J e a n R h y s 's P o s t m o d e r n N a r r a t i v e

A u t h o r i t y : S e l i n a ' s P a t o i s
in " L e t T h e m C a l l I t J a z z "
Kristin Czarnecki
Kristin Czarnecki is a visiting
professor of English at
Georgetown College. She has
published essays on Virginia
Woolf Jean Rhys, and Louise
Erdrich.
I
n the train that evening I think myself lucky, for
to walk about London on a Sunday with
nowhere to gothat take the heart out of you,"
says Selina Davis, the narrator of Jean Rhys's 1962
short story, "Let Them Call I t Jazz," as she heads to
an apartment proffered by a stranger in a caf. (
198 7 , 159) I n certain ways Selina resembles
the heroines of Rhys's modernist novels.
Down and out, she roves from flat to flat,
accepting offers of shelter and alcohol from
dubious men. Landladies and neighbors eye
her suspiciously, spread rumors, and complain
about her to the police. A crucial difference,
however, is that not only is Selina of West
I ndian background, as are several Rhys hero-
ines, but she is also mulatta, a Martiniquaise
immigrant to London in the 1950s, a depar-
ture in characterization for Rhys and a new
narrative response to patriarchal assaults upon
women and the poor. With Selina telling her
story in patois, "Let Them Call I t Jazz"
K r i s t i n C z a r n e c k i 21
responds to literary modernism's linguistic dilemmas and transforms the mar-
iginalized female voice into one of authority.
' As she begins, Selina explains that her parents are a white Enghshman
'she does not remember and a "fair coloured woman, fairer than I am they
iSay," who left Martinique for work in Venezuela when Selina was three or
'four years old (Rhys 1987, 164). Her grandmother raised her, she says, a
Iwoman "quite dark and what we call 'country-cookie' but she's the best I
know" (164, my emphasis), a comment reflecting the intraracial color preju-
:dice and nuanced racial stratifications of the West Indies in PVide Sargasso Sea
I (1966). Selina then tells of a demoralizing episode in her life. Having immi-
grated to London from Martinique to work as a seamstress, she learns that
iher skills are unwanted in an industry bent on fast mass production."[Hjere
they tell me all this fme handsewing take too long. Waste of timetoo
'slow," she says. "They want somebody to work quick and to hell with small
stitches" (164). Her life savings stolen, probably by her landlady, Selina gets
evicted from her Notting Hill flat and accepts an offer from a man (most
likely a pimp) named Sims of a place to stay. In a damp half-furnished flat,
i she finds herself surrounded by neighbors scornful of her color and espe-
icially of her voice.
' The force of Selina's voice in patois grows as the story continues, for she
does not retreat from incendiary subjects but acknowledges frankly English
, xenophobia and racism. She makes no apologies for who she is or how she
' talks, either, speaking matter-of-factly and declining to translate Creole
words like "fout" (Rhys 1987, 167) and "doudou" (168). As the experiences
she relates are hers, those privy to her account of themother characters as
well as readers of her storymust strive to understand her rather than expect
her to accommodate their/our particular (Anglo) cultural location. She uses
standard English only when repeating English people's words, as when tran-
scribing with perfect diction and punctuation her Notting HiU landlady's
discussion with the police: "She certainly had no money when she came
here," Selina quotes the landlady as saying to officers who respond to Selina's
report of the theft. "She wasn't able to pay a month's rent in advance for her
room though it's a rule in this house" (163). According to Selina, the landla-
dy then remarks conspiratoriaUy, "These people terrible liars" (163)a
phrase with no verb reflecting Selina's patois instead of the standard English
of the previous statements.
Does Selina misrepresent the English woman by putting her words into
patois, thereby diminishing her narrative credibility? Or does the English
woman "speaking" patois become less credible insteadculturally inferior or
low-class, the common English perception of patois? Of which woman is this
bit of patois more revealing? Rhys's narrative approach in the story illumi-
22 Co//ege/erare 35.2 [Spring 2008]
nates both. As she does in many of her works, Rhys makes clear in "Let Them
Call It Jazz" that "gender is not a homogenizing or unifying factor in socie-
ty, for both racial and class differences cut across gender lines" (Barnes 1995,
156). The landlady's betrayal of Selina becomes the focus and is worse than
Selina's betrayal of proper English. Furthermore, as the story's standard
English becomes increasingly scarce, it also becomes increasingly jarring to
see, as Selina speaks in her own idiom to be true to herself and better com-
prehend her experiences. In fact rather than recreate dialogue, she often
incorporates Enghsh people's words into her own. Of her first encounter
with Sims, she says, "when I tell him my trouble he say I can use an empty
flat he own till I have time to look around" (Rhys 1987, 158). Blending his
words seamlessly into her sentences, she asserts hers as the more authorita-
tive voice. She even scoffs at the impotence of Enghsh speech, becoming
more wary of her physically threatening landlady.
Selina's voice is also potent because it is loud, as those around her remind
her again and again. For a time she refuses silence, stepping outside to sing
and dance and on one occasion demand an explanation from her neighbors
as to why they malign her. Angered by a woman's insinuations and insults,
Selina defies her by starting "to sing so she can understand I' m not afraid of
her.The husband call out:' If you don' t stop that noise I'll send for the police.'
I answer them quite short. I say,'You go to hell and take your wife with you.'
