Post on 04-Apr-2020
transcript
Jyothy, C.R. 128
Chapter 4
Crystallized Expression: Vision of Race
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife-this longing to attain
self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In
this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.
W.E.B.DU BOIS
In an interview with John O‘Brien, Ishmael Reed once defined the novelist
as a ―fetish-maker‖ and the novel as an ―amulet.‖ The language he used is instructive
in that it ―conjures‖ (another of Reed‘s favorite words) a cultural perspective quite
different from the more conventional European one that Reed‘s densely and
enthusiastically intertextual approach opposes and parodically undermines. Against
the linear and largely univocal tradition of the European novel, Reed offers a
fiction that is both diffuse and multivoiced, close in structure to the Sufi ―scatter
style‖ that characterizes Reed‘s essays. His innovativeness involves a recycling of
older, often previously marginalized (in the West, that is) styles and materials.
This recycling is, however, not at all nostalgic. Reed uses material from the past
―to explain the present or the future. He opines: ―Necromancers used to lie in the
guts of the dead or in tombs to receive visions of the future. That is prophecy. The
black writer lies in the guts of old America, making readings about the future.‖
In the case of Flight to Canada, this past is most specifically and hilariously
Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the
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Jyothy, C.R. 129
Lowly (1852). Far from being a simple parody, Reed‘s novel is, in Jerome
Charyn‘s words, ―a demonized Uncle Tom’s Cabin‖ that draws upon two additional
aspects of Reed‘s ―Voodoo‖ (or, alternately, ―NeoHooDoo‖) aesthetic. First, it
brings together past and present at a single spatial-temporal narrative point, and
second, it amalgamates a vast variety of materials, of which Stowe‘s novel and the
slave narratives upon which it is based are only the most obvious. Just as Stowe
exploited the slave narrative tradition for her own novelistic and moralistic
purposes, Reed exploits Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this time in a self-conscious rather
than (as in Stowe‘s case) self-effacing manner.
Flight to Canada is divided into three parts. The first, ―Naughty Harriet,‖
makes abundantly clear Reed‘s satiric thrust. Reed‘s opening gambit does more
than ironize Stowe and her novel. It calls into question the very idea of openings,
something Michel Foucault was doing at around the same time, though in a far
more theoretical manner. Thus, ―Naughty Harriet‖ opens with what in effect may be
described as a series of openings. The allusion to Stowe is immediately followed by
the poem Flight to Canada, signed by Raven Quickskill, whose signature forms an
integral part of the poem. The next few pages offer a brief, italicized account by
Quickskill that narratively precedes but chronologically follows the rest of the
novel. Quickskill‘s account is in turn followed by a brief third-person account of
the Swilles in Virginia, which segues into the arrival of Abraham Lincoln, who
has eluded both Confederate soldiers and the far more pertinacious and dangerous
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Jyothy, C.R. 130
bill collectors. Freely mixing narratives, voices, and typefaces, and making a
variety of ―Liza Leaps,‖ from underground railroad to buses and jumbo jets, from
historical fact to outrageous imaginings, Flight to Canada is clearly a novel in
motion. It ―travels in style,‖ as Quickskill says in his poem, in more than one
sense.
Lincoln‘s arrival at Swille‘s estate, Swine‘rd, sets in motion one of the
novel‘s two major intertwined plots. The other concerns Quickskill and his poem,
which is about to be published in the Beulahland Review three years after
―submission.‖ (Literary enslavement and emancipation are two of the novel‘s
satiric targets). Not quite the autobiographically revealing poem it first appears to
be, Flight to Canada affects Quickskill in several ways. First, it makes him famous.
Second, it reveals his whereabouts and therefore forces him to become a fugitive
once more. (Swille, incidentally, accepts what the novel lampoons as the conventional
scientific wisdom of the day: that because escaping from slavery is an illness, it is
the owner‘s paternalistic responsibility to treat and cure—that is, catch—a ―sick‖
slave.) Third, it finances Quickskill‘s flight to Canada and he believes in freedom.
Realizing that his ―lease‖ is up, that he is ―overdue,‖ and that Swille wants his
―investment‖ back, Quickskill uses the two hundred dollars he receives for his
poem in an attempt to realize what he has thus far only written. Along the way, he
resumes his affair with Princess Quaw Quaw.
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Jyothy, C.R. 131
Interesting as their flight is, it exists less in competition with the plots
involving Lincoln, Swille, Uncle Robin, and others. These multiple narratives
together make up only a part of Reed‘s extraordinary novel. Quickskill‘s odyssey
may repeat similar escapes by other slaves as recorded, conventionally enough,
in slave narratives such as that of Frederick Douglass, but Swille‘s death just as
carefully and parodically follows the conventions of another literary type, Edgar
Allan Poe‘s Gothic fiction, including Roderick‘s death in The Fall of the House of
Usher; Swille‘s sister Vivian (playing the part of Poe‘s Madeline) returns from
death to embrace her sadomasochistic, necrophiliac brother one last time. Reed,
however, compounds matters by suggesting that this Poe-esque tale of forbidden
love and final retribution may be nothing more than an equally Poe-esque hoax, a
fiction used to cover the fact that Mrs. Swille has murdered her husband (for causing
the death of their son) by pushing him into the fire. Lincoln‘s death follows a no less
curious script, that of President Kennedy‘s assassination, recorded live and endlessly
replayed for a television audience. Just as the novel makes its leaps from one
historical period and narrative convention to another, Reed leads one to leap from
the reality of the story to the reality of the page.One must deal not only with
Quickskill and Swille but with Lincoln and Stowe, with Kennedy and contemporary
African American writer John A. Williams, with the 1860‘s and the 1960‘s, that
too with footnotes and material reprinted verbatim, including a lengthy passage
from Our American Cousin, the Tim Tyler play that Lincoln was watching when
he was shot by John Wilkes Booth. Readers will likely find it easier to accept
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Jyothy, C.R. 132
Quickskill, a fictional writer, meeting William Wells Brown, the country‘s first
black novelist, on a Lake Erie ferry, or even Swille meeting Lincoln, curious and
comical as their meeting is, than to have the notion of the inviolability of historical
time overturned and the boundaries of both history and the historical novel
transgressed with such carnivalesque delight.
There are three keys to understand Reed‘s handling of his characters. One is
his free mingling of fictional and historical figures. The second is his turning away
from character as it is generally defined, in terms of realistic detail, psychological
development, and the like, toward those ―essential elements,‖ as Reed calls them,
that ―distinguish the character from other people.‖ Instead of fleshing out his characters
physically and psychologically, Reed attempts to ―abstract those qualities from the
characters just like someone making a doll in West or East Africa.‖ Acknowledging
that this approach may appear ―grotesque or distorted‖ to the moderns (Western),
Reed contends that ―I‘m not interested in rendering a photograph of a person. I‘m
interested in capturing his soul and putting it in a cauldron or in a novel.‖
Reed‘s mode of characterization, like his mode of fiction writing, suggests
that ―black‖ magic and a doubly black humor are connected, even interchangeable.
