Now that I've finished provisional final edits on the novel that is likely destined to join my other four on the "Never To See the Light of Day" shelf, I need to blow the cobwebs off my brain. How better to do that than with an explication of a famous poem by the great, complex, contradictory Ishmael Reed?
"I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra" is iconic, much-misunderstood, and first published in 1972. It has been dazzling, confusing, confounding and infuriating readers ever since. My own explication follows:
First, the poem:
I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra
'The devil must be forced to reveal any such physical evil (potions, charms, fetishes, etc.) still outside the body and these must be burned.' (Rituale Romanum, published 1947, endorsed by the coat-of-arms and introductory letter from Francis cardinal Spellman)
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra,
sidewinders in the saloons of fools
bit my forehead like O
the untrustworthiness of Egyptologists
who do not know their trips. Who was that
dog-faced man? they asked, the day I rode
from town.
School marms with halitosis cannot see
the Nefertiti fake chipped on the run by slick
germans, the hawk behind Sonny Rollins' head or
the ritual beard of his axe; a longhorn winding
its bells thru the Field of Reeds.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. I bedded
down with Isis, Lady of the Boogaloo, dove
deep down in her horny, stuck up her Wells-Far-ago
in daring midday getaway. 'Start grabbing the
blue,' I said from top of my double crown.
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.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. 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.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Boning-up in
the ol' West i bide my time. You should see
me pick off these tin cans whippersnappers. I
write the motown long plays for the comeback of
Osiris. Make them up when stars stare at sleeping
steer out here near the campfire. Women arrive
on the backs of goats and throw themselves on
my Bowie.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Lord of the lash,
the Loup Garou Kid. Half breed son of Pisces and
Aquarius. I hold the souls of men in my pot. I do
the dirty boogie with scorpions. I make the bulls
keep still and was the first swinger to grape the taste.
I am a cowboy in his boat. Pope Joan of the
Ptah Ra. C/mere a minute willya doll?
Be a good girl and
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
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
party pooper O hater of dance
vampire outlaw of the milky way
Okay.... (deep breath)
First: literal meanings
or, References
This poem is a dizzying mix of references to the Old West, Egyptian mythology and history, religion, African ritual, and jazz, all leading to the question: Who am I?
Let's go paragraph-by-paragraph (in free verse they're not called stanzas, but paragraphs):
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra,
sidewinders in the saloons of fools
bit my forehead like O
the untrustworthiness of Egyptologists
who do not know their trips. Who was that
dog-faced man? they asked, the day I rode
from town.
The speaker declares himself a cowboy, traditionally a lone and lonely figure, independent and resourceful, in the boat, or service, or Ra. Ra is the Egyptian sun god, lord of all creation, who traveled across the day's sky and the night's underworld, in a pair of boats. Sidewinder is a species of rattlesnake native to the west, and the term also refers to devious cowardly men who sucker-punch their adversaries or, in other words, losers who bring guns to knife fights.
"Sidewinders in the saloons of fools" keeps the cowboy motif going, while underscoring that everything around the speaker is ignorant, devious or for sale. "Sidewinders....bit my forehead" --why forehead? It's the seat of knowledge; it's also where a crown resides. So the speaker, by inference, may be a king deposed by treachery. The "O" implies a lament, a warning, and an open wound.
And again, the warning about "the untrustworthiness of Egyptologists / who do not know their trips." In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans were busy opening tombs, exploring ruins and explaining Egyptian mythology, culture and archaeology, all the while ignoring the Egyptians themselves. Not only do they not know their "trips," their business, they're also unaware of the (hallucinogenic) effects the culture has on them.
The dog-faced man is Anubis, the jackal-headed god, guardian of the dead, conductor of the soul to the Underworld and weigher of the dead person's heart to determine his/her worthiness to enter the realm of the dead. So the speaker associates himself with Anubis, as he leaves town the way a cowboy leaves town for the wilderness.
School marms with halitosis cannot see
the Nefertiti fake chipped on the run by slick
germans, the hawk behind Sonny Rollins' head or
the ritual beard of his axe; a longhorn winding
its bells thru the Field of Reeds.
