Thursday, May 14, 2020

Ishmael Reed’s Use of Detective Novel Prototypes
Yves Bonnemère

p. 29-37 

“POLAR NOIR”: READING AFRICAN-AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION

  | 
Alice Mills
, 
 Claude Julie


ABSTRACT

Ishmael Reed uses detective novel prototypes to debunk white men’s “superiority”. Gang warfare depicts an age-old worldwide fight between polytheism and monotheism. Based on the founding myth of ancient Egypt, white men are portrayed as the heirs of Seth, an animal-like god, whereas black men resemble Osiris, Seth’s brother, the anthropomorphic god. Reversing the stereotypes attached to Ham’s sons, Reed turns white men into the members of an accursed family, forever doomed to depravity and perversity.

FULL TEXT

In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, the central character, the Loop Garoo Kid says that a novel “can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons” (YB, 40).1 If one applies Reed’s aesthetic theory to the detective novel, the latter is only a starting-point, a structure, a formula.

Elements of mystery stories, of classical and hard-boiled detective novels are resorted to for the writer to convey his own views of culture and religion. His purpose is not to hold the reader in suspense or to entertain him for the mere sake of entertainment. He often uses parody and satire because they are his religious and cultural weapons. In Reed’s work, gang warfare takes on world-wide dimensions. It illustrates two contending principles that have been at war for hundreds of centuries, and the Egyptian legend of Osiris and Seth is the founding myth underlying this world war.

Reed borrows elements from detective novels but doesn’t really write detective novels in so far as he doesn’t stick to standard formulas. For instance, a character like the Loop Garoo Kid appears in a comic epic, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. The action is set in the Wild West. The novel itself is a take-off of conventional westerns, of yellow backs. It features the Loop Garoo Kid, an avenger defending the oppressed —children and black people— against the rich and adults (Drag, a cattle baron and the inhabitants of Yellow Back Radio). Unlike western heroes who use their guns, Loop Garoo triumphs over the villains thanks to his hoodoo powers only. He defends the same cause as PaPa LaBas in Mumbo Jumbo, Reed’s closest book to a detective novel. Like the black cowboy, PaPa LaBas is the writer’s spokesman though he isn’t an avenger but a houngan (a hoodoo priest in Haïti) and jacklegged detective both in Mumbo Jumbo and The Last Days of Louisiana Red. He voices the hoodoo counter-tradition whose champion the author is.

Set in the 1920s, in the days of prohibition, Mumbo Jumbo refers to gang warfare at that time, and urban violence reminds us of Dashiell Hammett portraying corruption in American cities in his hard-boiled detective novels. A black character, Bud Jackson, has control over speakeasies in Harlem and is involved in fights against white gangsters. Biff Musclewhite, an ex-policeman with racist ideas and nominally curator of a famous New York Art Museum is actually a hired killer. He works for people heading white secret societies such as the Wallflower Order and its military organization, the Knights Templar whose leader is Hinckle Von Vampton, a defender of western values, and of the white man’s law and order. These white societies hire dubious characters who resist or attack the symptoms of “Jes Grew”", a black cultural and religious (hoodoo) movement in the twenties, in the Jazz Age.

Starting from New Orleans, the Mecca of African American polytheism (hoodoo), Jes Grew, through music and dancing, spreads to the whole of the USA. White authorities are afraid lest Jes Grew should undermine white values and get the better of white-dominated American culture. The Wallflower Order and one of the major characters in Mumbo Jumbo —Von Vampton, Labas’s opponent— try to curb the power of Jes Grew and fight against dancing, music, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, etc. Von Vampton has recourse to a variety of means: first, murder, that of Abdul Hamid, a Black Muslim, second the press: as the editor of The Sun, a New York paper, he defends Atonism, Reed’s word for monotheism, against the revival of hoodoo (polytheism) in the U. S. A. Third, he wages a cultural war: he acts as if he were interested in black artists and writers but he creates a black Android (“Safecracker” Gould, a white man disguised in blackface and who passes himself off as a black poet). His purpose is to undermine and put an end to Jes Grew’s power considered as a threat to the white man’s power and culture. Fourth, Von Vampton wants to retrieve the Jes Grew text, a sacred text, stolen by Moses, hidden in Solomon’s Temple (later on, the Templars’ headquarters). Hinckle Von Vampton, who is hundreds of years old, found it centuries ago in Jerusalem. The text is supposed to be a book written by Thoth, the patron of scribes in Egypt. It contains the essence of Osirian rites (polytheism). Reversing stereotypes, Reed portrays Von Vampton (a one-eyed man) and his companions as robbers, pirates, not only of things but also of black culture. Metaphorically, he is the vampire (Vampton) endeavouring to drain black Americans of their blood and of their distinctive culture.

