RE: [GOABOOKCLUB] Literati: Book Club - Ishmael Reed
Nazareth, Peter
Folks,
I was invited by MsSweeney's to write a tribute of under 1,500 words for a booklet being published to celebrate Ishmael Reed receiving the 2011 Barbary Coast Award. I was one of "twenty writers and thinkers" invited. I append below my piece. I am appending the whole piece but for reasons of space the title and the first paragraph were deleted by the editor and replaced by an introduction: "Peter Nazareth is Professor of English and Advisor to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His publications include In the Trickster Tradition: The Novels of Andrew Salkey, Francis Ebejer and Ishmael Reed (London: Bogle-L'Ouvertues, 1994) and Edwin Thumboo: Creating a Nation Through Poetry (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2008). He has edited Pivoting on the Point of Return: Modern Goan Literature (Panjim, Goa: Broadway Books, 2010)."
FLYING WITH ISHMAEL REED
Peter Nazareth
I came to the US in 1973, with my wife and two daughters, to accept the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University, granted to me for my novel In a Brown Mantle, which was prophetic of the Asian Expulsion from Uganda, announced by Idi Amin, nine days after the launching in Kampala. Unknown to me then, it was Professor Charles Davis, Chair of Afro-American Studies, who had read my novel and advised the committee to give me the Fellowship. At Yale, I decided to join the classes on Afro-American literature, taught by Paule Marshall, Larry Neal—and Charles Davis. One of the novels Davis discussed was Ishmael Reed’s The Free-Lance Pallbearers. He taught it with such enthusiasm that I participated in the laughter. Reed had dealt with serious issues in comic book style!
I met Reed for the first time in Iowa in 1974 while teaching in the Afro-American Studies Program. A student of mine who said she had once taught him, the poet Sarah Fabio, was determined to bring him to Iowa. She phoned him from the Afro-American Studies office and made me speak to him on the phone. When he came to Iowa, he read his work in the Museum of Art, the highlight of which was a new poem called “Flight to Canada.” I sat in the front row laughing at the way past and present were simultaneous and the escaped slave was putting it over the slave-master in the way he used language with multiple meanings . Two years later, Reed came out with a novel with the same title as, and prefaced by, the poem. I asked him about it when I next met and interviewed him in Iowa and he said that he looked at the poem and saw that there was more in it than he had thought. “It [the novel] can be anything it wants to be,” says the Loop Garoo Kid in Reed’s second novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. I wrote a review essay about Flight to Canada and Haley’s Roots, published in Afriscope, Lagos under the title, “The Phenomenon of Roots.”
When I began writing my novel about Idi Amin and the Asian Expulsion, urged to do so by Cyprian Ekwensi, the Nigerian novelist, I drew from Reed. I used as one of my three epigraphs a quotation from his fourth novel, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and I began and ended my novel with comic book language. Why this novel? Because Reed had written about Antigone, as I had done in a critical essay. I had written about how Jean Anouilh rewrote Sophocles’s Antigone and here was Reed riffing on the same play.
I was invited to give a presentation at the conference “Of Our Spiritual Strivings: Recent Developments in Black Literature and Criticism” at UCLA on April 23, 1983. Intending to deal with all of Reed’s fiction, I wanted to focus on Flight to Canada. Most Asians expelled from Uganda, including my people, Goans (originating from Goa in India) went to Canada. The historic obsession of Goans with Canada was explained to me by Reed’s novel in which Raven overcomes several obstacles to get to Canada because he believes it is the Promised Land, only to find once there that it was not free and he had to create his own Canada. But I realized that if I analyzed Reed’s fiction in a conventional academic way, I would overlook the experience, the performance, the way the imagination was made to fly, and thus would miss the heart of his work. I decided to create a form matching Reed’s, like RNA to DNA, into which I would put everything so my piece would reflect his and dialogue with it. His gumbo would be matched by mine.
I began my presentation as follows:
“The western stagecoach is being pursued by a posse. Cowboys. No, the pursuers are wolves. The driver’s assistant and some of the passengers throw out bones of various sizes and shapes. The real loot is hidden. The leading wolves see these bones and stop to eat them, giving up the chase. Several wolves trip over these leaders. The dog in them leads others to fight for the bones. Not one Wolf, however; he side-steps the bones and the mess. He decides to run off in an oblique direction and head the stagecoach off at the pass.”
