SOURCE: Goudie, S. X. “‘Leavin' a Mark on the Wor(l)d’: Marksmen and Marked Men in Middle Passage.” African American Review 29, no. 1 (spring 1995): 109-22.

The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word. … racism always betrays the perversion of a man, the “talking animal.” … A system of marks, it outlines space in order to assign forced residence or to close off borders. It does not discern, it discriminates.

(Derrida, “Racism's Last Word”)

I knew I'd have to write frankly about black fiction, which is always a dangerous thing to do, tempers being hair-trigger on this subject, and I don't much care to have anyone firing at me.

(Johnson, “Whole Sight”)

For some time Charles Johnson has been both a marksman and a marked man. As an outspoken critic, Johnson has taken aim at African American fiction, claiming that it frequently stifles its own vision by relying too heavily on a “‘deadly sameness’ of sensibility” ([Being and Race] 121) as opposed to a “four-dimensional” view of the Black experience (“Whole Sight” 2).¹ States Johnson:

We wonder, What Lord, are Black artists doing? Our interpretation of our experience … has become rigid, forced into formulae; it does not permit, as all philosophically (and aesthetically) genuine fiction must, an efflorescence of meaning or a clarification of perception.

(“Philosophy” 55)

To speak in such frank terms is akin to marking a bull's eye on one's back. Indeed, Johnson's agenda for emancipating artistic vision differs significantly from the vision of African American critics and writers who advocate a departure from “Western” critical and creative traditions as a means of liberation.² Outspoken in his criticism of those who suggest that African American fiction can mature without engaging Western philosophy, Johnson has argued for a return to Western literary forms as a means of diversifying African American writing.³ “It would be a pleasure,” Johnson states in his 1988 critical study Being and Race, “to see our writers experimenting with the prerealistic forms of the seventeenth century … [including] the classic sea story, the utopian novel, and a galaxy of other forms that are our inheritance as writers” (52).⁴ Two years later, in 1990, Johnson published Middle Passage, a formal pastiche that rewrites the major historical event of African American slave history, not to mention Conrad, Melville, Swift, and Defoe.⁵ Marked extensively by Eastern and Western philosophy, the novel relies on “intersubjectivity and cross-cultural experience” (Being 38) as a way of rethinking the traumatic ordeal of the slave trade.

Crucial to Middle Passage's narrative and thematic structure, I wish to argue, is a “system of marks” characteristic of racism and racist discourse.⁶ On one level, Johnson uses marks, marksmen, and marked men as tropes for racism, and on another level racism becomes a trope for larger marks of the human condition. This reticulated game of marksmanship, along with racism's “system of marks,” is refigured, along with Western philosophical and literary traditions, by a singularly imaginative African American perspective.

Judging from the ambivalent critical reception of Johnson's novel, however, it appears that many critics of African American literature may not share this view. Since Middle Passage garnered the prestigious National Book Award in 1990, only a single article has appeared on the novel other than reviews and short features about the award. Such relative critical silence ironically marks both Middle Passage and the African American literary community. By not “marking” Johnson's novel, by not assessing or responding to it, some within the critical community appear to favor banishing the work—and perhaps Johnson himself—to “forced residence” in a textual no man's land. Perhaps such silence responds to the controversy that surrounded the award. Paul West, a jurist on the panel that chose Middle Passage, protested that the selection was based on “‘ethnic concerns, ideology and moral self-righteousness’” (qtd. in Cohen 13).⁷ In addition, reviewer John Haynes blasted the book, suggesting that the protagonist's “romantic racism” perhaps demonstrates “the extent of his incapacity to get in touch with his own history” (23). Extending his attack, Haynes argues that “black readers may feel that the dark night of the Middle Passage has been exploited simply for effect” (23). These critical stances, while possibly defensible, clutch at the surfaces of Johnson's text, and in that regard they miss the mark.

In truth, we do not see what we expect to see in this novel concerning the middle passage, and we do not hear what we expect to hear—about the physical horrors of slavery—or at least these are not the novel's primary focus. Fully aware of his non-traditional point of view, Johnson seems to have anticipated the controversy simmering above and below the critical deck: “To a degree, I get panicky [sic], peer around, and wait for a kick in the pants when speaking of Black fiction and philosophy in the same breath” (“Philosophy” 59). If Johnson appears willing to exploit his “marked man” status, it is not surprising that Middle Passage exhibits its own difference by refiguring the complex “system of marks” and deconstructing their ostensible signifiers.

Rutherford Calhoun, the hero of Middle Passage, is also a marked man. A freed slave whose cons and thieveries entangle him in a “web of endless obligations” (15), Calhoun flees the wrath of a New Orleans crime boss and a marriage-minded girlfriend by sneaking on board the Republic, a ship marked by “the memory of too many runs of black gold between the New World and the Old” (21). Rousted out of hiding by “the cold barrel of a pistol,” he is targeted as “a black stow-away” (22), demarcated from the rest of the crew by skin color and lack of papers. Thus begins his journey, one that positions Calhoun at the site of a dizzying dance of marksmanship that reverses roles, deconstructs polarities, and ultimately reshapes the very essence of seeing and being.

