SCRUTINY

ISHMAEL REED'S OFFICE IS completely bare. None of the cliched paraphernalia of a prolific writer can be found in this immaculate room. Not a single crumpled wad of paper, not one disjointed scribbled phrase nor even a teetering pile of books. The white walls are blank, the metal bookshelves are empty, neither a scrap of paper nor a mote of dust disturbs the woodgrain desk.

The only evidence of life in this room is Ishmael Reed himself, who sits casually behind the desk, a blue-and-white scarf wrapped around his neck. His iconoclastic modesty makes it obvious he is not comfortable at the center of this empty office; he talks as though he would rather be writing--alone and somewhere else.

Ishmael Reed, who is a visiting professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard this semester, is the author of seven novels, four books of poems, two collections of essays and editor and publisher of several anthologies. He has been hailed as a dominant voice in a new era of the Afro-American tradition. Literary critics describe him as the man who has overcome the conventions that limited Afro-American literature, as one who has successfully combined seemingly unrelated elements of Black written and oral expression to redefine the possibilities of the novel as a literary form.

Commentators call him bold, original, experimental, difficult, exciting and funny. He has been praised as a pioneering post-modernist, shouted down as a strident sexist, dismissed as a mere satirist, but he insists that he eludes all simple labels and rejects the legitimacy of categorization.

As he rejects simple characterization of his own work, he also refuses to accept the common vision of the world as divided into neat little oppositional packages like male/female, black/white, good/bad. While this attitude might be expected to result in nihilism, Reed's refusal to compartmentalize offers the possibility of an alternative system of connections not recognized by current society.

As Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of English at Cornell University, says, "Reed names things for us, out loud, both that which we often do not even admit to ourselves--the private emotions--as well as those economic and racial relations by which this society seeks to regulate our lives, the invisible network within which we are bound, and which few will admit exists. Reed has the prophet's gift of vision. He tells us not only who we are, and where we as a society are, but why."

ISHMAEL SCOTT REED WAS BORN in Chattanooga, Tennessee on February 22, 1938, to Henry Lenoir, a fundraiser for the YMCA and Thelma Coleman, a homemaker and sales clerk. Later, his mother married Bennie Reed, an auto worker. In 1942, Reed moved with his mother to Buffalo, New York, where his mother worked in various wartime industries. As a teenager, he half-heartedly attended Buffalo public schools, he wrote a jazz column for a local newspaper in his spare time.

He began his college education at the University of Buffalo's night school, supporting himself as a clerk in the public library during the day. Reed had begun creative writing at the age of 14, and one of his short stories turned out to be his ticket out of night school and into the bachelor of arts curriculum at the University of Buffalo.

His satirical story, "Something Pure," in which the Second Coming is incarnated in an advertising agent whose unorthodox sales techniques earn him hatred and ridicule, alerted an English professor to Reed's gifts as a storyteller and parodist.

While a student at the university from 1956 to 1960, Reed developed his pastiche style, he says, as a result of the contradictory influences of traditional canonical English professors and linguists who helped him understand the potential of Afro-American vernacular in literature.

Reed withdrew from the college for financial reasons and moved into Buffalo's low-income Black housing projects to define himself "against the artificial social and class distinctions associated with American university education," he says. Life there was "a horrible experience" because of his growing awareness that no individual, no matter how well-intentioned, could change these basic conditions of poverty. This experience led Reed to a period of intense political activism during the late civil rights movement and the early stages of the Black power movement.

Currently, Reed chooses not to be involved in any overtly political activity, but his novels continue to wrestle with social problems. "`Political' doesn't mean anything anymore," he says. "When a novelist takes on social issues, his work is dismissed as a diatribe, not taken seriously." More than American apathy, Reed criticizes the "white elitist media" for being overly "under-class happy."

"The presence of Black people in America is a blessing, because it lets Americans escape responsibility for themselves by saying that Blacks have all the problems, like crack and welfare and teenage pregnancy," he says.