When the presentation was published, some readers thought the opening was a quotation from Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. It was not by Reed but like Reed, an allegory full of double-meanings and metaphors. The western stagecoach, the loot, the dogs thrown bones to distract them, the other pursuers of the western stage tripping over the dogs, the one wolf not distracted who side-steps the mess and heads the stagecoach off at the pass.
On April 30 1994, I delivered the keynote speech at the University of Ottawa at a conference on the Asian Expulsion, “Journey Into Hope,” sponsored by the University, The Uganda Asians and the Canadian Immigration Historical Society. I began by saying that although I had come to Canada many times, this was the first time I had actually caught a flight to Canada, as a student studying the novel with me in Iowa pointed out to me. I described Reed’s novel to the audience. I said that in the novel, Canada belonged to Arthur Swille, the American slave-owner/multinationalist, he just let the Canadians run it. It was weird seeing the Canadian immigration officers laughing. I was later informed by one of the organizers that a videotape of the conference was used for sensitivity training of Canadian immigration officers.
On June 25 1994, I gave a presentation at a Pan-Asian conference entitled “The Western Perspective on Asian Literature” at Kuala Lumpur , the city of my mother’s birth. Afterwards, one of the organizers, Tahir Abdullah, said, “You are always talking about Ishmael Reed. Why don’t you give a lecture about him?” I entitled my presentation “Ishmael Reed: America’s Greatest Third World Writer.” Imagine that! Giving a whole speech on the fiction of Ishmael Reed without having any of his books to an audience that knew nothing about him! My speech was written about in the Malay press.
A student of mine at Iowa, Scott Fratella, told me after taking my Conrad and Descendants class in 2005 that I was always talking about Ishmael Reed and so he wanted to do an independent study with me on Reed’s fiction. He did. I discovered I could teach all Reed’s fiction so I did, every Spring thereafter. Students are provoked by his work, deconstruct it, explore it in many directions because what you found in Reed’s fiction depended on what flight path you took. Last spring, two students who were friends each wrote a long paper on two different on different sides of Reed: Jacob Lee on “Edgar Allan Poe in Flight to Canada,” in which you see Poe’s writing and Poe the man, and Raymond Norris on “Gender, Sex and Power in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down” in which you see that Reed’s novel shows women being empowered.
Strange things happened in real life when I read or talk about Reed. On the last day of my teaching The Fiction of Ishmael Reed in the Spring of 2010, I told the class that the novel we had just studied, Japanese By Spring (1993) was his last, adding that I had heard he was writing a novel about OJ but I would believe it when I saw it. Two days later I received by e-mail the manuscript of the novel by Reed. Since we had not corresponded for some time, I could only believe that he must have caught my vibes. The novel was published this year as Juice!
In Juice!, the narrator is a cartoonist whose prize-winning speech provides the history of the comics I read in Uganda, telling us of the obstacles they faced from censorious forces. The cartoons in the novel are by Reed. When you laugh at the powerful, you have power. The end of my novel about Idi Amin and the Asian Expulsion is triggered by laughter at his megalomaniacal speech which brings down the TV camera and deconstructs the general, explaining the title of the novel taken from a poem by the great Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo: The General is Up.
Reed is sometimes like Jekyll and Hyde—read his seventh novel Reckless Eyeballing, which got a lot of critics mad because they read the protagonist, not the novel. I get mad at him too, but then I realize that he provokes in order to make us think. To think, we have to feed our minds. As PaPa LaBas has it in Mumbo Jumbo, REMEMBER TO FEED THE LOAS.
augusto pinto
I was really surprised by the first sentence of your lecture "...my
novel In a Brown Mantle, which was prophetic of the Asian Expulsion
from > Uganda, announced by Idi Amin ..." I read the novel long ago
and assumed, like many others I guess, that it was written after the
fact . except that I felt the Amin character was modeled (maybe
because he was the only African politician I knew of) on Jomo Kenyatta
late President of Kenya
Although I don't suppose it is worth gloating over the 'I told you so'
feeling that you may have got, and despite that the writing was on the
wall (people were leaving East Africa nearly a decade before the Amin
disaster happened) ... still to have put it in a novel when you did is
something to write home about.
