Near the end of his life, the Martinican poet and intellectual René Ménil—who played a pivotal if still underappreciated role in the inception of the Négritude movement as one of the main figures behind two key journals, the incendiary single issue of Légitime défense in Paris in 1932 and the incandescent Tropiques in Martinique during World War II—published an unsung gem titled “Sur un certain effet Ellingtonien dans la créolité” (“On a Certain Ellingtonian Effect in Creoleness”), a fascinating reflection on the black student scene in Paris in the interwar period.Footnote ¹ What I’ve always found especially eye-opening about the essay is the way Ménil emphasizes the degree to which the tiny but vibrant network of privileged Caribbean and African students in the metropole (including Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas, Étienne Léro, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, and Pierre Yoyotte) were transformed by what Ménil calls their “rencontre émerveillée avec le jazz des nègres américains” (“astonished encounter with American Negro jazz”; “Sur un certain effet” 253).Footnote ² Although he mentions Louis Armstrong—and although he wrote a poem in the fall of 1935 inspired by a Benny Carter tune (Ménil, “‘Dream Lullaby’”)—Ménil emphasizes Duke Ellington in particular as the composer whose music reshaped their sensibilities:

In contrast to the wildly popular clarinetist and biguine bandleader Alexandre Stellio, whose music “set down our folklore and in so doing expressed, not without genius, the past and present of our native land,” according to Ménil, above all by “reproduc[ing] with tenderness and pity the nostalgic songs of the period that culminated in the life of Saint-Pierre on the eve of the eruption” of the Mount Pelée volcano in 1902, in Ellington “folklore is not the point of arrival—the result of musical labor—but the implicit point of departure for a music to be invented.”Footnote ³ Because the “wellspring” of jazz is improvisation, Ellington’s music doesn’t wallow in the “repetitive modulation of a memorized folklore (as Stellio’s does)” but instead constructs a radically original “sonic language in a moment delivered to itself in order to seize an unknown new emotion in the mesh of a magic net.”Footnote ⁴

Revisiting Ménil’s articles from the 1930s and 1940s in the light of his comments half a century later, it is difficult to overlook the “Ellingtonian effect.” The shift in sensibility brought about by the discovery of Duke’s music resonates, for instance, in the caustic survey of the feeble accomplishments of the “colored ‘writer’ in the Caribbean” that Ménil published in Légitime défense, where he counsels that “the black Antillean ought first to recognize his own passions and express himself only by taking the opposite direction to the useful, the route of dream and of poetry,” drawing not only on African and Oceanic art and French avant-garde literature (“Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Jarry, Réverdy, the Dadaists and the Surrealists”) but also on African American jazz (“le jazz des nègres d’Amérique”) (Ménil, “General Observations” 52; trans. modified; “Généralités” 9). Ménil says in retrospect that in his articles in Tropiques, a decade later, too, “une réflexion critique se développe sous l’égide de Duke” (“a critical reflection is developed under the protection of Duke”; “Sur un certain effet” 257).

Ménil’s late essay is not only remarkable as an example of what I have elsewhere described as “hearing across media”: a literary aesthetic that is expressly elaborated under the formative influence of a musical model.Footnote ⁵ It is also fascinating in the way Ménil frames the “Ellingtonian effect” as a tutelary intradiasporic influence—in other words, one black modernism that takes shape in the wake of and adhering to what it takes to be the parameters of another black modernism from another part of the diaspora. As a way of situating the impact of jazz in interwar Paris, it is a marked departure from the usual exoticism we have come to expect even from the most sympathetic white European observers, who heard in jazz the specter of an absolute racial otherness, even as they encountered it in the nightclubs and cabarets of Montmartre. For white artists and writers, the intoxication was if anything amplified by their proximity to what Michel Leiris called “the Other who is not totally Other, the Other who appears chez vous” (“Jazz” 99). They took the music as “an orgiastic tribute to the colors of the moment” and, in a paradoxical triangulation, the thoroughly modern sophistication of musicians such as Ellington and Armstrong struck them as an emblem of colonial Africa, “the manifestation and the myth of black Edens.”Footnote ⁶