"School marms," teachers, innocent and unworldly figures, with bad breath (and I don't get that reference, unless it's to reinforce the unpleasantness of the school marms and the speaker's distaste for intimacy with them) continues the motif of the authority figures who are really ignorant, ignorant because they can't tell a real Nefertiti bust from a fake. Nefertiti, often now called the most beautiful woman in antiquity, was the main wife of Amenhotep (Akhenaten), the pharoh who introduced--briefly--monotheism. Amenhotep worshipped the sun (Aten). Nefertiti is now a cultural icon, and her famous bust is one of the most reproduced statues of Egyptian antiquity. Reproduced by "slick / germans" because German archaeologists and ethnographers were the first Westerners to study Egyptology and, hence, the first to interpret it.
So the "authorities" can't tell the fake from the real, which renders them unable to distinguish anything else, like the "hawk behind Sunny Rollins' head." The hawk was sacred to Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, the god of the sky and identified with the living king (while Osiris is identified with the dead king). Sonny Rollins is a master jazz saxaphonist, and by implication, the living king of jazz, not that anyone in authority could recognize that fact. Neither can they see "the ritual beard of his axe;" a ritual beard was worn by the pharoh and always portrayed in statuary--in fact, Hatshepsut, the female pharoh, is also depicted with a ritual beard. Why a ritual beard? Because Egyptian nobility shaved their bodies. In hieroglyphics, the axe is associated with divinity, and in jazz an axe is a guitar. The longhorn is a breed of cattle commonly herded in the west by cowboys. Cowbells were used so herders could find their cattle in mountainous lands or overgrown fields, while cowbells are also essential in popular music. The Field of Reeds returns us to the Nile Delta, but also evokes the reedy marsh where Moses was found by Pharoh's daughter and plays on the name of the poet himself. Everything in the paragraph is a catalog of the ignorance of the authorities, its breadth and dimension, while adding jazz allusions to the cowboy imagery.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. I bedded
down with Isis, Lady of the Boogaloo, dove
deep down in her horny, stuck up her Wells-Far-ago
in daring midday getaway. 'Start grabbing the
blue,' I said from top of my double crown.
Yes, there's sexual content to this paragraph, despite that, as Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. This is rarely true in poetry, by the way. Isis, daughter of Geb, the earth god and Nut, the sky goddess (Egyptian mythology is unusual in that the male principle is earth and the female sky--usually it's reversed) is sister and wife of Osiris, who is the god of both death and rebirth.
Quick but necessary aside:
A Bicentennial Minute of Egyptian Mythology--a greatly simplified version)
Osiris was the eldest child of Geb and Nut. Originally a vegetation god/king of Egypt, he married his sister Isis, who was considered the paragon of womanhood and wifely virtue. She taught the women of Egypt how to weave, bake and brew beer, was one of the first gods to find widespread worship throughout Egypt, and is still venerated today among pagan worshipers.
No happy couple is complete without an enemy, and in this case, the enemy is Set, their brother, a trickster god, lord of the desert, of storms and disorder. Set, intensely jealous, tricked his brother into trying out a casket made of a cypress log, shut him into it, coated it with lead and dropped it into the Nile (the first sarcophagus). Isis, in mourning, after a long search, found the log, which was by now supporting a palace roof in Byblos in Phoenicia, freed her husband's body, and used a magic spell to reanimate him, whereupon Set hacked him into fourteen pieces and scattered him. Isis retrieved all the body parts, except his phallus, which was thrown into the Nile and eaten by a catfish, wrapped and reassembled the body for burial (the prototype of mummification). For the missing piece, she made a replica of gold and, in spirit hovered over the body, whereupon she miraculously became pregnant.
Not-entirely-pointless trivia: early Greeks, witnessing ritual pageants reenacting the Osiris myth, immediately saw parallels to their own worship of Dionysus, the goat-footed fertility god who was torn to pieces and reassembled. The Greeks brought the Osirian pageantry back home, where it informed the Greater Dionysia, the festival in Athens during which plays, especially tragedies (the word tragedy translates to "goat song," hearkening back to the early Dionysian festivals in
which goats, and sometimes other animals including humans, were torn to shreds) were enacted. The two traditions share ritual dismemberment, regeneration, fertility, and probably an array of other elements I've forgotten.
Osiris could not rejoin the world of the living, so he became lord of the underworld, and lord of rebirth, since life springs from death in a vegetative culture, and he did start out as a vegetation god. Sometimes his image is black, depicting the color of the Nile's earth, and sometimes green, when his regenerative aspect is emphasized.