The third key to Reed‘s approach to character involves adapting his African aesthetic to
an American context by drawing on the native culture‘s own contributions to an
art of abstraction and broadly defined strokes: vaudeville, newspaper headlines,
and, above all, cartoons and comic strips. The result is a fiction of types
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Jyothy, C.R. 133
deliberately sketched along the crudest, most satirical lines possible in an art
designed to give offense, where grotesquerie and buffoonery prevail, and where
the chief Western models are Nathanael West and François Rabelais, not Jonathan
Swift and Alexander Pope.
It should not, therefore, be altogether surprising that when Quickskill meets
Brown, the fictional character should call the (seemingly) historical figure ―the
greatest satirist of these times.‖ It is as improbable a claim as one could make
about Brown, yet one that in a strange way comes closer to the essence of his art
than have scores of scholarly studies. Similarly, Reed inverts the generally accepted
portrait of Stowe: that in writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin she was less an author than
God‘s amanuensis and, as Lincoln is supposed to have said, the ―little lady‖ who
started the Civil War. Reed‘s ―Naughty Harriet‖ appears quite differently, as just
one more ―toady to the Nobility,‖ as ready at novel‘s end to exploit Uncle Robin‘s
Horatio Algerish rags-to-riches story as earlier she had exploited Josiah Henson,
the ―real‖ Uncle Tom whose tale she borrowed—whose soul she stole and
sentimentalized. Significantly, Reed‘s Henson, like the real one, ends up in
Canada, turns to the East African art of wood-carving, and finds a utopian
community that proves less successful than Yankee Jack‘s Emancipation City and
that becomes the forerunner of Reed‘s own alternative publishing projects.
Even the characters‘ names contribute to the novel‘s overall comic effect.
There is little Reed can do with historical figures such as Edgar Allan Poe and
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Jyothy, C.R. 134
Robert E. Lee, other than to play on the Honest Abe theme and rewrite Stowe as
―Naughty Harriet.‖ ―Swille‖ nicely testifies to the moral hog lurking just below the
patrician surface. Arthur and Vivian are drawn from Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s Idylls
of the King (1859-1885), which becomes as much the target of Reed‘s satire as Sir
Thomas Malory‘s work was of Mark Twain‘s. The oxymoronic Mammy Barracuda
inverts a stock type that stretches from Stowe‘s Aunt Chloe to William Faulkner‘s
Dilsey. Uncle Robin ironizes the African American folktale about picking poor Robin
clean (also used in Ralph Ellison‘s 1952 Invisible Man), and Princess Quaw Quaw
stands in much the same ironic relation to the Native American tradition as
Princess Winterfall summer spring on the 1950‘s children‘s television program Howdy
Doody, hosted by ―Buffalo Bill.‖ ―Quickskill,‖ like Swille, speaks for itself.
―Raven,‖ however, does double duty: It links Quickskill to both the African
American community (by color) and to the Native American culture (specifically,
the Tlingit version of the raven myth). Although Raven and Robin are clearly the
novel‘s ―heroes,‖ the novel‘s most vicious characters—the Swilles and Mammy
Barracuda are more interesting, largely because it is they and not the novel‘s more
admirable figures who embody Reed‘s own creative energy.
Reed has defined his ―Neo-HooDoo‖ aesthetic as a stance rather than as a
school, a means for undermining the dominant culture‘s grip and thus opening up
a space in which can be heard a multiplicity of multicultural voices previously
marginalized, co-opted, or silenced. In his own novels, Reed does more than
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Jyothy, C.R. 135
merely allow such voices to be heard. He espouses his aesthetic, openly and
polemically in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972),
and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), and less pugnaciously and more
successfully in Flight to Canada. More than an ironic and irreverent retelling of
American history, Reed‘s eclectic novel Flight to Canada incorporates often
unfamiliar material, opening up old wounds, pointing to the scars, leaving the
seams ragged, refusing either to monologize or homogenize. Read in terms of the
Neo-HooDoo aesthetic, Swille‘s love for his dead sister does double service. More
than a grotesque joke at Swille‘s expense, it points to Swille‘s love of the dead,
including dead traditions, his obsession with sameness and purity, including racial
purity, and his opposition to change of any kind.
A thorough going revisionist, Reed uses satire, parody, farce, invective, and
allegory to create a narrative space free of Western hegemony—free, from Western
notions of theme, plot, character, time, and space. His crafting of an alternative
story of American history, particularly the emancipation of enslaved African
Americans, parallels the work of the two European writers who have influenced
him most. William Blake and William Butler Yeats chose to create their own
systems rather than to be enslaved by another‘s. As editor, publisher, and cultural
gadfly, as well as poet, novelist, and essayist, Reed has enlarged this space to
include as many alternative voices and systems as possible. He served as cofounder of
the East Village Other and later of Yardbird Publishing (named for jazz great
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Jyothy, C.R. 136
Charlie ―Yardbird‖ Parker), and also founded the Before Columbus Foundation,
dedicated to the repatriation of art, especially folk art, expropriated from various
colonized peoples. The thrust of Reed‘s work is summed up in the title of an essay
that appeared in Le Monde in the same year that Flight to Canada was published:
The Multi-Cultural Artist: A New Phase. One can assume that the use to which
Uncle Robin will put Swille‘s fifty-room castle will be similarly multicultural,
with the freedom-loving, Indian-influenced former slave Raven Quickskill already
its first writer-in-residence.
Reed‘s fiction demands to be read in terms of a dual critical context, its
parts at once overlapping and conflicting. One is the African American literary
tradition, which begins with and remains largely influenced by the slave narratives
written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The slave narratives are
autobiographical in focus, moral in intent, and realistic and documentary in
approach. Far more than any other African American writer, Reed has, as Jerry
Bryant has pointed out, ―cut his links‖ to that tradition. The other side of Flight to
Canada’s critical context is postmodernism, particularly as it manifests itself in
the new kind of historical novel written by Reed, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon,
Robert Coover, E. L. Doctorow, and others. This is not to imply that Reed‘s
fiction represents a flight from the African American tradition to the postmodern.
It represents instead a flight from the narrow manner in which the former came to
be defined and accepted.
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Jyothy, C.R. 137
Instead of perpetuating the slave-narrative line, of which Richard Wright‘s
Native Son is undoubtedly the best known and most influential example, Reed
emancipated the tradition itself by tracing it back further still, to its roots in older
African and African American cultures, with their emphasis on the fantastic and
their abiding interest in the trickster figure. Equally important, Reed situated his
act of literary liberation within a larger conflict: the overthrowing of the very idea
and practice of cultural dominance. It was an approach that put him at odds not
only with the cultural establishment but also with the Black Arts movement of the
1960‘s and 1970‘s.
At the very least, Reed has redefined the African American literary tradition
and played his part in reshaping both the historical novel and American history.
The multiculturalism that Reed explored and expounded in 1976 in Flight to
Canada has become an accepted, if still contentious, fact of American life.
The same passage of time that has served to validate Reed‘s multiculturalism has,
however, also served to underscore what many have felt is the least attractive
feature of his writing, a misogynist streak that, while most pronounced in Reckless
Eyeballing, has manifested itself throughout his career.
