Revisiting Slave Narratives I
|The Americas
Her/His- (s)tory: Confronting the “shackles” of the African-American Urtext: Walker, Gaines, Reed Re-write the Slave Narrative
Résumé
In 1966, Margaret Walker published Jubilee. Five years later, Ernest Gaines published his Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In 1976, Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada was released. In a ten years’ span three prominent figures from the African-American literary world chose to confront the Slave Narrative tradition. These three examples of an attempt at revisiting the literary myth of the Slave Narrative, provide a corpus which offers three different approaches to this literary canon - three significant modalities of confronting the African-American Urtext, in other words the “primal text”. Indeed, the differences in the narrative mode and the overall tone of these works are to be assessed as the expression of the writers’ view on the conceptual interplay between History, historical truth and imaginative truth. What is an African-American writer to do when faced with the African-American Urtext? Is s/he to enter the chain of transmission, manipulate it for educative reasons or deconstruct the myth in order to reveal its actual value? The characters in these three Neo-Slave Narratives as well as their authors ask the fundamental question: can the end always justify the means?
Texte intégral
1In a ten-year span, between 1966 and 1976, three prominent African-American writers decided to revisit the slave narrative tradition. Margaret Walker published her acclaimed Jubilee in 1966. Five years later, Ernest Gaines published his Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. And in 1976, the year of the bicentennial, Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada was released. These three works testify to a common desire to confront the literary myth of the slave narrative, a literary canon, which might be regarded as the African-American Urtext, in other words the “primal text”. By this I mean that the slave narrative tradition is the basis on which African-American fiction is built. The African-American Urtext is the “always already” that pre-exists all African-American fiction writing. Yet, these three “narratives” offer differing modalities of rewriting the canon. First, in the gender combinations relating author and protagonist. As a matter of fact, Jubilee was written by a woman and tells the story of a black woman. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman tells the story of a black woman as well but was written by a man. As for Flight to Canada, the narrative mainly revolves around one male character and was written by a male writer. The second significant difference concerns the span of time covered by these narratives: Margaret Walker’s novel starts some twenty years before the Civil War and ends around 1870. Gaines’s covers a period going from the end of the Civil War to the 1960s. Reed’s central text is anchored in the Civil War years and so covers the shortest span though we’ll see that time is a notion that is constantly being subverted in Flight to Canada. But, the differences in the narrative mode as well as in the overall tone of these works are to be assessed as the expression of the writers’ view on the conceptual interplay between History, historical truth and imaginative truth. Indeed, what is an African-American writer to do when faced with the Urtext? Enter the chain of transmission? Manipulate it for educative reasons? Or deconstruct the myth in order to reveal its actual value? The question raised by these three Neo-Slave Narratives is that of the end justifying the means.
2In “How I Wrote Jubilee”, Margaret Walker said:
- 1 Walker, Margaret, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (New York: The Femini (...)
Long before Jubilee had a name, I was living with it and imagining its reality. Its genesis coincides with my childhood, its development grows out of a welter of raw experiences and careful research, and its final form emerged exactly one hundred years after its major events took place. Most of my life I have been involved with writing this story about my great-grandmother, and even if Jubilee were never considered an artistic or commercial success I would still be happy just to have finished it (my emphasis).1
3 Jubilee, she added, was the most valuable slave narrative of all, the living account of her great-grandmother, which had been transmitted to her by her own daughter. She knew then that she had a precious, almost priceless, living document of her own (56).
4In “Miss Jane and I”, Gaines said:
- 2 Gaines, Ernest, “Miss Jane and I”, Callaloo 3 (May 1978): 34.
I knew at least two years before I started writing on the novel that eventually I would write The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Maybe I had known it all my life, because it seems that I started writing it many, many years before when I used to sit on the porch or the steps and write letters for the old people.2
5Both authors acknowledge here the profound personal implications lying at the core of their desire for writing their own slave narrative. The text they were going to produce was to fill in the blank in history, whether personal or collective. Though expressed in a more detached way, what Reed said in an interview seems to corroborate this idea:
- 3 Nazareth, Peter, “An Interview with Ishmael Reed”, The Iowa Review 13: 2 (1982): 121-22.
one can speak more accurately of the psychological history of people if one knows the legends, the folklore, the old stories which have been handed down for generations, the oral tales, all of which tells you where you came from, which shows the national mind, the way a group of people looks at the world. I think that you can ascertain that by going and reconstructing a past...3
- 4 McGee, Patrick, Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: Mac (...)
