(November, 2015)
Ishmael Reed’s Flight To Canada shatters the monolithic narratives surrounding the Civil War into dozens of pieces, only to reconfigure and recombine the shards in an irreverent and hilarious fashion. The 1976 novel recasts the age-old fugitive slave narrative in an utterly new light, and brings 19th century questions about freedom, culture and race relations into a contemporary framework through purposeful anachronism. Reed restores relevance to stale questions and revives a glassy-eyed readership of monocultural humanities with piercing satire and an unabashed willingness to confront closeted ugliness in American society. Reed’s poet protagonist, Raven Quickskill, escapes from the Swille plantation in Virginia only to encounter the complexity of attaining freedom in a hideous world where material slavery is only one form among many. For Raven, “freedom [is] his writing,” a space of unadulterated creativity not subject to the limitations of the material world; however, as soon as his writing contacts the material world, its consequences reverberate and impinge upon Raven, constituting the freedom he achieves as mere temporary respite into an alternate reality. Ultimately, Reed represents authentic freedom as something which must be constantly sought, a subjectivity which the individual must discover and assert for themselves, an ideal existing in an interior, separate sphere which must be brought forward, maintained in the face of external and dominating forces.
Reed’s focus on freedom in all its varieties in Flight To Canada should make intuitive sense given the novel’s neo-slave narrative form, yet it can also be understood given the literary historical context from which the novel emerges. Richard Walsh points out the environment of controversy surrounding the black literary aesthetic in the late sixties and early seventies, stemming from a felt need to develop a black alternative to the dominant “bogus universalism” the white literary aesthetic of the time espoused. Reed was one of the few authors to explicitly confront and renounce this “goon squad aesthetic” prescription, suggesting that for Afro-American authors to adhere to a particular literary format would only confirm the white literary establishment’s unfavorable view of black literature. Instead, Reed sought to organically synthesize his own aesthetic from the authentic ground on which he stood, exploring the legacy he felt himself to be a part of. Joe Weixlmann writes that Reed calls his aesthetic “Neo-HooDooism”: a fresh take on the Afro-American adaptation of the Haitian original, or Voodoo. This alternative aesthetic frees Reed from the constraints of both white and black literary cultures, and also provides a tradition from which his own literature might emerge. This desire for flexibility, for creative freedom stems from Neo-HooDooism’s Voodoo roots: Helen Lock writes of the Voodoo aesthetic that it is “essentially improvisational,” with no rigid prescriptions for form, and that it is “in a continual state of flux.” Thus, at the same time as Neo-HooDooism provides Reed with a literary grounding, it is also an anti-grounding, a source of raw creativity unharnessed to any strict or establishment prescribed aesthetic goals.
Reed’s concern with creative freedom replicates itself through Raven’s concern with achieving authentic freedom not only from physical but cultural slavery. Even after he has escaped the material slavery imposed upon him by Arthur Swille, Raven experiences the oppression of a monoculture that perceives Raven as nothing more than an object to be catalogued and tokenized. Raven says to Quaw Quaw Tralaralara , “They’re going to get your Indian and my Slave on microfilm and in sociology books … then they’re going to put you on the nickel and put me on a stamp, and that’ll be the end of it.” Weixlmann addresses this passage as exemplary of the cultural slavery or “rape of ethnicity” that Reed sees as contemporarily continuous with the material slavery of a younger America. In this sense, Raven, despite his new status as a “free” man, remains a would-be commodity for the dominant white culture to neatly package and exploit. Laura Mielke points out the dichotomy between the ways in which Raven and Quaw Quaw confront this monoculture — Raven criticizes its attempts to dominate and subvert minority cultures, while Quaw Quaw endorses its “universalism” and seeks to assimilate, “willingly [selling] herself” into cultural slavery. If Quaw Quaw’s cultural assimilation makes her a slave, then Raven’s active resistance to the monoculture enables him to assert a kind of freedom. In the concrete reality of a coercive monoculture which causes even “slaves [to judge] other slaves like the auctioneer and his clients [judge] them,” this resistance is a constant process. Raven’s only escape from slavery can be through his writing, where, in Reed’s words, he can “get to [his] aesthetic Canada,” freed from the external and dominating standards of an oppressive culture.
