SOURCE: Martin, Reginald. “The FreeLance PallBearer Confronts the Terrible Threes: Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics.” MELUS 14, no. 2 (summer 1987): 35-49.

[In the following essay, Martin surveys the critical reaction to Reed's body of work as well as Reed's attitude toward his critics.]

The only really committed artist is he, who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

—Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners (1945)

Today I feel bearish
I've just climbed out of
A stream with a jerking
Trout in my paw
Anyone who messes with
Me today will be hugged
And dispatched.

—Ishmael Reed, “Untitled,” in A Secretary to the Spirits (1976)

Ishmael Reed's battle with the new black aesthetic critics began early in his career. From the very start, he has disliked being categorized and seems to find it impossible to play the literary game by the rules of others.¹

Clarence Major had said in his Walt Shepperd interview in 1969 that he was not sure if the novel form, as it was then commonly structured and marketed, was “worth saving,” and that he wanted, in the ensuing ten years, to “do something new with the novel as form, and getting rid of that name would be the first step” (Voices 552). As early as 1969, then, Major had seen the need for newness and experimentation under the rubric of the new black aesthetic. Other critics were not to be so expansive and ecumenical.

Reed's first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, did not exactly challenge the constitution of the novel form, itself, but the contemporary indices in the course of the novel certainly changed the reference points of American novels up to that time. Set in a city called HARRY SAM, which is also the name of the villain of the work, the action and plot of the novel rest on the broad concepts of human waste and corruption (Thomas Pynchon dealt with the concept of waste in the same year in The Crying of Lot 49), and is an extended satire on the state of the black artist in American Society circa 1966. HARRY SAM (Richard Nixon?) represents all those things about the society which are crippling to individualistic yearnings different from his own; and the only things which interest HARRY are power and sitting on the toilet, through which he evacuates his waste to poison and stultify the city. Reed's “hero,” Bukka Doopeyduk, wishes to become a “true believing Nazarene” (8), someone with power in the structure of HARRY SAM. When Doopeyduk achieves the mantle of Bishop of the Nazarenes, he is summarily crucified on meathooks and viewed by a television audience, including his mother and father.

But upon the death of Doopeyduk, there is no redemption for him or the other inhabitants of HARRY SAM; in fact, things carry on in a bit more depraved fashion than usual. This sort of satirical flippancy put Reed squarely against those who, as Reed said, wanted all work by black writers to “be one thing.” In his satire of the Crucifixion and the Passion, Reed refutes this connection with the religious foundation of Western literary tradition. Secondly, although the book touches on issues serious to the black community (black mouth-pieces controlled by the white power structure, inadequate housing, the narcotic effect of Christianity on the poor) each issue is satirized. Polemics, so much a part of writing during this period of the new black aesthetic to this point, are gone; or at least, they are transfigured to be humorous as opposed to being only or purely instructional. Since this was his first widely distributed work, it seems to have escaped heated reviews from the new black aesthetic elite, but because Reed was to continue to develop his brand of satire, and because that development turned out to be popular, it was not long before his name began to be mentioned in the criticism of the major black aestheticians, such as Clarence Major in Essence (March 1971), Houston Baker in Black World (Dec. 1972) and Addison Gayle in Contemporary Novelists (1972).

In 1969, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down met with good critical response, which laid the groundwork for numerous reviews of Mumbo Jumbo (1972); indeed, Mumbo Jumbo became a critical debating ground for discussions about the merits or faults of Reed's work. In general, the reviews of Mumbo Jumbo were positive; it was Reed's longest work to date, and it was also the text in which he made the switch from Egyptian symbols and myths to those of the Afro-American aesthetic or “Neo-Hoodoo” aesthetic. It is also his most sustained, illuminative satire, concretizing his stand against things in Western culture which make it oppressive and dull.