In his novel Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed uses the history of slavery in
the United States, as well as the genre of the slave narrative, in order to work out
his vision of race and American national identity in an era following the Civil
Rights Movement and the upsurge of Black Nationalism. Reed uses slavery to
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Jyothy, C.R. 138
challenge American national identity and looks to a new, global vision epitomized
by Canada. He also warns against the expansion of race-based nationalism on a
universal scale. A post national movement implies a thorough revision of the
relationship between citizen and polity, while maintaining vigilance towards imperialist
and exploitative forms of transnationalism. The solution Reed envisages in Flight to
Canada involves a return to the South, with a national consciousness grounded in
the local. Since this vision is achieved through transcendence, switching from
post national possibilities to cultural nationalism via domestic multiculturalism, it
reinforces the racially dubious notion of the US as a sublime nation and might be
considered a political retreat.
It has become a matter of concern that the nation is falling far short when it
comes to envisaging future universal peace and an equitable distribution of the earth‘s
resources. Christine Levecq opines: ―We need a positive model of internationalism
less bent on national sovereignty than on social equality.‖ Emily Apter says,
―Transnationalism signals political and economic equality for minorities, access to
the polis, and the belief in a common humanity over and against the promulgation
of Eurocentric universalism. ―(70)
It is this form of internationalism, in which ―forms of global feeling are
continuous with forms of national feeling‖ (that lurks on the horizon of the
character‘s journey in Flight to Canada), The conjunction of nationalism and
racism has become especially prominent in the political rhetoric of the rising
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Jyothy, C.R. 139
extreme right-wing parties in Western Europe. According to Peter Fitzpatrick, the
nation has a― mode of identity formation distinctive of modernity, one which
generates and relies on a pervasive and refined racism‖.(4)
The nation, according to Fitzpatrick, is constituted by its striving for universality
in opposition to what is exceptional or antithetical to it. The nation takes its identity
or coherence through its negation of the other, which it marks out as specific and
heterogeneous, as oppose to its own universality. As Etienne Balibar puts it,
―Racism always collaborates with the nation, which builds its political and cultural
unity or purity over against what it sees or constructs as a representative of
difference and impurity.‖
Winthrop Jordan has shown how the search for an American identity from
the Revolution was always deeply bound up with ideas about race. In Flight to
Canada, Reed offers what can be call a post modern analysis of the US as a nation,
by bringing to light the shaky foundations of its integrity and hence questioning its
validity as a concept in today‘s world. Flight to Canada is Uncle Robin‘s slave
narrative, written by Raven Quickstill, the first one of Swille‘s slaves to read, the
first to write and the first to run away. The protagonist, Raven Quickstill, who
runs away from his master, hides out in Emancipation City and finally after the
war has ended, crosses the border into Canada. ―Reed tries to bring about a
correlation between the twentieth century black American writer and his nineteenth
century counterpart.‖ To develop this parallel, Reed creates a 19th century theme
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and plot and overlays it with a 20th century format of ridicule, rebuke and
sarcasm. Flight to Canada is a comment upon the present plight of African
Americans, Native Americans, Jewish Americans, and other minority groups in
America. Through Quickstill‘s character , Reed shows how African American
writers as well as other American writers, can benefit from borrowing from other
traditions ; it suggests that slavery affects everybody, not just black.
It is also the exploration of symbolic geography as a narrative mode of
existence. The novel turns on the relationship between the demonic slave holder,
Arthur Swille and three or four absolute slaves. In fact, it is a comic exploration
of slavery by the best slave writer. Reed deftly blends the attitude and suffering of
the past century with those of today. He has created a grotesque Civil War America
out of scraps of the past, the present and the mythic. The despotic and demonic
character of Arthur Swille is brought home to us in detailing his morning nourishment
with two gallons of slave mother‘s milk. He also insists on his slave to dress up
like a slave to satisfy his cravings. Despite the seriousness of the subject(s), Reed
―keeps us in stitches,‖ throughout the novel.
Canada means different things to different people; each of the characters in
Ishmael Reed‘s Flight to Canada has his or her own view of Canada. Reed quotes
a description of the arrival of earlier slaves who escaped to Canada and were, at
least at first, jubilant.
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Reed writes:
They seemed to be transformed; a new light shone in their eyes, their
tongues were loosed, they laughed and cried, prayed and sang praises,
fell upon the ground and kissed it, hugged and kissed each other,
crying ‗Bless de Lord! Oh! I‘se free before I die!. (FC 168)
For the slaves in Reed‘s novel who stay on the plantation owned by the
nefarious Arthur Swille, Canada (with ―nada,‖ meaning ―nothing‖ in Spanish,
hiding inside the word) is as invisible as a dream or nightmare. Cato, the Graffado
overseer unwilling to see himself as Arthur Swille‘s ―white slave‖ (something
Uncle Robin points out to Cato‘s sidekick, Mingy Moe), is unwilling to admit to
the reality of Canada. Out of his narrow-minded vision, Cato says:
The part about Canada is just done to throw you off his trail.
That nigger ain‘t no Canada. There ain‘t no such place; that just
reactionary mysticism. I never seed no Canada, so there can‘t be
none. The only thing exists is what I see. Seeing is believing. (FC 63)
The sadistic Mammy Barracuda (a barracuda is a dangerous and aggressive
fish), who literally ―whips‖ and wrestles Swille‘s household (including his wife)
into line (FC 68), has ―re-signed‖ herself to ―Christian‖ punishment of sin (FC 29).
Aunt Judy tells Uncle Robin of Mammy‘s notion of Canada:
As for Canada, she (Barracuda) said they skin niggers up there and
make lampshades and soap dishes out of them, and it‘s more
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Jyothy, C.R. 142
barbarous in Toronto than darkest Africa, a place where we came
from and for that reason should pray hard every night for the
godliness of a man like Swille to deliver us from such a place. (FC 68)
This is preposterously funny because he is an unlikely and eccentric part of
the secret Underground Railroad for the escaped slave, Raven Quickstill, and his
girlfriend, Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara.
Yankee Jack, a vicious-but-mellowing pirate, has his own ideas about, and
experience of, Canada; he tries to dissuade Raven and Quaw Quaw from going
there by saying:
Do you think it‘ll be any different in Canada? The free population is
getting too big. There have been incidents. Grave incidents.
Students from the West Indies manhandled. Fugitives stoned.
Canadian parents, refusing to send their children to school with
‗coloreds.‘ And, have you every heard of the Mounted Police?
Vicious. After those huskies, you‘d welcome the bloodhounds like
wolves. They catch the flesh and won‘t let go. They have mean
habits. And, don‘t let the Prime Minister fool you. He may throw a
Potlatch once in a while, but he‘s still a white man. He sees himself
as a white man in a white man‘s country. (FC 162)
Arthur Swille knows that Canada exists, and is part of his plantation.
Offering a job to Abraham Lincoln, Swille says: ―I need a man like you up in my
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Jyothy, C.R. 143
Canadian mills. You can be a big man up there. We treat the Canadians like
coons‖ (FC 37).
This racist reference to Blacks as ―coons‖ aims back at the extension of the
appetites of the American frontier (where Daniel Boone wore a ―coonskin cap‖),
in its westward push from the American South where Blacks were branded and
chased like raccoons by dogs, if they escaped the plantations, northward, towards
the furs, gold and lumber of Canada and Alaska.
