Namwali Serpell and Cathy Park Hong on Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Every city has a pulse, a rhythm, a certain way it’s touched by light.

Continuing on tour for On Morrison, Namwali Serpell lands in sunny Oakland, California, where she reads Morrison’s striking, swinging portrait of Harlem’s jazz age with poet and writer Cathy Park Hong. At an event with the Bay Area Book Festival, Namwali and Cathy discuss slant rhymes, slanted grammars, and the slanting light Morrison wields in the passage to describe how a City stirs up beauty, violence, music, and love.

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From the podcast:

Cathy Park Hong: It makes a lot of sense that [Morrison] grew up around music and then she was forced to take piano lessons. I was forced to take piano lessons too, which is more typical, I’m Asian. And I hated it, but even though she thought she wasn’t musical, it’s so there in the writing. What did you think about the point of view and what she was implying about time and how saying everyone’s looking forward? “Here comes the new” “Look out,” “History’s over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last,” this comes at the beginning of the book. What do you think she’s preparing the reader for?

Namwali Serpell: I think for Morrison, jazz and the jazz age were this perfect way of depicting the now, right? The sense of the present and the sense of freedom as this desire to constantly be in the now, to stay up all night and this kind of reach for the future. But a way, always, of trying to put the past behind you, the idea that history is over. Morrison writes these incredible historical novels and you have to understand that this book is coming after Beloved, which is her masterwork of historical fiction, and it is connected to Beloved in her mind as what she would come to call the Beloved Trilogy: Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. And she contrasts the two books specifically with regard to the bondage of slavery being a haunting where the past has completely taken hold of your present, you cannot escape your past, and the after-lives of slavery is one way that people have talked about that book.

And she said, in Jazz, I wanted to talk about, well, what does freedom do to you and what does a sudden eruption of freedom do to your sense of self, but also your sense of time? And so the nowness that we feel here and also this refusal to actually think about the past, forget that history is over you, all right? And we’re just looking ahead. There’s something dangerous about that too, right?

CPH: There’s a sincerity to that sentiment. History is over. I was wondering if there was also some irony to it as a reader reading back and thinking about this, just in hindsight, that it’s like, yes, it’s over. And I’m thinking about more about American history, just American history at large, that it’s 1926, it’s the Harlem Renaissance, and at the same time it’s right after World War I, but it’s right before the Depression and right before World War II.

NS: And so we know that as readers, and I think this is part of why we have a first person narrator here, to have that irony, because she wants us to be fully immersed in the energy of this moment for these people. They all believe history is over, and she’s with them. She’s like, they’re right, and history is over, you all. So it’s like a sense of embrace of a community feeling. But because it’s a first person narrator, we as the reader know, oh, you might be a little unreliable, you might not be accurate. And because we know what’s to come, we understand that there’s a naiveté here to the sense of liberty and freedom that again cuts against or goes against the grain of the beauty and celebration of freedom and liberation, that shadow that’s always there, even though you seem to have entered the daylight.

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You can purchase On Morrison here and anywhere books are sold.

Cover art includes “Toni Morrison as Song of Solomon” by John Sokol (1981). “PASSAGES: On Morrison” is a production of the Random House Publishing Group.