From Escape to Ascension: The Effects of Aviation Technology on the Flying African Myth

Abstract

This essay traces effects of aviation technology on development of African myth within United States. Ultimately I argue that these new technological possibilities converged with civil rights integration efforts so as to transform mythic desires for physical escape into aspirations for socioeconomic ascension. Traditionally, African myth has reflected desire for freedom and cross-Atlantic return shared by generations of African descendants who inherited trauma of forced displacement and enslavement throughout Americas. Stories about New World slaves who could fly back to Africa over encumbering sea and escape slavery have permeated black popular culture and sacred ritual. This myth was created under painful conditions of New World, reflecting desires for freedom, cross-Atlantic return, and even death shared by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Though strikingly, since Golden Age of Aviation (1919-39), writers and storytellers in United States have readapted tradition of African myth to variously express a rejection of cross-Atlantic return, avow a distrust of Western technology, or focus on barriers to socioeconomic ascension within nation. But what unites all of these transformations is redirection of desire from collective memories of an African homeland to resolving internal struggles of United States. Although this redirection of desire followed larger efforts for civil rights integration, these shifts were also partially due to concurrent developments in aviation technology that led to an increasing awareness about, and contact with, African continent. Ultimately then, African myth was produced under conditions of slavery, but altered under possibilities that were generated by very technologies of flight for which it had once expressed an impossible desire.This essay thus explains myth's inception and early development, briefly reviews history of black American aviation, and considers myth's subsequent twentieth-century transformations. The final section includes a broad range of genres and literary forms-exploring travel writings and poetry of Langston Hughes (b. 1902, d. 1967), Ralph Ellison's short story Flying Home (1944), Ishmael Reed's novel Flight to Canada (1976), and Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon (1977), as well as Faith Ringgold's children's story Tar Beach (1991). I consider these texts in chronological order so as to give a general impression of shifts occurring between First World War and our more contemporary moment following civil rights movement-an era that moved from height of separatist Garveyism1 to ubiquity of assimilation and multicultural integration. Analyzing myth in this historical way thus reveals how some of these profound changes in political orientation came to be and how they came to be understood by blacks in America.After enduring Middle Passage, it became clear to enslaved Africans that sea posed greatest geographical barrier to freedom. It was thus necessary for narratives of escape to overcome this obstacle, and flight became most common resolution in slave folklore throughout Americas.2 Thus, sea performs a vital role in traditional versions, often portrayed as an adversary equal to slave master. But sea bears significance to this myth in other ways, as well. For example, myth reframed suicides of those captured Africans who threw themselves off slave ships. Rather than imagining such fatal leaps as suicidal, [t]his logical and defiant of rebellion actualized return to Africa.3 For many uprooted Africans,4 such as Azande, Kanuri, Ibo, and Hausa, suicide was considered forbidden and shameful. Similarly, in Nigeria, Tiv peoples thought suicide more ethically reprehensible than murder.5 Among African slaves, mythologizing or encoding act ritualistically cleansed deceased so that the individual's soul could find peace in spirit world and not roam in various 'shape-shifting' forms among living. …