Flight to Canada

by Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed has created a sharp, wildly funny slave's-eye view of the Civil War. Three slaves infected with Dysaethesia Aethipica (a term coined in the nineteenth century for the disease that makes Negroes run away) escape from Virginia. Not satisfied with leaving slavery halfway, one of the trio has vowed to go the whole distance to Canada; his master, Arthur Swille, determined to recover his property, pursues, hot on Raven Quickskill's trail.

With his myth-bending ingenuity, Reed merges history, fantasy, political reality, and high comedy as he parodies the fugitive slave narrative: the slave-poet Quickskill flees to Canada on a nonstop jumbo jet; Abe Lincoln waltzes through slave quarters to the tune of "Hello Dolly"; the plantation mistress lies in bed watching the Beecher Hour on TV. Flight to Canada's preposterous episodes leap out from the pages of history to reveal a keen sense of America past and present.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, African American, Novels, American, Humor, Literature

179 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Ishmael Scott Reed is an American poet, essayist, and novelist. A prominent African-American literary figure, Reed is known for his satirical works challenging American political culture, and highlighting political and cultural oppression.

Reed has been described as one of the most controversial writers. While his work has often sought to represent neglected African and African-American perspectives, his energy and advocacy have centered more broadly on neglected peoples and perspectives irrespective of their cultural origins.

Reviews

[Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wouldn't have thought it possible to write a funny book about slavery, but Ishmael Reed does just that in Flight to Canada. This is a multilayered postmodern satire of slavery and the racism that pervades America, not just in the 19th century, but in the late 20th century as well.

Reed diagnoses the sickness of the South by associating southern plantation owners with King Arthur and Edgar Allan Poe. They are wannabe Arthurians who wallow in decadence: "Raised by mammies, the South is dandyish, foppish, pimpish; its writers are Scott, Poe, Wilde, Tennyson." Furthermore, he says, Jefferson Davis "misread his people. It wasn't the idea of winning that appealed to them. It was the idea of being ravished. Decadent and Victorian writing both use the romantic theme of fair youth slumbering. Fair youth daydreaming. Fair youth struck down. In the New Orleans Mardi Gras, that great Confederate pageant, the cult of Endymion has a whole evening." It is this decadent romanticism that is the weakness of the South. In the tradition of Gone with the Wind , we are provided here with a vision of the South as full of fantasists who are completely divorced from reality. And the reality that they do encounter--the violence of the South--is experienced by them as a kind of sexualized horror. The narrator, Raven Quickskill, writes, "Why isn't Edgar Allan Poe recognized as the principal biographer of that strange war? Fiction, you say? Where does fact begin and fiction leave off? Why does the perfectly rational, in its own time, often sound like mumbo-jumbo? Where did it leave off for Poe, prophet of a civilization buried alive, where, according to witnesses, people were often whipped for no reason. . . . Poe got it all down. Poe says more in a few stories than all of the volumes by historians. Volumes about that war." Swille, the central representation of this Southern decadence, collects whips and "fettering equipment." "To make sure they were effective, he had Jim, the black stud, try them on him personally. He always tried out the fettering equipement personally so's to determine whether he'd gotten his money's worth. He loved the sound of screams coming from various parts of the plantation, day and night. Eddie Poe had gone bonkers over his equipment and used some of it in his short stories." Thus, it's not just that slaveowners were profiting financially from this system but that they had learned to love it, that they got off on it, the sadists that they were.

