On "Middle Passage"

John Hatcher

The dramatic and powerful "Middle Passage" is, first of all, a synthesis of historical voices recalling the inhuman cruelty of a people transported as chattel. And yet we must infer that violence from the civilized rhetoric of the court deposition:

that there was hardly room 'tween-decks for half
the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;
that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh
and sucked the blood.

We do not hear the voice of the African captives or their leader Cinquez; any indictment of the slavers comes from our own reaction to the powerful irony of the accusations of the slavers themselves, as is exemplified in the speech by the Spanish emissary from Havana:

We find it paradoxical indeed
that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty
are rooted in the labor of your slaves
should suffer the august John Quincy Adams
to speak with so much passion of the right
of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters
and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero's
garland for Cinquez.

Assembled by Hayden from historical records, these speeches document the fabric of a society, ostensibly founded on principles of freedom and justice, actually interwoven with threads of racism and injustice:

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move,
their bright ironical names
like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth ...

But just as the ancient identity and beliefs of the Mexican people reassert themselves, so these poems recount the "timeless will" of a people to struggle for freedom and identity:

the deep immortal human wish,
the timeless will:

Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,
life that transfigures many lives.

Voyage through death
                                to life upon these shores.

[. . . .]

in addition to referring to the second leg of a three-part journey of a slave ship (from America to Africa, from Africa to a Caribbean or West Indies port, from there to America) this middle journey implies the middle or transitional stage in the progress of the speaker, of the Afro-American people, and ultimately of mankind upon the shores of physical reality and history. In a most general sense the middle passage thus reflects the sentiments of the Bahá’í burial ring inscription which states that we come from God and return to God. The ascent from slavery symbolizes in broad terms the aspiration toward detachment and certitude for which the speaker longs in "Veracruz," and which the sleepers anticipate in "The Prophet."

from From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden. Copyright © 1984 by John Hatcher.

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Fred M. Fetrow

Hayden's early magnum opus has its origins in the same career era and creative tendencies as "Daedalus." "Middle Passage" probably Hayden's most famous heritage poem, grew out of his research work and the "Black Spear" project of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Notable for its broad sweep of black history, and striking for its virtuoso blending of narrative voices, the poem is especially intriguing in its generic features. Hayden's epic aspirations warrant special scrutiny in view of the poem's content, structure, tone, and theme. "Middle Passage" bears virtually all the tracings of an epic in miniature, but it is neither conventional nor mocking in its epic mode. While Hayden employs most of the "standard" epic conventions and devices, he consistently and ironically inverts or alters these features. Through this inversion technique, he creates what could be called an "anti-epic," an original form with which he achieves a coherent merger of formal technique and poetic theme. His "anti-epic" approach includes characterization. With it he brings to life and ennobles Cinquez, an "antihero" and a symbolic racial representative whom Hayden glorifies in celebrating the ultimate subject of the poem--the heroic struggle for freedom by the black victims of the "Middle Passage.

Some of Hayden's ironic inversions of epic elements are rather direct and apparent; others are more subtle and have profound thematic implications. In the former category, the poet does not begin the poem with a direct statement of epic theme but instead with a brief but appalling catalog of slave ships: "Jesus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy." These pleasant names and those that follow in line fourteen ("Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann") initiate the tone of cosmic irony that permeates the entire poem. Hayden's research shows in his deliberate use of historically factual Spanish and English names. Thus through historical selectivity Hayden emphasizes a situational irony that is as real as it is literary. The poet-narrator, in subsequently describing these symbolic ships, points up this irony: "Their bright ironical names / like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth." Those ships also figure centrally in the formal statement of theme, tersely injected early in the narrative:

Middle Passage:
    voyage through death
        to life upon these shores.

The classic epic premise of a quest-journey is thus established, but in terms that are uniquely Hayden's. He uses "death" in a literal sense to counterpoint ironically the figurative use of "life." As his narrative account makes clear, "death" as a part of the journey is no more horrible a prospect than the life to be "lived" after arrival. The transit through the Middle Passage is indeed a "voyage through death, " but the life of slavery to be experienced by the survivors will be a living death, a death in life.

