Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Notes

Chapter III

1.     Through his controversial position among his contemporaries, Johnson often swims against the literary current. Even if Middle Passage won the prestigious National Book Award in 1990, its critical reception has been ambivalent. Paul West, a jurist on the panel that chose Middle Passage, protested that the selection was based on “ethnic concerns, ideology and moral self righteousness” (Goudie 1995, 110). Moreover, in comparison to other African American authors such as Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, or Alice Walker, fewer articles have been written about Johnson’s work, which is in many respects innovative. Positive echoes come from Carl Pedersen, who succinctly remarks the combination “of the excitement of a sea adventure with the horrors of the Middle Passage,” so that the crossing of the Atlantic is transformed “into at once a microcosm of world history and an allegory of growing self-awareness” (1993, 233). In the same positive note, S. X. Goudie argues how Johnson “uses marks, marksmen, and marked men as tropes for racism, and on another level racism becomes a trope for larger marks of the human condition” (1995, 109). While Muther is interested in how female identity appears in the novel as “a composite of misogynistic stereotypes” (1996, 649), Daniel M. Scott III comments upon the novel’s ability to offer interrogations of African identity, which tests “the capacities of binary opposition, dualism, and abstraction to contain meaning and experience” (1995, 645). Enlarging the critical approach with a religious perspective, Celestin Walby discusses the ritual of the sacrificial kinship in relation to Christian and African mythology. In a comparative line, Christian Moraru analyzes Johnson’s text in the context of the postmodern age of cloning, paying special attention to the way in which the novel reworks Melville’s Moby-Dick. In addition, intra- and intertextual readings are offered by Virginia Whatle Smith (Middle Passage and John A. Williams’ Captain Blackman), Lorraine Quimet (Middle Passage and Oxherding Tale), Helen Lock (Middle Passage and Douglass’ The Heroic Slave and Melville’s “Benito Cereno”), Jonathan Little (Middle Passage and Siddhartha and Invisible Man).

2.     Johnson’s phenomenological ideas presented in his Being and Race place his work in a larger theoretical context, where Husserl and Merleau-Ponty play important roles.

3.     Johnson’s novel can be also read in relation to Alexandre Dumas’ Histoire de mes bêtes, published in 1858, in “Revue de deux mondes.” Dumas’ postmodern text avant la lettre “plays with multiple identities: human/animal, black/white/mulatto, in a thousand mirrors with reflections that are false, oblique, or blurred, which lead to (the lack of) self-knowledge and knowledge of the Other” (Mariana Než, copy in author’s files). See also Mariana Než, Alexandre Dumas: Le pays où il fait mort, Wien: Institut für Sozio-Semiotische Studien, 1997.

4.     Refraction, n. 1. Physics. The change of direction of a ray of light, sound, heat, or the like, in passing obliquely from one medium into another in which its speed is different. 2. Optics. a. The ability of the eye to refract light which enters it so as to form an image on the retina. b. the determining of the refractive condition of the eye. 3. Astron. a. Also called astronomical refraction, the amount, in angular measure, by which the altitude of a celestial body is increased by the refraction of its light in the earth’s atmosphere, being zero at the zenith and a maximum at the horizon. b. The observed altered location, as seen from the earth, of another planet or the like due to diffraction by the atmosphere. [<LL refraction- (s. of refractio) a breaking up, open] (Webster’s Dictionary 1207).

5.     This idea is also supported by James Coleman: “Johnson focuses on the black experience as it exists ‘in literature’ (Being 5), in written texts, and it is through the revision of the written textual tradition that Johnson tries to break its hegemony, to inscribe a revised black freedom and liberation” (1995, 631).

6.     Discussing the way in which Johnson rewrites the tradition of the slave narrative, Lorraine Quimet specifies: “the mongrelized characteristics of the form and its structural capacity for movement (from sin to salvation, ignorance to wisdom, bondage to freedom) make it the perfect vehicle for Johnson’s mapping of a phenomenology of freedom and for his identity politics” (2000, 34).

