Author plays the
'Half-Blood Blues'
Fri March 2, 2012Esi Edugyan's novel "Half-Blood Blues" is a portrayal of jazz musicians in Nazi Germany.STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- "Half-Blood Blues" captures end of jazz age in 1930s Germany in characters' staccato slang
- Novel conveys the paranoia leading up to start of World War II and racial tension of the time
- As Canadian-born daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, "I grew up between worlds," novelist says
- Esi Edugyan says a sense of uprootedness "lies at the heart of this novel"
(CNN) -- Imagine a smoke-filled jazz club, dark and crowded. The sounds of a trumpet solo echo on stage, while a piano, bass and drums pound out a finger-snapping groove. You can almost smell the cigarette smoke, taste the cheap booze being served. This is Berlin, 1939 -- the eve of World War II. These are the Hot Time Swingers, the imagined jazz band at the center of Esi Edugyan's "Half-Blood Blues." The novel was a finalist for Britain's prestigious Man Booker prize in 2011 and reaches U.S. bookstores this week.
The story is told through the eyes of the Swingers' bass player, Sid Griffiths, in alternating takes between events in Paris and Berlin in 1939 and Baltimore and Berlin in 1992. The novel captures the end of the jazz age in Germany perfectly in the characters' staccato slang, sounding much like jazz music imagined as dialogue. Offstage, the story captures the paranoia and fear of the days leading up to the start of the war, and the racial tension of the time period.
Sid narrates, but the band's brilliant young trumpet player, Hieronymus "Hiero" Falk, is the linchpin of the story, a German who happens to be black. Hiero's prodigy-like talent brings the band success, love and rivalries among its members. After being banned by the Nazis as "degenerate" music, the Swingers escape to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong. But then war breaks out, and the Gestapo arrests Hiero in a café. He is never heard from again.
Jump ahead 50 years. Falk has become a cult hero among jazz fans. He's now the subject of a documentary film. Sid and the only other surviving band member, Chip Jones, are invited to the film's premiere in Berlin. As they return to celebrate their long-lost friend, Sid, the only witness to Hiero's disappearance, is forced to reveal a decades-old secret.
"Half-Blood Blues" is the second novel from Edugyan, an author with a bit of a globe-hopping past. She was born and raised in Canada, the daughter of immigrant parents from Ghana. She has studied and lived in the United States and across Europe, including stops in Iceland, Spain and Germany. Now married and mother to an infant daughter, Edugyan lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
CNN recently asked her about the novel in a phone interview and via e-mail. The following is an edited transcript:
CNN: What was the spark behind your book?
Edugyan: I was living in Germany at the time, acutely aware of my difference -- being a black woman from Canada. At the same time I'd been reading about the so-called "Rhineland Bastards" -- the half-black children of France's colonial soldiers from Africa stationed in the Rhineland after the close of the first World War. I began imagining their lives in Germany, as both outsiders and insiders, and this naturally led to my wondering what must have happened to them during the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism. This is where my interest in the novel came from. But the book itself more rightly begins with Sid's voice, his character, the perplexing problems of loyalty and betrayal in any artistic life.
CNN: You really captured the feel, the language and the tone of the late 1930s European jazz scene. Did you research this period extensively before you started writing?
Edugyan: Thank you, that's kind of you to say. I researched assiduously, both before and during the writing, to capture the feel of that world. But Sid's voice is so very particular to Sid himself that I would never want it to stand in as some sort of "representative" voice from that time. It's an approximation of the kind of hybrid language he and his band mates were speaking at the time. But it's important to remember, too, that Sid is a man straddling two eras -- 1930s Europe and 1990s Baltimore -- and the shifts in his rhythms, diction, syntax hopefully capture some of that flavor.
CNN: I pictured you listening to a lot of jazz from this time period while you were writing. Did you and were there any jazz artists in particular that inspired you?
Edugyan: It's interesting to hear you say so. The music was my constant companion, even more than books. Not only as a way to lead me back into the novel after each break but also as a kind of consolation. There was a strength and faith and promise in it that I think I needed at the time. What's fascinating to me now is to think back on who I was listening to at various points in the novel and read the book with that in mind. Not only the language itself, but the speed and emotion under the prose finds a corollary in the music. Or so it seems to me in retrospect. Among the artists I listened to most often were Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong.
CNN: Your novel focuses on the Nazi persecution of the Afro-German community. What drew you to this little known chapter of pre-World War II history?
Edugyan: As the Canadian-born daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, I grew up between worlds, in a sense, aware both of my differences and kinships. Loyalties were always mixed, and the world inside the walls of my home was significantly different from the world beyond it.
I did my graduate work at Johns Hopkins, living in Baltimore for a short time, which reinforced this complicated sense of identity. And in the years since, I lived on and off in Europe, where, as ever, I had periods of feeling profoundly at home and periods of total estrangement. I think that sense of uprootedness, that quiet seeking after identity and self, lies at the heart of this novel.
... In the writing itself, you're not thinking about such things. You just know that there's a story there, one you want told. And you run with it.
CNN: While Sid narrates the novel, this really felt like Hiero's story to me. He's such a compelling character but remains something of an enigma. I assume this was by design?
Edugyan: Absolutely. That unknowability lies at the core of the novel. It seemed it would have been an act of extraordinary presumption to take Hiero's voice, to speak for him, to fill that silence. And, too, a way of diminishing the sadness of what he (and his real-life counterparts) suffered.