One of the most positive reviews of Mumbo Jumbo came from Houston Baker. Writing in the December 1972 issue of Black World, Baker called Mumbo Jumbo “the first Black American novel of the last 10 years that gives one a sense of the broader vision and the careful, painful, and laborious ‘fundamental brainwork’ that are needed if we are to define the eternal dilemma of the Black Arts and work fruitfully toward its melioration” (63). Adding that the novel has a few flaws, Baker ends his review of Mumbo Jumbo by saying that its “overall effect is that of amazing talent and flourishing genius …” (64). This review is typical of the way the new black aestheticians initially regarded Reed. He comes out quite well when mentioned in Gayle's The Way of the New World (1976). But between the Black World review of 1972 and the publication of Baker's review of The Last Days of Louisiana Red, published in numbers 3 and 4, 1975, of The Umnum Newsletter, something has obviously happened to Baker's appreciation of Reed's literary talents. Perhaps the plot line of Louisiana Red, in which the individualistic black, Ed Yellings, is the positive role model, while “militants” and “moochers” (blacks who look to federal or other types of aid) are given extremely negative portrayals, was what offended Baker. He opens his review in this way:

Ishmael Reed is at it again, wolfing, ranking, badmouthing, putting down those who stand in his way of love, harmony, common sense, and the neo-hoodoo way. This time the target is close to home: the liberation struggle of the late sixties and early seventies. Reed gets behind the creative burners and begins to deal. He throws in three or four Black Militants to one portion of old-fashioned Uncle Tomism, adds a few liberated Black women, mixes in a little mafia and organized crime, stirs lightly and ends up with a spicy dish.

(6)

Later, Baker adds:

The novel is too formulaic, relying heavily on the protagonist from Mumbo Jumbo … this is not to imply that Reed has nothing to say in his fourth novel. On the contrary, he has more than enough to say. This is the Swiftian opus, the one that clears out the system by putting down the folly of one's contemporaries and demonstrating how inane their most cherished enterprises are when exposed to the stinging barbs of satire.

Baker asserts that Reed saw in Louisiana Red a chance to “settle old scores.” Here, Baker seems to indicate that Reed was angry at the small amount of commercial success his works had gained, and Reed is at this point, after the critical success of Mumbo Jumbo, criticizing all those whom he may have seen as having limited his stylistic and earning power. After destroying the culture the new black aesthetic critics were trying to help create, Reed, according to Baker, had “reduced its frantic and desperate activities to nonsense. The catharsis secured, he belches loudly, rubs his stomach, and turns to the next promising enterprise” (7). Baker accuses Reed of betraying the very movement which had brought attention to Reed's work. Without the new black aesthetic movement, Baker asserts, there would have been no Ishmael Reed. At the end of the review, Baker hopes that Reed will “turn again to serious satire, i.e., the exposure of the vileness and corruption at the root of the racialistic society” (7).

Reed's response was published in the same volume of the Umnum Newsletter. Under the title of “Hoodoo Manifesto #2 on Criticism: The Baker-Gayle Fallacy,” Reed's kindest remark to Baker is that Baker's review is “unsubstantial.” Reed accuses Baker of being an “educated native priest,” such as those who helped Pizarro destroy the folk art of the Incas. According to Reed, Baker is in no way in touch with what “real black people” are in touch with, because he is Western-academy trained and more interested in fitting in than in correcting inequities. Reed writes:

Mr. Baker wants to be “right on” even if it means defending any wretch, any lout, or tramp who preys upon Afro-Americans, the kind of uncritical indiscriminate thought which has left a segment of a generation in intellectual shambles.

(8)

And later Reed says, “I dare Mr. Baker to enter the faculty lounge at the University of Pennsylvania and dismiss Yeats' mystical theories as ‘spurious.’” (As Baker had called Reed's notion of using aspects of voodoo as parts of a literary method). But Reed reserves his strongest words for the new black aesthetic. He had earlier in his writing called it a “goon squad aesthetics.” At the end of the response to Baker, Reed insists that the new black aesthetic critics be able to understand Afro-American artistic forms:

This means that they will have to (go to the) [sic] woodshed. It means when they speak of an Afro-American writer's “technical flaws,” they must discuss whose “technical” they mean. They will have to abandon those theories which were consciously and subliminally drilled into them or their attempts of creating a “Black Aesthetic” will continue to be beside the point, like someone building a magnificent black Winchester Mystery House with stairs leading to nowhere and doors behind them; and most pitiful of all, built on a great fault.

