Paul Morand’s Magie noire (1928) captures in literary form the vivid and revitalizing qualities attributed to African American dance and music in the 1920s. The third part of Morand’s Chronique du XXe siècle, the work presents a quasi-ethnological or sociological literary portrait of its era, with the poetic aim of discovering the “magic” of black culture. The chapter entitled “Congo (Bâton Rouge)” treats the figure of Sophie Taylor (“Congo”), a fictional black American dancer modeled on the figure of Josephine Baker. An 18-year-old dancer starring in the “super-revue” Paris-Cochon, Congo is a wild success in Paris, “the most photographed girl in the world.”1 An unspoiled figure (un monstre naturel) with dance in her blood, the predominantly nude Congo is at one with her body, a figure untouched by the modern metropolis (Morand 1992, p. 515). In accordance with the work’s aim to penetrate into the soul of black culture, the chapter moves from surface to profundity, from a ball at the dancer’s chic hotel at the rue de l’Université to the depths of Pigalle, where Congo will take part in an occult African ritual to find a cure for the voodoo spell cast over her. The ball is a social event, the black magic ritual a reality. In Morand’s depiction, the move from European to African culture, from the shining surface to the spiritual depths, is not depicted as a regression but rather as a movement toward essence or authenticity.
The portrait that Morand paints of African American culture is an exoticized and racialist one, which, however, reverses the predominant assumptions of the era. In a passage with an explicit reference to Josephine Baker, Congo evokes the nobility of a royal lineage: “She recalls Josephine, say the old-timers. No! I am speaking of another, who was empress, in the past …” (Morand 1992, p. 516). This rapprochement of Josephine Baker, the “empress of jazz,” with Napoléon Bonaparte’s first wife, the Empress Joséphine, renders Congo a royal figure in modern form. In a reversal of the logic of Gobineau, who held that the “Negroid” improves with racial mixing, Congo retains the noble qualities inherent to her race, wearing her naked body as an aristocrat would wear a royal gown. In the basement of the bar in Montmartre where she stands naked in a circle of nude bodies chanting an occult refrain, the narrator comments: “And here is Congo nude again, the smooth nudity of her Guinean ancestors, the ease and nobility of the high epoch” (Morand 1992, p. 521). Jazz music, which Morand calls in the preface “this imperious melancholia that comes from the saxophones,” is the modern voice of this ancient aristocracy, the pure and haunting expression of the essence of African culture (Morand 1992, pp. 481-82). But unlike the ancient nobility of Europe that was linked through bonds of blood, Congo’s aristocratic creed is based on a sense of brotherhood and unity. Congo’s ball represents a leveling of distinction, a crushing (plier), grinding (moudre), and trampling (fouler) of difference, and a promise of future unity.2
Congo’s transformative power operates primarily through the medium of dance. Morand infuses her movements with all the spontaneous energy and force imputed to the modern dance forms of Charleston, black-bottom, and the fox trot in the reception of the period. In a rapid-fire Charleston that she performs at the ball, she moves like a shot, with lightning force and unexpected gestures. While cast in an unmistakably modern form, Congo’s dance works an act of black magic, providing access to the realms of the authentic and the essential, to the primitive sources of the world: “[T]his young sorcerer pulverizes the musical, political or sentimental melodies of the Whites, makes them go back to the origins of the world” (Morand 1992, p. 516). The dance idioms of the 1920s are merely ancient African totemic rituals in modern guise. This modern, spiritual dance produces an occult effect, the transference of force from one body to another: “[I]t’s a vital shock that is immediately transmissible, a discharge more violent than that of the electric chair. As soon as she appears, everything is set in motion, the people, the lights, the furniture” (Morand 1992, p. 515). Much like W.E.B. Du Bois, who valorizes what he considers to be the profound musical capacity unique to African Americans, Morand imputes to Africans the gift of joy, an infectious gift with the power to distract and uplift a fatigued and cynical populace: “[T]he program of Congo, who is also called Congo the Joyous, has been accomplished: ‘I will drive Paris to distraction!’ Paris laughs, with her tired, cynical laugh, consoled by the simple elation of her refreshed limbs, brightened by these frolics of the stone age, perked up by this organic, indestructible radiance; doesn’t she know that God gave a gift to Negroes of his most precious treasure: joy?” (Morand 1992, p. 516).
It is the changing face of Paris which becomes the main character of Morand’s utopic vision: old Paris laughing its cynical, tired laugh; new Paris driven to distraction; a future Paris infused with energy and hope. Morand’s text brings out the restorative and revitalizing qualities imputed to jazz music and dance in the period. The essentializing tropes underscore the extent to which the reception of African American musical idioms were subject to European colonialist fantasties and the admiring embrace the extent to which these fantasies met the needs of a postwar generation. In the end, the popular reception of African American music and dance in the 1920s may tell us more about the cultural needs of the period than the art forms themselves.
- Paul Morand, Magie noire, in Nouvelles completes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, ed. by Michel Collomb (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 514. [↩]
- The narrator writes of Congo at the ball: “This evening, in this high hut of the dukes of Ré, she crushes classes, grinds races […] and tramples on ages” (Morand 1992, p. 516). [↩]