Hayden thus frequently includes, but inverts, denies, or uses ironic substitutes for, the typical epic conventions and devices. His treatment of the supernatural element further exemplifies this technique. The "gods" are present in the poem, but neither as fickle pagan deities with vested interests in human endeavor nor as providential protectors in a "Christian" epic. Instead, Hayden confronts the reader with two alternate pseudosupernatural influences: indifferent brute nature, or pious hypocritical Puritanism. The sharks who hungrily await the suicidal leaps of crazed slaves are also identified as the "tutelary gods" of the harassed or endangered slavers. These gods "intervene" in that they provide a quick death to the suffering victims of the Middle Passage and ironically serve as guardians and instructors to those responsible for that suffering. These "grinning" gods accompany the slave ships in mockery of both slaves and slavers, and with their pointed presence in the poem Hayden mocks the supernatural role in "ordinary" epics.

The Christian element in the poem also seethes with irony. The poet is quite clear about his intent here:

Irony is a constant element through the poem. The reference to Christianity in this section [Section I], the lines from the hymn, emphasize the irony of the Christian acceptance and justification of the slave trade as a means of bringing "heathen souls" to Christ.

Hayden refers to a hymn entitled "Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me, " parts of which he weaves between the narrative segments of Part I as an ironic refrain. For example, lines from that hymn bracket the brief stanza that represents a prayer for God's blessing upon slave ships departing from New England for the west coast of Africa:

Jesus     Savior     Pilot      Me
Over     Life's       Tempestuous      Sea

We pray that thou wilt grant, O Lord,
safe passage to our vessels bringing
heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

Jesus     Savior

By enclosing this three-line stanza with lines and phrases from the hymn Hayden evokes an atmosphere where slave trading was rationalized as a missionary rather than as a commercial venture. The poet also sets off subsequent narrative passages with more phrases from the same hymn ("Thou Who Walked on Galilee," "Pilot Oh Pilot Me"), thereby juxtaposing religious sentiments with details of horrible events and immoral carnage aboard slave ships, in order to emphasize the perverted application of Christian doctrine to human inhumanity. God exists neither as a source of hope for the enslaved nor as a divine "pilot" for seagoing Christians, but merely as an excuse to justify cruel exploitation of one group of human beings by another.

In denying the presence of Christian love through his treatment of the supernatural, Hayden characteristically provides a thematic alternative with a metaphoric basis. The slave ships negotiate the Middle Passage with navigational aids quite in contrast to God's blessing. The "voyage through death" is a "voyage whose chartings are unlove," where "horror is the corposant and compass rose." The narrator calls the slave ships "Shuttles in the rocking loom of history," and as these "dark ships move" to weave the fabric of history, their courses are governed not by divine providence but by inhumanity and horror.

Thus, in effect, God does not exist in "Middle Passage." When the poem is compared with traditional epics, this omission is notable because the presence of God or gods in such poems has often verified the favored status of the central character or epic hero. Indeed, only relatively late in Hayden's poem is the reader even introduced to the central character, and then the poet presents the hero both belatedly and indirectly. Hayden's treatment of the conventional epic concern for the fate and accomplishments of a prominent national or racial hero is probably the most thematically significant of his "epic inversions."

Cinquez, as an epic hero, demands special attention because with this character Hayden posits the primary message of the poem. Although the manner of Cinquez's presentation and his social stature as an epic hero are unorthodox, this character emerges as the spiritual symbol of the suffering and aspirations of his race. Cinquez becomes a "deathless primaveral image"; his is a "life that transfigures many lives"; his characterization is one of epic dimension achieved through an anti-epic mode. Since the narrative premise of the epic as a distinct genre involves the telling of a story that accounts the exploits of a prominent and noble warrior, such stories usually introduce the hero early in the telling. The "epic hero" of "Middle Passage" is not introduced until line 138 of a poem 179 lines in length. In the remaining forty-two lines Hayden provides an ironically indirect account of Cinquez's "adventures," establishes the character as central to the narrative structure and theme of the entire poem, and climaxes the heroic portrayal by identifying Cinquez as the ultimate symbol of the timeless human desire for freedom, a theme of epic proportions