7.     As April Langley affirms, Equiano’s movement has a profound cultural significance: “In the movement from freedom and enslavement in Africa to slavery, freedom, and racial enslavement and oppression in the New World, Equiano complicates the notion of freedom through his developing and changing kaleidoscope that imagines communities across geographical and historical landscapes of African literatures and cultures of the diaspora” (2001, 48).

8.     As in Johnson’s short story, “The Education of Mingo,” both master and slave influence each other’s behavior. Linda Selzer points how Mingo, the slave, “begins to function as a mirror for Moses, [his master]” (2003, 106). Reminding us of the “homunculus” in Goethe’s Faust, Mingo is more than a product, a passive receptacle of Moses’ ideas. He thus influences Moses in the same way Jackson seems to influence his master, Chandler.

9.     Focused upon the story of an black prince taken as a slave to America, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688) represents “an early attack upon the colonial problem of the human slavery, of sufferance and degradation” (Sanders 1997, 259).

10. The change of Equiano’s name is significant: Gustavus Vassa is the name of a Swedish nobleman who lived in the 16^th century, and who led the Swedish people into a war of independence against the Danes. Thus, Vassa is the first Swedish king who led his people out of slavery.

11. Equiano’s fictional persona is even more complicated if we take into consideration Vincent Caretta’s suggestion that Equiano was not born in Africa, but was born a slave in North Carolina, where his baptismal record has been found. If Caretta is right, then critics and historians will have to find a “new interpretation” to Equiano’s narrative (Sollors 1987, xxxi).

12. Possibly, Equiano’s acculturation to the Western world is performed only “to win his freedom and bring about his physical and spiritual salvation” (Costanzo 1987, 41, in Sabino and Hall 1999, 6). From another perspective, Equiano’s “Christian rhetoric” (Orban 1993, 655) can be seen an irreversible superimposition of a Western identity and an erasure of his African one.

13. The second part of Rutherford’s journey from Africa to America retraces Equiano’s uprooting passage from his African homeland to the New World. If in Equiano’s biography Africa appears as an Edenic homeland with a specific ethnicity, in Johnson’s fiction Africa is initially a blank space, which will be later inscribed through the Allmuserian worldview.

14. Notice here how Rutherford’s voyage by sea is initiated by his theft: he steals Josiah Squibb’s papers in order to embark on the Republic. Once on board, he fabricates a new version of his biography in order to persuade the captain of his lack of protection, family, and financial means. In addition, he ironically expresses in his writing his understanding of the shrewdness of his own race: “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but we all know it anyway: namely, that a crafty Negro, a shrewd black strategist, can work a prospective white employer around, if he’s smart, by playing poor mouth, or greasing his guilt with a hard-luck story” (28).

15. From the Greek word, parasitos meaning “beside the grain” (para, beside + sitos, grain). In his essay, “The Critic as Host,” Hillis Miller underlines the antithetical meaning of this prefix, “signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority“ (1979, 219).

16. Even if Conrad’s treatment of colonialism in Heart of Darkness  and Lord Jim draws upon Kipling’s Kim, he differs from Kipling and the other English authors of his age: “Alone among writers like Kipling, Haggard, Henley, and Stevenson, Conrad lived both as a native of a colonized country and as a member of a colonizing community. Thus, he achieved what they never could, although some, like Kipling, tried: a view from the other side of the compound wall” (McClure 1981, 5).

17. In spite of the fact that Rutherford is an African American, he is forced into the position of a colonizer who goes to Africa on a slave ship. To borrow from S. X. Goudie, “Calhoun is a black man playing a white man’s colonial game” (1995, 111). Moreover, since identity also means physicality, he has to beware not to be taken for an African and thrown back into slavery.

18. Johnson’s understanding of the Middle Passage can be compared to Toni Morrison’s view in Beloved. If in Morrison’s text, the perspective is that of numberless female slaves taken to America, in Johnson’s text, it is that of an observer. On the one hand, Beloved tells her story in fragmented, confused images that offer sympathetic identification to the reader with her traumatic experience. One the other hand, Rutherford’s voice is more orderly and controlled, therefore intended to disambiguate the reader’s perception of the narrated events. While Morrison presents the experience of the Middle Passage through dissipated perceptual metaphors, Johnson’s focus is on the more concrete, visual aspects of the passage. Here I disagree with Vincent A. O’Keefe who stresses that “Rutherford (and Johnson) may simply be unable to articulate Allmuserian perception through language,” and that “the narrative techniques of Middle Passage prevent readers from sharing that experience, contrary to Johnson’s intentions” (1996, 641). On the contrary, the horror of the event is augmented by Rutherford’s inability “to watch,” as well as by his awareness of being an accomplice “in taking part in the captivity of the Allmuseri” (Middle Passage 66).

