Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by A. Yemisi Jimoh

Saadi A. Simawe, ed. Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison. New York: Garland, 2000. 275 pp. $80.00.

When in 1935 the Martinican writer Aime Cesaire coined the term negritude in an essay published in L'Etudiant Noir, he grounded this term in the historicity and particularity of the imperialist and supremacist subjugation of black people and in the ensuing cultural and political resistance by black people to that subjugation. Even in 1939 with the publication of his celebrated piece in prose and poetry titled "Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal" ("Notebook of a Return to My Native Land"), Cesaire situated negritude within the lived realities of his life as a French colonial subject and his rejection of that condition. Over time, however, this term, along with its English predecessor and analogue blackness, has come to be associated with some sort of mystical and transcendent African/Black essence or soul.

This essentialist conceptualization of black culture has locked far too many discussions of African diasporic cultural and political issues within a binary prison of black versus white or dominant versus subordinate, and focused far too many discussions on transgressions against the purported power of whiteness instead of on understanding the operations--at all of their various intersections, social, political, historical, intellectual--of the culture at hand. In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to Leopold Sedar Senghor's anthology of black literature (Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie Negre et Malgache) positioned negritude writers within the self-reflexive and transgressive qualities of the orphic, and referred to these writers as Black Orpheus. This, very likely inadvertent, act of un-naming potentially usurps the particularity suggested in the term negritude as well as contests the negritude writers' desire to position themselves in an African heritage rather than in the hegemonic and often tyrannical embr ace of universalism located in ancient Greek culture. Subsequent uses of Sartre's appellation by Ulli Beier and Janheinz Jahn, the German founders of the Nigerian-based literary magazine Black Orpheus, contrast with the titles of similar journals (founded by diasporic Africans) from the 1930s through the 1950s, L'Etudiant Noir and Presence Africaine, as well as the title of Senghor's book, all of which conspicuously reclaim the contested terms black and African. Along with this reclamation or reconstruction of identity comes the concomitant revisions that the African enacts upon the received and privileged European culture in which she also is situated.

In African American literature, Kimberly Benston's revision, in the 1970s, of the orphic as a "re-membering"--a unifying and a recalling gesture situated in the music of John Coltrane--seemed to draw to a close this decades-old discourse on Black Orpheus, as few contemporary scholars now employ this allusion as an effective means through which to discuss African American literature. Thus my surprise when I encountered Saadi A. Simawe's edited volume of essays titled Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison. Simawe collects in this volume nine essays that, for the most part, present discussions of the figure of the musician, of jazz styling in prose, or of the transforming power of music in fiction by Sherley Anne Williams, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Gayl Jones, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Nathaniel Mackey, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. The value of this volume is in its emphasis on reading music in African American prose, as the operation s of music in fiction are an often cursorily explored wellspring of cultural knowledge about black people in the United States.

Most of the essays in Black Orpheus, however, suffer from the same limitation; they are too heavily invested in the concept of Black Orpheus as their controlling theme rather than on the rich operations of music in the fictional texts that the writers discuss. In, for instance, Johanna X. K. Garvey's "That Old Black Magic: Gender and Music in Ann Petry's Fiction," an otherwise wonderful reading of gender and music in Ann Petry's fiction, Garvey appears to establish the orphic as a standard against which Petry's characters are measured and suggests a certain failure in those characters that lack orphic qualities as Garvey defines them. The Blues characters Boots Smith and Lutie Johnson from Petry's novel The Street fail, from Garvey's perspective, as orphic characters, while Mamie Powther from The Narrows, Belle Rose from "Olaf and His Girlfriend," Chink from "Miss Muriel," and the writer Ann Petry all are lauded as representations of Black Orpheus. While the articles by Jacquelyn Fox-Good (this writer not onl y loses Sherley Anne Williams's novel Dessa Rose in the orphic but also immerses it in an ahistorical post-structuralist framework), Jane Olmsted, and Tom Lutz are firmly invested in the Black Orpheus concept, other writers in this volume manage to minimize or resist this limitation and write engaging articles on music in African American fiction.