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Whose Middle Passage?
| Article
# : |
19822 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
2,398 Words |
| Author
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Charles R. Larson
Charles R. Larson is an internationally known authority on
Third World literature. He is the author of The Emergence of
African Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and American
Indian Fiction. His novel The Insect Colony is set in West
Africa during the Nigerian civil war. He has edited several
anthologies of international writing and served as general
editor of Collier Books' African/American Library. He teaches
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. |
The heated controversy over Charles Johnson's Middle Passage--whether or not the novel deserved the National Book Award--has centered on charges of racism and reverse racism. Commenting on the prize, Johnson cited Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) as the previous novel by a black male writer to win the prestigious award. As anyone familiar with contemporary fiction knows, most literary prizes awarded to black writers have gone to women, who have largely dominated the literary scene during the last two decades. Questions of racism aside, one cannot help asking (initially, at least) why Atheneum published Johnson's novel in the first place, so egregious are the errors of fact and historical veracity. Was Johnson simply thumbing his nose at the literary establishment, trying to see what he could get by with, how far he could go? Could no editor at Atheneum foresee the problems his novel would encounter if readers (and literary judges) took the work seriously?
The major problem with Johnson's unquestionably inventive novel is one of tone: Middle Passage's confusing mixture of comic incident with dead seriousness. How, one asks, is a reader supposed to respond to a comic novel about slavery? Isn't that a little like asking in what manner a comedy about the Holocaust might be regarded by Jews? I cannot understand how anyone can think of slavery as a subject for humor. Yet, oddly, the outcry against Johnson's novel is not from his African American readers.
Comedy aside, one wonders just how seriously Johnson wants us to take his story, especially since the surface narrative of Middle Passage often says one thing while the subtext relates another. The story is related through the first-person narration of Rutherford Calhoun, a 22-year-old ex-slave, who leaves Illinois (after his manumission) for New Orleans and shortly joins a slave ship bound for West Africa. The year is 1830.
New Orleans, no doubt, has always had a special appeal for young men, but one cannot help asking why a freed slave would migrate to the South, where slavery was known to be at its worst. When bad debts threaten to force his creditors to take action against him, Rutherford is given a way out of his situation by a prospective marriage to Isadora Bailey. It is here that the narrative takes a totally unbelievable turn. By his own choice, Rutherford stows away on a slave ship called the Republic, fully cognizant of the fate that will befall him.
Curiously, the dust jacket description of Johnson's novel states, "To his shock and horror, Rutherford learns that
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