The ostensible situation aboard the Republic, on its return trip from a slave-trading outpost in Senegambia, sets the black slaves—members of a mysterious tribe, the Allmuseri—against the white slavers, headed by the wretched captain Ebenezer Falcon. The Allmuseri, although marked by the slave owner's brand, are strangely unmarked otherwise. Calhoun notes that “their palms were blank, bearing no lines. No fingerprints” (61) and that their expressions were “difficult to decipher. … they could not be uncoded” (124). Similarly, their culture, as indicated by the Latin anagram that structures their name, values unity—the lack of differentiations and demarcations—rather than the individual will-to-power that fissures Western culture into haves and have nots, oppressors and oppressed.⁸ In contrast, Ebenezer Falcon, the epitome of this dichotomized world view, is marked by visual impairment:

[His] imagination … was artistically limited to the finely wrought workmanship of pistols. … Maybe the reason for this was his being a natural marksman. From birth he'd lacked binocular vision. All his life he'd been squinting shut his left eye, so that when someone put a pistol in his hand at eighteen, he naturally sighted his targets and began blowing them away effortlessly.

(52)

While such vision enables marksmanship, Falcon's defective gaze undermines his ability to envision literally and metaphorically the “world from deep within his own heart” (164), as the Allmuseri slaves do.⁹ A Nietzschean superman whose cabin door is shot through by “three bullet holes” (26)—perhaps symbolic of the three investors for whom Falcon is a hired gun—Falcon serves as a “mental construct” of the “species of world conquerors [who] thrive upon … the desire to be fascinating objects in the eyes of others” (33), the need to be remarked upon, to be remarkable. In an attempt to satisfy this craving, Falcon targets an endless series of marks—things, ideas, people—although his control of those marks, and his ability to “impress” them, is predicated on their obliteration.¹⁰

Ironically, by behaving as marksmen, “leaders” such as Falcon themselves become “marked men”; they are always in the sights of those they have marked, oppressed, colonized, enslaved, and/or murdered. As Calhoun, the ship's crew, and the Allmuseri slaves discover, a slave economy built upon a monocular world view must inevitably turn on itself. “Marked men” ultimately rise up and invert the hierarchy, usurping the power of the marksmen. As Homi K. Bhabha suggests, “If discriminatory effects enable the authorities to keep an eye on [the enslaved], [the slaves'] proliferating difference evades that eye, escapes that surveillance” (154). The oppressor, because he privileges his own, narrowly defined dialogic with the Other in his racist psyche, is helpless to decipher or decode the proliferation of the system of marks he engenders. Thus, Falcon's complicity in the horrors of the human marketplace makes him paranoid about his grip on power: He “‘keeps a list of personal affronts,’” marking them in his log, always watching “‘for a man's weaknesses once he's signed on’” (63); his quarters are rigged with a “webwork of traps,” including “spring-released darts coated with curare” (53). Not surprisingly, the loyalty that might have allayed his fears escapes him. Among the crew “he had few allies. Only hypocritical lickspittles … who smiled in his face for favors and bad-mouthed him behind his back.” As a result, Falcon keeps “knives concealed in every cabin” and constantly suspects that someone is “plotting to kill him” (53).¹¹ Most telling of all, the crippling effects of his monocular gaze cause Falcon to petition Calhoun's perspective: “‘I need a colored mate to be my eyes and ears. … I need someone to keep his eyes open and tell me of any signs of trouble’” (57).¹²

In fact, Falcon, the “natural marksman,” proposes that slavery is merely a metonym of a far more significant scar, one deeply embedded in the human psyche: “‘Mind was made for murder. Slavery, if you think this through, forcing yourself not to flinch, is the social correlate of a deeper, ontic wound’” (98). The nature of this wound is the glory and mystery of Middle Passage: From a Christian perspective, it may be original sin; from a Buddhist perspective (Johnson is a Buddhist), it may be incessant desire; from a deconstructionist perspective, it may be the nature of language itself¹³; from a socioeconomic perspective, it may be what Deleuze and Guattari call the desiring machine of capitalist production and its elevation of “exchange value” to its highest operating principle (261, 287). In any event, slavery everywhere marks this text with “cankers and cancerspots” (170).

For example, in addition to being born with monocular vision, Falcon is dwarfish, symbolic of his Napoleonic complex, and his entire body is covered by tattoos. Likewise, every white crew member is wounded by his complicity in the slave trade and the larger social and spiritual (dis)orders it represents. They are “pitted by smallpox, split by Saturday night knifescar, disfigured by Polynesian tattoos, or distorted by dropsy” (23). These marks are metonyms for the many facets of colonialist oppression around the world and aboard the Republic: disease (smallpox and dropsy); violence (knifescars); and cultural imperialism (Polynesian tattoos).¹⁴ Also, the Republic itself serves as a metonym for the artificial borders marked off by racist discourse, as well as the oppressive aspects of Western-based philosophy and imperialist economics.