REED BEGAN HIS PROFESSIONAL career as a staff correspondent with the Buffalo Empire Star Weekly. During the summer of 1961, Reed and the Star's editor co-hosted a controversial radio roundtable which presented political opinions and personalities even further left than the civil rights activists. The radio station cancelled the program after Reed interviewed Malcolm X, the leader of Nation of Islam, the Black nationalist movement.

In 1962, Reed moved from Buffalo to New York City and became actively involved in the birth of the Black arts and Black power movements as well as various underground integrated political-cultural organizations. He served as editor of Advance, a Newark, New Jersey weekly and then moved on to found the East Village Other, the first non-conventional newspaper to achieve national circulation. He also participated in the Umbra Workshop, a Black writers' group which "began the influorescene of Black Poetry as well as other recent styles of Afro-American writing," he says. In 1966, he published his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers to enthusiastic critical reception.

Reed left New York in 1967 to move to Berkeley, California and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley ever since as well as a variety of other institutions across the country.

In the 70s, Reed established publishing companies intended to expand the idea of what texts and which authors make up the canon of American literature, a national literature which includes "Chicano and Chinese, Yiddish and Native American, Anglo-Saxon and Afro-American, multicolored and multivocal," says Reed.

Reed wages constant war against what Northrop Frye calls "the lumber of stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, superstitious terrors, crank theories, pedantic dogmatisms, oppressive fashions and all other things that impede the free movement of society." He refuses to use buzz-words or catch-phrases with the easy eloquence of a critic. He refuses to label himself as part of any tradition, be it post-modernist, anti-feminist, even Afro-American. He refuses to talk in categories--when asked about Black writing, he talks about Native Americans, Italian-Americans and any

other hyphenated group he can think of.

Erskin Peters, chairman of the Afro-American

Studies department at the University of California

at Berkeley, describes Reed as a "gadfly" when it

comes to getting books published. "He is very good

at getting publishers to address issues of

neglected groups and writers. He will call them or

visit them and ask them why they neglect certain

groups. If they say they don't have any of this

material, he will present them with some of his on

the spot," says Peters.

REED'S AGGRESSIVE STREAK appears throughout his

writing--his attack on everything Americans hold

dear has made him one of the most controversial

Afro-American writers. He has established his

presence as an artist not by repeating and

revising the great Black literary tradition of

writers such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright,

but "by challenging the formal conventions that

these texts share through the arts of satire and

parody," says Gates.

Gates describes the works of Black writers as

occupying space simultaneously in two

traditions--the European or American literary

tradition and a distinct Black tradition. The

result is that "every Black text is two-toned or

double-voiced," he says. "Its visual tones are

white and Black and its aural tones are standard

and vernacular."

Early Afro-American writing functioned

primarily as a way for Blacks to prove their

intelligence and equality by imitating white

literary forms, such as the work of Milton,

Shelley and Keats. The first indigenous

Afro-American writing was the slave narrative

which served to reveal the horrifying truths of

life on a plantation. Ever since, Black literature

has always been seen in the context of political

struggles. Readers have been concerned with the

relationship of the Black text to its world and

its author more than with its language and its

structure.

Afro-American literature began to work itself

into university curricula with multi-cultural,

often student-run educational experiments in the

60s. Now that some of these students are

professors, they demand more Afro-American

courses, and more students are studying the field

than ever before. With the institutionalization of

Black writing, there has been more focus on its

literary elements as well as its socio-political

contexts.

Reed, says Gates, is a "genius" precisely

because he not only satirizes social and political

institutions, but extends his criticism to the

linguistic and structural conventions of literary

texts as well.

As the protagonist of Reed's third novel

Mumbo Jumbo says: "No one says a novel has

to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to

be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the

mumblings of wild men saddled by demons." Reed's

outlandish conglomeration of literary devices,

film narrative techniques, American pop culture

icons and African folktales demonstrates exactly

that, critiquing and simultaneously extending the

Black literary tradition.

Although Reed breaks every literary rule and

attacks every convention in the book, his work

follows the guidelines of a his own philosophical

framework, Neo-Hoodoo--based on Hoodoo or

Voudun, a system of African religions. "My

art form has its own laws," he says. He is

determined to force the American public to

rediscover the largely untold role of Blacks as

creators of American culture or as "word sorcerers

who maintain a secret culture which, from time to

time, pervades all of American life," says Gates.

