[In the following essay, Martin provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Reed's fiction, focusing on his linguistic metaphors.]

Ishmael Reed extends the notion of syncretism into the level and texture he uses in his novels, thus creating a type of contemporary bathetic language, whose principal rules of discourse are taken from the streets, popular music, and television. In Reed's novels, it is not uncommon to find the formal blend of language mixed with the colloquial, as it is Reed's contention that such an occurrence in the narrative is more in keeping with the ways contemporary people influenced by popular culture really speak. By purposely mixing the myriad aspects of language from different sources in popular culture, Reed pulls into individual cardinal functions (one closed set of narrative actions; Barthes) words and expressions which create the fictive illusion of real speech. Though the emotive effect is bathetic, evoking interest and humor because of seeming incongruencies, the language Reed uses comes from concrete päróles (selected, individual utterances from the field of all available language usage [längúe]; Saussure) of the present day. The involved reader in the text knows that contemporary language is not static, is in fact in tremendous flux, and that actual people mix levels of diction constantly to achieve the desired communicative effect; and the proof of the validity of Reed's artistic method is the ease with which his characters display bathetic discourse.

In his second novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Ishmael Reed begins for the first time to use at length Vodoun (Voodoo; Hoodoo) methods and folklore as a base for his work. A description of Vodoun is important here. Although the culturally-absorptive, syncretic, religious base for Voodoo (Originally Vodoun from the Creole French version of the Dahomey Vodu; also possibly etymylogically related to the West African word for magic, JuJu) is of West African origin, the myriad religious, spiritual, and social elements that make up what are now called Voodoo beliefs are actually of Caribbean origin. Elements of Caribbean Voodoo influence are easily found among West African peoples, the Devego and the Shango for instance, who were influenced by re-patriated Africans from the Caribbean Diaspora, such as the Maroons. Elements native to the Yoruba religion of Nigeria, said to be one of the origin countries of syneretic, African religions, are found to be joined with elements from sources which are alien. The major Yoruban elements of Voodoo are: 1) the fetish [a physical icon], 2) trance, 3) Voodoo gods and their spiritual essences (loas), 4) sacrifice, 5) offerings, 6) magic, and 7) an absence of a clear hierarchy in its gods (Voodoo 5-8). The fetish, in Voodoo terminology, has a tri-parite meaning: a) it may be an icon, b) the human may “carry” the fetish attributed to a god (the human carrier is then labeled a “horse”) and show a quality attributed to a god, or c) the fetish may be the god, itself, in control of the horse. The carrier of such Voodoo spirituality may be human or inanimate, but the carrier is not the fetish itself. The fetish or god “rides” the horse. The spiritual part of a fetish is a part of everything (animism), but remains an entity unto itself. A western analogy which may serve is the idea of the expanding celestial spheres of Gnosticism, a concept in which each particle of the expanding number of spheres retains some remnant of the original Source or God-head in its being. The function of any fetish is to increase its power in a horse, so that for a time a horse may be more divine and possess supernatural powers for use. The form the fetish may take depends upon the ritual situation in which it exists.

The trance is the method by which a fetish (god or god-essence) is brought more into the corporeal sphere. If a god does possess the carrier during the trance ritual, then the carrier's human essence is sublimated by the identity of the god. In Voodoo, these transmissions are dynamic and emotional, while in original Yoruba, they are more refined (Voodoo 10).

The Voodoo gods are unlike most church-sanctioned gods or saints of European origin, in that Voodoo gods are often malicious. Indeed, most Voodoo gods are quite human in personality range and are subject to severe mood shifts. In this way, the gods are thought to be more human, and, thus, more understanding of human strengths, weaknesses, and desires.

Sacrifices are often used to evoke the presence of a god during a ritual ceremony. Common sacrifices are food, alcohol (especially gin), tobacco, and perfume. These offerings are spilled or imbibed during the invocation. Sometimes a small animal may be killed for the evocation; at other times, dancing or chanting rituals are the demands of the gods. Offerings of food play a large part in evoking the fetish because food may be the stipulative representative of man in the world of the gods. Gert Chesi in Voodoo: Africa's Secret Power explains that while fruit and foodstuffs have no intellect, “they have metaintellect. They are the product of a creator who makes use of a higher intelligence; thus they have a share of this intelligence, and, because of their metaphysical qualities, they may stand up for man with all his problems in the world of the gods” (8).

