Harmony Of Character In African American Fiction

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Music and literature have always shared a common bond in storytelling and upheld a sort of conversation - exchanging characters, borrowing themes, stealing lines. But in a new book about the intersection between music and fiction, University of Arkansas researcher Yemisi Jimoh examines a more subtle dialogue.

In "Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction," Jimoh explains how the philosophies behind African American musical forms carry information about society and serve as metaphors for ways of living in it. She goes on to show how African American authors of the 20^th century took those metaphors and added flesh - creating characters who embodied the social and political spirit of the music and acted out the conflicts and paradoxes of life as an African American.

"All along, as I was writing the book, people expected the typical - that I would talk about the figure of the musician in the text or examine direct quotes and allusions to music," Jimoh said. "But I wanted to get at something even more fundamental: how culture teaches us how to live in the world and how that gets conveyed through two of the most powerful cultural carriers, music and fiction."

Published by the University of Tennessee Press, Jimoh’s book follows the changing philosophies of African American music as it reflects the social and political atmosphere of its time. Yet by viewing those changes through the lens of fiction, Jimoh brings into focus prevalent African American reactions and reveals a resistance to radicalism.

Looking at works from Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and others, Jimoh classifies their literary characters into three groups, each of which corresponds to a form of African American music.

For example, spiritual characters are those who rely on God’s will to solve problems. They emphasize the importance of the collective African American community and its role in advocating for greater social freedoms. Within the text, their limited self-expression suggests the bounds of an oppressive society - a society all too similar to that which held the original makers of spiritual music enslaved.

Blues characters, on the other hand, bridge a paradoxical state of existence. Though no longer enslaved, the blues musicians of the early 20^th century lived in a world that still bound them with social and political oppression. It was a world of arrested transition - freed but not yet free.

Blues characters reflect that paradox. They remain closely associated with the African American collective and its goal of greater freedom. But their more expansive range of self-expression implies that they live within a society that allows more individual freedom.

"The blues philosophy remains connected to the collective, the community and all its ideas about how to live in the world. But these characters begin to recognize and assert their individual identities," Jimoh explained. "They express themselves in a singular way, though that way is still rooted in the collective wisdom."

Jazz characters take individual freedom a step further. In much the same way that jazz musicians use improvisation to assert the unique voices of their instruments within the group, jazz characters recognize their origin in the African American collective, but they choose to fashion their own identities and follow their own goals. These characters assert their own unique voices by experimenting with new modes of self-expression and new ways of experiencing the world.

This burgeoning independence would seem to run parallel with growing social freedoms, which allowed African Americans greater opportunity as individuals. But while social freedoms expanded throughout the 20^th century, the role of jazz characters did not. Jimoh notes that writers continued to feature blues characters prominently but seemed reluctant to let the more independent jazz characters take control of their stories.

"Jazz characters are found in African American literature throughout this period, but they tend to be marginalized and criticized as inappropriate," she said. "That’s partly because jazz characters represent a radical revision of the status quo. There’s a resistance to allowing jazz people to speak as the main voice of a text."

Jimoh believes this reluctance to feature radical black characters results from the multiple pressures that 20^th century African American writers faced - political, social, even financial pressures. Writers who wished to publish their books knew there were boundaries beyond which their characters and plots would not be salable.

But aside from the preferences of readers and publishers, even beyond the considerable pressures placed upon minority writers by the dominant society, Jimoh suggests that African American authors may have censored their jazz characters as a result of their own hesitation about what those characters represented.

As a product of the collective identity and wisdom, themselves, African American writers may have been reluctant to relinquish the voice and the purpose of the collective in their work. They may have feared that the oppressive conditions that had made the collective necessary still existed, Jimoh said.

Although they created jazz characters as representations of real individuals and ideas that were making an impact on African American culture, Jimoh believes that many writers questioned the value of that impact and the outcome of radical change.

"The collective narrative says certain things about how one is to live in the world. That narrative has been very useful in the survival of African American people, and it has proven its mettle over the years," Jimoh said. "Some people want this narrative revised to allow new ways for black people to define and express themselves. But there are consequences to following that proposal, and African American writers in the last century may not have been ready to accept those consequences."