ISHMAEL REED BETWEEN AMIRI BARAKA 
AND GEORGE S. SCHUYLER

Ntongela Masilela
http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/NAM/general/essays/reed.pdf

In an essay written from Oakland, "Ground Zero," the novelist Ishmael
Teed predicts that the time is fast approaching when the Black working
class - 'people who've suffered all manner of degradation so that their
children might become achievers' - will have to take the offensive against
'Black terrorists . . . the brutal crack fascists.' Comparing daily existence in
East Oakland to the oppression in Haiti under the Tontons Macoutes . . .

-Mike Davis, "Los Angeles: Civil Liberties between the Hammer
and the Rock," New Left Review

Ishmael Reed, one of America's premier novelists today, is a real paradox: in his
critical and cultural essays, assembled in SHROVETIDE IN OLD NEW
ORLEANS (1978) and in GOD MADE ALASKA FOR THE INDIANS:
SELECTED ESSAYS (1982), he is capable of making the most nonsensical
political and historical statements; yet in his very impressive novels, especially in
the great MUMBO JUMBO, one encounters a most lucid historical imagination
inhabiting complex literary figurations. It is presumably this incomparable novel
which impelled Fredric Jameson to place Reed among the leading postmodernist
writers, in company with John Ashbery and others. 1 Though the postmodernist
constituents in literature have still to be precisely located, defined and theorized,
one cannot accept Harold Bloom's scorn and dismissal of the concept of
postmodernism, substituting for it the continuation of Emersonian Romanticism.
MUMBO JUMBO is remarkable not only for its convoluted literary structure, but
also for its historicity, in that it articulates its postmodernist nature against the
modernism of HEART OF DARKNESS. Jameson in THE POLITICAL
UNCONSCIOUS has taught us that it was in Joseph Conrad that modernism
constelated towards its unity, and it was in him also that it began the elementary
configurations of its configurations. The historical imagination displayed in
MUMBO JUMBO is deep, in that it not only disputes and challenges Conrad's
interpretation of African history and African civilization, but it also attempts to
postulate the cultural unity of the African world (in Africa and in the diaspora).
Elsewhere, in the context of attempting a critique of Houston A. Baker's
poststructuralist reading of African-American modernism and Henry Louis
Gates' poststructuralist mapping of black American postmodernism, we
attempted to indicate the importance of this here postmodernist novel. Here our
concern is Reed's critical imagination, or really, its profound absence.
f
If the historical imagination is bristlingly present in MUMBO JUMBO, it is
insufficiently present in his literary essays. It is this insufficiency which has been
at the center of Reed's political and intellectual reaction , so much fashionable
with neo-conservatives, who nearly exercise cultural hegemony in political habits
is profoundly disconcerting to someone from the Third World, especially to this
black South African exile. For instance, in an address to a National Conference
of Afro-American Writers given on November 9, 1974 in Howard University,
Reed seriously postulates: "Marx recognized man's material needs, but he didn't
recognize man's psychic needs. That's why the people come up with a Nixon
from time to time---' cause Nixon knows more about the people than Marx did;
and I suggest that just because Marx spent twenty years in the library, doesn't
mean he's all that smart. I used to work in a library, and a lot of people just came
in to get warm." How can one possibly respond to this supposed intellectual
comparison! In which way Nixon had a better grasp of human history that Marx,
a superior understanding of human culture than Marx, a finer intellectual culture
than Marx. Such a mediocre talent; but Reed is a man of outstanding literary
abilities, who has written a great novel, and has a potential of being a very great
writer. It is not by chance that Derek Walcott, whom Joseph Brodsky considers
to be the greatest poet in the English language today, considers Ishmael Reed to
be a writer of the first rank. Clearly then, a writer of such formidable literary
abilities, who comes from an oppressed and dispossessed national group, has a
historical and intellectual responsibility to educate , as Ngugi was Thiongo and
Chinua Achebe so well understood over twenty years ago, in the middle 1960's.
By expressing such a supposedly serious intellectual estimation, Ishmael Reed
mis-educates Ameri-people, especially the African-Americans, who are already
disadvantageously placed within American 'culture', i.e., the American social
structure is predicated on the mis-educating of African-Americans. Reed merely
compounds the problem, instead of providing solutions to it. In other words,
Reed mis-educates on behalf of the American ruling class. His uncritical
invective against Marxism knows no limits, for in another context, he writes:
"Notice how Solzhenitsyn recently referred to Marxism as a Western idea. As
Ionesco recently pointed out, Marxism is rooted in the Christian tradition.
Solzhenitsyn's remarks can be interpreted as those of a Russian pagan getting
back at the Church of Rome. . . . His (a 'black' social realist critic) calling it 'cute'
was one of the events that convinced me that you can't apply the Marxist reading
to what is happening here in this country. . . ." This text, "Ishmael Reed---Self
Interview", is so fundamental to understanding Reed's political, intellectual and
literary consciousness, that it will be necessary to return to it later in this sketch.
Suffice to say for the moment, that Ionesco and Solzhenitsyn are hardly the
authorities one can take intellectually serious on the matter of historical
materialism, because of their rabid anti-Communism and deep hatred of Marxism
as an intellectual tradition. What knowledge of Marxism, since it seems to come
to him from third sources, yet his denunciation of this great intellectual tradition

is with the pretence of authoritativeness.