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America: The Multinational Society by Ismael Reed edited
by Daniela
Gioseffi Featuring Ishmael Reed We are pleased to welcome
one of the finest writers of our time, African/American, Ishmael Reed, poet,
fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor and critic, to the pages of our
first “Guest Spot.” This feature, will appear in ongoing issues of VIA, in a spirit of cross-cultural
intercultural exchange. It will include writers of poetry and prose who,
though part of the American mainstream, offer something special and original
from their ethnic or racial roots. Ishmael Reed’s “America: The Multinational
Society” is chosen as the perfect essay for launching our new multicultural
guest spot, as it expresses the philosophy with which this feature has been
instituted for the pleasure and edification of our readers. To our next issue
we will welcome poetry contributed by Amiri Baraka, one of America’s most
distinguished poet playwrights, along with Leo Connellan, accomplished
American poet, an Irish New Englander of original voice and consummate
endeavor. These writers have helped to forge a Renaissance of writing within
their own sub-cultures even as they have contributed a pioneering originality
to American letters. Ishmael Reed, born 1938, in Chattanooga Tennessee, is a
founding board member of The Before
Columbus Foundation which seeks to promote “ethnic” American literature
and offers The American Book Awards for the advancement of multicultural
literature. Mr. Reed has been a supportive pioneer of the current
intercultural movement within American letters. His work has contributed
greatly to establishing ethnic voices and names in the mainstream of our
culture. A Fellow of Calhoun House, Yale University, 1983, he serves as an
associate editor for The American Book
Review. Reed is a recipient of an award from The National Institute of
Arts and Letters, 1975; The National Endowment for the Arts, 1974; and a
Guggenhiem Fellow, 1975. He has served as a chairman for the Berkeley Council
on the Arts, and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. A major
force in the advancement of African/ American literature, as well as other
ethnic literatures, he has written many astute and controversial novels,
collections of poetry, and essays, among them the highly recommended: Writin’ Is Fightin’ (© 1988 by Ishmael Reed, Atheneum
Publishers, Macmillan, NY), from which America:
The Multinational Society comes. It orginally appeared in San Francisco Focus and has appeared
in Graywolf Annual #5 as well as On Prejudice: A Global Perspective
(edited by Daniela Gioseffi, 1993, Anchor, Doubleday, NY). Among his other
works are Mumbo Jumbo, 1972; The Flight to Canada, 1976; Terrible Twos, 1982; Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon,
1986; Catechism of the Neo-American
Hood Doo Church, 1970; Ishmael
Reed: New and Collected Poems, 1989; and God Made Alaska for the Indians, 1981. He’s a senior lecturer at
The University of California at Berkeley and a member of the language usage
panel of The American Heritage
Dictionary. He is currently editing a collection of essays for a new book
from Addison Wesley, titled We’re All
In This Together? It deals with the continuing struggle to assert the
multinational and inter-racial character of American culture even as the
phrase “P.C.” or “politically correct,” has become a reactionary “put down,”
and an accusatory pejorative used to stop the vital dialogue concerning
issues of racism, sexism, ethnocentricism, and xenophobic monoculturalism. America: The Multinational Society Ishmael
Reed At the annual Lower East
Side Jewish Festival yesterday, a Chinese woman ate a pizza slice in front of
Ty Thuan Duc’s Vietnamese grocery store. Beside her a Spanish-speaking family
patronized a cart with two signs: “Italian Ices” and “Kosher by Rabbi Alper.”
And after the pastrami ran out, everybody ate knishes.—New York Times 23 June 1983 On the day before
Memorial Day, 1983, a poet called me to describe a city he had just visited.
He said that one section included mosques, built by the Islamic people who dwelled
there. Attending his reading, he said, were large numbers of Hispanic people,
forty thousand of whom lived in the same city. He was not talking about a
fabled city located in some mysterious region of the world. The city he’d
visited was Detroit. A few months before,
I was leaving Houston, Texas, I heard it announced on the radio that Texas’s
largest minority was Mexican-American, and though a foundation recently
issued a report critical of bilingual education, the taped voice used to
guide the passengers on the air trams connecting terminals in Dallas Airport
is in both Spanish and English. If the trend continues, a day will come when
it will be difficult to travel through some sections of the country without
hearing commands in both English and Spanish; after all, for some western
states, Spanish was the first written language and the Spanish style lives on
in the western way of life. Shortly after my
Texas trip, I sat in an auditorium located on the campus of the University of
Wisconsin at Milwaukee as a Yale professor—whose original work on the
influence of African cultures upon those of the Americas has led to his
ostracism from some monocultural intellectual circles—walked up and down the
aisle, like an old-time southern evangelist, dancing and drumming the top of
the lectern, illustrating his points before some serious Afro-American
intellectuals and artists who cheered and applauded his performance and his
mastery of information. The professor was “white.” After his lecture, he
joined a group of Milwaukeeans in a conversation. All of the participants
spoke Yoruban, though only the professor had ever traveled to Africa. One of the artists
told me that his paintings, which included African and Afro-American
mythological symbols and imagery, were hanging in the local McDonald’s
restaurant. The next day I went to McDonald’s and snapped pictures of smiling
youngsters eating hamburgers below paintings that could grace the walls of
any of the country’s leading museums. The manager of the local McDonald’s
said, “I don’t know what you boys are doing, but I like it,” as he
commissioned the local painters to exhibit in his restaurant. Such blurring of
cultural styles occurs in everyday life in the United States to a greater
extent than anyone can imagine and is probably more prevalent than the
sensational conflict between people of different backgrounds that is played
up and often encouraged by the media. The result is what the Yale professor,
Robert Thompson, referred to as a cultural bouillabaisse, yet members of the
