Reed, 2015. “Combative Writing has always been our tradition, even when we try to avoid it.”

I met Ishmael Reed at the Bowery Hotel, in New York, where he was staying for a ­couple of nights with his wife, the dancer and educator Carla Blank, and his daughter, the poet Tennessee Reed. In the novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Reed’s most acclaimed work, black artists spread “Jes Grew,” a virus of freedom and polytheism and ­improvised expression that overthrows a repressive status quo. Reed, gray hair swept to the side, eyes constantly darting around, restless with ideas and mischief, has become Jes Grew personified. His own groundbreaking literary output over six decades, in multiple languages and every form—essays, fiction, poetry, film, even editorial cartoons—has infected a generation of artists. His work as an institution builder, anthologist, and publisher has spread the work of hundreds of writers from outside the literary mainstream—students, black folks, immigrants, working-class writers, avant-garde experimentalists, and every member of his immediate family. Tennessee and Carla are both published authors, as is Timothy, Reed’s elder daughter. Reed’s late mother, too, wrote a memoir, called Black Girl from Tannery Flats. 

Reed’s present trip to New York, from his home base in Oakland, was a quick stopover on his way to Venice, where he was to receive the Alberto Dubito International Prize for his poetry. In his acceptance speech for the award, he would talk movingly about the tradition of black writing, “the kind of writing that I called ‘writing is fighting,’ a term that I borrowed from the boxer Muhammad Ali,” and of his hero Dante, another fighting writer who paid a price for his iconoclasm. The award was a reminder that poetry, as a form and sensibility, is the thread woven through everything he’s produced, from blues lyrics and a gospel opera to his collage-like fiction.

Despite his deep generosity and his pioneering work in defining an ­inclusive American aesthetic, Reed’s literary combativeness over the years—his clashes with certain feminist critics are the best known, but his list of targets and antagonists is long—has made him, in his words, a writer in exile. When I walked into his hotel room, the mood was quickly set by the bright, bickering figures on his television screen—a cable-news program on Donald Trump. Reed sat in a darker corner of the room shaking his head at the farcical scene and allowing a deep, sly laugh. Over the hours we talked, I occasionally tried to steer the conversation to questions of style and technique, but Reed parried those questions and instead returned, again and again, to politics, history, the fate of America and the world, and his battle fronts, still raging.

—Chris Jackson

INTERVIEWER

Let’s start with something elementary. What is the first poem you remember reading?  

REED

You know, I didn’t really start reading poetry until I started going to the University of Buffalo, where I spent two and a half years. Before that, I spent a semester in the night-school division of the university, Millard Fillmore College. I may have read T. S. Eliot, maybe some of the modernists. I read some Langston Hughes in the newspapers. The Simple series. I read some things in high school, routine stuff—Edgar Allan Poe and all that. They didn’t introduce us to a single black author. But I really didn’t start reading poetry until I started at the university. The university was like a trade school for me. Matter of fact, I stayed too long, because within two years I had all the tools necessary to make a modest income as a writer. 

INTERVIEWER

Did you enter university thinking that that was what you wanted to do, to be a writer?

REED

When I went to grammar school in Buffalo, I got mostly negative reviews from the white women teachers—these teachers would say such terrible things about my behavior that I was ashamed to take their report cards home. I had only one black teacher during my whole education, a woman named Hortense Butts. She encouraged me and gave me tickets to concerts. Called upon me to play Christmas carols on the violin. I used to get beaten up by black women and white women. I was an equal-opportunity target. In first grade, I was slapped so hard by one white teacher my mother took me out of school. In eighth grade, I was assaulted by a woman teacher. She had a Victorian style. It was because I had a fistfight with her teacher’s pet, who called me a rat in front of the class. I thought to myself, How do I gain this woman’s affection? Because I wanted to be liked. That was my whole thing. I was someone who wanted people to like me—I still am.

INTERVIEWER

And how did you win her favor? 