In contrast to Falcon and the ship's crew, the llmuseri, as I noted earlier, are initially unwounded. Unfamiliar with the Western marketplace, they are described in adulatory terms by the awestruck Calhoun. Allegedly free from individualistic desire and the tyranny of representation, the Allmuseri are unable to “read” a female portrait sketched by a white male artist (75). Natural, “unmarked” men, they live in undifferentiated wholeness: “Eating no meat, they were easy to feed. Disliking property, they were simple to clothe. Able to heal themselves, they required no medication. They seldom fought. They could not steal.” Even their language is characterized by Calhoun as uncorrupted, not good for “deconstructing things” (78).¹⁵

Though he admires the Allmuseri sense of being, for much of the voyage Calhoun is a black man playing a white man's colonial game; consequently his marks, both physical and psychological, are complex and severe. When he is ordered to toss a slave's putrefied body overboard, a heap of decayed flesh attaches itself to his hand: “My stained hand … tingled. Of a sudden, it no longer felt like my own. Something in me said it would never be clean again …” (123). This tingle seems to be Calhoun's mark for transgression. Calhoun confesses that he had felt it before, the “familiar, sensual tingle that came whenever I broke into someone's home, as if I were slipping inside another's soul.” Calhoun adds that the tingle of theft “was the closest thing [he] knew to transcendence. … it broke the power of the propertied class …” (46-47). Once aboard the ship, he feels the tingle almost immediately upon his introduction to Falcon: “… I felt skin at the nape of my neck tingling like when a marksman has you in his sights …” (29). The tingle reminds Calhoun that he too is being trespassed against, being marked for exploitation and subjugation by the rapacious monocular gaze, being colonized by the “propertied class” that Falcon represents.

This crucial intersubjectivity mirrors the discursive ambivalence that all on board the Republic exhibit. For example, Falcon “knew seven African coastal dialects and, in fact, could learn any new tongue in two weeks' time” (30), and the Allmuseri learn English remarkably quickly. What Abdul R. Jan Mohamed has termed the Manichean structures of identity that split colonialist discourse into binary oppositions (61) are rendered inadequate as terms of identification, as ways of marking the condition aboard the Republic.¹⁶ Jacques Derrida calls this sort of intersubjectivity “the structure of the double mark” (Dissemination 4), a metaphor for demonstrating how discourse “is constantly being traversed by the forces, and worked by the exteriority, that it represses: that is, expels and, which amounts to the same, internalizes as one of its moments” (5). In other words, discourse is “ceaselessly marked and remarked” (6), and consequently resists absolutism or essentialism. Similarly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty—whose writings have significantly influenced Johnson's critical and creative work—suggests discursive interdependence when he claims that “the highest point of truth is still only perspective.” He adds, “We shall completely understand this trespass of things upon their meaning, this discontinuity of knowledge which is at its highest point in speech, only when we understand it as the trespass of oneself upon the other and of the other upon me …” (133). Thus, in order to control the proliferation of the “system of marks,” Calhoun must come to understand the discursive double mark, its interminability, and ultimately the creative power that it affords him.¹⁷

In the novel, the most compelling metaphors for intersubjectivity, for the instability of double-marked meaning, are spawned by revolution. As a result of Falcon's fundamentally flawed tyranny, the crew mutinies, only to be displaced by the very bottom of the hierarchy, the shackled and branded Allmuseri “tight-packed” below deck. However, despite the success of their uprising, the previously immaculate Allmuseri begin to contract “dark spots” (107) on their cheeks, marks of cultural infection. Ironically, white crew members attribute their own facial blotches to their being infected by an Allmuseri girl: “‘I think she give all them boys somethin' …’” (108), explains the ship's cook, refusing to see the spotting as the metastasizing mark of slavery. Soon Calhoun finds it difficult to distinguish the girl's wounds from his own, confessing that, “‘if she bruises herself, I feel bruised’” (195).

Other borders deconstruct, and the double mark begins to interrogate universalist philosophy. In Middle Passage, intersubjectivity suggests that universals exist but are constantly in flux, being acted upon and acting upon the Other.¹⁸ More specifically, the Allmuseri uprising seems less a function of free will than of necessity; the revolt remarks abstractions such as freedom and victory. As Frantz Fanon has argued, the violence inherent in the entire concept of colonialism mandates anti-colonial revolution.¹⁹ Unfortunately, even victorious rebellion entails loss; the Allmuseri are marked psychically in ways that prove more problematic than their physical wounds. That mark is the re-marking of their universalist faith, the undoing of their trust in undifferentiated wholeness and the closure of universality.²⁰ As Johnson argues, “Universals are not static … but changing, historical, evolving” (Being 56). Though the Allmuseri once prided themselves on nonviolence and a philosophy that posits “the unity of Being everywhere,” they fall prey to the Captain's corrupting system of values. For instance, during the successful uprising, a liberated slave turned marksman takes aim at the Captain, now a marked man, and blasts a cannon shot through Falcon's door, severely injuring him and hastening his subsequent suicide. Thus, despite the overthrow of power, it seems, as Calhoun remarks, “that Falcon had broken [the Allmuseri] after all; by their triumph he had defeated them. From the perspective of the Allmuseri the captain had made … [them] as bloodthirsty as himself …” (140). Falcon colonizes the Allmuseri's collective psyche, rupturing it indelibly and eternally.²¹

Falcon, in turn, is no longer the same either. In his death throes, reports Calhoun, the “natural marksman” seemed to struggle against not only “a physical pain involuted and prismatic but deeper wounds as well” (143). His monocular world has been shattered by the blast of his own cannon turned against him by the dispossessed Other.²² As a result, Falcon is dispossessed of the racist notion that African peoples lack intellect, and that Western imperialism (despite its disregard for human liberty and decency) is acting according to some predestined historical course. The cannon ball—especially at the precise moment it blasts through Falcon's triply penetrated door—is a symbol of the Derridean double mark, a revenging movement that leaves Falcon, and the unwitting investors he represents, remarked upon, stunned, and no longer “whole.” “‘Then we underestimated the blacks? They're smarter than I thought?’” queries Falcon. “‘They'd have to be,’” responds Calhoun (146).