Reed also takes on the Uncle Tom stereotype in this book. The reader is presented with multiple possibilities for coping with slavery and racism. Raven Quickskill chooses to write, to speak for his people and to try to expose the problems of the system. He resists commodification and servitude as he runs away from his master (Swille) and refuses to even attempt to buy himself because, as he points out, he is not property but a person. Stray Leechfield, another escaped slave, takes a different tack. He sells his body so that he can buy himself, taking part in pornography: "Leechfield was lying naked, his rust-colored body must have been greased, because it was glistening, and there was . . . there was--the naked New England girl was twisted about him, she had nothing on but those glasses and the flower hat. How did they manage? And then there was this huge bloodhound. He was licking, he was . . . The Immigrant was underneath one of those Brady boxes--it was flashing. He . . . he was taking daguerrotypes, or 'chemical pictures.'" Through the commodification and sexualization of his body, Leechfield earns the money he needs to buy his legal freedom. Quickskill is horrified at Leechfield's willingness to take part in this racist ideology, even for this purpose. A third option is provided in the experience of Uncle Robin, upon whom Harriet Beecher Stowe based some of her Uncle Tom's Cabin and who is a trusted and loyal servant of Swille--except he is also taking advantage of Swille. He changes Swille's will so that the plantation is left to himself instead of Swille's family and, because he has played the Uncle Tom so thoroughly, the family allows it as a reward for his loyal service. In the end, despite the condemnation that others may heap on him, calling him and Uncle Tom and a traitor, Uncle Robin is able to say, "Yeah, they get down on me an Tom. But who's the fool? Nat Turner or us? Nat said he was going to do this. Was going to do that. Said he had a mission. Said his destiny was a divine one. Said that fate had chosen him. That the gods were handling him and speaking through him. Now Nat's dead and gone for these many years, and here I am master of a dead man's house. Which one is the fool?"

By providing these possibilities, none of which is without its drawbacks, Reed complicates one the questions consistently raised in African American literature: is it better to openly resist, to act politically, to run away? or is it better to take what you can get, to moves slowly and behind the scenes, to stay and take some shit but to live? W. E. B. DuBois or Booker T. Washington? Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr.? Nat Turner or Uncle Tom?

Finally, no matter which approach to slavery is taken, Reed shows us, slavery is not so easily escaped. Even outside of the slavemaster's control, there are forms of slavery that are harder to shake. Raven Quickskill says, "Not only were the slaves enslaved by others, but they often, in subtle ways, enslaved each other. . . . 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 behavior of another slave could be just as painful as a spiked collar--a gesture as fettering as a cage." Even beyond this, though, there remains the enslavement of advertising and popular culture. Quickskill confronts Yankee Jack, a distributor/advertiser, saying, "You decide which books, films, even what kind of cheese, no less, will reach the market. At least we fuges [refugees:] know we're slaves, constantly hunted, but you enslave everybody. Making saps of them all. . . . It's unearthly, the way you hold sway over the American sensibility. They see, read and listen to what you want them to read, see and listen to. You decide the top forty, the best-seller list and the Academy Awards." This pseudo slave narrative at this point becomes commentary on contemporary American culture and the ongoing need to be in control or to be controlled.

Ultimately, I suppose, that's what Flight to Canada is built on: the varieties of control we are subject to or that we subject others to.

[George]

The abridged conversation with Ishmael Reed is now available to read for free here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/05/2...

To read the uncut version, considering support The Collidescope’s efforts and becoming a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/TheCollidescope

Four months in the making: I interviewed Ishmael Reed, making Collidescope history with the longest interview to date. Only Patreon supporters will have access to the uncut interview which includes almost 2,000 more words of literal and metaphorical juicy material that won’t be published elsewhere.

I talk with Mr. Reed about the meaning of Mumbo Jumbo in the age of COVID-19, restrictions placed on Black writers, how Americans create their own mythology, Pynchon’s name-drop of Reed in Gravity’s Rainbow, Ishmael Reed’s publishing efforts, and a whole lot more!

