Chapter 4shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/37140/4/chapter4.pdf128 Jyothy, C.R. Chapter 4 Crystallized Expression: Vision of Race The history of the American Negro is the

Chapter 4

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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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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


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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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


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


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


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


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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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.


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


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


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


Jyothy, C.R. 140

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.


Jyothy, C.R. 141

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


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


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


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)


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).


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),


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)


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)


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


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,


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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.


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‖


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).


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


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


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


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.


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).


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)


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.‖


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.


Documents

Chapter 4shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/37140/4/chapter4.pdf128 Jyothy, C.R. Chapter 4 Crystallized Expression: Vision of Race The history of the American Negro is the