Your lecture too seems quite brilliant and I suspect that to enjoy it
best one needs to be part of the audience listening to it live...
I like what you are doing. With so many books in search of a reader it
is inevitable though sad that often very good writers just get lost in
the shelves, and sometimes not even that. I wish that you and your
people who you have observed in your sardonic but concerned way get
the recognition you deserve. (What is this trickster thing anyway?)
I looked up flipkart which is the Amazon counterpart in India, and
find that most of Ishmael Reed's novels are available for about Rs
600/ Which would you recommend for a taste of what he is like at his
best? The Free-Lance Pallbearers?
Sadly I couldn't find your novels on that site: there were though
listed Critical Essays On Ngugi Wa Thiong O: Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ( B.
1938) (Hardcover); Critical Essays On Robert Burns: Robert Burns both
of which you coedited and Peter Nazareth by Jamey Franciscus Modestus
costing Rs 3755/ (numbers make me nervous)
Have you observed your people in America too? I'd like to know what
you say about them there.
Cheers
Augusto
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Augusto Pinto
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Moira, Bardez,
Goa, India
E pint...@gmail.com or ypin...@yahoo.co.in
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Frederick Noronha
international books via Amazon.com. Flipkart is costly when it comes
to foreign books. But you might have to request someone overseas to
buy-and-ship the books across to you from Amazon (international
postage can be a killer).
In return, just do a quid-pro-quo by sending them some books they need
from here.
While searching for a book on the British taxes on salt in India (for
a friend doing her PhD), I managed to get the copies this way...
thanks to some members of the Goa Book Club too! FN
Nazareth, Peter
So much in your e-mail needs a response from me that I am going to insert my answers after your statements and questions.
________________________________________
From: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com [goa-bo...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of augusto pinto [pint...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2012 2:35 PM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [GOABOOKCLUB] Literati: Book Club - Ishmael Reed
Dear Peter
I was really surprised by the first sentence of your lecture "...my
novel In a Brown Mantle, which was prophetic of the Asian Expulsion
from > Uganda, announced by Idi Amin ..." I read the novel long ago
and assumed, like many others I guess, that it was written after the
fact . except that I felt the Amin character was modeled (maybe
because he was the only African politician I knew of) on Jomo Kenyatta
late President of Kenya
ANSWER: I sent the draft of "In a Brown Mantle" to the publishers, the East African Bureau, Nairobi in late 1970. There were many reviews and I made some changes. None of them were political. None of them were about sex in the novel. All had to do with fine-tuning the novel. All recommended publication. By the time the novel came out, in May 1972, Idi Amin was in power, having carried out a coup [with British and Israeli support] on January 25 1971. I sent a copy of the novel to Elliot Lehman, the father of Ken Lehman, an American who had studied with Ngugi and me in Leeds. Elliot came on a visit to Uganda in December 1971 and was alarmed at what Amin was saying about Asians. When he was leaving, he said to me at the airport, "If ever you want to come to the US, let me know: I have contacts at Yale." I told him I would have to think about it after my two books came out in 1972. So he had the novel when Amin announced the Expulsion of Asians and he went to Yale and put forward my name to be the first Seymour Lustman Fellow. Lustman, the Chair of Child Psychiatry at Yale, had died in a drowning accident the year before. The committee asked Lehman whether he had anything by me, and he had, and he gave them the novel [they never returned it to him and I sent him a copy of the second edition three years ago). They gave the novel to Charles Davis, Professor of English and Chair of Afro-American Studies. He read it and told them to give me the Fellowship. I left Uganda on January 19 1973 with my wife and two daughters to go to Yale. And it was Charles Davis who told me that Iowa was the place for me to be--he had come to Yale the year before from Iowa--and he made sure I was invited by the International Writing Program and Afro-American Studies.
My novel received a lot of publicity in Uganda, including a long article by Theo Luzuka in the university paper which criticized the Expulsion. Luzuka had designed the cover of the novel (the first edition).
