Jean Toomer revisited in james emanuel's postmodernist jazz haiku

Virginia Whatley Smith

pp. 81-108

in: Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed), Cross-cultural visions in African American literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

In the title as well as in the introductory haiku poem of his 1999 volume JAZZ from the Haiku King, Nebraska-born poet and African American Parisian exilic James A. Emanuel takes on Japanese culture and announces that he is the "Jazz King of Haiku." This is a statement challenging Japanese masters of the haiku tradition, its forms dating back to the thirteenth century and afterward perfected by Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century. But one has to recall that Emanuel is a postmodernist poet; his text, in essence, is a syncretism of African American, blue-jazz-gospel musics that have been integrated with a Japanese poetic form. Moreover, Emanuel is also writing out of African American literary traditions that parody its own expressions. In JAZZ from the Haiku King, he revives this literary cultural pattern by upgrading Jean Toomer's modernist, 1920s experimental novel Cane to contemporary times in order to stave off the social death of a dying, musical artistic form and, therefore, of its African American creators (Toomer 14). Jazz music is that oxymoronic Death-Life inspiriting force, and James A. Emanuel is its "electromyographic," regenerative poetic voice. He weds the Japanese, seventeen-syllable haiku form to an already musically driven, racialized cultural trope of "admixture" defining African American jazz music that had arisen during slavery and become revitalized during the Harlem Renaissance.