Ménil and his cohort primarily experienced jazz “autour du gramophone,” on phonograph records rather than live in nightclubs, he notes, and so it spoke to them at a distance, through the mediation of the commodity form, as a disembodied voice from the other side of the Atlantic (Ménil, “Sur un certain effet” 255). They associated jazz with blackness—or in other words, as Fred Moten puts it, they understood it in a “rough translation” through the “general equivalent” of “stolen life” (88)—and thus with the ways they were beginning to think of themselves as artists of African descent, but part of the reason it was so potent seems to have been that it represented an unfamiliar blackness, an other blackness, an emanation of a racially inflected modernism not assimilable to the all-too-well-known vicissitudes of race in the colonial society of the French Caribbean.Footnote ⁷

“Un espace sonore inédit” (“an uncharted sonic space”; 255), Ménil calls it, one that, even if it was built on an “original foundation of incorporated folklore,” drawing on vernacular music including the blues and the spirituals, was itself an “elaboration” that could attain the refinement of symphonic composition, “using along the way all the technical resources within reach.”Footnote ⁸ Ellington’s music struck them as “a music of the second degree. Using sonic material and rhythms already in place, a secondary elaboration took shape in the industrial city to express the actuality of life and not the backward-looking exoticisms of the primitive forest; fields of sugarcane and cotton would only have a place in the musical composition as a foundation held at a distance.”Footnote ⁹ In its “thickness of accumulated cultural influences (Arica, Europe, the Caribbean, the Americas) carried as living traces by the colored diaspora,” the music “corresponded to the efforts that were emerging among the most conscious of the colonial students” to discover “a black and mixed-race aesthetic that would be fitting and appropriate.”Footnote ¹⁰ More than any other music in earshot, Ellington’s records for Ménil and his cohort came to “echo the unease and questioning provoked by their circumstances.”Footnote ¹¹

As the title of Ménil’s late essay already intimates, one aspect of the roughness of the translation is that the vague figuration in the titles of certain Ellington compositions, such as the 1927 “Creole Love Call”—which in fact was derived at least in part from a previous composition whose title invokes a seemingly different setting, King Oliver’s “Camp Meeting Blues”Footnote ¹²—and the 1932 “Creole Rhapsody,” could come to suggest something like a “Creole” aesthetic in the specifically Caribbean sense of the term. Ménil recalls that for his cohort Ellington’s music served to sketch “une créolité-de-valeur (une créolité exquise, complexe, déliée, vaste et ouverte)” (“a creoleness of value (an exquisite, complex, mobile, vast, and open creoleness)”; 258).Footnote ¹³

In Ménil’s contributions to Tropiques, this transposition results in some startling passages. One April 1942 essay is framed as a direct address to “cette trop grand fraction de la bourgeoisie de couleur que nous estimons définitivement perdue…. Toujours les mêmes: lâches, lâcheurs, lécheurs, arrivistes, admirateurs de tous succès surtout ceux de mauvais aloi” (“that too-large portion of the colored bourgeoisie that we consider definitively lost…. Always the same: layabouts, deadbeats, boot-lickers, careerists, admirers of every success, especially when adulterated”; “Laissez” 21). Right from the first lines, Ménil pulls no punches: “je vous demande, à vous même, quelle valable raison avez-vous d’exister? Quelle grand idée vous anime? Quelle aspiration grandiose vous donne le droit de gaspiller comme vous faites les forces précieuses de la vie? Ne voyez vous pas que vous gâchez le joyeux torrent de la vie au grand midi? Ne voyez-vous pas que votre parole est une insulte au grand jazz de la Caraïbe?” (“I’m asking you, yes, you, what valid reason do you have for existing? What great idea motivates you? What grandiose aspiration gives you the right to squander the precious forces of life the way you do? Don’t you see that you’re spoiling the joyous torrent of life in the brightness of midday? Don’t you see that your words are an insult to the great jazz of the Caribbean?”; 23–24). If it thus opens by suggestively situating jazz in the Caribbean, the essay culminates with an unexpected and bewildering confrontation with the music deep in the Martinican forest:

