Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter III

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter III

“A Cultural Mongrel”

Transatlantic Mediations in Charles Johnson’s

Middle Passage

Mediating Visions: “Oneself as Another”

Carl Pedersen comments upon three ways in which the Middle Passage can be understood. Firstly, the traditional view advocates a complete erasure of the African history. Secondly, the Afrocentric perspective claims the intact preservation of the African inheritance. Thirdly, a more moderate, “middle” position pleads for a “cultural syncretism” (226), in which various elements from both the colonized and the colonizing cultures are intertwined. Furthermore, Pedersen regards the Middle Passage as “the defining moment of the African-American experience” (1993, 225).

Johnson’s Middle Passage explores the “uneven, yet symbiotic relationship” between the American colonizer and the African colonized (Pedersen 1993, 225). For Johnson, race is defined through mediation, contamination, and symbolic exchange. He consequently demonstrates that racial identity is not a Parmenidean notion with a fixed character,³² but an always-shifting entity, essentially transformed by the interaction between the black and white protagonists.³³ During his voyage, Calhoun’s multi-faceted character and mediating position allow him to witnesses the way in which both the blacks and the whites leave their imprint on each other.

On the one hand, the Allmuseri are initially presented as an unmarked people, one whose cultural text cannot be “uncoded” by the ignorant Calhoun (124). Later on during the passage, Rutherford will come to comprehend that their nature has irreversibly been altered, that their colonization consists in their assimilation into a new worldview. Thus, “the slaves’ life among the lowest strata of Yankee society—and the horrors they have experienced—were subtly reshaping their souls as thoroughly as Falcon’s tight-packing had contorted their flesh during these past few weeks... No longer Africans, yet no longer Americans either” (124-25).³⁴ The multiple layers of the Africans’ identity reveal accordingly what Homi Bhabha called “the palimpsest of the colonial identity,” “not Self as Other, but the ‘Otherness’ of the Self” (1967, xiv-xv).

On the other hand, the white crew’s relation to the Africans alters them irreversibly. One particular instance is offered by Falcon, whose person is so badly damaged after the slave mutiny that he can no longer control his facial expression. Once his self-reliance is gone, he is able to confess to whom the ship belongs—to the black man Philippe Zeringue alias Papa—the real possessor of the “goods.” The narrator’s rhetorical question condenses the reversal of terms he has to witness: “Was Ebenezer Falcon telling me that he, at bottom, was no freer than the Africans?” (147). Is he, a white man, telling us that he is controlled by a black man? Falcon’s confession exemplifies that being overdetermined from without does not function only in the case of the colonized, but also in the case of the colonizer. Both master and slave are half-entities, crippled subjectivities, caught in a wider web of selfish interests.

Witnessing the blacks’ and whites’ changes, we come to understand the deep interaction between the colonizer and the colonized, the reciprocal nature of social and racial relations. Johnson’s novel thus reminds us of Paul Ricoeur’s view in Oneself as Another advocating that “the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other, as we might say in Hegelian terms” (1992, 3). In Middle Passage, a Transatlantic exchange takes place, as the Africans’ and the Americans’ identities become closely interconnected. Using a rhetoric of duplicity, Johnson’s text underlines the interaction of identities that occurs in this process of appropriating the other. It offers accordingly an Americanized version of African-ness, as well as an Africanized version of American-ness.

More than anybody else, Rutherford has a flexible identity that allows him to identify both the perspectives of the colonizer and of the colonized; he bends his ear both to Falcon’s colonial view and Ngonyama’s colonized frame of mind. His postmodern relativism allows him an insight into their antagonistic perspectives and the ways in which they influence each other. To exemplify, in a significant scene, Rutherford is forced to heave overboard the corpse of an African boy. By touching the slave’s “rigor mortis” (O’Keefe 1996), he experiences a simultaneous state of self-estrangement and identification with the abject body. In the same way in which the boy’s body gets disconnected, so Rutherford feels alienated from his own hand that held the cadaver and, as if reiterating Lady Macbeth’s desire to wipe the murderous stain off her hands, he wants to slice off his wrist. As in an inverse mirror, the corpse becomes Rutherford’s double:³⁵

His open eyes were unalive, mere kernels of muscle, though I still found myself poised vertiginously on their edge, falling through these dead holes deeper into the empty hulk he had become, as if his spirit had flown and mine was being sucked there in his place (123).