nation’s present educational and cultural Elect still cling to the notion
that the United States belongs to some vaguely defined entity they refer to
as “Western civilization,” by which they mean, presumably, a civilization
created by the people of Europe, as if Europe can be viewed in monolithic
terms. Is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which includes Turkish marches, a part
of Western civilization, or the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century
French paintings, whose creators were influenced by Japanese art? And what of
the cubists, through whom the influence of African art changed modern
painting, or the surrealists, who were so impressed with the art of the
Pacific Northwest Indians that, in their map of North America, Alaska dwarfs
the lower forty-eight in size? Are the Russians, who
are often criticized for their adoption of “Western” ways by Tsarist
dissidents in exile, members of Western civilization? And what of the
millions of Europeans who have black African and Asian ancestry, black
Africans having occupied several countries for hundreds of years? Are these
“Europeans” members of Western civilization, or the Hungarians, who
originated across the Urals in a place called Greater Hungary, or the Irish,
who came from the Iberian Peninsula? Even the notion that
North America is part of Western civilization because our “system of
government” is derived from Europe is being challenged by native American
historians who say that the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin especially,
were actually influenced by the system of government that had been adopted
by the Iro-quois hundreds of years prior to the arrival of large numbers of
Euro-peans. Western civilization,
then, becomes another confusing category like Third World, or Judeo-Christian
culture, as man attempts to impose his small-screen view of political and
cultural reality upon a complex world. Our most publicized novelist recently
said that Western civilization was the greatest achievement of mankind, an
attitude that flourishes on the street level as scribbles in public restrooms:
“White Power,” “Niggers and Spics Suck,” or “Hitler was a prophet,” the later
being the most telling, for wasn’t’ Adolph Hitler the archetypal
monoculturalist who, in his pigheaded arrogance, believed that one way and
one blood was so pure that it had to be protected from alien strains at all
costs? Where did such an attitude, which has caused so much misery and
depression in our national life, which has tainted even our noblest
achievements, begin? An attitude that caused the incarceration of
Japanese-American citizens during World War II, the persecution of Chicanos
and Chinese-Americans, the near-extermination of the Indians, and the murder
and lynchings of thousands of Afro-Americans. Virtuous, hardworking,
pious, even though they occasionally would wander off after some fancy
clothes, or rendezvous in the woods with the town prostitute, the Puritans
are idealized in our schoolbooks as “a hardy band” of no-nonsense patriarchs
whose discipline razed the forest and brought order to the New World (a term
that annoys Native American historians). Industrious, responsible, it was
their “Yankee ingenuity” and practicality that created the work ethic. They
were simple folk who produced a number of good poets, and they set the tone
for the American writing style, of lean and spare lines, long before
Hemingway. They worshipped in churches whose colors blended in with the New
England snow, churches with simple structures and ornate lecterns. The Puritans were a
daring lot, but they had a mean streak. They hated the theater and banned
Christmas. They punished people in a cruel and inhuman manner. They killed
children who disobeyed their parents. When they came in contact with those
whom they considered heathens or aliens, they behaved in such a bizarre and
irrational manner that this chapter in the American history comes down to us
as a late-movie horror film. They exterminated the Indians, who taught them
how to survive in a world unknown to them, and their encounter with the
calypso culture of Barbados resulted in what the tourist guide in Salem’s
Witches’ house refers to as the Witch-craft Hysteria. The Puritan legacy of
hard work and meticulous accounting led to the establishment of a great
industrial society; it is no wonder that the American industrial revolution
began in Lowell, Massachusetts, but there was the other side, the strange and
paranoid attitudes toward those different from the Elect. The cultural
attitudes of that early Elect continue to be voiced in everyday life in the
United States: the president of a distinguished university, writing a letter
to the Times, belittling the study
of African civilizations; the television network that promoted its show on
the Vatican art with the boast that this art represent “the finest
achievements of the human spirit.” A modern up-tempo state of complex
rhythms that depends upon contacts with an international community can no
longer behave as if it dwelled in a “Zion Wilderness” surrounded by beasts
and pagans. When I heard a
schoolteacher warn the other night about the invasion of the American
educational system by foreign curriculums, I wanted to yell at the television
set, “Lady, they’re already here.” It has already begun because the world is
here. The world has been arriving at these shores for at least ten thousand
years from Europe, Africa, and Asia. In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, large numbers of Europeans arrived, adding their
cultures to those of the European, African, and Asian settlers who were
already here, and recently millions have been entering the country from South
America and the Caribbean, making Yale Professor Bob Thompson’s bouillabaisse
richer and thicker. One of our most
visionary politicians said that he envisioned a time when the United States
could become the brain of the world, by which he meant the repository of all
of the latest advanced information systems. I thought of that remark when an
enterprising poet friend of mine called to say that he had just sold a poem
to a computer magazine and that the editors were delighted to get it because
they didn’t carry fiction or poetry. Is that the kind of world we desire? A
humdrum homogeneous world of all brains and no heart, no fiction, no poetry;
a world of robots with human attendants bereft of imagination, of culture?
Or does North America deserve a more exciting destiny? To become a place
where the cultures of the world crisscross. This is possible because the
United States is unique in the world: The world is here. |