The fictional representation of the American city
African American literature is often characterized by a stark manifestation of
its hierarchical colour division. Interestingly, African American novels are replete
with images of post-bellum migration to the city and the ghettozation of the “nigger.” Toni Morrison’s Jazz powerfully captures a
vision of an urban locale in which racial spaces are viscerally demarcated for
the blacks through long conditioning, though in reality no physical marker
separates the white and black worlds. Such a traumatic awareness of their
pariah status makes the blacks in Morrison’s Jazz perpetually reposition themselves.
This constitution of difference evidently replicates throughout the cityscape
where both race and class create their respective unique spaces. These factors
perhaps compel critics like Anne-Marie-Paquet-Deyris
to view in the city an inimical force that denatures the Black communal voice: “As a
new composite, the City is conditioned by the Great Migration from the rural
South which started in the 1870s and climaxed between 1910 and 1930. Whatever
traces of this former history survive in the text remain fragmentary or else
unarticulated. They sometimes even lead to literal dead ends” (African American Review, Summer 2001).
This perspective assumes that the displacement necessitated by the northward
migration has resulted in an irreparable loss of the community’s historical
narratives.
Deyris’s take is problematic because there is nothing to warrant the assumption
that the community invested unstintingly in a consolidated historical voice
prior to the urban relocation. Whatever was lost owing to the migration to the
city had been more than compensated by the enormous opportunities it offered
for liberal engagement with black individualism and collective group action, as
has been superbly delineated in Morrison’s Jazz.
Particularly for the black woman, this relocation to the urban centre was a
proven blessing in that they no longer were confined to the domestic space or
whatever socio-cultural environment was assigned to them. Violet has a high
degree of professional mobility within the contours of black space. Ironically,
it is Joe, the former master woodsman in Vesper County, who is reduced to a
salesman of cosmetics in the city. The black women in the novel through
continual engagement with their surroundings display sensitivity to the urban
cartography. Delimiting such territory contributes to a simultaneous creation
of a personal environment which facilitates a smooth transition to the social
life of the city.
It cannot be denied, however, that no matter how liberating such spaces turn
out to be, a sense of fear haunts the avenues of action available to the black
people. The insertion of an additional ‘n’
that bizarrely transforms Violet’s name to the sobriquet “Violent” ironically
touches upon the primeval drive for survival. Nevertheless, the availability of
such linguistic play bespeaks a luxury hardly possible in the pre-urban time
frame. Further, such a creative possibility ties in meaningfully with the shift
in signification, later, from “Sth” to “Sweetheart” which is
richly evocative of a mood of fruition and fulfillment that was woefully absent
prior to the transitional phase marked by the text.
The sheer ebullience of the narrative in Jazz
then significantly attests to the intellectual mobility of the community itself.
In having Dorcas fall prey to her own whims and venalities the novel subtly underwrites
the endurance and invincibility of the matriarchal vision that sustains the
black narrative. Violet serves the role of a cultural link bridging the Past of
the community in the country with the present in the City, as it were, and
appropriately she even exhorts Felice to “make [the world] up the way you want it
to [be]”. It is amply clear from the text that these communal narratives
both sustain and empower the beleaguered black population through the transition
phase. The colour division has ironically helped evolved a space and
culture in the city that is uniquely and vociferously black. Of course, the
mushrooming of several interest groups and associations later such as the National Negro Business League and the Civic Daughters forum point to the
project of consciousness raising that is already underway. And the possibility
of the central narrative voice being gender-neutral is unmistakably belied by
the intimate access this voice has to spaces such as the Salem Women’s Club. These associations with their palpable presence
in the narrative signify discourses that clearly reject stereotypical notions
of the Negro as being regressive.
Thus, Morrison’s Jazz
forcefully registers the nascent stirrings of group action at a certain
historical moment, which though not politically strident, hold out the
possibility of exploding into an organized revolt against the hegemonic forces.
Feel free to share your response. Thank you and good bye for now.
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