’s "I Am A Cowboy In The Boat Of Ra" Essay, Research Paper
Robert H. Abel
Ishmael Reed’s poem "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra" turns on a series of
elaborate puns and allusions that all reinforce the central idea that the old (black) god
Ra is about to reclaim his throne and his power over men. In addition, Reed’s marriage of
"popular culture" imagery with figures from Egyptian mythology produces an
offspring with some startling independent features.
Ra, the sun god and creator of men, was variously portrayed as a baby who grew older
each day and was reborn the next, and later as a rider in a boat who traveled across the
sky. In this poem, Ra appears momentarily as a cowboy riding in the traditional boat, but
his true identity remains unrecognized. The first five stanzas explain Ra’s rise and fall,
the sixth and seventh stanzas suggest his present "underground" activities and
his growing strength, and the last stanzas give us Ra preparing to do battle with Set
(Ra’s brother who was so evil that he ripped himself from his mother’s womb) who has
usurped him for so long. The organization of the poem itself suggests the
birth-death-rebirth cycle of the Isis-Osiris myth in which Ra was ritualistically torn to
shreds (Sparagmos) and sown in the barren, winter ground so that the soil
would become fertilized and nature (and Ra himself) renewed. The irony that the god of
rebirth is also the god of death is stressed by Reed in stanza 6, lines 6-8, where he
suggests that virgin "sacrifice" is a necessary ingredient in Ra’s regeneration.
In stanza 1, sidewinders means "evil men" in the jargon of the old
movie Westerns, but it also conjures images of Cleopatra’s asp and what was a rather
classic Egyptian death ritual. The saloon of fools suggests a sodden variation of
the classic "ship of fools" theme and at the same time reveals that Ra’s view of
the affairs of men is rather cynical and removed: we are not only crazy and at the mercy
of a remote god, but blind drunk as well. That our Egyptologists, our supposed experts,
"do not know their trips" in one sense means they do not know where they are
going, but in another "popular" sense means they do not know the effects their
drugs and medicines will have upon them. This is in contrast to Ra himself who (in stanza
8) "hold[s] the souls of men in [his] pot," where pot suggests both the
ritual vessel which held the ashes of the deceased and marijuana which may imbue the
present god with marvelous powers of imagining. In their ignorance, the Egyptologists
drive the true god from town, and to the question "Who was that / dog-faced
man?" I suspect we should answer "The Lone Ranger." (Compare "Radio"
in stanza 10).
Stanza 2 reveals that the true divinity and its various manifestations are invisible to
modern man. "School marms with halitosis"—perhaps
tourists—"cannot see" either the artifacts of the past for what they are
(fakes mutilated by Germans in their African campaign), or the divine symbols of the
present. Sonny Rollins, a forceful jazz tenor saxophone player, appears as one of Ra’s
royalty, and the Field of Reeds has possible triple reference to the field on the banks of
the Nile (where Moses was found and where a longhorn now replaces the water buffalo), to
the "creeds" of the saxophone, and to the "Reed" who authors the poem,
all of which stand as evidence of Ra’s continuing life and strength for those who have
eyes to see and ears to hear.
That Ra is a black god becomes increasingly evident in the next two stanzas. Isis is
"Lady of the Bugaloo"—the bugaloo being what amounts to the ritual dance of
black Americans—and Ra thinks of himself as the black middleweight boxing champion of
the 1950’s, Ezzard Charles, one of the few fighters to make a successful comeback in the
ring. The command to Isis to "start grabbing the / blue" means both to
"reach for the sky" and "grab the blue cloth" which symbolized
Egyptian royalty. Thus she is not only a victim of Ra’s lust, but is also blessed because
of it. That Ra is "Alchemist in ringmanship but a / sucker for the right cross"
means not only that his boxing has a weakness but also that his talismanic rings were no
match for the symbols of Christianity. In the fifth stanza, Ra makes it plain that he has
been ousted from his temple and that "outlaw alias copped my stance"—the
forces of evil have robbed him of his throne and place.
