Nabe and the Rhetoric of Sodomy

At the beginning of his somewhat biographical, somewhat auto-biographical, and somewhat jazzy essay on the singer Billie Holiday, the author, Marc-Édouard Nabe, offers a rhetorical conceit that places him, though as yet unborn, as a sentient being at a performance by the singer. Though he is “moins 3 mois [minus three months old]” (BH 11), he reacts to the concert viscerally, as he drinks in the sound of the blues singer at her famous New York concert at Carnegie Hall. This conceit points to Nabe's self-assessment that he is one of the true jazz mavens, one of the few people able of great discernment, so talented that he is able to appreciate excellent jazz even in utero. But the initial conceit goes beyond that. Here and elsewhere in his writing, he points to his unique position, as an only child, as a solitary being, as a singular man; in this case, he is underscoring that jazz – and the author's father, Marcel Zanini, is a pop and jazz musician – is a native language for him.