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Slave Mutiny With a Difference
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19821 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
2,305 Words |
| Author
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Bernard W. Bell
Bernard W. Bell is professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. His latest book is The Afro-American
Novel and Its Tradition (1987). |
Middle Passage, as Thomas Keneally noted in the New York Times Book Review (July 1, 1990), "is a novel in the honorable tradition of Billy Budd and Moby Dick." Intertextually, Charles Johnson's National Book Award-winning third novel is also in the honorable tradition of accounts of actual slave mutinies, especially those aboard the Amistad in 1839 and the Creole in 1841. Its ancestral roots may be found in pioneering slave narratives like Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and The Heroic Slave (1853) by Frederick Douglass. Based on the successful mutiny of Madison Washington and 134 slaves who were being shipped from Hampton, Virginia, to New Orleans aboard the Creole, The Heroic Slave is the first novella in African-American literature. Cultural dualism and pluralism, then, are the major narrative and ideological impulses that inform the quest for unity of Being in the content and form of Johnson's African-American philosophical fiction.
After "six bad, apprentice novels" influenced by the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s, Johnson published his first novel, Faith and the Good Thing (1974). It is the highly praised, black and white folktale, allegory, and myth of Faith Cross, "a brown-sugared soul sister seeking the Good Thing." Oxherding Tale (1982), his second novel, is a wry, philosophical first-person neo-slave narrative. In his quest for liberation and the Good Thing (Selfhood), its half-white protagonist, Andrew Hawkins, embodies the tensions between the thought of East (Zen) and West (phenomenology), as well as black and white racial and cultural traditions. The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1986), a collection of eight magical tales of cultural and spiritual transformation with bookend stories about the descendants of Allmuseri sorcerers, owes much of its captivating power of craftsmanship (but not its power of conjuration) to Johnson's mentor, the late John Gardner. In all of his philosophical fiction, Johnson explores the phenomenological foundation or aboriginal faith of his central characters; through detailed descriptions, metaphors, and similes, he encourages the reader's indirect experience or intuition of other lives.
In Being and Race (1988), a slender yet important critical survey of black writing since 1970, Johnson reveals the common history of the dual racial and cultural perspectives of his intellectual and aesthetic principles. "Beginning first as a religion imposed upon slaves to keep them in line," he argues:
... the black church became, not merely the means through which Western thoughts from Plotinus to Buber entered indirectly into the lived
...
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