Literature, Film & the Arts

(a paper I wrote for a critical theory and narrative course at HKU)

Jazz as Violence in Michael Harper’s Poetry:

 Creating Identity through Deconstruction and Reactions to Colonialism

            Specific cultural identities are difficult to define due to their dynamism.  To be true to a group of people, they must have a foothold in the past but also be free of it, defined by creative forces rather than a purely historical synthesis. And if this identity is repressed by another group, as in the case of colonized peoples, Postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon argues that violence must be used to break free toward a true identity and liberated life.  However, this violence, he admits, has not solved the problem; rather, colonized people who are successful in their violent rebellions merely invert power structures and maintain hierarchical oppression as well as a suppression of true identities.  A use of metaphorical violence in literature and the arts may instead deconstruct power and create identity, because it requires dynamic thinking both at the time of creation and for the reader/listener/viewer to access it.  In America, jazz music does this by responding to musical structures of the past, breaking them, and creating new music linked with Black[1] culture.  Black poets who include jazz in their poetry make the identity creation more complex and more valid through their use of language.  Michael S. Harper is a contemporary poet who does such; his use of jazz in poetry both honors Black American tradition and creates new identity with a violent cutting of our concept of reality. Although Black Americans were not colonized in the literal sense of the word, they did and do have a repressed cultural identity.  They were, in a sense, imported from Africa to be colonized in a foreign land, making it even easier for the colonizers (white Americans) to assert their power.  Their stories become those of the colonized, of a diaspora, and of a people who have gained rights but still struggle in a white dominated society.

            Harper asks us to deconstruct, to question, and to investigate in order to understand both our own identities and those collectively of Black Americans.  He teaches as he writes, creating dissonance with each discussion as he does in his poetry.  I took a course with Harper during my senior year at Bowdoin College.  Harper drove to the mostly white campus once a week to teach an evening class in the historic Massachusetts Hall, where ten of us would sit around an old, weighty, Pine table, ready to be unsettled and confused by questions raised and seemingly random quotes read from the infinite pile of books Harper kept by his side.  Robert Dale Parker also discusses his classroom experience with Harper in “Poetry and Pedagogy: A Memory of Michael Harper Teaching”: “The first day, I was lost.  He kept talking about ‘myths,’ but it was clear these myths were true—and yet he didn’t seem to like most of them” (810).  Myths are a link to the past, but they are stagnant and do not speak of the contemporary.  They need revisiting.  Parker further emphasizes Harper’s pedagogy: “Culture was form, form was culture…Poetry is about culture…And culture is about hegemony” (811).  By breaking our concept of form in poetry, he also questions societal hierarchies and creates cultural identity.  Harper saw a danger in stagnancy at the beginning of his career when he attended the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa.  They saw him as “another James Baldwin,” but he wanted to be fresh; Harper asserts that “All the writers in the workshop at the time were victims of the New Criticism, the poets writing in rhyme and meter, the fiction writers reading James and Forster.”  Instead, Harper “searched for the cadence of street talk in the inner ear of the great musicians, the great blues singers” (Harper “Don’t They Speak Jazz” 4).  The mixing of discourse with this music gives Harper the dissonance he seeks; it is presented to his students in texts and then further complicated through his questioning and unexplained juxtapositions.  He wants his students to understand Black culture as an active, dynamic identity, while also investigating their own identities. 

            To understand Harper’s creation of Black identity in his poetry, we must first understand how Black people are both colonized and creolized in American society.  There is a complex relationship here due the aforementioned importation of the colonized as slaves.  The end of slavery was not the end of colonization for Blacks in America.  Robert Philipson looks at race relation in the United States as first colonial and then Postcolonial in “The Harlem Renaissance as Postcolonial Phenomenon” in its mirroring of European colonialism in Africa.  However, we go beyond a colonized (Black)/colonizer (white) relationship with the later immigration of those who identify themselves as Black.  For example, during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance in the early twentieth century, twenty five percent of Harlem’s Black population had recently immigrated from the Caribbean (Philipson 146).  In “Creolization and Cultural Globalization: The Soft Sounds of Fugitive Power,” Robin Cohen explains this new diverse group of Black people in Harlem as “creole,” where the word signifies “to create anew” (371).  A “trichotomy” is created with the creole/colonizer/colonized relationship, and an identity vivid with “local color” is asserted (372).  The shifts between these relationships further enhance the dynamism of Black identity.

