Reading Toni Morrison with Jawole

If you're familiar with Toni Morrison's poetic prose and
haunting, beautiful stories of African American reality, or maybe her Pultizer
or Nobel, you won't want to miss this FREE Book Club
event Mon, Oct 25 at 7 pm at the U of M Urban Research and Outreach Center.
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, another legendary African American artistic leader, and
Arleta Little, Executive Director for U of M's African American Literature,
will lead the discussion of the book's themes and relating them to their own
personal histories.

Jazz, the book
being discussed at the book club event, is the second in her trilogy about the
African American experience, starting with Pulitzer-prize winning Beloved, a story about a mother and her
children, and the fragmentation of memories of slavery, resurfaced. The trilogy
ends with Paradise, which is, as
Morrison says, it's an "interrogation of the whole idea of paradise, the safe
place, the place full of bounty, where no one can harm you. But, in addition to
that, it's based on the notion of exclusivity. All paradises, all utopias are
designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in."

Jazz falls between
these two narratives. Broken down, there are some re-emerging themes:

-Narrator: The
book's narrator speaks tangentially, similar to improvisational jazz. The
speaker does not hurry, and often stops to linger on a thought or description
longer than most. It's what Morrison calls "the voice of the talking book
... as though the book were talking, writing itself, in a sense."

-Time: The
narrator switches back and forth between eras, and consequently there are many
characters coming in and out of the story's focus. Don't get bogged down in the
time continuum - rather, focus on the bigger picture of the individual stories,
and where they intersect with each other.

-The City:
Emphasis on the capital "C." The backdrop is Harlem, and it's the schematic
that the rest of the story's jazz-like tangents fit into. It stimulates the
story, yet also contains danger and challenges.

-Jazz and Love: I'll
let Toni Morrison speak for herself - "Exercising choice in who you love was a
major, major thing. And the music reinforced the idea of love as a space where
one could negotiate freedom. For some black people jazz meant claiming their
own bodies. You can imagine what that must have meant for people whose bodies
had been owned, who had been slaves as children, or who remembered their
parents' being slaves. Blues and jazz represented ownership of one's own
emotions."

Check out this TIME interview with Toni Morrison
for more insight. See you Monday night!

-Melissa Wray, Communications Coordinator