So Osiris retired to the underworld; meanwhile, Isis, knowing her child will be in danger from Set, hid in the reeds of the Nile Delta and gave birth to Horus. He was raised in obscurity until Set learned about his existence, whereupon he sent scorpions and beasts to harm him (remember the sidewinder in paragraph 1). The battered Horus was healed by Thoth, who also gave him powers of transformation, and Horus set about avenging his father. The battles between Set and Horus inform a series of legends, all of which are usually interpreted as the struggle to unite Upper Egypt (the desert region) with the Lower (the Nile delta). Horus loses and eye and Set loses a testicle, in token of the sterility of the desert. According to some myths, in the final showdown, Horus overcomes Set in a traditional archetypal battle: he comes to Set in a variety of forms, each time asking "Who am I?" When Set can't answer, he loses, and Horus becomes the lord of Egypt, inheriting from his mother his aspect as protector of Egypt.
Horus is usually depicted as a falcon or hawk. He is also considered to be the sky, with the sun and moon as his eyes (the waxing and waning moon is the weakened, or blinded, eye.) The "eye of Horus," a symbol in its own right, is a powerful amulet for protection and is often found on mummies.
Okay, back to the poem.
"I bedded down with Isis" It's not all that unusual in mythologies for protagonists to take on an Oedipal aspect. It could also be a part of the riddle game, the question of "Who am I" being misdirected. But to call Isis "lady of the Boogaloo" is radical, and not in keeping with her traditional role as protectoress, wife and mother. It does, however, put Isis firmly in the tradition of African American r&b. So the web of "blackness" begins to take shape--our cowboy is putting himself into different aspects of African and African American experience. Couple that with the sexual content--"dove / down deep in her horny, stuck up her Wells-Far-ago," and add the old West stagecoach stick up, complete with "daring midday getaway," and we begin to divine just who this cowboy might be (that is, if you skipped the mythology part).
"'Start grabbing the / blue,' I said" This line offers multiple implications, including but not limited to the old West line, "Reach for the sky." Horus is the sky, the line is sexual, he's talking to his mother/lover Isis. "I said from top of my double crown." The double crown is the pharoh's emblem, which symbolizes the union of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms. Interestingly, the top of the double crown symbolizes the Upper Kingdom, which was Set's desert domain. However, it's also extremely phallic in appearance.
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.
After a brilliant career as a middle- and light-heaviweight boxer, Ezzard Charles (1921-1975) put his career on hold to serve in the military in WWII. He returned to become the world heaviweight boxing champion in 1949 and 1950. He was also a respected double bass player who played jazz at Birdland and other clubs in New York and Chicago. After he lost his championship status in 1951, he was never able to regain it. I almost forgot to mention (as if you hadn't assumed it by now), he was black.
In this paragraph, the speaker begins to speak of his defeats. By now, we've got the Old West and Egyptian references synthisized and married with jazz; now religion comes in--alchemy, which was a gnostic pursuit of spiritual "gold" that was eventually suppressed by the Reformation of the Catholic Church. "Ringmanship" puns on both the existence of alchemical rings that purportedly possessed mystical powers, and the conventions of boxing. By treachery he has been maimed, and he's been suckered, (sucker-punched?) by a right cross, another pun turning on which cross is the right one? (Remember the ankh when you're weighing which is the "right" cross).
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. 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.
The speaker is in exile. "Vamoosed from / the temple" he waits. Time has passed. "The price on the wanted / poster was a-going down": the speaker has passed from his enemy's mind; his death is no longer so valuable to him. Meanwhile, he has suffered--an outlaw alias has stolen his identity, "moody greenhorns" humiliate him for their entertainment, and he can't even speak to defend himself.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Boning-up in
the ol' West i bide my time. You should see
me pick off these tin cans whippersnappers. I
write the motown long plays for the comeback of
Osiris. Make them up when stars stare at sleeping
steer out here near the campfire. Women arrive
on the backs of goats and throw themselves on
my Bowie.
Our cowboy bides his time and hones his skills. He's mastered picking off both tin cans and whippersnappers, possibly the "moody greenhorns" of the last paragraph, with his six-shooter. He writes songs, "motown long plays," long songs that, in the early 1970's, were usually relegated to late night cool, subversive FM radio shows. Motown, of course, was the Detroit-based music company that promoted black artists and became famous for the "Motown sound." And "long plays" plays on the slang use of "play" of a sexual nature. His songs herald "the comeback of / Osiris." Osiris has also been at his nadir, his fate much like the speaker's but, like the speaker, he will come back.
