Highlights - Half-Blood Blues

Amnesty International's second book club selection in Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues. 

Half-Blood Blues is about a group of jazz musicians, the Hot-Time Swingers, trying to survive in Europe just before and in the early months of the Second World War. 

The novel is about moral complexity and ambiguity, and about the individual's need to come to terms with himself. 

The novel seems to ask the question What does it mean to be fully human? It is about integrating the positive and the negative which create every whole. About becoming emotionally mature. 

A second theme seems to be The role of art in elevating humanity. Feelings > commonality > empathy.

WHAT IS HALF-BLOOD BLUES ABOUT?

WHAT IS HALF-BLOOD BLUES ABOUT?

PLOT SUMMARY: Half-Blood Blues is about a group of jazz musicians, the Hot-Time Swingers, trying to survive in Europe just before and in the early months of the Second World War. The timeline jumps around in six chapters--Paris 1940, Berlin 1992 (which opens in Baltimore), Berlin 1939, Berlin 1992, Paris 1939, and Poland1992. In pre-war Berlin the musicians are persecuted by laws against their degenerate music and laws denying rights of citizenship and travel papers based on their place of birth, parental nationality, and race. Two of the musicians, Chip Jones, the drummer, and Sid Griffiths, the bassist narrator, are African-American friends from Baltimore, USA. The pianist, Paul Butterstein, is Jewish and epileptic. Ernst "the Mouth" von Haselberg on clarinet is a German rebelling against a Nazi father. Fritz Bayer, alto sax, chooses to stay in Germany. Hieronymus Thomas Falk, trumpet player, is the son of a Black occupying soldier and a German mother. As a half-blood German-speaker, he has no papers. Although German-born, he is denied citizenship. Ernst's father arranges for forged papers, exit visas for all three including Hiero to pass as American (as long as he doesn't speak).

Delilah Brown, a Canadian American singer with two passports, comes to Berlin to ask the musicians to come to Paris and play for/with Louis Armstrong. They arrive a few months before Paris falls to the Nazis. Delilah arranges for visas to allow Sid and Chip to leave with her for the States but there are no papers for Hiero. As they wait for his travel papers, they decide to cut their own blues record which Sid saves and smuggles out of the studio before Hiero is really satisfied with the take. Their "Half-Blood Blues" is a jazz interpretation of the second official German national anthem, the Nazi Horst Wessel song. They had taken the enemy's signature piece and made it their own. Hiero, who has been ill, insists on going out for milk. Sid agrees to accompany him. While Sid is in the washroom, the Boots arrive. Hiero has no papers. He is arrested. Sid can only stand and watch. Hiero spent the rest of the war in a concentration camp and they heard he died shortly after being liberated. However, just before Chip and Sid are set to fly over to Berlin in1992, for the premiere of the documentary about their group, Chip reveals to Sid that Hiero is alive and living in Poland.

Fifty years after the war, in Kurt Caspar's1992 documentary about the group, Chip betrays Sid by accusing him of being responsible for Hiero's arrest. A crime, he calls it, caused by personal and professional jealousy. Denying Hiero the way Peter denied Christ. Sid continues to tell details of their last days in Paris, revealing that, in order for the group to complete the recording, he had hidden Hiero's visa and papers which would have allowed Hiero to escape to Switzerland.

After the premiere of the film, Chip convinces Sid to come with him. They take a bus to Poland to visit Hiero. Sid confesses the truth to Hiero who is shocked but comes around. He has matured. He does not blame anyone. Chip also absolves Sid, telling him "We all done things we ain't proud of, especially back then." "What you done was inexcusable, Sid. Absolutely wrong" but at the same time his old friend recognizes that "you'd have given you whole life to spare him if you could." The novel is about moral complexity and ambiguity, and the individual's need to come to terms with himself. 

The UNRELIABLE NARRATOR:

The UNRELIABLE NARRATOR:

Who is the reliable narrator? Sid tells the story. To me, Chip is the one who betrays his friend, publicly, cruelly, in the documentary. In their younger days, Sid recalls Chip stealing from his own family members. In their Berlin and Paris days, Chip plays the Iago, teasing Sid about the woman he loves and her concern for Hiero. Sid seems believable where it concerns memory, plot, what happened, but he is less strong, unreliable, when it comes to interpreting his own and others' feelings. "Trust the tale, but not the teller." He is immature and insecure, and seems only to come of age in his eighties when he finally sees Hiero again. What Sid did to Hiero, withholding the papers, was morally wrong, a lie of omission which, if he had told Hiero that the papers had arrived, would have allowed Hiero to make his own informed life or death decision about when to flee Paris. Sid chose to put their art, the possibility of musical immortality, ahead of his friend's safety. 