The double mark signifies a metamorphosis in the psyches of all aboard the Republic; all become aware of the endless remarking of one's discourse and culture. As Calhoun states,

I pitied [Falcon], as I pitied ourselves, for whether we liked it or not, he had changed a people simultaneously for the better and worse. … Centuries would pass whilst the Allmuseri lived through the consequences of what he had set in motion; he would be with them, I suspected, for eons, like … a rapist who, though destroyed by the mob, still comes to you nightly in your dreams. …

(143-44; emphasis added)

The Allmuseri identity becomes “something different—a mutation, a hybrid” (Bhabha 153); their name, a Derridean “double mark,” a mongrelized signifier, is forced to signify both the idyllic, peaceful people of the past before contact with the slavers, and the redefinition of a people post-contact. By taking up arms and assuming the role of marksmen—revolutionaries—they are fractured physically and psychically, forever altered by the desire of “Icarian” (143) man. Adrift in the unreadable universe of the post-rebellion stage, where neither stars nor European maps can be used to chart the ship's course (the universe itself may be said to be double-marked), the revolutionary Allmuseri, Calhoun reflects, are transformed: “No longer Africans, yet not Americans either. Then what? And of what were they now capable?” (125).

In fact, the Allmuseri show themselves to be capable of a host of human transgressions. Their murder of white crew members marks the commission of “the blackest [whitest?] of sins”; like the Europeans who, according to Allmuseri belief, were once “members of their tribe,” they inherit “the madness of multiplicity” that traces itself backward in Christianity to the “mark of Cain.” Accordingly, Calhoun tells us, “the thought of it drove them wild …” (65). They become hostage to “racial outrage,” holding anger close, “like a possession” (153). Their cooption is metaphorized by physical marks. These first show themselves as mysterious skin bruises, then erupt symbolically in an extravagance of wounds, most of which require amputation: “… the newly liberated Africans … were lurching about their tasks minus one leg, or with only two fingers on one hand, or without an arm.” Formerly able to heal themselves, the Allmuseri are overwrought by a “maddening fever degenerating into a frenzy so violent that the victim ripped away his clothes, shredded his skin, or that of the man next to him” (156). In sum, the “Unity of Being” that guided their culture in Africa—or so they tell Calhoun—is quite literally ripped asunder.

Indeed, Calhoun reflects that the purity of their natural, unmarked state may have been a “pure” misreading on his part. Although the Allmuseri initially appeared to him to embody a meta-wholeness of Being, a supernatural power shared by their captive god in the ship's hold and symbolized by their “presence of countless others in them, a crowd spun from everything” (61), Calhoun confesses that his universalist desire may have caused him to overlook the power of the double mark:

Stupidly, I had seen their lives and culture as timeless product, as finished thing, pure essence or Parmenidean meaning I envied and wanted to embrace, when the truth was that they were process and Heraclitean change, like any men, not fixed but evolving and as vulnerable to metamorphosis as the body of the boy we'd thrown overboard.

(124)

In addition, Calhoun learns after the uprising that the Allmuseri dealt ruthlessly with thieves back in Africa, that their tribe was a class society, and that various members of the community were known to tyrannize each other. As Ngonyama, an Allmuseri who assumes leadership of the ship, tells Calhoun, he fears a fellow Allmuseri more than any of the ship's crew:

You know, in our village I was a poor man, like you, but [Diamelo's] father was well-to-do. Diamelo is used to getting his way. I worry less about your captain now than how Diamelo can sway my people.

(137)

By deconstructing his own longings, Calhoun comes to realize what Marianna Torgovnick identifies as the West's false image of the primitive, one that implies “singularity, universality, that there is a truth about primitives not only available but comprehensive” (3). Thus Calhoun begins to understand the need to comprehend the double mark and the reality that “experience” aboard the Republic has transformed marksmen into marked men, and vice versa.

The degeneration of the Allmuseri causes Calhoun to acknowledge “a cruel kind of connectedness” between all on board the Republic; he realizes that “in a sense we all were ringed to the skipper in cruel wedlock” (144). For example, Falcon literally espouses Calhoun by placing a ring on his finger—significantly, one capable of unlocking the captain's custom-designed pistols. Nevertheless, just as Calhoun overcomes his primitivistic illusions about the Allmuseri, he begins to unlock his link to the exploitative ideology Falcon represents. This un-linking involves rejecting Falcon's essentialism, the tainted conviction that imperialist philosophy is a universal, monolithic truth: “‘Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind,’” the captain tells Calhoun early on. “‘Subject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and other—these ancient twins are built into mind. … We cannot think without them …’” (98).

Falcon himself, ironically, facilitates Calhoun's rejection of his own dualism. On his deathbed Falcon charges Calhoun with his destiny, with the control of not only his text—his ship's log—but his story/history as well by begging him to be his “biographer”: “‘I cannot write, so you must keep the log. … Do your best. Include everything you can remember, and what I told you, from the time you came on board’” (146).²³ Falcon's desperate quest for textual inheritors represents how significantly the cannon (canon) blast has ruptured him psychically, and it also suggests his lack of community and the consequent instability—and interminability—of his text, its susceptibility to being remarked upon. Calhoun accepts Falcon's bequest, but rejects his discriminatory agenda, the way he “cuts the border(s)” (Spillers 16) of his text: “I took his logbook from the ruins. But I promised myself that even though I'd tell the story (I knew he wanted to be remembered), it would be, first and foremost, as I saw it since my escape from New Orleans” (146).

