Reed's Moral Compass

ISHMAEL REED'S MORAL COMPASS



Reed, Ishmael.  Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico. Montreal : Baraka Books, 2019.



Many American thinkers have tried , by way of philosophical essays, jeremiads, reflections on habits of the heart and soul, provocative manifestos, and open letters,  to improve our nation's debatable social contracts and fragile moral compass. Indigenous victims of imperial genocide, enslaved persons and  slavery' s  enemies;  poets and writer of many colors;  advocates for equity, human rights, and social justice; clergymen and clergywomen and a small number of elected  officials---all of them , the dreamers  and the doers have participated in moral and ethical warfare.  Fighting.  Since the mid-twentieth century, Ishmael Reed has been deep,  abrasive, and didactic,  an iconoclastic champion of what is "good" and a formidable critic of what is "bad" in domestic and transnational affairs.  Reed is a fighter , a battered but  undefeated fighter.   Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico is a compelling record of his place in literary histories and moral struggles.  It is a feast one consumes with grains of pepper and salt.

How does a reviewer observe due diligence in commenting on Reed's life and multiple achievements? One notes how apt is Wendy Hayes-Jones's notion that Reed is an "erudite pugilist punching out rounds of words interlaced with the bookish military strategist planning his next move to outwit the enemy" [[ See "Ishmael Reed: Fifty-Eight Years of Boxing on Paper."On the Aesthetic Legacy of Ishmael Reed. Ed. Sami Ludwig.  Hamilton Beach, CA: World Parade Books, 2012: 14-27 ]]  How does one make a fair but trenchant evaluation of a conscientious sorcerer, a Neo-Hoodoo priest, an iconoclast whom certain feminists crucify as hyper-masculine (toxic)  misogyny personified?  How does one coordinate his depictions of American and world histories with his unique logic and calling out of our nation's hubris, yearning to be fascist, and uses of imperial desires?  It is a daunting task to account for Reed's fiction (expanded by drama, music, and film) and non-fiction  from 1968 (Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down) to 2019 (the most recent collection of essays and journalism)?  Several book-length studies of Reed offer clues about the required thinking, but actual assessment is a dim glow in a tunnel of a future.

Background and underground work must be done.  If one had world enough and time, it would  be ideal to measure Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico against a chronological re-reading of

• Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978)
• God Made Alaska for the Indians (1982)
• Writin' Is Fightin' (1988)
• Airing Dirty Laundry (1993)
• Another Day at the Front (2003)
• Blues City, a Walk in Oakland (2003)
• Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections (2008)
• Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Beakers (2010)
• Going Too Far: Essays about America's Nervous Breakdown (2012)

Sufficient world and time are hard to come by.  One must improvise, hoping that one's grasp of Reed's moral compass is accurate.  American cultural literacy has reached a nadir, understanding rhetoric  has grown impotent, and the probability of anxious misreading is enormous.

Reed is not an anachronism.  His moral compass ensures that we will be tutored by his ethical discourses, his testimony about and indictment of the American people in Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico.  He is a pre-future sage who speaks to us with the authority of an Old Testament prophet. Fame has given Reed a few material rewards, but the reward he most deserves is knowing, within his lifetime, that his uncanny intelligence succeeded in making the divided  peoples of the United States a bit more honest about who and what they are.

Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico is a relentless mirror that forces us to gaze upon ourselves in 2019 and to ponder that the absence of Confederate statues in Mexico highlights the inerasable presence of those statues in our fights with revitalized racism and white supremacy, with the fact that the American Confederacy lives in a Brazilian town  [[see https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gq8ae9/welcome-to-americana-brazil-0000580-v22n2  ]]  We cannot excuse ourselves from our histories with the bad faith of  post-whatever  ideologies so assiduously cultivated b the super-rich and hegemonic international cartels.  Reed's essays compel us o deal with 1) our land of fluid identities ,2) culture in general --especially to what Reed contends is the brilliant performance and bad history of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, 3) politics or the tragedy and travesty of government and the rule of law, and 4) culture as a theatrical.  Reed makes good use of his stern journalism and moral compass to remind us again and once more again that the historically situated insights of David Walker, Frederick Douglass,  Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Toni Morrison,  Michelle Alexander,  Tommy J. Curry and other moralists who compete for our attention are as crucial, as necessary as air. At end of decoding Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico, reader will  either absorb  the lessons with gratitude or reject them with howls of execration.  Reed does not pander; he challenges us to maximize our critical thinking to discriminate among  what he gets right, what he get half-right, and what he gets wrong.  His new essays are solid in their depiction of what Simon de Beauvoir brilliantly named the ethics of ambiguity.

Only the most perverse readers can fail to profit from the sweeping motions of Reed's moral compass.  And most readers, I suspect , will get the point of so typical an assertion as

The latest shedding of light on the "tangle of pathologies" in the white community is to be encouraged.  Better late than never.  Maybe no longer will the white community be treated as Lake Wobegon, with the black community as a sort of waste disposal across the tracks for the country's social problems" (265).