And I sing louder" (Rhys 1987,164).According to Edouard Glissant,"Creole
organizes speech as a blast of sound" (qtd. in Nort h 1994, 109) a fitting
description of how Selina's singing and yelling strike her neighbors.
Unwilling to acknowledge her "blasts" as legitimate language, the neighbors
have her arrested, physically taken out of their sight and earshot when words
fail to subdue her. As the arresting police officer tells Selina, "You can't make
that noise here" (1987,165).Visceral responses to her "noise" indicate its pen-
etration of patriarchal sensibilities. Differing conspicuously from standard
Enghsh, her patois and songs illustrate how marginalized women might
oppose their denigration, in this case through a "dynamic process of reterri-
torialization" (Barnes 1995, 150).That the poUce forcibly remove Selina for
singing demonstrates her determination to stake out a linguistic and physical
space of her own.
The frisson of Selina's patois in England becomes clearer in the context
of dialect usage during the modernist period, when Rhys began writing and
when experimental narrative harbored different implications for "whi t e" and
"black" writers. 1 Michael Nort h examines the "racial cross-identification"
prevalent throughout the modernist period, when Ezra Pound,T.S. Eliot, and
Gertrude Stein, among others, wrote in black dialect, or their perception
thereof, to create innovative literature (1994, Preface n. p.). Wallace Stevens
I
I
' K r i s t i n C z a r n e c k i 23
I
i once signed a letter "Sambo," while Pound dubbed himself "Brer Rabbit"
] and nicknamed Eliot "de Possum" (8). Such practices were meant to defy
' convention and restructure language, abolishing restrictions on diction,
vocabulary, and punctuation. North concludes, in fact, that white high mod-
ernists only found a voice through their adoption of black speech patterns.
"As a violation of standard English," he states, "dialect became the sign of
Pound and Eliot's collaboration against the London literary establishment
and the literature it produced. Dialect became, in other words, the private
double of the modernist poetry they were jointly creating and publishing
in these years" (77). I would highlight "double" as the key to such a prac-
tice, indicating white writers' privileged maneuvering back and forth
across cultural borders.
[ Conversely, African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance delib-
i erated over dialect and often eschewed it in their works for fear of propagat-
I ing base stereotypes. As adapted by white writers and urged by white patrons
I and publishers, dialect often confined black writers within an exotic, folksy,
I or humorous framework, contrary to the principles of racial uplift outlined
; by W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, wherein African Americans would gain
I an entre into mainstream society through a black aesthetic founded on
sophisticated cultural accomplishments. African American modernism "had
to fight its way out ofthe prison of white-created black dialect" beforehand
I (North 1994, Preface n. p.), while black modernists had to consider the
potential and pitfalls of dialect in their own literature.
I The poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, for one, experienced the convoluted
dynamics of dialect writing. "The quaint charm and humor of Dunbar's
dialect verse brought to him, in his day, largely the same kind of encourage-
ment one would give a sideshow freak (A colored man writing poetry! How
odd!) or a clown (How amusing!)," writes Langston Hughes (1926, 29).
Indeed William Dean Howells asserts in the early twentieth century that
Dunbar's "dialect pieces and Charles Chestnutt's [51c] The Conjure Woman
were superb because they captured the humor and the limitations of Black
America" (Baker 1976, 120). Despiteor perhaps because ofthe commo-
[ tion over the black vernacular, black West Indian poet Claude McKay's white
I mentor and patron, Walter Jekyll, an English expatriate to Jamaica, urged him
I to drop his "perfect standard English . . . in favor of Jamaican dialect" (North
I 1994,100) as the white vogue for all things black continued unabated in the
; 1920s. Jekyll's advice ran counter to McKay's upbringing in Jamaica, where
' schoolteachers strongly discouraged dialect for signifying social and intellec-
tual inferiority.^
; George S. Schuyler, on the other hand, includes McKay in a list of
I English writers, seemingly disregarding McKay's dialect writing and Jamaican
2 4 C o l l e g e L i t e r a t u r e 3 5 . 2 [ S p r i n g 2 0 0 8 ]
background altogether, and Stephen E. Henderson finds that "some struc-
tures [of poetry] are more distinctly Black, more recognizably Black, than
others.Thus the three-hne blues form is more distinctly Black than a sonnet
hy Claude McKay" (1926, 106). Nevertheless McKay is also known as a
Jamaican poet, resembling Jean Rhys in his diverse heritage. With his
Caribbean background and later involvement in American and European
modernist circles, McKay, like Rhys, perceived how "European avant-garde
and modernist artists . . . participated in the European colonialism and bour-
geois respectability many of them sought to critique" (Rosenberg 2004,
222). In his view, "it is the blackface 'impersonators' and 'imitators' who set
'the current standards' for 'Negro art"' (North 1994, 104). Authentic black
vernacular would yield a black aesthetic, McKay believed, addressing the
problems of dialect in several dialect poems.
Zora Neale Hurston's dialect writing was also a source of controversy.