After the Republic founders and sinks, the rescued Calhoun fulfills his destiny, his compulsion to repossess history, by superseding the Falconian desire that acts as a “‘transcendental Fault’” (98) in the imperialist consciousness. As a literary inheritor, Calhoun borrows from and moves beyond his literary precursors—the philosophers he studied while still a slave on Reverend Chandler's plantation, Falcon and his imperialism, and even the Allmuseri and their idyllic universalism—in order to remember and recreate perspective. Calhoun remarks upon the above oral and literary traditions in order to establish “his own distinctive sense of form” (Frye 41). Having reassessed the game of destructive marksmanship, Calhoun emerges as a strong novelist by demonstrating a remarkable, mature command of the double mark:

Looking back at the asceticism of the Middle Passage, I saw how the frame of mind I had adopted left me unattached. … The voyage had irreversibly changed my seeing, made of me a cultural mongrel, and transformed the world into a fleeting shadow play I felt no need to possess or dominate, only appreciate in the ever extended present.

(187)

His conversion indicts a crew member's searing words, uttered shortly before the Allmuseri uprising, which characterize Calhoun as a shallow, worthless, anonymous piece of cargo: “‘Once we reach New Orleans the rest of us kin sign on to other ships, and Calhoun'll go on his own way, like he's always done, believin' in nothin', belongin' to nobody, driftin' here and there and dyin', probably, in a ditch without so much as leavin' a mark on the world—or as much of a mark as you get from writin' on water’” (88).

The crew of marksmen perish in the Atlantic's “ditch,” in an unmarked grave, but not Calhoun. Contrary to their fatalistic forecast, upon being rescued from the sea Calhoun announces that he feels compelled “to transcribe and thereby transfigure all that we had experienced” (190; emphasis added). The deceased crew can never know how completely the captain's remarked log demonstrates Calhoun's talent for “writin' on water”; how faithfully it memorializes the Allmuseri “Day of Renunciation” of desire (180)²⁴; how compellingly it deconstructs and remarks the marksman's way of “leavin' a mark on the wor(l)d”; how profoundly it extends the reader's perspective of the middle passage, for we have been reading Calhoun's remarked log all along.²⁵ Reunited with his still-marriage-minded girlfriend, custodian of the only surviving Allmuseri children, reenwebbed with the crime boss who ensnared him in the first place, Calhoun evades repeating the marksman/marked man cycle: “… I found a way to make my peace with the recent past by turning it into Word” (190). His achievement reflects Johnson's conviction that “the lived Black world has always promised a fresh slant on structures and themes centuries old” (“Whole Sight” 56-57). Calhoun uses the word—the salvaged and remarked ship's log—to silence Papa Zeringue, the crime boss, whom the log reveals is one of the Republic's three investors, an imperialist who has hired Falcon to enslave not only peoples from his own ancestral Africa, but “to salvage the best of their war-shocked cultures too” (49).²⁶

Calhoun's “cross-cultural fertilization” has allowed him to “move closer to the objective of whole sight” (“Whole Sight” 4).²⁷ Writes Toni Morrison, “… for both black and white American writers, in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of that language is complicated, interesting, and definitive” (12-13). Calhoun's retracing of the middle passage allows him to literally and metaphorically “unhobble” himself after he has been physically and psychically wounded by the voyage. Even if the achievement of the Allmuseri ideal, because of colonization and slavery, is no longer possible, Calhoun's odyssey argues for the importance of the pursuit of that ideal while simultaneously exploring intersubjectivity, the positive and empowering aspects of his double-marked consciousness. Calhoun's language and perceptions are both Western and African, allowing him to do the cultural work Brook Thomas suggests is necessary for historically oppressed peoples: “to construct and legitimate new histories in which they are finally represented” (191). As Calhoun states, “Sometimes without knowing it, I spoke in the slightly higher register of the slaves …” (194). Above all, Calhoun's “double-voiced” text (Gates 110-13) erases “the notion that the Middle Passage was so traumatic that it … create[d] in the African a tabula rasa of consciousness” (Gates 4).

If, as Fredric Jameson asserts in The Political Unconscious, narrative “must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community” (70), then Middle Passage's meditation seems to be that “strategies of containment” (Jameson 53), prescribed ways of thinking and writing about experience, repress valuable expressions of reality inside and outside the African American community.²⁸ For example, after the Allmuseri uprising, Calhoun confesses that Squibb, the white cook and the only surviving white crew member,

anticipate[d] my pain before I felt it. … His breathing even resembled that of the Allmuseri. … I felt perfectly balanced crosscurrents in him, each a pool of possibilities from which he was unconsciously drawing moment by moment, to solve whatever problem was at hand.

(176)

Though perhaps not fully conscious of his blossoming humanity and intercultural sensitivity, Squibb has transformed the wounds of competing discourses and ideologies into spiritual empowerment; he has shifted closer to the Allmuseri, not in racial dimensions, but in human devotion. He has conquered the “ontic wound” of dualism, of which racism is but one manifestation. In addition, by noting such a transformation in the once alcoholic and crippled ship's cook, Calhoun himself moves closer to “whole sight,” toward a four-dimensional world view.

