1 2011 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium Panel with Cecil Foster Writing Jazz: Gesturing Towards the Possible Interview conducted by Paul Watkins Transcribed by Elizabeth Johnstone Edited by Paul Watkins PW: So, this is the morning plenary. It’s more of an interview, a discussion of wits, somewhat dialogic, with Dr. Cecil Foster, who is a Canadian novelist. You may also know him as an essayist, journalist, and scholar. He was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, where he began working for the Caribbean News Agency. You can read his autobiography, which was published around 1998 and is called Island Wings, which describes his experience of growing up in Barbados and eventually emigrating to Canada, which he did in 1979. He worked for the Toronto Star, as well as the Globe and Mail. He was also a special advisor to Ontario’s Ministry of Culture. His most recent books, Where Race Does Not Matter, and Blackness and Modernity, explore the potentials for multiculturalism in Canada. Currently he is an associate professor of Sociology here at the University of Guelph, and hopefully today we’ll talk about multiculturalism, as well as improvisation, and how those intersections may relate to his own writing process. Without further ado I introduce Dr. Cecil Foster. CF: Good morning and let me say a special hello to all of my friends and colleagues, and people that will become friends and colleagues. It certainly is a pleasure to be here. I rather enjoy being here at Guelph. I have now gone through the ranks from assistant, to associate, to full professor, to end up being, one of the, I hope Ajay would consider me to be a writer. So I guess, I don’t know if [Paul] had me in mind when he talked about someone who is kicking ass [laughs], but if I can get the proceedings going on with a bit of levity, as well as some serious considerations.... Now as an introduction let me take as a point of departure Houston Baker and his notions of black vernacular and ideology expressed in blues and jazz. This is the idea of a.) blues geography, and b.) the idea of motion (migration, trains, building new communities, finding a new home). This is Baker’s notion that jazz/blues is the music of America–and I say by extension, of the Americas–and that the railroad, or the railway as we say south of the border, as central to this vernacular. Then we can look at Canada and trace its development, and continued development, from its earliest times to official multiculturalism now. When you look back at the Royal Proclamation of 1783 that started all this national development, we see how transportation was so central to the development of Canada – for what started as the place to exploit Aboriginal resources became a home for peoples of the world looking for a just society. And we look at Canada through Confederation, where the railway was so central to the notion of a home – the railway “that ribbon of steel” that kept Canada together, that kept Canada humming. Then we have that important motif of the Underground Railroad, and an entire language and code that goes with it, about dry goods and captains, and the idea of the early Canadian national pride and identity, one that is fostered in slavery. And we see the idea of blacks on the railroad, railway, hidden in the seminal works, such as Two Solitudes, and those smiling darkies faces on the trains of Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Small [sic]Town. Then there is 2 Quinte Brown with his banjo, who one might argue is the main keeper of the history and claims of Canada, in A.R. Davis’ important novel of 1908, The Old Loyalist, and which carries the subtitle: A Story of United Empire Loyalist Descendants in Canada. And then we come into the era of official multiculturalism, and I contend it is hard not to hear it in those discussions the refrains and riffs and digressions from the Civil Rights Movement down South, but also in Quebec and in Halifax, and in Toronto, where blacks (whether they are Negroes or French “white niggers” of North America) are “in motion” traveling to a new land and new times. Again we think of Baker’s motion, blues vernacular and blues geography, and hear the refrains of a new society in the liberation theology of James Cone in the God of the Oppressed, and in The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation, and in Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America, and in Ellison, and Wright, and Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison, and Wideman, to name our pantheon. Of course, equally here in Canada we have people like Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand—one of our colleagues—and Larry Hill, George Elliott Clarke, all writing about searching for a home, for freedom, for full citizenship. Multiculturalism as blues/jazz, in its improvisation and intermingling, in its always gesturing to the new and the future promised land, to how we can make better what we already have, for the blues are just too much the blues. Much of this I have attempted in my academic work, Blackness and Modernity: The Colour of Humanity and the Quest for Freedom, in which I argue that multiculturalism is idealistically—and even culturally—blackness, and for me it is using the different cultures and bodies from around the world and working them, just as we would expect in a good jazz ensemble, where individuality and collectivity are always in tensions. I also look at this in my other book, Where Race Does Not Matter: The New Spirit of Modernity, where the only place that I can think of when race is present and still does not matter, is in the books, the negro spirituals, and in jazz. So the novel, the one that I am playing with now, and I’ll share an excerpt with you, I tried some of these things, some riffs on some of them, trying to write about jazz/ blues while making it as second nature to the story, and storytelling, as jazz/blues is in Baker’s way of saying second nature to the Americas and this experience. Right now the working title for what I’m going to read from is George’s Run, or I was thinking maybe I should change it to Jazz’s Run. I’m not sure with that cadence it would work. But it’s about the Pullman porters, the music on the trains, the music in the tracks, the music in the silences, the music in the churches, the juke joints, in the search for a home in North America– in Canada –a home where everyone is free, as free as Quinte Brown and his banjo, as the home loyalists. Let me give some examples and then perhaps we can talk, and Paul can question. Now I’m going to read an excerpt from the novel, where...to set it up: this guy who is a Pullman porter...is reflecting on a trip that his father once took him on across Canada, in which the course on that trip, it was about his seventh or eighth birthday, was to introduce to him the notion that Canada is his. Well of course this is in a time when the notion of Canada being his, to a black boy out of Halifax, would be quite absurd because this was Canada, the white man’s country. So they are taking this trip across Canada. The train they are traveling on, number 15, or ‘the Ocean’ – on the way back it becomes…Oh, I forgot, but on the way out it’s the Ocean. [Dr. Foster begins to read] So the Ocean rocks side to side. It is as if this train too is shaking, not only me. The brakes squeal against the curves in the rails. Horns blaring. Rugga-rugga-rugga. In the beginning this train seemed as determined as me to get away. We were in collusion. For almost an entire day 3 and night from Halifax, the Ocean and I had run parallel to the St. Lawrence river, heading for Montreal, still so many hours away, and in this bone chilling weather. It shielded me and within its dark crevices I found the anonymity I desire. I was free, without a past, without an identity, no longer anybody’s son; I was starting all over again, this time as myself; this time finally free of him. My part in this pact requires me to trouble no one, to just keep to myself, letting time and distance slip away, letting this train take me far, far away. This way we can steal away together. Now rocking and hooting, the train is joined with those calling me out. Such betrayal this is. Now I am exposed and helpless. Once again I am thrown back into the briars, there to join my father. I look through the window into the mist. What country is this, so big and yet there is no place to hide and to simply be myself. My father is always so fond of quoting someone or the other as saying on a map of this continent the St. Lawrence looks like someone of superior strength took a great big sword and thrust it into the top of North America. All he left is a long gaping wound all the way to the heart. That wounded heart means everything. For Poppa is always saying the tracks of the trains, oh yes those ribbons of steel, even if laid by mere mortals, well they are like stitches binding a wound.