Carpenter, a free slave named for his building trade, (which is symbol of
the process of building a new life in Canada), is beaten up in Canada and learns the
hard way that Canada is part of Swille‘s world. He shares his personal ―re-search‖ on
Canada (as failed home) with Raven Quickstill, the protagonist and fugitive slave
about to go into Canada:
Of the top ten Canadian Corporations, four are dominated by
American interest. Americans control fifty-five percent of sales of
manufactured goods and make sixty-three percent of the profits.
They receive fifty-five percent of mining sales and forty percent of
paper sales. Man, Americans own Canada. They just permit
Canadians to operate it for them. (FC 174)
The two other fugitive slaves, Stray Leechfield and 40s, who escape, like
Raven Quickstill, from Arthur Swille‘s plantation in Virginia, are equally pessimistic
about Canada as a place of freedom. Leechfield has ―strayed‖ to ―Canada‖ to
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Jyothy, C.R. 144
continue his confidence games; his partner, Mel Leer – who used to sell him as
a slave in the South, and then steal him back to repeat the process (FC 91) – is
pornographically with repressed, Puritan women who ―openly‖ hire him as
(sexual) ―slave for a day‖ (FC 79, 82, 91), and who recall Reed‘s version of
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Leechfield sees Canada as ―a white man‘s country‖ (FC 86),
where he can nevertheless make enough money with his pornography to ―cash‖ his
way out of history‖ (FC 18) and slavery. Stray says to Raven: ―I sent Swille a
check. Look, Quickstill, money is what makes them go. Economics‖ (FC 85).
The hilarity and paradox of Leechfield‘s pornography which parodies
freedom as nothing more than the freedom to sell oneself into further or different
slavery, is in his defense of it as the only possible individual act; as he says to
Raven:
See, Quickstill, the difference between you and me is that you sneak,
while I don‘t... (You house slaves). Always rooting for somebody,
and when you do it, say we did it. I got tired of doing it. ―We did
it‖ wasn‘t buying my corn, molasses and biscuits. Where was ―we
did it‖ when I was doing without, huh? When I was broke and hungry.
So, I decided to do something that only I could do. So, that‘s why I‘m
doing what I‘m doing. What I‘m doing is something ―we did it‖
can‘t do, unless we did it one at a time. You follow.? (FC 85)
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Jyothy, C.R. 145
In ―Canada, ‖ the ugliness of dogs sent after runaway slaves is changed into
sexual perversion of adding the bloodhound to Leechfield‘s sexual ―act.‖ (FC 82).
If Leechfield is prepared to ―shoot‖ his way to freedom with a camera, Raven‘s
other fellow fugitive slave ―40s,‖ is prepared to shoot his rifle to maintain his freedom.
Like Leechfield, 40s believes that Canada is a white man‘s country; but unlike
Leechfield, he does not believe he can buy his way out of a slavery that is menacingly
omnipresent. 40s carries the burden of all the old American ―fears of conspiracy.‖
When Raven knocks on his door, 40s responds by saying:
―Who‘s there?‖ 40s opened the door on Quickstill. He had a shotgun
aimed at him. ―Aw, 40s, put it away. We‘re not in Virginia no more.‖
40s spat. ―That‘s what you think. Shit. Virginia everywhere. Virginia
outside. You might be Virginia....‖ ―Immigrants comin over here.
Raggedy Micks, Dagos and things. Jews. The Pope is behind it...
The Pope and them be in them places plotting. They getting ready to
kill Lincoln so‘s they can rule American. (FC 87-88)
The belief of 40s, whose name partly recalls the unfulfilled promise of
―forty acres and a mule‖ to blacks during Reconstruction (after the Civil War) in
the American South, is a pun on the old cliche: ―a man‘s home is his castle.‖
Thus, Canada is the Promised Land and 40s says to Raven: ―You ought to get your
own home instead of watching them for people. I got my home‖ (FC 87).
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Jyothy, C.R. 146
Raven, knowing the feudal power of Swille, ―shoots down‖ this modest
proposal of 40s for the long-promised home by asking him: ―how can a ‗fuge‘
(fugitive slave) have his own home, 40s? Why, I‘d be a sitting duck. Swille‘s
claimants and catchers could find me any time they wished.‖ (FC 87-88). 40s is a
little uneasy with his answer:
―I got something for them. This rifle.‖ (FC 88). So, as Quickstill is
about to leave, he takes him to the window, points to the mountains
and adds: ―I can hide up there for twenty years and don‘t have to
worry.‖ (FC 91)
Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, Raven‘s lover, both depresses and amuses him
when she is childishly ecstatic about accompanying him to Canada (FC 116-117).
She sees Canada as a place to practice her art. Raven, like his fellow fugitive
salves, is stubborn. When Jack, the pirate, tires to warn him that Canada is as
enslaved as America to the likes of Swille, Raven quotes the old Hoodoo saying:
―Once you start for a place, there‘s no turning back‖ (FC 161). In spite of the ugly
things he is learning about the ―real‖ Canada, Raven says, ―I have to have my
Canada.‖ (FC 161). And, connecting the lives of other slaves, Raven says of
himself, ―He preferred Canada to slavery, whether Canada was exile (e.g. 40s),
death (e.g. Carpenter‘s near miss, and those ―grave incidents‖ mentioned by
Yankee Jack against freed slaves), art (e.g. Quaw Quaw‘s tightrope walk),
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Jyothy, C.R. 147
liberation (e.g. those slaves who were ecstatic over arriving in Canada), or a
woman (e.g. Leechfield‘s Beecherite).‖ (FC 99)
It is in the thoughts of Robin, Raven‘s fellow house slave, about Canada
that one begins to understand Raven‘s way out of this dilemma that arises from the
discrepancy between Raven‘s dream of liberation and reality of a repressive,
Americanized Canada. Thinking of Raven and musing to himself, Robin thinks:
―I guess Canada, like freedom, is a state of mind‖ (FC 191).
At the end of the book, Raven has accepted the invitation to write Robin‘s
story, which is a part of his own. As Raven tells 40s:
―Words built the world and words can destroy the world‖ (FC 92).
Raven finally can admit himself that ―it was his writing that got him
to Canada... freedom was his writing. His writing was his Hoodoo,
but this was his writing. It fascinated him, it possessed him; his
typewriter was his drum he danced to.‖ (FC 100).
Quaw Quaw confirms the view of Raven‘s typewriter as her talisman in her
letter when she says that Raven‘s ―typewriter was sitting there and seemed to be
crouched like a black frog with white clatter for teeth‖ (FC 21). And, in the
―flashback‖ at the beginning of the book, Raven says, while talking about the theft
of Josiah Henson‘s book by ―Naughty Harriet‖ Beecher Stowe, ―A man‘s story is
his gris gris, you know.‖ (FC 16)
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Jyothy, C.R. 148
Thematically, Reed tries to rediscover the still largely untold role of blacks
as creators of America‘s culture, or as word sorcerers who maintain a secret
culture, which pervades all of American culture. The untold role of blacks as
creators of American culture – or as keepers of secret culture which at appropriate
moments invades the main-stream... has been a dominant theme in Reed‘s fictions.