6So, Reed insists on the necessity to “undermine traditional American pragmatism that says ‘what you need are your own facts’ rather than your own fictions”.4
7This is precisely because of their internal interplay between facts and fictions that these three neo-slave narratives offer quite a compelling corpus, which will be studied under three main headings: first, amanuenses or who’s to tell whose story? Second, bearing witness to the truth: History vs history; and third, Her/His/My story: re-appropriating the Symbolic.
8The question raised by the term “amanuenses” is that of the narrating voice. According to Charles Nichols:
- 5 Nichols, Charles H., Many Thousands Gone (Leiden: Brill, 1963): x.
There is no doubt that most of the [slave] narratives were produced with the aid of the anti-slavery men of Boston and New York, and contain literary, ethical and sentimental elements added by the white ghost writers and editors. Indeed it has often been charged that most of the narratives were, in effect, written by abolitionists to whom they were sometimes dictated.5
- 6 Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., “Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo Slave Narrative”, Narrative 2: 2 (1994): 117.
- 7 Olney, James, “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature in Th (...)
9In a way, the African-American subject was robbed of his own story or at least of his own way of telling it, of his own narrating voice. As Rushdy writes: “the text expressing the slave’s literacy and freedom was governed and determined by other voices”6. Consequently, as slave narratives were focused on slavery as an institution rather than an individual experience, the slave narrator was turned into an eyewitness, not an I-witness.7 The slave’s narrative was thus mediated through the language of the Other, if not literally stolen by the white other. This is precisely what is denounced in Flight to Canada in the first part entitled “Naughty Harriet”:
- 8 Reed, Ishmael, Flight to Canada (New York: Scribner, 1976): 8.
She popularized the American novel and introduced it to Europe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin.... The story she “borrowed” from Josiah Henson.... The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave. Seventy-seven pages long. It was short, but it was his. It was all he had. His story.8
10The slave narrator is dispossessed of his story/history. This is the truth which lies at the very centre of the writing process of Walker’s, Gaines’s and Reed’s neo-slave narratives. All three authors have to admit and confront the truth about the African-American Urtext, a text subverted by the Other. Which is why dealing with the modes of amanuenses is so relevant.
11Who is to tell whose story? This question is raised in the introduction to Gaines’s novel. It must be reminded that Ernest Gaines had thought of telling the story of Miss Jane Pittman from a multiple point of view, a device which he had successfully resorted to in a previous book. “A Short Biography of Miss Jane Pittman” was then changed into The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman when Gaines “had fallen in love with [his] little character and [he] thought she could tell the story of her life much better than anyone else” ( “Miss Jane” 37). Yet, the four-page introduction to the novel presents us with the character of the history-teacher/editor who is indeed to be Miss Jane’s amanuensis. According to Beavers:
- 9 Beavers, Herman, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest Gaines and James Alan McPherson(...)
Gaines provides the reader with a fictional “editor” whose purpose, it would seem, is to authenticate Miss Jane’s story. Gaines recognizes the nineteenth-century slave narrative’s use of authenticating documents and intimates that this novel’s task is to identify the anomalies that ensue from this format.9
12Indeed, the fictional editor, a recurrent device in western literature, serves to put the historical process in question:
- 10 Gaines, Ernest, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (New York: Bantam, 1972): vii.
There were times when I thought the narrative was taking ridiculous directions... Much of it was too repetitious and did not follow a single direction. What I have tried to do here was not to write everything, but in essence everything that was said.10
- 11 Beckhman, Barry, “Jane Pittman and Oral Tradition” Callaloo 3 (May 1978): 108.
13Though, through the use of tape recording, the emphasis is put on a faithful transcription of what the “slave narrator” is saying and even, in a way, on a true-to-life reproduction of the narrating voice, the words added by the fictional editor in the introduction confirm that history has to do with textuality and all the problems it raises concerning the link between truth and fiction. The notion of amanuensis is rendered all the more complex in Gaines’s case as the author himself seems to challenge the place from which the narrator is telling the story: “Once the story really got moving, Miss Jane did and said pretty much whatever she wanted, and all I could do was act as her editor. Never her advisor” ( “Miss Jane”, 37). In spite of his saying that once he had started with the teacher, he was ignored, Gaines resorts to what Beckhman calls “incidental directness”, those asides to the would-be listener, here and there throughout the narrative.11 Paradoxically, this device as well as giving more power to the orality of the narrative, strengthens the very presence of the history teacher/editor/amanuensis thus acknowledging the role of editing - deleting, reordering, selecting, etc. - in textuality. Moreover, Gaines himself pays tribute - albeit indirectly - to his aunt Augustine and the old people he listened to on the porch, revealing himself as the amanuensis of this black community and thus creating some kind of mise en abyme:
Miss Jane is Miss Jane. She is not my aunt, she is not any one person - she is Miss Jane. Maybe I had my aunt in mind when I was writing about her, but I had other people in mind as well - those who sat on our gallery in the 1940’s, and those whom I’ve met on the road since then ( “Miss Jane”, 37).