Women come to him, riding goats, and "throw themselves on / my Bowie." The goat is a loaded symbol (remember the aforementioned connection between Dionysus and Osiris and the Greek word for tragedy being derived from the term "goat song?") A goat connotes rampant sexuality, but it also connotes sacrifice, as in the Hebrew tradition of the scape-goat carrying the community's confessions to God. Similarly, women throwing themselves on the speaker's Bowie is a sexual metaphor (sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar) that carries a similar secondary sacrificial meaning. It sanctifies the sexual and eroticizes the sacrificial.
Finally, in this poem that has been relentlessly atonal, with its dependence on allusion, synthesis of allusion and mashup of reference, as if to prove that, yes, he can do the prosody thing, Reed tosses off a couplet of graceful alliteration and rhyme that almost prefigures rap: "Make them up when stars stare at sleeping / steer out here near the campfire." The long vowels lengthen the line and the sibillants evoke the snakes, the sidewinders, and also the hiss of the whip.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Lord of the lash,
the Loup Garou Kid. Half breed son of Pisces and
Aquarius. I hold the souls of men in my pot. I do
the dirty boogie with scorpions. I make the bulls
keep still and was the first swinger to grape the taste.
The lash, the whip, the flail, which is half of the crook and flail, are symbols of kingship to the Pharaoh, and symbols the specifically associate the king with Osiris and Horus. "Loup garou" is French for werewolf and, according to Robert Abel in The Explicator 30:9, Item #81, May 1972, the Loup Garou Kid is a character, an outlaw, in Reed's Yellow Black Radio Broke Down: "who is the perpetual thorn in the Establishment's side." (Okay, I did some homework. For the record, Abel totally blows the poem, and probably got tenure for it.) Loup Garou is also a Voodoo loa, a spirit who serves as an intermediary between the believer and God, and who is not prayed to, but literally served by the believer.
He is a half-breed, son of Isis and the dead god, born on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, in other words, on the threshold of a new order. He asserts his divinity by saying that he holds "the souls of men in [his] pot," like Ra, like Osiris. The dirty boogie (in pre-Brian Setzer days) was a popular Southern rockabilly song released by Roy Hall in 1949. The "dirty boogie" is, of course, slang for the horizontal mambo. And he does it with scorpions! He's come a long way from the first paragraph, when the sidewinders beset him, biting his forehead (where the double crown of Egypt should be.) Remember, Set sent snakes and scorpions after Horus, but Thoth healed him and gave him transformative powers.
"I make the bulls / keep still." In Egyptian mythology, the bull is sacred to Osiris and to Ptah, the creator, the god of creation, who merges over time with Osiris. The word ka refers to the life-force or soul of a man and the word also means "bull," tying the allusion back two lines to holding "the souls of men in my pot."
"The first swinger to grape the taste": I haven't got a clue. The Urban Dictionary has some reasonable definitions of the transitive verb "to grape," but I think it likely they all post-date Reed's use. "Swinger," of course, hardly needs a definition.
Anyway, the intention of the paragraph is clear enough--the speaker is summoning his many strengths and abilities (including his sexual ones, which isn't out of line, considering the sexual abuse aspect of some of the Horus/Set battles), putting them on, as it were, as he prepares for battle. He's known failure and come through it stronger. It's time.
I am a cowboy in his boat. Pope Joan of the
Ptah Ra. C/mere a minute willya doll?
Be a good girl and
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
Pope Joan is a legendary figure who first appears 13th century Church chronicles. In around 1100, Joan, disguised as an Englishman, rose through the Church hierarchy, eventually being elected Pope, and ruled until she gave birth to a child and subsequently died. For a while, the Church itself accepted her existence, until it was debunked in the mid-18th century. Here, I think Pope Joan is the ultimate example of the Outsider as Insider, one whose disguise is so perfect it allows the wearer to be elevated to the highest offices. Joan's a fascinating figure in her own right, but here, she serves as a reference that implies not only does the speaker have an ally on the inside, his powers of transformation are now so powerful he can be anyone, anywhere.
The Ptah Ra is the Immortal Ra, Ra the sun god, Lord of all Creation in all his power. His emissary, his Pope, is the speaker's lover, or his moll, whom he addresses in affectionate, but condescending, 1930's mobster language: "C/mere a minute willya doll? / Be a good girl and / bring..." Here begins the litany of magical talismans, as the speaker arms himself for battle. The imagery of an African witch doctor re-evokes the Voodoo loa Loup Garou of the previous paragraph and augments it; historically black/African/non-Christian forces are gathering on our speaker's behalf.
