The Essays of Ishmael Reed by Ishmael Reed

First published:Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, 1978; God Made Alaska for the Indians, 1982; Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper, 1988; Airing Dirty Laundry, 1993; Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race War, 2003

Type of work: Essays

A Provocative Essayist

Though he is one of the best-known contemporary American writers of both poetry and fiction, Ishmael Reed has created the greatest level of controversy with his efforts in the genre of the essay. Beginning with his first published collection of essays, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978), which contains pieces from the early and mid-1970’s, Reed displays a talent for both satire and humor that led one writer in The Nation to compare him to Mark Twain. Refusing to argue from any one limited cultural or political paradigm, Reed has criticized, and been criticized by, all sides of the political spectrum. His conflict with what he calls right-wing “ethnic chauvinists” motivates much of his nonfiction. His even more famous feud with feminists such as the African American novelist Alice Walker (who refers to herself as a “womanist”) has also drawn considerable publicity. Whether commenting on racism, religion, writing, or popular culture, Reed maintains one constant in his nonfiction: He wittily and strenuously argues the merits of turning a multicultural perspective on all areas of American culture.

Reed is most eloquent on the need for multicultural education and publishing. He comments on this topic in the title essay of his first volume of nonfiction, “Shrovetide in Old New Orleans,” and multiculturalsim is a constant theme throughout many of his collected essays. The resistance to multiculturalism is, in Reed’s opinion, one of the many legacies of racism. While in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, Reed is struck by the many African and Caribbean African components of the celebration. In particular, he is impressed by the many elements of the African religion of Vodoun, or Voodoo, in the midst of a nominally Christian celebration. Not surprising, Mardi Gras becomes for Reed an emblem of the unacknowledged contributions of African Americans to American culture, ranging from the jazz music that accompanies many parades to the costumes and disguises that are of obvious African or African American origin.

Reed also finds that there are many African Americans eager to capitalize on the reputation of Mardi Gras; one native Louisianan, the self-appointed “prince” of Voodoo, makes a living by defrauding tourists on “Voodoo” tours, sleeping in a coffin, and “geeking,” or biting the heads off chickens. Even after observing this display, though, Reed finds Mardi Gras to be the most enjoyable of American holidays, a welcome mingling of cultures replete with such inescapable contradictions. As he writes,

Mardi Gras is also of ancient origins, when it was a celebration involving fornication, self-castration, human sacrifice, and flagellation with goatskin whips. Therefore, it’s appropriate that it takes place in the South, where, in a former time, whipping was the chief entertainment.

Reed’s most pointed comments on North American racism appear in three later essays, “God Made Alaska for the Indians,” from the volume of the same name; “Race War in America?” a chronicle of a discussion among a group of African American intellectuals and writers; and “Hymietown Revisited,” a defense of Jesse Jackson, a contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential slot in 1984 and 1988. In “God Made Alaska for the Indians,” Reed reports on the conflict among two groups of Native Americans, the U.S. government, and several environmental organizations spearheaded by the Sierra Club. The Sitka Tlingits, a Native American tribe, attempted to develop a portion of tribal property on Admiralty Island, Alaska, only to be opposed by environmentalist legislators and sued by the Sierra Club. The resulting legal battle, Reed notes, included and in many ways paralleled much of the history of the struggle of Native Americans with European Americans. Reed considers the conflict to be paradigmatic of relations among the races, though after protracted litigation the Sitka Tlingits won the right to use the land that they already owned and achieved an unexpected victory against the American system.

“Race War in America?” is another meditation on racial conflict in the late 1970’s. Similar to the longstanding conflict between European immigrants and Native Americans, the relations of the races in South Africa serves as a starting point in this discussion. Reed, at different times and locations, asks a distinguished group of guests including novelist Al Young, playwright Ntozake Shange, and critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., about the possible effects that a racial war in South Africa might have on race relations in the United States. Few of those questioned think that a racial war is imminent, but many see a recurrent fear of such a war operative in American culture. Reed theorizes that it is indeed a fear that recurs during American political and economic crises.