It is a remarkable apparition: Ellington’s Mood Indigo as a literal sort of “jungle style”—to allude to the euphemism under which his early orchestra was feverishly marketed at Harlem night spots such as the Cotton Club in the late 1920s (see Teal; Teachout 90)—a music emanating eerily from the forest itself to shock the petit bourgeois, the soundtrack to a “sublime spectacle” that somehow compresses the entire archipelago (“a Caribbean greater than nature”) into a single chanced-upon clearing.

If Ménil’s work can be considered a particularly striking instance of what I have described as tutelary intradiasporic influence, other examples come to mind, perhaps above all the late-1960s literary criticism of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, which likewise turns to jazz—which he describes as the “archetype” of the “general movement of New World creative protest” (62)—as a “working model” for a “possible West Indian aesthetic” (77). Through close readings of “rhythmic” strategies and “improvisatory effects” (87) in key works of Anglophone Caribbean fiction, including Roger Mais’s 1954 Brother Man, Brathwaite argues that some of the most compelling fiction “taking its form from the pressures of West Indian social reality” has made recourse to “a form similar to that evolved by the American Negro in jazz” (93).

Taken as instances of a broader predilection in African diasporic thought, we might consider the cases of Ménil and Brathwaite as something like the obverse of the great bassist and composer Charles Mingus’s humorous and habitual dismissal of the saxophonist Ornette Coleman as a “calypso player,” which Moten has considered in some detail, juxtaposing it with the critique of US domestic racial policy in the lyrics of calypso hits such as Lord Invader’s “Crisis in Arkansas.” Ironically, as Moten observes:

Despite the seeming diametrical opposition between these impulses—between emulation, on the one hand, and dismissal, on the other—all these cases must ultimately be understood as manifestations of “the complex system of intramural and extramural antagonistic hierarchies” that are the condition of possibility of “diasporic contact and solidarity” (112). To recognize this fact is to begin to make sense of the ways black internationalism is structured by décalage.Footnote ¹⁵

In the 1930s and 1940s, Ménil and the other young intellectuals of the Négritude generation considered the jazz they were listening to as the kernel of “un thème littéraire, ou une idée littéraire” (“a literary theme or a literary idea”; Ménil, “Entretien” 439) that, in its emphasis on improvisation, corresponded with a number of the techniques and strategies (including automatic writing) being employed in the other major discourse that shaped them, surrealism. As Ménil recalled decades later, “[N]ous en avons fait une théorie, à un moment donné, à savoir que la bonne littérature devait être une littérature à l’image du jazz: une littérature d’improvisation qui se développait aux hasards des circonstances, ce qui cadrait très bien avec la conception surréaliste de BRETON” (“[A]t a certain moment we came up with a theory that good literature should be literature in the image of jazz: a literature of improvisation that was developed in the hazards of the circumstances, which fit very well with Breton’s surrealist conception”; “Entretien” 439). The most elaborate case for a literature of improvisation is found in another essay he published in Tropiques, in May 1944, “Situation de la poésie aux Antilles” (“The Situation of Poetry in the Caribbean”), where he writes:

This passage adheres to a familiar conception of improvisation as the “particular discipline” of “allowing the idea to express itself…in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.”Footnote ¹⁶

