Patrick A. Howell

Through the need to suppress a variety of black voices, the literary and cultural establishment engage in one-at-a-time-ism. So the establishment still tries to control the direction of black culture by creating tokens, a remnant of the old Colonial strategy which relies upon a few gifted assimilated natives to tell the colonial office which natives are reasonable and which are unruly.

– Ishmael Reed

‘Living legend’—two words that when put together conjure many ideas. But what is a living legend? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a living legend as ‘a person who is famous while still living for doing something extremely well.’ To the Macmillan dictionary it is ‘someone who is extremely famous during the time that they are alive.’ Surely a living legend is more than that?

My definition of a living legend is an individual who has lived fearlessly, puncturing the cosmetic veil of a reality thick with superficiality, without concern for their own well-being. Martin Luther King was a living legend. So was Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali. Of living legends who are currently living there is Toni Morrison and Colin Kaepernick, to name only two. ‘Living legend’ is second cousin to ‘martyr.’ Both define a person with the willingness to speak, live, and be the truth no matter the potential consequences.

Ishmael Reed—poet, playwright, activist, essayist, songwriter, editor, publisher, novelist, Pulitzer nominee, two-time National Book Award nominee, and author of over thirty titles including 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, described by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon—is a living legend. Some of the most celebrated work in African-American culture—Colson Whitehead’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize and 2016 National Book Award winner, The Underground Railroad, for example, or the 2016 Booker Prize winner, The Sellout by Paul Beatty—would not be possible without the verve and vision of Ishmael Reed.

I asked Reed a few questions about American culture and his work past and present:

Patrick A. Howell: While so much has changed in American culture, so much has remained the same. We live in a time divided between the movement of Afrofuturism and the 16th century America that gave birth to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and so many of our current contradictions and idiosyncrasies (a nation of ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ founded on the perversion of those ideas). At times, it seems we will be permanent prisoners of this past. At others, it seems we surge into a future of unlimited potential. What insights can you offer to artists of all kinds who want to create a better future?

Ishmael Reed: More tools are available to writers than any time in history. For the first time, a writer can keep his work available for decades. As for me, right now, I’m looking at artists who opposed totalitarian regimes like the one that is operating now. My most recent play, Life Among the Aryans, was based upon Brecht’s experience under the Nazis. The Nazis denied his staging a performance of the play and so he sponsored readings, which is what we did in June at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Blacks, browns, and others are faced with administrations that have openly argued for a benign extermination, which explains Katrina, Flint, Puerto Rico, as well as policy positions proposed by the administration. Buzz Feed recently found a link between white nationalists and 45’s administration. So, instead of the kind of euphemism that Lee Atwater proposed (as Jesse Jackson said, ‘The bus is us’), spokespersons for this administration such as Richard Spencer advocate ‘non-violent ethnic cleansing.’

Black fiction is at the crossroads. Before the 1960s black fiction writers were imitative. They were guided by the modernists Eliot, Hemingway, and Faulkner. The 1960s saw black writers expand their sources. Some studied Arabic. Others African languages. The Black Arts Movement spearheaded this cultural direction. Groups like Umbra and the Watts Writers Workshop. In the late seventies there was a return to imitation.

But the Afrofuturists, John Keene (whom I first published when he was a student at Harvard), and many others have picked up where the 60s took off. Hip hop is an offspring of black arts, especially Tupac, who mentions me in a song. In music you have Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, David Murray, and others.

I did a workshop for the Givens Foundation. Most of my students were black women. They were writing science fiction. My approach to achieving longevity in a country that is mostly hostile to my work is what in basketball is called a full court press. I write novels, poetry, plays, songs, and play jazz piano. Because of my collaboration with David Murray and Kip Hanrahan, Taj Mahal, Bobby Womack, Jack Bruce, Macy Gray, Cassandra Wilson, and Little Jimmy Scott have all done my songs. Composers like the great Allen Toussaint have set my songs to music.

Howell: Your work expands to a period of time that passes from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement to hip hop culture to Black Lives Matter. Early on in your career, you worked with writers such as Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, and Walter Lowenfels. You have interviewed Ralph Ellison for the New York Times. Where do you see the African expression in universal art right now? Is there a new movement underway? Or is the culture stagnant?

Reed: Black culture never stands still.As I said in Darius James’ film HooDoo in America, Neo-African religion had to always be one step ahead of the law. The same can be said of black culture in music and writing. Novelist Martin Delaney’s mother had to leave Virginia because she was teaching her son how to read and write. Through the need to suppress a variety of black voices, the literary and cultural establishment engage in one-at-a-time-ism. So the establishment still tries to control the direction of black culture by creating tokens, a remnant of the old Colonial strategy which relies upon a few gifted assimilated natives to tell the colonial office which natives are reasonable and which are unruly.