However, the nuanced relationship in this myriad of power relationships may also make the oppressive forces more difficult to attack: “Because American imperialism usually took the form of economic and political influence rather than outright annexation or the proclamation of a formal empire, its history has been harder to trace and less publicly acknowledged than its French and British counterparts” (Philipson 148).  Therefore, it may take a more complex reaction than Fanon’s call for rebellious violence to deconstruct the power.  At the start of his Postcolonial book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon does not give any leeway from using violence to rise above colonial oppressors: “National liberation, national reawaking, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event” (1).  The Black Panthers attempted to use this violent strategy to free Blacks from American oppression.  The foreword by Homi K. Bhabha to Fanon’s book discusses Reginald Major’s explanation of the Panthers: he “praises Fanon’s analysis of the colonial mentality in understanding the yardstick of ‘whiteness’ that devalues black consciousness and results in a ‘cultural and psychic genocide’ that leads to the inadequacy of black manhood” (Fanon xxviii).  However, neither the Panthers nor Fanon formed a solution with this method of violence. 

Fanon does, however, at least suggest an example of true Postcolonial cultural identity creation through nonviolent means.  In a fresh blend of politics and the arts, Keita Fodeba was minister for internal affairs of the Republic of Guinea and director of the African Ballet.  In Fanon’s words, he “reinterpreted all the rhythmic images of his country from a revolutionary perspective” (163).  In his poetry, he looks at “the exact historical moment of the struggle” and extends it to a new definition of culture.  He creates “a genuine invitation for us to reflect on demystification and combat” (163).  Fodeba achieves dissonance in his readers’ minds through history, “struggle,” and “combat.”  The violent nature of the deconstruction is supported by Fanon, but also noted as a rare example of this achievement.

Jazz can do this as well by creating a more complex and effective response to the problem of Black identity in America than the too narrowly focused violence from the Black Panthers.  If we take the crucible of Harlem, we see a contained violence but a space where music, literature, and art are created for a worldwide audience.  In this space, “[J]azz developed as a Creole music par excellence…[and] is probably the world’s most powerful music form since the development of European classical music” (Cohen 373).  It spread much further than isolated acts of violence by the Panthers throughout the twentieth century.  Jazz is not the passive nonviolence that Fanon condemns, which “conveys to the colonized intellectual and business elite that their interests are identical to those of the colonialist bourgeouisie and it is therefore indispensable…to reach an agreement for the common good” (Fanon 23).  There is a vision or a “Voice” of the colonizers that must be broken rather than met that Ian Baucom discusses in “Frantz Fanon’s Radio: Solidarity, Diaspora, and the Tactics of Listening.”  Fanon speaks of the “sound wave warfare…[where the] rebel radio station tune[s] in to this multiply-interrupted, frequency-hopping, fugitive Voice” (Baucom 21).  He speaks of a “broken, fractured” voice and its “fragmentation” that creates metaphorical violent rebellion. (Baucom 23, 24).  While he grew up listening to the “Creole radio station rather than to the prescribed French fare” (Baucom 15), Harper listened to jazz, claiming he “knew Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday from birth” (Harper “Don’t They Speak Jazz” 3).  Fanon suggests listeners are a “relay” versus “destination” of information and that “listening is…about making – a techne” (Baucom 28-29).  Harper creates active cultural identity from what he hears in jazz. 