The passage encodes Johnson’s technique of textual slippage, through which he gets acquainted with the fascinating double-sided nature of abjection. Not only does Rutherford identify with the abject other, but also the reader experiences a sense of complicity with a text situated at the verge of the sublime and the perverse. As Julia Kristeva observes, writing about abjection “implies an ability to imagine the abject, that is, to see oneself in its place and to thrust it aside only by means of the displacement of verbal play” (1982, 16). The cadaver³⁶ therefore encodes the epitome of self-denial, the border that is necessary for self-definition, but beyond which one no longer exists.³⁷

Rutherford’s vertigo while looking at the dead body adumbrates his later transformation into a living cadaver—a young man in his twenties who has grown old, a puer senex empathizing with others, yet estranged from them. He turns into Coleridge’s ancient mariner destined to wander in a floating “coffin,” upon an “impenetrable” ocean (Middle Passage 83, 105); one who bears witness of the life-in-death state of his crew. As “Death climbed in through every portal” (155), all people on board get infected by countless types of physical or mental disease. Their severed limbs speak of their amputated souls that have committed what the Allmuseri call the “moral plague” of slipping into relativity (163).

Another crucial instance of Rutherford’s identification with the Allmuseri is manifested in his encounter with their god, which makes him better understand his relation to his African ancestry. Rutherford’s descent into the ship’s darkest chamber symbolizes his contemplation of his own psychological abyss—a liminal experience that offers him the possibility to comprehend his family history and come to terms with his tormented past. Being an elusive shape-shifter, the African god reincarnates into Rutherford’s father, “the fugitive Riley Calhoun” (167). His father’s figurative portrait offers an emblematic image for countless slaves whose failure to escape has proved to be meaningful. Besides his Don Juanesque manners and naughty joy de vivre, Riley Calhoun believes in the slaves’ power to continue fighting for their freedom. Rather than directing his anger toward his white owners, his subversive words have the mission of awakening the black people by reminding them of their African lineage. His death is endowed accordingly with a deeper significance, as his voice belongs to an anonymous chorus—“a mosaic of voices within voices, each one immanent in the other, none his but all strangely his” (171). Toni Morrison’s countless slaves crammed in the tight-packer described in Beloved are converted here into a chorus of harmonious voices:

I had to listen harder to isolate him from the We that swelled each particle and pore of him, as if the (black) self was the greatest of all fictions; and then I could not find him at all. He seemed everywhere, his presence, and that of countless others, in me as well as the chamber, which had subtly changed. Suddenly I knew the god’s name: Rutherford (171).

In the ubiquitous sound of paternal voices, Rutherford has the epiphanic experience of his own identification with the ancestral image, so that his identity should become fictionalized, part of a collective story of death and rebirth. Rutherford’s state of being unconscious for three days (evoking Lazarus’ death and resurrection) suggests his inner mortification and renewal that result in his acquisition of a visionary double-sight: “my sight was distorted, I saw everything in doubles” (171). Neither a colonizer nor a colonized, his “middle” position allows him to become “a cultural mongrel,” to inhabit a state of in-between-ness that tends to reconcile extremes (187).

In Johnson’s view, Rutherford’s ability to see himself as another implies the transcendence of relativism: “If we go deeply enough into a relative perspective, black or white, male or female, we encounter the transcendence of relativism; in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, ‘to retire into oneself is to leave oneself’” (Johnson 1988, 44). This idea is also supported by Emmanuel Levinas for whom transcendence implies “the desire for something else.” As the alterity is not conceived in advance, “it opens from the outside in the face of another, in the other who faces” (Levinas 1978, 11). For Levinas, the main concern of our existence is given by “the being with which one finds itself affected” (10). In the same line, for Johnson, the encounter with the Other does not absorb or annihilate the self, but transforms it in a continuous relational process.

NOTES

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