The next three stanzas include a number of allusions which emphasize that Ra’s return
to power will be the return of a black god and the black people. The "motown long
plays" written for "the comeback of Osiris" are long-playing records from a
popular Detroit "soul" record producer; but "long plays" also hints at
prolonged seduction "play" in street parlance, quite appropriate to the god of
fertility and potency. In stanza 7, "the Loup Garou Kid" (Lone Wolf Kid) alludes
to the black outlaw of Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke Down who is the perpetual
thorn in the Establishment’s side. The most definite assertions of Ra’s blackness come in
stanza 8 in which he dresses for war with Set in "black powder" (suggestive of
"black power" and "gunpowder") and "black feathers" and asks
for the bones of the Ju-Ju snake (Ju-Ju being a principal African tribal religion in which
the bones of the Ju-Ju snake are cast to make prophecies and worn to ward off evil
spirits). One of the allusions which does not imply racial identification directly
("Pope Joan of the / Ptah Ra") nevertheless suggests both the exclusion of
blacks from power (Pope Joan was a card game in which one of the cards was removed) and
that Ra this time will appear as Ptah, protector of artists and artisans, a manifestation
that obviously gives poets like Reed a great deal to benefit from. When Ra says that he
"makes the bulls / keep still" he refers in one way to himself as a cowhand
watching the herd, but in another sense he means that he keeps the police
("bulls") at bay. There is a final non-racial allusion in Ra’s claim to be
"Half-breed son of Pisces / And Aquarius" which is an extravagant way (assuming
that this is the age of Aquarius) of saying he feels like a fish out of water. Pisces is
the eleventh astrological sign and Aquarius is the twelfth or last sign, which strongly
intimates that a new beginning is close at hand.
The last stanza throws the cowboy and Indian chase, the battle between good and evil,
into the heavens, where we may expect events to transpire with the speed of
constellations, that is, with maddening slowness after all.
from The Explicator 30:9, Item #81, May 1972.
Shamoon Zaamir
Reed’s poem is structured as an inverted epic. The three stanzas
that follow the second one consider the failure of synthesis. Isis, like Leda, gives birth
to war, and the ringmanship of Ezzard Charles is defeated. The fifth stanza then
acknowledges the exile of art. This pattern is in fact closer to Blake’s satiric
meditation on the impossibility of art and the failure of Los in a fallen world in The
Book of Urizen (1794). In reversing the transcendent sequence of Milton, Reed
dramatizes the pressures of history and the social upon the ideal of the synthetic
imagination.
[. . . .]
The "I" of "I am a cowboy" is a descendent of the expansive and
incorporative selves of Whitman and Emerson. Reed’s cowboy hero, confronted with the
double-consciousness of a divided self, adopts a strategy of inflation, an
"unrealistic aggrandizement" of the ego. This process is part of the
"shifts from communal modes of self-validation to a psychic self-reliance [that] have
always been part of magic and religion, and perhaps of action itself," and have
characterized classic texts of American literature. The transition from the Blakean
notions of artist and community to the model of the gunslinger reverses the transition
from sacrifice to performance in the second stanza and reincarnates the artist as
sacrificial priest. This section examines this shift as the site of the imperial self’s
fullest manifestation and Reed’s use of the possibilities of immanence in magic as the
vehicle of this appearance.
[. . . .]
Reed’s poem retells an ancient Egyptian myth of divine conflict as a wild west
showdown. The outlaw gunman, once "vamoosed from / the temple" and now fighting
for "the come back of / Osiris" is the exiled Horus who returns to avenge the
murder of Osiris, his father, at the hands of Set, the brother of Osiris. Osiris, the
black fertility god and culture hero who, according to Plutarch, civilized Egypt through
the power of his songs, introducing agriculture, the observation of laws and the honouring
of gods, is sacrificed in a Manichean drama to the forces of chaos. Horus’s aim is to
restore cultural and political order. Although never named as such in the poem, the cowboy
is clearly identifiable as Horus. According to the myth, even while Horus was under the
protection of Isis, Set managed to have him "bitten by savage beasts and stung by
scorpions." Reed alludes to this in the poem’s first strophe ("sidewinders in
the saloons of fools / bit my forehead"). Having obtained magical powers of
transformation from Thoth, Horus fought the battle against Set from the boat of Ra.
But the poem’s persona is multiple in its identities. As one who "bedded / down
with Isis," the cowboy is also Osiris; as the "dog-faced man" he is Anubis;
later he appears as "Loup Garou," a Vodoun loa of the fierce Petro cult of
Haiti; he is also an African priest and necromancer demanding his "bones of ju-ju
snake"; and a gangster calling his "moll" ("C/ mere a minute willya
doll?"
[. . . .]
