[In the following essay, Abel offers a critical reading of Reed's poem “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra.”]

Ishmael Reed's poem “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra” turns on a series of elaborate puns and allusions that all reinforce the central idea that the old (black) god Ra is about to reclaim his throne and his power over men. In addition, Reed's marriage of “popular culture” imagery with figures from Egyptian mythology produces an offspring with some startling independent features.

Ra, the sun god and creator of men, was variously portrayed as a baby who grew older each day and was reborn the next, and later as a rider in a boat who traveled across the sky. In this poem, Ra appears momentarily as a cowboy riding in the traditional boat, but his true identity remains unrecognized. The first five stanzas explain Ra's rise and fall, the sixth and seventh stanzas suggest his present “underground” activities and his growing strength, and the last stanzas give us Ra preparing to do battle with Set (Ra's brother who was so evil that he ripped himself from his mother's womb) who has usurped him for so long. The organization of the poem itself suggests the birth-death-rebirth cycle of the Isis-Osiris myth in which Ra was ritualistically torn to shreds (Sparagmos) and sown in the barren, winter ground so that the soil would become fertilized and nature (and Ra himself) renewed. The irony that the god of rebirth is also the god of death is stressed by Reed in stanza 6, lines 6-8, where he suggests that virgin “sacrifice” is a necessary ingredient in Ra's regeneration.

In stanza 1, sidewinders means “evil men” in the jargon of the old movie Westerns, but it also conjures images of Cleopatra's asp and what was a rather classic Egyptian death ritual. The saloon of fools suggests a sodden variation of the classic “ship of fools” theme and at the same time reveals that Ra's view of the affairs of men is rather cynical and removed: we are not only crazy and at the mercy of a remote god, but blind drunk as well. That our Egyptologists, our supposed experts, “do not know their trips” in one sense means they do not know where they are going, but in another “popular” sense means they do not know the effects their drugs and medicines will have upon them. This is in contrast to Ra himself who (in stanza 8) “hold[s] the souls of men in [his] pot,” where pot suggests both the ritual vessel which held the ashes of the deceased and marijuana which may imbue the present god with marvelous powers of imagining. In their ignorance, the Egyptologists drive the true god from town, and to the question “Who was that / dog-faced man?” I suspect we should answer “The Lone Ranger.” (Compare “Radio” in stanza 10).

Stanza 2 reveals that the true divinity and its various manifestations are invisible to modern man. “School marms with halitosis”—perhaps tourists—“cannot see” either the artifacts of the past for what they are (fakes mutilated by Germans in their African campaign), or the divine symbols of the present. Sonny Rollins, a forceful jazz tenor saxophone player, appears as one of Ra's royalty, and the Field of Reeds has possible triple reference to the field on the banks of the Nile (where Moses was found and where a longhorn now replaces the water buffalo), to the “reeds” of the saxophone, and to the “Reed” who authors the poem, all of which stand as evidence of Ra's continuing life and strength for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

That Ra is a black god becomes increasingly evident in the next two stanzas. Isis is “Lady of the Bugaloo”—the bugaloo being what amounts to the ritual dance of black Americans—and Ra thinks of himself as the black middleweight boxing champion of the 1950's, Ezzard Charles, one of the few fighters to make a successful comeback in the ring. The command to Isis to “start grabbing the / blue” means both to “reach for the sky” and “grab the blue cloth” which symbolized Egyptian royalty. Thus she is not only a victim of Ra's lust, but is also blessed because of it. That Ra is “Alchemist in ringmanship but a / sucker for the right cross” means not only that his boxing has a weakness but also that his talismanic rings were no match for the symbols of Christianity. In the fifth stanza, Ra makes it plain that he has been ousted from his temple and that “outlaw alias copped my stance”—the forces of evil have robbed him of his throne and place.

The next three stanzas include a number of allusions which emphasize that Ra's return to power will be the return of a black god and the black people. The “motown long plays” written for “the comeback of Osiris” are long-playing records from a popular Detroit “soul” record producer; but “long plays” also hints at prolonged seduction (“play” in street parlance) quite appropriate to the god of fertility and potency. In stanza 7, “the Loup Garou Kid” (Lone Wolf Kid) alludes to the black outlaw of Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down who is the perpetual thorn in the Establishment's side. The most definite assertions of Ra's blackness come in stanza 8 in which he dresses for war with Set in “black powder” (suggestive of “black power” and “gunpowder”) and “black feathers” and asks for the bones of the Ju-Ju snake (Ju-Ju being a principal African tribal religion in which the bones of the Ju-Ju snake are cast to make prophecies and worn to ward off evil spirits). One of the allusions which does not imply racial identification directly (“Pope Joan of the / Ptah Ra”) nevertheless suggests both the exclusion of blacks from power (Pope Joan was a card game in which one of the cards was removed) and that Ra this time will appear as Ptah, protector of artists and artisans, a manifestation that obviously gives poets like Reed a great deal to benefit from. When Ra says that he “makes the bulls / keep still” he refers in one way to himself as a cowhand watching the herd, but in another sense he means that he keeps the police (“bulls”) at bay. There is a final non-racial allusion in Ra's claim to be “Half-breed son of Pisces / And Aquarius” which is an extravagant way (assuming that this is the age of Aquarius) of saying he feels like a fish out of water. Pisces is the eleventh astrological sign and Aquarius is the twelfth or last sign, which strongly intimates that a new beginning is close at hand.

The last stanza throws the cowboy and Indian chase, the battle between good and evil, into the heavens, where we may expect events to transpire with the speed of constellations, that is, with maddening slowness after all.