I Get on the Bus by Reginald McKnight

First published: 1990

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1980’s

Locale: Senegal

Principal Characters:

• Evan Norris, the protagonist and narrator, an alienated African American who has left the United States for two years to teach in Senegal for the Peace Corps
• Wanda Wright, Evan’s stateside girlfriend, with whom he persistently fails to communicate
• Aminata Gueye, a student, Evan’s Senegalese girlfriend
• Africa Mamadou Ford, a native of Oakland, California, and resident of Senegal
• Lamont Samb, Aminata’s Senegalese fiancé, a former teacher of French in Wales

The Novel

Building on some of the territory identified by the author in his first work of fiction, the prize-winning collection of stories Moustapha’s Eclipse (1988), and on his experiences as a teacher in West Africa, I Get on the Bus is a compelling meditation on the state of blackness in the closing years of the twentieth century. Given the novel’s background and the innumerable manifestations of Senegalese life, culture, language, and environment that it contains, it is tempting to regard the work in an autobiographical light. Although the work itself does not intentionally dismiss such an approach, its use of a first-person narrator paradoxically makes that approach unsustainable, since by virtue of the terms of reference of his narrative, the protagonist becomes a representative and problematic case and not a distinct, ego-centered “I.” Evan Norris is a condition rather than a person; or rather, because of the type of person he is, he becomes a condition.

That condition issues from the involvement of Evan’s perceptive and alert intelligence with a culture that is articulated in unfamiliar and unassimilable terms. Evan’s intelligence, the critical character of which has been honed by his education, speaks essentially of the individual’s autonomy. His decision to leave the United States and a complicated but potentially rewarding situation with his girlfriend, Wanda Wright, confirms his individuality and autonomy. His individuality leads Evan to reject his position with the Peace Corps. It is not clear, however, that he rejects the Peace Corps as such, since to do so would place him in an analytical mode and thus undermine the peculiar forms of impotence that color his Senegal experience.

By resigning his Peace Corps position, Evan in effect submits to a different order of experience, one that produces visceral rather than cerebral reactions. One of the ways in which he progresses through the world of the novel is by recounting a range of physical symptoms, most revealingly intense pains in his head. This order of experience intensifies some of the feelings of disorientation from which he has suffered, both in the United States and as a teacher supposedly identifying with a benevolent mission. This intensification is expressed in ways over which Evan has no control and which are manipulated, for their own inscrutable purposes, by the various other characters with whom he becomes involved.

The forms of expression that make Senegalese experience distinct and impossible for Evan to fathom appeal to areas of himself with which he has little experience. His Senegalese world is one of spirits, some of which are disembodied forces while others are what might be termed reembodied. The reality and force of these unhuman entities, and of the means whereby they attain human agency, is undoubted by all but Evan. Understandably, he is at a loss to know what to make of the jinni and the demms who evidently hold his existence in thrall. It is this condition and his lack of command over it that constitute the disjointed but ultimately overwhelming plot line of I Get on the Bus.

The obscure maneuvering of the plot, with a problematic basis in various versions and interpretations of events that predate Evan’s arrival in Senegal and in the painful physical and hallucinatory mental state to which he succumbs while there, seems ultimately to demonstrate how Evan, although ostensibly in a state of transition, is a prisoner with three options. The first and most compelling of these is represented by the joint forces of Aminata Gueye, his Senegalese girlfriend, and Lamont Samb, her fiancé. Were Evan to align himself with their forces, he would of necessity become the enemy of Africa Ford. Africa, however, represents a second condition that Evan might attain, that of an African American who assents to the spiritual and cultural code of the host nation while retaining enough of his Americanness to prosper as a vendor on the streets of Dakar, the Senegalese capital. The third possibility is to resist both of these options, which is what Evan, with his occidental orientation, wonders if he wants to do, particularly since that orientation has to be filtered through his relationship with Wanda Wright. The very assumption that such an orientation is feasible defines Evan’s troubling and troublesome condition. He finds himself prey to the various cultural structures of others, whose invitation to him to identify with those structures is both irresistible and essential to resist. Whether Evan succumbs is moot, since in either case he loses his integrity.

The Characters

The identification of Evan as a character at a crossroads in his life is emphasized by the fact that he encounters a confluence of external forces. Evan’s passivity, indecisiveness, and erratic judgment are brought home to him by his headaches, paranoid imaginings, and profound sense of cultural dislocation. These sufferings are not merely the fabrications of Evan’s own distressed state of mind. They have their sources and their power in the ways in which he is perceived by the characters who come into close contact with him.

This quartet of characters consists of two Senegalese, Aminata and Lamont, and two Americans, Africa and Wanda. They establish the terms of the conflict that besets Evan, although to see the novel strictly in terms of the framework they provide is too schematic. The author is sufficiently attentive to the texture of the world he is creating to ensure that the scaffolding of imaginative logic that these four characters support is adequately concealed. In addition, many of the minor characters, both Senegalese and American, make distinctive contributions to the novel’s overall effects, even if the value of this contribution derives from the manner in which it augments the central issue of Evan’s psychological and cultural travail.

The combination of Aminata and Lamont represents, at different but interrelated levels, the seductive power of Senegal. Their sleek appearance, the supple manner in which their minds work, and their ability to negotiate Anglophone and Eurocentric mind-sets while retaining an alert sense of their native culture give their presence a potency that Evan finds irresistible. Evan’s attraction to this formidable couple is the very thing that undoes him. Aminata’s curative and restorative powers, together with Evan’s strongly developed sense of her sexuality, provide him with a viable and willed attachment to his foreign surroundings. It is largely as a result of Aminata’s intervention that Evan is motivated not only to feel well but to discover what has been poisoning not only his body but also his consciousness.

