SOURCE: “The Middle Passage in African Literature: Wole Soyinka, Yambo Ouologuem, Ayi Kwei Armah,” in African Literature Today: 11 Myth & History, Africana Publishing Company, 1980, pp. 62-84.

In the following essay, Johnson examines the use of the Middle Passage (a term describing the grueling voyage between West Africa and the Caribbean that slaves were forced to endure), literally and figuratively, as the focus of novels by Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ouologuem.

Introduction

The Middle Passage in literature is, at bottom, a metaphor for displacement and exile. Predictably, the historical trauma of the slave trade generates the metaphor's dramatic and often decisive points of departure or reference:

To my mind it all started with the scarlet handkerchiefs … It was the scarlet did for the Africans. … When the kings saw that the whites—I think the Portuguese were the first—were taking out these scarlet handkerchiefs as if they were...