636
JEROME KLiNKOWITZ
Western civilization has had an idea of what black men are...." John A.
Williams discusses how he has "an inclination to do to the novel what Charlie
Parker did to jazz," to improvise upon the old forms and create new mean–
ings. For Al Young's fiction and for his poetry as well, "the dance is the most
dramatic and satisfying image for what's really going on in creation," the
perfect metaphor "to describe the natural movement of my own life." Most of
all, the new black artist is a shaman: "his language can change things, if only
by changing the way one other person looks at 'reality.' Poets should alert
people to the fact that they have imaginations." The novelist Charles Wright
"creates a fictional world in order to make something real," even as reality
in
The Messenger
and
The Wig
and in his journalistic
Absolutely Nothing to Get
Alarmed About
"keeps outstripping the imagination." If it seems a hassle
to
keep up with the more inventive experimenters, realize that they are having a
hard time keeping up themselves, with us.
The leading spokesman for the new style of black writing has been Ish–
mael Reed, and his dialogue with John O'Brien offers the most articulate
defense of his own innovative fictions and those of his colleagues. "I think that
the Western novel is tied to Western epistemology, the way people in the West
look at the world"; on the contrary, he sees his own books "as amulets, and in
ancient African cultures words were considered in this way. Words were
considered to have magical meanings and were considered to be charms." But
Reed does not carry this Africanism too far; he is preeminently an American
writer, and it is by purely American criteria that he wishes to bejudged. To
L.
E. Sissman, who ranked his novels short of Emily Bronte's, Reed replies,
"This is the kind of confusion and ignorance that you have prevailing in the
American critical establishment. A man comparing my work-I grew up in
Buffalo, ew York, an American town-comparing it with a woman writer of
nineteenth-century England who was involved with different problems and a
different culture."
It
is interesting to learn that
The Free-Lance Pallbearers
"actu–
ally started out as a political satire on Newark. It was going to be a naturalistic,
journalistic, political novel. But as it went through draft after draft, the style I
thought was mine came back and I developed it." That personal style is the
result of studying Americana in the Bancroft Library, but also from the native
absorption of vaudeville, comic-strips, and tv: ·"I've watched television all my
life and I think my way of editing, the speed I bring to my books, is based
upon some of the television shows and cartoons I've seen, the way they edit.
Look at a late movie that was made in 1947-people become bored because
there was a slower tempo in those times." Most of all, Ishmael Reed sees
himself as a modern American conjure man. "What it comes down to is that
you let the social realists go after the flatfoots out there on the beat and we'll
go after the Pope and see which action causes a revolution. We are mystical
detectives about
to
make an arrest."