CNN: You come from such an interesting background, the child of Ghanaian émigré parents, born and raised in Canada. You've studied in a number of countries, including the U.S. and Europe. You now live in British Columbia. How has all that world travel influenced you as an artist and a person?
Edugyan: ... There can be something liberating ... for the fiction writer who finds herself caught between worlds. An opportunity to observe and inhabit the skins of others. I know, for myself, that all of that traveling has impacted the kinds of stories I am drawn to.
CNN: You're also the mother of a young child. Has that changed your approach to writing?
Edugyan: Oh, it's still so early to tell -- our daughter is only 6 months old. But that, too, is turning out to be a different kind of journey.
CNN: What's next for you?
Edugyan: I find myself staring out the windows an awful lot these days, dreaming up the next book. But our daughter fills up the immediate hours of the day.
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Esi Edugyan
REVIEW: FICTION
Half-Blood Blues
- by Esi Edugyan
BY DONNA BAILEY NURSE
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Sep. 09, 2011
For centuries, Africans in the New World have drawn sustenance from biblical stories detailing the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. In mid-20th-century America, many Jews supported civil rights by marching alongside black demonstrators. Recent decades, however, have sometimes found these two peoples at odds, arguing over who has had it worse. It is a bewildering contest to say the least, for there has always been more than enough evil to go around.
Victoria writer Esi Edugyan reconciles these two haunted histories in a stunningly original work about black experience in Nazi Germany which was this week short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It's a second novel for Edugyan that, like her first, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, taps a rich, little-known vein of black history.
Set in Baltimore, Berlin and Paris, Half-Blood Blues spans from just after the Great War to the 1990s, but centres on the months leading up to the occupation of Paris. It chronicles the increasingly deadly trials of an interracial jazz band in which the lead musician, a German of African descent, is arrested by the Nazis.
Half-Blood Blues can be compared to a jazz symphony with discrete movements, shifting moods and a complex chorus of human and instrumental voices: It swings between present and past, North and South, East and West, black and white, art and violence, war and peace.
In 1939 Berlin, Sid Griffiths, an African-American bass player, and his friend, Chip Jones, belong to a popular jazz band. Composed of African-American and German musicians, the Hot Time Swingers play the city's clubs and cabarets. Eventually, Hieronymous Falk, a brilliant Afro-German trumpeter, joins the ensemble. He is the son of a French African soldier and a white German mother, a member of a despised population known as the Rhineland bastards. As the Nazi threat grows, Hiero's racial heritage places him in constant danger. To make matters worse, the Nazis label jazz the degenerate music of blacks and Jews.
After the band is involved in a fatal brawl, and the Nazis deport their Jewish piano player, Chip, Hiero and Sid flee to France. In Paris, where they believe they will be safe, they audition for Louis Armstrong. It is their dream come true. But French officials have already started rounding up Germans, and after the occupation, Nazis begin rounding up undesirables. Both developments place Hiero at risk.
Edugyan illustrates how the Germans treated blacks according to their nationality. African Americans – mainly artists and diplomats – could move about with the proper documents, while Hiero, a native of Germany, is considered a despicable outsider.
Canada exists far from the landscape of this novel, represented only by Delilah, from Montreal, with whom Sid falls in love. Nevertheless, key themes of black Canadian literature surface throughout, including the international nature of racism, the unpredictable treatment of blacks, the conundrum of biracial identity and the anxiety-inducing issue of passing.
Sid is a light-skinned black from Baltimore whose Virginia relatives have decided to pass for white. In Berlin, however, Sid's olive complexion makes him more suspect than the band's blond, blue-eyed pianist, who is Jewish. Still, Sid's light skin guarantees him greater privilege than either Chip or Hiero, both dark. Edugyan shuffles the race cards to illustrate the dizzying implications of various permutations of shade, nationality and ethnicity. At the same time, she subtly implies that the poignancy of Chip's and Hiero's racial experience informs their superior musical gifts.
The novel is narrated by Sid in a jazzy black vernacular full of bawdy wit and rough tenderness that may give some readers cause to quibble. Yet Edugyan's shaping of plot through voice and dialogue resembles a painter who models her subjects from whorls of colour. At times, Sid's voice feels limiting, for he is a slightly naive, moderately talented musician, full of insecurities and petty jealousies. Sid comes to resent Hiero for his extravagant gifts and for the special bond the young man shares with Delilah. His pettiness turns malevolent.
Edugyan's musically educated ear allows her to transpose notes into words and back again. Listen, then, to Hiero's duet with Armstrong: “It was the sound of the gods, all that brass. … Hiero thrown out note after shimmering note, like sunshine sliding all over the surface of a lake, Armstrong was the water, all depth and thought, not one wasted note. Hiero, he just reaching out, seeking the shore …”
Stranded in Paris, Hiero persuades Sid and Chip to record a song he calls Half-Blood Blues. Delilah finds them an ancient studio where they play take after glorious take. In a few days, Hiero would be captured by the Nazis. But “for that night at least,” Sid recalls, “we was free.”
Much of the power of this unforgettable novel comes from the way its racial themes echo. It is very difficult to perceive and articulate the twisted skein of emotion that is black experience – and yet that is just what Edugyan manages to do with this brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed novel. It's a work that promises to lead black literature in a whole new direction.
Donna Bailey Nurse is the author of What's a Black Critic To Do? She is writing a literary memoir of the U.S. South.
>via: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/half-blood-blues-by-esi-edugya...