Jazz

As I had read Morrison's "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon" before, I knew I was going to have a special experience with "Jazz." And, while the book started slowly for me and I found the characters at first unsympathetic, I was so drawn in by Morrison's skill at delving into people's pain that by the time I was halfway through I was wondering whether this may be my new favorite Morrison novel. Rarely have I encountered a more redemptive arc in a book.

Set in 1920s Harlem, this book opens with a shock. A teenaged girl is dead, shot by the middle-aged man she was having an affair with.

The man’s wife takes a knife to the funeral, intending to cut the face of her dead rival. So how did it come to this? Morrison paints a picture of Jazz age Harlem, hopping between past and present to show not only the history of this ill-fated couple, but that of Black Harlem. 

No one understands people and the African American experience and can make it come alive like poetry like Toni Morrison. I felt I was living in a different world as I read Jazz.

The book taught me how deep pain can run in one’s spirit and how some dreams for some people will always be a dream. I came to understand what internalized oppression looks like and how racism perpetuates such pain in people’s lives. The book made me want to work harder to dismantle white supremacy culture.

This 1993 novel focuses on a Black couple, Joe and Violet, who move from Virginia to Harlem during the Great Black Migration; after Joe murders his teenage lover. Violet goes to the girl’s funeral intending to deface the corpse. Morrison delves into the family history of the two main characters, showing how the trauma of their ancestors’ enslavement shapes them psychologically. She also illustrates the challenges faced by Black women in both rural and urban settings. I recommend Jazz because it helps us rethink how stories of that time can be told. Morrison created an omniscient, unreliable, and sometimes inscrutable… show more.

American pantheists imagine a self whose body and will are possessed by the force of nature. Transcendentalism, which focuses on nature, and Modernism, which focuses on urban technology, both stage American double-consciousness, and generate a series of ungoverned bodies, of arms and hands with wills of their own. For Morrison, blacks become nature-possessed, City possessed, narrator possessed, and music possessed. In Jazz, Morrison conjoins the natural and the mechanical as a representation of black double-consciousness. It is only music—half Nature, half City—that transcends double-consciousness and restores nature to itself, when, as Morrison tells us with a tip to Charlie,… show more.