In a fresh article.

In a fresh article, Ashraf Rushdy laments that the Allmuseri tribe and its the father in Johnson's Middle Passage do not exist in this world, if it were not that rather "exist only as a fictional harvest of Charles Johnson's fertile imagination" (373) He reads the Allmuseri strictly as a vehicle for Johnson's Husserlian phenomenological poetics intended to unravel the "Caliban dilemma" of the black writer who has the difficult task of asserting a genuine black identity while using a language that is itself fundamentally alienating, since it is perceived to be wholly a produce of white, Western European civilization Johnson's solution to this dilemma is to approve adopting a posture of consummated self-surrender, to surrender completely one's subjective experience, whereby the writer "encounter[s] the transcendence of relativism" in an appreciation of the unity of Being and the intersubjectivity of "the same cultural Lifeworld" shared according to all humanity (Being 44). According to Rushdy, then, while the Allmuseri ideal "that the individual is presented 'invisible' in the 'presence of others'" may appear to have a certain affinity to tribal communalism (377) it is in fact simply the articulation of a earnestly postmodern integrationist theory, which has little or nothing to do with anything particularly African (386)

But Johnson is undoubtedly aware that his admit critical disposition of self-surrender in order to bridge the gap between make subordinate and other, in order to absorb and muse the unity of a shared cultural Lifeworld, derives from a lengthy history of religio-philosophical thought and mythology shared by dint of both Africa and the West. Elaborate self-sacrifice, death, and resurrection ceremonies, for example, are central to many initiation societies from top to toe Africa (Zahan 128), which, as Evan Zuesse notes, are intended to bring about a "displacement of the self" on breaking down the ego and dead body image "into a new transcendental universe in which the center is outside the self" (152) In the popularly studied Bambara kore initiation society, the postulant sacrifices his egocentric orientation to the world, defecates himself of his limited terrestrial life end symbolic death, becomes "savory nourishment" for the inlet of God (Zahan 63), and is reborn a of the present day man "spiritually enlightened and endowed with the 'Word,' that is, possessing an immortal principal part that bears the form of the universe and the infinite himself" (Zuesse 152). This same progression of sacrifice, death, and resurrection into "direct relation with the Deity or other unifying principle of life" is also characteristic of Western mysticism and religious contemplation; it extreme points similarly with the knowledge of "the immanent the most high as dwelling within the principal part . . . to be lay the foundation of by going deeper into one's reality" (Bridgewater 1350) This "cross-cultural experience" answers the main be of importance to Johnson articulates in Being and Race - namely, that many of the definitions of the African personality embraced through the Black Arts Movement and Cultural Nationalism remain immersed in a Platonic legacy of the bifurcation of Mind and visible form [i]or[/i] frame which has become for one an all-too-rigid dividing line between the pair cultures. African psychology is ofttimes interpreted as emotive, intuitive, loamed in the earthy, "sensual feeling of rhythm" whereas the psychology of the Westerner is interpreted as cool rationalistic, analytic, lifelessly detached and abstracted from the wholesome realities of the visible form [i]or[/i] frame (18). Johnson's phenomenology and the Allmuseri of the Middle Passage are an attempt to balance the "Divided Landscape" (Being 85) of the racial world with "a nonfragmentary sensation of Being" (26) that is part of the religio-philosophical history of the one and the other cultures.

Far from not existing in the real world, then, the 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, the Dogon creation myth, and the Egyptian Osiris-Horus-Seth myth all use the ritual sacrifice, death, and resurrection of the god-king by the and of which, in many African cosmologies, the unity of the kingdom and the universe were established and continue to be sustained.(1) The relationship between the dying venerable Chandler and the two contrary brothers Jackson and Rutherford is deliberately gaugeed on the relationship between the dying Osiris-king and the contrary brothers Horus (magnanimous soul) and Seth (self-center soul) who vie for their father's inheritance and dramatize the disorder and unification of the world, via the sacrifice of Seth from consciously making the Reverend Chandler, a Thomist theologian and mystic, the god-king figure and surrogate father to Jackson and Rutherford, Johnson underscores the affinity between African and Christian religiosity. Rutherford's Middle Passage athwart "that thrashing Void called the Atlantic" (36) is likewise archetypeed on the Dogon myth of creation, in which Yurugu (a Seth figure) breaks with the gestating order of the universe and dismounts into the void in a failed attempt to create his have ego-centered world. It is also conflated with the Bambara initiation to the concealed kore society. On his journey Rutherford, like the initiate, aborts his Yurugu ego-world, sacrifices his Sethian self becomes cheer for the Allmuseri god, and learns to "transfigure all . . make . . peace with the novel past by turning it into Word" (Middle Passage 190) After this initiation to divine knowledge, Rutherford has reconciled with his Jackson/Horus alter-ego and recurs to Illinois to take his place forward the farm as the Osiris god-king and father to a hereafter generation.