Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter III - “A Gentleman of Color:” Equiano’s Reversed Travelogue

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter III

“A Cultural Mongrel”

Transatlantic Mediations in Charles Johnson’s

Middle Passage

“A Gentleman of Color:” Equiano’s Reversed Travelogue

The Middle Passage is a major recurrent trope in the poetry and prose writings of many contemporary Africans and African Americans: Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage” (1945), Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poem The Arrivants (1973), George Lamming’s novel Natives of My Person (1986), Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), Charles Johnson’s novel Middle Passage (1990), and Clarence Major’s poem “The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage” (1994). The text that serves as a matrix for the works above is undeniably Olaudah Equiano’s eighteenth century narrative—a biography that is emblematic for the fate of countless slaves.

Captured from his native African land, Equiano was landed in the West Indies in the 1750s, and was later taken to the Colony of Virginia. He spent more than ten years of enslavement, before being able to regain his lost freedom. His narrative makes reference to the historical background of Middle Passage, at a time when the annual importation of slaves to the Americas “increased so rapidly that by the 1780s it stood at more than eighty thousand” (Horton and Horton 2001, 25). Equiano speaks on behalf of millions of slaves kidnapped from Africa and brought to the Americas, mainly for economic reasons. Even if he is familiar with the institutional slavery of the African countries, he “saw the Anglo-Christian version of slavery as an abomination” (Sabino and Hall 1999, 8). His narrative—a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic—points to the painful process of Transatlantic acculturation. The book can be seen as a cultural hybrid, in which the author’s unstable colonial identity is (re)formed in a process of exchange, of “strategic reciprocity” between the African, American, and European spheres (Kelleter 2004, 68).

In this context, Johnson’s Middle Passage is written in a parodic key, which both converses (with) and reverses Equiano’s travelogue and the premises of a slave narrative centered on the quest for freedom.⁶ For Johnson’s hero—who is already a liberated slave—his emotional and spiritual freedom is at stake. His running away from Isadora’s affective bondage connotes his escape from a conventional world, from being trapped in a barren existential project. Rutherford cannot accept the respectable status implied by Isadora’s marriage proposal, which is in fact a recurrent pattern in her family, (where her mother “tamed” her father’s adventurous character).

Ironically, Rutherford’s refusal to become “a gentleman of color” (9) makes reference to Equiano’s ardent desire to refashion himself into “a European” (2), to turn into a literate person who could contribute to the liberation of his black people through the dissemination of his writing. In Johnson’s text, Equiano becomes embodied in Rutherford’s brother, Jackson, a perfect model of Christian charity, who militates for his fellow beings’ liberation. Distancing himself from his fraternal counterpart, Rutherford stands at the beginning of the novel as an antihero, a Prodigal Son, the black sheep of the family. Only after his initiation, does he seem to attain a profound understanding of the others, which makes him identify with them and assist them in their suffering.

Written in the first person, Equiano’s and Johnson’s texts share another slave narrative convention: the insistence upon the protagonist’s acquisition of literacy. Equiano appears at the beginning of his narrative as an illiterate person, whose African monocultural view attributes to the slavers a magic existence. It is through the reading of the “Talking Book” that Equiano becomes “almost an Englishman” (132). Literacy thus gives him access to the Western knowledge, which has formerly been incomprehensible.⁷ He achieves in this way a multicultural perspective, in which his conversion to Christianity plays a major role—as indicated by the epigraph of his narrative:

Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid, for

the Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song; he also is [sic] become my salvation.

And in that day shall ye say, Praise the Lord, call upon his name,

declare his doings among the people (Isaiah xii. 2, 4).

These religious reverberations are to be found in Johnson’s synthetic epigraph, too:

Laud Deo

Journal of a Voyage intended

by God’s permission

in the Republic, African

from New Orleans to the Windward

Coast of Africa.