When jazz enters poetry, it further enhances the deconstructive effect for society.  As Harper states in “Don’t They Speak Jazz,” “Language and rhetoric is essential power; why else were the slaves prohibited from reading, from learning to pen their own sagas” (5).  Jazz becomes lexical in Harper’s poetry as an echo of Black people speaking to each other in an underground jazz bar and asserting their identities.  He tells the story of a bus driver in South Africa who asks him, “Brother…when blacks are among themselves, don’t they speak jazz?” (Harper 6).  Neither Harper nor the bus driver were the first to verbalize jazz, however.  During the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes used jazz in his poetry both as form and as narrative.  In “Scrapple from the Apple: Jazz & Poetry,” Sean Singer explains: “Hughes “used a jazz aesthetic as a way of talking about culture, race, history, and as a choice…to be joyful in spite of conditions.”  For him, “it is the lexicon of Harlem’s streets, its nightlife, its emotional trajectory.”  For Harper, this lexicon is even more deeply connected to violence, but as a power of healing.  He “search[es] for the wounds, the death, of his people within them and within him so that the healing power of his poetry can have its effect” (Brown 218).  Although “his people” refer to Black identity, Harper’s poetry proves to both create its definition and that of any hurt or oppressed reader.  It is as if jazz mimics the violence and poetry’s language and form heal as it creates truths and further questions for all people to find solutions. 

This is why poetry is such a powerful medium in which to deconstruct society’s oppressive binaries. Jacques Derrida describes deconstruction as a way to reverse colonial-like hierarchies: “In a traditional philosophical opposition we have not a peaceful coexistence of facing terms but a violent hierarchy.  One of the terms dominates the other…, occupies the commanding position.  To deconstruct the opposition is above all, at a particular moment, to reverse the hierarchy” (Culler 85).  With poetry, form, language, and allusions work in conjunction so that more than a simple reversal is created.  Instead, poetry “perform[s] an operation: [it] suture[s] the wound” that America as a nation has created, and we see this “throughout the poetry of Harper” (Brown 219). 

Derrida also calls for an ellipsis in which to explore the unknown or to try to solve society’s seemingly unsolvable problems in his essay “Before the Law.” Those who are trying to create law, or here cultural identity “do[] so by ellipsis, at once retracting and advancing” definitions (215).  Language and identity are created and negated at the same time.  It uses past, future, and present simultaneously to create cultural identity rather than trying to form a simple oppositional reaction to history and violence.  Fanon also speaks of “national consciousness” as a “crude, empty, fragile shell” (Fanon 97), but there may be something powerful created within it.  He also believes that “in the gaps..., in the vacant place where something, perhaps, should have been but was not, that such a soundscript encounters the secret of its own vitality, in its fragmentation and incompleteness that it speaks its invitation to an audience for whom the real task of reconstruction will then begin” (Baucom 47).  Jazz’s indefinite definition and space for improvisation is an ellipsis in this way.  Poetry is also this place to explore the unknown.  Therefore, when poets use aspects of or allusions to jazz in their poetry, it creates a mis-en-abyme.  The poet is “the scribe of the musician from the inside” (Brown 217), where this double layering creates a multitude of further questions and truths about Black identity.

Harper clearly links poetry with this ellipsis in “Jazz Station.”  The subtitle to the poem is: “Some great musicians got no place to play,” but he creates this space within the poem itself.  He speaks of those who may not have money or power and play in underground jazz haunts late at night.  But these spaces may have even more power of deconstructing binaries in their separation from society’s binaries.  As he “speak[s]” of the “strategy of poems,” there are words that  connote violence: “bleeding wives,” “cut-heat,” and even “ice-skating,” where the blade of the skate is sharp and cutting.  But here, “arteries of smog fixate this place/in each recording, music, music, on Impulse.”  The “smog” is the haziness created through deconstructing racial binaries underneath the “little racist community.”  The “music” is the cultural identity that is being formed, and we know this identity comes from within the musicians.  They do not react in opposition but act on “Impulse.”  There is newness in the last image of two poets trying to survive and create with their daughter, concluding with the abstract: “this beach ball sings.”  The ball’s imagined color, weightlessness, and connection with childhood allow for fresh identity creation that can be linked with the daughter.  The way that it “sings” allows the message to be spread to others in song, in poetry.

