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