The last line, "Hand me my shadow," deviates from the religious and moves into the psychological. The shadow, in Jungian terms, is the "other," the complementary, sometimes suppressed, component of the Self, the unconscious, the darkness whose embrace makes one whole. It's also a great reference to the old radio show "The Shadow" ("Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!")
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
party pooper O hater of dance
vampire outlaw of the milky way
With the line "I'm going into town..." we return to the Old West, with the cowboy heading into town to take on the bad guy. For the first time, his enemy is named: Set. Now we are sure the speaker is Horus, setting out to avenge his father, Osiris. He gives Set warning: look out, here I come. The next two lines that follow are puns on Set's name, but they do more than pun: he knows his enemy. He names him. Naming is power: if you know the real name of a thing, you have power over it. In the riddle contest, Set loses because he can't guess his enemy's identity.
The final four lines are offset from the margin, I think because not only do the extend the definition of who Set is, they are Horus' private thoughts, his musings, as he heads into town for the great battle.
Now, finally, wrapping it up
Horus plays the "who am I?" game, the battle that finally vanquishes his uncle and enemy, Set. Through the course of the poem he names himself continually, telling us what he is, but not who he is: he is Sonny Rollins and Ezzard Charles, he is a cowboy, he is Lord of the Lash, he's a witch doctor. He summons and synthesizes a vast array of references, all drawn from African and African American culture, including the buffalo soldier/cowboy, and sites them in Egypt--he is Africanizing Egypt, taking the country and culture away from its European interpreters. As the poem progresses, he enacts the naming contest, summoning all his many powers for the final battle, which will vanquish evil and restore justice in the universe.
One of the things about the poem that strikes me most about the entire poem is the repetition "I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra." It unites the poem, heads every paragraph; it also tells us something essential about the speaker. As he repeats the line, he identifies himself without telling us his identity. He is a righteous force, loyal to Ra, riding with Ra across the sky and, in some myths, battling Set from Ra's boat itself.
We know now who the speaker is, Horus, Egypt itself, identified with Pharoah, with eternal kingship itself, with Anubis and his father Osiris as lord of the dead and the god of regeneration.
So who is Set?
More than Osiris's jealous brother who treacherously usurps his place (until his son sets things right), he's identified firmly in the final lines:
usurper of the Royal couch
imposter RAdio of Moses' bush
party pooper O hater of dance
vampire outlaw of the milky way
"usurper of the Royal couch," grounded in the myth, refers to Set's betrayal of Osiris, taking his place, but not, significantly, his wife. This becomes important because, when we learn Set's real identity, we notice that this particular god takes no consort.
"imposter RAdio of Moses' bush": This line is crucial, and it identifies Set in history. He's the imposter god, the fake Ra, who spoke to Moses in the burning bush, turning Moses away from Egypt. Set is Yahweh, Jehovah, the Judeo-Christian God, who hates dance and celebration--as the early Church suppressed native worship both in Africa and among the tribes of Native Americans (in the Old West, bringing the cowboy theme triumphantly back). This God is a vampire, and sucks the blood out of "real worship," the kind of worship Horus himself has received in exile, as women come to him on the backs of goats. This God is an outlaw--in that Jewish and Christian tradition brought something utterly new to humanity: a God whose real name cannot be known, whose face cannot be seen, a banishing of idols and a far more astringent form of worship, one that is certainly not as much "fun" as the ones it replaced.
The reference to the Milky Way makes the battle cosmic--these are gods doing battle in the sky; this is significant, it will affect the course of humanity.
Now the epigram: "'The devil must be forced to reveal any such physical evil (potions, charms, fetishes, etc.) still outside the body and these must be burned.' (Rituale Romanum, published 1947, endorsed by the coat-of-arms and introductory letter from Francis cardinal Spellman)"
In case we missed the point. Of course, Christianity would see Horus as the devil. But in this case, he is not forced to reveal his "physical evil;" instead, he summons them to himself, to use them as his armor, his arsenal.
This is why Reed so infuriates some critics. This poem, arguably his most iconic, names Judeo-Christianity as an evil force and prophesies the ascendence of "blackness," the Africanization of culture that is really a retaking of what was stolen by Christian Europe and America.
At least that's what I think it means. It's a marathon. Thanks for running it with me.