He portrays his black characters as the creators of American culture. In fact, they
assume the stance of ‗keepers of secret culture‘ that at times invade the
mainstream, which deliberately used as the dominant theme in his fiction.
Ishmael Reed has succeeded in caricaturing an array of crucial personalities
of American blacks and whites – of Swille‘s Uncle Robin, Raven and even
Lincoln. A good part of the novel is taken up by Raven‘s adventures on his long-
cherished sanctuary, that is Canada, which abounds in unforgettable scenes of
black humor and wit. Raven‘s misadventures and encounters among the half-
world of fugitives, slave catchers and freebooters provide the readers with several
instances of irony and native wit. Raven, finally makes it to Canada – the ultimate
destination of his long-cherished dream, the ecstasy which his passengers
experienced is indescribable. He says:
They seemed to be transformed, a new light shone in their eyes, their
tongues were loosed, they laughed and cried, prayed and sang
praises, fell upon the ground and kissed it, tugged and kissed each
other, crying Bless de Lord! Oh! I‘se free before I die!. (FC155)
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Jyothy, C.R. 149
Swille and Uncle Robin give the book its life, and Reed can shape them
with a line when he wants to. ―People don‘t know when the Swilles came to
Virginia, and the Swilles ain‘t talkin,‖ suggests as much about the diabolical
nature of Swille‘s hold on his possessions as a list of his perversions. Reed‘s
portrayal of Allen Poe, the principal biographer of the Civil War, his rendering of
Swille‘s death provokes a sense of absolute and pervasive morbidity. Swille, the
personified evil and depravity, a wretched necrophile and the last word in
wretchedness becomes the living devil in the mind of the readers. And again,
Reed succeeds in intertwining black humor with the ability in the delineation of
character. In Flight to Canada, Reed offers what can be called a post modern
analysis of the US as a nation, by bringing to light the shaky foundations of its
integrity and hence questioning its validity as a concept in today‘s world.
Here, Reed satirises the two major recurring characters, Abraham Lincoln
and Harriet Beecher Stowe, implying that ―neither the political nor the sentimental
appeal to solidarity with the slaves constitutes a valid way of effectively constructing
a new nation.‖ Reed exposes the two white national figures associated with
abolitionism as simultaneously representative of a racially restrictive concept of
national identity. Since America fails to reverse itself as a nation, Canada emerges
as the site of the post national desire.
The novel capitalizes on the ambiguities that surround Abraham Lincoln‘s
relationship to nation and race. There has been a view that Lincoln did not envisage
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Jyothy, C.R. 150
social equality between blacks and whites. In an 1854 speech against the Kansas
Nebraska Act, which repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise and left the Kansas-
Nebraska territory open to popular sovereignty on the issue of slavery, Lincoln
recognized that his ―own feelings‖ would not admit of equality: ―A universal
feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded‖ (175).
According to him, slavery is wrong because it goes against the belief in
equality as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. At the same time, the
question of social equality and of the rights of blacks to participate equally in the
nation destiny is decided on the ground of a ―universal feeling,‖ which indeed he
knows to be shared by many white Americans. The nation turns out to be founded
on this supposedly universal feeling, in effect the distillation of white racial
prejudice.
The novel presents Lincoln as a player, a minstrel, a wearer of marks. Reed
portrays Lincoln as a weathercock eager to please all his constituencies, he exposes
the nation as based less on republican principles than on the co-optation of diverse
elements of national union. While, Lincoln represents the desire to preserve
national unity in the country without slavery, his presence also signifies the
establishment of a white order once he has decided that he wants to emancipate the
slaves, he devises the means to make his decision popular:
We change the issues, don‘t you see? Instead of making this some
kind of oratorical minuet about States‘ Rights versus the Union,
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Jyothy, C.R. 151
what we do is make it so that you can‘t be for the South without
being for slavery! I want you to get that portrait painter, Feller Denis
Carter to come into the office, where he‘ll show me signing the ......
the Emancipation Proclamation. (FC 49)
He seems to consider it imperative to draw an immediate connection between
his decision to emphasize the role of slavery, and thus of race, in the division of
the nation and his own pictorial representation. In other words, race will only be
allowed to come between North and South on the condition that it be associated
with a clear depiction of his-white-body as a maker of that decision. Only the
presence of his whiteness can counterbalance the presence of black bodies
standing between the two parts of the nation.
During Lincoln‘s assassination, the narrator intermixes sensual description
of Quickstill‘s and Quaw Quaw Tralaralara‘s lovemaking scenes. The lovers
represent a possible definition of American identity through the depiction of
interracial bliss. Then, just when they ―reached the hilt‖ (102), they hear a scream:
the assassin has fired a shot. The implication seems clear: Not without the death
of Lincoln and what he represents can a new, multiracial kind of nation be created.
The novel does end with a definite note of admiration: ―Old Abe showed them,
though. What a player Abe showed those Dukes and Earls‖ (178). Reed does not
attribute any redeeming quality to Harriet Beecher Stowe, she spreads the rumor
that he was ―illiterate‖ (FC 7). Reed in fact accuses her of ruining the Planters
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Jyothy, C.R. 152
(FC 8). A ―Toady to Nobility‖ (8), her ties to the white upper class combine her
association with the white publishing world of the North to make her into a typical
representative of the white monoculture‘s hegemony over national stories.
The novel also ridicules Stokle‘s brand of feminism, Mammy Barracuda‘s
violent reaction to Mrs. Swille‘s newfangled feminist desires possibly indicates
her fear of a new order in which she might lose the small amount of pokler she has
managed to establish for herself under slavery. Like any other kind of national
union, solidarity between the white women of the North and the South can only, in
spite of their materialistic gestures toward black women, lead to a different form
of subjugation. Thus, Mammy Barracuda provides an insight into the racial
thinking that will shape up in future. Quickstill‘s flight to canada is not a post
national gesture. As for the fugitive slaves, fleeing to Canada represents leaving
an oppressive nation and entering one that at least had no slavery on the books.
The novel takes a particular pleasure in emphasizing the South as harboring a
primitive, medieval culture. It weaves threat between its aristocratic tendencies,
its gothic nature, its reverence of Camelot, its sickly femininity as its immorality.
When Quickstill flees north, he supposedly enters the true, modern national
space. During his visit to the White House, Lincoln‘s son congratulates him on his
poem: his flamboyant entrance into both literacy and the literacy world makes him
a ―national institution‖ 9FC 84). In quite a timely fashion, Beulahland Review
agrees to publish his poem, paying him two hundred dollars and consecrating his
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Jyothy, C.R. 153
status as a new writer in the modern nation. Reed uses his Hoodoo vocabulary to
emphasize the special meaning of writing for Quickstill: ―While others had their
tarot card, their ouija boards, their I-Ching, their cowrie shells, he had his ‗writings‘‖
(FC 88). Indeed, ―others had their way of Hoodoo, but his was his writing.‖
Ironically, though it is precisely this magical appeal of writing that brings
him closer to modernity, he has a similar love affair with modern technology.