Raised in the incorporated aU-hlack town of Eatonville, Florida, on the
rhythms of black dialect, Hurston defied any proscriptions on her writing
and made the black vernacular an integral part of her work. Her immersion
in Florida's black folk culture and use of the black vernacular troubled some
of her African American contemporaries, embarrassed by what they viewed
as demeaning holdovers from slavery. Hurston appreciated and even availed
herself of the volatile nature of dialect, often to appease her white patron, the
formidable Charlotte Osgood Mason, or "Godmother," as she required her
protgs to call her. Hurston and Mason's five-year association illustrates the
complexities of black writers, white patrons, and, to borrow North's expres-
sion, the "dialect of modernism." Dependent upon Mason's money to sup-
port her writing and folklore-collecting expeditions, Hurston played into
Mason's biases by assuming degrading terms for herself like pickaninny and
darky and referring to her Mule Bone dispute with Langston Hughes as "my
nigger mess" (2002, 206).-' A savvy woman with high aspirations, Hurston
goes against the grain of standard English to further her literary endeavors,
yet while white modernists could come out from behind such masks, African
American writers risked exacerbating white prejudice.
Such examples of the intricacies of dialect writing help unpack Jean
Rhys's own narrative, linguistic, and cultural conundrums. Feeling decidedly
un-Enghsh throughout her life hut not wholly Dominican either (Carr
2003,39), she occupies a liminal space, first inscribed in the character of Anna
Morgan, the white Creole heroine of her third novel. Voyage in the Dark
(1934). Of British heritage, from a British colony, Anna ought to be accept-
ed upon immigrating to England. Instead she is mocked and scorned there
primarily because of her Caribbean accent, which identifies her instantly as
alien."! don't hold with the way you go on," her landlady says."You and your
I K r i s t i n C z a r n e c k i 25
I
I
I
I drawly voice" (Rhys 1934,17-18)although Anna's voice is much softer and
I more hesitant than Selina's. Many of Rhys's characters are tormented by their
i voices along with the hostile English voices all around them. "She had an
I English lady's voice," Anna says of her stepmother, Hester, "with a sharp, cut-
I ting edge to it. Speak up and I will place you at once. Speak up, for I fear the
i worst. That sort of voice" (35).
I Sent "back" to England as a teenager, as was customary among colonial
families, Rhys, a white West Indian woman, never saw herself or her manner
of speaking come into vogue, and her voice coupled with her lack of money
1 prohibited her acceptance into bourgeois British circles. McKay encountered
I similar prejudice during a trip to England in 1919. Expecting to be embraced
I for his talent and breeding, assuming "special bonds of affection and tradition
' between Great Britain and her colonies . . ., he discovered quickly that the
average Briton had not the remotest idea that they shared at least a common
culture of school and court, let alone any notion of equality between them"
(Lewis 1979, 50). No matter that he spoke the King's English, McKay's dark
skin disqualified him from ever being considered "British." For Rhys, it was
her accent that did her in, rendering her ethnically, thus sexually, suspect to
I the English, who ridiculed her "nasty, sing-song nigger's voice" (Angier
1990, 46). Rhys's voice caused her such grief throughout her life she even-
i tually never spoke above a whisper."*
I The half-English, half-Caribbean patois-speaking narrator of "Let Them
' Call it Jazz" does far more than whisper. Deriving from Rhys's early white
I Creole heroines, Selina confronts head-on the linguistic complexities long
brewing in colonial and postcolonial England, with scholars weighing in on
her dialect's affect and authenticity. In his introduction to a collection of
Rhys's Caribbean short stories, Kenneth Ramchand calls Sehna's "remarkable
and convincing dialect" a "declaration of living identity" arising from Rhys's
own "meinory of the Caribbean, and ofWest Indian society and speech pat-
tern" (1985, Introduction n. p.). Curiously, he does an about-face three years
later in his overview ofWest Indian literary history. Denionstrating the char-
acteristics of Selina's patois, Ramchand reproduces the first paragraph of "Let
Them Call It Jazz" with a pronunciation key, italicizing certain words to indi-
cate verb tense"present form for past and present"and noting that we
ought to hear "I" as "Ah" and "me" as "mih" (1988,105):
1 One bright Sunday morning in July1 have trouble with m y Notting Hill
I landlord because he ask for a month's rent in advance. He tell m e this after
I I live there since winter, settling up every week without fail. I have no job
j at the timeand if I give the money he want there's not much left. So I
I refuse. The m an drunk already at that early hour, and he abuse meall talk,
he can't frighten me. But his wife is a bad onenow she walk in my room
2 6 C o l l e g e L i t e r a t u r e 3 5 . 2 [ S p r i n g 2 0 0 8 ]
and s a y sh e mus t h ave cas h . Wh e n I te ll h e r no , s h e give my s uitcas e o ne kick
and it burs t o pe n. My be s t dress fa ll o ut, th e n s h e la ugh and give ano th e r
kick. Sh e s a y mo nth in advance is us ual, and if I can't pay find s o me wh e re
e lse . (Rh ys qtd. in Ramch and 1988, 105)
In Ramch and's vie w, "Rh ys 's s to ry do e s n't die if we mis s o ut o n th e
diale ct to ne , but it be co me s much le s s dramatic, and th e narrating ch aracte r
do e s no t le ap into life wh e n th e e ar do e s n't co me into play" (1988, 105).
