Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Notes

Chapter V

1.     Flight to Canada, back-cover.

2.     When discussing the negative response to Reed’s aesthetic, Bernard Bell specifies: “Uppity, pretentious, pompous, sexist, and sophomoric are the most frequent if not kindest names hurled by unsympathetic critics at Reed for the Neo-HooDoo aesthetic he develops between 1967 and 1983” (1987, 330).

3.     Robert Elliot Fox cogently notes the multiple meanings of Reed’s Neo-HooDoo aesthetic: “Neohoodooism is the name Reed gave to the philosophy and aesthetic processes he employs to take care of business on behalf of the maligned and mishandled. Hoodoo—the African American version of voodoo, a misunderstood term that actually refers to traditional African religious practices as they have reasserted themselves in the diaspora—appeals to Reed because of its “mystery” and its eclectic nature, thus providing him with an appropriate metaphor for his understanding and realization of art. Reed’s best statements concerning the workings of neohoodooism can be found in his first book of poetry, Conjure (1972)… while the most successful actualizations of neohoodooism as a practice are his novels Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), the aforementioned Mumbo Jumbo, and Flight to Canada (1976)” (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/reed/about.htm, 1997).

4.     Richard Swope considers Reed’s Neo-HooDooism a “multicultural amalgamation” that “includes the intermingling of differing, culturally infected spatial perceptions and constructions” (2002, 614).

5.     Ashraf H. Rushdy considers Flight to Canada the point of origin of the neo-slave narrative (1999).

6.     Like in Mumbo Jumbo, in Flight to Canada, Reed undermines the idea of linearity (see Hogue 2002).

7.     In Flight to Canada, Reed emphasizes his black-on-black rewriting and his literary indebtedness to Brown. In a symbolic scene during Raven’s passage to Canada, the character meets William Wells Brown, to whom he confesses: “My poem ‘Flight to Canada’ is going to be published in Beulahland Review. It kind of imitates your style, though I’m sure the critics are going to give me some kind of white master. A white man. They’ll say that he gave me the inspiration and that I modeled it after him. But I had you in mind… Mr. Brown” (121). As Roumiana Velikova observes, “Reed uses this encounter to rebuff his critics in the 1970s who compared him exclusively to white writers” (2004, 38).

8.     Not just Stowe rewrote a number of African Americans’ stories (as she points in Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin), but also Brown rewrote various texts, including Lydia Maria Child’s story, “The Quadroons” (1842).

9.     In this direction, Helga Geyer-Ryan stresses that rewriting history is not an easy task: “For what is left is a pure form—pure because it is defunct—into which new meaning can be deposited, an activity performed by the artist, the historian and the collector alike” (1994, 15).

10. The use of anachronisms is also one of William Wells Brown’s techniques. Lee Schweninger evinces Brown’s problematic authentication and his chronological inconsistencies as part of his process of transforming a historical fact into fiction. For Brown (as for Reed), “historical accuracy seems hardly important insofar as the plot is concerned” (Schweninger 1999, 23).

11. Moreover, like other postmodern authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon, Reed reveals “the self-reflexivity of a postmodern narrative that is concerned with its telling of a tale, at the same time being conscious of its incapacity to represent the narrated events” (Crișu 2002, 213).

12. From another angle, Reed’s text can be seen as “surfiction”—a narrative that does not simply reproduce former meanings, but ingeniously produces new ones. In Reed’s textual endeavor, “to write is to progress, and not to remain subjected” to past narratives (Federman 1993, 38). This creative interpretation of reality is underlined by Raymond Federman, who differentiates between surfiction and realistic fiction: “Rather than serving as a mirror or redoubling on itself, fiction adds itself to the world thus creating a meaningful relation that did not previously exist. To write today is before all an effort to create a DIFFERENCE, and not to pretend that fiction is the same thing as reality. The traditional, realistic novel was a representation of the SAME. Surfiction will be a presentation of difference—a liberation of what is different” (38).

13. In his chapter “Outwriting, Ishmael Reed’s Critical Appropriations,” Christian Moraru focuses on Reed’s ability to rewrite Edgar Allan Poe in a variety of ways. References are made to Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Premature Burial,” “The Raven,” etc. Moraru points out that Reed’s novel “crayons the psychological portrait of an epoch by laying bare morbid, Sadistic, or necrophilic drives as core components of a definition of slavery and ‘Nobility’ simultaneously” (93-94). Quoting Kathryn Hume, Moraru distinguishes between the “Poe midsummer day’s dream” (i.e. the chivalrous, idealized image of the South) and the “Poe nightmare” (i.e. the Southern preposterous racism) (Hume 1993, 508-9, in Moraru 2001, 94).

14. In this sense, Karl Marx makes the following commentary: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” (Marx 1973, 146, in Young 1996, 146).

15. Reed castigates Whitman’s image as the poet-healer—the reconciler who sympathizes with the common suffering of the North and the South—by turning him into a “polite” poet, one who sits in a corner of the White House and sniffs “a lilac” (83). Reed hints here at Whitman’s poem dedicated to Lincoln’s death, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”

16. Reed’s anachronism is obvious here, since “the Washington Monument was only about 1/3 complete and construction had completely stopped by the time of the Civil War. It was not finished until the 1880s” (Frank N. Schubert, copy in author’s files, 2005).