Assenting to Aminata as a source of revitalization, however, eventually leads Evan to Lamont. The latter embodies at an intellectual level the seductive promise of the rehabilitation that Aminata provided at the physical level. Once the connection with Lamont has been made, Evan finds it impossible not to become preoccupied with, and then implicated in, the plot that seems to be the joint property of Lamont and Aminata. Belief in this plot, and acceptance of its consequences, requires Evan to become a creature of the spirit of Senegal, with its mystery, jeopardy, and overtones of animism. Captured by this spirit, he will implicitly surrender the American component of his Africanness.

On the other hand, this American component does not put Evan in his element. His attempt to dissociate himself from his Americanness, signified by flashbacks to some white, aging, hippie friends, is complicated by the fact that he has not been able to find an alternative to it. Wanda, with whom Evan is living and whom he will perhaps marry, is recalled a number of times, indicating that it is with the African ingredients of being an African American that Evan should identify. No model of how this might be accomplished is available, however, and Wanda herself is recollected as an embodiment of pragmatism and a self-improvement ethic that seems to underline the power of the dominant culture in the United States to condition even those who seem to reject it. Wanda argues for her rejection of Americanness along racial lines, a line of argument Evan finds unpersuasive on grounds that it does not describe the terms on which he desires to relate to the world, terms that would articulate the double burden of the African and the American experience.

Something of what this burden entails and how it might be borne is suggested by Africa Ford. In a number of ways, however, his position is more a complement to Wanda’s than a model for Evan. Africa’s Senegalese experiences may be a prototype for Evan’s, even to his bewitched involvement with the Gueye family. Ford identifies with those experiences, internalizes them, processes them, adopts the terms upon which they have been conceived, and assimilates them into himself, with the aid of a marabou as powerful and as resourceful as Aminata’s father. None of these accomplishments prevents him from selling American T-shirts on the sidewalks of Dakar, as though he still retains not only his native country’s business ethic but also the class level at which he knows that such an ethic can work for him. Evan is not from the lower classes, nor does he think of himself as the “homeboy” that Africa calls him. There is no home for Evan, largely as a result of his declining to be anybody’s boy.

Critical Context

Cultural relations between Afro-America and Africa have a long history and have gone through a number of phases, seeking expression in a number of artistic and social forms. Despite the importance and significance of this area of African American culture, the transition from one environment to another and from one form of historical conditioning to another has given the intercontinental connections a limited, tentative, and frequently picturesque character. Not the least interesting aspect of I Get on the Bus is the manner in which it enacts some of the tensions in the connections. It recognizes within the disordered sensibility of Evan Norris the problems that even beginning to account for the consequences of the black diaspora must bring into being.

Although the author has good and sufficient personal reasons for setting the novel in Senegal, the choice of country helps to crystallize some of the cultural and historical problems. As one of France’s African possessions, this country has had a cultural development somewhat different from that of the countries that were under British rule. One of the consequences of this difference can be seen in the fact that it was the Senegalese poet and political leader Leopold Senghor who was one of the creators of the term “negritude.” The word is not merely a term coined to emphasize the cultural and humanistic significance of blackness but is rather an ethic of difference. The cultural history of modern Senegal is excluded from I Get on the Bus, which is set in the less inspiring time of Senghor’s successor, David Diop. It is not difficult, however, to see the novel’s protagonist struggling to articulate his difference in an attempt to find a means of reconceptualizing his blackness that will provide him with a measure of self-respect and integrity at the same time.

The crisis of consciousness Evan enacts, and which the novel shows penetrating every fiber of his being, is one that arises directly from his citizenship of the United States. Evan is a product of the upward social mobility experienced by the expanding African American middle classes after the Civil Rights movement—a movement in which buses were not unknown, as perhaps the author punningly wishes to remind readers—and the institutional advantages, notably educational, this mobility entailed. The result for him is a more than proportionate decline in authenticity. This dimension of I Get on the Bus provides the novel with a greater sense of urgency than the more distant and academic Senegal dimension can provide. Despite its color and interest, Senegal is effectively the medium of loss as Evan experiences it. His life in the United States, however, is the source of that loss. The urgency that arises from this state of affairs is related to the confusing, inconsistent, and typically one-dimensional images of black maleness disseminated in contemporary American culture. In its cogent and subtle representation of this issue, explicitly related to the influence of culture on psyche in the protagonist’s Senegal experiences, I Get on the Bus documents a critical context for the author’s generation.

Bibliography

Brailsford, Karen. “I Get on the Bus.” The New York Times Book Review, September 16, 1990, 22. A review of the novel, giving a sense of its main features.

Giddings, Paula. “Reginald McKnight.” Essence 21 (March, 1991): 40. A profile of the author, providing relevant background information.

Larson, Charles R. “Cultures in Collision.” Washington Post Book World, June 17, 1990, 1, 11. Review of I Get on the Bus, focusing on its treatment of the identity theme.

McKnight, Reginald. Moustapha’s Eclipse. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988. The author’s prizewinning first book, a collection of stories that provide relevant introductory material to some of the themes, issues, and locales of I Get on the Bus.

Vaillant, Janet G. Black, French, and African: A Life of Leopold Sedar Senghor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. A biography of the Senegalese poet and politician whose work raised fundamental issues relating to interconnections between race, identity, and literature. I Get on the Bus should be evaluated in the context of these interconnections.