(11)

Again, the aim here is against the limiting notions, the artistic boundaries of the new black aesthetic. Reed wants the literary artist, black or white, to be free to create with boundaries only of his or her own creation. Then, if the work fails, the artist has only himself or herself, his or her own ability and standards to blame.

For Baker, the terms of the new black aesthetic were more theoretical and helpful than Reed saw them. By 1980, for Baker, the term “black aesthetic” had taken on more of an anthropological and linguistic/cultural bent. Baker wrote in The Journey Back (1980) that one must know well the particular society or culture being examined to understand adequately the manifestations of that society, such as literature. This understanding may start with literature, eventually moving to other aspects of the culture in question. And in his Jerry Ward interview, Baker adopts the formally dreaded term universal as an admissable label for the ways in which human communities perceive. He says that insofar as the term is used in a non-pejorative sense to address the similar ways in which cultures develop, he has no objection to the term's usage. Baker goes on to say:

And to the extent that there are these trans-regional essential similarities in our culture, in Afro-American culture, whatever serious inquiries in aesthetics we make are going to have similarities. That is, the inquiries into the aesthetics, the Afro-American aesthetics, of Mississippi are going to connect, in my mind, persuasively with the aesthetics of Afro-America growing out of Philadelphia. They're going to connect more closely than they would with, say, the aesthetics growing out of Aspen, Colorado, and a colony of white poets. So that's my assumption. But I believe that to the extent that black scholars are provocative, brilliant, successful in their analyses, their findings are going to be claimed as evidence of universals, as proof that all “human” communities perceive in essentially the same ways.

(57)

Baker had been of a double-mind about Reed before (he published another review of Louisiana Red in Black World, June 1975, which praised some parts of the work and which was certainly not as virulently against Reed as his earlier review had been.) Perhaps that is indicative of the way Reed initially struck the new black aesthetic critics—Reed leaves them not quite sure of what he is doing or where he stands. In any event, Reed's insistence upon doing exactly what he wished to do would put him squarely against any sort of formalistic critical structure.

After calling Reed “perhaps the best black satirist since George Schyuler” in The Way of the New World, Addison Gayle turns upon him in the same year in a strongly-worded review of Flight to Canada, which had also been published in 1976. Gayle criticizes Reed severely for the structure of Flight to Canada, as well as his handling of black male-female relationships. Gayle cites a flippancy about serious gender relations, as well as a “ridiculous” notion of collusion between black women and white men against black men, as some of the reasons he is displeased with Flight to Canada. In the winter volume of Black Books Bulletin (1976), Gayle had written that Reed was an “anomaly, and if much of his fiction, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Flight to Canada, proves anything, it is that Black women have no monopoly on demons, real or imaginative” (51). Gayle calls Reed the “victim of the myths of others,” and, after posing the question of whether blacks should be compassionate enough to call back to the fold of black brotherhood writers such as Reed, Gayle ends his review with this peroration:

This writer has no such compassion, will join in no appeals to lure the prodigals back to the fold. At this juncture of history the battle lines are being drawn, wherever Black people are, in Africa, the Caribbean, South America, the United States, and one must choose for himself which side of that line he stands on. No, my compassion is not to be wasted upon writers, who, after all, must take responsibility for what they write.

(51)

Reed was quick to respond. 1978 saw the publication of essays and interviews, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, in which Reed begins to call by name his staunchest critics and enumerate their criticism of him in their works. Reed writes that Gayle, in the pages of Black World had said that “there is too much hedonism going on,” and that “Black World thought it a simple matter of white faces being white racists. It should be so easy. Like Pogo said: ‘We have met the enemy and they is us’” (“Hate” 285). In the same essay, “You Can't Be a Literary Magazine and Hate Writers,” Reed calls Houston Baker “a slithering critical mugger,” who “based an entire review of my book The Last Days of Louisiana Red upon where he thought I lived in Berkeley. Not only was the review illiterate, but he was too lazy even to check the telephone directory” (284). It is also in this essay that Reed labels Gayle the “Witchfinder General,” and in the text of the speech, “Harlem Renaissance Day,” Reed says,

Some sullen, humorless critics of the Black Aesthetic movement seem to have long since abandoned rational argument and take their lead from Addison Gayle, Jr., who at the conclusion of his careless new book, The Way of the New World, recommends the machine-gunning of those who disagree with him, surely a sign of intellectual insecurity.