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something about this personalness despite having to live in the world with its fucked up agendas and confusion from all sides spoke to me. No one gets to steal anyone else's story. Are our ideals and ideas vulnerable to being enslaved on us? Dulled into stupidity? Or selling-out? What the hell does anyone owe anybody else, anyway? (I don't think they do, beyond trying not to hurt anyone.) The sickness is worked up... I could probably pick many examples from today's culture (like pregnant teens made celebrities on reality tv). I don't wanna. I hate being pinned to that. I don't feel it has anything to do with me. I've lived in the American south all of my life. I don't see an image of a racist! southerner and feel it is a self-portrait. I don't "get" society, or see some opening to jump in (when playing jump rope, I'd stand and wait until the other girls tired of me waiting for the "right" moment to jump in) for a fitting place. I have no freaking clue how other people decide what stuff gets worked up between themselves to grow into some collective mindset. Someone decides that someone else owes them to be the martyr and "the bigger man" when taking their own. I loved this book for not trying to make them any thing other than their own story, despite the voices and forced swallow (like a Darth Vader choke). It's impossible to avoid it for good. Letting someone else tell you know you feel about it? I don't wanna.
Flight to Canada is gonna go in my stable of hos for stories that meant a lot to me about trying to live past images meant to put someone down on fly trap paper and watch them squirm for their own sense of mind and place.
You don't have to talk about it at all. The feeling of trying to live when you don't even have the basics... It's the mental equivalent of that, to me.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flight to Canada is probably Reed’s most coherently satisfying novel, despite reining in his comic exuberance, and imposing a linearity-of-sorts to the affair, only retaining a smidge of structural lunacy and unchained antics. A slave narrative set in the time of the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s assassination, the main storylines follow rich aesthete Arthur Swille and poet-slave Raven Quickskill, trying to flee to Canada. Swille is proslavery and even dresses his white servant as a negro slave and makes him talk the talk, and talks down to Lincoln who has come to his mansion to ask for money. Quickskill has become known through his poem ‘Flight to Canada,’ and has to keep himself moving. This summary barely tickles the surface, as the novel plays with history like playdough and moulds it into a brief and continuously stinging satire on the period, on the narratives of Beecher Stowe, Lincoln’s ropey myth, and all kinds of lousy bestiality in general. Top bookage.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flight To Canada is a curious satire, one ostensibly concerned with slavery, Lincoln and the American Civil War. It is a more probing examination of emancipation for a people regarded as property and considered a sixty percent equivalent to a normal (read:white) human.

Reading this is akin to a Kathy Acker literary dissection, but one ingested while singing along to Nina Simone's Backlash Blues. Reed tackles the avalanche of exploitation and commerce from the vantage of the mid-70s 9cue images of Nixon/Reagan and perhaps Archie Bunker).

Reed isn't sparing in his treatment of the academy or the purported gentility of the planter class.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes it's cartoonish, but it does pack a punch and I found it entertaining

[Daniel Polansky]

Oh man, I loved this. L-O-V-E-D. I like, walked into lamp poles reading this. I tripped on the beach reading this. A brilliant, bizarre comic satire of race relations during the civil war and a hundred years after, taking place in a nonsensical wonderland where Gettysburg is overlapping with rock-and-roll music and our protagonist, Raven Quickskill's eponymous escape from slavery might take place on a jumbo jet. Like Nathanael West (peculiar that I just read him last week, as Reed's debt to West is clear throughout) the plot really is just thin cover for an endless barrage of side characters, misadventures and narrative asides. The best satirists are hedgehogs, all points, and Reed is one of these, with every facet of American society being pitilessly, savagely, hysterically skewered. There are no easy answers here, no clear political program, just a fabulous writer exposing the underlying hypocrisy endemic to the human character. Also, you could basically read any sentence in this book and just laugh your ass off-- all this great wordplay and dead pan humor. Obviously I'm keeping this.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was pretty awesome, so I'm surprised to see that none of my friends have read it. I was going to write a review telling you all how great it is and that you should read it, but frankly I'm just too lazy to bother and apparently the only reason I come here anymore is to post strange unwanted rants about the futility of life on people's reviews (sorry about that Eric) and also to make stupid jokes that no one laughs at, whatever, I think they're funny even if you bastards don't, beside which this chick wrote a pretty decent review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... which says most of the things I wanted to say anyway and do we really need so many fucking reviews when most of them say the same shit? So yeah, read that other review and then read this book.