My Uganda citizenship was taken away on a technicality that had nothing to do with the novel [the story is told in "The General is Up" as the experience of David D'Costa].
Pio Zirimu, a friend of mine from Makerere and Leeds days, was in London on a sabbatical at the time and he taught the novel in a course at the University of London called "Prophetic Voices." Pio came to see me when I was in London on my way to Yale. I tried to persuade him not to go back but he said, "Let them kill me if they want to, I am going back." He wrote a last letter to me before leaving London and I used his words when George Kapa gave a farewell speech to David D'Costa at the Institute in "The General is Up." Pio was to chair the Colloquiem at Festac in Nigeria in 1976 and friends of ours believe Amin arranged for him to be poisoned the night before. The friends asked for an autopsy but Amin raised the issue to the diplomatic level and then flew the body back to Uganda on his private jet.
The dream of the Expulsion the protagonist has in "In a Brown Mantle" was a real dream I had (in Tanzania) in 1970 during the time I was working on the novel.
Although I don't suppose it is worth gloating over the 'I told you so'
feeling that you may have got, and despite that the writing was on the
wall (people were leaving East Africa nearly a decade before the Amin
disaster happened) ... still to have put it in a novel when you did is
something to write home about.
ANSWER: I bought copies of the novel and gave it to friends who were leaving Uganda and I was never going to see them again. I also left a signed copy for the American Ambassador, Thomas Melady, who bumped into me at the opening of the Libya-Uganda Arab bank in Kampala after the Expulsion deadline; he told me his wife enjoyed it and he later instructed his immigration officer to assist me when I was about to leave.
My novel is taught in Uganda and is frequently written about Ayeta Wangusa wrote a long article in The Monitor in 1997 entitled "The Novel That Foretold the Expulsion." The paper used a photo of Amin and of me, facing each other, from 1972. Something was written about the novel again in the papers two years.
Your lecture too seems quite brilliant and I suspect that to enjoy it
best one needs to be part of the audience listening to it live...
ANSWER: If you are referring to the piece I called "Flying With Ishmael Reed", it was not a lecture. It was a tribute I wrote in response to the invitation from McSweeney's publishers to write a tribute which would have a touch of the personal.
I like what you are doing. With so many books in search of a reader it
is inevitable though sad that often very good writers just get lost in
the shelves, and sometimes not even that.
ANSWER: A lot of attention has been paid, and continues to be paid, to my writing by writers and scholars worldwide, including studying my work or referring to it in Masters' and PhD' dissertaions and literary essays. Perhaps the only East African writer who has received more widespread attention is Ngugi wa Thiong'o.
I wish that you and your
people who you have observed in your sardonic but concerned way get
the recognition you deserve.
ANSWER: It is my protagonist of "In a Brown Mantle" who is sardonic. He is also covering up for his own corruption and betrayal, including blaming his history as a Goan for his own moral failure.
(What is this trickster thing anyway?)
ANSWER: This is too big a question to answer in a few lines. It is dealt with in my Trickster book and also my essay on Conrad, "Dark Heart or Trickster?", published in the Korean Journal of Nineteenth Century Literature in English. It is not the same as "Con Man." The Trickster god in Yoruba is Eshu and in Hinduism Krishna.
I looked up flipkart which is the Amazon counterpart in India, and
find that most of Ishmael Reed's novels are available for about Rs
600/ Which would you recommend for a taste of what he is like at his
best? The Free-Lance Pallbearers?
Answer. I found "The Free-Lance Pallbearers" difficult to read and concluded it was more easily read by an American than by me, so I don't teach it, although I tell the students about it. I think you should start with "Flight to Canada." "Mumbo Jumbo" is philosophically the most complex of Reed's novels, but I recommend this one: I am currently teaching it and re-reading it. There is a lot of history in this work. "Japanese By Spring" is very accessible to outsiders.
Sadly I couldn't find your novels on that site: there were though
listed Critical Essays On Ngugi Wa Thiong O: Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ( B.