Magic in Voodoo may be either black or white; white magic is used to summon gods who can be used for positive actions; gods who will perform negative actions, such as the punishment of an enemy, are summoned by black magic (the adjectival ascriptions have no connotative, racial association). I want to point out that, in general, black magic is used only for what the houngan or “holy person” feels is good cause: a prior murder, theft, or a previous act of violence. There seems to be no clearcut hierarchy of gods in Voodoo. And the number of gods is tremendous. Any person or thing may become a god under the right circumstances; an individual who makes an exemplary act, a divine manifestation of human emotion, or an object which is connected with a supernatural happening may all be transfigured into gods.

Underlying all of these components are the two main bases of the Voodoo religion: 1) the Voodoo concept of syncretism and 2) the Voodoo concept of time. Yoruba, as it existed before the exportation of slaves to the Caribbean, was even then a syncretic religion, absorbing all that it considered useful from other West African religious practices. Upon the return of blacks from the Caribbean, Yoruba was infused with Voodoo practices. The plantation owners of Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and other countries introduced Christianity to the slaves because it was seen as a tranquilizer, something to “help” the slaves become more docile in their acceptance of the horrors of slave life in this world, and giving them the belief that if they were faithful slaves, they would go to a better world when they died. But the slaves were not placated by this, as can be witnessed by the successful slave revolt in Haiti in 1801. Haiti is also generally recognized as the birth place of Voodoo. Although given Christian principles in skeletal form, the slaves appropriated, or syncretized, many aspects of Christianity, including saintly icons as well as Catholic practices which were used in rituals against the slaves' oppressors. Thus, figures such as St. Paul and the Virgin Mary appear as Voodoo fetishes. In Voodoo murals, Catholic symbols and Voodoo symbols appear side by side as positive or negative talismans (Haitian 54-59).

During the great cultivation period of Voodoo in the Caribbean, roughly from 1650 (the beginnings of the forcible removal of West Africans by the Portuguese) to 1800 (the beginnings of the Haitian revolt against France) West Africa itself was undergoing great religious change due to the 1200 years of influence of Islam and the more recently arrived Hinduism. Consequently, Voodoo (Hoodoo is the United States' version) returned to an African religious landscape already greatly altered and different from the original Yoruban landscape it had left behind. Presently, one finds aspects of all of the aforementioned religions, along with icons and practices from each, present in Voodoo. Thus, Voodoo, a religion formed under the pressure of degrading social conditions to give human beings dignity and a connection with helpful supernatural forces, thrives because of its syncretic flexibility; its ability to take anything, even ostensibly negative influences, and transfigure them into that which helps the horse. It is bound by certain dogma or rites, but such rules are easily changed when they become oppressive, myopic, or no longer useful to current situations.

It is this concept of syncretism that Reed turns into a literary method. All aspects which he can borrow from the päróle of längúe are used to positive ends; in other words, any aspects of “standard” English, dialect, slang, argot, neologisms, or rhyming for rhetorical ends, are used. Secondly, Reed effectively uses to great advantage emotive terms from all of these aspects of English. In a key scene in Mumbo Jumbo (1972), The Talking Negro Android, Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, who has educated himself on the writings of Marx and Engels, is saved by his Baptist preacher father from the clutches of the evil Hincle Von Vampton (Carl Van Vetchen). Though Jefferson converses only as bespeaks his training in mid-19th-century polemics, his father from “Rē-mōte,” Mississippi speaks in a combination of King James Bible English and “Black English.” The incongruences of the two types of language, along with the emotive situation, achieves Reed's desired emotive effects: cathartic humor through bathetic constructions, and audience recognition of the folk idiom. Upon seeing Von Vampton and Jefferson applying skin bleacher to Jefferson's face, his father responds:

LAWD! LAWD! LAWD! WE COMES UP HERE TO FETCH THE PRODIGAL SON AND HERE WE IS GOT D WHORES OF BABYLON! LAWD IT'S WORSE THAN I THOUGHT!

The 3, Hubert, Hinckle, and W. W., turn to see a huge man dressed in a black Stetson, Wild Bill Hickok flowing tie and black clergyman outfit and cowboy boots.

PA!!!

The 3 deacons accompanying Rev. Jefferson kneel as Rev. Jefferson stretches his hands toward the heavens.