Johnson’s praisesong deconstructs Equiano’s invocation of the Christian white god. Throughout the novel, Rutherford learns how to accept the other African god not only as an image of an ancestral divinity, but also as an emblematic self-projection. In fact, he mocks at his brother’s religious pretensions and the way in which he “treated everyone the same” and leveled the others’ differences (108). As one who would not share Jackson’s religious credo and communitarian ideas, Rutherford feels excluded from the conversation between Jackson and his former master, Reverend Peleg Chandler.⁸

A surrogate paternal figure, Chandler has antislavery views and teaches the two brothers “out of Christian guilt” (8). Even if Rutherford has to meticulously learn the Neoplatonic doctrines, “the evils of nominalism, the genius of Aquinas, and the work of such seers as Jacob B�hme,” he fails to rise himself to the mission of a Negro preacher (3). In many ways, Chandler’s educational method provides Rutherford’s travels with a Eurocentric cultural framework. Both highlighted and parodied, these numerous cultural references become relative as they are placed in a broader Transatlantic perspective through the African models invoked. From a Bakhtinian perspective, Rutherford’s “negative mockery” and laughter undermine the “official seriousness” of the mainstream culture and reverse its “hierarchic levels” (Bakhtin 1984, 67, 81).

Within this framework, Johnson’s main focus on black identity artfully reconfigures Equiano’s outlook. In the tradition begun by Aphra Behn (1640-1724),⁹ Equiano’s narrative focuses on an African that is forcefully taken to the Western hemisphere. Obliged to give up his former identity, Equiano undertakes a profound transformation reflected in the change of his name (done by one of his masters) from Olaudah Equiano into Gustavus Vassa.¹⁰ The special significance of the title of his autobiography points to the intentional placement of his African name before his Western name, and also to his insistence upon his self-definition as an African: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself.¹¹ After buying his freedom, after fashioning himself into a gentleman and making himself famous as an advocate of abolitionism, Equiano seems to resume his former African identity—an act of “renewed awareness of himself as an African” (Overton 1992, 307).12

Departing from Equiano, Johnson creates a character that is not an African, but an American of African origin.¹³ Rutherford’s hybridized, hyphenated African American identity allows him to be placed in a mediating position in the conflict between the slaves and the slavers on the slave ship. Defined via negativa, he is neither an American (he is seen by the other crewmembers as none of them), nor an African (the slaves think of him as “a Yankee” (163) or “a Cooked Barbarian” (167)). A little bit American, a little bit African, his Ersatz self is made of a mosaic of features more “borrowed” than inborn. His occupation as a petty thief corresponds to his ability to steal inside various characters, to put on diverse masks.¹⁴

If we look at Rutherford through Brian McHale’s lens (1987), he is a postmodern character whose identity is no longer defined (as in modernism) by an epistemic paradigm focused on what he knows, but by an ontological one in which who he is becomes the main issue:

Believe me, I was a parasite to the core. I poached watches from Chandler’s bureau and biscuits from his kitchen… I listened to everyone and took notes: I was open, like a hingeless door to everything. And to comfort the weary on the Republic I peered deep into memory and called forth all that had ever given me solace, scraps and rags of language too, for in himself I found nothing I could rightly call Rutherford Calhoun, only pieces and fragments of all the people who had touched me, all the places I had seen, all the homes I had broken into (162).

As his writing incorporates other texts, so Rutherford’s composite self is parasitical,¹⁵ and feeds on others’ possessions. His collage-self with no essence stands for the epitome of the fragmented, indeterminate postmodern identity. This “dismembered” black Orpheus bears testimony of his own rootless condition, pertaining to everywhere and nowhere (Hassan 1971). Easily crossing borders, he is able to adapt by adopting the individuality of other people. “A mosaic of many countries” (162), his cosmopolitan identity thus becomes engaged in a process of self-mockery and mimicry of the others.

The idea of a Transatlantic identity can be therefore traced both in Equiano’s and Johnson’s texts. Their multiple perspectives (African, American, and European) offer access to a plural vision, which is accomplished through a complex process of cultural translation. For the African Equiano “consent” to the Christian religion offers compensation for his suffering and a deeper understanding of the Western world. In a reversed process, for Rutherford his attainment of a transnational consciousness helps him look beyond his racial identification as a former American slave into his African ethnic “descent” (Sollors 1987).

NOTES

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