Hayden attributes personal nobility to Cinquez by combining history with art, by confusing myth, legend, and fact. Although Cinquez clearly was the leader of the Amistad mutiny and was put on trial in that role (in the case of the United States, Appelants, v. Cinque, and Others, Africans), he was a rice planter, not a chieftain or a prince. As a leader of slaves in rebellion against their captors, he gave his followers hope and direction, but contemporary events, curiosity, and sympathy elevated him to "regal" status. Public curiosity was abetted by an idealized portrait done by Nathaniel Jocelyn, a phrenological profile, and by several sympathetic newspaper editorials in praise of Cinquez, e.g., "The more we learn of the man's character . . . the more are we impressed with a sense of his possessing the true elements of heroism." The abolitionists who took up the cause of the "Amistaders" regarded Cinquez as a "noble savage" and saw his situation as an opportunity to set a legal precedent that would forward the abolition movement.

Hayden retains these historical perspectives and then transcends them by portraying Cinquez in symbolic terms of epic scope. Cinquez's desire and struggle for freedom become the "deep immortal human wish, / the timeless will." Ultimately, then, "Middle Passage" creates a hero who represents his race in a quest for personal liberty, something in which all men have a real shared interest. Hayden's hero remains central to the entire narrative because Cinquez is the symbolic personification of the primary theme of the poem. Hayden makes the hero appear larger than life because his "life transfigures many lives." Cinquez's rebellion against enslavement thus stands for the physical and spiritual struggle for freedom by all blacks then and since.

"Middle Passage" is epic in theme and import although "anti-epic" in formal structure and technique. Due to Hayden's manner of ironically contrasting his style with traditional epic characteristics, the poem fairly reverberates with unanticipated thematic implications throughout its length. If "unlove" provides the direction for imposed travel through the Middle Passage, then irony is the thematic gloss for reader progress toward an understanding and appreciation of Hayden's epic tribute. This indirect and muted treatment of a horrible chapter in human history at once demonstrates the poet's developing craftsmanship, verifies his compassionate objectivity (his "negative capability," one might say), and substantiates Robert Hayden's own humanity.

From Robert Hayden. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by G.K. Hall & Company. Reprinted with permission of the author.

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 Pontheololla T. Williams

In "Middle Passage" he treats the origin of the slave trade in Africa as it relates to the devlopment of the new ethnic group—the Afro-American.

"Middle Passage" tries to achieve a two-fold purpose. Hayden says that he wanted to fulfill Benet's prophecy and to write a poem that would give the lie to bigots who had distorted the Afro-American's history.  Though it was inspired by epic intentions and contains elements of the epic, it is not quite that. The traditional epic depicts the values and patterns of the life of an entire people or culture through the experience of a hero who represents in himself certain ideals of that culture. "Middle Passage" attempts through a hero to present the values, both positive and negative, of the slavery era and the Afro-American's historic condition, depicting his dislodgment and displacement from his mother country to an alien land.

The hero of the poem is Cinquez, the captive prince who inspired and carried out the Amistad mutiny. This figure, however, blends with the poet-observer, who enunciates "the deep dark immortal human wish / the timeless will to be free" (lines 172-73).

Aldon L. Nielsen

Between the two litanies of ships' names Hayden introduces the ironic and elegiac voice of the poem's organizing persona, a voice that speaks only a few times but that seems to have seized control over the assorted documents written in other hands that Hayden takes into his hands in his poem; it is this voice that announces the poem's defining trope: "Middle Passage: / voyage through death / to life upon these shores." Announcing also its own textual strategy, Hayden's poem immediately embarks upon an intertextual passage that refigures the Middle Passage of its title, voyaging through a textual death to rebirth in a new poetics of a new world. By next adopting the voices of the slave traders themselves and adapting their texts to his own purposes, Hayden accomplishes a scriptural revolution that mirrors the revolt of the Amistad Africans. Hayden, in rewriting the words of the slave owners and captains, in ironically voiding them and redeploying them within his historical discourse, effects a metaphorical repetition of the Amistad rebellion, a rebellion in which the cargo, the tenor, seizes the vehicle and redirects it homeward. Just before his second list of ships, Hayden transcribes the log of a captain that brings into our reading presence the absent songs of the Africans. The captain, uneasily listening to the African languages rising from his craft, must turn to an intercessor, the ship's linguist, to learn that the Africans' words are "a prayer for death, / ours and their own." He seemingly seeks no translation of the more startling songs his log states were sung as they went under the waters by those who threw themselves overboard.

