Because reading Reed’s fiction is like savoring and devouring Gombo Févi or Gumbo à la Creole, two metaphors that Reed develops in the poem “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic” and the novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), a thorough analysis of Reed’s novels must start by recognizing their underlying postcolonial discourse, African Diaspora reconnection, and multicultural poetics. Because so far very little attention has been directed toward the intertextuality that pervades his work (novels, poems, plays, essays), Reed has been rightly complaining about both readers and critics’ failure to investigate the allusions used in his work. By failing to both investigate the multiplicity of allusions in Reed’s novels and to regard Neo-HooDooism as a poetics of multiculturalism, critics have either misread or misinterpreted Reed’s novels. In his Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper (1990), Reed complains that when he “set out to add fresh interpretations to an ancient Afro-American oral literature by modernizing its styles so as to reach contemporary readers,” he knew that his work would be greeted with controversy. He further states that he knew that some critics “would dismiss the material [included in his work] as arcane, when millions of people in North, South, and Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa are acquainted with the structures [he] used” (137).1 By “ancient Afro-American oral literature” Reed refers to the folklores and stories from Vodoun/Voodoo and HooDoo religious systems (from Africa and the African Diaspora), the dozens, the toasts of the Signifying Monkey (in which the monkey subverts the power of the lion and the elephant) as well as Native American myths (of the raven in Flight to Canada [1976] and coyote in The Terrible Threes [1989]), Asian, and other world oral traditions. It is out of this “ancient Afro-American oral literature” and Voodoo/HooDoo traditions that Reed has developed his multicultural and global writing style called Neo-HooDooism.
On the other hand, readers and critics have been complaining that Reed’s books are difficult to read because of their numerous subtexts, their non-Aristotelian plots (or artistic arrangement of events), and their stock, flat characters – in almost all of the nine novels. Reed returns the favor by having characters either mock the conventional ways of writing novels or proclaim their being in favor of Aristotelian aesthetics and round characters. The point to be made here is that Reed always has many non-related things (Syncretism) going on at the same time (Synchronicity), while his readers and critics tend to follow a straight line or one thing at a time in their reading. Robert Gover has cogently pointed out that as “a houngan [a Voodoo priest] of his novels,” Ishmael Reed is not only “hard on his readers,” but he seems to take them for granted by assuming that “they already know the basics of Voodoo or are quick-witted enough to pick them up by osmosis.” What is more, Reed “is a tireless researcher and he writes to send his readers scurrying to their dictionaries and libraries.”2
While Reed’s work seems to be concerned with de-centering Judeo-Christianity in order to affirm African-based identities, it seems to do so within a global perspective made possible by his Neo-HooDooism. Thus, Reed’s aim is not simply to assert “the blackness of blackness”3 or an Afrocentric aesthetic in the manner of Amiri Baraka, Molefi Asante, and others, but that his writing goes beyond the reconnection to African spirituality in order to create a multicultural space for all cultures and modes of being and thinking. Reed has argued that his idea of Neo-HooDooism differs from “the Black Nationalist approach,” because he sees “West African imagination as capable of being inspired by many different cultures,” while “the Black Nationalists are mono-cultural. The absorptive capacity of ‘Neo-HooDooism’ incorporates European ideas as well as Native American ideas.”4 In Reed’s fiction, the decolonization process hinges not only on appropriating the language of the master but also on liberating his writing by both forging his writing style out of ancient African-based traditions and enmeshing them with those found in the “New World.” Interestingly, black characters (South American or North American) who are endowed with the knowledge of these ancient African-based traditions and the cultural interdependence that exists between the latter and American traditions are those who survive and are positively portrayed in Reed’s fiction – missing this point has misled many critics to label The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1989) and Reckless Eyeballing (1986) misogynistic novels. On the other hand, those characters who lack the historical knowledge of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, tend to become colonial collaborators.
Just as language is central to any colonial, postcolonial, or neo-colonial experience – every colonial or imperial oppression begins by controlling language as a medium of communication – so is it pivotal to Reed’s fiction (as it has always been in African American literature). It is not a coincidence then that his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), addresses such issues as “the bastardization of the tongue,” and Japanese by Spring (1993), his most recent novel, abrogates and appropriates the English language by using Yoruba and Japanese languages and cultures, all made possible by Neo-HooDooism. To borrow from Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Reed and his characters understand that it is through language that “a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth,’ ‘order,’ and ‘reality’ become established.”5 Reed’s writing cogently demonstrates that the liberation of any oppressed people begins by recovering the language of communication just as the liberation of the so-called minority or colonized writer starts with tampering with the Word. Not only does Reed’s writing re-place the language and text of the master, but it also elaborates its own theory of writing whereby it achieves its liberation: Neo-HooDooism. Further, Reed’s novels demonstrate how African American literature is part of African oral tradition, not a subcategory of Western literature, by abrogating Western novelistic forms and appropriating them to both express his African American experiences and establish true multicultural American and global realities.