1938) (Hardcover); Critical Essays On Robert Burns: Robert Burns both
of which you coedited and Peter Nazareth by Jamey Franciscus Modestus
costing Rs 3755/ (numbers make me nervous)
Answer: Google has messed things up here. I did not write any book on Robert Burns, and I have not co-edited anything with Jamey Franciscus Modestus. A few days ago I found on Google that Modestus had apparently written a book on "Peter Nazareth" but I have not found any such book. The book I edited, by myself, is Critical Essays on Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Ngugi introduced me to his class at UCI in 2003 by saying this was one of the best books on him. He also lists it on the computer among a dozen books on him. [By my count, more than one hundred books have been written on Ngugi worldwide.]
Have you observed your people in America too? I'd like to know what
you say about them there.
ANSWER: Since coming to the US, I have been cut off from Goans. The few Goans I meet here are individuals to me. I used to meet Goans every summer when we went to Canada: my sister's house in Toronto is 740 miles from Iowa City, a day's drive; but since my first grandson was born (in San Antonio, Texas), my wife and I have been going South every summer (and for Christmas: at first San Antonio, now Ashburn, Virginia). The character and writer Ronald D'Cruz makes brief but pungent reference to Goans in Canada in my novel "The General is Up."
Cheers
Augusto
ANSWER:
Best.
Peter
Nazareth, Peter
Since you wanted to know about the Trickster, I am quoting from my essay on Conrad, "Dark Heart or Trickster," published in 2005 in the Korean Journal of Nineteenth Century Literature in English, Vol. 9-3:
So why does Conrad not tell a straightforward story?
I began answering the question first in my class, “Conrad and His Descendants,”14 and then in my book, In the Trickster Tradition: The Novels of Andrew Salkey, Francis Ebejer and Ishmael Reed.15 After analyzing the works of Salkey, Ebejer and Reed as texts that use strategies to get past mental and political barriers, it became easier to see that Conrad was using similar techniques, techniques readers may not have previously noticed because of their social, political and literary conditioning. My trickster travels a great distance with the one of Lewis Hyde [Lewis Hyde, "Trickster Makes This World", New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998]:
A trickster does not live near the hearth; he does not live in the halls of justice, the soldier’s tent, the shaman’s hut, the monastery. He passes through each of these when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their guiding spirit. He is the spirit of the doorway, leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of the town (the one where a little market springs up). He is the spirit of the road at dusk, the one that runs from one town to another and belongs to neither…
The road that trickster travels is a spirit road as well as a road in fact. He is the adept who can move between heaven and earth, and between the living and the dead. As such, he is sometimes the messenger of the gods and sometimes the guide of souls, carrying the dead into the underworld or opening the tomb to release them when they must walk among us. Sometimes it happens that the road between heaven and earth is not open, whereupon trickster travels not as a messenger but as a thief, the one who steals from the gods the good things humans need if they are to survive in this world…
In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser… Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox…
I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on.
I agree with Hyde's description, although he is not concerned with the element I am stressing: the political-colonial dimension, the fact that Europe exploited the non-European world to build itself up, to do which it used the smokescreen of civilizing “inferior” peoples. This belief had been conditioned into the people of the colonizing countries by the time Conrad writes about it. So Marlow must use trickster techniques to “uncover and disrupt the very things” the colonizing culture is based on. I am proposing that Conrad opened a door through which writers from colonized countries walked—and when they had done so, they made it possible to take Conrad through. This may be another way of saying, with Wilson Harris, that Heart of Darkness “stands upon a threshold of capacity to which Conrad pointed though he never attained that capacity himself.”
It is necessary, therefore, to analyze the story in terms not only of what the story says but also how the story says it. Most readers of Conrad know the statement about where the meaning of a story lies. Naipaul ends his “Conrad’s Darkness” by attributing the statement to Marlow but it is actually the unnamed narrator who sums it up as his understanding of Marlow’s belief.
Best.
Peter
________________________________________
From: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com [goa-bo...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of augusto pinto [pint...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2012 2:35 PM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [GOABOOKCLUB] Literati: Book Club - Ishmael Reed
Dear Peter
I like what you are doing. With so many books in search of a reader it
is inevitable though sad that often very good writers just get lost in
the shelves, and sometimes not even that. I wish that you and your
people who you have observed in your sardonic but concerned way get
the recognition you deserve. (What is this trickster thing anyway?)
Cheers
Augusto