Reed's work continues a Black tradition of

perceiving the individual as inseparable from his

collective community. Peters says he is afraid

that this tradition is disappearing as some newer

Black writers place more emphasis on the

individual. "Some feel that maybe Afro-Americans

have evolved to a point where some need not worry

so much about the collective. But, people still

tend to take the individual as representative of

the race, and there are not enough positive images

or enough variety of images to negate the

pervasive stereotypes," he says.

beware : do not read this poem

tonite, thriller was

abt an ol woman, so vain she

surrounded herself w/

many mirrors

it got so bad that finally she

locked herself indoors & her

whole life became the mirrors

one day the villagers broke

into her house, but she was too

swift for them, she disappeared

into a mirror

such tennant who bought the house

after that, lost a loved one to

the ol woman in the mirror:

first a little girl

then a young woman

then the young woman/s husband

the hunger of this poem is legendary

it has taken in many victims

back of from this poem

it has drawn in yr feet

back off from his poem

it has drawn in yr legs

back off from this poem

it is a greedy mirror

you are into this poem, from

the waist down

nobody can hear you can they?

this poem has had you up to here belch

this poem aint got no manners

you cant call out frm this poem

relax now & go w/ this poem

move & roll on to this poem

do not resist this poem

this poem has yr eyes

this poem has his head

this poem has his arms

this poem has this fingers

this poem has his fingertips

this poem is the reader& the

reader this poem

statistics : the us bureau of missing persons reports that in 1968 over 100,000 people disappeared leaving no solid clues nor trace only a space in the lives of their friends.

Another central conflict arising in the area of

Black writing today is the debate over Black women

writers' portrayal of Black men. A group of Black

male writers, including Reed, attacked Alice

Walker's novel The Color Purple, accusing

her of portraying men as brutal and oppressive.

When the book was made into a movie, these

negative stereotypes reached an even greater

audience than Walker's best-selling novel, and the

outrage of the Black male intellectual community

increased proportionately. This hostility directed

at Black men, they argued, divided the movement

for racial equality along sexual lines, thus

limiting the movement's success.

Reed's most recent novel, Reckless

Eyeballing was in turn attacked by feminists

for what they called its antagonistic portrayal of

women as petty, materialistic and power-hungry.

Feminists object to the central character of

Reed's novel, the playwright Ian Ball, a sexist

womanizer who gives in to feminist pressure to

adapt his plays to glorify women at the expense of

men. But, according to one Black feminist, this

reading of the novel ignores the character's

complexity and his double-facedness at the novel's

conclusion.

"Some women call Reed an incredible misogynist,

but I think he's been misread," says Carolivia O.

Herron, assistant professor of Afro-American

Studies at Harvard. "I don't think he's against

Black women. Reckless Eyeballing's

conclusion contradicts any anti-feminist reading."

Reed denies feeling any antagonism towards

Black women writers, explaining that he was the

first to publish many Black women who are now

successful writers. Reed complains that the Black

man vs. Black woman issue has been exaggerated by

the white intellectual media and that Black

neighborhoods have no contact with the issues

affecting the Black artistic community.

Mary Helen Washington, professor of English at

the University of Massachusetts at Boston, asserts

that this battle is completely a media creation.

"This conflict does not exist in the Black

literary community in any real way. The problem is

allowing Hollywood to create Black literary

developments."

Reed explains his next venture into the

feminist arena with a mischievous grin. He is

working on a project for Berkeley television

called Mother Hubbard about Mother Hubbard

who goes to her cupboard, finds no food in it for

her dog and becomes a feminist terrorist.

No matter how strange this sounds, Reed seems

to have a knack for creating zany plots that

somehow ring true. Reed recalls with a smirk that

his 1982 novel The Terrible Twos, set in a

futuristic America, was initially dismissed as an

absurd polemic. The plot involved a fashion model

who was elected President and a government which

hatched an elaborate plot of which the President

was completely ignorant--in light of recent

events, the book has received renewed attention.