In November 2024 I was invited to take part in a symposium around the work of the contemporary Martinican novelist and theorist Patrick Chamoiseau organized by Thomas Trezise and Charly Verstraet at Princeton University. Over the course of two days, nine participants were asked to deliver short, informal talks taking up various themes and formal concerns running through the author’s wide-ranging oeuvre and to engage with Chamoiseau himself in what became an extraordinarily rich and inspiring set of intertwined dialogues. As I reread Chamoiseau’s work to prepare for the occasion, it occurred to me that even if it never quite comes into the foreground as a primary topic or concern, jazz comes to be invoked as a figure or aesthetic model for “un bond créatif dans l’inconnu” (“a creative leap into the unknown”; Chamoiseau, Baudelaire jazz 88) throughout his writing in a manner that is not unrelated to the way it functions in Ménil’s earlier articles. So in my remarks I tried to trace the intermittent yet persistent allusions to jazz across a number of Chamoiseau’s published works, approaching the topic somewhat in the style of the “poetic and musical meditations” of Baudelaire jazz, his 2022 collaboration with the saxophonist and scholar Raphaël Imbert, which boldly and anachronistically uses jazz as an analytical lens to consider the correspondences between Charles Baudelaire’s work and African diasporic history and culture.

The previous year, in an extended bilingual correspondence with the bassist William Parker, Chamoiseau suggests that jazz should be understood as the paradigmatic figure for the creativity with which African captives in the New World struggled for their “rehumanization.” “The human societies created in the West Indies and the Americas are made of this stuff, a ‘jazz spirit’ [un esprit-jazz] so to speak,” Chamoiseau writes, arguing that the jazz ensemble is an “illustration” of the particular mode of social interaction that has defined societies in the Americas in general, in an open-ended receptivity to the unforeseen:

Even if the term jazz itself “reste à interroger” (“remains open to interrogation”; 35, 34; trans. modified), Chamoiseau continues, nonetheless the “jazz spirit” in this expansive sense remains a “mysterious and fertile soil” for the emergence of the creolization that has characterized the Americas (34). The insistence on jazz as a model for collectivity based on an unceasing dynamic between the individual and the group, in a manner that brings to mind Ralph Ellison’s paradigmatic formulation, allows Chamoiseau to posit the “jazz spirit” as the “base potentielle d’une ‘communion non totalitaire’” (“potential foundation of a ‘nontotalitarian communion’”; Le conteur 186).Footnote ¹⁷

Jazz also serves throughout Chamoiseau’s work as a model for innovation, a commitment to pushing an artistic medium beyond its own limitations. As Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey have pointed out, the elements of jazz that are difficult to replicate in literature—evanescence, simultaneity, improvisation, polyphony (how might one represent on the page the effect of multiple voices speaking or singing at the same time?)—can be considered, rather than an absolute impasse, as a provocation to push against and even to transgress the putative limitations of the written text: “it is particularly unsurprising that a music which so frequently and characteristically aspires to the condition of speech, reflecting critically, it seems, upon the limits of the sayable, should have provoked and proved of enormous interest to practitioners of the art of the word—writers.” In another letter to Parker, Chamoiseau writes, in a similar vein, that “I believe that music ‘knows’ what existed before anything was even speakable, before the very advent of languages; music constitutes a perception of reality that languages also possess, hidden within, and this is what writers also seek, desperately trying to retrieve, in their writing, something that exists beyond all alphabets, beyond language itself” (Chamoiseau and Parker 78). When Chamoiseau makes reference to jazz it is often in an effort to espouse this experimental imperative to unearth the unspoken or the beyond:

Although the theorist, poet, and novelist Edouard Glissant has at times described jazz rather differently as a “recomposition” of traces,Footnote ¹⁸ an art that would somehow be capable of healing the diasporic condition—suturing what Wilson Harris once called “the dislocation of a chain of miles” (26)—I find other parts of his work particularly useful in making sense of the ways that, for Chamoiseau, the tutelary intradiasporic invocation of jazz serves as the privileged figure for a “creative leap into the unknown” or an artistic method for conjuring the unthinkable or the beyond. In Glissant’s indispensable theorization of what he calls the “poetics of Relation,” the term culture itself does not define a fixed set of norms or practices, much less a shared essence (in other words, “the old idea of identity as root”), but instead points to an unending and infinitely complex global filiation in which “every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (Poetics 141, 11). In contemporary global society, Glissant argues, “identity is no longer just permanence; it is a capacity or variation, yes, a variable—either under control or wildly fluctuating” (141).