(297)

A literary Banana Republic approach to things by those who've forgotten that the mainstream aspiration of Afro-Americans is for more freedom, and not slavery—including freedom of artistic expression.

Perhaps the civil rights movement lost its steam because people noticed that blacks weren't practicing civil rights among themselves. Apostles of the Black Aesthetic held “Writers' Conferences,” which served as tribunals where those writers who didn't hew the line were ridiculed, scorned, mocked, and threatened. The ringleader, Addison Gayle, Jr., a professor at Bernard Baruch College, argues that the aim of black writing should be to make “black men feel better,” as if we didn't have enough Disneylands.

(298)

And in three interviews published in 1978, Reed makes it clear that two of the main causes of his dissatisfaction with the literary world are Gayle and Baker. In his interview in Conversations with Writers II, Reed calls Gayle and Baker “black opportunists in the English departments” who had been set up by liberal critics to keep Afro-American writers in check by imposing rigid guidelines for what would be considered acceptable writing by blacks (219). In his interview with The American Poetry Review, Reed says that the Manhattan literary and dramatic establishment has propped up and speaks through “tokens, like for example that old notion of the one black writer, the one black ideologist (who's usually a Communist), the one black poetess (who's usually a feminist lesbian)” (33). A third interview in Black American Literature Forum gives the other important bases, aside from the limiting critical boundaries, for Reed's disapproval of the black aesthetic critics as the critics' interest in “meally-mouthedness” and their attempts at making things seem orderly and “serene” when in fact they are not (16).

Amiri Baraka had already written in his essay “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature’” (1962) that “A Negro literature, to be a legitimate product of the Negro experience in America, must get at that experience in exactly the terms America has proposed for it in its most ruthless identity,” and that the Negro, as an element of American culture, was “completely misunderstood by Americans” (196). Thus, his rigidity in the face of any novelistic method which did not coalesce with his notion of the “Negro experience” was already stated five years before Reed's first novel would see print. And another comment, which would pit Baraka squarely against Reed, who was according to critics an advocate of the black middle class, was Baraka's own polemic against a black middle class. In discussing why, in his opinion, there was so little black literature of merit, Baraka said,

… in most cases the Negroes who found themselves in a position to pursue some art, especially the art of literature, have been members of the Negro middle class, a group that has always gone out of its way to cultivate any mediocrity, as long as that mediocrity was guaranteed to prove to America, and recently to the world at large, that they were not really who they were, i.e., Negroes.

(Aesthetic 191)

Baraka wrote that as long as the Negro writer was obsessed with being accepted, middle class, he would never be able to “tell it like it is,” and, thus, would always be a failure, because America made room only for white obfuscators, not black ones.

After Baraka formally announced that he was a socialist, no longer a black nationalist, and with some different goals (1974), his guidelines for valid black writing changed, but his new requirements, though with a slightly different emphasis (liberation of all classes, races, genders) and a slightly different First Cause (Monopoly Capitalism), were as rigid as his prior requirements. Writing in his autobiography (1984) of his change from black nationalist to socialist, Baraka says:

But we made the same errors Fanon and Cabral laid out, if we had but read them, understood them. Because the cultural nationalism, atavism, male chauvinism, bourgeois lies painted black, feudal dead things, blown up nigger balloons to toy around with. I would say the Nation of Islam and the Yoruba Temple were the heavist [sic] carriers of this, the petty bourgeois confusing fantasy again with reality. The old sickness of religion—all the traps we did not understand. Crying blackness and for all the strength and goodness of that, not understanding the normal contradictions and the specific foolishness of white-hating black nationalism. The solution is not to become the enemy in blackface, that's what one of the black intellectual's problems was in the first place. And even hating whites, being what the white-baiting black nationalist is, might seem justifiable but it is still a supremacy game. The solution is revolution. We thought it meant killing white folks. But it is a system that's got to be killed and it's even twisted some blacks. It's hurt all of us.

