, 83, 95, 141 Sullivan, Vernon  see Vian, Boris Sun Ra  119, 122–4, 127–8 Surrealism blackness and renewal  58–9, 62–3 jazz clubs  55 n.7, 63 perspectives on jazz  40–1, 42–3, 52, 53 nn.3–4 Tels des astres éteints  (Miano), 173–5, 178, 179, 180 Tempo Club  44–5 Thomas, Dominic  102 n.12, 174 Tiersot, Julien  40–1 Togo  147, 149–52 Togolese novelists see Alem, Kangni Tournès, Ludovic  37–8, 39 tragic mulatto  191 Tram 83  (Mujila), 1, 48, 154–8, 159, 183 Trop de soleil tue l’amour  (Beti), 48, 134– 46, 156, 157 n.9 Tshombé, Moïse  10 Tucker, Sophie  69–71, 73 tumulte noir  1, 36–8, 185, 216 Tunisia  193, 194, 195 United States  see America; jazz: as African-American; modernity: industrial

X00_Hig_Book B.indb 237

237

Urbain, Ismayl  28 Vian, Boris  36, 38, 95, 97, 141 n.85, 168–9 L’Écume des jours  47, 52, 73–82, 83, 84 J’irai cracher sur vos tombes  78, 83 Viel, Tanguy Le Black Note  47, 82, 85–6 Vita Nova Jazz  (Cormann), 47, 82, 90–5 Waberi, Abdourahman La Divine Chanson  48, 159–171, 174, 175, 183 Wheatley, Phillis  87 whiteness  5, 59, 70, 76, 149, 150, 165, 171, 176, 185, 194, 203 as abject  47, 82–96 and jazz audiences  11, 45, 76, 114, 177, 178 see also writing women in jazz  176–8 writing and authenticity  87–88 frivolous literary  143–44 and film  185–7, 192–3, 201–2, 210, 218 and Francophone African jazz fiction  102, 130, 146 and white French jazz fiction  56, 60–62, 70, 77, 83–85, 90, 92–5 opposed to music  3, 4, 5–6, 11 n.22, 14–17, 19, 31, 47, 106–110 see also black musicality; racial score; whiteness

10/05/2017 09:09

Pim Higginson is Professor of Global French Studies at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

‘This is a marvelous book, full of meticulous, inspired yet concise closereadings. A fine addition to the new diaspora studies, tracing ties between Africa and its US and French diasporas, Higginson beautifully parses music’s complex place within aesthetics, revealing the centrality of race to this branch of philosophy. Such interdisciplinary work will be a game-changer.’ Tsitsi Jaji, Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies, Duke University

SCORING RACE  

Explores in depth how Francophone African authors and filmmakers have negotiated the French construction of jazz as the medium of an exoticized and radical alterity.

Pim Higginson

Pim Higginson draws on race theory, aesthetics, cultural studies, musicology, and postcolonial studies to examine how jazz became in France what the author calls a ‘racial score:’ simultaneously an archive and script that has had far-reaching effects on the French avant-garde and on 20th and 21st century Francophone African writers and filmmakers for whom the idea of their own essential musicality represents an epistemological conundrum. Despite this obstacle, because of jazz’s profound importance to diaspora aesthetics, as well as its crucial role in the French imaginary, many African writers have chosen to make it a structuring principle of their literary projects. How and why, Pim Higginson asks, do these writers and filmmakers approach jazz despite its participation in and formalization of a particularly problematic kind of difference? To what extent do they reproduce the terms of their own systematic expulsion into music and to what extent, in their quest for writing (or film-making), do they arrive at tactically efficacious means of working through, around, or beyond the strictures of the racial score?

SCORING RACE

Series Editors Stephanie Newell & Ranka Primorac

Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa Pim Higginson www.jamescurrey.com

Scoring race jkt aw01.indd 1

Jacket front: Louis Armstrong, the famed jazz trumpeter, is borne aloft on a tipoye making its way towards Baudouin stadium in Leopoldville Congo, on Oct. 28, 1960 (AP Photo/Horst Faas)

10/05/2017 15:02