The attraction to collective improvisation as a utopian model was indeed strong among
Afro-American writers in the 1960s. For one who both listens to jazz and reads Blake,
there are obvious crossovers between the two. For in Blake (and other Romantics) there is
a complex balance of individuation and unity; community arises not through common
denomination but through the aggregate of difference: "The poet as man aims at a
society of independent thinkers, a democratic ‘republic,’ but on the smaller and more
intensive scale of community. The poet as prophet seeks to create a community of prophets,
a New Jerusalem." Blake seeks not the regaining of Eden in the present but the full
potential of creative imagination in the fallen world. The poet-prophets form an apostolic
succession, and through them history is turned back to its sources in myth, divided
humanity is transformed into community. This is the third cultural blind-spot of Reed’s
school marms.
The "ritual beard" of Sonny Rollins’ "axe" holds Reed’s ambivalent
transitions between sacrifice and performance in the poem; in the terms of the Blakean
scheme, poetry and art, and not the priests, are the sources of culture. But Reed does not
clearly sustain that distinction (just as he does not explicitly distinguish between
priest and prophet). The musician and his instrument and the priest and his ritual tool
are intertwined. "Ritual beard" again refers not only to Rollins’ physiognomy
but also to the pictorial analogy between the curved shape of beards in Egyptian
(Assyrian?) iconography and the form of the saxophone ("axe" is jazz slang for
the saxophone). In the second stanza of the poem the cut of the axe initiates the reader
into the community of tradition and the "longhorn winding / its bells thru the Field
of Reeds" completes the synthesis. The dance of the Sidhe, the ancient gods of
Ireland, in the wind, and the poetic refiguration of the "philosophic gyres" as
the "winding stair" of the tower of Thoor Ballylee in Yeats now resurface as a
different motion of history and myth. For one, the meandering movement of the cattle looks
ahead to the mythic west of the Chisholm trail in the fourth stanza. Rollins’ saxophone
(the "long horn" with the open "bell" of its mouth) threads its own
voice with the music of other players of the reed instrument configured as a vibrant
synchronic "field": "Tradition, in a word, is the sense of the total past
as now." The sounding of the bell may well reach to the boxing ring in which
the Afro-American boxer Ezzard Charles is defeated later in the poem, but the competition
in this stanza is something altogether different; the "cutting sessions" among
the improvising soloists in jazz clubs perform a finer marriage between the group and
self. The "Field of Reeds" is also the Egyptian Elysium and the Nile bank where
the Horus child, like Moses, was hidden from Set, and Rollins is finally identified with
Osiris, the god crowned with horns who weighs the hearts of the dead in Fields of
Satisfaction that are the after-world. These dizzying metamorphoses are gathered up as the
domain of the artist’s active imagination in the pun on the author’s name.
[. . . .]
When he synthesizes the multiple personas of his poem prior to the final showdown into
the figure of the poet-priest, or the artist as necromancer, the poet-priest’s call for
his ritual paraphernalia refers the reader to Blake’s Milton:
bring me my Buffalo horn of black powder
bring me my headdress of black feathers
bring me my bones of Ju-ju snake
go get my eyelids of red paint.
Hand me my shadow.
Here are the corresponding lines from Blake’s preface to Milton:
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
Reed’s invocation of Blake at a climactic point in the poem–when the cowboy Horus
announces his return from exile–establishes Romantic literary structures as necessary
interpretive frames for Reed’s poem: Milton is a paradigmatic text of Romanticism’s
exploration of the imagination’s struggle against duality and its quest for resolution
through the higher synthesis of culture–in Blake’s case through the restoration of
prophetic vision. This process of consciousness is commonly dramatized by the Romantics in
terms of the Homeric journeys away from and back to home, the Iliad and the Odyssey
serving as the respective halves of the dialectic. Reed simply substitutes the Nile
voyage for the Mediterranean one. But while Reed organizes his poem by referring to the
Romantic plot, the sequence of his poem is as a partial inversion of this plot, concluding
in a New World configuration that is not easily assimilable into Romantic synthesis.
Reed’s poem offers variations on the theme of culture clash organized within an
overarching plot of exile, return, and renewed war. Two other frames overlap with this
larger structure. The return of the exiled hero is also the resurfacing of the repressed
and the suppressed. The urge towards the psychologizing of history borders on the
Spenglerian and remains true to the politics of the 1960s counterculture in the context of
which the poem takes shape. And the drama of departure and journey home narrativizes the
dialectic of dualism, of unity lost and regained, that is the central plot of Romanticism
and undergirds its obsession with immanent teleology and a metaphysics of integration,
laying the foundations for the modern divided self–a fragmentation described most notably
in the Afro-American context by W.E.B. DuBois.
