Waking Cain: The Poetics of Integration in Charles Johnson's Dreamer

In Dreamer Charles Johnson recasts Martin Luther King's life as an East/West exchange in which the Christian intellectual traditions and values of Reverend King test and are tested by a the sudden appearance of a disturbing character named Chaym Smith who is an exact look-a-like of King. Smith could be described as a black dharma bum, and the fictional character provides a magic-realist device to support Johnson's staging of a Buddhist-Christian dialogue, but Johnson does much more than simply find a way to mix Buddhism and African-American history. In several ways Dreamer develops the possibilities of an integrationalist poetics: Johnson combines the ideal of racial integration with various philosophical and religious discourses that profess a redemptive vision of human inter-subjectivity, particularly Buddhism. Dreamer presents the reader with five specific divisions, which I will discuss in five sections to follow, that obstruct the realizable world that King termed "beloved community": (1) essentialist claims about human identity, which are in the novel dialogically answered by Buddhist claims that no such inherent identity exists; (2) class divisions between middle class and poor blacks, which Johnson links to the rise of Black Power and contemporary American identity politics; (3) the segregation of American literary history by focusing on ethnic sub-traditions exclusively; (4) religious mythic doctrine that, improperly understood, authorizes divisive thinking; and (5) the "curse of canonization" that has enshrined King's memory only to contain it so that it does not become the basis for social action. At the end of Johnson's most politically engaged novel to date, King is slain and America is ready to forget his deeper message, but the narrator of Dreamer, Matthew Bishop, has learned that the aforementioned obstacles are in reality doorways to "beloved community."