19. The analogy between the crew of the Republic and the motley American-scape is obvious. Notice how the crew is described after a tempest: “Without speaking we all clapped out hands together as one company—thirty-two sopping-wet cutthroats black-toothed rakes traitors drunkards rapscallions thieves poltroons forgers clotpolls sots lobcocks sodomists prison escapees and debauchees simultaneously praying like choirboys, our heads tipped begging forgiveness after this brush with death in Irish, Cockney, Spanish, and Hindi for a litany of collective sins so long I could not number them” (82).

20. See here how during a storm Rutherford meditates upon the ocean’s “vortices that were mirrored in [him]” (79).

21. He thus illustrates Bakhtin’s conception of the novel as a “dialogized heteroglossia,” which incorporates diverse and sometimes contradictory views subverting the monolithic supremacy of a unitary language.

22. My affirmation is also supported by Brian Fagel, who observes Calhoun’s ability to “speak from the middle”—a thing which “creates a moment of postcoloniality.” Fagel also discusses the two effects of Calhoun’s middleness: “the confinement to middleness of Calhoun’s colonial moment, and the transcendence of coloniality via enunciation from the point of confinement” (1996, 625).

23. The short stature is another common point of Kurtz and Falcon: while in Johnson’s text, we are explicitly told that Falcon is short, in Conrad’s story, Kurt’s very name means “short” in German.

24. The documents are given by Marlow to Kurtz’s cousin, to a journalist, and to Kurtz’s lover, signaling their distribution to three symbolic spheres.

25. Ironically, as if to draw attention to the deceitful, many-faced character of his postmodern writing, Rutherford stresses his main occupation as a thief, who fabricates different versions of his life-story in order to take advantage of certain situations.

26. In this context, the Allmuseri god transported by Captain Falcon to the Western hemisphere symbolizes the climax of his Ahab-like desire to subdue the essence of the colonized culture.

27. Both Melville’s and Johnson’s texts take their inspiration from Frederick Douglass’ novella, “The Heroic Slave” (1852), which depicts the successful slave rebellion aboard the ship Creole in 1841. Led by Madison Washington, the African slaves manage to take control of the ship en route from Virginia to New Orleans, and change the course of the ship to the British free port of Nassau. Douglass’ main objective was to emphasize Washington’s heroic stature, his ability to outwit the white crewmembers, as well as his ideals of liberty and equality.

28. As Helen Lock stresses, “although Melville uses different techniques, he and Johnson nevertheless are making the same point: both illustrate how when the master/slave, ruler/ruled roles are inverted, each side reveals the characteristics of the other, for better and worse, until, as at the end of Orwell’s Animal Farm, there is no discernible distinction” (2000, 59).

29. Rutherford has a similar vision of a reversed situation, during one of his discussions with Falcon, when he is told about the African god they carry on the ship: “Could it be that in a dimension alongside this one I was a dwarf sitting in a Chinese robe, telling a white mate I had captured a European god and, below us, the hold was crammed with white chattel?” (102).

30. Babo, Atufal, Diamelo, and Francesco are Africans whose haunting presence can be traced both in Melville’s and Johnson’s texts. In Middle Passage, the scene after the mutiny makes direct reference to Melville’s characters. Rutherford narrates: “I saw three Allmuseri sitting on the benches; I recognized two more named Babo and Francesco passing a bottle of the skipper’s best bellywash, and still another called Atufal, a big man who had an iron collar around his neck and stood behind the mate arguing—if my hasty translation could be trusted—for them to toss him over the side” (Johnson 131). Moreover, the slaves’ desire to kill their mate reenacts another scene in Melville’s text, where the former slaves argue over the killing of the cook—whose life is finally spared. Significantly, the same scene can be traced in Douglass’ The Heroic Slave, where Madison Washington does not allow his black men to kill Grant, the white man who is lying unconscious on the deck.

