Fantastic Flights

THE SEARCH FOR ANCESTRAL TRACES IN BLACK SPECULATIVE NARRATIVES

Thomas Allen Harris's documentary É Minha Cara/That's My Face traces a formative period of the Black American filmmaker's early life during which he is haunted in his dreams by spirits and a hovering, red-faced female figure that his Christian grandmother suggests is Satan but that a Cuban family friend conversely identifies as a mystical being representing a messenger from the Yoruba pantheon. Harris, frightened and intrigued by the insistence of these visions, seeks answers to their recurrences throughout his life, eventually expressing a longing for psychic unification with the ancestors across time and space. The narrative composition of Harris's film consists of interviews with his family members about their religious beliefs and Africa and how they intersect with or part from the journey that Harris initiated just before his eighth birthday, when he became aware of his double vision. "My left eye," Harris explains in a voice-over, "sees completely normal, but my right eye never, ever focuses — it's as if it sees not the object but its essence ... its aura. ... Now I find myself with this double vision, looking for a place where I can be at peace as myself searching for my own Africa." Harris's grandfather's reported unrealized desire to discover his distant ancestral roots and failure to secure a sense of freedom from American racism that only Africa could offer piqued Harris's mother's interest in ancestral homelands as well. This generational fascination with moving toward Africa in rejection of social and cultural isolation within the United States propels Harris's own journeys in northeastern Brazil.

The documentary is, in essence, an exercise of generational speculation about Africa, which is carried out by the youngest descendant's intradiasporic travel. The soundtrack — music, interviews, narrator's script — is fused deftly with old family pictures and Super 8 silent film footage shot by Harris, his grandfather, and his stepfather from the 1960s to the 1990s in the United States; Tanzania; and Bahia, Brazil. Images dissolve into one another throughout the film and serve as an indication to the audience that Harris's past and present are intertwined. Evocative refrains, too, occur — particularly in the aural insistence of a disembodied female voice, perhaps Harris's version of a ghost or deity, chanting for him to "Go to Brazil, find the orixas there," which is juxtaposed with the repetition of a recording of his grandmother's persistence, "You need to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. You need to serve Him." This time travel to recoup family lore and images sets the audience up for Harris's impending journey to Bahia. Africa, as Harris had experienced it on the continent proper in Tanzania as a child, had not sated his desire for identity completion. He is led to Bahia in search of spiritual salvation, contact with ancestors, and clarity. In a startling voice-over directed at the haunting presence of his avidly Christian, long-deceased grandmother, Harris explains his pending spiritual exploration: "All my life, I've felt the presence of a power beyond me, but your God is not mine. Your Christ is not the face I see in my dreams. Where do I find that face? My face?"

Taking its cue from Harris's quest for recognition in É Minha Cara, this chapter examines the trope of travel as it is utilized in cultural production by and about Black Americans as a means of allaying dispossession via time travel back to the era of slavery, intradiasporic movements, and traversals of the African continent. In literary and filmic texts, various modes of travel offer spaces for authors and their protagonists to come to terms with their complicated diasporan positionalities by allowing — often forcing — them to experience their ancestral pasts and Africa as potentially restorative, redemptive measures. It is as if the travelers in these texts are haunted by a ghostly imperative to seek out the faces — the literal visages, cultures, and traditions — of their ancestors. In what follows, I will analyze several neo-slave narratives and travel accounts concerning travel toward Africa to illustrate how speculative flights work to provide a twentieth- or twenty-first-century response, if not always an antidote or an answer, to the radical violence of and dispossession caused by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic slavery. In these diverse contemporary texts, including Maya Angelou's All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Haile Gerima's Sankofa, Eddy Harris's Native Stranger, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, and Reginald McKnight's I Get on the Bus, the inherited mark of slavery is not necessarily healed but, at least, is palliated by the travel that these protagonists undertake. Potentially restorative travels are not only made by the fictional characters that I will discuss but also by actual persons who head back to sites of slavery for healing. While scholars heretofore have tended to think about the neo-slave genre as that which illustrates how the past informs the present and future, I argue that it also works in the reverse — using trips back to repossess imagined origins. Fantastic flights are vexed propositions, as they allow protagonists to attend to the wounds and ruptures caused by slavery. Yet, as will be explored in the nonfiction travel accounts covered throughout this book, speculative acts often lead dispossessed travelers on perpetual return journeys to recover what they imagine has been lost.

Lived Experience: The Fantastic, Neo-Slave Narratives, and Shame

This perplexing emotion is also passed from each generation to the next; the transfer is mediated directly by critical scenes of shame which become internalized through imagery but which then are reactive and reenacted with others.

— Gershen Kaufman and Lev Raphael, Coming out of Shame

Throughout the speculative texts explored in this chapter, there is a necessity for the Black American protagonists, who are always already travelers and always already socially alienated, to re-create, revive, become one with, and/or convene with the physically dead and thus repatriated though ever-present ancestors. The realization of such desires often hinges on the employment of the fantastic, whose themes in literature typically involve the following: "harried souls in search of peace, asking for specific actions"; "ghosts condemned to...