Jean Rhys's postmodern narrative authority: Selina's patois in "Let Them Call It Jazz".(Essays)(Critical essay)

"In the train that evening I think myself lucky, for to walk about London on a Sunday with nowhere to go--that take the heart out of you," says Selina Davis, the narrator of Jean Rhys's 1962 short story, "Let Them Call It Jazz," as she heads to an apartment proffered by a stranger in a cafe. (1987, 159) In 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 Indian background, as are several Rhys heroines, but she is also mulatta, a Martiniquaise immigrant to London in the 1950s, a departure 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 It Jazz" responds to literary modernism's linguistic dilemmas and transforms the marginalized female voice into one of authority.

As she begins, Selina explains that her parents are a white Englishman she does not remember and a "fair coloured woman, fairer than I am they say," 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 woman "quite dark and what we call 'country-cookie' but she's the best I know" (164, my emphasis), a comment reflecting the intraracial color prejudice and nuanced racial stratifications of the West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Selina then tells of a demoralizing episode in her life. Having immigrated to London from Martinique to work as a seamstress, she learns that her skills are unwanted in an industry bent on fast mass production. "[H]ere they tell me all this fine handsewing take too long. Waste of time--too 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, she finds herself surrounded by neighbors scornful of her color and especially 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 them--other characters as well as readers of her story--must 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 transcribing with perfect diction and punctuation her Notting Hill 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 landlady then remarks conspiratorially, "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 instead--culturally 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 illuminates 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 society, 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 comprehend her experiences. In fact rather than recreate dialogue, she often incorporates English 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 authoritative voice. She even scoffs at the impotence of English 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 North 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 penetration of patriarchal sensibilities. Differing conspicuously from standard English, her patois and songs illustrate how marginalized women might oppose their denigration, in this case through a "dynamic process of reterritorialization" (Barnes 1995, 150). That the police 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 "white" and "black" writers. (1) Michael North examines the "racial cross-identification" prevalent throughout the modernist period, when Ezra Pound, TS. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, among others, wrote in black dialect, or their perception thereof, to create innovative literature (1994, Preface n. p.). Wallace Stevens 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 modernists 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 practice, indicating white writers' privileged maneuvering back and forth across cultural borders.

Conversely, African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance deliberated over dialect and often eschewed it in their works for fear of propagating base stereotypes. As adapted by white writers and urged by white patrons and publishers, dialect often confined black writers within an exotic, folksy, 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 an entree into mainstream society through a black aesthetic founded on sophisticated cultural accomplishments. African American modernism "had to fight its way out of the prison of white-created black dialect" beforehand (North 1994, Preface n. p.), while black modernists had to consider the potential and pitfalls of dialect in their own literature.