- 12 Babb, Valerie, Ernest Gaines (Boston: Twayne, 1991): 8.
14Indeed Miss Jane is, according to Valerie Babb, a re-elaboration of Aunt Fe, the central character in “Just Like a Tree”, which draws an irresistible link between real facts and fiction and puts in perspective the role played by Gaines as writer/editor.12
15Margaret Walker, on the contrary, clearly positions herself as the amanuensis of her grandmother. The book is actually dedicated to:
- 13 Walker, Margaret, Jubilee (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1966): v.
the memory of my grandmothers: my maternal great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, whose story this is; my maternal grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier, who told me this story; and my paternal grandmother, Margaret Walker (my emphasis).13
- 14 Carmichael, Jacqueline, Trumpeting a Fiery Sound: History and Folklore in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (...)
16Walker acknowledges from the start whose story it is and who tells the story, although she takes for granted her position as editor. In the essay about the genesis of Jubilee, she insists on the promise made to her grandmother that “when [she] grew up [she] would write her [Walker’s grandmother’s] mother’s story” (51). She even adds that “[she] was anxious to put down many of the folk sayings verbatim. Many of these chapter headings are exact repetitions of [her] grandmother’s words” (54). Strangely enough, just as in Gaines’s novel, there is some kind of mise en abyme when, in the narrative itself, Aunt Sally entertains Vyry with her slave narrative, which, we imagine, is reminiscent of that of Margaret Walker’s grandmother.14 But the role played by Walker as writer/editor is not to be overlooked as, as Jacqueline Carmichael puts it: “Walker does not transfer her grandmother’s oral history directly to the printed page: the passage of time and the filtering of the story through family tradition alone would militate against that” (5). As a matter of fact: “the work achieves its aim in the very terms that white southern culture tended to reserve for its own self-expression: folklore, history, and the literature of memory” (Carmichael, i). What Walker as writer/editor/amanuensis does is some kind of reversal of the appropriation typical of the history of the genesis of most slave narratives.
17As for Reed’s novel, the above-mentioned denunciation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stealing Josiah Henson’s narrative which is indeed the fact that urges Raven Quickskill, the protagonist, to accept to become Uncle Robin’s amanuensis:
He would try to live up to the confidence Robin had in him by writing a good book.... Uncle Robin had turned down an offer from Jewett and Company of Boston’s best-known writer and had put his story in the hands of Quickskill: “Now you be careful with my story,” Robin said. “Treat that story as precious as old Swille treated his whips.” They both knew what that meant (Flight, 13).
- 15 Walsh, Richard, “A Man’s Story is His Gris-Gris”: Cultural Slavery, Literary Emancipation and Ishma (...)
- 16 Reilly, John M., “The Reconstruction of Genre as Entry into Conscious History” Black American Liter (...)
- 17 Kemper Beck, Janet, “I’ll fly away: Ishmael Reed Refashions the Slave Narrative and Takes It on a F (...)
18What is put in relief here - though with a strong ironical twist - is the analogy between the way white masters treated their slaves and the way white ghost writers or editors treated slave narratives. “Harriet Beecher Stowe, according to Walsh, ... is... made to represent cultural slavery... Plagiarism therefore stands for the cultural appropriation by which minority cultures are suppressed, and for the consequent oppression of their people”15. By entrusting Quickskill, a fugitive and educated slave, with writing his own story, Uncle Robin re-introduces the black subject into the African-American Urtext and posits the problem of “narrative control” - a term borrowed from Stepto - at the centre of Flight to Canada. As a matter of fact, as John Reilly remarks: “we must remain constantly aware of his [Reed’s] work as writing and not permit ourselves the comfort induced by old customs of reading”.16 We readers are confronted with a narrative “in the making”, something that is paradoxically “more of a reading than a writing” (7). Raven Quickskill, being a fugitive, who has freed himself from the shackles of slavery, can save Robin’s text from the literary enslavement slave authors had been entrapped in.17 It is all the more indispensable as “a man’s story is his gris-gris... Taking his story is like taking his gris-gris. The thing that is himself” (8). As Patrick McGee explains:
- 18 Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race, 36.
