situation report from ishmael reed

 

 

SITUATION REPORT FROM ISHMAEL REED

 

Writing is easy.  Digital technologies might persuade us that writing is very easy, very democratic.  One New York writer has proclaimed that barriers between those who write for income, advancement in academic sectors, and fame and those who write for pleasure and therapy ought to be eschewed.  If you write, you are a writer.  That proclamation must be taken with a grain of skepticism.  Writing might not be easy for billions of people who live in pain and  confusion, who are paralyzed by daily stress and fear in hostile environments, who  are disadvantaged by limited formal education.  Those people talk.  They sing.  They draw or paint.  They  depend on oral not written communication to make their way through the world.   They do not write, but they do not fail to communicate.  We ought not praise privileged forms of writing without due diligence of critical thinking.  People who find it difficult to write might have a stronger grip on levels of truth about which those of us can write with ease tend to be oblivious.     

 

As I listened yesterday to the Powerhouse Arena "Virtual Book Launch: The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda by Ishmael Reed in conversation with Gerald Horne,"   I recalled recent discussions with a few novelists and poets about what writing means (or fails to mean) in our nation's  disintegrating cultures. Reed and Horne focused  on how poorly American histories (as form and content) are managed by many historians and the  consequences  mismanagement has for ideologies and public policy.  Since the 1960s, Reed has risked much as he reminds readers how easy it is to write deceptive histories in a climate of capitalism and  systemic racism.   He challenges the validity of traditional, state-sponsored history.  There is not surprise in Reed's taking Miranda to task for a vulgar whitewashing of available facts.

 

 For almost sixty years, Reed never bypassed an opportunity to broadcast how much human damage we have to witness and why we should scrutinize who is telling whose stories in multi-racial/ethnic societies.  He has not ignored  Toni Cade Bambara's sterling question: "Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths?" (Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, 139 )  He has used writing to warn us that Plato's cave is alien territory.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            October 7, 2020