No rth s imilarly finds th at "actual diale ct, o f any kind, can ne ve r re liably be
re nde re d in th e black and wh ite o f print. Th e ve ry s o unds o f th e no ns tan-
dard . . . e lude th e s tandard re pre s e ntatio ns " (1994, Pre face n. p.)pre cis e ly
wh y Se lina's vo ice re s o nate s s o s tro ngly, I wo uld argue , fo r th e pato is o n th e
page co me s acro s s diffe re ntly to th e e ye , de faiTiiliarizing s tandard Englis h and
ne ce s s itating th e re ade r's care ful atte ntio n to th e printe d wo rds . Mo re o ve r, I
co ncur with Mark Hus s e y th at th e e ar do e s inde e d "co me into play" wh e n
we re ad, fo r "we 'h e ar' wh at we re ad in a particular vo ice , " write s Hus s e y,
"and . . . th at vo ice is o fte n a functio n o f a co ns tructio n o fth e figure o fth e
auth o r" (2004, 21). If we re main mindful o f Rh ys 's Caribbe an h e ritage ,
Se lina's vo ice co me s acro s s mo re cre dibly, fo r unlike o th e r lite rary te ch -
nique s , s uch as s tre am o f co ns cio us ne s s o r multiple narrative th re ads , diale ct
writing be ars th e burde n o f h aving to s te m fro m an auth o r's pe rs o nal e xpe -
rie nce in o rde r to be co nvincingye t as we s e e , e ve n s uch e xpe rie nce do e s
no t que U th e de bate .
Re fus ing to re linquis h h e r pato is , Se lina h igh ligh ts th e s ubje ctivity o f
racial, natio nal, and linguis tic bo undarie s built upo n h e ge mo nic lie s . "Thes e
people te ll lie s , " s h e re calls h e r landlady s aying to th e po lice immigrants , th e
bro wn-s kinne d, wh e n th e wh ite Englis h landlady is th e o ne wh o is lying, th e
like ly th ie f o f Se lina's mo ne y.Th e ph ras e re minds Se lina o f h e r abs e nt Englis h
fath e r, wh o , acco rding to h e r grandmo th e r, was als o a co mpuls ive liar. "Eve ry
wo rd th at co me s o ut o f th at man's mo uth a damn lie , " h e r grandmo th e r
claims . "He is ce rtainly firs t clas s liar, th o ugh no clas s o th e rwis e " (Rh ys 1987,
16 4). Sims lie s to Se lina abo ut wh e n h e will re turn with fo o d. Ph o ning h im,
s h e is to ld ano th e r lie wh e n th e wo man wh o ans we rs claims no t to kno w
wh e re h e is . Afte r an e ve n mo re vo latile run-in with h e r ne igh bo rs , pro mpt-
ing h e r to h url a ro ck th ro ugh th e ir windo w, th e y and ano th e r wo man co l-
lude in lying abo ut th e e ve nt to th e po lice , th ro wing do wn th e ir racial trump
card fo r go o d me as ure : "At le as t th e o th e r tarts th at cro o k ins talle d h e re we re
white girls , " says a fe male ne igh bo r (16 7), alth o ugh in th e fictio n o f Je an
Rh ys , wh ite girls fare little be tte r.
Ins te ad o f a wh ite girl, "Le t Th e m Call It Jazz" fo re gro unds a wo man o f
co lo r, wh e n in e arlie r wo rks Rh ys h as o th e r wh ite ch aracte rs o r a s tandard
Englis h s pe aking narrato r te ll th e mulatta o r black wo man's s to ry fo r h e r. An
! K r i s t i n C z a r n e c k i 27
!
interlude in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) relays the sufferings of a black
I West Indian woman via the male character Serge Rubin, a Russian Jewish
migr in Paris befriended by the novel's heroine, Sasha Jensen. Serge
I describes to Sasha a day in London when he investigated a noise in the outer
j hallway of his flat. Peering out, he sees a drunken woman lying on the floor
I and crying. She tells him she is from Martinique, the mistress of the man in
I the flat above who has not allowed her outside except at night for over two
years.The woman tells Serge ofthe other residents' contempt for her because
I she is not white, that the man she lives with ignores her sorrow and keeps
'her because she can cook. When Serge fmds her, she has just drunk a bottle
I of whiskey, devastated after a little girl in the building told her "she was a
dirty woman, that she smelt bad, and that she hadn't any right in the house"
I (Rhys 1939,404).
Rubin flnds it remarkable that a young child should know "so exactly
'how to be cruel and who it W A S safe to be cruel to" (Rhys 1939, 404),
I attributing her behavior to some kind of sixth sense. More likely, she, a white
English child, has absorbed her country's color and gender bias and knows
that brown-skinned women with accents are suitable targets for derision,
even from children. Given Rhys's acute insights into English prejudice, writes
Helen Nebeker, it appears the little girl has in fact "spoken deadly truth" to
the Martiniquaise (Nebeker 1981, 103): that her kind is unwelcome in
England and most likely will not survive there. The story of a Martiniquaise
trapped in a sham marriage in England, simultaneously sealed off from socie-
ty and available for its contempt, resonates with Sasha, who, as Rosenberg
I notes, sees her own alienating experience reflected in the Creole woman's.Yet
'"Rubin's story makes it clear that as a white woman, Sasha has escaped the
I physical devastation and cruel taunts inflicted on the other woman by English
children.Thus . . . Rhys delineates between white and brown crele women
leven as she points to the shared ground of their marginality" (2004, 234).