A gris-gris... is the container of the essence of the human being.
A narrative is a gris-gris in the sense that it defines one’s relationship to the other through the power of self-representation... Persons are defined by the stories they tell about themselves. Human subjectivity as a linguistic category is bound to the fictions of narrative form... [Hence] the refusal by the dominant myths of hegemonized ’white’ society to grant African Americans a subject-position, in a historical narrative, that would legitimate their sense of the past and relation to the future18.
19 Thus, placing Raven Quickskill as the amanuensis of Uncle Robin’s story amounts to a political act. Ironically, at the end of the story, Uncle Robin turns himself into some kind of amanuensis of his master’s history as he rewrites Master Swille’s will and inherits all his properties, himself included:
Swille had something called dyslexia. Words came to him scrambled and jumbled. I became his reading and writing. Like a computer, only this computer left itself Swille’s whole estate. Property joining forces with property. I left me his whole estate. I’m it, too. Me and it got more it (Flight, 171).
20By the play on the personal pronouns, Robin’s text discloses the real power of words and language, where truth lies.
- 19 “Ishmael Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo Slave Narrative”, 116-17.
- 20 How I wrote Jubilee, 51.
21The issue raised by the mediated genesis of slave narratives entails the question of the distortion of the truth. All the novels and authors included in this comparative study appear as focused on disclosing the truth that has long been silenced. If, as Rushdy suggests, the subject in slave narratives is an absent one because their central focus was the institution of slavery19, these three neo-slave narratives aim at putting the black subject back at the centre of the narrative. In other words, because of white editing, the African-American subject was excluded from the Symbolic, which amounts to saying that s/he represents the Real, in Lacanian terms. The Real is the unspeakable, the unutterable, that which was repressed because unbearable. This obsession with the truth is somewhat acknowledged by Gaines and Walker. Walker remembers her grandmother, when accused of ruining her granddaughter by telling her tales, growing indignant and answering: “I’m not telling her tales; I’m telling her the naked truth”20. This is this naked truth Margaret Walker intended to reproduce on the printed page. What’s more, Walker adds that she had never read in any novel the substance of what she wanted to say (57). Here lies an echo of what the history teacher/editor in Gaines’s novel says to justify his interest for Miss Jane: “‘I teach history... I’m sure her life’s story can help me explain things to my students.’ ‘What’s wrong with them books you already got?’ Mary said. ‘Miss Jane is not in them’” (v). Besides this is exactly what Gaines himself declares:
- 21 “Miss Jane and I”, 26.
I read many novels, many short stories, plays - all written by white writers.... I found most of the work that I read untrue and unreal to my own experience.... Whenever a black person was mentioned in these novels, either she was a mammy, or he was a Tom; and if he was young, he was a potential Tom, a good nigger; or he was not a potential Tom, a bad nigger. When a black woman character was young, she was either a potential mammy or a nigger wench.21
- 22 Trumpeting a Fiery Sound, i.
- 23 The Reconstruction of Genre as entry into Concious History, 3
- 24 “Miss Jane and I”, 37.
22This is precisely the unsaid, the blank chapter in the story that triggers this desire for truth and pushes African-American authors to write “a fiction that recalls the truth of what was too long silenced and overlooked in the annals of both American history and American fiction”.22 As McGee explains: “an oppressed class... achieves its consciousness by identifying with what history has failed to say, with the silences in the official record that can only be filled by folklore, myth, and imagination” (31). Which is why those narratives play such an important role as the “so-called true has been replaced by a truer story”.23 Indeed, Gaines, paraphrasing what his history teacher/editor has already said, explains: “If you go to the history books, you will find that most of them would not agree with what (Miss Jane) has told you.... Truth to Miss Jane is what she remembers. Truth to me is what people like Miss Jane remember”.24 Ironically, some time after The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman had been published, Gaines received reviews in which critics called Miss Jane a real person. A representative of Newsweek asked him to send the editors of the magazine a picture of Miss Jane Pittman, and a lady accused him of using a tape recorder, then calling the interview a novel after he had cut out all the inconsequential material (23). But Gaines insisted that Miss Jane was a fictitious character he had created. On the contrary, Walker, in the acknowledgments, added:
- 25 Jubilee, x.
I have a true photograph of my great-grandmother, who is the Vyry of this story.... The real name of my maternal great-grandfather, Randall Ware, free black man of Georgia and a blacksmith of Dawson, has been retained in the story.25
- 26 Ishmael Reed and the End of Race, 31.