I opened the paper by noting that Johnson has his detractors; in closing I shall allude to someone who supports his mission. Instead of adhering to a political agenda of a particular group, Johnson claims that he responds to the call of a much celebrated African American novelist: “‘Proponents of the black arts movement of the 1960s have urged us to control our images. But since the late 1940s … Ellison has counseled us to expand our images’” (qtd. in Williams D8). It is fitting, then, that at the 1990 National Book Awards ceremony held in New York City, the place where the protagonist emerges at the end (and beginning) of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison exclaimed in response to charges that Johnson's victory was racially motivated, “‘You don't write out of your skin, for God's sake, you write out of your imagination’” (qtd. in “Writing” 6).

Similarly, Johnson states, “‘I think we have in some cases forgotten the remarkable triumphs of black people … remarkable human beings who understood racism but stepped over it the way they would a puddle’” (qtd. in Monaghan A3). The Atlantic, as Middle Passage points out, is an awfully significant “puddle,” and so is the will required to “outlast the Atlantic's bone-chilling cold” (209). But remarking the achievements and potentials of Black peoples in a way not bound exclusively to the dialogics of racism seems a logical alternative to perpetuating Manichean oppositions, as Johnson believes Black cultural nationalism does. One alternative: Johnson shuns the role of speaking for his cultural group. “‘Traditionally, since the time of Richard Wright, black writers have been expected to be spokesmen for the race,’” Johnson explains. “‘But I find it difficult to swallow the idea that one individual, black or white, can speak for the experience of 30 million people’” (qtd. in Williams D1). Middle Passage, however, certainly does speak to the experience of some of those 30 million people, and to the experience of many white readers as well.²⁹ Johnson may believe he can evade ideology. Yet, in Jameson's words, “the mirage of an utterly nontheoretical practice, is a contradiction in terms”; even Johnsonian metaphysics and ethical humanism present as pervasive or personal “what are in reality the historical and institutional specifics of a determinate type of group” (58-59). With Middle Passage, Johnson contributes a valuable dimension to African American literature and its creative and critical sensibility: By demonstrating self- and communal empowerment through cross-cultural literacy and refertilization, Johnson's novel, placed in its proper perspective, argues the potential rewards awaiting African American writers, and American writers in general, who fully explore their double-marked American texts, selves, and consciousness.

Notes

1. Johnson hasn't spared many writers from his critical gun, though perhaps the group of writers of whom he has been most critical has been contemporary African American women writers. While commending writers such as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Paule Marshall for their superior analysis of the “nuances … and eccentricities of human behavior” and their shared ability to write like “prose singers, golden-throated speakers,” Johnson suggests that these writers are often guilty of shabby plot constructions and a lack of “formal virtuosity” (Being 118). I am hardly in agreement with Johnson on much of what he has to say about African American female writers; I only point out his recurrent challenge to suggest one way in which he has set himself up as a target for others in the African American literary community (a cursory look, for example, at Naylor's Linden Hills or Morrison's Song of Solomon suggests that these writers are capable of remarking upon Western forms and of sophisticated plot constructions, though their emphasis is often on spiraling structures as opposed to linear ones). See Being 54ff.

2. See, for example, Barbara Christian's often discussed position in “The Race for Theory,” wherein she states that some African American literary critics “have changed literary critical language to suit their own purposes as philosophers” (67), and Joyce A. Joyce's well-known discussion about contemporary critical language in “The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism,” in which she challenges the methodologies of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr.

3. Calling movements such as “Afro-centric” education “‘the new name for black cultural nationalism’” (qtd. in Williams D8), Johnson argues against any “‘monolithic, ideological fiction’” and stresses the importance of “‘celebrat[ing] black American life and achievement … in a philosophical mode’” (qtd. in Monaghan A3). Johnson contends that “‘a serious student of philosophy, or a serious artist’” cannot be comfortable with the idea that he or she need not read European literature or philosophy: Artists “‘ought to know as much as they can about as many cultures as they can’” (qtd. in Williams D8). This notion does not jibe with the thinking of some nationalistic African American critics, like Christian, who argues that critics risk cooption by writing in poststructuralist and philosophical terms. Notes Christian, “At least so far, the creative writers I study have resisted this language” (68). Until now, indeed. Johnson's manumitted slave protagonist is well-versed in Hegelian dialectics and often speaks in discipline-specific philosophical terms.

4. Johnson recognizes Ishmael Reed—“a pioneer in literary experimentation”—Alice Walker, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove as three writers who have attempted to reinscribe traditionally “Western” literary forms by applying an African American perspective (Being 4, 118).

5. The novel, as Paul Gilroy has recently pointed out, also has a “neat intertextual relationship with [Martin] Delany's Blake” (218). It signifies, too, on a number of slave narratives, perhaps most significantly on that of Olaudah Equiano.

6. As the epigraph makes clear, Jacques Derrida labels racism a “system of marks” in “Racism's Last Word.” A more complete discussion of marks and marking in discourse can be found in Dissemination. Johnson uses this system of marks and marking, I'm suggesting, as the foremost trope in the novel, moving beneath the boundaries of racism to ask logical questions about the ethics not just of racist discourse, but of any discourse that essentialize or discriminates.

