Globalizing Holocaust Memory in Contemporary African Diaspora Fiction: John A. Williams' CLIFFORD'S BLUES

• In Event: Convergences: jewblack is blackjew

Abstract

This paper identifies a subgenre of Holocaust fiction that portrays the experiences of Black victims of the Nazis. Although unlike Jews, Blacks were not systematically targetted by the Nazis with elimination, they suffered a variety of forms of persecution during the war including forced sterilization, incarceration and death. In the 1990s and 2000s, a number of African diaspora writers published works that imaginatively recover the memory of this little known episode of Holocaust history. Their novels and short stories recast World War II and the Holocaust as part of African diaspora experience. In Black Holocaust fiction, the relationship between African diaspora and Jewish historical traumas is not one of abstract parallelism but rather of historical overlap and intersection.

A significant example of this subgenre is John A. Williams' novel CLIFFORD'S BLUES (1999), which recounts the experiences of a gay African American jazz pianist who is imprisoned in Dachau and forced to perform in a club for SS officers. Williams' novel positions the Black victim as a witness to Jewish suffering and relies on a persistent analogy between Nazism and American racism. This paper will argue that CLIFFORD'S BLUES adopts the literary device of the fictionalized camp diary in order to redress gaps in the historical archive. I will consider the unstable relationship between fiction and history in Williams' novel by tracing its invocation of a series of historical figures and sources, including Surinamese artist Josef Nassy's visual diary of his internment at Laufen and Tittmoning. Finally, I will situate CLIFFORD'S BLUES' postmemorial project in relation to other examples of Black Holocaust fiction that similarly mimic the camp diary form (Michèle Maillet) and reconstruct the lives of jazz musicians living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe in the 1930s and 40s (Esi Edugyan, Michelle Cliff). My interest is in the mnemonic function of these texts—in how, in the absence of a more complete historical record, they exercise their poetic license to secure the transmission of memory and to reframe the Holocaust through a transcultural, multidirectional lens.

Author

• Sarah Phillips Casteel, Carleton University