[. . . .]
As in Blake’s preface to Milton, the poet-priest of "I am a cowboy,"
after calling for his "Buffalo horn of black powder," his "bones of Ju-ju
snake" and other ritual instruments, launches his mental war against the cultural
domination of Set, an archetype for all forms of religious, ideological and cultural
monisms in Reed’s mythology:
I’m going into town after Set
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra
look out Set here i come Set
to get Set to sunset
Set
to unseat Set to Set down Set
usurper of the Royal couch
imposter RAdio of Moses’ bush
part pooper O hater of dance
vampire outlaw of the milky way
The return of the outlaw cowboy is in fact the return of art to the arena of effective
cultural struggle since earlier in the poem the exile of the outlaw hero is defined as the
exile of art:
Vamoosed from
the temple i bide my time. The price on the wanted
poster was a-going down, outlaw alias copped my stance
and moody greenhorns were making me dance;
while my mouth’s
shooting iron got its chambers jammed.
It is the poet’s voice, the "mouth’s / shooting iron," that is
silenced.
[. . . ]
The unjamming of the "mouth’s / shooting iron" narrativizes the release of
the creative and playful potential of language and simultaneously stages this release as a
moment of self-genesis for the poetic persona.
[. . . .]
The action of "I am a cowboy" begins to turn in the seventh stanza. Though
still in exile, the poet no longer has his mouth’s shooting iron jammed. He is now writing
"the mowtown long plays for the comeback of / Osiris."
[. . .]
The return of the exiled hero is no longer imagined as Horus’s revenge. Instead of
the more familiar and culturally more distant mythology of Egypt, Reed now turns to a New
World transformation of African folklore and works his own syncretic changes upon it. In
the eighth stanza the sexual union of Osiris and Isis is re-formulated in more traditional
occult and astrological terms as the coniunctio of Pisces and Aries. But the
product is "the Loup Garou Kid," "Lord of the Lash," not Horus, a
"half breed son," a reincarnation of the Afro-American divided self, not an
incarnation of national unity. . . . [W]ith Loup Garou he makes the representative hero of
the age a figure of aggression and outward confrontation.
Loup Garou, derived from the French, is the name given to werewolves and vampires in
Haiti. Though the werewolves can be male, loups garous are more commonly known to be
female vampires who suck the blood of children, as they are generally in West African
societies. . . . Reed’s hero is also "Lord-of the Lash" but Reed, with his
characteristic penchant for the humour of the incongruous, reincarnates a now-forgotten
hero from B-movie westerns in the grim shadow of the Petro cult. According to The Film
Encyclopedia, Al La Rue, a.k.a. "Lash" La Rue, was
Born on June 15, 1917, in Michigan. Cowboy hero of miniscule-budget Hollywood Westerns
of the late 40s, known as "Lash" for his principle weapon, a 15-foot bullwhip,
which he used on his enemies with great skill. His film career was brief and unmemorable.
He later performed in carnivals and toured the South as a Bible-thumping evangelist,
preaching the gospel and contemplating astrology and reincarnation. He had several brushes
with the law, answering charges of vagrancy, public drunkenness, and possession of
marijuana. He claims to have been married and divorced 10 times.
[. . . .]
Following Yeats’s occult model for a poetics of history, Reed’s poem figures history as
the incessant alternation of conflict and coniunctio. This pattern is already
present in the larger narrative of the poem where war is a prelude to the restoration of
order. But each stanza repeats the drama as an almost independent unit. While the
Horus-Cowboy narrative of exile and return shapes the poem, an over-emphasis on the
overarching structure of the poem can undermine the experience of local transitions and
image by image progression. The links between (and within) stanzas follow no principle of
logical or historical connection. The violent juxtaposition of diverse materials which
disrupts the linear flow of narrative is held together by formal principles derived from
Yeats’s poetics.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. I bedded
down with Isis, Lady of the Boogaloo, dove
down deep into her horny, stuck up her Wells-Far-ago
in daring midday getaway. ‘Start grabbing the
blue’, I said from top of my double crown.
