SOURCE: Moraru, Christian. “‘Dancing to the Typewriter’: Rewriting and Cultural Appropriation in Flight to Canada.” Critique 41, no. 2 (winter 2000): 99-113.

In the following essay, Moraru examines the role of writing and rewriting in Reed's fiction, particularly as portrayed in Flight to Canada.

Books titles tell the story. The original subtitle for Uncle Tom's Cabin was “The Man Who Was a Thing.” In 1910 appeared a book by Mary White Ovington called Half a Man. Over one hundred years after the appearance of the Stowe book, The Man Who Cried I Am, by John A. Williams, was published. Quickskill thought of all of the changes that would happen to make a “Thing” into an “I Am.” Tons of paper. An Atlantic of blood. Repressed energy of anger that would form enough sun to light a solar system. A burnt-out black hole. A cosmic slave hole.

—Flight to Canada 82

The epigraph above...