- 27 Flight, 7, 10.
- 28 Jacques Lacan solves the dilemma by creating a neologism in French - “vérifiction” - which merges b (...)
23Although they claim two opposing attitudes to fiction and truth, the effect of truth is the same in both cases and seems to corroborate what McGee says about historical truth: “The truth of history never lies within the historical narrative but rather beyond it, elsewhere”.26 Reed, in his turn, by mixing real historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, and fictitious characters like Master Swille, points to the fragility of the border between truth and fiction. Indeed, Quickskill himself, at the beginning of the story, asks the fundamental questions: “Who is to say what is fact and what is fiction?... Where does fact begin and fiction leave off?”.27 Or vice-versa.28
- 29 Trompeting a Fiery Sound, 73.
- 30 How I wrote Jubilee..., 56.
24As a matter of fact, the three authors seem to be concerned with the problem of verisimilitude. This is most obvious in Walker’s Jubilee through its focus on details and folklore. Some pages are explicit descriptions of “herbal medicines, cooking, needlework, songs, sayings”29 which are part of Walker’s purpose of authenticating the story: “I was simply determined to substantiate my material to authenticate the story I had heard from my grandmother’s lips”30. Indeed, in her turn, Walker asks the questions about the limit between fact and fiction:
How much of Jubilee is fiction and how much fact? When you have lived with a story as long as I have with this one, it is difficult sometimes to separate the two, but let us say that the basic skeleton of the story is factually true and authentic. Imagination has worked with this factual material, however for a very long time.... I always intended Jubilee to be a folk novel based on folk material: folk sayings, folk belief, folkways.... I always wanted the book to be realistic and humanistic (62).
25Walker spent years in libraries and archives to get the real sense of what slavery was like, that is to say the everyday character of it. Even though Gaines insists on the primacy of fiction over facts in his writing, he too spent quite a long time studying Lay My Burden Down, the collection of Work Projects Administration interviews of ex-slaves and he acknowledged that he used them to achieve linguistic verisimilitude. According to Gates:
- 31 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., “Review of Flight to Canada, by Ishmael Reed” in The Critical Response to (...)
the political use to which the abolitionists put black literacy demanded a painstaking verisimilitude - a concern with even the most minute concrete detail.... This concern with realism, known as naturalism in fiction, characterized nearly the whole black fiction until Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man (1952).31
- 32 A Man’s story is His Gris-Gris..., 62.
26This remark may account for Walker’s then Gaines’s concern with realistic details. Ishmael Reed’s attitude to verisimilitude is quite different. It would be erroneous to state that Reed is completely oblivious of realism. Indeed, Flight is pervaded with very realistic, concrete details but this realism is subverted. Walsh says: “Reed’s complete lack of concern with the criterion of realism upon which the slave narratives depended (is an expression of his refusal) to be slave to his narrative”32. This is staged in the text by his resorting to anachronisms - mixing past and present:
The use of anachronisms, adds Walsh, combines two distinct aspects: it creates a contemporary atmosphere through the casual use of props such as jumbo jets, telephones, satellite television, Time magazine...; it also involves a fundamental disregard for the sequence of historical events... This disruption serves both to negate the sense of history as a linear evolution, a measure of progress, and to undermine the war’s conventional significance as a watershed in African-American history (59).
27Whereas chronology is respected in Walker’s and Gaines’s novels - albeit much more chaotic in Gaines’s case - it is subverted in Reed as, for him, “history is of more analogical than causal significance” (60). Which can but lead us to reflect about the problem of viewpoint and History.
- 33 How I wrote Jubilee..., 63.
- 34 Pettis, Joyce, “Margaret Walker: Black Woman of the South” in Southern Women Writers, Tonette Bond (...)
- 35 Rowell, Charles H., “Poetry, History and Humanism: An Interview with Margaret Walker” Black World ( (...)
- 36 Wrestling Angels into song..., 147.
- 37 The Autobiography..., vi-vii.
28Explaining her philosophy of history, Margaret Walker said: “(it) is radically different from either the southern white or a northern white point of view. It is exactly what one would expect it to be, a point of view”33. According to Joyce Pettis, “(Jubilee) participates in revisionist social history”.34 Walker in her novel focuses on important historical landmarks from another point of view, that of the slave woman, thus disclosing another history of the United States. In effect, Walker believed the role of the novelist was the role of a historian and that history was slanted just as fiction.35 This is what is highlighted by the history teacher/editor in Gaines’s novel when he realises that “history is a selective discourse”36. In Gaines’s case this is all the more relevant as the narrative is generated by multiple voices: “there were times when others carried the story for her.... someone else would always pick up the narration”37. Karen Carmean refers to new historicism to explain Gaines’s approach:
- 38 Carmean, Karen, Ernest Gaines: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1998): (...)