Harper creates an even more pronounced message when he writes of great jazz musicians.  The layering of his text includes a real personality and real music that can be listened to alongside his poetry.  In “Kind of Blue,” he writes of Miles Davis, the famous Black jazz trumpeter.  The title is also his most famous album, inviting readers to listen to this music specifically.  The poem is like a sketch, mentioning artists and lacking both punctuation and complete ideas.  In the middle of the poem, Harper reflects: “Because you cannot go back/ resonance builds/ new material/ at a recording session.”  He doesn’t want to “go back” to history, to wrongdoings completed.  Instead, the past is the fuel to create “new material.”  He believes that Davis does this “perfectly/ as if to play live/ alone in a group.”  An ellipsis is created in a performing space and Davis plays “live,” as if  he truly creates in that moment.  As he is “alone in a group,” the singular and universal are addressed simultaneously.  He creates questions for his audience: “Miles asked/ we answered.”  But in the poem, there is no end punctuation to this last line.  The “answer[s]” are unfinished and continuing.  We can listen to his album again; we can read this poem again; we can create our own poem or music in response to either.  The cycle may be infinite.

Harper also writes extensively of John Coltrane, a famous Black jazz saxophonist who also played with Davis at times.  These are special poems in Harper’s oeuvre: “It is important to see Harper’s longstanding meditation on the life and art of John Coltrane as a reflection on how Harper views himself as an Afro-American artist” (Brown 209).  Coltrane’s music speaks to Harper like no other in its ability to break society’s colonial structures.  The independent voice of the creolized assertion of power comes through.  Joseph A. Brown quotes Harper in “Their Long Scars Touch Ours: A Reflection on the Poetry of Michael Harper:”

“One of the things that is important about Coltrane’s music is the energy and passion with which he approached his instrument and music.  Such energy was perhaps akin to the nature of oppression generally and the kind of energy it takes to break oppressive conditions, oppressive musical structures.” (211)

Here, energy is the weapon to violently break the hierarchy.  Harper is so moved by the music that he is best able to transfer the music to language that asserts cultural identity while simultaneously asking his reader to continue in an active relationship with this identity.  Kimberly W. Benston further asserts this relationship between Coltrane’s music and Harper’s language in her essay included in Chant of Saints, which was edited by Harper, entitled “Late Coltrane: A Re-Membering of Orpheus:”

This belief contains the powerful suggestion that music is the ultimate lexicon, that language, when truly apprehended, aspires to the condition of music and is brought, by the poet’s articulation of black vocality, to the threshold of that condition…[T]his merging of the word with the musical ideal, can be found in the myriad poems directly inspired by Coltrane….This complex tension is strongly felt behind the technical ingenuities of Coltrane’s music.  Its assault on form has, in all probability, no exact parallel in the history of Afro-American music.  It is at once more various, destructive, and self-conscious than its precedents; it challenges the idea of form itself and resolves that challenge by forcing new demands on every aspect of the medium.  (416-7)

As Coltrane responds to music and creates new, Harper also responds to Coltrane and creates new.  This assertion of identity as an active force is similar to the example of Guinea’s Fodeba.  Because this solution to fighting society is precisely undefined in its drive to keep questioning and create “new demands,” it is difficult to label it as an answer to colonialism.  Perhaps because of this lack of definition, we can only look at the impact within individuals rather than on the whole of society.

            One of Harper’s poems on Coltrane is entitled: “A Narrative of the Life and Times of John Coltrane: Played by Himself.”  The use of the individual’s life story captivated in a single poem creates an ellipsis in which we may explore our individual cultural definitions.  There is the hint of painful memories related to race.  The persona, Coltrane, starts with what he does not “remember” but the “feel of the reed on [his] tongue/ haunts [him] even now, [his] incisors/ pulled so the pain wouldn’t lurk.”  Harper claims that in reality Coltrane was always in pain when he played:

There’s a story that Trane was searching for a particular tone on his horn; he had what we thought was a perfect embrochure, but his teeth hurt constantly, so he searched for the soft reed which would ease the pain.  After searching for a year, each session killing his chops, he gave it up completely; there was no easy way to get that sound – play through the pain to a love supreme. (Harper “Don’t They Speak Jazz” 3)

It could be that Coltrane needed to “play through the pain” to make more meaningful music.  The dissonant sounds are representations of his painful memories.  We shall see further response to “a love supreme” in the ensuing poems on Coltrane as a sort of ontology.  It represents the power created from his music.  We know the memories are related to “separations of skin,” but the exact nature of this pain is unclear.  The sounds of the past, of the “church choir,” are “labeling [him] into dissonance.”  There is a paradox here in that “dissonance” demonstrates confusion and intersections rather than a clear “label[].”  However, since Harper wants a “label[],” or an identity, to continue to be malleable, the “dissonance” may in fact create his identity.  At the end of the poem, the persona asserts: “I broke loose from crystalline habits/ I thought would bring me that sound.”  The “crystalline habits” are oppressive forces understood in memory as truths.  Once he can break them apart, or deconstruct them, the “sound” of his inner self may be freed.