Lawd we axes you to pray over this boy … mmmmmmmmm an' deliver this child away from these naked womens and sweet black mens. And save his soul from torment … mm.

(162-63)

After stuffing his son into a cotton sack, Rev. Jefferson responds “New Yorkers ain't the only 1s possess a science” (164), evoking John 2:14 (Christ and the money-lenders) as his explanation for beating Von Vampton. But Rev. Jefferson is speaking to justify more than his use of violence. He stipulatively speaks for Reed and justifies Reed's usage of syncretic method as valid literary technique.

The emotive effectiveness and economy of syncretism harkens back to the difference between an oral culture and a literate culture, and the particular origins of the Afro-American oral background. To provide for and elicit emotive response from the listener is of greatest importance to the Afro-American imparter of a narrative. This method springs not only from the African oral culture background of black Americans, but also from the degrading status they have been forced to occupy in American society. As Berndt Ostendorf writes in Black Literature in White America (1982), much of the striving for emotive terms in modern Afro-American writing comes not only from a racial and cultural past, but also a social one as “black oral culture and folklore has been trained for centuries in the art of squeezing a large measure of emotional ‘liberty’ from the enjoyment of the here and now, thus to make the lack of civil and conceptual liberty tolerable” (29). And further, Ostendorf states:

In oral culture performance and style are central, while little attention is paid to textual complexity and discursive logic … in oral cultures semantic ratification is immediate and linguistic invention the norm. They are warm hosts to loan words and breeding grounds for neologisms and slang. They favor performance words over content words, i.e., words with affective rather than cognitive wealth. Echoes of the ‘oral modality’ of black speech are to be found in black poetry even today.

(25-27)

Note in this exchange in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down between Loop Garoo and Zozo, who are discussing the betrayal of Loop by his girlfriend, Black Diane, the disjunction in levels and textures of diction, sentence length, and sentence structure:

I let her open my nose Zozo. I should have known that if she wasn't loyal to him with as big a reputation as he had—I couldn't expect her to revere me. What a line that guy had. A mit man from his soul. And her kissing his feet just because those three drunken reporters were there to record it. Ever read their copy on that event Zozo? It's as if they were all witnessing something entirely different. The very next night she was in my bunk gnashing her teeth and uttering obscenities as I climbed into her skull.

She got to your breathing all right Loop. Even the love potion you asked me to mix didn't work, the follow-me-powder. Her connaissance was as strong as mine.

(12)

Along with the inclusion of a contemporary index which roots the narrative in reality, (“drunken reporters,”) these passages mirror what Reed believes to be general, contemporary discourse structures, even though the characters involved are fantastic and surreal. The euphemistic expressions are not “standard,” but they achieve Reed's intended effect, verisimilitude, because, first, the involved reader in the text knows that contemporary language is not static, is in fact in tremendous flux, and that actual people mix levels of diction constantly to achieve the desired communicative effect; and, secondly, Reed's characters seem more believable because they display their discourse with such seeming ease, comfort, and naturalness. Slang expressions occupy the same paragraph as pollysyllabic, “standard” discourse (“open my nose,” and “got to your breathing,” in conjunction with “revere me” and “uttering obscenities as I climbed into her skull.”)

The historical sense of time in Reed's discourse, based on the African concept of time, is not linear, or diachronic, as diachronicity is commonly discussed in Western terms. Obviously, this is not to say that Africans do not acknowledge the passage of time; but along with this acknowledgement goes a most pointed emphasis on the present, the here-and-now. Dates are not generally ascribed to the past, and in narrative past events overlap with present events. Ostendorf notes that time is “telescoped;” that there is no concept of a future, just the certainty that nothing will bring an end to man's existence. Reed's version of this synchronicity incorporates a future by believing in time as a circle of revolving and re-evolving events, but the past/present concept is certainly maintained in the way characters correspond about past and present matters as though they were simultaneous.