As Reed has argued in his Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978), Voodoo is “the perfect metaphor for the multiculture,” because it “comes out of the fact that all these different tribes and cultures were brought from Africa to Haiti” with “all their mythologies, knowledges, and herbal medicines, their folklores, jelled” (232–233). In an essay in Writin’ Is Fightin’, Reed explains that it is this multicultural aspect underlying Voodoo that attracted him to study and write on Voodoo, for “there seems to be no room” for “intellectual meanness” in African-based religious systems. Indeed, Voodoo “could mix with other cultures with no thought of ‘contamination,’ or ‘corruption,’ but usefulness.” In this light, Catholic saints could perform the functions of African gods, just as in Guadeloupe “the gods of the immigrant Indians were added to the neo-African pantheon, and a curry dish, with Indian origins, has become the national dish of this Caribbean country” (141). Reed further theorizes Neo-HooDooism in three poems: “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic,” where Gumbo is used as a metaphor for syncretic writing insofar as the amount of ingredients to make Gombo Févi or Gumbo Filé rests entirely on the cook/artist; “Catechism of a Neoamerican Hoodoo Church,” in which the poet declares that, unlike computers, writers are not programmable and their pens are free; and “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” in which the origins of Neo-HooDoo are traced back to Africa via Haitian Voodoo. Equally important, Neo-HooDoo is linked to dance and serves as the matrix for African American expressive cultures: several blues, R&B, and rock and roll musicians are named Neo-HooDoos. As the poem suggests, central to Neo-HooDooism is the belief that “every man is an artist and every artist / a priest,” and people can bring their “own creative ideals to / Neo-HooDoo.” The poem cites Charlie “Yardbird (Thoth)” Parker as an example of “the Neo-HooDoo / artist as an innovator and improviser” (New and Collected Poems 21). Not only does Charlie Parker get mentioned in every one of Reed’s novels after The Free-Lance Pallbearers, but also on the back cover of Conversations with Ishmael Reed, Reed is quoted as saying that if anyone was going to compare him to anybody, then compare him to “someone like Mingus and Charlie Parker, musicians who have a fluidity with the chord structure just as we have with the syntax or the sentence which is our basic unit.” Not only do all Reed’s novels depend on improvisation of scenes and characters, an improvisation the essence of which Reed finds in jazz musical forms such as Be-Bop, but for almost four decades Reed has also been arguing that in order to survive slavery, Reconstruction, lynching, Jim Crow, imperialism, and other colonizing systems, Africans in the “New World” have had to improvise on little that had been left of African traditions. As Reed points out in his introduction to 19 Necromancers From Now (1970), a multicultural anthology of American fiction, Neo-HooDooism allows him to write more effectively by returning “to what some writers would call ‘dark heathenism’ to find original tall tales, and yarns with the same originality that some modern writers use as found poetry – the enigmatic street rhymes of some of Ellison’s minor characters, or the dozens. I call this Neo-hoodooism [my emphasis]; a spur to originality.”6 That is, Reed is a “necromancer,” a visionary and prophet who possesses his “vision of reality” and is “from the culture of the underground – the conjurer,” a descendant of “the conjure people” who can be found in other cultures.7 In this light, Reed views the African American artist as a “necromancer,” “a conjuror who works JuJu upon his oppressors; a witch doctor who frees his fellow victims from the psychic attack launched by demons of the outer and inner world” (19 Necromancers xviii). Reed points to the fact that the Mayans and the Egyptians regarded the writer as “a necromancer, soothsayer, priest, prophet; a man who opened doors to the divine” (xx).
The Free-Lance Pallbearers sets Reed’s literary Neo-HooDooism in fiction in motion for his subsequent novels. In it Reed collages parodies of the toasts of the urban ghetto traditions, Vincent McHugh’s Caleb Catlum’s America, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Voltaire’s Candide, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Charles Wright’s The Wig, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, the German voodoo film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nathaniel West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Daffy Duck cartoons, and voodoo aesthetics (to name a few), from which stem the fantastical landscape, the style, the protagonist, and the narrative. Parodying (signifying8 upon) these literary and popular texts – which Reed has recently called “a mixing and sampling technique” or the gumbo style (The Reed Reader xiv) – is part of Reed’s Neo-HooDooism and multicultural poetics, for Reed feels that these texts have been neglected, though they are part of American culture. The Free-Lance Pallbearers signifies upon the idea of the American Dream that Bukka Doopeyduk, the protagonist, is so obsessed with that he leaves college, where he was expected to become “the first bacteriological warfare expert on the colored race” (4), “to start at the bottom and work [his] way up the ladder” through “temperance, frugality, thrift” and studying the book of the Nazarenes. More specifically, Bukka Doopeyduk studies the Nazarene manual hoping to overthrow HARRY SAM, the name of both a dictator and a country, and become one of the Nazarene bishops. But like the protagonist in Invisible Man, Doopeyduk eventually not only discovers that HARRY SAM is a dictator and a murderer of children, but he also realizes that alienating himself from the black community and blindly embracing American myths about hard work and its rewards can only lead to disappointment and disillusionment. Indeed, any attempt to escape from tyranny throws Doopeyduk into a state of utter confusion in a country filled with excrement and waste – HARRY SAM is a head of state who governs while sitting on a toilet and whose sexual practices are anal. Reed seems to suggest that Doopeyduk mainly fails in his quest because he is alienated from black cultures, including his dislike of the black dialect for the fear that the assistant dean of arts and sciences and the students from the University at Buffalo would circulate a petition about the “ADULTERATION OF HER TONGUE” (100).