            In “Here Where Coltrane Is,” Harper also starts with “memories” and ends with “music.”  The “memories” are abstract, but they have to do with “soul and race” as well as dealing with “suffering” related to a childhood in poverty.  Harper allows readers to connect with their own experiences of racism and class struggle by keeping Coltrane’s life elliptical.  The family and the experiences shape into “a love supreme,” Coltrane’s song but Harper’s mantra.  It is the song of experience and newness, but also of love and connection.  The last stanza speaks of all the colors of his people as a Black identity in “memories:” “oak, birch, maple,/ apple, cocoa, rubber.”  Coltrane is linked with “Martin” Luther King, jr., and “Malcolm” X in death.  The colors of their beings merge into one painting.  King fought for civil rights with nonviolence; Malcolm X did so through violence in connection with the Black Panthers; Coltrane fought with music.  They are all part of the Black American identity creating new colors.  “[I]n the eyes of [his] first son,” Harper sees “the browns/ of these men and their music.”  “[M]usic” now is not only jazz but also any shattering production against oppressive societal structures. 

            The music and mantra of “a love supreme” repeatedly enters the poem “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” to similarly respond to painful memories and positively assert identity.  The phrase is repeated four times as a subtitle before the poem even begins.  In this way, we are asked to sing it rather than speak it.  Those of us who know Coltrane’s music immediately connect with the echoes of his song, ready for Harper’s fresh take on it.  Again, he begins the poems with memories left behind; “you tuck the roots in the earth.”  His switch from first to second person in this poem allows the reader to make an even deeper connection.  The memories are again abstract, but whatever their specifics may be, they are again linked with “pain” and suffering: “there is no substitute for pain.”  “You,” as the reader and maker of Black of identity, cannot forget about painful memories.  Instead, he again responds to them by “singing: a love supreme, a love supreme,” and then asks, “what does it all mean?”  “You” must respond with what it means to you.  After going through two more sequences of abstract, painful memories resulting in song, Harper takes us through a sequence of question and answer:

                        Why you so black?

                        cause I am

                        why you so funky?

                        cause I am

                        why you so black?

                        cause I am

                        why you so sweet?

                        cause I am

                        why you so black?

                        cause I am

                        a love supreme, a love supreme:

The repeated “why you so black?” explicitly connects this poem to the formation of Black identity.  The assertion of “I am” need not be explained; rather, it is up to the reader, now “I,” to form this sense of being from within.  Ending in song again is both a link to the singular and universal, inclusive of history, present action, and future dreams.  The last stanza repeats the sequence of abstract memories resulting in song.  This time, “a love supreme” is repeated four times like the subtitle.  It is the formation of Coltrane’s recorded song.  However, the poem ends with a dash instead of a period.  It leaves the recorded memory open to our own interpretations and uses.

“Peace on Earth” also ends with “A LOVE SUPREME:”, now in capital letters with a colon for an end mark.  We are asked to fill in the identity that follows.   This poem seems to encompass Harper’s ontological view about achieving “Peace” and true identity.  The penultimate line reads: “salaams of becoming:”.  It sets up Coltrane’s song title as his method of “becoming.”  The “salaams,” or salutations of peace in Islamic countries,” allow our understanding of peaceful existence to extend beyond national borders.  Despite Fanon’s call for violence, he echoes this method of finding identity: “[A] diasporic identity is constituted neither as a fixed essence nor as an utterly unbound performance but as a changing of the same…in which identity mingles with difference” (Baucom 37).  Harper proves there is no need for violence to attain this type of “identity mingle[d] with difference,” or a deconstruction of binaries.  He again alludes to the nonviolent methods of rebellion that “Reverend King” taught America.  However, it is still metaphorical violence that leads to this peace and “oneness” represented in “music.”  The poem starts with prayer “for the war-dead broken/ at Nagasaki.”  This link to the atomic bomb and World War II is not directly connected to the Black experience.  It shows that Harper is trying to connect all people who have been hurt by memories or oppression.  The healing music still contains “assault” and even a “demonic angel.”  The musical violence deconstructs pain and oppressive binaries that may blind an individual from living as he wishes.  Before the conclusion about peace and “becoming,” the persona finds a place “where scales came to my fingers.”  Song is created without thought.  It is therefore coming from deeply within the individual.  This identity creation is neither part of nor direct response to societal oppression. 