This assertion ought to guide us in understanding that none of our ethnic communities are free of pathologies.  We are all ---yellow, black, brown, white and red -- afflicted with pathologies, and our most prudent course of action is to perpetually write and fight for the uncertain remedies that may in time future provide reasonable or rational or pragmatic cures for our human conditions.  As a coda for my improvised ideas, I have offered  APPENDIX A, the specification of my terms of engagement, my regard for Ishmael Reed's  moral compass.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            December 18, 2019





APPENDIX A --from my book The China Lectures: African American Literary and Critical Issues (2014). Available only in China, the lectures are my modest gifts to Chinese people who have given me moments of happiness and enlightenment.

Ishmael Reed and the Idea of Multiculturalism

We may agree that the concept of multiculturalism is concerned with one of several ways we have  chosen to talk about how human beings live together.  The most basic meaning of “multiculturalism” refers to conditions of existence in a defined space (nation or territory) that is inhabited by people who have and identify with different cultural assumptions, beliefs and practices.  Our discussions of multiculturalism often borrow ideas from the discipline of anthropology. If we have been trained to study literature rather than the subject matter of various social science, we need to be cautious.  Good critical thinking demands that we first examine de facto (actual, operative) conditions of the multicultural in tandem with de jure (abstract, legal) conditions.  I think it is wise and prudent to identify the multicultural behaviours that obtain in our own countries before we produce ideas about the multicultural in “cross-cultural contexts.” We need to know the nature of borders (both geographic and metaphorical) prior to destroying them.

The wording “cross-cultural” implies, for me at least, that the foreignness of culture A has been distinguished from the foreignness or strangeness of culture B.  If we are not in possession of such distinctions, we fail to notice that we can be foreign (strange, dissimilar, marginal) in our “home” cultures; recognition of that possibility is crucial. How easily we can fall into the trap of believing that our culture and its artifacts are superior to the culture and artifacts of the “other,” especially when “we” and “the other” share the same citizenship. Recognition of a problem that is at once cross-cultural and multicultural led to the publication in 1990 of Redefining American Literary History by the prestigious Modern Language Association. Those of us who produced that book found a theoretical model in the groundbreaking work of Ishmael Reed, even if we did not say as much at that time. We did say that our redefining project eschewed “traditional, patriarchal thought about culture and literature” and sought “instead explanatory models that account for the multiple voices and experiences that constitute the literature and literary history of the United States”(4).

 Failure to minimize disciplinary prejudices tends to defeat our objective of acquiring new knowledge.  It would be a  mistake, for example, to ignore the hidden dimensions of differences that have obtained historically in the evolving of American literature before making a dash to find the significant differences among a range of literatures written in some variety of English, in some variety of other languages.  In the case of American literature, we can gain insights about multiculturalism as a combative process from a brief review of what Ishmael Reed has been working at for almost half a century.

Among contemporary American writers, Ishmael Reed is the major “informal” theorist and “pragmatic” proponent of late 20^th –century and early 21^st-century “literary” multiculturalism in the United States of America.  Since the early nineteenth century, America has embraced political myths of “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” to minimize recognition of its multiethnic and multicultural identity.  Reed has effectively challenged the validity of those myths by action that goes beyond “deconstructing.”  He has consistently “constructed,” by way of his provocative essays, anthologies, and fiction, a rationale to maximize acknowledgement of the interactive presence of multiculturalism in the literary and social evolution of America.  My comments quite briefly address what might be designated Reed’s “combative conversation” with his nation.   Reed’s anthologies ---- 19 Necromancers From Now: An Anthology of Original American Writing For the 1970s (1970), Calafia: The California Poetry (1979), MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (1997), From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002 (2003), and Pow Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience –Short Fiction from Then to Now (2009) -----provide subject matter as well as evidence for open-ended debate regarding theory and praxis of  “literary” multiculturalism in American and  global contexts. Reed’s introductions contain the theory; the works he selected for each anthology illustrate the praxis.

Reed opens a recent collection of writing, Going Too Far: Essays about America’s Nervous Breakdown , with two sentences that fundamentally establish his place in the history of black writing since the 1960s:

When they tell me “don’t go there” that’s my signal to navigate the forbidden topics of American life.  Just as the ex-slaves were able to challenge the prevailing attitudes about race in the United States after arriving in Canada, I am able to argue from Quebec against ordained opinion that paints the United States as a place where the old sins of racism have been vanquished and that those who insist that much work remains to be done are involved in “Old Fights,” as one of my young critics, John McWhorter, claims in articles in Commentary and The New Republic, where I am dismissed as an out of touch “fading anachronism.”

