The African Sacrificial Kingship Ritual and Johnson's Middle Passage

Abstract

In recent article, Ashraf Rushdy laments Allmuseri tribe and its god in Johnson's Middle Passage do not in this world, but rather exist only as fictional product of Charles Johnson's fertile imagination (373). He reads Allmuseri strictly as vehicle for Johnson's Husserlian phenomenological poetics intended to resolve Caliban of black writer who has difficult task of asserting genuine black identity while using language is fundamentally alienating, since it is perceived to be wholly product of white, Western European culture. Johnson's solution to this dilemma is to recommend adopting posture of complete self-surrender, to surrender completely one's subjective experience, whereby writer encounter[s] transcendence of relativism in an appreciation of unity of and intersubjectivity of the same cultural Lifeworld shared by all humanity (Being 44). According to Rushdy, then, while Allmuseri ideal that individual is rendered 'invisible' in 'presence of others' may appear to have certain affinity to tribal communalism (377), it is in fact simply articulation of strongly postmodern integrationist theory, which has little or nothing to do with anything particularly African (386). But Johnson is undoubtedly aware his own critical disposition of self-surrender in order to bridge gap between subject and other, in order to absorb and reflect unity of shared cultural Lifeworld, derives from long history of religio-philosophical thought and mythology shared by both Africa and West. Elaborate self-sacrifice, death, and resurrection ceremonies, for example, are central to many initiation societies throughout Africa (Zahan 128), which, as Evan Zuesse notes, are intended to bring about displacement of self by breaking down ego and body image new transcendental universe in which center is outside self (152). In popularly studied Bambara kore initiation society, postulant sacrifices his egocentric orientation to world, purges of his limited terrestrial through symbolic death, becomes savory nourishment for mouth of God (Zahan 63), and is reborn new man spiritually enlightened and endowed with 'Word,' is, possessing an immortal soul bears form of universe and God himself (Zuesse 152). This same progression of sacrifice, death, and resurrection into direct relation with Deity or other unifying principle of life is also characteristic of Western mysticism and religious contemplation; it ends similarly with knowledge of the immanent God as dwelling within soul . . . to be found by going deeper into one's reality (Bridgewater 1350). This cross-cultural experience answers main concern Johnson articulates in and Race - namely, many of definitions of African personality embraced by Black Arts Movement and Cultural Nationalism remain immersed in Platonic legacy of bifurcation of Mind and Body, which has become for some an all-too-rigid dividing line between two cultures. African psychology is often interpreted as emotive, intuitive, grounded in earthy, sensual feeling of rhythm, whereas psychology of Westerner is interpreted as cold, rationalistic, analytic, lifelessly detached and abstracted from wholesome realities of body (18). Johnson's phenomenology and Allmuseri of Middle Passage are an attempt to balance Divided Landscape (Being 85) of racial world with a nonfragmentary sense of Being (26) is part of religio-philosophical history of both cultures. Far from not existing in real world, then, Allmuseri, as the Urtribe of humanity itself in Middle Passage (61), is an amalgamation of Bambara, Dogon, and Egyptian religion and mythology. The Bambara initiation rite, Dogon creation myth, and Egyptian Osiris-Horus-Seth myth all employ ritual sacrifice, death, and resurrection of god-king through which, in many African cosmologies, unity of kingdom and universe were established and continue to be sustained. …