Then, following the list of ships, the poem speaks again in its own voice, a voice that alludes most strongly to other texts as a means of troping its own renewed source of song, signifying its reemergence in full control of the words it masters and forms.

from Aldon L. Nielsen. Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994: 122-123.

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Vera M. Kutzinski

If writing (here in the form of a slaver's logbook) creates an illusion of control and of an authority already in the process of being eroded, it does so by "exorcizing" a threatening reality, or better, by containing the disturbing inconsistencies of reality within the ordered patterns of linearity. The religious overtones of this kind of exorcism are readily apparent, especially in connection with the mocking plea to grant "safe passage to our vessels bringing / heathen souls unto thy chastening." But if exorcism, in the religious sense, is a form of "chastening," of restoring the purity of the soul and the kind of innocence associated with Christian mythology, it is also, more generally, a way of negating otherness, that is, cultural differences of any sort.  Exorcism, then, becomes a self-imposed blindness resulting from the failure (or refusal) to acknowledge the legitimate existence of other cultures and creeds in order to avoid being "contaminated" by them. This ironic play on the religious justification of slavery is indeed effective, but Hayden's language penetrates the myth of purity even more deeply. Hayden's language reaches down to the ideological core of American society: its Puritan heritage. The implications of Hayden's attack on the narrow-mindedness and intolerance of Puritanism are clarified by a statement from Octavio Paz's meditations on the same subject. He contends that for the Puritans and their North American descendents, "every contact is contamination. Foreign races, ideas, customs, and bodies carry within themselves the germs of perdition and impurity. Social hygiene complements that of the body and soul."

For Hayden, the kind of writing to which we generally attribute the status of historical documentary and thus a certain truth-value is characterized precisely by such practices of "social hygiene," which is of course but a euphemism for slavery in its many forms. In this way, the written chronicles of the slave ships'  voyages render visible in their own rhetoric the underlying ideological structures and strictures of North American imperialism: historiography becomes a mechanism of defense against cultural otherness and difference, against everything, in short, that would challenge ("contaminate") existing social institutions. Hayden's is a struggle not only against historical slavery; his struggle is also against the linguistic vestiges of slavery manifest in the continued confinement of Afro-Americans by a language that denies not only their complex historico-cultural identities, but their humanity: for him, the difference between such phrases as "sweltering cattle," "chattel slaves," and "black poet' is one of the degrees only.

from Vera M. Kutzinski."Changing Permanences: Historical and Literary Revisionsim in Robert Hayden's 'Middle Passage.'" Callaloo 9.1 (Winter 1986): 179.

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Jon Woodson

Like other poets who wished to compose long poems in the mode of The Waste Land, Robert Hayden had not only to resolve the many problems inherent in such a project, but he also had to negotiate another complement of difficulties occasioned by the distance from which he was forced to contemplate American society. Haydens account of his own appropriation of the long poem is revealing. The most striking feature of Hayden’s career is that he did not begin as a modernist poet. Reading Stephen Vincent Benet's poem John Brown's Body (1928) moved Hayden to attempt the writing of an epic poem about the efforts by blacks to gain their freedom during the slavery era, the Civil War, and its aftermath. Hayden began his epic in a style similar to Benet's and won the Hopwood Award in 1942 with sections of "The Black Spear," written in blank verse. In an interview with Paul McCluskey in 1972, Hayden's description of the creation of "Middle Passage," the opening section of "The Black Spear," doesn’t address Hayden's shift from classical to high modernist poetics: he observed that he was dissatisfied with "The Black Spear because it was too much like Benet, and that after a year of revising "gradually a form began to suggest itself." Hayden added, "The style, or method, might be thought of as, in a way, cinematic, for very often one scene ends and another begins without any obvious transitional elements." In the same interview, Hayden comments that his poem contains different voices—the voice of the poet that "at times . . . seems to merge with voices from the past, voices not intended to be clearly identified" as well as the voices of the traders, of the hymn-singers, and "perhaps even of the dead."