In“Hymietown Revisited,” published in Writin’ Is Fightin’ (1988), Reed defends an often-publicized remark made privately by presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, who referred to Jewish Americans as “Hymies.” Reed compares the treatment accorded Jackson with that given to notable white politicians, including Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Richard Nixon, and others, who have made public comments with strong racial overtones. While Jackson’s comment received tremendous attention in the media, comments by white politicians that were insulting to a wide range of ethnic groups garnered little if any attention. Reed discovers here the same thing that he found in his previous essays: the double standard that lies at the heart of both American media and official culture, in which the dominant race is innocent until proven guilty and minorities are treated in the opposite fashion.

Religion and Multiculturalism

Reed’s views on religion reflect his multicultural concerns. He often writes on the topic of Vodoun, an African religion that is known in the Americas as Hoodoo or Voodoo. Unlike Christianity, which is monotheistic, Vodoun is pantheistic and even animistic in its various forms. Reed offers some commentary on the influence of Vodoun in the New Orleans Mardi Gras in “Shrovetide in Old New Orleans,” but his most extended analysis and exposition on African-originated religions is found in the essays “I Hear You, Doc,” in the same volume, and “Soyinka Among the Monoculturalists,” in Writin’ Is Fightin’.

“I Hear You, Doc,” is the chronicle of Reed’s trip to Haiti, where Vodoun is practiced extensively. Reed finds Haiti to be a country of contradictions but not the grisly place many Americans believe it to be. The political situation, according to Reed, is no different from that of many U.S. allies. Reed discovers Haitian culture and religion to be refreshingly energetic, contrary to the stereotypes disseminated by U.S. media. He first encounters relics of Vodoun shortly after his arrival at the Port-au-Prince airport, which is decorated with a huge mural of a Voodoo ceremony. Prepared for all eventualities, Reed travels with a “Watson Cross,” which allegedly melts when it comes in contact with the evil eye (Haitian president Joseph Nemurs Pierre-Louis is said to have been brought down by the evil eye). Reed sees evidence of the practice of Vodoun everywhere in his travels around the impoverished island, but eventually he becomes disturbed by the number of armed guards and policemen who also appear to be everywhere. He is relieved when he finally arrives back at the Miami airport, only to be ignored by a Cuban American waiter and insulted by an airline official. In a typically ironic comment, Reed notes that the insults assure him that he is back home.

Reed draws parallels between the negative stereotyping of African religions by the media and the negative reception given to an American production of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman (pb. 1975, pr. 1976). Reed’s essay “Soyinka Among the Monoculturalists” is a metacommentary on the North American critical response to Soyinka. Reed finds most of the criticism of the play to be based on a misunderstanding of African religions, referred to as “cults” by one critic. Reed ironically notes that even the Muslim character in the play, Sergeant Amusa, voices his appreciation of the Yoruban religion, something that American critics apparently missed. One critic terms the traditional tribal beliefs of the African characters in the play to be “tribal superstition,” which leads Reed to compare the criticisms to the tradition of the persecution of religious nonconformity in North America, from the Salem witch trials to the hanging of the Quaker Mary Dyer.

Reed and the Critics

Just as Reed finds evidence of intolerance and monocultural bias in religion, he finds no end of bigotry in his relations with critics and fellow writers. Reed has written a number of laudatory essays about fellow writers, founded his own publishing company, and served as the president of the Before Columbus Foundation, which is dedicated to recognizing the achievements of writers from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. He continues, however, to answer criticism that he is bigoted and intolerant in his views concerning writing and American culture.

One of Reed’s most provocative essays on contemporary writing, “American Poetry: Is There a Center?” is featured in God Made Alaska for the Indians (1982). Reed wrote the essay after attending a benefit poetry reading in 1977. Many of the writers present at the reading had connections with the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, proclaimed to be the center for American poetry by an article in Time magazine, although in this case, as Reed notes, the Buddhists were primarily transplanted Easterners. Reed deconstructs the idea of a center for American poetry by pointing to the multicultural flowering of the arts taking place on the West Coast and in many other areas in the United States. The atmosphere and hype concerning Boulder finally bears out Reed’s thesis that poetry includes many of the components of modern urban civilization: “competition, greed, sexism, and racism.”

