From the podcast, Excerpt: On Morrison
Every city has a beat, a rhythm, it is touched by light in a certain way.
continues to tour for at morrison, Namwali Spiral Lands in sunny Oakland, California, where she reads Morrison’s charming, swinging portrait of Harlem’s Jazz Age with the poet and writer Kathy Park Hong. At an event at the Bay Area Book Festival, Namwali and Cathy discussed the slant rhyme, slant grammar, and slant lighting used by Morrison and how a city evokes beauty, violence, music, and love.
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From the podcast:
Kathy Park Hong: It makes a lot of sense that (Morrison) grew up around music and then was forced to learn piano. I was also forced to take piano lessons, which is more typical considering I’m Asian. And I hated it, but even though he thought he wasn’t musical, he was into writing. What did you think about that perspective and what it was saying about the timing and how everyone is looking forward? “Here comes the new one,” “Look,” “History is over, y’all, and at last everything is ahead,” it comes at the beginning of the book. What do you think she is preparing the reader for?
Namwali Spiral: : I think for Morrison, this was the perfect way to portray jazz and the Jazz Age present, right? The feeling of the present and the feeling of freedom, the desire to constantly be in the present, the desire to stay awake all night and this kind of access to the future. But one way, always, is to try 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 him Dear, which is his masterpiece in historical fiction, and is associated with Dear What in her mind she would call her favorite trio: Dear, Jazz, And Heaven. And she compares the two books specifically in relation to the bondage of slavery, where the past has completely taken over your present, you can’t escape your past, and life after slavery is a way that people have talked about that book.
And he said, I jazz, I wanted to talk about, well, what does freedom do to you and what effect does a sudden burst of freedom have not only on your sense of self, but also on your sense of time? And so the emptiness that we feel here and our refusal to really think about the past, forgetting that history is up to you, okay? And we’re just looking forward. There is something dangerous in this too, isn’t it?
CPH: There is honesty in that feeling. History is over. I was wondering if there was some irony in that, as a reader reading this and thinking about it, it’s like, yes, it’s over. And I’m thinking more about American history, American history overall, that it’s 1926, it’s the Harlem Renaissance, and also 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 this as readers, and I think that’s part of why we have a first-person narrator here, to keep that irony, because she wants us to be completely immersed in the energy of this moment for these people. They all believe that history is over, and he is with them. They’re right, she says, and history is over, y’all. So it’s like a feeling of embracing a community spirit. But because it’s a first-person narrator, we as readers know, oh, you might be a little IncredibleYou may not be precise. And because we know what’s going to happen, we understand that there’s a naïveté here in the spirit of freedom and liberation that again contradicts or cuts off the beauty and celebration of freedom and liberation, that shadow that’s always there, even when it seems like you’ve entered the daylight.
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you can buy at morrison Here And anywhere else books are sold.
Cover art includes “Toni Morrison as Song of Solomon” by John Sokol (1981). “Passages: On Morrison” is a production of Random House Publishing Group.