REED

She told me that the greatest thing in the world for me would be to be a tech man. She told me I should go to the technical high school. So I did. I was totally unequipped. I got Fs. We had a thing in woodshop where the first ­assignment was to make a box to put your tools in—I never got beyond that. I spent most of the time in the band room playing the trombone and the violin. 

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever get the box done?

REED

No, I didn’t, because I was afraid of those electric saws. So I transferred to a traditional high school, and that year I went on a trip to Paris, sponsored by the Michigan Avenue Y in Buffalo, for a Bible-study thing. That trip changed my life. 

INTERVIEWER

How?

REED

On the plane to Paris, I read in this guidebook that there was a place in Paris called Pigalle where you could see “acres and acres of breasts.” A few days later, that’s exactly where I went and before the day was over I was at a table with a big old bottle of champagne in front me—me and a couple of hip white boys from Long Island. And we woke up there the next morning, too, at that same table. In Paris, I met Africans for the first time. All I knew of Africa before was what I’d seen in the movies and the textbooks here in the United States, but these Africans were students and intellectuals studying at the Sorbonne. I thought, I have been lied to. Not one had a bone in his nose. I think that was when I began to challenge everything I was being taught. One day, one of my high school teachers asked me to be part of a delegation that was going to meet Eleanor Roosevelt. I said, No, because I’m not going to be here. What can you all teach me? I had been in Paris, man, wearing my fake glasses and talking about existentialism, even though I was mispronouncing the word. When I came back to Buffalo, I dropped out of school. I was seventeen. My plan was to stay home and read plays but my mother said, You’ve got to get a job, so I worked at a library and that’s where I first read James Baldwin. I think it was Notes of a Native Son. It stopped me cold. I had never seen a black guy that could do this. When I was a child, I thought literature was written by lords and knights and stuff. You know, these people living in these great estates wearing beautiful clothes. Baldwin showed me something different. Then I discovered Dante, man. That really turned me on. My parents thought I had lost my mind. I would go up to the attic of our house in Buffalo and play a recording of John Ciardi’s Inferno while I followed along with the book. I read Dante and realized how much power a writer could have. A writer could put people in hell who weren’t even dead yet. I loved James Joyce, too, and really studied his work—at the library I would listen to proceedings of the James Joyce Society. I especially loved Dubliners. Nathanael West was another favorite, A Cool Million. I had never seen satire and nonlinear writing like West did—he was creating collages—and that influenced me. I still write that way. I wrote a short story in night school that was a mix of Joyce and Nathanael West. My teacher ­responded very strongly to the story, and they offered me a full scholarship to day school at the University of Buffalo. I didn’t receive the full scholarship because my stepfather wouldn’t sign a statement of his assets.

INTERVIEWER

Why not?

REED

“These white folks want to know all my business.” I liked my stepfather, I loved him. But there was just a gap between us. He was semiliterate and grew up in the South. Southern blacks were always getting finagled out of their assets by con artists. This still happens. Since 1979 I’ve lived in Oakland’s ­inner city, where we’re bombarded by mail and phone by predators who want to lure us into shady transactions. Anyway, I didn’t get the scholarship, but I didn’t really need it. I borrowed money to enter day school. After a year and a half, I had read Yeats, I had read Pound, and I had already read Joyce. I had studied enough to steer me to what I wanted to do in writing. My ideas for Neo-HooDooism were inspired by those Irish writers and their Celtic Revival. I discovered Pound’s ideas about multiculturalism, which influenced me, although I think I’ve gone beyond him because I’ve studied Japanese. I get my characters right. He didn’t. And he was a fascist, but I’m talking about his writing. Yeats’s anticolonial literature was another important discovery for me. What we ended up doing in the sixties was to revolt against the colonial masters. You see colonialism in the fifties generation of writers, in Baldwin, in Ellison. They talk about their masters and influences—Baldwin, who was a great writer, a great writer, always mentioned Henry James and Dickens. Ellison and those guys, they mention Hemingway. There was an abrupt departure from those sources in the sixties, when black writers start reflecting the influence of Malcolm X. And then we went off into all kinds of directions. Some black writers went into Arabic and African languages. I went into folklore, looking for examples of African religions surviving the slave trade. I called this Neo-HooDooism. Nobody told us about this but it was all right there, underground. 

