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The behavior is only the surface of the character s inner life and you re dealingwith people who are essentially inarticulate, that s their main characteristic.Theirlives are more complex than they seem.So you have to articulate for them, anddo it without condescension.I hate the kind of fiction that makes the reader feelsuperior to the people who are being revealed.6Banks needed to invent a narrator more removed from intimate participationin the narration, a narrator who projected a more neutral point of view, per-haps like a windowpane.Banks cites Anderson whose realism of the grotesquehe had handled in an neorealistic manner when composing Trailerpark, yet thecitation of Dreiser, a naturalist (a later development of realism), rings withmore relevancy for this new book.Traditional realism ambled in the main-stream of popular reading, as the journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe was laterto vociferously argue.7 Despite Banks s grittier naturalistic strain of realism inthe manner of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, Continental Drift becameBanks s first book to go through more than one printing and the subsequentprintings of the paperback edition went into double digits.Reviews of the bookwere unusually exuberant and Banks began to reach a wide reading audienceas he wrote in the spirited working-class tradition that Nelson Algren, author ofA Walk on the Wild Side (1956), had once encouraged him to pursue.Banks snovel presents a descent into a doomed underworld that Algren so eloquentlyand dramatically limned for Americans in Chicago; yet locating this under-world in the Caribbean context offered a subject not much touched upon sinceZora Neale Hurston s novel Tell My Horse (1938), which explored voodoo. Mainstream Realism and Zombies: Continental Drift 73Continental Drift opens with what appears to be an apparent anti-invocation,summoning not the traditional Western muse of memory ( nothing here thatdepends on memory for the telling ), but an impassioned prayer to the YorubaWest African god Legba to come forward! Legba, the Benin horned god ofvirility and fate, the youngest son of the supreme god Lisa and his consortMawu, the moon goddess, functions as the messenger god who moves betweenthe all-father sun god Lisa and the earth, warming and fertilizing the earth,much like the Celtic sun god Lugh who was incarnated in the rays of the sun.Roman Catholic missionaries considered Lugh to be a prototype of Jesus Christ,and Legba to be a gatekeeper prototype of St.Peter or St.Anthony.Like Lugh,the inventor of the alphabet, Legba is the god of language, versed in all humanlanguages.The invocation conjures the mouth-man, the tribal narrator, to come forthwith the story that provides an accounting to occur, not a recounting, and apresentation, not a representation. 8 Legba stands at the crossroads and givespermission to speak with the spirits of Guinea, that is, other West African godsor any departed souls (like the Greek god Dionysos, nicknamed Christos).While Trailerpark imitated Homer s technique in the narrator s casting of eventsthrough the prism of the storyteller s echoing memory rings, here the narratorconjures the fateful and lusty present dark mysteries to carry the story morein the manner of an entrancing tribal recitation than the Western concept ofart as mimesis (imitation of life) because the story presents an account of a reallife story.Legba is asked to permit the story of a dead man, Robert Duboisfrom Catamount, New Hampshire, to be told.9 Above all, the religious sense ofVoodoo offers a process of self-discovery,10 recalling the wandering leitmotifaddressed to the anthropologist in The Book of Jamaica, You will see what youwant to see. And yet the Western traditions of both realism and naturalism portray animitation of life as the artist conceives it.Is the voodoo incantation itself acolonial cultural appropriation in the hands of a New Hampshire writer? Is itjust rhetorical window dressing? The novel shuns the colonial view of voodooas a base superstition, presenting voodoo as a living, dynamic religion, some-thing that opposes the traditional agnosticism or atheism characteristicallyfound in realistic or naturalistic novels.Here the nonwhite world finds itselfportrayed as a vital transcendent world subject to much suffering; the readerexperiences shock at the end of the novel when a white man suddenly experi-ences suffering at the hands of evil, which no race or people are free from.Theuniversal theme that all people should live with dignity binds the collidingblack and white worlds together in the novel.Rather than answering all ques-tions with an imperial discourse, the book challenges the reader to ponderissues of cultural prejudice and cultural insularity in the greater tragedy ofour common humanity.The approach that Banks takes to voodoo (the word is derived from the Fonlanguage of Dahomey and means spirit or god)11 is akin to that of Hurston s inTell My Horse, which is to present Voodoo as a sophisticated and legitimate 74 Russell Banks: In Search of Freedomreligion.12 Both attempt to rescue Voodoo from the sensationalism of the whiteentertainment industry13 or the prejudice of previous white writers.Eachchapter of Banks s novel features a simple but relevant line drawing in the tra-ditional style of drawings reproduced in Alfred Mtraux s book Voodoo in Haiti(1972).Since no attributions appear, it seems the drawings are the work ofBanks, who as a young man, once thought he might be a painter.Robert Raymond Dubois, who works as an oil-burner repairman for theAbenaki Oil Company, drinks with Doris Cleave (with whom Robert has beenconducting a casual affair), recalling the intimate but distraught ambiance ofthe bar scene from The Book of Jamaica when the anthropologist converseswith the prostitute Yvonne.Like Algren, Banks excels in handling such sceneswith a nuanced deftness, his only contemporary working-class rival at the timein such authentic narration being some stories by Raymond Carver, author ofCathedral (1984).The first section of the first chapter, Pissed, concludes witha biographical prcis in the manner of Ivan Turgenev who kept profile files onhis characters before beginning his novels
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