That language is an issue in The Free-Lance Pallbearers is indicated in the opening paragraph where Doopeyduk, the “I” narrator, reveals that he lives in HARRY SAM, a “big not-to-be-believed out-of-sight, sometimes referred to as O-BOP-SHE-BANG OR KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG” (1). This phrase, repeated as a leitmotif throughout the novel, certainly introduces and foreshadows the slang and Be-Bop language of the 1950s – jazz drummer Max Roch has called Ishmael Reed “the Charlie Parker of American fiction.”9 Not only has Reed expressed his admiration for Parker, but he has also compared his way of writing plots to Parker’s Be-Bop style and jazz. Writing laudatorily about the “technical innovations” of Be-Bop and emphasizing the latter’s influence on “American style in fashion, manners, and language,” Reed notes that Be-Boppers “invented words long ago consigned to the slangheap by out-of-touch grammarians.”10 More directly, Reed has argued that just as Parker improvised on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” and produced “something more than what it was,” so does he improvise on “the western form” to create new and more viable forms – understand multicultural forms – of writing.11 Clearly, the term “Bop” in the phrase above is part of the black vernacular insofar as it designates “an innovative form of jazz started in the 1940s by Charlie Parker (the Prince of Bop)” and several other jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk, in which “innovation was the key: melody and harmony were open-ended; anything could happen in bop.”12 Clarence Major reminds us that Be-Bop designated a style of scat singing or unconventional playing of an instrument. Ultimately, such a phrase and several others in The Free-Lance Pallbearers demonstrate how in this novel Reed de-centers the English language and form of the novel in order to make room for other languages such as black dialect, Be-Bop language, Chinese – the last message of the novel has been supposedly glossed from the Chinese – and Yoruba. It is worth noting that in this first novel Reed introduces HooDoo through the back door of Hollywood insofar as Voodoo is perceived as a bad thing; indeed, Doopeyduk gets hoodoooed by his wife’s grandmother who thinks that he is a failure. In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Reed studies Voodoo further and begins to chart its origins from West and Central Africa via Haiti to New Orleans.
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down represents a major shift from The Free-Lance Pallbearers not simply as a HooDoo Western, the first of its kind, but also by the way it moves from a Hollywood-type idea of Voodoo to a well-documented concept of HooDoo as a North American version of Dahomean and Haitian Voodoo. At the same time, it transforms an oral form of Voodoo folklore into a written form of a HooDoo Be-Bop Western novel. That is, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down illustrates Neo-HooDooism (Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic) and its application to the cultural character of the American West and the Western genre. Reed’s abrogation and appropriation of the Western hinge on his premise that the Western is traceable to both African Voodoo and African American HooDoo insofar as when in Voodoo and HooDoo loas (spirits) ride/possess human beings (who become their hosts), the latter become horsemen and horsewomen. Therefore, Reed “would naturally write a Western, here again using traditional styles of Afro-American folklore but enmeshing such styles with popular forms with which readers could identify”13 The very syncretic and synchronistic nature of Neo-HooDooism allows Reed not only to question the colonial world of the American West and the Western, but also to reappropriate and to reinvent the American West and the Western through Loop Garoo Kid, a black HooDoo cowboy and houngan (Voodoo priest), as a hero of the Western. The result is a multicultural and multiethnic Western. Using his HooDoo powers against Drag Gibson and his acolytes, and helped by the Native American Chief Showcase and his science fiction technique mixed with Native American trickster characters, Loop Garoo Kid transforms the Western into a HooDoo Be-Bop Western (scatting like Charlie Parker) that accommodates African Americans, Native Americans, women, children, Chinese, Germans, and Christians, with their differing linguistic and cultural views. In the novel, Loop Garoo Kid is presented on the one hand as a demonic figure and the apocryphal twin of Christ, and as a HooDoo houngan/priest who is both the lord of the lash and the master of conjuration, on the other. For Drag Gibson, however, Loop Garoo represents the forces of disorder and evil just like the Bacca Loup-gerow loas of Haitian Voodoo.14 Additionally, the character Loop Garoo originates from Africa via Haiti, for the “slaves were brought from Haiti to New Orleans, so you get a Loup Garou in Haiti who’s a female and you get a Loup Garou in New Orleans who’s male [and who has] got leather and a lasso.”15 Kid, of course, is a reference to William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, who has been considered the epitome of the bad man in the Western. Through Loop Garoo, Reed reverses the belief system in the Western according to which good prevails over evil: it is the supposedly demonic Loop Garoo who epitomizes good, order, compromise, and a sort of harmony among races, genders, cultures, and religions. On the other hand, the law and order that Drag Gibson represents are nothing but oppression, repression, and corruption. When Drag Gibson fails to fight the Loop Garoo’s HooDoo forces, he invites the Pope from Rome to come and save Christianity from the evil Loop Garoo. But it turns out that Loop Garoo and the Pope know each other from Heaven from where Loop Garoo was chased by the Father for allegedly plotting a coup against Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, the Pope strips Loop Garoo of his protective mojo/charms and leaves him at the hands of Drag Gibson, but only after entreating him to go back with him to prevent the Virgin Mary from singing the blues. With the Pope in the novel, Reed theorizes how, despite the Catholics’ efforts to wipe out Voodoo and other African traditional religions, the latter have survived in the African diaspora by mixing with Catholic saints and Native American mythologies. Not only does the Pope characterize Loop Garoo’s HooDoo as “scatting arbitrarily, using forms of this and adding his own. He’s blowing like that celebrated musician Charles Yardbird Parker – improvising as he goes along” and “throwing clusters of demon chords at you,” but he defines HooDoo as “an American version of Ju-Ju religion that originates in Africa [Dahomey and Angola].” What is more, the Pope acknowledges that Europeans have attempted to falsify the history of Sub-Saharan Africa by hiding the facts and claiming the history of North Africa as their own (153).