Confronting Von Vampton is PaPa LaBas, a figure close to the Haitian god Legba (or Eshu), a messenger between our world and the supernatural world. Like Hinckle, he is also in search of The Book of Thoth. He thinks he needs it for Jes Grew to fulfil its mission, for black culture to prevail. Like the detectives of classical detective stories, he makes use of reasoning and deduction and, after managing to decode a secret message, finds out The Book of Thoth under the Cotton Club in Harlem. Yet, he is unlike a Hercule Poirot because he also combines ratiocination with his occult knowledge, voyance. He is a voodoo priest at the head of the Mumbo Jumbo Cathedral and his hoodoo powers give him an insight into the problems he has to solve. Hoodoo helps him along with his inquiries.

Although he is a central character in Mumbo Jumbo, he doesn’t always act on his own. He works with Haitians (one of whom is Benoit Battraville) fighting against the American occupation of Haiti in the days of the Harlem Renaissance. If LaBas appears for the first time in Mumbo Jumbo, he reappears in The Last Days of Louisiana Red, this time to fight against discord among blacks on the West Coast in the 1960s. Louisiana Red embodies the evil forces disrupting the black community. Reed refers here to Marxistinfluenced groups like the Black Panthers in the 60s. He calls them Moochers since he regards them as spongers, parasites. LaBas’s role is to investigate them and also to support the Work, an organization whose proponents defend hoodoo knowledge, a remedy whose healing power is supposed to cure the black community, to ward off the evil which besets it and to restore order and harmony among the blacks.

So, all these remarks about some of Reed’s novels emphasize the fact that his fiction bears little resemblance to standard detective novels. Actually, detective novel formulas help him to depict and reconstruct various periods of American history from the black man’s point of view. The characters he uses are more types or archetypes than true-to-life characters.

Robbers, pirates, perverts are recurrent characters so far as whites are concerned, and most of the time, he makes use of irony or its black version, signifying, to expose the white man’s cowardice in hilarious passages that entertain the reader more than suspense does. Nevertheless, irony isn’t only used to make us laugh but also to indict and satirize the white man’s power and culture, and also to deliver a message. The novelist’s aim is to assert the power of African American culture, a counter-culture, as superior to white culture. However, Reed makes the most of a white author to achieve his purpose, I mean Edgar Allan Poe. He often does a pastiche of parts of Poe’s tales. For instance, he is indebted to him for his parodic imitation of the atmosphere of Gothic novels when depicting the South in Flight to Canada. Some characters like Raven Quickskill or Lenore, Alfred’s fiancé, in The Free-Lance Pallbearers, are echoes of Poe’s “The Raven”. Besides, themes like perversity and depravity recur in each of Reed’s novels to characterise his villains, whites like Drag, the cattle baron in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Swille the Southern planter in Flight to Canada, Harry Sam, the president in The Free-Lance Pallbearers. One may trace the literary influence of the theme of depravity back to Poe’s Imp of the Perverse, although Reed also connects it with the myth of Seth, the Egyptian god embodying death and evil. So, when Reed plays up the Egyptian heritage of black Americans, one may not see the influence of white authors in his work and at times, he appears to be a trickster attempting to outwit his reader.

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