In exploring the intricacies of culture understood in this way, as an open-ended unfurling and pervasive cross-fertilization, Glissant suggests that difference can function as a “determining gap.”Footnote ¹⁹ In one particularly dense passage, he writes, “La confluence massive et diffractée des cultures fait ainsi que tout écart (par rapport à une pré-norme suggérée ou imposé) est déterminant, mais aussi que toute détermination (de soi) est écart générateur” (“The massive and diffracted confluence of cultures thus makes every gap (from a suggested or imposed pre-norm) be determining but also makes every (self-)determination be a generative gap”; Poétique 168; Poetics 153; trans. modified). It is a useful critical vocabulary for making sense of the species of intradiasporic translation I have been attempting to think through here. The spaces between scenes—say, the distance from Harlem to Montmartre—are constitutive gaps that cannot be wished away. Any prospect of “interdependence,” any positing of internationalism, must proceed by registering those “determining gaps” rather than by smoothing them out into a mass of “amalgamated indistinctions” (Poetics 143; trans. modified).

This is to say that internationalism can only be read through what Moten calls its “disrupted and disruptive locales” (116), like that unsuspected clearing in the forest where “Mood Indigo” becomes the anthem for a “prodigious beauty” that is particularly, inexorably Caribbean. As Glissant puts it elsewhere, “Dans la Relation, ce qui relie est d’abord cette suite des rapports entre les différences, à la rencontre les unes des autres. Les racines parcourantes (les rhizomes) des idées, des identités, des intuitions, relaient: s’y révèlent les lieux-communs dont nous devinons entre nous le partage” (“[I]n Relation what binds is first of all that suite of relations among differences as they encounter each other. The roots (rhizomes) that traverse ideas, identities, intuitions, are what bind: what are revealed in them are the common spaces where we divine what cleaves us”; Philosophie 72). To approach this point from another angle, it would be worth considering the relation between the generative disruption of intradiasporic translation—which is produced by the internal division of what is putatively shared (“lieux-communs”)—and what Edward Said has described as the productive “dislocation” of certain instances of “travelling theory” (253), or what Roberto Schwarz has called the aesthetic “advantage” afforded by the reliance on “misplaced ideas” in literatures of the periphery (65).Footnote ²⁰

At the Princeton conference, the role of the allusions to jazz running through Chamoiseau’s work—and the interrelations between music and literature more broadly—became one of the main currents of the collective dialogue that unspooled across our time together, along with issues including writerly process and collaboration, animality, political economy, migration, translation, and creolization. I was seated across from Chamoiseau at lunch, and we kept talking about jazz and about my proposition that francophone invocations of the music be understood as instances of écarts déterminants in Glissant’s sense. Although he didn’t object to my reading of the ways that, for Ménil and Paulette Nardal, jazz served as an aesthetic model that was explicitly intradiasporic (that is, associated for them with African American blackness in particular), I realized that—even when confronted with the ways his work makes reference to musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane as emblematic—Chamoiseau was reluctant to associate jazz with any given diasporic locale. Although I find that the way jazz is mobilized in his writing is singular and exceptional, Chamoiseau seemed to want to position it as representative of a general diasporic phenomenon, a strategic mobilization of improvisation and polyrhythm that is characteristic of the “galaxie inépuisable” (“inexhaustible galaxy”) of New World black music (Baudelaire jazz 81).Footnote ²¹

The evening of the first day, there was a concert by the Guadeloupean saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart, followed by a conversation between the musician and the indefatigable Chamoiseau. The exchanges throughout the day were clearly still rippling through his head, and he kept coming back to points we’d been discussing earlier. It was during this closing dialogue that Chamoiseau offered his most thorough formulation of his position:

