Of "Cane" and Capoeira

In retrospect, I probably should have cancelled my 1:00 class and told my students, "Go learn to samba!" We'd been watching a group of talented visitors playing Brazilian percussion on the mall and demonstrating the Afro-Brazilian dance/martial art form called capoeira, but we had to leave for class just before our visitors started teaching students to samba.

Instead, my students and I sat inside and grappled with Jean Toomer's Cane, in which conflicting styles, characters, and concepts come together in an impressionistic collage. Toomer's energy-infused lines carry readers irrevocably onward, although we don't always know where we're going or understand what we've seen when we get there.  His lyricism effortlessly carries a heavy burden of poverty, hatred, and racism, suggesting that in the Jim Crow south, beauty comes tinged with the ash of burnt flesh and there is no separating love from violence.

Capoeira also combines beauty and stylized violence without the threat of bloodshed. Legs swing high toward a partner's head before he ducks gracefully backward or leans improbably to the left; energy flows in leaps and bodies intersect in lines that keep shifting. Hands black white and brown clasp in the dance, pound on the drums, clap in time in the audience, all eyes enthralled by the whirling bodies and faces radiating the joy of movement, the thrill of creating beauty together.

In my classroom we heard no drums aside from the beating hearts within Toomer's characters, who dance across the page in an anguished cry across the years, begging us to pay attention to the lives of outcasts, oddballs, and the invisible people who lead lives of quiet desperation on the edges of society. I don't always understand where Toomer is taking me, but I hear his lines sing and see his characters dance and I cannot look away for fear of missing something important, some essential answer to a question I don't even know how to ask, about pain and love and joy and loss and how we make sense of it all.

Or maybe sense isn't what we need to be making today. Maybe we'd be better off making music, creating beauty, joining in the dance and the drumming and the clasping of hands, in a timeless place where tension and energy skirt the edge of violence and erupt into an ineffable joy.