17. The seven states were: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

18. George B. Tindall summarizes the whole event: “To save the Union, Lincoln finally decided, complete emancipation would be required for several reasons: slave labor bolstered the Rebel cause, sagging morale in the North needed the lift of a moral cause, and public opinion was swinging that way as the war dragged on. Proclaiming a war on slavery, moreover, would end forever any chance that France or Britain would support the Confederacy” (1988, 670).

19. As George Fredrickson affirms, “Lincoln had apparently absorbed two of the basic principles of Northern white nationalism: that whites and blacks could not live together in equality and that each was biologically suited to inhabit a different region” (1987, 151).

20. Like George and his family, Miss Ophelia and Topsy sail to Africa, as missionaries. Stowe envisages them as part of a grand national project, in which “Our nation shall roll the tide of civilization and Christianity along its shores, and plant there mighty republics, that, growing with the rapidity of tropical vegetation, shall be for all coming ages” (441).

21. Reed alludes here to the rock musical “Hair,” with the song, “Happy birthday, Abie baby, happy birthday to you, yeah! Happy birthday, Abie baby, emanimotherfuckin’pater of the slaves.”

22. Mammy Barracuda’s rapacious character is also suggested by her name, Barracuda, a species of predaceous, tropical and subtropical marine fish.

23. George Fredrickson specifies in this sense: “There was opposition to this apparently equivocal glorification of Negro docility, not from genuine ‘non-resistants’ who suspected a double standard, but also from their antislavery opposites, those who in the 1850s began to encourage slave resistance and other forceful methods of destroying slavery” (1987, 119).

24. Opposing the view of the mulatto superiority, the romantic racialists supported the idea of the mulatto inferiority, the mulatto being seen as a degenerate individual. These romantic racialists that opposed racial amalgamation sustained that the black and white races were totally distinct.

25. Among the Americans and the British, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was extremely popular. In the first two days, it sold out five thousand copies, and during the first year, it sold three hundred thousand copies in America and two hundred thousand copies in England.

26. The first federal Fugitive Slave Law was passed by the Congress in 1793, and in 1850 the Congress passed major compromise legislation containing harsher federal Fugitive Slave Law.

27. In response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both pro-slavery and anti-slavery texts were written. Moreover, minstrel shows arose after the publication of Stowe’s novel, shows that survived up to the 1960s, radically changing Stowe’s text. See also Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993), especially chapter “Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production” (211-238).

28. Baldwin compared Stowe’s novel with Richard Wright’s Native Son, seeing similarities between Uncle Tom and Bigger Thomas, two characters that “accepted a theology that denies [them] life,” and had “to battle for [their] humanity” (1955, 155).

29. In her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), Stowe strives to underline that in her novel all her events and characters have a real correspondent: “Now all these incidents that have been given are real incidents of slavery, related by those who know slavery by the best of all tests—experience; and they are given by men who have earned a good character in freedom, which makes their word as good as the word of any man living” (1998, 476).

30. Not everyone wanted his or her story to be written by Stowe. Harriet Jacobs is a case of resistance. In order to write her autobiography, Jacobs asked for Stowe’s help. Stowe treated Jacobs from the superior position of a successful white writer, and all she offered Jacobs was to include her story in the writing of Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Appalled, Jacobs refused.

31. Uncle Tom’s message was directed toward white readers and elicited the sympathy of a white audience. Susan Ryan stresses the importance of “benevolence via identification that Stowe encourages among her readers” (2000, 760). Ryan reads Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the broader debate over benevolent citizenship, “a way of thinking about national membership and national character through the paradigm of doing good” (2000, 752).

32. A key figure, Josiah Henson (1789-1883) could be seen as the prototype of both the fugitive and the religious black man. Henson escaped from slavery and he faithfully led a party of slaves from Maryland across free territory in Ohio, to Kentucky. By means of the Underground Railroad, he fled to Upper Canada (now Ontario). Significantly, he became a Methodist Episcopal preacher, and was considered the leader of the community of escaped slaves (see Johnston 1990, 3-4).

33. Moraru reminds us of David Cowart’s comments on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake wordplay on storytelling and stolentelling, so that “storytelling always involves theft, that all ‘telling’ is ‘stolen’” (Cowart 1993, 2, in Moraru 2001, 91).

34. Latin. Literally, it means “a scholar with books,” referring to someone who is incapable of thinking by himself and always borrows ideas from other books.

35. In Reed’s novel, the Southern mistress—the romanticized image of the white, pure belle—turns into an emancipated character, Ms. Swille. One can trace her literary ancestor in Brown’s Georgiana (a character in Clotel), another Southern woman who was educated in the North and returned to the South in order to spread her ideas of emancipation. Still, while in Brown’s book Georgiana puts into practice her plans and liberates her slaves, in Reed’s novel Ms. Swille lacks the energy to change the fate of the slaves on the plantation. Barracuda’s bossy behavior obliging Ms. Swille to behave like a Southern belle challenges Ms. Swille’s authority that is temporarily turned into a puppet mistress.