The rapid transitions in this third stanza are representative of the procedures of the
whole poem and extend the flamboyant punning of the poem into a collagist aesthetic. A pun
reminiscent of the sexual innuendos of blues lyrics allows Reed to leap from Egyptian
mythology to nineteenth-century America and from an image of sexual union to a history of
political and economic conflict, a parody of the rape of Leda by the Swan, used here to
engender North American history. Isis’s "Wells-Far-ago" is a distortion of the
name of the Wells Fargo company, established in 1852 by Henry Wells, William G.
Fargo and associates, founders of the American Express. The company carried mail, silver
and gold bullion and provided banking services. "In less than ten years," Alvin
F. Harlow explains, the company had "either bought out or eliminated nearly all
competitors and become the most powerful company in the Far West." Wells Fargo later
extended its operations to Canada, Alaska, Mexico, the West Indies, Central America, and
Hawaii, as well as the Atlantic coast. The economic monopoly of Wells Fargo parallels the
monotheism of Judaism and Christianity which not only banished other gods (Osiris and the
Voodoo loa) but also suppressed its own heretical traditions. The outlaw cowboy’s cry,
"start grabbing the / blue," is slang for "put your hands up" but also
refers to "blueback," an archaic term for a bank note of Confederate money, so
called for the contrast of blue ink on its back with the green ink used on the Northern
"greenback." With Horus speaking from the "top of [his] double crown"
in the next line, the blueback carried by the Wells Fargo Company can be taken as a symbol
of the division between North and South in the "United" States. This is
confirmed by the double crown as symbol of a unified Egypt in Egyptian iconography, and
one of the manifestations of Horus was "Har-mau," or "Horus the
uniter," upholder of the unity of northern and southern Egypt. The aggressive lover
of Isis is of course Osiris (the "longhorn" in the previous stanza refers, among
other things, to the horned crown of Osiris, and the rather obvious sexual pun on
"longhorn" and "horny" completes the link). The product of this
intercourse is Horus, whereas in Yeats the rape leads to the birth of Helen and
Clytemnestra, Love and War. The outlaw Horus initiates the fall of the Confederacy and the
rise of the Union, while Leda hatches the fall of Troy and the ascendancy of Greece. The
same pattern is repeated in the next stanza.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Ezzard Charles
of the Chisholm Trail. Took up the bass but they
blew off my thumb. Alchemist in ringmanship but a
sucker for the right cross.
Here each sentence is a yoking together that, like the rest of the poem, brazenly
defies the facts of history. The conjunction of Ancient Egypt and the American West is, by
this point in the poem, familiar. The cowboy then appears as the Afro-American heavyweight
boxing champion from the early 1950s riding the famous 19th-century cattle trail that
stretched from south Texas to Kansas City. His transformation into a musician, linking
back to Sonny Rollins in the second stanza and to the "Lady of the Boogaloo" in
the third, is aborted by gun law. The last sentence is a characteristically condensed pun,
welding together boxing and alchemy–again, confrontation and synthesis. Not only is the
allusive hero’s boxing prowess weak, but his "talismanic rings [are] no match for the
symbols of Christianity." The alchemist’s dream of coniunctio, of the
philosopher’s stone, is defeated. The ring, occult symbol for such unity and wholeness but
also representative here of the boxing ring, encapsulates the balance of conflict and coniunctio
throughout the poem. But this very balance is shattered by a blow from the cross, a
re-match between the gnostic traditions and Christianity in which the later once again
emerges as victor. After being knocked out by "Jersey" Joe Walcott in seven
rounds in Pittsburgh in 1951, Charles was never able to make a successful comeback in
boxing. He was defeated again by Walcott in 1952 and by Rocky Marciano in 1954. In the
next stanza the artist-hero accepts that an "outlaw alias copped my stance" but
the exile is only a temporary set-back: "Vamoosed from / the temple," he
explains, "i bide my time."
[. . . .]
At the end of "I am a cowboy," the returning hero seeks to chase out Set, the
"imposter RAdio of Moses’ bush."
[. . . .]
Reed’s personae are his masks. Through them he too enacts the drama of dual or multiple
selves caught between the constraints of history and the promise of heroic action and
self-genesis. The imperial self retrieves its own projected self as its sanction and
inspiration. It is through this poetic device that Reed overcomes the experience of
history as absolute fate.
Excerpted from "The Artist as Prophet, Priest and Gunslinger: Ishmael Reed’s Cowboy
in the Boat of Ra." Callaloo (Fall 1994), 1205-1235.