[Bandit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perfect title in light of the electoral college voting decision, isn't it? The book...not so much. Or really, probably just isn't for me. Intellectually I recognize the cleverness of this satire on race politics. Stylistically though most 70s literature is like most 70s styles...just not at all aesthetically appealing to me. I tend to prefer a more conventional narrative and story structure. This story was somewhat all over the place and the present tense used for most of it made it read like a play instead of giving it immediacy as such things often do. The juxtaposition or mash up of the 1860s/70s and 1970s took a while to get used to. There was some enjoyable things about the book, but in sum total it didn't really work for me. More of a respect than a like and far, far from love. The sort of thing that might be much too clever to try to be conventionally good. Which isn't to say a conventionally enjoyable book can't or mustn't be clever, it's just that optimally it ought to be both. Very quick read though.

[Zadignose]

When I started into this, I felt sure that it would be my favorite Ishamael Reed book. Further into it, I wasn't so sure. It got kind of murky--some humor was stretched too far and I was losing my way with it--I returned to it later and found I was really enjoying it near the end. I'm not sure how I got from there to here. So, it was like a lot of Reed's books for me--bright moments mixed with some moments of doubt, an acceptance of the fact that Reed's going to go his own way because that's what he does, admiration for those parts that I did connect with and enjoyed, and some lingering confusion about what to make of it all. Part of me wants to go back to the start and give it a fair shake, and part of me wants to put that experiment off for another year.

[caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

sorry professor, i don’t get the hype

[Paul Tatum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Odd. This novel was odd. It was a good kind of strange, the kind that makes you wonder and process what is being written. Reed certainly has a profound idea to share, he discusses slavery in a way that makes one wonder the many ways we enslave others and ourselves. It reminds us of the horrors that occurred but reminds us that things have not been fully repaired. We still suck. How do we deal with that. I am still processing what I read, but it was great. But more importantly, it was odd.

[Fadillah · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The devil’s country home. That’s what the South is. It’s where the devil goes to rest after he’s been about the world, wearying the hunted and the haunted. This is where he comes. The devil sits on the porch of his plantation, He’s dressed up like a gentleman and sitting on a white porch between some columns. All the tormented are out in the fields, picking cotton and tobacco and looking after his swine, who have human heads and scales on their pig legs and make pitiful cries when they are whipped.”
- Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed
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The first page when i saw the poetry of “flight to Canada” written by the fugitive slave named Quickskill, i was instantly sold. The poem described how he escaped and managed to outsmart his master. Then we proceeded with the aftermath after Quickskill, leech and 40 escaped from the house of his master Arthur Swille. Arthur wanted to capture back all 3 of them back because if he didn’t do that, the other slaves will be tempted to do the same like Quickskill .To be frank, when the direction of the story went deeper with his master in the beginning of the book - i was a bit frustrated because i thought the focus should be on Quickskill journey to be free and pursue what he wanted to do which is writing. Fortunately, it came to full circle in the middle of the book. This book also deep dived into the controversy revolved around Uncle Tom's Cabin written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. While it was considered as part of important literature that showed the evil and immorality of slavery, Quickskill pointed out that the author stole the work of other slaves and simply make a quick buck for herself. Another point that was debated in the novel is does Abraham Lincoln really went into Civil War to end the slavery? or is it just another angle that he used because he knew that by using it as a motive, he will win the war. A controversial point, i must say but it is supported with convincing and solid arguments at least by Quickskill. This is the my first Ishmael Reed’s book but it will never be the last. I am dreading to read this book because the subject matter revolved around slavery during the civil war. However, seeing how the author managed to write the story brilliantly that i feel i must read his other books. I won’t spilled any other details because i believe it will ruin if any of you wanted to read this book. Overall, a highly recommended reading. What an amazing masterpiece!

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Flight to Canada is a bit hard to summarise. People go places and say things, but everything that happens is rather loosely connected. But a superbly structured plot is not the point of this book. This book is a satire, and a good one at that.