Reed’s decentering of American poetry is balanced by his lauding of those writers who he feels best represent the multicultural tradition. Among African American writers, he is especially complimentary of the works of Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara. Reed has written several essays on the works of Richard Wright, the most detailed being “Native Son Lives!” included in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. Wright, in Reed’s opinion, is an exemplary writer who went beyond mastery of his art to question the taboos that lie at the center of black-white relations. Hurston, whose revival was occasioned by admirers such as Reed, is noted not only for her fiction, which accurately depicts African American folklife, but also for her extensive nonfiction works, such as her pioneering work on North American Voodoo.

Chester Himes, whose work has also enjoyed a revival, received a positive review from Reed for The Quality of Hurt (1972), the fascinating first volume of his autobiography, covering his years as an Ohio State University fraternity man, an Ohio state prison inmate, an expatriate in Paris, and a literary celebrity. Meanwhile, playwright August Wilson and the novelists Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara are among the contemporary African American writers whom Reed admires most. All these writers function, to paraphrase Reed’s comment on Wilson, as bearers of the African American tradition.

In addition to his concern for writers who sustain the African American tradition, Reed has written essays on numerous other North American writers from outside the Anglo-American tradition. Reed introduces the subject in “The Multi-Cultural Artist: A New Phase in American Writing,” written in 1976 for the French newspaper Le Monde and included in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. Reed notes, as have many following him, that demographic and other changes have dethroned New York as the centralized capital of American writing. New York, Reed argues, has been replaced by a number of regional centers, especially areas populated by Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans. Because of Reed’s California connection, all four of these ethnic groups have influenced his own writing, a fact evidenced by, for example, the Native American raven figure in his novel Flight to Canada (1976) and his references to Japanese culture in Japanese by Spring (1993). In other essays, Reed proudly points to his own ethnic background, including his Cherokee heritage.

Reed’s concern with multiculturalism has often led him into the realm of popular culture, usually to criticize the representation of ethnic groups by the information and film industries. Among the most publicized conflicts that Reed has faced has been his dispute with the African American novelist Alice Walker over the 1985 film version of Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple. In the essay “Stephen Spielberg Plays Howard Beach,” in Writin’ Is Fightin’, Reed attacks the portrayal of African American males in the film. He begins the essay with the observation that an audience of feminists in Berkeley, California, had identified the typical rapist as an African American male, although, he notes, more than three-fourths of convicted U.S. rapists are white. Such a stereotype, Reed argues, can be attributed to the images purveyed and sold by the multinational media, in particular the film studios.

Reed argues that in the film version of The Color Purple “all of the myths that have been directed at black men since the Europeans entered Africa are joined.” In particular, Reed emphasizes the depiction of African American males in the film as rapists and wife-beaters; these characterizations, he argues, are soon generalized to include all African American males. In particular, Reed points to the eager adoption of the generalization by the mainstream media, including such film critics as Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. The media began to use the film’s fictional African American male characters as examples of the behavior of real African American men. Reed appeared on The Today Show in 1986 to criticize this media trend. His remarks caused a furor, during which he was described as a misogynist and a racist. Reed responded that American film and television function as propaganda organs and that they can easily be used to demonize a segment of the population, just as the Nazis used film to demonize Jews.

Airing Dirty Laundry (1993) is a frontal attack on media propaganda, mainly concerning the portrayal of ethnicities in the news and, more specific, the connection of crime and varying ethnicities. Reed’s main argument is that the correlation between crime and African Americans represented explicitly and implicitly throughout the American media is fictional: Crime is widespread through all ethnicities, including whites, and it is widespread through all locales, including suburbia. The collection’s title essay, “Airing Dirty Laundry,” explores these points in depth. Reed reviews media portrayals of various minorities in the United States and takes a closer look at the idea of a “model minority.”