Harper has achieved in poetry what many Black poets discoursing with jazz hope to achieve: “it is in music that the [Black] poet hopes to achieve both the individual creation – the call bearing the shape of his own spirit –and communal solidarity – the response of infinite renewal” (Benston 416).  He is more optimistic than Fanon, who believes “white jazz fans” are at best passive listeners and at worst reasserting power through their own use of the music (176).  Harper even goes a step further to allow at least all oppressed Americans to create identity through his poetry: “Harper…allows himself to become a child of all who have been scarred by the long winter of America” (Brown 219).  Some of his poetry links with Native Americans, for example, but anyone who feels painful memories may achieve salvation through his song.  He creates more questions alongside infinite truths in his poems, just as Deconstruction theorists ask us to do.  His “double binds” and “double character of meaning” mimic the complex myriad of the relationship of Black Americans with their society (Culler 136, 132), but also of any individual in this Postcolonial and globalized world.  Just as the open-ended poems reveal: “We need not believe in the possibility of actually attaining truth, the argument runs, but we must believe that there is a truth” (Culler 155).  In my experience as his student, I found that Harper truly wants us all to find “truth,” to find an empowered sense of being.  For him, “Testimony becomes pedagogy, and pedagogy becomes prophecy” (Parker 812).  He does not stop at a double layer of meaning by talking about jazz and the Black experience in his poetry.  He continues by using education to reach out to all communities, including Bowdoin College’s small campus in the midst of its harsh Maine winters, where admissions officers actively recruit Black students to achieve a more diverse student body.  After I finished his course, I left not knowing what I had learned.  That summer, I received a copy of his book Chant of Saints in the mail with a note written by typewriter on a yellowed index card:  “…The art of making is a conceit of special value to me, so make sure you continue your investigations…”[2]

Bibliography

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Benston, Kimberly W. “Late Coltrane: A Re-Membering of Orpheus,” in Chant of Saints,             ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto.  University of Illinois Press:                      Chicago, 1979. (413-24)

Brown, Joseph A. "Their Long Scars Touch Ours: A Reflection on the Poetry of Michael             Harper." Callaloo. 26. (1986): 209-220. Print.

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Culler, Jonathan.  On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.  Ithaca,    New York: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Derrida, Jacques.  “Before the Law.”  Great Acts of Literature.  Routledge: New York,       1992.  181-220. 

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox.  New York: Grove        Press, 2004. Print.

Harper, Michael S. "Don't They Speak Jazz." MELUS. 10.1 (1983): 3-6. Print.

Harper, Michael S. “Here Where Coltrane Is,” “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” and “Jazz       Station,” PoetryFoundation.org.  2000, 2000, 1971.  Web. 25 Nov 2010.       <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/michael-s-harper> .

Harper, Michael S. “Peace on Earth” and “A Narrative of the Life and Times of John        Coltrane: Played by Himself,” in Chant of Saints, ed. Michael S. Harper and      Robert B. Stepto.  University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1979. (408-11)

Harper, Michael S. “Release: Kind of Blue,” in The Vintage Book of African American       Poetry, ed. Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton.  Random House: New York,      2000. (277-8)

Parker, Robert Dale. "Poetry and Pedagogy: A Memory of Michael Harper Teaching."      Callaloo. 13.4 (1990): 810-12. Print.

Philipson, Robert. "The Harlem Renaissance as Postcolonial Phenomenon." African           American Review. 40.1 (2006): 145-60. Print.

Singer, Sean. "Scrapple from the Apple: Jazz & Poetry." Poets.org. N.p., 2010. Web. 27 Nov 2010. <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5919>.