(Autobiography 323)

Baraka, as did Gayle in Wayward Child, sees certain black writers as disrupting the essential and beautiful Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Baraka calls these writers, as was said of Booker T. Washington, “capitulationists,” and says their movement was simultaneous with and counter to the Black Arts Movement. Baraka feels that the simultaneity was no accident. In his long essay “Afro-American Literature and the Class Struggle,” in Black American Literature Forum (1982), Baraka, for the first time, makes several strong, personal attacks on Reed, and also attacks other black writers whom he feels fit into the capitulationist mold. And, again, Baraka echoes Gayle in his belief that the ground-breakers in the Black Arts Movement (as regards the social values to be embodied in literature read, new black aesthetic) were doing something which was new, needed, useful, and black, and those who did not want to see such a flourishing of black expression appeared to damage the movement.

Naming Reed and Calvin Hernton as “conservative,” Baraka writes:

Yes, the tide was so strong that even some of the “conservatives” wrote work that took the people's side. (The metaphysical slide [sic] of the BAM even allowed Reed to adopt a rebellious tone with his “Black Power Poem” and “Sermonette” in catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church, 1970, in which he saw the struggle of Blacks against national oppression as a struggle between two churches: e.g., “may the best church win. shake hands now and come/out conjuring.” But even during the heat and heart of the BAM, Reed would call that very upsurge and the BAM “a goon squad aesthetic” and say that the revolutionary writers were “fascists” or that the taking up of African culture by Black artists indicated such artists were “tribalists.”)

(8)

Much of the labeling of Reed as a conservative and a “house nigger” begins with the publication of his 1974 novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red, in which, as I briefly noted before, a group of people Reed labels as “moochers” loiter around Ed Yellings, a black small-business owner who is making active efforts to earn a living and who, through voodoo, finds a cure for cancer in the process. Critics interpreted “the moochers” as being stipulative of some of the black aesthetic group. Reed, in the course of the novel, explains moochers this way:

Moochers are people who, when they are to blame, say it's the other fellow's fault for bringing it up. Moochers don't return stuff they borrow. Moochers ask you to share when they have nothing to share. Moochers kill their enemies like the South American insect kills its foe by squirting it with its own blood. God, do they suffer. “Look at all of the suffering I'm going through because of you.” Moochers talk and don't do. You should hear them just the same. Moochers tell other people what to do. Men moochers blame everything on women. Women moochers blame everything on men. Old moochers say it's the young's fault; young Moochers say the old messed up the world they have to live in. Moochers play sick a lot. Moochers think it's real hip not to be able to read and write. Like Joan of Arc, the archwitch, they boast of not knowing A from B.

(20-21)

This passage was seen as callous and unfeeling toward the disadvantaged. Relatedly, The Last Days of Louisiana Red contains figures who do little more than emphasize Reed's definition of moochers, and who continually re-enact negative black stereotypes. Ed Yellings, the industrious black, is killed by moocher conspirators. Does this mean that blacks will turn against what Reed believes to be the good in their own communities? Ed Yellings is a business owner, a property owner, and this station puts him in opposition to the platform of Baraka. Attacking both Ralph Ellison and Reed in the same section of the Black American Literature Forum article, Baraka quotes Ellison as saying:

“After all I did see my grandaddy and he was no beaten-down ‘Sambo.’ Rather he owned property (Baraka's emphasis), engaged in Reconstruction politics of South Carolina, and who stood up to a mob after they had lynched his best friend … I also knew one of his friends who, after years of operating a printing business for a white man, came north and set up his own printing shop in Harlem.”