RESISTANCE:

RESISTANCE: 

Was resistance possible? I don't believe at the time Hiero was arrested that Sid could have done anything. A friend of mine has published a memoir of growing up in Germany during this same era (Plagues and Placebos by Dr. Gerd Asche, amazon.com), witnessing classmates disappear, windows of businesses and synagogues being smashed, special needs people being hidden, state employees being pressured to conform, resign, or commit suicide if they refused to comply with Nazi policy. Sid was not responsible for nor could he in any way control the racist policies and anti human rights laws.

Bernhard Schlink's The Reader also tackles the conundrum of the options available to German people, to people in Germany, under the Nazis. Half-Blood Blues also has echoes of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, the repeated references to the lover's collarbones, the hero reading Herodotus, the link between language and papers and identity. In The English Patient, the anonymous patient rejects nationalism and the emphasis on paper identities and taking sides and attempts to live "under the radar," to continue his life as an explorer, cartographer, and lover. In a sense, all four of these books are about attempting to live a fully human life in spite of war and other people's inhumanity. As does Christopher Isherwood's 1939 novel Goodbye To Berlin which became I Am a Camera and later, the musical, Cabaret. The Hot-Times Swingers' version of Horst Wessel, their "Half-Blood Blues," is their answer to the Cabaret patrons singing "Tomorrow Belongs To Me." Their record, although it was confiscated, resurfaced fifteen years later and led to Chip's successful career. And when we meet Hiero again, his record collection confirms that not necessarily jazz but music survived in Europe in spite of the Nazi attempt to exterminate it. So in this sense, jazz, music, represents the human spirit, the spirit of humanity. As do the monumental metal statues surrounding Hiero (Thomas') home. A blind Hiero gazing at the sky. A protective Sid, cradling his bass. The friends have been with Hiero all along. 

Half-Blood Blues - THEME #1 - BEING FULLY HUMAN:

WHAT IS HALF-BLOOD BLUES ABOUT?

THEME #1 - BEING FULLY HUMAN:

Although the evil Boots and the feeling of impending doom are ever present, at the same time, the musicians themselves are not perfect. They are fraught with pettiness amongst themselves, and jealousies over sexual adventures and musical talents. As a microcosm, their personal failures parallel the larger failures of the Jim Crow laws at home, or of the Nazi regime. The plot and character development suggest that part of the human condition is this sense of competition and this “I'm okay, but these over here are not okay.” Or, as Hiero puts it when showing Sid the human beings in the Hamburg zoo, "A jack always reckon his own customs is the best in the world."

How can humanity address this failure, this ethnocentrism? Human rights legislation is the answer only as long as it is respected and enforced. Think Putin. Think Canada where, these last few years, we see governments disrespecting laws, denying treaty rights. The novel seems to suggest that all solutions are individual, and that the changes must all happen within each individual. Honesty, the ability to confess, to face the truth, to accept the failures of self and others, to say sorry, to offer forgiveness. So that the first theme of the novel seems to be this idea of what it means to be fully human, to embrace imperfection, to integrate the positive and the negative which create every whole, to become emotionally mature. 

Half-Blood Blues - THEME #2 - ART and HUMANITY:

Half-Blood Blues - THEME #2 - ART and HUMANITY:

A second theme in this novel seems to me to be the role of art in elevating humanity. The musicians seem able to make the connection between the conscious and the unconscious, to recognize and express emotions, to make the audience feel. The statues also express feelings, emotion, wherein rests our commonality. From feelings, empathy may arise. 

Human Rights Action - ROMA

Human Rights Action - ROMA

ROMA: I am not comfortable at all with the information provided on the education of Roma children. How do the Roma educate their children? What do their parents, their community, their culture, want the Roma children to learn​? The information given leaves the impression that someone else is responsible for the children, and that someone else is responsible for educating the children. It verges on feeling patronizing and condescending. Education by the state is often used as a way to force assimilation, acculturation. When the state becomes involved in education systems, it is assumed that the parents contribute to the curriculum and towards the costs (taxes, etc.)

Is education a human right? Whose responsibility is it? The parents, the community, or the state? Or others? If the child's culture is in conflict with state school attendance, what gives? When the child's education surpasses the parents, rifts can develop within the family. The parents have difficulty helping the children with their schooling, and the children feel pressured to choose between schooling and family/community. So, although I accept your premise that there is discrimination against and persecution of Roma in places in Europe, I am not convinced that suitable action options are offered here, nor that outsiders are the ones who should be deciding what should be done about this issue. What do the Roma want?