Despite Pontheola Williams's assertion of Hayden’s uniqueness and brilliance in the face of her acknowledgment of Hayden's debt to Eliot and Pound, Hayden did not so much realize the form that his poem could take as much as he realized the form his poem should take. Had Hayden refused to accommodate the demands of high modernist practice, African American poetry would have remained aesthetically archaic, removed from contemporary discourse, and a further demonstration that blacks were culturally retrograde. The most salient breakthrough that Hayden accomplished was the realization that whereas the "mythic histories," "the poems including history" of Eliot, Pound, Crane, and Williams, fell outside of the concerns of most Americans, "mythical histories" written for African Americans would necessarily find a captivated audience.

In constructing "Middle Passage," Robert Hayden borrowed directly from Eliot, Pound, and Crane much more than has been acknowledged by his critics. Hayden's use of the "cinematic" technique of montage can ultimately be attributed to Eliot's stylistic innovation; however, Hayden's most numerous and consistent direct appropriations are from Pound and Crane as well. From Pound, Hayden derived the use of documents and the use of a "historic character who can be used as illustration of intelligent constructivity." From Crane, Hayden derived the narrator who is a "floating singer," the catalogs of the names of ships, and some of the vocabulary (e.g. "corposant").

"Middle Passage" has a deceptively simple structure: the poem consists of three sections, each of which tells a brief story. The materials that are cinematically collaged serve to disguise and complicate this simple narrative structure, for they intersperse fragments of history in the form of names, diaries, and snatches of disembodied ruminations in the interest of deepening the temporal scope. Despite Hayden's adoption of Pound's documentary method of introducing history into poetry, his goal differs from Pound's, who never moves away from the contents of his own mind. Like the symbolist poet Yeats, Hayden seeks to revive a mythic past, yet he must accomplish this by means that are essentially realistic and self-articulated. Hayden's goal was, then, to erect a racial myth out of the materials of history.

After the speech of the outraged Spaniard, the poem concludes with a six-line coda: in these lines Cinquez is identified by the poet-narrator and thereby personifies the "deathless primaveral image" of "the deep immortal human wish, / the timeless will." The poem is brought to an end with the lines that have been used to establish a motif, appearing formerly in the first section and in a varied form at the beginning of the third section: "Voyage through death / to life upon these shores."

Haydens method is to present historical detail as though historical events compose a body of evidence that incriminates the slave traders, and, by extension, Western Christian culture. Haydens faithfulness to the Eliotic doctrine of impersonality has determined the narratological strategy of "Middle Passage": the slaves are never presented directly, and they do not speak for themselves. In its simplest form, the poem pairs examples of the worst horrors of the slave trade with examples of the religious hypocrisy of the Christians who profited from its merciless operation. Yet because the poem opens cinematically with a sweeping "objective" gesture—the recitation of the names of the slave ships that has the effect of a pan of the camera—the slave traders also are distanced and are not yet allowed to speak for themselves: these distancing devices are largely responsible for endowing the poem with an aura of self-articulated historical event. However, the poem's self-articulation is challenged by the discontinuous presentation of the scenes, for when this effect is examined, the narratological consciousness that orders and presents the scenes soon becomes evident. What the poem musters as history must now be recognized as argument.

Thus, the history in Hayden's epic is illusory, a matter of semantic interpolations. The names of the ships are mere names, and, as signs, are not containers of history. While their semiotic value is that, for the poet-narrator, they are icons of the discourses of Christianity, sailing, and commercial enterprise, they are not in themselves, as the poet-narrator must say, "ironical." The poet-narrator wishes to present the ships as objective correlatives of the failed moral code of Christianity and thereby to indicate that a naturally occurring semiotic (and symbolic) situational irony exists in the conjunction of the names and function of the slave ships. This type of irony, however, actually exists as a substitutive myth that is being fabricated by the associative and sign-making efforts of the poet-narrator. "Jesus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy": to the namers of the ships, the Christian myth that enfolded and motivated their activities was as solid a conceptual map of their culture as the poet-narrators rejection of the interpretants of European myth and the conception of an African American antimyth is indicative of his own cultural mythmaking.

