Every city has a pulse, a rhythm, a certain way it's touched by light. Continuing on tour for ON MORRISON, Namwali lands in sunny Oakland, California, where she reads Morrison's striking, swinging portrait of Harlem's jazz age with poet and writer Cathy Park Hong. At an event with the Bay Area Book Festival, Namwali and Cathy discuss slant rhymes, slanted grammars, and the slanting light Morrison wields in the passage to depict the City's beauty, violence, music, and love. Here's the passage Cathy reads from Morrison's JAZZ: "I'm crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It's the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I'm strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible—like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything's ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything's ahead at last." You can find an abridged transcript and additional show notes here at Literary Hub. You can buy Namwali Serpell's ON MORRISON at this link and anywhere books are sold. PASSAGES: On Morrison is a Random House production, hosted by Namwali Serpell. The podcast was created and produced by Sara McCrea. Sound design and technical direction by John DeLore. Campaign strategy and development, media partnerships by Carrie Neill. Publicity and tour coordination by Peter Dyer.