When he meets Quaw Quaw again at a friend‘s party, she lures him to the den by
appealing to his love for television:
There‘s a television set. I will never forget how much you like
television. You would keep it on without even looking at it.‖
He quickly replies: ―I‘m glad to know it‘s there. The world will
disappear if it‘s not there. (FC 97)
Obviously in tune with the modern fabrication of the world through images,
Quickstill seems to have ended up in a world that through his sensibility he has
always belonged to. But, he quickly realizes that he has no real place in this world.
His new found mobility becomes the symptom of an errant diaspora rather than a
sign of free movement: ―He kept walking against the shop windows, sliding
around the corner. He was a fugitive‖ (FC 76).
The character‘s passage to Canada hints at an action more complex than
expatriation. In its description of Quaw Quaw and Quickstill‘s movement across
the novel hints at a new conceptualization of national identity or rather a
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Jyothy, C.R. 154
rethinking beyond the nation. Although danger is a natural component of the trip
and actually an important aspect of the fugitive slave narrative as a genre, the
novel‘s dwelling on risk allows a parallel with Beck‘s theory. The novel involves
narrow thinking and its attendant forms of oppression. Before he crosses over,
Quickstill gives an antislavery lecture in Buffalo, NY during which he realizes that
―some of the people in the audience wanted more fire‖ (FC 144), and that the black
members in the audience are especially rude. He feels that they are judging him:
Slaves judged other slaves like the auctioneer and his clients judged
them. Was there no end to slavery? Was a slave condemned to serve
another master as soon as he got rid of one? Were overseers to be
replaced by new overseers? Was this some game, some fickle
punishment for sins committed in former lives? Slavery on top of
slavery? Would he ever be free to do what he pleased as long as he
didn‘t interfere with another man‘s rights? Slaves held each other in
bondage; a hostile stare from one slave criticizing the behaviors of
another slave could be just as painful as a spiked collar – a gesture as
fettering as a cage. (FC 144)
Reed conveys his resentment of Black Nationalism‘s narrow-minded agendas,
publicly in this novel. Reed sees the risk of the same monolithic thought pattern
that produced racism. As he and Quaw Quaw pick up their luggage and leave,
they are fleeing any form of narrow nationalism. Yankee Jack, Quaw Quaw‘s
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Jyothy, C.R. 155
husband represents the ultimate oppressor, the invisible hand behind the supposed
freedom of ideas and freedom of the press. Quickstill makes it clear:
At least we fuges know we‘re slaves, constantly hunted, but you
enslave everybody. Making saps of them all. You, the man behind
a distribution network, remaining invisible while your underlings
become the fall guys. (FC 146)
In a process of obfuscation not dissimilar from the workings of the nation,
Yankee Jack carried Quaw Quaw away from her village when she was fourteen,
sent her to the best schools and made her white. Now, ―she is under a white spell
and has no feeling for her own people‘s culture‖ (FC 147).
In the meantime, he buried her brother in the Metropolitan Museum and is
using her father‘s skull as an ashtray. Yankee Jack and his yacht represent forms
of white washing or social processes that lead to a ―lack of identity.‖ (FC 149)
In a movement that emphasizes that she might be the character most at risk, she
jumps off the ship while the men are fighting. When they stop to look at her,
―Quaw Quaw is swimming, moving away from the ship, in the treacherous rapids
of the Niagara River‖ (FC 151).
Both, Quickstill‘s and Quaw Quaw‘s ways of reaching free soil evince
simultaneously an exhilaration at the prospect of entering a new mode of being
and an intimation of the dangers and illusions inherent in the process. When
Quickstill finally ―Reached the other side,‖ and before he steps down into the
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Jyothy, C.R. 156
canoe that will take him to the banks, he refuses to shake Yankee Jack‘s extended
hand, promising to kill him if he ever sees him on free ground. As Quickstill is
leaving, Yankee Jack launches into an explanation of how he killed Quaw Quaw‘s
brother as the latter was protesting the racist and paternalistic statue of Theodore
Roosevelt ―sitting on a horse with a black slave and an Indian obsequiously
kneeling next to it, like the President‘s children. (FC 154) That the murder took
place in the Museum of National history, where he is now stuffed and exhibited in
the lower floor, reinforces the image of a nation where racism is naturalized and
even neutralized through sham forms of reverence and contrition. But the chapter
ends with a scene of ecstasy, in which a historical witness of fugitive slave‘s
arrival on free soil changes his view of the people he has just transported.
As Quickstill is sitting at a terrace in Niagara Falls, enjoying this heavenly
spot where ―people of all races, classes, descriptions seemed to be,‖ he was looking
with wonder at the ―terrifying rapids below‖ (FC 156). He slowly makes out a
figure in the mist, who seems to be walking on a tightrope. He soon realizes that it
is Quaw Quaw walking backward, carrying a banner. In the first image, Quaw
Quaw walks backward her eyes still directed at the nation she is leaving and which
is pushing her out. Reed is an active and an important proponent of cultural
pluralism; In a 1988 interview with Shamoon Zamir, he says:
So, I think nationalism is sort of a mystical idea among Afro
American people. Black separatism, on the upside, instills black
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Jyothy, C.R. 157
pride, which, I think, is better to be high on that on cocaine, but one
the downside it plays into the hands of racists. It is also negative,
arrogant and cynical. (Dick 282)
Reed‘s multiculturalism, which he has espoused, if not theorized, for many
years, stems from a healthy and insightful criticism of the white monoculture he
had to grow up with. In 1976, he published 19 Necromancers from Now, a
multicultural anthology. In 1976, he co-founded the Before Columbus Foundation, a
multi-ethnic publishing house, in order to foster an awareness of various cultures.
Although a passionate denunciator of racism who has especially pointed out the
fate of black men in America, he manages to convey the sense that his respect
goes out to forms of culture and aesthetic rather than race. In fact, he likes to
point out differences in points of view within the black community and rightly
attacks the politics of racial tokenism. He is also generous with praise for forms of
white culture he appreciates. While his judgments are often clear-cut and tersely
put, he conveys a sense of openness and tolerance for difference. Reed said in
1978, ―I think the problem in America is assimilation. I think the problem is the
melting pot‖ (Dick 167).
Reed‘s multiculturalism stands for a global vision. This vision comes out
clearly in his Introduction to Multi America, a collection he has edited about
―cultural wars and cultural peace.‖ Here he quotes approving from T.S Elliot‘s
essay American Literature and Language: ―And though it is only too easy for a
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Jyothy, C.R. 158
writer to be local without being universal, I doubt whether a poet or novelist can
be universal without being local (XXI). Reed brings up the example of Alex Haley‘s
Roots, which ―became an archetype for men everywhere, because Haley tapped
into the anxiety of American Europeans, based upon their not knowing where they
came from‖ (XXII).
Significantly, Haley manifests his locality by tapping into white American‘s
desire to explore their whiteness, the way Roots explored the origins of blackness
in American. Thus, by contributing to a biracial, but very national, story Haley
accedes to the universal. Reed‘s aim is to develop a ―new, inclusive definition of
the common culture‖ (XXVI). He quotes Bharati Mukherjee, when she implies
that the logic of multiculturalism fosters separatism. Reed aims at a ―reconciliation‖
between monoculturalists and multiculturalists (XXVI). Mentioning the often
remarked – on American difference, he ends his essay with the hope that ―defining
the difference may provide the key to our common culture‖ (XXVIII).