7. Catharine Stimpson, chairperson of the fiction jury, disagreed with West's characterization of the selection process, stating that, although the committee members expressed “‘differences’” of opinion, the meeting at which the final decision was made was “‘delightful’” (qtd. in Cohen C18).

8. All-museri/erimus, meaning ‘We shall be All.’ Though occasionally difficult to uncode, anagrams mark meaning in several of the names in Middle Passage. For example, Ngonyama, a leader of the Allmuseri who bemoans his loss of purity upon his corruption by the white man and withers away, can be reconfigured as “Agony Man.” The double signification (double-marking) of these names symbolizes the interrelationship of discourses in the “fallen world” of the Republic.

9. In this respect, the play of the gaze in Middle Passage could be dealt with profitably in Lacanian terms: Although what structures the gap is the absence of the Other, the not-there, human subjectivity explodes when the gaze is deflected back on itself. See Lacan 285; MacConnell 71-72, 154.

10. A “mark” of Western empiricism, Falcon, Johnson states, is loosely based on Sir Richard Francis Burton: “‘He was an explorer, an imperialist, a translator, a quasi-genius, and also the biggest bigot in the world’” (qtd. in Blau C9). Melville's Captain Ahab comes instantly to mind on a fictional level. States Johnson, “‘I went back and looked at every sea story from Apolonius of Rhodes, to Homer—oh God, all the way through Melville, Conrad, London, the Sinbad stories, slave narratives that took place on boats—about the middle passage’” (qtd. in Williams D8). This sort of reliance on Western tradition has marked other African Diaspora writers for criticism. Compare, for example, the backlash in the 1960s and '70s in the Caribbean and elsewhere against Derek Walcott, the 1992 Nobel Prize-winning poet. Walcott's argument, like Johnson's, has consistently been that such forms are as much his inheritance as anyone else's. See Ismond 54ff.

11. Though colonial and postcolonial theories have often highlighted the “mimicry” and “mockery” present in racist and colonialist discourses on an inter-racial level (see Bhabha 150ff), Johnson's exploration of the intra-racial ambivalence created by imperialist discourse—in this case between the various members of the ship's crew—in Middle Passage is a dimension of colonial and postcolonial discourse frequently overlooked by theorists, critics, and creative writers, perhaps because of the understandable interest in highlighting the inter-racial dialectic (white/black, slaver/enslaved, etc.).

12. Falcon also selects Ngonyama, the leader of the Allmuseri, to be a “confidence man” above deck. In this regard, Falcon grants both Calhoun and Ngonyama the capacity of assimilating into the white power structure. Thus, their respective roles—Calhoun as an unpaid ship's cook and Ngonyama as a privileged liaison between enslaver/enslaved—function as camouflage for the slave uprising that both of these characters have a hand in plotting. In short, their “black skins/white masks” prove extremely problematic for Falcon's hold on power. See Fanon, Black Skins 109ff.

13. See Hartman (118-57) on the nature of “words and wounds.”

14. There are many ways that this oppression manifests itself in mis-markings of Allmuseri culture. Such mis-markings include wild speculations by crew members as to the identity of the Allmuseri god caged below deck, as well as shallow and primitivistic notions concerning the Allmuseri themselves. For example, the only sentence to be found in explorers' logs concerning the Allmuseri identifies them as “‘Sorcerers’” and “‘devil-worshiping, spell-casting wizards’” (43). States Abdul R. Jan Mohamed, “Just as imperialists ‘administer’ the resources of the conquered country, so colonialist discourse ‘commodifies’ the native subject into a stereotyped object and uses him as a ‘resource’ for colonialist fiction” (64).

15. Calhoun's initial assessment of the Allmuseri mirrors Gulliver's idealization of the Houyhnhnms in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Calhoun observes that “… they so shamed me I wanted their ageless culture to be my own …” (78). This is one of many examples of Johnson re-marking not only Swift, but others in the Western tradition.

16. Bhabha and Jan Mohamed have involved themselves in an angry feud, one that in many ways reflects the tension surrounding Johnson's texts. While Bhabha argues that both colonized and colonizer are implicated in the development of colonialist discourse, Jan Mohamed resists merging binaries into a discursive and cultural hybrid, a unified colonial subject (59). Johnson's novel argues for intersubjectivity of culture and discourse while simultaneously acknowledging differences in perception according to the dynamics of one's particular community and life experiences.

17. Such recognition lies at the heart of a number of major studies in African American and African Diaspora criticism. W. E. B. Du Bois recognizes this play as part of his concept of “double consciousness”; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s assessment of the signifying monkey trickster figure, a metaphor of “double-voiced” texts within the African tradition that speak both inter- and intra-racially, is another example (see The Signifying Monkey 21ff). A related Diaspora concept is VéVé Clark's “marasa consciousness” (41ff). Also, Francophone Caribbean critic Françoise Lionnet argues that “a given space (text) will support more life (generate more meanings) if occupied by diverse forms of life” (17-18). In fact, each of the “Western,” “African American,” and “Caribbean” critics listed here, by arguing essentially the same concept but in culturally specific ways, points out the infinite possibilities of the “double mark” (in a sense, double becomes a misnomer) and seems to support Johnson's faith in cross-cultural fertilization as a mode of literary production.