All of Reed's books exhibit dystaxy, i.e., the disruption of linear narrative, but certainly the book which gives the best example of Reed's use of dystaxic, synchronic development in its various forms is Flight to Canada (1976). The “time” of the novel is the antebellum period. But that time period overlaps with the present (1976) through the use of contemporary indices such as language lexicon, cardinal references, and the situational responses of the characters. For example, the characters make long-distance phone calls when in distress; Raven Quickskill, the crafty slave who escapes, joins the lecture circuit and uses a jet to travel through Canada, where he delivers his abolitionist speeches, reads his poetry, and collects his honoraria; Josiah Henson's spirit appears to lambast Harriet Beecher Stowe for stealing from Henson's slave narrative the plot for Uncle Tom's Cabin. Leechfield, another escaped slave, is making a fortune selling photographs of himself with women through an antebellum pornography magazine: “I'll be your slave for the night,” one pictorial caption might read, not unlike the “personal” ads in the Village Voice (a newspaper given its original name, The East Village Other, by Reed).

This overlapping-period, synchronic effect does several important things for Reed. First, it mimics the African oral culture sense of time, an intention of Reed's, and, secondly, and relatedly, it takes the narrative out of the routine, the linear, the dull. And dullness, again, is one of the things Reed's writing is rhetorically against. Thirdly, the narrative structure offers Reed a way to construct historical causes and parallels for present-day events in his attempt to write what he calls “detective” fiction (Martin 180). Reed's Hoodoo term for this is necromancy. Unlike the evil forces in a novel by Dashiell Hammett or J. M. Cain, the villain in Reed's brand of hard-boiled action is usually a myopic system, racist policy, or black-backwardness in the face of oppression, not a gang boss, hopeless drifter, or rich-girl-gone-wrong. There are criminals in Mumbo Jumbo to be sure, but they are, like Hinckle Von Vampton, ones who steal one's sense of self and steal one's soul; only by associated action do they steal one's purse. Lastly, the synchronicity of Reed's narratives roots the books in more of a contemporary reality. That is, contemporary life is fast-paced, each moment filled with several expected responses to several unexpected events, and any number of events important to an individual take place simultaneously. The individual who faces the maddening present without a sense of historical cause, and, thus, without a balm for the madness in its explanation, is not only existential; he or she is lost.

Further, Reed's type of synchronicity takes several simultaneous events, seemingly unrelated, and arranges them so that later they coalesce to further the ends of the plot. His plot structures are archetypes of detective fiction in that they are periodic: details first, main idea, or answer, revealed at the end. This method is taken to Rabelaisian proportions in the final section of Mumbo Jumbo, wherein, the origins of evil and the origins of the “original Afro-American aesthetic” are revealed in a long, detailed, diachronic section which begins with the creation of the world by the Egyptian sky-goddess, Nut, and ends with the Hoodoo priest (houngan) Papa LaBas lecturing to college classes in the 1960's about the powers of Voodoo. Flashbacks also aid in the traditional detective plot and Reed's brand of synchronic development, as they are bits of narrative, interspersed throughout the plot, which are not necessarily interpreted or related together until the end of the novel when the “answer” or culprit is revealed. This also leads to the text's reflexiveness, as the text intermittently turns back upon itself to explain itself.

This narrative self-referentiality is not always so simple to decipher, as all of Reed's novels are readerly texts; he expects the reader to be familiar with past fiction and non-fictional events external to the particular novel at issue. Reed also expects the reader to “make” the text and its implications by way of understanding the narrative games being played. The fact that the 1976 publication of Flight to Canada is a direct response and a counter-blast to the publishing of Alex Haley's Roots, and that both books can be appreciated much better with this knowledge, is something of which Reed expects the interested reader to be aware. Moreover, without a readerly knowledge of historical and contemporary personages, much of the satirical effect of any Reed novel is lost. A part of the cause of oppression, in Reed's scheme of things, is ignorance, and he will not accept ignorance from his readers; thus, an aspect of any Reed novel is didactic. Again, the point of syncretism as a literary method for Reed is that it pulls together from all existing language-level and discourse possibilities those utterances which he feels are most effective in illuminating the fictional situation he has created.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” Trans. Lionel Duisit. New Literary History 7, 2. (Winter 1975): 67-73.

Chesi, Gert. Voodoo: Africa's Secret Power. Austria: Perlinger-Verlag Ges. m.b.II., 1979.

Martin, Reginald. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4:2 (Summer 1984): 176-87.

Ostendorf, Berndt. Black Literature in White America. New Jersey: Noble, 1982.

Reed, Ishmael. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. New York: Doubleday, 1969.

———. Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Avon, 1972.

———. Flight to Canada. New York: Avon, 1976.

Stebich, Ute. Haitian Art. New York: Harry Abrams, 1978.