Does this mean that everybody who didn't own property or become a small politician was “a beaten down ‘Sambo’”? Ishmael Reed and Stanley Crouch both make the same kind of rah-rah speeches for the Black middle class. Reed, in fact, says that those of us who uphold Black working people are backwards (see Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, pp. 136-37) or as he says, “the field nigger got all the play in the '60s.” Focus on the middle class, the property owners and music teachers, not the black masses Ellison tells us. This is the Roots crowd giving us a history of the BLM [Black Liberation Movement] as a rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger tale in brownface, going off into the sunset and straight for Carter's cabinet or the National Book Award. No, slavery was not as bad for the house-Negroes, nor is national oppression as grim for the petty bourgeoisie—not bad at all for the tiny bribed element among us. But for most of us it is hell, and we want it destroyed!

(10)

Baraka also sets up a dichotomy for a “white aesthetic” and a “black aesthetic,” but while defining the two, one would assume toward the end of endorsing one or the other, Baraka shows only the failings of each and discusses his points of divergence from “the Black Aesthetic Crowd.”

In Baraka's dichotomy, the “white aesthetic is bourgeois art—like the ‘national interests’ of the U.S. at this late date when the U.S. is an imperialistic superpower” (9). Immediately following this excerpt, Baraka seems to defend the black aesthetic group over Ellison's negative criticism of them. Baraka writes that Ellison says of the black aesthetic crowd that they “buy the idea of total cultural separation between blacks and whites, suggesting that we've been left out of the mainstream. But when we examine American music and literature in terms of its themes, symbolism, rhythms, tonalities, idioms, and images it is obvious that those rejected ‘Negroes’ have been a vital part of the mainstream and were from the beginning” (9). Baraka then writes, “We know we have been exploited, Mr. Ralph, sir; what we's arguing about is that we's been exploited! To use us is the term of stay in this joint …” (9). Baraka writes that he takes issue with the “comfortable commentator” used with his own permission who seeks “no connection with the mass pain except to get rich and famous off it.” (9)

Baraka's point is that it makes no difference if the corrupt personage is black; the issue is still corruption, and it is a double insult to the oppressed when that corrupt one turns out to be black. (Ironically, this is one of Reed's themes in The Free-Lance Pallbearers.) But it is at that point that Baraka separates himself from others in the new black aesthetic movement:

Where I differ with the bourgeois nationalists who are identified with the “Black Aesthetic” is illuminated by a statement of Addison Gayle's: “An aesthetic based upon economic and class determinism is one which has minimal value for Black people. For Black writers and critics the starting point must be the proposition that the history of Black people in America is the history of the struggle against racism” (“Blueprint for Black Criticism,” First World, [Jan-Feb 1977], 43). But what is the basis for racism; i.e., exploitation because of one's physical characteristics? Does it drop out of the sky? Is it, as Welsing and others suggest, some metaphysical racial archetype, the same way the white racists claim that “Black inferiority” is? Black people suffer from national oppression: We are an oppressed nation, a nation oppressed by U.S. imperialism. Racism is an even more demonic aspect of this national oppression, since the oppressed nationality is identifiable anywhere as that, regardless of class.

(10)

Baraka reminds the reader that his disagreement with the new black aesthetic elite is not to say that there is no such thing as a black aesthetic, but that his conception of a black aesthetic manifests itself in his definition of it differently than it does for others. For him it is “a nation within a nation” that was brought about by the “big bourgeoisie on Wall Street, who after the Civil War completely dominated U.S. politics and economics, controlled the ex-planters, and turned them into their compradors” (10).

After explaining his important divergence from the black aesthetic elite, Baraka attacks Reed and the quality of his work. He calls Reed an “arsehole” and says that his comments are “straight out agentry,” and, significantly, he claims that Reed and those who agree with him have their own aesthetic, one of “capitulation” and “garbage.” Baraka writes:

Recently, the bourgeoisie has been pushing Ishmael Reed very hard, and to see why let's look at his most recent book, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. In essay after essay Reed stumps for individualism, and asserts ubiquitously that the leadership of Black folks is the Black middle class, rather than the working class, …

(11-12)

Baraka takes other writers to task whom he feels have made money and fame on the Black Arts Movement, but who have turned viciously on the true meaning of that movement. Michael Harper is called “rhythmless”; Michelle Wallace gets things wrong about the Black Liberation Movement because she “wasn't there and doesn't know,” and, thus, she “takes the side of our oppressors.” Ntozake Shange “deals in effects but not causes,” which results in “one-sidedness and lack of information.” Correspondingly, there are writers whom Baraka feels uphold his aesthetic standards, such as Sonia Sanchez in I Been a Woman, and Henry Dumas in “Will the Circle Remain Unbroken,” and Toni Morrison in Sula and The Bluest Eye (16).