The "impersonal" rhetoric of Hayden's epic is designed to disguise the fact that an operation of mythic inversion is taking place: the poet-narrator has taken the approach that the documentary depictions of the depredations of the Christian enslavers of the Africans are all that need to be shown in order that the poem will establish the "mirage and myth and actual shore" that the poet-narrator sees blended in the history of the building up of the Americas. However, we have only to realize the implications of Hayden's argument in order to grasp the absolutist and ideologically conservative nature of his discourse. Hayden's rereading of history might at first seem inevitable and inescapable because the poet-narrator speaks from the point of view of the "good" in order to show the "evil" of the traders in slaves. However, we may deconstruct this view of the slave trade by reflecting upon the fact that the poem does not enact Cinquez's transfiguration so much as it justifies and then dramatizes Cinquez's slaughter of the crew of the Amistad. The poem avoids the direct engagement of moral problems by shifting the ground of its argument to the symbolic mode of agency: "Middle Passage" enacts a relativistic reversal of the controlling myth from the Christian and imperial law of the Europeans and substitutes for it the mythic agency of the revolutionary "will" of the Africans. What we see of this retributive "will," as it is expressed in the person of Cinquez as a transfigured agent, is that he is as ruthless as the self-righteous Spaniard who narrates the climactic events of the mutiny in the poem's final section. As in The Tempest, which serves as the paradigm of "Middle Passage," the action proceeds judicially, while those on trial remain unaware of the ongoing process. However, because the poet-narrator is at once Ariel, Prospero, and Caliban, there is no voice to take on Ariel's role as sympathetic intercessor for Sebastian and Antonio ("if you now beheld them, your affections / would become tender," 5.1.18-19) and, likewise, to speak against the condemnation of the Spaniard who has been cast in the role of villain by the poet-narrator.

The dramatic structure of "Middle Passage" places Cinquez parallel to The Guinea Rose and King Anthracite as recipients of the actions of the Europeans, who are the poem's prime agents until the entrance of Cinquez; moreover, we also see Cinquez in a speech that attempts to reassert action upon him. However, the semiotic relationship between Cinquez and the other Africans who figure in the narratives that precede the Spaniard's diatribe is quite different, for we are not presented with the example of King Anthracite and The Guinea Rose in order to see in them examples of deathless "will" or transfiguration, as we are in the case of Cinquez. Perhaps we do not see the agency of "will" in its problematic relation to the poem until we try to ascertain Cinquez's role in the poem. The poem establishes a group/individual dialectic alongside the more obvious black/white dialectic: this group/individual dialectic is problematic, since the European speakers represent "history" and appear in an African American poem as concrete examples of their culture's moral failure. In opposition to these acts of history speaking for itself through documents that are supposedly objective and impersonal, we have only the example of Cinquez as interpreted by the poet-narrator after we are presented with the Spaniard's speech—the speech that we must interpret ironically, because the poet—narrator, who is also the judge, implies that its meaning is ironical. Cinquez, then, comes to signify the "transfiguration" of a group, the collective entity of the slaves, even though he is presented to us as an individual, a name, and a hero. Conversely, actions of individual evil committed by the Europeans signify only at the collective level, for otherwise their actions would not be ironic.

Hayden's "Middle Passage" is rather like a Tempest in which Caliban is not allowed to speak for himself. At first we seem to see the actions from the view of an impartial poet-narrator, and what we are shown seems to be, history. However, when we ask who the poet-narrator is, we soon recognize that Caliban does indeed speak, for he has taken on the powers of Ariel: as Ariel, Caliban shows us his debased and silent state through the consciousness (and consciences) of his oppressors. Later we see Caliban finally rise against Prospero to assume the power of the former master, and we do not question what we see because the special effects are so deft. Hayden has, for example, employed allusions to remove the poet-narrator's need to present the slaves directly, allusions to two European literary works ("The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and The Tempest), both of which (ironically) wrestle with issues of power and forgiveness and betrayal and reconciliation.