The last of Rhys's modernist novels. Good Morning, Midnight portends the
"brown" woman's increasing self-possession in Rhys's writing. Susan Sniader
iLanser's study of female narrative voice sheds light on this aspect of Rhys's
I later works. Deconstructing common assessments of women's modernism,
iLanser explains, "many contemporary feminists have . . . celebrated mod-
ernism as a movement open to the 'feminine,' to the 'androgynous' and cross-
'sexual, to patriarchal deconstruction, to Julia Kristeva's 'semiotic chora,'
lindeed to criture fminine" (1992, 103), yet modern women writers were
marginalized then and for years to come for delving into female daily life in
! their fictionpenalized, in effect, for adhering to touted modernist aesthet-
ics. Lanser finds Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes
struggling in this respect; to her list we must add Jean Rhys, whose first four

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2 8 C o l l e g e L i t e r a t u r e 3 5 . 2 [ S p r i n g 2 0 0 8 ]
novels, entrenched within the minds of troubled women, were out of print
and out of favor until relatively recently. With Selina narrating her story in
patois, Rhys suggests a change of fortune for women who emerge from their
psyches to speak up and critique their surroundings. As Suarez and Lopez
remind us, Selina has chosen to be in Englandto "meet her white father"
and "live in a white society" (1990, 157). Facing adverse circumstances, she
does not go down easily, responding swiftly and vocally to her male and
female English antagonists. "How unlike her white West Indian counterparts
is this high-spirited black woman," writes Lucy Wilson (443).
Selina's spirit wanes, however, upon her arrest and sentencing to
HoUoway Prison after the window incident. Even earlier, her singing fails to
comfort her as before, for what once "sound good in Martinique patois . . .
go right away and it never come back. A pity" (Rhys 1987,168). Leary ofthe
ensuing court proceedings, she answers questions evasively and unwittingly
loudly until she perceives herself through English eyes: out of control and
absurd. During the next several weeks in prison, Selina observes her sur-
roundings but dechnes to eat or speak, and silence, like dialect, spurs conflict-
ing views. Sue Thomas considers Sehna's silence "a tactic to maintain integri-
ty in the face of such invalidation" (1994,187), in line with Gerry Smyth, who
finds silence "the most effective as well as the most widely disseminated form
of resistance to institutionally organized power" (2000, 54). Yet as Stephen
Spencer points out, "Silence could also be interpreted as concession rather
than resistance. Isn't silence what the oppressor wants?" (2006,123)
Feminist Hterary scholars differ on the issue of silence as well. Patricia
Laurence posits the silences and narrative gaps of modern women's writing
as an active restructuring of language and literature, resulting in a "theory of
mind" more revelatory of human nature than spoken dialogue (1991, 60). In
contrast, bell hooks enjoins African American women to achieve conscious-
ness-raising through writing but primarily through speech. The imposed
silences upon people of color have thwarted their self-realization and robbed
them of community and cultural pride, hooks beheves. Black women must
refuse voicelessness and speak out in their efforts to attain selfhood. The "lib-
eratory voice," hooks writes, "wiU necessarily confront, disturb, demand that
listeners even alter ways of hearing and being" (1989, 16). Rhys integrates
both strategies into "Let Them Call It Jazz," with Selina adopting silence or
speech depending on her circumstances. Her suence in prison may signify her
depression, but it also serves as a carapace shielding her from further insult.
In "Let Them Call It Jazz," the patriarchy's grip weakens not only
through Selina's handling of silence and speech but also through her refusal
to tell her story through an oppressive narrative lens. It is beyond the scope
of this essay to rehearse the wealth of material on how or when modernism
i K r i s t i n C z a r n e c k i 29
and postmodernism diverge, yet casting Selina in the role of postmodern
heroine yields insights into Rhys's poetics, for "as postmodern psychology
suggests, the very notion of identity is bound up with narrative, the stories
we tell ourselves and the stories others tell of us or tell us into" (Wyile and
Pare 2001). Recalling her Martiniquaise background as well as her experi-
! enees in Englandthe stories she knows to be true versus those her neigh-
I bors, the police, and the lawyers tell about her, Selina pieces diverse narra-
tives together to attain greater emotional wholeness.
' Rhys's mid-century narrative methods resonate with those of another
: woman writer intent on amphfying marginalized voices. As Lanser explains,
Toni Morrison faces her own particular "narrative quandary": she must con-
sider the cultural location of her white readership vvhile maintaining "a
deliberate posture of vulnerabiHty to those aspects of Afro-American culture
that can inform and position [her] work" (Morrison qtd. in Lanser 1992,
121). Morrison's ensuing "double-voiced text" speaks meaningfully to
African Americans while allowing white readers to engage with it as well, if
not always fully understand it (Lanser 1992,121). I f whites feel wholly alien-
ated from texts by people of color, those texts become "unspeakable"inef-
fectual and misunderstood.5 Postmodernity enables writers such as Morrison
to come to voice:
i The postmodern aesthetic, as it is associated with hegemonic literature in
[ the United States especially after 1960, presses modernist skepticism to an
extreme: while modernism understood narrative authority as conditional,
postmodernism finds it a sham. Meaning is now not merely contingent but
indeterminate, and the notion of a narrator as a textual "higher" authori-
tyor of any textual figure as privileged knowerbecomes not merely
I hollow but absurd.Yet the "postmodern" decades have also been a time of
I new discursive activity by previously suppressed communities who might
I be less enthusiastic than hegemonic writers about dispensing with narrative
I authority. (Lanser 1992, 126)
I Narrators in Morrison's works neither abdicate fully their authorial preroga-
! tive nor posit themselves as infallible authorities; either strategy would fail to
challengeand fail to lead readers to challengewhite privilege. Similarly,
Selina is not without self-doubt, yet in her story, supposedly representative
subject matter becomes questionable through a minority point of view.