A study of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down would be incomplete if it did not include Reed’s criticism against critics’ prescriptive rules about writing novels – this is central to Neo-HooDooism. Responding to Bo Shmo’s neo-social realist criticism, Loop Garoo utters what both underlies Neo-HooDooism and describes Reed’s fiction career: “what if I write circuses? No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons” (36). Loop Garoo is initially part of a circus from New Orleans (ambushed and killed by Gibson’s men), and the novel is itself a circus, a vaudeville show Western in which Gibson and his Yellow Back Radio town are saddled by “demons” sent by Loop Garoo. Reed further reclaims the artistic freedom for African American creative writing when he lets the children of the Yellow Back Radio town proclaim that they have decided to create their own fiction (16). This means that one “can speak accurately of the psychological history of a people if one knows the legends, the folklore, the old stories which have been handed down for generations, the oral tales, all of which tells” where one’s people come from, “which shows the national mind, the way a group of people look at the world,” which one can establish by “reconstructing a past” that Reed calls Neo-HooDooism whereby people can have their “own psychology rather than somebody else’s.”16
Mumbo Jumbo (1972) will always have an important place in African American literary and critical traditions: it inspired Henry Louis Gates to elaborate his theory of the Signifyin(g) Monkey in his seminal work The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988). It is also clear that Reed’s novel inspired E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Mumbo Jumbo is Reed’s dissertation about the manifold aspects of Voodoo and HooDoo and the role of Africa and Haiti in the origins of African American literature and culture. The novel involves a considerable amount of research on Haitian history, Voodoo, and HooDoo, psychology, Western history, Christianity and its link to colonization, world history, the history of dance, and American history, just to name a few – Reed wrote Mumbo Jumbo after a trip to Haiti in 1969. Throughout Mumbo Jumbo, Reed “profanes” Western words by “beating them on the anvil of Boogie Woogie [Blues, Cakewalking, the Congo, Jazz, ragtime, Jes Grew, Neo-HooDoo(ism)], putting [his] black hands on them so that they shine like burnished amulets” and demonstrates how European civilization benefited from other civilizations, including African and Asian17 If in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down Loop Garoo Kid indicts Christianity for trying to eliminate African-based religions and cultures, the HooDoo detective and HooDoo therapist PaPa LaBas – based on the figure of Legba (Fon) or Esu-Elegbara (Yoruba), the Western Voodoo loa of the crossroads and interpretation – of Mumbo Jumbo cogently proves how Greek civilization, the foundation for European civilization, is Egyptian-derived. Not only does Mumbo Jumbo theorize how Africans in the Diaspora have succeeded in retaining and re-creating African religious beliefs, but it also shows how Reed has created an African-based multicultural poetics to negotiate the historical, social, political, and cultural conditions of Africans in the “New World.” Through syncretism and synchronicity, Reed parodies the classical idea of the novel by turning Mumbo Jumbo into “a polyphonic novel,” a collage of detective fiction, prose, poetry, drawings, ads, footnotes, photographs, a partial bibliography of 104 titles, the Harlem Renaissance, Egyptian and Greek mythologies, European myths, The Conjure-Man Dies, and De Mayor of Harlem. These are a few of the intertexts that make Mumbo Jumbo a multicultural novel par excellence. Indeed, the paratextual insertions in Mumbo Jumbo move away from the center of the main narratives by pointing to themselves while at the same time moving to the center of the main narratives whose multicultural underpinnings they compound. In other words, the footnotes and excerpts challenge those who do not acknowledge their sources and borrowings while at the same time enriching the multiculturalism of Mumbo Jumbo. In conjunction with the partial bibliography, they function as a response to PaPa LaBas’s criticism against Hinckle Von Vampton, a stand-in for Carl Van Vetchen, that the “white man will never admit his real references. He will steal everything you have and still call you those names. He will drag out standards and talk about propriety” (194).
Through visual illustrations, footnotes, quotations from other books, newspaper clippings, and poems, Mumbo Jumbo rewrites the technique of realism and authentication used in many slave narratives. Besides these subtexts, the novel contains an international and multiethnic group of “art-nappers” called the M’utafikah, whose role is to steal and repatriate art and religious objects that European colonizers embezzled and stored in museums the world over. More important, Jes Grew, the latest manifestation of Neo-HooDoo and the point of conflict in the novel, is a metaphor for multiculturalism. Although its detractors such as the Atonists call it a plague, it becomes clear that it is a form of possession related to Voodoo and HooDoo through dances and songs. In Reed’s poem “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” we learn that “Neo-HooDoo is a litany seeking its text / Neo-HooDoo is a dance and Music closing in on its own words / Neo-HooDoo is a Church finding its lyrics.”18 That is, being an African diaspora phenomenon that originates from Haitian and African Voodoo, Neo-HooDoo must keep improvising and blending with other South and North American oral traditions, something similar to jazz riffing. Asked how to catch Jes Grew, the Haitian houngan detective Benoit Battraville advises Nathan Brown to ask Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, musicians, painters, and poets (Mumbo Jumbo 152). At the end of his lecture in the Epilogue section, PaPa LaBas emphatically declares that the “Blues is a Jes Grew, as James Weldon Johnson surmised. Jazz was a Jes Grew, which followed the Jes Grew of Ragtime. Slang is Jes Grew too” (214). Throughout Mumbo Jumbo, Jes Grew appears as multiracial, multiconscious, and multilingual, as people it possesses begin by dancing and speaking in tongues.