Noting that African Americans receive praise for airing their race’s dirty laundry, Reed’s final call to action is to air everyone’s dirty laundry. Doing this, Reed argues, will free the United States from its fear and its secrets, providing the opportunity for Americans to rebuild racial relationships. To further these goals, the essays that follow the title essay investigate specific representations of race within the public arena. The collection includes such titles as “Clarence Thomas Lynched Again,” “Rodney King and I,” and “Mike Tyson and the White Hope Cult.” This volume also contains profiles and reviews of many African American leaders Reed feels have been misrepresented or underrepresented by the media.

The essays in Reed’s Another Day at the Front (2003) reinforce his claim that, for African Americans, each day is another day at the front. African American life represents a battle for freedom and justice, in which every African American is a veteran of the front lines. In his introduction, Reed recounts a question posed to him by Patrick Reardon of the Chicago Tribune, who wanted to know if Reed thought the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, would affect Americans’ civil liberties. Reed replied that African Americans’ civil liberties had been threatened for three hundred years. Thus, the essays of this volume reveal the discrimination faced by many contemporary African Americans, in direct rebuttal to those who argue that racism is no longer a problem, that it no longer occurs, or that it is falsely attributed to some as a result of political correctness.

In “Another Day at the Front,” Reed suggests that people who “believe that blacks are P.C.-ing or making up things” can learn at first hand by imitating the Griffin-Solomon test. Griffin and Solomon were white men who changed their features and passed as black and who experienced discrimination they never had as whites. Other essays discuss veterans such as Quincy Troupe, a poet and professor who has been integral to African American arts and politics, and civil rights leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, both of whom developed the Tuskegee Institute and cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), among other accomplishments. Reed also covers figures on the other side of the front, such as John Calhoun, vice president to Andrew Jackson and a supporter of slavery. While his references to September 11 are few, his point that it was not the first terrorist attack to take place on American soil is well made.

Reed has become an articulate spokesman discussing a wide range of problems facing not only African American men and women but also a number of other oppressed ethnic groups. His relentless pursuit of the truth as he sees it has made him a popular figure in American culture, as well as an object of fear to those who oppose him.

Bibliography

Bugeja, Michael J. Review of New and Collected Poems and Writin’ Is Fightin’, by Ishmael Reed. Southern Humanities Review 24, no. 3 (1990): 291-295. An omnibus review of Reed’s poetry and nonfiction. The writer notes that Reed has progressed from the avant-garde to the mainstream of North American poetry (or that the mainstream has moved toward him). Argues that Reed continues to be one of the most honest, thoughtful, and provocative writers on the literary scene.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. A fundamental work of African American literary criticism. Using the work of Ishmael Reed as a paradigmatic example, Gates investigates the importance of the rhetorical tactic of “signifying” in African American literature. “Signifying” is a form of verbal gamesmanship often introduced into Reed’s fiction and nonfiction.

Lively, Adam. “Bunging Everything into the Gumbo.” Review of The Free-Lance Pallbearers and The Terrible Twos, by Ishmael Reed. Times Literary Supplement, May 18, 1990, 534. A positive review of Reed’s work. The writer finds Reed at least as interesting as the highly canonized contemporary American writer Thomas Pynchon and speculates that the “universal” appeal of Reed’s novels may be overlooked because of racial politics.

Mercer, Joye. “The Improvisations of an ‘Ethnic Gate Crasher.’ ” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 1993, A5. A short biographical and literary portrait of Reed emphasizing his later work, particularly the novel Japanese by Spring. The essay emphasizes Reed’s efforts on behalf of multiculturalism, including remarks by Reed concerning the necessity in preaching and improvising.

Punday, Daniel. “Ishmael Reed’s Rhetorical Turn.” College English 54 (April, 1992): 446-461. An extended analysis of Reed’s use of rhetorical techniques in his fiction, with the novel Reckless Eyeballing (1986) used as a paradigm. Punday examines the various rhetorical modes present in the fiction, including signifying and “double-consciousness.”

Watkins, Mel. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed.” The Southern Review 21 (Summer, 1985): 603-614. Watkins’ interview features an extensive discussion of Reed’s fiction and multicultural views. Reed offers commentary on some of his more controversial views, particularly concerning the role of the media in the characterization of African American males.