By alluding to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Hayden is able to suggest the problem of European guilt: in contrast to Coleridge's narrator, the Ancient Mariner, the three dominant voices who speak in each section of "Middle Passage," "the deponent," the slave-catcher, and the Spaniard, show no signs of remorse or awareness of their evil. These three speakers represent the destruction, respectively, of African social relations, African civil order, and (again, ironically) European religious/moral and legal/civil order. The writer of the "8 bells" section is problematic, however, for in this fragment of a ship's log we have the suggestion of a figure who is able to recognize and express the criminal nature of the actions that have been committed in the name of the salvation of the African pagans: thus Hayden invokes a European text to indicate the moral failings of European culture. Hayden had no choice but to include this assessment within the poem, since the recognition of the contradictions within European culture is an important component of that culture; however, to allow European texts to voice a realization of European immorality undercuts the absolutist thrust of the poem's dialectical articulation of history.

That Hayden’s employment of myth is so reductively absolutist also has the effect of forcing him to shift historical factuality into mythmaking. Since the poem restricts itself to only the middle passage, it cannot evaluate the theme of "life upon these shores" even while evoking the themes of futurity and transcendence in the poem's concluding lines: "Voyage through death / to life upon these shores." We are allowed to witness the triumph of Cinquez's survival but not the historical facts of his escape: thus his slavery alone is life, while his life is reduced to the voyage. Moreover, we are being asked to ignore the fact that "deathless" Cinquez's survival is paid for in the same bloody coin as the lives of the Europeans, by the destruction of the Other: yet this remorseless violence is the agency of Cinquez's transfiguration.

To engage in moral absolutism with regard to history, as Hayden does in "Middle Passage," is to construct a myth and to revise history with an eye toward a distinctly moral interpretation. The revision is particularly evident when we learn that Cinquez was not a prince but a rice planter, was made a hero by the white Americans who freed him, and did not remain in America but returned to live out his life in Africa. In Hayden's scheme the two emblems of European purpose, religion and law, are shown to be bankrupt; "the timeless will" of the poem's concluding movement, on which the poem hangs its meaning, is the same will as that which is the driving force of European civilization, yet it has been rendered unrecognizable as will by the destruction of its mythic icons in the three sections of the poem. The will to which Hayden points is the same will to power that exists in all humans, African and European, the will that the Europeans express by conducting the slave trade: in speaking of Nietzsche's book The Genealogy of Morals, Hayden White has observed that "men looked at the world in ways that conformed to the purposes which motivated them; and they required different visions of history to justify the various projects which they had to undertake in order to realize their humanity fully." This idea may be neither comforting nor savory, nor is it pleasant to realize that Hayden's attempt to transfigure Cinquez is a semiotic adjustment; what does Cinquez signify if not the dialectical conversion of Caliban into Prospero and, thereby, the ahistorical man into the historical man?

By rising against Prospero, Caliban merely becomes Prospero: the inadequacy of the symbolic means to accomplish Cinquez's transfiguration is made tangible in that Hayden himself felt that the conclusion of the poem did not ring true in his ears and that after four revisions it still required a strengthening that it never adequately received.

The conceptual fault in "Middle Passage" is that Hayden overlooked the fact that The Waste Land and The Cantos achieve their synthesis by assuming, in the final analysis, a superhistorical stance expressive of spiritual wholeness and a transcendence of the dualities and tautologies within which Hayden's poem remains marooned. History, in "Middle Passage," is present as text: it is the textual presentation of what happens to the historyless and unhistorical Africans. Finally, Cinquez's "transfiguration," which the poet-narrator speaks into existence in its closing lines, is Cinquez's entrance into history as an individual, a name, a consciousness, a monad of the historical will.

from "Consciousness, Myth, and Transcendence: Symbolic Action in Three Poems on the Slave Trade" in The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry. Ed. Joanne V. Gabbin. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia., 1999. Copyright © 1999 by the Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia.

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