Passages from the Middle: Coloniality and Postcoloniality in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage

Abstract

I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take pack of cigarettes lying at other end of table. The matches, however, are in drawer on left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in of a spatial and temporal world - such seems to be schema. (Fanon 111) The book is filled all but a finger's breadth. I shall lock it, wrap it and sew it unhandily in sailcloth and thrust it away in locked drawer. With lack of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under sun and moon. (Golding 278) Middle Passage - very words conjure up violent images of movement, wrenching of Africans from their homes, their families, and their freedom, and ill-fated voyage to hostile territory. Middle Passage describes not only aqueous route of slavers, but also notions of origin and destination embedded in phrase. For Middle Passage's passage, its conveyance of human African cargo across space and time to America, New World, is what makes Middle Passage the defining moment of African-American (Pedersen 225). Charles Johnson's novel Middle Passage, by its title and narrative space, necessarily suggests similar conceptions of movement, of traversing globe from America to Africa and back. But Johnson's novel is less about movement and passages than about middle-ness. Middle Passage's narrator and central figure, Rutherford Calhoun, is confined, spatially and temporally, to a space - in-between ship's crew and Allmuseri, in-between factions of ship's crew, and in-between generations of African Americans. How Calhoun negotiates between borders(1) provides Johnson's metaphor of a passage: Johnson, through Calhoun's experiences, envisions a particular moment that is not about passages, but about mediation. At level of narrative, Calhoun personifies middle of Middle Passage. But Johnson's novel works on another level, level of discourse: The fact that Calhoun, African-American subject, speaks from space of creates a moment of postcoloniality. And thus two effects are at work here: confinement to middle-ness of Calhoun's moment, and transcendence of coloniality via enunciation from point of confinement. The first of these effects, moment - Calhoun's spatial and temporal location in - surfaces from a reading of Middle Passage's narrative. Calhoun exists in colonial space terra incognita or terra nulla, empty or wasted land whose history has to be begun, whose archives must be filled out, whose future progress must be secured . (Bhabha 246). Calhoun cannot identify with borders, where culture exists, because he is excluded from every community; he only mediates, mapping out constricted space in-between. One site of Calhoun's middle-ness is between Republic's crew and Allmuseri: This is uncharted space between America and Africa, white and black. As with every instance of Calhoun's middle-ness, his confinement is a combination of externally imposed exclusion and internally realized difference. This mode of subject construction - or, in this case, subject placement - is not unfamiliar, as it opposes any totalizing version of self: Calhoun's subjectivity is neither entirely self-constructed nor entirely socially constructed. He is product of many forces.(2) Calhoun's first experience of interposition between crew and Allmuseri illustrates his multiply generated subject construction well. During Calhoun's first evening in Bangalang, Squibb warns Calhoun that he might be mistakenly captured and sold like Allmuseri: 'Better yuh keep your noodle down, Illinois. …