Toward the end of his article, Baraka says that the “main line” of his argument has been that “class struggle is as much a part of the arts as it is any place else” (14). His pleas and support are reserved for those artists who are “struggle oriented,” those who are trying to “get even clearer on the meaning of class stand, attitude, audience, and study, and their relationship to our work” (14). And, thus, Baraka's argument is epanaleptic, as it turns back upon the same core of arguments of the other black aestheticians he has said he is in disagreement with; those arguments forming a complete circle with Baraka's stated premise that black literature, black art must do something materially positive to help black people. Art must be socially functional.

Reed responded in letters to Black American Literature Forum, and in an interview conducted in 1983, Reed called Baraka's charges “irresponsible,” “scurrilous,” and “outrageous” (Martin 184). He asserts that Baraka is one of the “romantic” heroes of the left, and that the left supports him for that reason (1986). Further, Reed accuses the new black aesthetic critics of their own brand of capitulation; i.e., a division of labor and resultant capital from the tacit agreement not to infringe on each other's critical territory. Reed says:

I think there was a nonaggression pact signed between the traditional liberal critics and the black aesthetic critics. They were brought into the publishing companies about the same time I was … But the black aesthetic crowd came in and writers were required to conform to their Marxist blueprints. But that's happened to Afro-American artists throughout history.

(183)

And, of course, Reed continues to insist that he is not against a black aesthetic or a black way of doing things; it is simply that, the way he sees it, censorship cannot be a part of the black aesthetic, an aesthetic which is intrinsically against critical limitation and is by nature racially syncretic.

Thus, Reed will not admit to being an “anomaly,” a “spurious writer,” or a “capitulationist,” in the terms of Gayle, Baker, or Baraka. In Reed's work, white villains and crimes against oppressed people are shown in just as poor a light as they are in the works of his severest critics. In The Terrible Twos (1982), white businessmen have called a meeting to discuss the danger to their Santa Claus Plan. Big Business decides that they could corner the Christmas market if there were just one official Santa Claus. But before that scheme can be hatched, the upsurge of colored peoples' independence must be taken care of (54). But it seems that even with a peace treaty signed between the major “white” countries, the darker peoples of the world still will not learn their place and are doing ridiculous things every day such as demanding decent housing, free education for their children, and enough food to eat. This is Reed's jab at “monopoly capitalism.” But unlike his critics, there is often a healthy dose of black villains in his work as well, such as the “talking Negro Android” in Mumbo Jumbo, and the Amos and Andy moochers of Louisiana Red.

As I have pointed out, the major points of disagreement between Reed and the key new black aesthetic critics are thematic, philosophical, and programmatic. Baker cannot condone Reed's use of negative black characters in Louisiana Red and Flight to Canada. The only truly negative black character to the aestheticians is the traitor to black causes; admittedly, causes whose validity is established by the aestheticians themselves. Gayle accuses Reed of constructing themes which are frivolous and backward, as in Mumbo Jumbo, or which substitute one harmful set of myths for another, as in Flight to Canada. To Baraka, Reed's approach to the serious problems which still face black Americans is flippant, traitorous, and his use of satire is an escape method for not naming the true cause of distress in the world: capitalist exploitation. And Baraka admits that there are those who would say that there may be errors in Baraka's judgments about Reed, since Baraka, himself, has said that he has been wrong before. To these critics, Baraka writes: “People always say, ‘Well what's Baraka doing now? he keep on changing.’ I am a Marxist-Leninist, because that is the most scientific approach to making revolution. But for a long time most of y'all knew I wanted to be a revolutionary. I'm still committed to change, complete social change. We just got to get back on it” (“Afro” 14).