In The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), PaPa LaBas reappears as a Neo-HooDoo detective who is sent to Oakland, California, to investigate the murder of Ed Yellings, an Osiris-type HooDoo therapist who is murdered because he was trying to get rid of Louisiana Red, a neo-slave mentality that leads African Americans to kill and hold one another down like crabs in a barrel. The signifyin(g) revisions (parodic intertexts) include Cab Calloway’s song “Minnie the Moocher” (thus we have the character of Minnie Yellings), Egyptian Antigone, Sophocles’s Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus, Richard Wright’s Native Son, the Amos ‘n’ Andy Show, The Picayune Creole Cook Book, the Congolese history in the 1960s, the detective story, and Marie Laveau and Doc John of nineteenth-century New Orleans. The preface from The Picayune Creole Cook Book about gumbo-making foreshadows all these intertexts and bears on the meaning of the novel as a whole insofar as Ed Yellings is in the gumbo business – “Business” and “Work” are code names for Voodoo and HooDoo to avoid detection. As an example of Reed’s syncretism and synchronicity at work – several disparate elements from different cultural and time periods are brought together and given twists so that they happen at the same time – Ed Yellings’s children are shaped after characters in Sophocles’s Antigone: Minnie the Moocher is Antigone (Reed makes it clear that the original Antigone was Egyptian), Wolf Yellings is Eteocles, Street Yellings is Polynices (but also Bigger Thomas), Sister Yellings is Ismene, and PaPa LaBas is Creon, while Ed Yellings parallels Oedipus and is compared to Osiris because of his being a HooDoo therapist with polytheistic approaches. Through Ed Yellings, Reed explores the psychological effects of slavery/colonization on the slave/colonized and tackles black male–black female relationships. In a sense, Ed Yellings functions as a HooDoo therapist, not unlike Frantz Fanon in Algeria, who strives to redress the psychological effects of slavery and colonialism as represented by Louisiana Red. Despite some dialogues that some feminist critics have labeled misogynist, the novel cogently suggests that black male characters are not better portrayed than their female counterparts; the latter actually come out of the novel in a better shape than the former. As is the pattern in Reed’s poetics of multiculturalism, characters such as Chorus in The Last Days of Louisiana Red blame Christianity for the decline of Greek drama and charges that Christianity has excluded “the dance and life from Greek Drama/-Religion (in early plans for the Greek Amphitheater there was included a seat for the Priest of Dionysus).”19 Later in the novel, Chorus accuses Antigone of being “a monoculturalist with a twist” who worships “one God [Hades]” and wants “to make it with Death” (87). In Reed’s Neo-HooDooism, monotheism is to polytheism what monoculturalism is to multiculturalism. Contrary to what some critics argue, Reed in this novel does not have any problem with matriarchy and the black woman: Sister Yellings and Ms. Better Weather evince the fact that Reed has a variety of female characters and that matriarchy is not a problem in the novel. Throughout The Last Days of Louisiana Red, both women are constantly praised (and contrasted to Minnie) not only for helping Ed Yellings and later PaPa LaBas, but for also understanding the necessity to preserve the Solid Gumbo Works as a representation of African cultural retention in North America. They also know that it is disastrous for any black woman, and for any black man for that matter, to let a white man such as Max Kasavubu manipulate her against her own people.
Like previous novels, Flight to Canada (1976) suggests that characters who survive the displacement caused by slavery are those who possess the knowledge of “ancient Afro-American oral literature,” which can allow them to trick the master as well as to use the acquired writing skills as someone would use HooDoo. Flight to Canada rewrites the slave narrative and the historical novel, revisits the American Civil War, and discusses slavery (old and contemporary), Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and his Idylls of the King, Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin (during the performance of which Lincoln was shot), the Native American myths of the raven, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” Phillis Wheatley’s “To His Excellency, General Washington,” Gone With the Wind, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the politics of race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. As can be noticed, the implicit Neo-HooDooism in this novel allows Reed to incorporate variegated references from different cultures and traditions and in so doing closes the gap between slavery, the Civil War, and the present Bicentennial Year, as well as the future. Although on the surface it is the story of Raven Quickskill, an escaped slave who flies on a jumbo jet (in nineteenth-century America!) to Canada but eventually comes back to the plantation to be freed by Uncle Robin and to write the latter’s biography, Flight to Canada is a comment upon the present plight of African Americans, Native Americans, Jewish Americans, and other minority groups in America. Through Raven Quickskill, a trickster character, Reed shows how African American writers, as well as other American writers, can benefit from borrowing from other traditions; a further suggestion is that slavery affects everybody, not just blacks. Just as literacy as a pathway to freedom underlies most slave narratives, so is it a main theme in Flight to Canada. The quest for literacy and freedom is so poignant that the novel moves from an oral tradition of Voodoo and HooDoo to a hybridized HooDoo literary text. Quickskill, indeed, sees his writing as “his HooDoo. Others had their way of HooDoo, but his was his writing; his typewriter was his drum he danced to.”20 Another example is Uncle Robin – he is a subversive version of Uncle Tom – who, aware of the power of language, masters the master’s language and uses it to subvert the subjugating power of slavery by rewriting Swille’s will and inheriting his property.