Just as Reed finds freedom from the confines of aesthetic prescriptions and dominant culture through his Neo-HooDoo writing aesthetic, his protagonist, Raven, finds “freedom [in his] writing.” Writing becomes a mode which discloses stories, and for Raven, “a man’s story is his gris-gris … the thing that is himself.” Raven attains this freedom through self-disclosure because he is “the first one of Swille’s slaves to read, the first to write and the first to run away.” Walsh suggests that Reed distinguishes between cultural emancipation and literacy: Cato, a literate yet simpering and servile house slave, aligns himself with dominant white culture by dismissing Raven’s poetry as “bereft of any sort of pièce de résistance,” employing the language of the literary review to devalue not only Raven’s story, but by extension, Raven himself. Even if literacy remains deficient to provide freedom in its own right, Reed gives it a place of importance within the text. Swille is dyslexic, utterly dependent on Robin to manage his will, and on Raven to manages his finances. Swille’s subscription to and emphasis on the primacy of European culture within the text is, in this sense, inauthentic — the dominant culture enslaves Swille as well because he struggles with the medium which might enable him to synthesize or comprehend any alternative.
For Raven, writing enables just this kind of synthesis and comprehension, even if it occurs on a level he cannot consciously grasp. Reed writes, “[Quickskill’s] poems were ‘readings’ for him from his inner self, which knew more about his future than he did.” In this sense, though Raven’s writing discloses his story, the agent constructing this story cannot be the conscious Raven — his poetry functions as a kind of metaphysical necromancy, his inner-self crouching in the crypt of Raven’s memory, receiving and transcribing visions of his future. Even as writing allows Raven creative freedom, his writing nevertheless “fascinate[s] him, it possesse[s] him.” Reed sets up what appears to be a contradiction — while “freedom is [Raven’s] writing,” he cannot possess this freedom, but rather is possessed by it. Raven’s story catches up with him, much in the same way a slave catcher might, and thus his writing both frees him and entraps him, the freedom occurring on a cultural level, and the entrapment on a subconscious, or metaphysical level. Despite this quasi-enslavement to his inner-self’s voice, Raven’s writing remains authentically his, even while he also belongs to his writing — his poetry is his story, his “gris-gris,” and his very self. And it is this subjectivity, this personhood, that Raven asserts in his writing, regardless of how it is received by the public, by the dominant culture which seeks to subvert its status as art and thereby Raven’s status as a human.
For Reed, a definition of freedom seems to rely upon this subjectivity. He writes, “Well, I guess Canada, like freedom is a state of mind.” Canada stands in as a signifier for freedom throughout the text, and is often accompanied by language that individuates its meaning. “Each man to his own Canada,” “Your Canada,” “That’s my idea of Canada,” among other iterations all serve to underscore that Canada functions less as a physical location within the text than as an ambiguous, personalized placeholder for freedom, happiness, and the good life. Raven’s struggle throughout the novel makes clear that this “state of mind” does not come easily, and Weixlmann affirms that “real liberation requires a spiritual and mental struggle beyond all the arbitrary guidelines that threaten to rob us of a full existence.” What remains unclear both in the text and in scholarship is whether or not this kind of “real liberation,” defined by Weixlmann as “a movement utterly beyond restrictions, expectations, and categories,” can be fully attained. What would this freedom consist of? What would need to change in our society for it to become a reality? Raven’s determination to move towards whatever freedom he envisions, to “make a ‘Thing’ into an ‘I Am,’” suggests that it can only be grasped through dogged persistence if we can grasp it at all. Whether or not authentic freedom is within our grasp, Reed nevertheless presents the reader with the opportunity to pursue our respective Canadas, tirelessly asserting our interior ideals in the hopes that we can make them manifest.
WORKS CITED
Reed, Ishmael. Flight to Canada. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976. Print.
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 (1993): 57–71. Web.
Weixlmann, Joe. “Politics, Piracy, and Other Games: Slavery and Liberation in Flight to Canada.” MELUS 6.3 (1979): 41–50. Web.
Lock, Helen. “”A Man’s Story Is His Gris-Gris”: Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic and the African- American Tradition.” South Central Review 10.1 (1993): 67–77. Web.
Mielke, Laura L. “”The Saga of Third World Belle”: Resurrecting the Ethnic Woman in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada.” MELUS 32.1 (2007): 3–27. Web.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 