31. In this way, the crew sees in Rutherford’s drifting nature (“a vagabond,” who “got nothin’ to lose” (87)) his possibility to kill Falcon and still escape the hand of the law. At the same time, Falcon wants Rutherford to become his spy, and turns him into an accomplice by poisoning his “perception of the other[s]” (58), by unraveling their secrets. Besides, Rutherford himself acts as the agent of the African revolt, since he offers them the key that unlocks their fetters.

32. Parmenides, Greek philosopher who lived in the fifth century B.C. In his poem, On Nature, he depicted the universe as having one, continuous, fixed nature.

33. In addition, by revising the Platonic/Cartesian dualism between (the inferior) body and (the superior) spirit, he suggests that both corporal and mental aspects are equally important and in constant process.

34. His question to Ngonyama proves enlightening for his ability of reverse roles: “If you were captain of this ship, what would you do?” (119). In Ngonyama’s answer, his desire to return to Africa transpires, so that the whole Middle Passage appears as a nightmare, “a tale to thrill—and terrify—our grandchildren” (119). With deep psychological implications, the voyage on board of the tight-packer is thus understood by the Africans as a plunge into the unreal, a departure from their holistic understanding of the universe and an entrance “into the madness of multiplicity” (65). Alluding to Ishmael’s rhetorical question in Moby-Dick (“Who ain’t a slave?”), Falcon’s monologue before his death also prophesizes an apocalyptic vision of America as a dystopian land of anomalies, in which former values no longer hold: “It came to me as I lay here, a nightmare that this was the last hour of history… Everything from ancient times to now, the civilized values and visions of high culture, have all gone to hell in fire old hamlets filled high with garbage, overrun with Mudmen and Jews, riddled with viral infections and venereal complaints that boggle the mind and cripple whole generations of white children who’ll be strangers, if not slaves, in their own country. I saw families killing each other. People were killing in alleyways. Sexes and races were blurred” (144-45).

35. The episode of embracing the dead is also present in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Marlow has to lift and throw overboard the dead body of his African helmsman, so that it will not be eaten by the other members of his crew who are cannibals (“I hugged him from behind desperately” (73)). At this moment he meditates upon their “subtle bond” and mournfully realizes the loss of his partner (73).

36. Kristeva points to the etymology of the word “cadaver,” from the Latin cadere, “to fall.” She also discusses the idea of loss in relation to the abject corpse: “There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from the border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere—cadaver” (1982, 3).

37. At a general level, Paul Giles cogently notes: “one of the greatest needs of any culture is to proscribe its own form of abjection, to censor those models of deviance that the culture itself produces” (2002, 181).

38. Ironically, Falcon’s colonial log helps Rutherford to accomplish his liberating mission. Falcon’s written word serves as an instrument of exposing Papa Zeringue’s involvement in the slave trade. The log manages to turn the tables on Rutherford’s side by making Santos aware that his black employer is one of the principal investors in a slave ship. An Allmuseri via his grandfather, Santos distances himself from Papa’s complicity in the colonial trade. Having the Herculean Santos on his side, Rutherford dares to request “a full endowment” for the African children “until they come of age” (203). Suggestively, by making a black character an accomplice in the slave trade, Johnson draws our attention to the network of power in which the master/slave antagonistic positions are still preserved. As Rutherford understands the fragility of his momentary triumph, he keeps the logbook as his future “insurance,” the ace in his pocket that will enable him to preserve his rights.

39. Analyzing the novel from Isadora’s perspective, Elizabeth Muther convincingly comments: “Isadora’s offstage adventuring, however, is at the center of Johnson’s purpose in Middle Passage. Crises of gender, of family and destiny, drive the plot of Johnson’s novel and provide a key to reading its parodic representations of classic male quest adventures. The stock quality of Isadora’s character—she is a composite of misogynistic stereotypes—conceals the strength of her embedded rival story. She goes to sea, and she stays at home, but her story is a critical locus of resistance in the novel” (1996, 649).