Reed is not an anachronism.  He is a writer who provokes us into seeing what multiculturalism might be and why it is so often attacked

Reed’s evolving theory began with his assaults on restrictive monoculturalism associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. In his December 1969 introduction for 19 Necromancers From Now, Reed proclaimed

Perhaps at the roots of American art is a rivalry between the oppressor and the oppressed, with a secret understanding that the oppressor shall always prevail and make off with the prizes, no matter how inferior his art to that of his victims.  Art in America may even be related to sexual competition.  In the beginning was The Word and The Word is the domain of White patriarchy.  Beware.  Women and natives are not to tamper with The Word. (xix)

After much autobiographical testimony about America, Reed admitted that he “omitted White writers.” Having examined “the many exclusionary American anthologies that flood the market, I somehow feel that they will get by” (xxiii). With a slip of contradiction, he wrote “Indian People, Black People, White People, Chinese People, and Blue People unravel their experiences through its [the anthology’s] pages”(xxiv).  At this stage of theory-making, Reed was himself exclusionary.

He was feeling his way into multiculturalism.  By January 22, 1978, the date of his preface to Calafia: The California Poetry, he had arrived at a more mature idea of multiculturalism and how to represent it.  He provides a quite “breezy” historical account of California as “the home of the multi-cultures,” the physically and linguistically different indigenous peoples, the Spanish, the Mexicans, the blacks and, since the 1840s, Asian immigrants. To reflect all this mixing, tense state of difference, and cross-fertilization in poetry, Reed brought “together the poetry of different California cultures under one roof” without segregating “those cultures according to ‘race,’ ‘nation,’ or chronology. The erasing of categories makes it appear that poetry, in the words of Simon Ortiz, is “an all-inclusive singular event and idea throughout time” (xlii). Imitating, I suspect, the practice of authenticating early autobiographical narratives of enslaved people in America, the book has introductions by Bob Callahan, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Simon Ortiz, Shawn Hsu Wong, Wakako Yamauchi, and Al Young to give multiethnic credibility to the multicultural enterprise.

Reed’s speculations about multiculturalism take an instructive turn in his introduction to MultiAmerica. He was dealing with the essay, a genre that contrasts with either poetry or fiction; collecting essays facilitated a turn from multicultural expression as “proofs” to multicultural expression as an array of “weapons” to deploy in battle with American mass media’s efforts to promote monocultural thought, even as it gave lukewarm recognition to cultural diversity or cultural difference. Reed was fighting the persistence of the binary (the black and white characterization of American society) and highlighting essays by writers of many ethnicities to put “race” in its place and offer the American public alternative articulations, newer diverging and converging perspectives on the drama of being American. Reed recognized multiculturalism is “safe” between the covers of a book but often dangerous and threatening outside the book. The anthology was to some degree Reed assured us “an intellectual anti-trust action against the tyranny that communications oligopolies hold over public discussion”, an action conducted by writers “concerned about the future of the United State in which one ‘race’ or ethnic group is no longer  dominant and where the pressures to assimilate are not as demanding as they were in a former time “(xxvii). Such multicultural battle still continues, sponsoring optimism and pessimism, or the branching of multicultural speculations we find in Reed’s introductions for From Totems to Hip-Hop and Pow Wow.

The introductions to these recent multicultural experiments are less combative in tone, less devoted to speculation than to application. Their nuances call for very close reading. The shift is a warning about limits, about how radical discourses may get transformed over time into persuasive gestures and lose a bit of strident provocation.  From Totems to Hip Hop is constructed as a textbook of multicultural poetry. Reed gives much more attention to consequences of teaching multicultural literature and to the status of universal themes in his October 23, 2002 introduction.  At the core of his Cinco de Mayo 2008 introduction to Pow Wow is a concession germane to thinking about cross-cultural contexts, because Reed asserts that

Deprived of or excluded from the normal channels of communication by media increasingly monopolized by a few companies, people from diverse background and from different time periods may have no other means but writing to engage in a cross-cultural or a cross-time dialogue with one another.  No other means to comment on the important issues both historical and current: war, slavery, race, anti-Semitism, gender, class, dysfunctional family life, and the like (xi).

A few pages later, he reiterates:

Excluded from media power, American Indian, Hispanic, Asian American, and African American writers often use fiction to tell their side of the American story and to explore the fault lines that separate groups from one another. In the media it is left to outsiders to define members of ethnic groups, often with disastrous results like Birth of a Nation and the television series The Wire (xiii).

I sense that Reed has given us an important lesson about power in his introductions, that he warns us to exercise caution in how we go about engaging “multiculturalism” as conditions of existence in a defined space (nation or territory) that is inhabited by people who have and identify with different cultural assumptions, beliefs and practices.  Scholars are never exactly “outside” that space nor immune to its conditions.

WORKS CITED

Reed, Ishmael, ed. Calafia: The California Poetry. Berkeley, CA: Y’Bird Books, 1979. Print.

____________. From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003. Print.

___________., Going Too Far: Essays about America’s Nervous Breakdown Montreal: Baraka Books 2012. Print.

___________. MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace. New York: Viking Penguin, 1997. Print.



___________. 19 Necromancers From Now: An Anthology of Original American Writing For the 1970s. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1970. Print.



___________, ed. with Carla Blank.  Pow Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience ---Short Fiction from Then to Now. Philadelphia: DaCapo Press, 2009. Print.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. Redefining American Literary History. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. Print.