36. Moreover, Matthew R. Davis points out that there are two other characters taken from Brown’s third autobiography, My Southern Home. Thus, the overseer in Reed’s text, Cato the Graffado, is ingenuously copied after Brown’s Cato. The poorly educated Cato in Brown’s text, who “plays doctor and tries to heal several fellow slaves,” turns into Reed’s extremely educated Cato, Ph.D., the overseer, the slave who exploits other slaves (Davis 1996, 751). Reed also borrows from Brown’s third autobiography another character: Pompey, the trickster. While in Brown’s text, Pompey persuades the others to do him various favors, in Reed’s text, Pompey is the one who “precipitates the demise of the Swille plantation,” through his special ability to “’impersonate’ the whole Swille family” (Davis 1996, 751).

37. At this point, I tend to agree with Beatrice Anderson, who, in her suggestively entitled essay “Uncle Tom: A Hero at Last,” stresses that Tom’s pacifism should not be seen as passive submission, but rather as heroic behavior that arises from “religious ethics,” from his desire “to maintain his dignity and manhood while holding fast to his convictions and rescuing his friends from tortures he knows they cannot bear” (1991, 99).

38. In Flight to Canada, the Christian religion is also at stake. When Robin affirms that he acts in accordance with the African gods’ advice, his words are meant to deconstruct the precepts of the Christian religion and its pretensions of universal validity. Robin’s remark sends us back to Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo focused on the spreading of the Jes Grew epidemic that subverts the Western/Christian cultural framework: “I’ve about had it with this Christian. I mean, it can stay, but it’s going to have to stop being so bossy. I’d like to bring the old cults back” (1972, 171).

39. Reed alludes in his novel to book titles that draw attention to slaves’ status as things or property: “The original subtitle for Uncle Tom’s Cabin was ‘The Man Who Was a Thing.’ In 1910 appeared a book by Mary White Ovington called Half a Man” (Flight 83).

40. As Waugh remarks, “the aim of metafiction” is to disclose the “artificiality of [the former] fictional form,” to displace its language and finally replace it (1995, 45).

41. Stowe carefully draws George Harris’s portrait in order to suit the type of the rebellious mulatto: it is from his white father that George inherited “a set of fine European features, and a high, indomitable spirit” (111). In a famous passage, Stowe draws a comparison between the white Americans’ heroism and George’s craving for liberty: “Liberty!—electric word! What is it? Is there anything more in it than a name—a rhetorical flourish? Why men and women of America, does your heart’s blood thrill at that word, for which your fathers bled, and your braver mothers were willing that their noblest and best should die?… To your fathers, freedom was the right of a nation to be a nation. To him, it is the right of a man to be a man, and not a brute” (391-92).

42. Giulia Fabi discusses the three book-form editions of Clotel that “reveal not only the off-noted close connection between early African American literature and historical events, but also the author’s effort to adjust his original text to its own accomplished novelization, in the attempt to tame its proliferation of characters and events” (Fabi 1993, 639).

43. For an analysis of cross-dressing in Brown’s novel, see Michael Berthold’s “Cross-dressing and Forgetfulness of Self in William Wells Brown’s Clotel.” Berthold pays special attention to the episodes concerned with Clotel’s disguise—disguise that has the function to unsettle the power system, as well as “to negotiate the chasm of private and public” (1993, 23-24).

44. Another instance of black-on-black oppression should be found in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, where Zeringue alias Papa, like Yankee Jack, is the invisible hand that moves people’s destinies, the real possessor of the “goods.”

45. Notice that Quaw Quaw’s marriage to Yankee Jack is denuded of any sacred connotation: “When his church objected to this marriage between a Christian and an Infidel, he closed the church down” (93).

46. If we compare Stowe’s and Reed’s titles, we observe that Stowe chooses the Uncle Tom symbol (related to the narrative of immersion), while Reed prefers the flight symbol (related to the narrative of ascent). In the first case, the focus is on the “group consciousness,” while in the second, the focus is on the protagonist’s “self-consciousness” (Stepto 1979 a, 168).

47. As Irina Grigorescu Pană notes, any exilic land can be seen as “an alibi (derived from the Latin for elsewhere), articulated and eventually deciphered through modes of relatedness.” In this way, Canada’s “colonial edge” is transformed into a “seminal origin” (1996, 10,12).

48. The poem is also his textual “bloodhound” (13), as its photocopying and printing leave traces to be followed by the slave-catchers.

49. Reed stresses the connection between freedom and literacy: “It was his writing that got him to Canada. ‘Flight to Canada’ was responsible for getting him to Canada. And so for him, freedom was his writing. His writing was his HooDoo. Others had their way of HooDoo, but it was his writing. It fascinated him, it possessed him; his typewriter was his drum he danced to” (88-89).

50. Strange enough, neither Stowe’s George nor Brown’s George remain in Canada—one of the landmarks of their complex trajectory.

51. For an analysis of the relation between Reed’s aesthetic and Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, see Sami Ludwig’s “Dialogic Possession in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo: Bakhtin, VooDoo, and the Materiality of Multicultural Discourse” (1994).