Reed seems to combine a multicultural desire with forms of American
cultural nationalism not dissimilar from the ones George Hutchinson has identified
in the Harlem Renaissance. For Hutchinson, the New Negroes eschewed both
cultural conformism and separatism, in order to evolve an American Cultural
Nationalism that would reconceptualize America along racial lines. Reed displays
a similar sensibility in his desire for a cultural pluralism that will transcend
separatism and hopefully meet in the higher regions of a national common culture.
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Jyothy, C.R. 159
Through this novel, Reed intimates the possibility of moving beyond the concept
of the nation. The postmodern, post national gesture comes out best in a genre
that ideally combines the narrative and the metaphorical, in one best suited to
mirror the formation and deformation of national consciousness.
His depiction of the character‘s movement to Canada can be seen as
simultaneously an uncovering of the race-based foundation of the US as a nation,
and the projection of a possible reconceptualization of the world beyond nationalism.
Ultimately, Reed retreats from his post modern vision back into a nation-based
philosophy, in which multiculturalism carries the hope of a nation without racism.
Canada means different things to different people; each of the characters in
Ishmael Reed‘s Flight to Canada has his or her own view of Canada. Reed quotes
a description of the arrival of earlier slaves who esaped to Canada and were, at
least at first jubilant. He writes:
They seemed to be transformed; a new light shown in their eyes,
their tongue were loosened, they laughed and cried, prayed and sang
praises, fell upon and ground and kissed each other, carrying ―Bress
de load! Oh! I‘se free before I die‖.! (FC 168)
For the slaves in Reed‘s novel who stay on the plantation owned by the
nefarious Arthur Swille, Canada with ―nada‖, meaning ―nothing‖ in Spanish,
hiding inside the (word) is as inevitable as a dream or nightmare. Cato the
Graffado overseer, unwilling to see himself as Arthur Swille‘s ―white slave‖
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Jyothy, C.R. 160
(something uncle Robin points oout to Cato‘s sidekick, Mingy Moe)2 is unwilling
to admit to the reality of Canada. Out of his narrow – mindedness and tunnel
vision, Cato remarks:
That part about Canada is just done to throw you off his trail. That
nigger ain‘t in no Canada. There ain‘t no such place, that‘s just
reactionary mysticism. I never seed no Canada, so there can‘t be
none. The only thing exists is what Isee. Seeing is believing. (FC 63)
The sadistic Mammy Barracuda (a barracuda is a dangerous and aggressive
fish), who literally ―whips‖ and wrestles Swille‘s household (including his wife)
into line (FC 68), has ―re-signed‖ herself to ―Christian‖ punishment of Sin (FC 29).
Aunt Judy tells Uncle Robin of Mammy‘s notion of Canada:‖ As for Canada, She
(Barracuda) said they skin niggers up there and makes lampshades and soup dishes
out of them, and it‘s more barbarous in Toronto than darkest Africa, a place where
we come from and for that rreason should pray hard every night for the godliness
of man like Swille to deliver us from such a place.‖ (FC 68). This is preposterously
funny until Yankee Jack – he is unlikely and eccentric part of the secret underground
Railroad (that transported slaves into Canada) for the escaped slave, Raven
Quickskill, and his girlfriend, Princess quaw Quaw Tralaralara (who is also Jack‘s
wife) – talks about his ashtray made from the skull of an Indian chied (Quaw
Quaw‘s father, FC 158).
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Jyothy, C.R. 161
Yankee Jack, a vicious-but-mellowing pirate, has his own ideas about, and
experience of, Canada; he tries to dissuade Raven and Quaw Quaw from going
there by saying:
Do you, think it‘ll be any different in Canada? The free population
is getting too big. There have been incidents. Grave incidents.
Students from the West Indies manhandled.Fugitives stoned.
Canadian parents refusing to send, their children to school with
‗coloreds.‘ And have you ever heard of the Mounted Police?
Vicious. After those huskies, you‘d welcome the bloodhounds. Like
wolves. They catch the flesh and won‘t let go. They have mean
habits. And don‘t let the Prime Minister fool you. He may throw a
Potlatch once in a while, but he‘s still a whiteman in a white man‘s
country. (FC 162)
Arthur Swille knows that Canada exists, and is part of his plantation.
Offering a job to Abrahim Lincoln, Swille says: ―I need a man like you up in my
Canadian mills. You can be a big man up there. We treat the Canadians like
coons‖ (FC 37).
This racist reference to blacks as ―coons‖ aims back at the extension of the
appetites of the American frontier (where Daniel Boone wore a ―coonskin cap‖),
in its westward push from the American South (where blacks are branded and
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Jyothy, C.R. 162
chased like raccoons by dogs, if they escaped the plantations) northward, toward
the furs, glod and lumber of Canada and Alaska.
Carpenter, a free slave named for his building trade, (which is symbol of
the process of building a new life in Canada), is beaten up in Canada and learns
the hard way, that Canada is part of Swille‘s world. He shares his personal
―re-search‖ on Canada (as failed home) with Raven Quickskill, the protagonist and
fugitive slave about to go into Canada:
Of the top ten Canadian, corporations, four are dominated by
American interests. Americans control fifty five percent of sales of
manufactured goods and make sixty-three percent of the profits.
They receive fifty-five percent of mining sales and forty percent of
paper sales . Man, Americans own Canada. They just permit
Canadians to operate it for them. (FC 174)
The two other fugitive slaves, Stray Leech field and ―40s,‖ who escape like
Raven Quickskill, from Arthur Suille‘s plantation in Virginia, are equally pessismistic
about Canada as a place of freedom. Leechfield has ―strayed‖ to ―Canada‖ to
continue his confidence games; his partner Mel Leer(3) --- who used to sell him as
a slave in the South, and then steel him back to repeat the process (FC 91) --- is
now photographing Leechfield pornographically with repressed, Puritan women
who ―openly: hire him as (sexual) slave for a day‖ (FC 79, 82, 91), and who recall
Reed‘s version of Harriet Beccher Stowe. (4)Leechfield sees Canada as ― a white
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Jyothy, C.R. 163
man‘s country‖ (FC 86), where he can nevertheless make enough money with his
pornography to ―Cash (his) Way out of history‖ (FC 18) and slavery. Stray says to
Raven: ―I sent Swille a check. Look Quickskill, money is what makes them go.
Economics.‖ (FC 85).
The hilarity and paradox of Leechfield‘s pornography, which parodies
freedom as nothing more than the freedom to sell oneself into further or different
slavery, is in his defense of it as the only possible individual act, as he says to
Raven:
See, Quickskill, the difference between you and me is that you
sneak, while I don‘t --- (You house Slaves) Always rooting for
somebody, and when you do it, say we did it. I got tired of doing it.