The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989) – two novels in a trilogy series; Reed has been writing The Terrible Fours, a novel which, according to Ishmael Reed (the character) in Japanese by Spring, begins in Rome where the detective Nance Saturday (from the two previous novels) has finished helping the Pope deal with his creditors – are probably the most misunderstood and unappreciated novels of Reed’s. Not only have they received scathing reviews, they have also been neglected.21 Yet a closer analysis reveals that The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes are as successful and as undergirded by Neo-HooDooism as Reed’s previous novels. What confuses critics is the fact that Reed has appropriated Rastafarianism and Calypso, aesthetics borrowed from the Caribbean traditions and used by several Caribbean writers (Orlando Patterson, V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Earl Lovelace, and Derek Walcott) into his Neo-HooDooism to make a social commentary on the plight of minorities in the US and American foreign policies towards the so-called “Third World” countries. In The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes, Reggae and Calypso are both the latest manifestations of Neo-HooDooism and bridges between Africa, South America, and North America. Just as Rastafarianism in Jamaica and Calypso in Trinidad are postcolonial discourses used to make social commentaries, so, in turn, they are used by Reed (through Black Peter) to charge America, its politicians, and its religious leaders with behaving like Scrooge and the two-year olds, as they say “ho” to poor and minority people. Given the sheer amount of images and symbols of Rastafarianism and references to Calypso, any reading of The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes must take into account Rastafarian theology and Calypso aesthetics. The confluence of these aesthetics shows that in the two Christmas novels characters such as Dean Clift and Nola Payne, though initially endowed with “dissonance,” are constantly searching for cultural “consonance”22 found in the variations of the myths of Black Peter and St. Nicholas, myths that are latent in Christmas mythology, under positive vibrations23 and sounds of Reggae and Calypso. In these two novels, whose structure is loosely based on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Reed uses Christmas as metaphor to explore cultural oppression, social and economic inequalities, and how the US government (stand-in for the Reagan–Bush administrations) and big corporations coalesce to monopolize Christmas to benefit the rich who can afford it. In The Terrible Twos, Bob Krantz, an advisor to President Dean Clift, implores the Heavenly Father to send him a signal that “Operation Two Birds, a plan to save all of Thy Christian work from being overrun by the forces of the anti-Christ . . . is the right ting to do” (104). In The Terrible Threes, Rev. Clement Jones, a faith healer and televangelist, concocts a plan to “drive the infidels out of the country. They will have to convert to Christianity or leave” (10). Parallel to this colonialist setting is the story of Black Peter and St. Nicholas, culled from myths from all over the world, in which Black Peter and St. Nicholas try to rectify things in the US by appearing to President Dean Clift (and taking him to visit the American hell to see what happened to Harry Truman, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower because of their actions) and Nola Payne, a Supreme Court Justice, and several members of Congress.
Because critics have failed to investigate the parodic intertexts (signifyin(g) revisions embedded in Reckless Eyeballing (1986) and because of the way the latter handles multiculturalism in regard to (neo-)colonialism, anti-Semitism, feminism, race, and gender issues, critics have erroneously charged this novel with misogyny and wrongly labeled Reed a misogynist, a label that has been following him and his work since Michele Wallace’s (in)famous “Female Troubles: Ishmael Reed’s Tunnel Vision.” Purporting to review Reckless Eyeballing, the essay ends up being a personal attack on Reed for “feminist baiting” and anti-black women’s progress. A close textual analysis reveals the opposite: in Reckless Eyeballing Reed rather signifies upon and pays homage to African American women’s fiction by abrogating and appropriating the novels of Toni Morrison (Sula), Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Gayl Jones (Corregidora), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Michele Wallace’s unpublished work, Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters), and Paule Marshall, particularly by critiquing the way they portray black male characters and how the latter mistreat black female characters. Tremonisha Smarts’s play Wrong-Headed Man, for example, draws its scenes and characters from Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, just as Randy Shank’s argument about why white boys love Tremonisha is a signifyin(g) revision of Sula’s dialogue about why white women and men love the black man in Sula; the narrator also directly comments on how difficult it is for Sula to be independent, since people at the Bottom want her to be submissive. Thus, understanding Reckless Eyeballing requires one to explore and analyze the signifyin(g) revisions and parodic intertexts from African American women’s fiction as the underpinnings of Reed’s Neo-HooDoo discourse or poetics of multiculturalism with focus on decolonization, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality. It is worth noting that discussing Velma in Reed’s novel is natural because in The Salt Eaters Toni Cade Bambara revises Reed’s The Last Days of Louisiana Red by teaching Minnie the art of Voodoo healing about which she is accused of not caring in Reed’s novel. Gayl Jones has also returned the favor by signifyin(g) on Reed’s Neo-HooDooism in her recent novels such as The Healing (1998) and Mosquito (1999).