I Caribbean readers could likely empathize more closely than Westerners
with Sehna's dismay at seeing fruit rot on trees and gardens being torn up for
new construction"echoes of a colonial experience . . . the paternalism and
the plundered Eden" (Malcolm and Malcolm 1996, 45). Her reliance on her
I grandmother's songs, her disregard of money, and her encounters with racism
recall cultural origins with which many readers may have little or no expe-
3 0 C o l l e g e L i t e r a t u r e 3 5 . 2 [ S p r i n g 2 0 0 8 ]
rience.Yet throughout the story Selina also engages in '"extrarepresentation-
al' acts: reflections, judgments, generalizations about the world 'beyond' the
fiction . . . that allow the writer to engage, from 'within' the fiction, in a cul-
ture's literary, social, and intellectual debates" (Lanser 1992, 16), whereas her
modernist novels tend to express "too uncritical an identification with her
heroine, and too little sympathy with anyone else" (Angier 1990, 526).
Recalling key exchanges with others and critiquing the English incapacity to
understand her or speak to her in any meaningful way, Selina displays in pat-
ois the immigrant woman of color's experience in England: "ideological ten-
sion made visible in textual practices" (Lanser 1992, 6, my emphasis). Rhys
never ceases to acknowledge the status quo in her works, yet the dynamic
between women and hegemony shifts in her developing resistant literary
voice, just as the shift in "epistemological viewpoint" marks the transition
between modernism and postmodernism (Galef 1992, 85).
For a time, SeHna waits listlessly for each monotonous day in prison to
end, much like Rhys's modernist heroines wishing away their lives. After sev-
eral weeks, her outlook changes when she hears singing coming from an
upper cell window. As her grandmother's songs once did, the woman pris-
oner's song awakens Selina's spirit and inspires hope for escape and freedom.
She recalls listening raptly, joyously, because the song "don't fall down and die
in the courtyard; seems to me it could jump the gates of the jail easy and
travel far, and nobody could stop it. I don't hear the wordsonly the music"
(Rhys 1987, 173). As Suarez and Lopez observe, listening to the Holloway
song is "an individual and communal act" (1990, 161): everyone in the yard
pauses to hsten to the singing, even the nurse on watch that afternoon. In a
moment, "Everybody starts walking again, and nobody says one word," but
the song's message lingers, for as another prisoner explains to Selina, it "tell[s|
the girls cheerio and never say die" (Rhys 1987, 173).
Selina regains her appetite and, to her surprise, is released from Holloway,
meaning someone has paid her fine, although she never learns who. She finds
her flat cleared out when she returns, but her upstairs neighbor has retrieved
her clothes and packed her suitcase, and a woman on the train later initiates
small-talksimple humane gestures that, like the song, help free Selina from
her fears and confusion. She finds another room to live in and a job altering
women's dresses. She even befriends a co-worker, a sister immigrant, a "very
light coloured, very smart" young woman, Clarice, who throws parties at her
flat (Rhys 1987,175). It is at Clarice's one night that Selina begins whistling
the Holloway song, recalling only its tune, not its words, for as she says, "I
never sing now" (175). Because standard Enghsh insults and slanders her, she
blocks it out to focus upon the song's rhythm and melodythe underlying
message existing in a register where "foreign" accents and English lies can-
K r i s t i n C z a r n e c k i 31
I
not hurt her. Just as she finds her own patois more expressive than standard
EngHsh, the HoUoway song made wordless more truly represents her firee-
dom and self-knowledge.
A man at the party compromises both, however, when he dashes to the
piano and jazzes up the song, much to the dehght of the other guests,
although Selina insists he has it all wrong, (Given the story's setting and the
disregard of Selina's protests, I take the musician to be a white Enghshman
find it intriguing that the 1995 Penguin edition o( LetTltem Call it Jazz
Other Stories pictures Andr Watts on the cover, a half-African-American,
half-Hungarian classical pianist,) After selling the song, the man sends Selina
'five pounds in thanks, committing a cultural and spiritual theft that could
ihave delivered the coup de grce to her identity, "For after all, that song was all
I had," she says (173); "when that girl sing, she sing to me and she sing for
'me, I was there because I was meant to be there. It was meant I should hear
itthis I know" (175), Resigning herself to the theft, Sehna actually rein-
forces her sense of self, "So let them call it jazz," she says, "and let them play
it wrong. That won't make no difference to the song I heard" (175), main-
taining her patois and affirming a reality other than an Anglo-European one.
Such strength of mind contrasts starkly with our final glimpses of Rhys's
modernist heroines: Marya of Quartet (1929) and Anna of Voyage in the Dark,
; whose deaths are suggested as the novels conclude, and Julia in After Leaving
IMK Mackenzie (1931) and Sasha of Good Morning, Midnight, who succumb
again to male degradation of their minds and bodies. In "Let Them Call It
ijazz," Rhys's postmodern heroine "draw[s] [her] energies from a resistance to
established, dominant narratives and emphasize[s] the importance of the
'social construction of subjectivity notjust in traumatizing the individual but
I also as the basis for a resistance to those metanarratives" (Wyile and Pare
2001), Selina recognizes the Holloway episode as a watershed event in her
life, providing in her own voice the vivid details of its prelude and aftermath.