Gaines’s historian is forced to look at [Miss Jane’s] story not as a set of fixed facts proceeding in an orderly progression but rather as a discourse (or a conversation) in need of interpretation.... History, then cannot be used simply as a background for a text. Instead, it provides one of several possible beginning points of interchange between a creative work and other texts, institutions, even literary genres. A favorite word employed by new historicists to explain this interrelationship is “negotiation”.38
- 39 Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race, 31.
29History as fixed facts is re-elaborated and historical figures such as Joe Louis, Martin Luther King are but human beings, Booker T. Washington or Du Bois are demythologised. As for Reed, as McGee puts it: “History is never a direct and unproblematic perception of the facts but a relation to facts that is riddled with politics and desire”39.
30Lastly, let’s focus on the force of desire contained in these three neo-slave narratives, which must be apprehended as that of re-appropriating the Symbolic. As the black subject had been excluded from the Symbolic by the Whites, first by prohibiting any sort of education then by editing the African-American Urtext so that it could fit their ends, the black subject was turned into some kind of Real, absent from the Symbolic, which, now and then returned just as the repressed returns when called for by some signifiers. The task of the African-American author of neo-slave narratives appears to be that of attempting to write the unwritten, maybe even the “unwritable” - the Real - and reintroducing the black subject into the Symbolic through language. Indeed, the object of desire in the slave narrative is freedom, often represented by a precise and concrete place on earth where freedom is achievable. This is the case for Miss Jane, who starts her journey to freedom, which is equated with Ohio, the place from which Corporal Brown - the white soldier who changes her slave name Ticey into Jane, Jane Brown, amounting thus to some kind of symbolic father and symbolic re-birth - comes. It is also included in the very title of Reed’s novel Flight to Canada. Yet, the three novels end with the protagonists returning or not leaving the South which may mean, as Babb puts it, that:
true liberation and the progress it engenders are not an abstract, such as the notion of “freedom”, or a spatial entity, such as “the North”, but rather a spiritual entity, deeply rooted in a person’s character, dignity, and knowledge of his or her history and place (85).
- 40 Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race, 39.
- 41 Berg, Temma, “Margaret Walker’s Jubilee: Refocusing William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Women’s S (...)
31About Reed’s novel, McGee says the same in different terms: “Freedom is never final or complete. The real Canada is not a place but a process, a desiring process.... Writing in this sense articulates desire as the process of becoming-subject”40. This is precisely what Margaret Walker does in Jubilee by telling her story, “her” standing for Elvira Ware Dozier, Walker’s grandmother, for Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, Walker’s great-grandmother, for Vyry and for Walker herself. In effect, Vyry’s story, as Temma Berg says, “can be seen as a post-modern revision of a modernist text, which gives voice to what is seldom heard - the voice of an anti-hierarchical acceptance and dismissal of difference, the voice of the feminine”.41 Vyry’s story stands for the history of black women in slavery and thus is a creative process giving birth to the black female subject, a double Real as it both belongs to blackness and the feminine. As Innis Brown realises at the end of their long journey:
- 42 Jubilee, 486.
“She was, in that night, a spark of light that was neither of the earth nor September air, but eternal fire. Yet it was not that she stood there in pride for them to worship her or be in awe of her deep integrity. She was only a living sign and mark of all the best that any human being could hope to become.... she was... the best true example of the motherhood of her race, an ever present assurance that nothing could destroy a people whose sons had come from her loins”42.
- 43 Bryant, Jerry H., “Ernest Gaines: Change, Growth, and History” The Southern Review 10 (October 1974 (...)
- 44 The Autobiography..., viii.
- 45 Wrestling Angels into songs..., 146.