To these black women’s texts within Reckless Eyeballing one has to add Scott Joplin’s ragtime play Treemonisha from which Reed draws the character of Tremonisha, Emmett Till about whom Ian Ball, the protagonist, writes Reckless Eyeballing, a play whereby he hopes not only to get off the sexist list he got on after writing Suzanna, but also “to distance himself from the misogynistic attitudes that have ruined the work of some of his [black male] contemporaries.”24 In addition to being a “Southern term for a black man who looks at a white woman the wrong way, sometimes with dire consequences,”25 the term “Reckless Eyeballing” is an important metaphor from a multicultural perspective insofar as Ian Ball contends that on one level his play is about people who intrude “into spaces that don’t concern them” (Reckless Eyeballing 81). Earlier in the novel, Jake Brashford accuses Jewish writers (Updike, Malamud, Wolfe) of stealing black material and writing about blacks. The ironic twist here is that in this novel Reed is already writing about Jewish people and their experiences, including the Holocaust, a case of cultural reckless eyeballing. Throughout Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing, it is clear that whatever Ian Ball says about black women and their collaboration with the enemy (white feminists and white men) is not to be taken seriously because he is a “double-headed” character (an Obeah woman hoodooed him when he was born), a Legba figure, who “has a way of talking out of both sides of his mouth, as though he were of two heads or two minds” (127). Like Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt in Japanese by Spring, Reed’s ninth novel, Ian Ball changes his mind and switches sides whenever it benefits him. Thus, overlooking the fact Ian Ball is a Neo-HooDoo trickster can only lead to a misreading of Reckless Eyeballing. Despite the bitter satire against radical black feminism, the novel does offer some empathy for black women in America. At the end of the novel, not only does Tremonisha Smarts reject Becky French’s white radical feminism, but she also develops from a black-male-bashing black feminist into a caring mother and a womanist.26
As is always the case with Reed’s novels, Japanese by Spring (1993) contains more than one plot and subplots. On the surface, it is the story of Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt (named after two black American generals: Benjamin O. Davis, Chappie James, and some echoes of Colin Powell), an African American professor at Jack London College in Oakland, California, who is more interested in getting tenured than in the cause of his people. For three years since he was hired, he has been spending time commuting between Eurocentrists and Afrocentrists. To the black students, Puttbutt is an “Uncle Tom,” because he argues that affirmative action is a form of quotas and that blacks should negotiate instead of being confrontational – here Reed was prophetic and ahead of Proposition 109 in California. Throughout the novel, Puttbutt’s hallmark is the fact that he changes his mind like revolving doors. While in the 1960s, he belonged to the Black Power Movement and believed that black was both beautiful and the future, in the 1980s he became a feminist and memorized works by Zora Neale Hurston and Sylvia Plath, because he wanted the feminists in the Department of Humanities to vote for his tenure. In the 1990s, convinced that the twenty-first century was going to be a “yellow” century, Puttbutt learned Japanese “to take advantage of the new global realities.”27 One of the new global realities is that the Japanese would take over the US, just as Dr. Yamato (one of the ancient names for Japan) takes over Jack London College and renames it Hideki Tojo No Gaigaku (Hideki Tojo University) after the Japanese prime minister hanged for war crimes following World War I. Further, Dr. Yamato renames the student union Isoroku Yamamoto Hall, after the general who masterminded the attack on Pearl Harbor. As a result of the “Orientalization” of Jack London, Puttbutt becomes the second man in command, an opportunity for him to get even with those who voted against his tenure. Of course, Puttbutt and Dr. Yamato are just two voices among hundreds of voices and references from Africa, Europe, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, not to mention literary and nonliterary names such as Rodney King, Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Saddam Hussein, Shakespeare (whose Othello Puttbutt reads as racist), Arthur Schlesinger and his The Disuniting of America, Milton (after whom the racist and monoculturalists at Jack London College are named Miltonians), and Plato (whose philosophy Dr. Yamato calls rubbish), just to name a few. Truly, Japanese by Spring is a jazz composition, not unlike Charlie Parker’s, filled with improvised calls and responses among various instruments. It is an improvisation, “like a jazz musician stating a song and dancing around it elliptically” (Japanese by Spring 128).
It must be noted that until Japanese by Spring Reed had learned about Voodoo and HooDoo cultures second-hand via Haiti and then Africa. With this novel, however, he learns an African language and goes directly to African oral traditions of the Yoruba people. Equally important, in Japanese by Spring Reed achieves the highest degree of Neo-HooDooism – thus the highest degree of postcolonial writing and discourse (the highest degree of abrogating and appropriating the English language), African diaspora reconnection, multicultural poetics, and globalism, by writing in three languages: English, Yoruba, and Japanese. While Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt is learning Japanese because he thinks that English will be obsolete in the 1990s US, his nemesis Ishmael Reed is learning Yoruba from a Nigerian houngan and bookstore owner in Oakland, California. Concerning Yoruba, Reed has argued that not only do black people “still speak Yoruba,” they “speak English with a Yoruba syntax” and “drop their verbs.” Further, Reed wanted to explore “some of the literature of the Yoruba civilization, and when one does, one can see some of the retention that has happened [in the African diaspora].”28 As for Japanese, Ishmael Reed (the character), convinced that languages die unless they expand and borrow from other languages, argues that English is already “hungry for new adjectives, verbs and nouns” and can use “some more rhythm from a language like Japanese, which sounded like as though it were invented for bebop. Atatakakatta, past tense for the word warm. Doesn’t it sound like a Max Roach attack? . . . It could use some Yoruba drumtalk” (Japanese by Spring 50). Ishmael Reed also studies Yoruba to “end the jazz poetry hype” – everybody claiming to be a jazz poet. Having realized that speaking and reading Yoruba is like reading a song sheet, he sees Yoruba as a jazz language, the “foundation of jazz. The language that was the only real jazz poetry” (123). Clearly, Ishmael Reed appears in his own novel to challenge Puttbutt’s views against affirmative action, racism, multiculturalism, and ethnic studies on college and university campuses across America. But there is another important reason Ishmael Reed is in the novel: to challenge and poke fun at “the death of the author” proclaimed by Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault whom he discusses in the novel.