INTERVIEWER

So those writers gave you some ideas about drawing from alternative sources, but did they also help you think about your style on the page? 

REED

Yes, and so did W. H. Auden. I still have that sort of spare style. I was also very much influenced by George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” where he advocated that you refrain from flamboyant language.

INTERVIEWER

What appealed to you about that kind of clean, clear writing? 

REED

It’s like Miles, man. Somebody said that Miles didn’t have the chops of Coltrane, who was a scholar, but Miles and Louis Armstrong went for the tone. You hear some of these guys playing like they’re getting paid by the note. Miles was very disciplined, very smart. Spare. Kind of Blue is a minimalist masterpiece. That was my style, too, right up to today. 

INTERVIEWER

What was the black community like in Buffalo back then? Was there a literary scene? Were other people reading Baldwin?

REED

Yes, our circle included Lucille Clifton, who had performed in Baldwin’s play The Amen Corner when she was a student at Howard. She went on to win a National Book Award. At the time, she was raising a family and writing on the weekends. She was crazy about Emily Dickinson. I introduced her to her husband, Fred Clifton, who, next to Malcolm X, was the brightest person I’ve ever met. There was my late friend Carl Tillman, who was writing novels in high school, and the classics professor Philip Wooby, who won a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, and Teddy Jackson, who introduced me to the works of Camus and Sartre. 

INTERVIEWER

You met Malcolm X in Buffalo in 1961? 

REED

Yes, I worked with Joe Walker, a young man who put out the Buffalo Empire Star, the city’s black paper. We had a radio program and interviewed Malcolm when he came to town in 1961. The radio station thought we were too friendly toward him and his point of view, so we got fired. Malcolm took Joe to New York and Joe became an editor of Muhammad Speaks. When I went to New York, I’d sometimes talk with Malcolm. I even wrote a terrible poem about him called “Fanfare for an Avenging Angel.” It was so bad I threw it away. But Malcolm X complimented the poem. He said it reminded him of Dante and Virgil. Back then we thought the Nation of Islam was ­going to go south and kick ass, eliminate the Klan, and all that. But they were nonconfrontational. It was King who was the militant. 

INTERVIEWER

What did you do when you got to New York?

REED

I went to meetings of the Umbra collective, on East Second Street. We were surrounded by geniuses back then, people like Lorenzo Thomas. He was aligned with the white avant-garde and straddled these worlds—white avant-garde, black nationalism. And then there was Norman Pritchard, who was chanting and doing this rhythmic jazz, but he died mysteriously. And Calvin Hernton—I later published two of his books. I publish these guys’ books and don’t sell them because I just like to keep them. Amiri Baraka, of course—I published his book of cartoons and a play. David Henderson, who later wrote a biography of Jimi Hendrix, was also a member. I met a lot of ­painters and writers and musicians. I’d go out of the house for the newspaper in the morning and return at four a.m. I’d run into Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Joe Overstreet—we knew all those people. That was New York. 

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned Umbra, the radical writers’ collective. A lot of these people were part of it. What was Umbra like when you joined? 

REED

It was already factionalized. The poet Askia Touré, who was then Roland Snellings, was leading the black-nationalist faction, which was a first for me. Because we were very green in Buffalo about political movements, I had always thought nationalism was something that Italians had or other Europeans had. I had never heard of any black nationalism, even though it’s been around since the 1900s. And then there was an integrationist faction. The two sides were irreconcilable. For one mad moment, I was caught up in over-the-cliff extremism. It was the poet Joe Johnson and his girlfriend at the time, Cathy Rogers, who talked me down from the ledge. When the four children were bombed at the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, black intellectuals were hurt deeply. No matter how much our poetry had a militant pose, we realized that we didn’t have the firepower to take on our enemies. We turned on each other.

INTERVIEWER

Did you think of yourself as being close to the Beats, like Baraka and Ted Joans? 