32History, as Bryant says about Ernest Gaines, is character, “the most important aspects of the past can be fully conveyed only through character.... but the character of little people rather than the great movers of events that inhabit formal history books”.43The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is her story - Miss Jane’s - in so far as she represents the vantage point and the voice of the narrative, although this voice becomes communal as the other members of the community help her to fill in the blanks: “this is not only Miss Jane’s autobiography, it is theirs as well” remarks the teacher/editor/amanuensis. “Miss Jane’s story is all of their stories, and their stories are Miss Jane’s”44. This is exemplified by the very structure of the narrative, which is divided into four parts and grows from most personal to most communal. Indeed, whereas the first part is focused on Miss Jane’s journey, the rest of the tale grows more and more disinterested in her personal history and the last part is deprived of the typical section divisions used in the previous parts, thus forming a unity, a kind of continuum of the flow. Her story is progressively turned into their story and, as Beavers puts it, “Miss Jane’s and the teacher/editor’s narrative collaboration exists in a communal matrix that essentially ‘saves’ information from being lost”45. The teacher/editor is in charge of passing on her/their story creating some kind of transference that will amount to my story, this re-appropriation of the Symbolic. Her autobiography is intended as a symbolic reality in which
- 46 “Miss Jane and I”, 38.
history is recalled by “talking”, but as “talk” is used within this story it signifies more than the act of speaking or telling the story: it encompasses self-affirmation; it commands respect; it creates communal identity46.
33This is also carried out by the use of African-American Vernacular English throughout the tale, a means to hand back to the black subject his/her own voice, that which was cancelled, erased, smothered in the first slave narratives. The communal tale is conveyed by a technique which recalls the African-American biblical and religious heritage: the call and response. Indeed Beavers rightly insists on Miss Jane’s tale not being the result of whimsicality but of call and response (147), typical of sermons and negro spirituals. History is “made up of diverse individuals” Valerie Babb recalls (80) and this is this communal voice which can bear and pass on the history of black people in America: “More important than theoretical sociopolitical issues are characters’ internal desires and passions and how they position themselves in relation to their immediate society and environment” (137).
- 47 Flight, 89.
34Although desire is at the very centre of Reed’s text, his own revision of history and the African-American literary canon revolves around a very personal theory which he calls Neohoodoism, a reference to Voodoo, a religious practice so common to African-Americans and Caribbeans. It is a complex theory which is not to be expatiated on here, but what seems quite relevant in this theory is the idea of possession, the notion that the relation between the writer and the text is reversed, the text possessing the writer: “freedom was his writing. His writing was his HooDoo. Others had their way of HooDoo, but his was his writing. It fascinated him, it possessed him”47. This belief is in agreement with what Lacan said about the Symbolic and language, namely that the subject is but a signifier and is defined in the Symbolic by language. Rushdy explains it in other terms:
- 48 Ishmael Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo Slave Narrative, 124.
What Raven discovers... is that he cannot control his story so long as it remains only his story. That personal story has to become an expression of collective identity and a representation of a communal experience in order not to be appropriated48.
- 49 Fox, Robert Elliot, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri B (...)
35So, ironically, “the way to control one’s own narrative... is to allow the writing to possess oneself instead of having oneself possess the writing” (130). This is carried out through what Fox calls “heterophany of elements” which is likened to the syncretization of the worship of African and other deities in Voodoo.49 “Reeds basically works with ideas, syncretizing them, juxtaposing, even inverting, to create a counterview, an alternative semiosis” (69). By subverting the hypotext and what is regarded as History, Reed can free the text from any limited sense or univocal reading. Thus, Reed’s text not only liberates its own writer and, by a mise en abyme, its own amanuensis/protagonist, but also gives free rein to its reader:
- 50 Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race, 31.
Through pastiche and caricature, Reed flattens the utopian referent as well as the referent of history itself in such a way that the signifier supports as its signified not the facts, in some narrow sense of the word, but the desire animating them. The writing of Ishmael Reed never satisfies desire, but it keeps producing the pleasure that can be derived from the play of desire as interpretation itself50.
- 51 Ishmael Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo Slave Narrative, 131.
36Reed’s neoslave narrative is about History as textuality, textuality as desiring process. By cutting, subverting, inverting the traditional relations between signifier and signified, the text produces meanings and readings which demystify the unique, single, official reading of his/her/their story called History. And as Rushdy puts it “the writing is no longer about the self or the other, but about the intersubjective relations between the two”51. Indeed, her/his story is their story and can become my story.
37The aim of this paper was to carry out a comparative study of three of the most prominent neo-slave narratives in order to reveal differing modalities, different means to reach the end. It seems that all these neo-slave narratives are driven by the same desire: emending History. Consequently, these three writers are confronted with the complex relation between fact and fiction. They cope with that problem in very different ways, resorting to what could be regarded as naturalism/realism in Margaret Walker’s case, to a modernist use of multiple viewpoints to challenge the official concept of History for Gaines and to a post-modern approach of writing as a process and History as textuality for Reed. These three neo-slave narratives seem to exemplify the evolution of the attitude of the African-American writer to the African-American Urtext. The question that is raised, that these works raise, and that was raised from the beginning by slave narratives is raised by Walker herself in “How I wrote Jubilee”: “How much of the burden of history can fiction bear?” (56). This is the question most African-American writers are still trying to answer: How much of my people’s history can my story bear?