At lunch, Chamoiseau had cited Imbert’s work to make his seemingly surprising point that “le jazz n’est pas une musique noire” (“jazz is not a black music”).Footnote ²² I looked up the passage when I got home. In his captivating and unfortunately still untranslated 2014 book Jazz supreme: Initiés, mystiques et prophètes, a wide-ranging study of jazz and spirituality, Imbert suggests that coming to terms with the global influence of jazz means coming to terms with the ways the music has engendered “une conscience politique et spirituelle qui soutient la lutte et l’émancipation par ces moyens symboliques, allégoriques, souvent à l’insu de l’oppresseur” (“a political and spiritual consciousness supporting emancipation struggles through symbolic and allegorical means, often unknown to the oppressor”; 15). Observing the evolution of this consciousness “dans le cheminement d’une musique perpétuellement réinventée par les Noirs américains offre une alternative aux simples tentatives de récupération nationaliste ou ethnocentrée du jazz” (“in the advances of a music perpetually reinvented by Black Americans offers an alternative to simple attempts at nationalist or ethnocentric recuperations of jazz”). On the contrary, this consciousness has been a “moteur créatif” (“creative motor”) for all the musical forms it has touched. Imbert adds:

When I found this passage in Imbert’s book, I realized that I had stumbled upon another, perhaps inadvertent, transposition. What are we to make of the discrepancy between Imbert’s formulation and Chamoiseau’s subtly diffracted citation of it—that is, between a circonstance nègre and a circonstance noire?Footnote ²⁴ Or is this yet another instance of a determining gap—an idea spirited out of place and made to signify otherwise? Or is the blackness of a black circumstance precisely a matter of the ways any figure for racial commonality is always already internally divided—a “common space where we divine what cleaves us,” as Glissant puts it?

Among the arresting and revelatory shards of language in the first section of numbered poems in M. NourbeSe Philip’s “hauntological” book Zong! (201), in which the poet deliberately restricts herself to the “word store” of the 1783 Court of King’s Bench report of Gregson v. Gilbert (191), patiently and intuitively (“certain words leap out at me, asking me to choose them” [195]) and furiously recombining the words of the report, first through the “mechanism of force” of grammar (193), putting words in new syntactical relationships through a manipulation of transitive verbs and prepositions, and then through the anagrammatic reshuffling of individual letters, “using the text of the legal report almost as a painter uses paint or a sculptor stone—the material with which I work being preselected and limited” (198), all in the daring conviction that the “story that can only be told by not telling” of the African captives murdered during the ill-fated transatlantic voyage of the slave ship the Zong in 1781 is somehow “locked in the text” of the report itself (191), that the captives’ names and voices can somehow be wrung out of “the language of the only publicly extant document directly bearing on these events” (199) or, in other words, rung (made to sound) out of “the one public marker of the murder of those Africans on board the Zong, locating it in a specific time and place” (194), one of the recombined phrases that reappear and reshape themselves across multiple iterations is an enigmatic prepositional phrase:

A beautiful work is a work of circumstance. And what is a circumstance? A setting; an environment; the surrounding conditions; the place where it happened; the given; a predisposition; how we found things when we got there. It suggests something stumbled upon by chance, a clearing in a forest, something predetermined by an empirical foundation outside your control. A work of circumstance is the product of its moment, of the particular conditions of its genesis: something occasional, contingent—one might call it epiphenomenal, then, or even indirect or tangential (as in the legal term circumstantial evidence). But a circumstance is also “determining,” in Glissant’s sense: it is a predicament, a tightrope, a precarious situation you’re thrown into, and one that can throw you, that can unsettle you (the unease and questioning provoked by their circumstances), that can upend you, that can even entrap or violate you. (In the fatalistic phrasing of another recombination in the book’s opening section: “negroes exist / for the throwing” [34].) To listen across the infinite distance from blackness to blackness, to take jazz as a model for poetics, for a literature of improvisation that is developed in the hazards of the circumstances, is not to anchor oneself in the solace of identity but instead to stand deliberately, self-consciously, on broken ground.