The Trickster as Savior in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage

The trickster figure is a key figure in the African American tradition. Charles Johnson employs the trickster figure in his Middle Passage as a figure of mediation and liminality. In spite of the excessive literature on the novel, no publications address the trickster figure in the novel. This paper aims at revealing the role of the trickster as a savior. It relies on Henry Louise Gates, Jr.’s reading of the African American trickster as a figure of transcendence that amalgamates characteristics form the African heritage with the American culture and Carl Jung’s psychological archetype of the trickster as a savior. The African American trickster is a crossroads figure which combines both cultures. The voyage of Middle Passage is the voyage of America through slavery, capitalism, revolution, and transformation. Against this background the trickster figure emerges as a figure of resistance who defies boundaries. He generates constructive chaos to create a favorable situation for him or his group to overcome oppression. This reading of the novel shows how the trickster protagonist transforms from a source of chaos and disunity into a figure of resistance and redeeming. The Middle Passage voyage represents this transatlantic transformation connecting him with his African roots offering him the opportunity to recover his lost past and the cultural gaps created by slavery. The trickster, in the novel, represents the hybridity, transformation, and amalgamation of the American experience, in general, and the African American experience, in particular.