As can be noticed, one of the challenges for readers of Japanese by Spring (and other Reed novels) is not only to have a Gargantuan knowledge of world history and cultures, but also to be able to navigate between three linguistic centers: English, Yoruba, and Japanese. In the Epilogue section of Japanese by Spring, for example, Reed has purposely left the song to the Yoruba god Olódùmarè, “Àwá Dé O, Olórun” [Here We are Olorun (God)],29 untranslated, and there is no way of surmising its meaning from the context. One has then to either be a speaker of Yoruba or find someone who speaks it to do the translation. Knowing that the song praises Olódùmarè for being the Creator (first verse), for his glory and unblemished love on earth (third verse), and for owning today, yesterday, and everyday (second, fourth, and sixth verses) helps one realize that in the song Reed expresses a Neo-HooDoo concept: time past is time present and future, which allows Reed’s novels to draw from as many cultures and texts from different times as possible and to compress them in one time frame of the parodying novel. Japanese by Spring further suggests that Reed’s ultimate message in all his nine novels is that Americans can overcome (neo-)colonialism, monoculturalism, and bigotry by not only learning about other cultures, but also by learning an extra language in addition to English. The best example is Professor Crabtree, a former Miltonian who used to argue that Africa did not have the Tolstoys and the Homers, who learns Yoruba and even leads the song of praise to Olódùmarè. In other words, Reed’s Neo-HooDooism encourages characters to “reckless eyeball” other cultures as a means of surviving in an increasingly multicultural and multiethnic American society and global world.
1. Ishmael Reed, Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper (New York: Atheneum, 1990), p. 137.
2. Robert Gover, “Interview with Ishmael Reed,” Black Literature Forum 12.1 (Spring 1978): 14.
3. For more on the “blackness of blackness,” see Henry Louis Gates’s chapter on Mumbo Jumbo in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 217.
4. Joseph Henry, “A MELUS Interview: Ishmael Reed,” Conversations with Ishmael Reed, ed. Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), p. 211.
5. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 7.
6. Ishmael Reed, ed., 19 Necromancers from Now (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), pp. xvii–xviii.
7. Joseph Henry, “A MELUS Interview,” p. 210.
8. For more on signifyin(g) and signifyin(g) revisions, see Gates’s The Signifying Monkey.
9. Praise found on the back cover of Ishmael Reed’s novel The Terrible Threes (New York: Atheneum, 1989).
10. Ishmael Reed, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (Garden City: Doubleday, 1978), p. 108.
11. Al Young, “Interview with Ishmael Reed,” Conversations with Ishmael Reed, ed. Bruck Dick and Amritjit Singh, p. 44.
12. Clarence Major, Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 57.
13. Ishmael Reed, Writin’ Is Fightin’, p. 137.
14. In Tell My Horse, Zora Neale Hurston remarks that in Haiti the Bacca Loup-gerow belong to the order of the Petros and the Congos, especially the “Congos of the open field or woods,” who are “recognized as evil, but one must feed them to have better luck than others” (167).
15. Gover, “Interview with Reed,” 14.
16. Peter Nazareth, “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” Conversations with Ishmael Reed, ed. Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh, p. 186.
17. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972), p. 114. All further references to the text will appear parenthetically in the remainder of the essay.
18. Ishmael Reed, Conjure (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), p. 25.
19. Ishmael Reed, The Last Days of Louisiana Red (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 25. All further references to the text will appear parenthetically in the remainder of the essay.
20. Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 88.
21. As a sample of negative reviews, see Stanley Crouch in The Nation 234.20 (1982), Ivan Gold in The New York Times Book Review July 18, 1982, Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books 39.13 (1982), or Michael Kransy in San Francisco Review of Books, January–February, 1983.
22. I borrow these terms from Leonard E. Barrett Sr.’s The Rastafarians: Sounds of Cultural Dissonance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).
23. Here I am referring to the late Bob Marley’s famous song “Positive Vibration” from the Rastaman Vibration CD (Islands, 1976).
24. Ishmael Reed, Reckless Eyeballing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 127.
25. Ishmael Reed, The Reed Reader (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. xxiv.
26. For more on the concept of womanism, see Alice Walker’s definition in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983). See also Chapter 14.
27. Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring (New York: Atheneum, 1993), p. 5.
28. Steve Cannon, et al., “A Gathering of the Tribe: A Conversation with Ishmael Reed,” Conversations with Ishmael Reed, ed. Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh, p. 37.
29. For the translation of this I received help from T. Temi Ajani from the University of Florida in Gainesville.