18. Johnson has frequently expressed frustration with African American critics who fail to understand the phenomenological concept of the universal. As Johnson has painstakingly noted, contrary to mistaken fears of totalized experience, the universal in phenomenological terms suggests that meaning is always in flux, that perception of “truth” must always be reinterpreted. Religion, for example, may be a universal, but Haitian Voodoo “is a cause for reflection on that theme.” See “Whole Sight” 55ff. Thus, Calhoun is marked upon and remarked upon and must reevaluate his very existence as a manumitted black slave; his sense of being is markedly different upon the completion of his near-fatal journey than it was at the beginning.

19. Fanon makes it clear that successful decolonization by the native cannot be achieved without bloodshed: “From birth it is clear to [the native] that his narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence” (Wretched 36). Applied to the Allmuseri, such a tenet suggests that their cultural purity is destined to self-destruct.

20. “Meaning” aboard the Republic resembles the operations explored by reader-response criticism, which allows for meaning but only as it is experienced by individual discourse communities according to their interpretive strategies, which necessarily undergo change. Such a theory denies that there is any predetermined, absolute meaning at which we are striving to arrive. Falcon believes that he is carrying out some preordained historical will, and the Allmuseri idea of the universal turns out to be similarly flawed in its faith in closure. As Stanley Fish argues, communication occurs and meaning is made within social structures that cohere in normative social practices, purposes, and goals, yet structures that change as situations change.

21. In the sense that the colonialist's mark remains furrowed in the psychic subsurface, no matter how transient surface marks may be, it resembles structurally the mystic writing pad, or magic slate, as metaphor for the psyche and for memory. See Derrida, “Freud.”

22. Calhoun, the crew member whom Falcon has called on to be his “eyes and ears,” manipulates three violent plots on board the Republic—one by the Allmuseri, one by the ship's crew, and a counter-plot by Falcon—because each of them is to one degree or another dependent on him for success. If the goal of African American literature is to achieve a “four-dimensional” consciousness, as Johnson has argued, then Calhoun, by exploiting his awareness of the four competing schemes (the three above plus his own desire to manipulate those three), serves as a metaphor for such a consciousness. One might also connect four-dimensionality with Derrida's concept of “marks of dissemination,” which “cannot be summed up or ‘decided’ according to the two of binary oppositions nor sublated into the ‘three’ of speculative dialectics. … they cannot be pinned down at one point. … They ‘add’ a fourth term the more or the less” (Dissemination 25).

23. Falcon's desperate attempt to memorialize and stabilize his “text” of oppressive cultural and ideological dogma is a pathetic act of denial, as Hortense Spillers makes clear in her essay “Who Cuts the Border? Some Readings on ‘America’”: “No ‘real’ biotext (and/or culture text, for that matter) ever achieves much more than an unstable relationship to some abidingly imagined, or putative, centrality, even though one is surely loathe to admit that possibility” (16).

24. As Ashraf H. A. Rushdy argues, in Middle Passage Johnson outlines an enabling phenomenological perspective that involves the “transcendence of relativism” by Calhoun in favor of a more community-oriented sense of being: “The ideal of intersubjectivity includes the condition of the individual's being ‘unpositioned’ in the world, of each person's having a relationship with the tribal community that is so integral that the individual is rendered ‘invisible’ in the ‘presence of others’” (377).

25. My use of parentheses represents a predominant intersubjectivity in the African American tradition that Johnson acknowledges: “Black writing assumes, as it must, the traditionally held correspondence between word and world … and I am going to say flat out that I don't believe this ancient faith in fiction is entirely without foundation” (Being 37).

26. In fact, Philippe “Papa” Zeringue's henchman, Santos, reveals that he is a direct descendant of the Allmuseri. When he learns from Calhoun that Papa Zeringue has enslaved his tribe, he turns on him and threatens to beat him up. Thus Calhoun succeeds in destabilizing the neocolonialist hierarchy in New Orleans.

27. Johnson's notion of “whole sight” is an idea that has been remarked upon in connection with other Diaspora traditions. For example, in a study that addresses the political implications of Third World literary history, Michael Valdez Moses concludes that “to be alert simultaneously to both the Western and African literary traditions, to rely upon the knowledge of both to make fruitful comparisons and judgments strikes me as eminently reasonable and just” (226).

28. On a critical level, Barbara Johnson has warned against positing a black vernacular theory that claims to be unaffected by cross-cultural exchange: “Cultures are not containable within boundaries. Rhetorical figures are not Euclidean. New logical models … [should] acknowledge the ineradicable trace of Western culture within the Afro-American culture (and vice versa) without losing the ‘signifying black difference’” (42). See also Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's notion of ‘Glossolalia” (speaking in tongues), based largely on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Hans-Georg Gadamer, which argues that African American women's writing “speaks as much to the notion of commonality and universality as it does to the sense of difference and diversity” (137).

29. Certainly the novel speaks to Johnson. Like his protagonist, Johnson was trained in philosophy: Calhoun on the plantation of the Reverend Chandler in Southern Illinois, and Johnson at Southern Illinois University. Calhoun, as a result of his contact with the Allmuseri, becomes a disciplined martial artist; Johnson has practiced as a martial artist for many years. Calhoun ultimately marries the schoolteacher who was partly responsible for his remarkable journey; Johnson is married to a schoolteacher who has enabled his own.

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