Migration Blues in Jazz Styling: Spinning Them Overlooked Jazz and Blues Numbers in Brian Chikwava’s Fiction

This essay contends that the narrator’s invocations of music in Harare North are not as serendipitous and isolated as they seem. Rather, jazz and blues function semiotically and axially in the story. I argue that together they serve, on the one hand, as a reminder of and an indirect authorial salute to Harare’s and, by extension, Zimbabwe’s urban music history, particularly its long tradition of jazz and blues. As one of Zimbabwe’s “cultural workers” (Dube), as part of what Stuart Nicholson calls “the global jazz scene,” and as the author of what Tsitsi Ella Jaji would dub an African stereomodernist text, Chikwava partakes of those illustrious legacies. On the other hand, although they are linked with the characters, jazz and blues extrapolate as joint signifiers of Harare North’s postmodernist form and overtones. They codify and consolidate its metafictionality, its allusions, playfulness, contingencies, and irresolution, but then its crisis- and migration-engendered undertones of melancholia and stoicism.