An example: Robert Boynton informed the neocon establishment of which he is a member that a new group of black writers weren’t pestering people with ‘victimology.’ The kind of people who denounce Affirmative Action after having benefitted from it. He then listed those writers whom he cast as unruly. This was the role of the Indian agent who went back to the military and told which savages were reasonable and which weren’t. Or an informant in India doing the same thing for East India Tea. I debated Boynton at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He knew nothing about black intellectual history. For that you’d have to read Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012.

This is an example of what I call the Occupation of the Black Experience. Men who have never been racially profiled or red-lined are more likely to get their script ideas, novels, and TV projects about blacks green-lighted than black writers. I guess I’m unruly. Paul Devlin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s former employee and collaborator, said that with my recent novel Juice!, which uses the hysteria surrounding the O.J. [Simpson] phenomenon as a backdrop, I’d gone too far—a rare glimpse into the restrictions placed upon black writers by the establishment. My answer was to title my next book of essays Going Too Far.

Howell: Aside from razor-sharp wit and intellect, there is little relating your eleven novels. What is your creative process? How do you know when you have an idea that will fit into a body of work as eclectic as yours?

Reed: One can find inspiration from many sources. The idea of Japanese by Spring originated in a news item that claimed the endowment to a major university was traced to Japanese mob, the Yakuza. Flight to Canada began as a poem. The Terrible series began when I heard someone at party mention that there was a black figure, Black Peter, in the Dutch Christmas, and by coincidence I was invited to the Netherlands shortly afterwards, where I witnessed the arrival of Saint Nicholas and Peter on a barge that floated into Amsterdam with crowds looking on. I took photos of the ceremony, which are in my archives at the University of Delaware. I’ve published The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes and I’m working on The Terrible Fours, excerpts of which have appeared in Artbyte Magazine and Black Renaissance Noire. Conjugating Hindi began from an appearance at an Irish conference held at the University of California—a heckler questioned my criticism of Lord Mountbatten, who was Viceroy of India. It is also a follow-up on Japanese by Spring which freed me from the restrictions placed upon black artists in this country. I have difficulty getting my op-eds printed in this country. And so within the last half year I’ve had articles published in Spain’s leading newspaper, El Pais, and the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. I have an op-ed coming out in a London newspaper. I can’t be stopped.

Howell: Why does Tennessee feature prominently in your work? You wrote ‘Chattanooga’ in 1980, writing,

They’re all right
Chattanooga is something you
Can have anyway you want it
The summit of what you are
I’ve paid my fare on that
Mountain Incline #2, Chattanooga
I want my ride up
I want Chattanooga

Reed: Chattanooga was the scene of many family tragedies, including schizophrenia suffered by my grandmother, which was passed down to my oldest daughter. My grandmother’s husband was murdered by a white man under strange circumstances. According to my mother, she visited him in Chattanooga’s Erlanger hospital, where I was born, and he said that he overheard a doctor say ‘Let that nigger die,’ and when I got the death certificate, it noted that he died from shock. The white man who stabbed him of course walked. I haven’t been able to locate notes of the inquest. My mother called the murderer a liar during it. Since she and my grandmother worked for a wealthy family in the mountains, she had white people form a buffer between my family and the die-in-the-wool racists of the kind that you still find in the South. The murderer said that my grandfather came at him with a knife, yet the undertaker said that the knife was unopened. There was no note of his 1934 murder in the Chattanooga newspaper. I got the name of the doctor from a book about Erlanger hospital. The book mentions that there were segregated practices in this hospital during the 1930s. There was another cold case. His sister Rita Hopson was murdered by some Klansmen in Anniston, Alabama. Of course, my stepfather and mother couldn’t wait to get out of Chattanooga in the 1940s.

Things have changed though. I was welcomed back to Chattanooga a few times. During the first, there was an empty auditorium because the Klan had launched a terrorist attack that included the shooting of nine black women. During the second trip I was hassled by a cop as I stood outside of a gift shop on Lookout Mountain, but he toned down when he noticed I was in the company of some of Chattanooga’s leading black citizens including the Robinson sisters, whose father Walter Robinson was a Republican newspaper editor and had the power to elect mayors and challenged the Klan after they left a coffin on his door step, the cop calmed down and gave us an escort. There are streets named after black heroes on the mountain said to be the creation of black soldiers who accompanied General Grant. My most recent visit at Chattanooga State [Community College] was pleasant. They requested that I read ‘Chattanooga,’ a poem that has some fans in the town and makes the Chattanooga papers from time to time. My brothers were raised in Buffalo yet followed Chevrolet jobs to Nashville where they and their families live very well. Nashville blacks have always been industrious. Their answer to segregated buses was to start their own bus company. I was refused entrance to Chattanooga’s main library. Now they carry my books.Chattanooga is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.