She claims to have given up singing and, disturbingly, links Clarice's intellect
with her hght skin color, but she clings to the Holloway song and the cul-
tural strength it recalls and represents,
' Of course Selina's claim that the song is hers is not entirely true, for she
I only happens to overhear it sung by someone else. What rights can she claim
to the Holloway song? Similarly, what rights can Jean Rhys claim to a black
! idiom? Scholars continue to deliberate over cultural and linguistic authen-
I ticity and appropriation in Rhys's works. Perhaps Rhys participates in racial
' masquerading: gazing from the outside into Dominica's black community,
I insisting throughout her hfe that she felt more black than white, and refer-
I ring to "us" blacks in Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.Veioniai Gregg
views Rhys's imagination as "profoundly racialized, even racist" in structure
32 C o / t e g e t / f e r a t e 3 5 .2 [S pring 2 0 0 8 ]
given "her use ofWest Indian 'black people' as props to the Creole identity
and as cultural objects" (1995, 37), She certainly appears to essentialize black
Dominicans: "I decided that they had a better time than we did," she says,
reflecting on her adolescent impressions; "they laughed a lot though they sel-
dom smiled. They were stronger than we were, they could walk a long way
without getting tired. Carry heavy weights with ease" (Rhys 1979, 39-40),
Helen Carr, however, urges us to recognize "how remarkably opposed to
racism [Rhys] was for her day, and how far she resists or complicates the
essentiahzing definitions that colonialism relied on" (2003, 53), Indeed,
Gregg continues, "there is in all of Rhys's writing a knotted dialectic tension
between the ontological negation/appropriation of'black people' and a for-
midably critical intelligence that understands and analyzes the constructed
nature of the colonialist discourse that passes itself off as natural and trans-
parent" (1995,38),
Nevertheless misgivings persist regarding Rhys's background. Descended
from a slave-owning family, she visited Dominica just once after leaving the
island in 1907 and sets the majority of her fiction in Europe with European
characters,*' Although Ramchand asserts that "West Indian literature includes
writings by people who were born or who grew up in the English-speaking
territories and Guyana" (1988, 95), Carr (rhetorically) asks, "In what sense
could [Rhys] be called a West Indian?" (2003, 39) Not until the acclaim of
Wide Sargasso Sea did critics begin to think of Rhys as Caribbean,'^ although
Carr points out that nearly "everyone in the West Indies has come, or their
ancestors have come, from elsewhere" (43),^ In the mid-1970s, scholar
Kamau Brathwaite refused to include Rhys in an emerging classification of
West Indian writers. In 1995, however, he rescinded his earlier comment,
calling Wide Sargasso Sea a "great Caribbean novel" (qtd. in Carr 2003, 41),
Yet categorizing Rhys as Caribbean is also problematic, Barnes finds
Rhys "suffer[ing] under a form of literary colonialism," on the one hand
claimed by European modernists as their own, while on the other hand
labeled a postcolonial West Indian writer upon the success of Wide Sargasso
Sea (1995,151), Like Barnes,Thomas takes issue with the either/or nature of
much Rhys criticism. Labeling her either modernist European or Caribbean
neglects the "unique hybrid modernist female Gothic and immigrant
Caribbean picaresque" manifest in "Let Them Call It Jazz, " for instance
(1994, 196 ), As Sehna feels enlivened, special, and singled out by a song she
did not create, Rhys feels intimately connected to Dominica even while
acknowledging her troubles there, particularly her complex feelings toward
and exclusion from its black community.
In addition, Rhys's background and Selina's patois prefigure the chorus
of voices in Wide Sargasso Sea, which Rhys worked on in fits and starts for
! K r i s t i n C z a r n e c k i 33
nearly a decade, if not longer.^ Her difEculties along the way were manifold,
particularly creating characters around that of her heroine, Antoinette
Cosway. In a letter of 1958, Rhys concludes, "Another ' I' must talk" in Wide
Sargasso Sea, "two others perhaps. Then the Creole's ' I' will come to life"
(1984, 156). The following year she refers to "one major difficulty to be
solved" (159): not voicing the white Creole woman, Antoinette, or the black
1 West Indian woman. Christophine, but Rochester, the Englishman arrived in
; Jamaica to claim his dubious legacy, her inability to delve into his side of the
I dismal affair troubling her the most.io Angier attributes Rhys's eventual
' breakthrough to her life-long love of poetry. "In early April [1964] she wrote
' four poems," Angier says. "But it was the fourth poem that was important. It
was called ' Obeah Night.' In it Jean became Edward Rochester: and when
] she did that her long battle with the novel was won" (1990, 514).The voic-
es of all threethe black West Indian, the white Creole, and the Enghsh per-
' sonplay crucial roles in Rhys's life and fiction.
Rhys therefore never lays claim to an unadulterated Caribbean patois,
nor do her personal writings mimic the language of the black West Indians
among whom she was raised, unlike the dialect letters of white modernists
incorporating a made-up vernacular." An anecdote from Angier's biography
' \ of Rhys illustrates the extent to which dialect inflects her life and art.