Ishmael Reed describes a mid-19th century America with all the fixtures and fittings of the 20th century, which creates a lovely jumble of things. It's not supposed to make sense and have some kind of internal order, I think, it's just a mix that pokes fun at everything.

People who loved Paul Beatty's The Sellout should definitely give this book a try: it's also a funny book about slavery, and it's also a rather random sequence of events with a host of strange characters. And like The Sellout, it's also very well-written. I don't really like comparing books too much (I think it's lazy reviewing and unfair to the books) but this one was staring me right in the face.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compared to "James" this book soars with humor, creative imagining & satire.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to Subvert Colonization
(spoiler alert)
When an Imperial culture seeks to dominate a population outside their own without actually killing them off, three essential tools are to (as best as is possible) take away their language, their folklore and their spirituality. When slave-trading whites from the West sought insure subjugation of African slaves, they employed these tools with a vengeance. In his anachronistic satire of the Civil War, Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed wrests these tools from the hands of the oppressors and hands them back to his characters, thereby facilitating a liberation.
The trickster figure is a staple of African folklore and by extension, has become part of African American literature. Reed is by far not the first to invoke the trickster. Nineteenth Century writers such as Chestnutt and Harris, Twentieth Century writers such as Hughes and Ellison, and on into the Twenty-first century in the works of Toni Morrison and others, have the trickster appear as a way of holding onto to an identity, which colonial powers have continually sought to squelch.
In Flight to Canada, the trickster is embodied in two characters: Raven Quickskill and Uncle Robin.
The novel opens with a poem that bears the same name as the book. The poem is actually a letter from the trickster (here Quickskill) to the oppressor (here Massa Swille). The letter reveals that the narrative associated with the trickster myth has already been played out. Indeed the trickster, by craft and cunning, has won out over his oppressor who, according to the myth, is always equipped with more resources. Quickskill is a relative avatar for Ishmael Reed.
The second trickster in novel, Uncle Robin, plays a crucial role in the defeat of oppression's representative in the story, Massa Swille. After Swille meets with a Mephistophelian end, it becomes clear that by doctoring his "owner's" will, Robin has afforded the slaves freedom and awarded himself and his wife the plantation. He says to Aunt Judy, "Sometimes the god that works fast for them is slow or indifferent for us. We have to call on our own gods. When we came here, our gods came with us. They'll never go away." (Reed 170) Here Reed shows the constancy of the spiritual beliefs that came as part of an African heritage. Quickskill also alludes several times throughout to decidedly non-Western, non-Christian spiritual tenants (reference gris gris page 8).
With Swille dead, it is now safe for Quickskill to return and the novel ends with the possibility of its beginning when Quickskill/Reed sits down to write. By this action, while admittedly not in any African language, he does take back the power of language and will tell the tale of a Flight to Canada, invoking the folklore of his ancestors who had been shackled and dragged from their home and into bondage. Reed has now returned language, folklore and spirituality to the ghosts of those from whom it was stolen.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Flight to Canada' is a bit of a Hitchhiker's Guide to Slavery, really. The story about fugitive slave-poet Raven Quickskill, who manages to escape the Swille plantation and travel to Canada, is hardly more than a backdrop for parody and tongue-in-cheek vignettes about racism and discrimination. It's fun, though, especially considering how I've been reading mostly dead serious accounts of life under slavery the last few months.

Slave owner Arthur Swille is a show stealer, trying to reconstruct a sort of white elitist Camelot on his plantation. His 'main slave' Uncle Robin is a delightful spoof on Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe's infamous slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Protagonist Quickskill is less comically exuberant, although he does incorporate some of the main themes of slavery literature, constantly struggling with the responsibility of the 'freed slave' to help his brothers, and his new-found fate as a liberated, but still oppressed man.

Also, Reed really likes taking the piss out of Abraham Lincoln, which is okay, since he does so quite brilliantly.

[Seán · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beside broadly symbolic characters, the book's chief feature is a sort of bleary historical simultaneity, the total merger of the 1860s and the then now of the 1970s. This setup yields a few comic moments and a very good sense of the endlessness of American history, but it didn't make for much of a story. A few excellent passages, however, offer some redemption.