Bibliographie
Works cited
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Notes
1 Walker, Margaret, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1990): 50.
2 Gaines, Ernest, “Miss Jane and I”, Callaloo 3 (May 1978): 34.
3 Nazareth, Peter, “An Interview with Ishmael Reed”, The Iowa Review 13: 2 (1982): 121-22.
4 McGee, Patrick, Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: MacMillan, 1997): 29.
5 Nichols, Charles H., Many Thousands Gone (Leiden: Brill, 1963): x.
6 Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., “Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo Slave Narrative”, Narrative 2: 2 (1994): 117.
7 Olney, James, “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature in The Slave’s Narrative, Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 154. Andrews, William, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986): 65.
8 Reed, Ishmael, Flight to Canada (New York: Scribner, 1976): 8.
9 Beavers, Herman, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest Gaines and James Alan McPherson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995): 144.
10 Gaines, Ernest, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (New York: Bantam, 1972): vii.
11 Beckhman, Barry, “Jane Pittman and Oral Tradition” Callaloo 3 (May 1978): 108.
12 Babb, Valerie, Ernest Gaines (Boston: Twayne, 1991): 8.
13 Walker, Margaret, Jubilee (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1966): v.
14 Carmichael, Jacqueline, Trumpeting a Fiery Sound: History and Folklore in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 1998): 86. It is worth noting that in both cases - Gaines’s and Walker ’s - an aunt is the source of the slave narrative.
15 Walsh, Richard, “A Man’s Story is His Gris-Gris”: Cultural Slavery, Literary Emancipation and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada’, Journal of American Studies 27: 1 (April 1993): 66-67; 67.
16 Reilly, John M., “The Reconstruction of Genre as Entry into Conscious History” Black American Literature Forum 13: 1 (Spring 1979): 6.
17 Kemper Beck, Janet, “I’ll fly away: Ishmael Reed Refashions the Slave Narrative and Takes It on a Flight to Canada” in The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed, Bruce Allen Dick ed. (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1999): 134.
18 Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race, 36.
19 “Ishmael Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo Slave Narrative”, 116-17.
20 How I wrote Jubilee, 51.
21 “Miss Jane and I”, 26.
22 Trumpeting a Fiery Sound, i.
23 The Reconstruction of Genre as entry into Concious History, 3
24 “Miss Jane and I”, 37.
25 Jubilee, x.
26 Ishmael Reed and the End of Race, 31.
27 Flight, 7, 10.
28 Jacques Lacan solves the dilemma by creating a neologism in French - “vérifiction” - which merges both the fictional side of the truth and the “truthful” side of fiction.
29 Trompeting a Fiery Sound, 73.
30 How I wrote Jubilee..., 56.
31 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., “Review of Flight to Canada, by Ishmael Reed” in The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed, Bruce Allen Dick ed. (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1999): 119.
32 A Man’s story is His Gris-Gris..., 62.
33 How I wrote Jubilee..., 63.
34 Pettis, Joyce, “Margaret Walker: Black Woman of the South” in Southern Women Writers, Tonette Bond Inge, ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990): 12.
35 Rowell, Charles H., “Poetry, History and Humanism: An Interview with Margaret Walker” Black World (December 1975): 10.
36 Wrestling Angels into song..., 147.
37 The Autobiography..., vi-vii.
38 Carmean, Karen, Ernest Gaines: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1998): 76.
39 Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race, 31.
40 Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race, 39.
41 Berg, Temma, “Margaret Walker’s Jubilee: Refocusing William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Women’s Studies International Forum 10: 5 (1987): 31.
42 Jubilee, 486.
43 Bryant, Jerry H., “Ernest Gaines: Change, Growth, and History” The Southern Review 10 (October 1974): 861.
44 The Autobiography..., viii.
45 Wrestling Angels into songs..., 146.
46 “Miss Jane and I”, 38.
47 Flight, 89.
48 Ishmael Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo Slave Narrative, 124.
49 Fox, Robert Elliot, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (New York, Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1987): 50.
50 Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race, 31.
51 Ishmael Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo Slave Narrative, 131.
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