I Planning a stage production of Voyage in the Dark in the mid-1960s, before
! the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, Selma V az Dias visited Rhys at home to
' record her singing some Caribbean songs. Angier writes:
' She sang several, including a rude one in which a woman boasts to a man
; "Woman sweeter dan man. Woman sweeter dan man. If you t'ink you sweet
' like me. Go t'row yourself down de WC And two or three pretty patois
' , songs, including the whole of'Ma belle ka di maman li," which Antoinette
' sings to Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea. . . . [T]he recording is astonishing
to hear. Jean was seventy-three, but her voice is sweet, light, slightly trem-
bling, the voice of a very young girl. Her West Indian accent is delicate but
distinct: she says "dahn" for "down" ("Go t'row yourself dahn de WC"),
and when she explains how one of the songs should sound she says,"It sinks
I and rahses." There's something else too. She starts "Ma belle ka" several
' times, but keeps confusing or forgetting the words. You can hear in her
I voice that she's getting very nervous. (Angier 1990, 503-04)
The episode should allay qualms that Rhys appropriates a black idiom.
At times her West Indian roots prove elusive, evident in her distress over
i "confusing or forgetting the words"; in fact Malcolm and Malcolm refer to
! Rhys's "attempt at dialect writing" in "Let Them Call It Jaz z " (1996, 11; my
; emphasis). In a letter to her editor, Rhys even claims to have put down a
' "styliz ed patois" in the Holloway story. "Here are two pages," she writes.
3 4 C o l l e g e L i t e r a t u r e 3 5 . 2 [ S p r i n g 2 0 0 8 ]
"What do you think? Does it sound right? I've not read any of the 'West
Indian' people. It's by ear and memory" (1984,197).Through narrative inno-
vation born of intersecting racial and linguistic constructs, Rhys creates a
story deemed both a "detached work of art" (Ramchand 1985,
"Introduction," n. p.) and "passionately engaged" with its narrator (Malcolm
and Malcolm 1996, 3). Both impressions reflect a postmodern narrative
authority in "Let Them Call it Jazz."
N o t e s
^ I place certain words in quotation marks to note their equivocal, shifting, and
culturally constructed definitions.
2 Jamaican folklorist Louise Bennett, born nearly twenty years after McKay,
underwent similar experiences. "Ms. Bennett was ostracized by educated Jamaicans
who saw the local patois [in her poetry] as inferior to the Oxford English they tried
to speak. The island's newspaper The Gleaner refused at first to publish her poems, but
later paid her for a regular Sunday column, which became popular" (Moses 2006,1).
^ Hurston's long and cherished friendship with Hughes was irrevocably dam-
aged by their failed collaboration on the play Mule Bone. See Boyd's biography of
Hurston for an account of the affair (2003).
4 See Angier 1990,50.
5 Lanser adopts the term from Morrison's essay "Unspeakable Things
Unspoken:The Afro American Presence in American Literature," in which Morrison
discloses canonical white fiction's buried (unspeakable) yet pervasive obsession with
African America. Lanser's usage of the term denotes the historical critical assessment
of African American women writers. "[Fjiction by and about African-American
women has been marginalized not only as insufficiently 'universal,'" Lanser writes,
"but as insufficiently 'female' and insufficiently 'black': African-American voice
becomes officially 'unspeakable'" (1992, 121).
^ Because they are "black," the status of Jamaica Kincaid,V.S. Naipaul, and Caryl
Phillips as West Indian writers has not been questioned, although they too are emi-
grant writers with fiction set outside the Caribbean (Carr 2003, 39-40).
^ Ford Madox Ford is an exception.The first to publish Rhys, Ford grasped "the
importance of her origins for her writings" (Carr 2003, 40)her sense of alienation
in Dominica that grew stronger in England, rendering her island experience integral
to all of her work.
^ A New York Times review of Iron Balloons, an anthology of Jamaican writing,
notes that the writers included "take the multiple identities of the Jamaican diaspo-
ra for granted; some of them were not even born there. Above all, they are influenced
by the rhythms, the colloquialism and the self-confidence of reggae music" (Smith
2006, 1).
^ Rhys says she first conceived of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1957, although it may
have been as early as 1939. See Angier (1990, 371).
^^ Rhys discusses her writing of Wide Sargasso Sea in numerous letters. In June
1963, she fears that Part II of the manuscript, Rochester's version of events, is "the
K r i s t i n C z a r n e c k i 35
least convincing" (1984, 221), Several weeks later, she tells Athill, "much of Part II
reads like clich. As I planned the book the girl told the storythen my husband
was seriously ill, and when I got back to work it seemed better to tell it, Part II, from
the man's point of view" (224), Several months later, she says of Rochester, "Dreadful
man, but 1 tried to be fair and all that, and give some reason for his acting like he
did" (1984, 233), Ultimately, she states, "Part II has always been so much the worst
and most difficult" (234),
' ' I have in mind the absence of Creole words and expressions in Rhys's per.-
sonal writings, whereas Carr provides a broader view on the vernacular, stating, "The
\ language of [Rhys's] fiction and memoirsand here she has much in common with
! other West Indian writersis always the vernacular, and though it is often a differ-
ent vernacular from, say [the West Indian writer of color] Sevlon's, like him she
writes in the voice of the disempowered" (2003, 44),
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