REED

I read the Beats and took some influence from some of them—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. Members of Umbra read with Ginsberg and Amiri in 1964 at Columbia University. But by then I was reading mostly black literature. We had a different reading list than the Beat writers did. I also learned I had to get out of New York because it had become too distracting. 

INTERVIEWER

What distracted you? 

REED

New York was possessed of that old European idea of respecting or even revering the writer or the artist. I mean, if you were black in those days, you could get by with one poem or one novel. If I had remained in New York, I would’ve been killed by an overdose of affection. By 1974, after I published The Last Days of Louisiana Red, I was a token in waiting. Later on, Saturday Review even suggested I was the next Negro Whisperer, whose job is to tell whites what those drums mean. I wrote to Saturday Review declining the honor. It’s like somebody putting a target on your back. As an editor, I’ve found that black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American talent is common. I’ve read thousands of manuscripts, put them in my magazines, anthologies. But anyway, I left New York because I couldn’t be their token, hanging out with Norman Mailer, having Leonard Bernstein invite me to write the text for his Mass, appearing with Robert Lowell at Town Hall, getting cussed out by a drunken Ralph Ellison in front of a bunch of great artists. I said, I’m going to go to the most barbaric place in the United States. So Carla and I went to Los Angeles. 

INTERVIEWER

At the time did you feel drawn to the nationalist camp, as opposed to the idea of multiculturalism?

REED

I broke with nationalism when people started taking seriously Elijah Muhammad’s idea of Yakub—that the white man was a devil, not even ­human. Baraka wrote a play about Yakub. Askia Touré had by then converted Amiri to nationalism, and whenever you’d see him he’d be in African garb. I always said you could tell the state of the political avant-garde by how Amiri dressed. When he had a seersucker suit, he was an integrationist. Then he put on robes and became a nationalist. Then he discarded that and went to jeans and became a communist. But back then he was always in the robes. Of course, he was also still coming downtown.

INTERVIEWER

I know you and Baraka had an up-and-down relationship through the years.

REED

He had an up-and-down relationship with everybody. He was like Sugar Ray Leonard. He’d kill you in the ring, but outside the ring he’d be the nicest guy. I never stopped having an active correspondence with Amiri—as a matter of fact, I published him up until a few months before his death.

INTERVIEWER

What did you think of him as a writer?

REED

He was a great writer. As I’ve said before, Amiri did for English syntax what Monk did for chords. Both were into original inversions. And now that he’s dead they’re recommending his book for a Christmas gift. The New York Times hated him. Then they recommended SOS for Christmas. 

INTERVIEWER

It just goes to show, it’s never too late to be a token. So, you left New York, and at some point you went down to New Orleans, and this is where you immersed yourself in voodoo culture.

REED

I had a tourist’s idea of voodoo. I think in my generation most black ­people grew up in families where people whispered about a religion as old as Christianity. I was naturally curious. My first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, plays with the idea, jokes about it. My second novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, shows the influence of Haitian mythology and religion, which I’d started to study, and I put some of those themes and characters in there. In my next novel, Mumbo Jumbo, I went as far as I could in using the Haitian spiritual idea. Years before, I went to Nigeria and began to study Yoruba. I discovered that this religion ranks with Islam and Christianity as a world religion. Oshun, one of the children of the Yoruba god Olódùmarè, is celebrated every year in Atlanta, in Nigeria, and in Brazil. So this is a worldwide religion. But I’m not a religious person. I’ve always been skeptical of religion. And some people get carried away. I know of a Dutch woman who read Mumbo Jumbo and then went to Haiti and became a priest, and now she’s got some religion going on in the Netherlands. That’s happened. But to me it was about something different—Mumbo Jumbo connected to the idea we had in the sixties, that we had to find new mythologies. Like the Irish reviving Celtic culture, we had to go deeper into our own culture. We were in a colonial situation where we were treated like good natives if we got the catechism of colonialism correct, and we wanted to get far away from that. Then I wrote Japanese by Spring because I thought that if I ever wrote another book in English exclusively, I would have to quit.