(Im)Possibilities

On Monday Dr. McCoy put us into groups and asked us to discuss any remaining questions we had about Jazz, after we had finished reading the last chapter in class and finishing the novel. We began talking about who/ what the narrator was in the story, we came to the conclusion that the narrator was actually the book talking to us. At one point in the beginning of the novel when the narrator is introducing itself to us it says something along the lines of being used to not being used until after dinner, and when it is used the person often falls asleep before they can finish using it (I can’t remember the exact page we found this evidence on). Also when we finished reading the final chapter aloud it finishes with the words ” But I can’t  say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.” (pg. 229). As a group we believed that this was the book telling us that we are the ones with the power to change who we are the book will forever ever the same words it can never be changed, but the book can change us as people. Alpha had the thought that Toni Morrison writes black humanities. She puts stories that can help to show us the defaults in humans, and what we can do to change it. She is the modern day Sophocles, Dante.

Because Morrison wrote her Trilogy based on Dante’s divine comedy, I decided to do some research on how Dante’s Divine Comedy has been related to humanities. I found an article in the Wall Street Journal titled ” The Ultimate Self-Help Book: Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, written by Rod Dreher. The author said that calling “The Divine Comedy” a self- help book “is almost the point of blasphemy”, but he goes onto say that Dante believed this himself which was shown in a letter he wrote to Can Grande Della Scala, in the letter he said “to remove those living in this life from a state of misery and lead them to a state of bliss.” How Dante does this according to the author is he makes us reflect upon our own life’s when reading it, which I believe can also be said about Toni Morrison’s Trilogy.

The article:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303663604579503700159096702

Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer and activist that fights for what goes unnoticed in our justice system. But alongside this, Stevenson works to reteach American history… Stevenson forces his audience to remember the amount of black bodies that have been lynched and enslaved in our country’s history by demanding that we build them memorials and museums. One of the ways I was introduced to him was by watching this TED Talk at the museum I worked at last summer. It motivated me to rethink the ways that my education has been framed and I hope it will do the same for those of you who choose to watch it as well.

Ever since we read the article in class, and made the connections between the prison system and slavery, I’ve been interested in reading further into this. And so in the process of researching, I found this awesome article detailing how slavery and prison can not only be described in like terms, but also how the two two institutions are directly historically connected.

Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the South was a violent and turbulent place for people of color, particularly because of the various laws, such as Jim Crow Laws, that were enacted to virtually halt all reform that might have been possible. Reformation following the Civil War was a failure. Technically slavery was abolished, but the oppression that previously supported the institution remained, making it nearly impossible for freed African Americans to exercise their rights to the same political, social, and economic freedoms as their white counterparts. The article discusses how, while the African-American population went from one situation of intense oppression to another, a new institution replaced slavery as the hands on the plantations- the Convict Lease Program.

The Convict lease program brought a new way for freed slaves to be once again taken advantage of. The incredible and terrible influx of new oppressive laws in the South brought mass imprisonment to a new level, and as the article explains- “mass imprisonment was employed as a means of coercing resistant freed slaves into becoming wage laborers. Prison populations soared during this period, enabling the state to play a critical role in mediating the brutal terms of negotiation between capitalism and the spectrum of unfree labor. The transition from slave-based agriculture to industrial economies thrust ex-slaves and “unskilled” laborers into new labor arrangements that left them vulnerable to depressed, resistant white workers or pushed them outside the labor market completely.” And so thus, many victims of Jim Crow south went from one form of slavery to another, and those who didn’t had almost an equally difficult time assimilating.

Here’s the article if you’re interested in reading and learning more:

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/gilmoreprisonslavery.html

Lots of you have probably heard of/read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Recently, Rankine earned a MacArthur genius grant. Here, Steven W. Thrasher interviews the artist about her plans and about the need to study whiteness, “its paranoia, its violence, its rage.” The conversation carries echoes of the ways Jazz deploys “The Thunder, Perfect Mind” and attends to “the Beast.”