[Raja · Rating 1 out of 5]

I might have liked this more as a freshman in college, but I probably still wouldn't have been able to finish it. Glad to invoke my tried and true "if it's not better halfway through, it never will be" rule in this case.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reed is the king! one of the few pomo writers that truly feels like he’s got something under the hood other than detachment and irony. Truly funny novel about slavery - shouldn’t be possible!

[Harry Dichmont · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ishmael Reed is a genius

[Sanjida · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird ass book but highly influential

[Miles Procter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Potentially my favorite author. Some of the funniest and entertaining writing I’ve ever read, and Ishmael Reed is unbelievably talented, as seen by the fusion of novel, poem and play that is interwoven (incredibly artistically and impressively) into the novel.

I enjoyed this one more than his other novel Mumbo Jumbo.

This one had stronger characterisation and a better storyline that isn’t so bogged down by the sheer amount of anecdotes. The anecdotes are obviously a strong part of Reed putting his voice into the writing. This can be confusing if you don’t get a historical/political reference, but on the whole are the key to his style and humorous writing.

Plot wasn’t what I expected but so much better and richer. Incredibly satirical, ironic, but so insightful and meaningful.

I’m Rambling on but loved.

[toria · Rating 3 out of 5]

so smartly written, so funny, so engaging!!!!

[Nick Carnac · Rating 5 out of 5]

,,,,,humour dwells/harsh lament bringing Beat sensibilities to the look back at Slavery,,,,,Pynchon cites hin
,,,,,,

[Matt Ely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't let its short page count trick you into thinking it lacks depth. In this quickly-shifting narrative, an alternate history of slavery and the Civil War is told, where it happens in the past and in the modern day, the realities of one time inseparable from the other. In the absurdity of its satire, Reed seeks to draw the reader out of the comfortable sense that slavery and genocide are historic events, stuck in history and free to be perused at one's leisure. Instead, it is presented as a war still being fought, a conflict of souls and the sense of one's self, of the legends we tell ourselves and the selective readings of our history. It merits a close read and a slow one.

[Freddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wacky and thought-provoking. Had a few laugh-out-loud moments. Interesting playing with history and chronology.

[Gray Frandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's pretty bold to throw around the term favorite book, and I'm not willing to. But the book I've spent the most time on is without a doubt Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, which I've read a good number of times and I was happy to discover he had written other books. If you haven't read Mumbo Jumbo you might be surprised that a book on slavery is funny, but if you have, this book has a similar satirical tone with a mix of caricatures and actual historical figures. I loved this book too, it's definitely more accessible than Mumbo Jumbo but there's still some odd things. It takes place during the civil war but not really, there's jets and television giving it an oddly modern feel. I feel as if Quickskill is an abstraction of a black man and time is just a direction in this book, his journey from Virginia to emancipation city and eventually Canada can symbolize the black man's journey throughout American history and the fight for equality, him moving north is comparable to the great migration in the 1910's which is fitting that this is when he wrote his poem as this movement was synonymous with the Harlem renaissance. Additionally, Slavery and its effects are minimized by people like Quaw Quaw despite the ever present danger of his captors still pursuing him, not unlike reality where black people's struggles after being exploited are attributed to lack of work ethic as opposed to the lack of a foundation of generational wealth. (Both this book and Call of the Wild I finished today and they both made me think about Trading Places.) On a final note I appreciated the redemption and new light shone on Uncle Robin, the reimagined character from the novel by Harriet Beecher-Stowe, who is not held in high regard in this book.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this novel as a 5th grader, I do not advise giving this book to a child, however I do think by high school you should encourage every young person who loves history, literature and ideally both to read Ishmael Reed's 5th novel: Flight to Canada. It was published, with great intention, in 1976 to commemorate in it's own, extremely unconventional fashion, the bicentennial. Raven Quickskill is a: poet and runaway slave and as the principal protagonist the opening pages virtually identify him with the author of the book, and the story itself traces his coming to awareness. Ashraf Rushdy describes the way in which Reed reclaims African-American literary history through parody in Flight to Canada.