Recently, Reed has tried to get away entirely from the notion of “aesthetics.” He calls the “black aesthetic thing … a northern urban, academic movement—that's why you have a fancy word like aesthetic which nobody figures out. When you come to talk about standards of taste, everyone differs” (Martin 187). Certainly, the major new black aestheticians never adapted their own critical boundaries enough to admit Reed into their circles of critical acceptance; and Reed shows no signs of reining in authorial methods which keep him on the outside of these boundaries. Yet, between these two opposites, one senses on the parts of both Reed and his critics, a lack of intended opposition and animosity, as though the two sides are being only what they intrinsically are, living out their artistic desires in the only ways they can, finding that, a priori, their methods for constructing a new black aesthetic cannot be fused together. On the part of the new black aestheticians, one senses that they saw their purposes as essential and higher than structural arguments may have led some to view their movement. It was a chance for black intellectuals to lay groundwork for a kind of literature and study of literature that had not before been done; a chance to influence a younger generation of writers—white as well as black—toward more than one standard. From all the heat and confusion, and genius, must have come some good. Perhaps Baraka sums up the idea best toward the end of his autobiography when he writes:

But even in that tradition, that dumb thrall, we built some actual things, we laid out a process of learning. For the close readers. We did step through madness and bullshit. But we were not just full-of-shit-tourists. We did take the city away from the lowest level, and if the next level is sickening, the task is of a higher order, and its solution is the current day's work. Are we up to it, anyone, anywhere? Of course, is the roared refrain.

(326)

Note

1. Baraka's own footnote on this term warrants quotation, as it is a sterling example of his search for exactness in diction and a perfect example of his particular kind of rhetoric:

   Capitulationist here equals general submission to the U.S. status quo of Black national oppression and racism; “Tom” would spell it out in classic Black cultural terms. I also use the scientific term comprador, which means literally an agent of the oppressor nation (in this case, a Black agent); “house nigger” we have traditionally called them, with some accuracy.

   (Black American Literature Forum 14)

Works Cited

Baker, Houston. “Books Noted.” Black World. (December 1982): 63.

———. “The Last Days of Louisiana Red—A Review.” Umnum Newsletter 4, 3-4 (1975): 6.

———. The Journey Back. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Baraka, Amiri. Raise, Race, Rays, Rage: Essays since 1965. New York: Random, 1971.

———. “What the Arts Need Now.” Negro Digest (Winter 1967): 43.

———. “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle.” Black American Literature Forum 14, 1 (1980): 37-43.

———. The Autobiography. New York: Freundlich, 1984.

Domini, John. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed.” The American Poetry Review.

Gayle, Addison. The Black Aesthetic. New York: Doubleday, 1971.

———. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. New York: Doubleday, 1976.

———. “Black Women and Black Men: The Literature of Catharsis.” Black Books Bulletin 4 (1976): 48-52.

———. Wayward Child: A Personal Odyssey. New York: Doubleday, 1977.

Gover, Roger. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed.” Black American Literature Forum 12 (1978): 12-19.

Jones, Leroi. “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature.’” Black Expression: Essays by and about Black Americans in the Creative Arts. Ed. Addison Gayle. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969.

Martin, Reginald. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4, 2 (Summer 1984): 176-187.

Northouse, Cameron. “Ishmael Reed.” Conversations with Writers II. Ed. Richard Layman, et al. New York: Gale Research Co., 1978.

O'Brien, John. “Ishmael Reed.” The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Ed. Joe David Bellamy. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1975.

Reed, Ishmael. The Free-Lance Pallbearers. New York: Bard, 1967.

———. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. New York: Bantam, 1969.

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

———. “Hoodoo Manifesto #2: The Baker-Gayle Fallacy.” Umnum Newsletter 4, 3-4 (1975): 8.

———. A Secretary to the Spirits. London: BOK, 1976.

———. “You Can't Be a Literary Magazine and Hate Writers.” Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. New York: Avon, 1978.

———. The Terrible Twos. New York: McGraw, 1959.

Shepperd, Walter. “An Interview with Clarence Major and Victor Hernandez Cruz.” New Black Voices. Ed. Abraham Chapman. New York: Mentor, 1972: 545.