―We did it‖ wasn‘t buying my corn, molasses and biscuits. Where
was ―We did it‖ when I was doing without, huh? When I was broke
and hungry. So I decided to do something that only I could do, so
that‘s why I‘m doing what I‘, doing. What I‘m doing. What I‘m
doing is something ―we did it‖ can‘t do, unless we did it one at a
time. You follow?. (FC 85)
In ―Canada‖ the ugliness of dogs sent after runaway slaves is changed into
the sexual perversion of adding the bloodhound to Leechfield‘s sexual ―act‖ (FC 82).
If Leechfield is prepared to ―shoot‖ his way to freedom with a camera, Raven‘s
other fellow fugitive slave, ―40s, ― is prepared to shoot his rifle to maintain his
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Jyothy, C.R. 164
freedom. Like Leechfield, 40s believes that Canada is a white man‘s country; but
unlike Leechfield, he does not believe he can buy his way out of a slavery that is
menacingly omnipresent. 40s carries the burden of what some would call the
―paranoia‖ of all the old American ―fears of conspiracy.‖
When Raven knocks on his doors, 40s response by saying;
―Who‘s there?‖40s opened the door on Quickskill. He had a shot
gun aimed at him. ―Aw, 40s, put it away. We‘re not in Virginia no
more.‖ 40s spat. ―That‘s what you think. Shit. Virginia everywhere.
Virginia outside. You might be Virginia.----‖ ―Immigrants comin
over here. Raggedy Micks, Dagos and things. Jews. The Pope is
behind it----. The Pope and them be in them places plottin. They
getting ready to kill Lincoln So‘s they can rule America.‖ (FC 87 – 88).
The belief of 40s, whose name partly recalls the unfulfilled promise of
―forty acres and a mule‖ to blacks during Reconstruction (after the Civil War) in
the American South, is a pun on the old cliché:
a man‘s home is his Castle.‖ Thus Canada is the Promised Land,
and 40s says to Raven:―You ought to get your own home instead of
watching them for peoples. I got my home.‖ (FC 87). Raven, knowing
the feudal power of Swille,‖ shoots down‖ this modest proposal of
40s for the long promised home by asking him: : How can a ‗fuge‘
[fugitive slave] have his own home, 40s? Why I‘d be a sitting duck.
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Jyothy, C.R. 165
Swille‘s claimants and catchers could find me anytime they
wished.‖ (FC 87 -88). 40s is a little uneasy with his answer: ― I got
something for them. This rifle.‖ (FC 88). So, as Quickskill is about
to leave, he takes him to the window, points to the mountains and
adds: ― I can hide up there for twenty years and don‘t have to
worry.‖ (FC 91).
Raven is unable to bridge the gap between ―field nigger‖ and ―house slave‖.
He makes one last bitter attempt when he says to 40s: ―I ----- I can‘t understand
you guys. You, Leechfield, irrational, bitter. You still see me as a Castle black,
some kind of abstraction. If we don‘t pull together, we are lost.‖ (FC 89).
Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, Raven‘s lover, both depresses and amuses him
when she is childishly ecstatic about accompanying him to Canada (FC 116 -7).
(5) She sees Canada as a place to practice her art. When she walks backwards into
Canada on a tightrope stretched across Niagra falls and ―plays up‖ to the crowds
of tourists watching her, she is insensitive and oblivious to the symbol of her
(past, Native American) ―home land‖ (in ―Buffalo,‖Newyork)6 that she is ―backing
away‖ from; the fact that, since she is a Native American, her tight rope walking is
in their tradition of Urban Native American Steel workers who maneuver dangerously
at the top of sky scapers during their construction; and Canada as the Promised
Land of runaway slaves like Raven (even though he tells her of this).
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Jyothy, C.R. 166
Raven, like his fellow fugitive Slaves, is stubborn. When Jack, the pirate,
tries to warn him that Canada is as enslaved as America to the likes of Swille, Raven
quotes the old HooDoo saying:― Once you start for a place, there‘s no turning
back‖ (FC 161). Inspite of the ugly things he learning about the ―rreal‖ Canada
Raven says: ― I have to have my Canada.‖ (FC 161). And connecting the lives of
other slaves Raven says of himself: ― He preffered Canada was exile [eg.40s],
death [e.g. Carpenter‘s near miss, and those ― grave incidents‖ mentioned by
Yankee Jack against freed slaves], art [eg. Quaw Quaw‘s tightrope walk], liberation
[e.g. those laves who were ecstatic over arriving in Canada], or a woman
[e.g. Leechfield‘s Beecherile].‖ (FC 99).
It is in the thoughts of Robin, Raven‘s fellow house slave, about Canada that
one begins to understand Raven‘s way out of this dilemma that arises from the
discrepancy between Raven‘s dream of liberation and the reality of a repressive,
Americanized Canada. Thinking of Raven, and musing to himself, Robin think:
―I guess Canada, like freedom, is a state of mind.‖ (FC, 191). At the
end of the book, Raven has accepted the invitation to write Robin‘s
story, which is part of his own. As Raven tells 40s: ― Words built the
world and words can destroy the world.‖ (FC, 92). IF 40s answer ---
- ―rifle. That‘s the only word I need. R-I-f-l-e. Click.‖ (FC, 92)---.
Can destroy the world, Raven is partly the healer of Native
American mythology who keeps ―re-building‖ the world. (7)
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Jyothy, C.R. 167
Raven finally admits about himself that:
it was his writing that got him to Canada ---- freedom was his
writing. His writing was his Hoo Doo. Others had their way of Hoo
Doo, but his was his writing. It fascinated him, it possessed him; his
typewriter was his drum he danced to. (FC, 100).
Quaw Quaw confirms this view of Raven‘s typewriter as talisman in her
letter when she says that Raven‘s ―typewriter was sitting there and seemed to be
crouched like a black frog with white clatter for teeth.‖ (FC, 21). And in the
―flashback‖ at the beginning of the book, Raven says while talking about the theft
of Josiah Henson‘s book by ―Naughty Harriet‖ Beecher Stowe, ―A man‘s story is
his gris, gris, you know.‖ (FC, 16).
In Ishmael Reed‘s Flight to Canada, Canada is no better than America, and
just as ―outrageous‖ as, the America pictured in the novel. It has, for example the
same American corporations, and secret societies similar to those in the United
States. There is a black man who, as fugitive slave, rents himself as ―slave for a
day‖ to repressed (read ―puritan‖), white, abolitionist women partly to make lucrative
pornopraphy. And there is a gun-toting ―squatter‖ in a remote cabin, a fugitive
slave who trusts no one. Reed, flying with Raven, Robin, Judy and others in Flight
to Canada, is such a healer; somehow, he manages, despite the seriousness of the
subject (s), to ―keep us in stitches.‖
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Jyothy, C.R. 168
The final chapter Summation: Positive Impact on American Ethos is a
coalescence of all the chapters discussed earlier. It emphasises on the value of
multiculturalism and succeeds in debating the controversy whether a melting-pot
model or a multicultural model is better for the health of a nation. The novels
Mumbo Jumbo, Japanese by Spring and Flight to Canada value diverse identities
eventually embracing solidarity amidst cultural diversity. This in turn paves a way
for a peaceful living at large. It is imperative to realise that Unity in Diversity is
the quintessence of a modern democratic system, and that Ishmael Reed
steadfastedly holds aloft the cardinal principle in the novels.
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