Rushdy claims that “Reed dismantles any of definition of the black experience as monolithic” by “rendering obsolete…readers’ reading patterns and expectation.” One of the ways Reed accomplishes this task is through his blending of the past and the present. His use of anachronism and irony cause the reader to question all previously held notions concerning the slave narrative and its place in the black literary tradition. Rushdy also maintains that the White literary tradition would not allow the presence of a Black narrator in abolitionist literature, resulting in the “idealism of a transcendent Black subject.” It is to the end of reinvesting the slave narrative with not only a black “presence” that Reed is working, but also a renaissance of the genre itself.

When he leaves the plantation, he is a naïve idealist engaged in abolitionist activism. He regards not only Arthur "Massa" Swille and the, seemingly genial Uncle Robin as his enemy. He believes that Canada is freedom, that the slaves who escape with him will join the cause, that Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, as a Native American, shares his civil rights crusade. One by one, events disabuse him of his illusions. Yet he does not become a cynic. However his eyes are opened and he realizes that very few things are in sharp relief and instead he lives in a world of chiaroscuro.

Reed has been taken to task, with some justification, for the somewhat slapdash way that he creates and negotiates the consciousness of his female characters. Raven Quicksill has relationships and encounters with Mammy Barracuda the: wet-nurse, major-domo, mater familias and force of nature who in many ways is the most single-note, even if it's a rather loud note, character in the novel. Arthur Swille's wife is by turns the classically Southern Gothic swooning lady and a budding suffragette. All of her pretenses to agency are quickly harpooned either by Mammy Barracuda or Massa Swille himself. Finally Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, initially she's espoused to pirate/entrepreneur, Yankee Jack, but she leaves him. She gives us our first glimpse at feminine complexity when she tells her husband “You’ve always complained about your lack of identity.” She leaves him for Quickskill. But she's later seduced by pop/celebrity culture.

The language semiotics are far from subtle, Swille, enough says, Yankee Jack is slang for money, I don't think Mammy Barracuda requires exegesis and the name Raven Quicksill, suggests speed and dexterity, quick-wittedness, the ability to improvise on the spot. Quick also means living; thus, Quickskill possesses life-skill: he knows how to stay alive and he knows how to live. By the novel's end he does indeed see how to live.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

ATT: You are reading a pro forma Transmission from the Godhead of Retroactive Reviews 2025

I have no idea why I didn’t write anything about ______. It was so fucking _________ and _________ that, possibly, I was at a rare loss for words. Or maybe I was on the lam. I can’t remember; hey, it’s been a few since ___________ and I crossed paths.

(If you’re reading this, this is a form letter—a placeholder, if you must—done retroactively as a stop-gag corrective of historical wrongs I committed by failing to uphold my end of the book-reader compact. That compact, my own, dictates that I record SOMETHING/ANYTHING (not a Rundgren reference, but…) to mark my engagement with a given novel/work/etc. at a fixed time in my personal life history. These ‘reviews’ are not really reviews (no shit, I know) at all; their purpose is that they act as pretty accurate reflections of where my head/heart was at the time of engagement. It’s something between the book and I, and a good way to check your hubris from time-to-time. If you find any part of it enriching, that’s a wild compliment. If not, you can just feel free to move along—I can almost guarantee that no offense was genuinely intended. Almost.)

So, clearly, __________ pretty much made me revaluate my entire cosmological and epistemological edifices, those false shells I’d enacted over years to protect whatever core ‘me’ I felt uncomfortable exposing. And it is so fucking _______! The _______? Unbelievable, right? Good/bad times…Ahhhh. Anyhow, __________ by ____ _________ obviously deserves a reread to inform a proper write-up. In between now and whenever that reread happens (foregoing death or living on the lam again), all I can say is ___________________.

I know. That’s why I’ll be back.

X Cody
10.25