ON THE AESTHETIC LEGACY OF I S H M A E L R E E D : CONTEMPORARY REASSESSMENTS

EDITED BY SÄMI LUDWIG

W O R L D P A R A D E B O O K S

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 5 by Sämi Ludwig (Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse) and Paul Tayyar (Golden West College, Huntington Beach, CA) Ishmael Reed: Fifty-Eight Years of Boxing on Paper 14 by Wendy Hayes-Jones (Swansea Metropolitan University) “We Have No Leaders Holy Men or Gurus”: � 28 The Carnivalesque as an Egalitarian Alternative in Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Johannes Fehrle (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) Antigone’s Myth and Ishmael Reed’s 60 The Last Day of Louisiana Red by Nadine Chappalley (Université de Fribourg) Getting Trapped in the Textual Wonderland Conjured by 72 Ishmael Reed in “Beware: Do Not Read This Poem” by Régine Margraff And Caroline Mosser (Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse) Ishmael Reed’s Jazz Aesthetics: �Placing Reed Within a 84 Rhythm, Blues, and Jazz Poetic Tradition by Elizabeth Spies (University of California, Riverside) Rethinking Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo: 107 A Neo-Hoodoo Womanist Text? by Kameelah Martin Samuel (University of Houston) The Depiction Of Women In �Ishmael Reed’s 128 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Veronika Trachsel (Université de Fribourg)

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Ishmael Reed, the Sentimental Heathen; �or: 137 Why Humans are More Important Than the Gods by Sämi Ludwig (Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse) Decolonization, (Post) Postmodernism and Syncretism � 159 in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo by Crystal Boson (University of Kansas) “I Enjoy Writing Fiction, But I Write Non-Fiction Out Of Anger”� 180 An Interview With Ishmael Reed by Paul Tayyar (Golden West College, Huntington Beach, CA) Born Dead (J.B. Lenoir) 188 by Laurence Pierrepont & Soundcircus (Jocelyn Bonnerave, Pierre Carsalade, Laurence De Cock, François Lorin, Alexandre Pierrepont & Romain Tesler) “You Have to Know Way Too Much?”: 204 Teaching Ishmael Reed in the University Classroom by Kalenda Eaton (Arcadia University) One Ori is Better Than Two: 223 �Issues of African-American Community, Identity, and Spirituality in Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring by Alison C. Rollins (Temple University) When “The Media Get Juiced”—A Review of Juice! (2011) 239 by Sämi Ludwig (Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse)

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“WE HAVE NO LEADERS HOLY MEN OR GURUS”: � THE CARNIVALESQUE AS AN EGALITARIAN ALTER-NATIVE IN ISHMAEL REED’S YELLOW BACK RADIO BROKE-DOWN1 by Johannes Fehrle (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) Completed in June 1968 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (YBRBD) quite clearly criticizes the American society of this era. It com-ments on the then ongoing Vietnam War, as Todd Tietchen and others have shown, and on the often racist, hostile, and ignorant society Black Americans were still facing in the late 1960s—the considerable successes of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements notwithstanding. The novel’s political con-cerns about its contemporaneous society are emphasized by temporally conflating 1960s America with a 19th century myth-ical West, primarily through the introduction of technological gadgets: helicopters, TVs, etc. Reed would return to this tech-nique of ‘temporal melt-down’ in his 1976 neo-slave narrative Flight to Canada, which also deals with racist continuities, among other things. A definitive grounding in a 1960s Black political envi-ronment notwithstanding, the novel has in many respects re-tained an astonishing up-to-dateness. A speech held by the sheriff after Drag’s cutthroats have executed the children of Yellow Back Radio, for instance, bears an almost eerie resem-blance to US foreign politics after 9/11: “Boys … thought you might want to know that the middle aged of Yellow Back Ra-dio voted to commend you for saving the town from them kids who had it under siege. Didn’t even need the Preacher and his hazel wand this time. Just talked fast and said freedom every three words” (51). Apart from such gems, the novel speaks most

                                                                                                               1 As always, I would first and foremost like to thank Kerstin Müller for her

helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank the editors for their comments and suggestions.

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powerfully to the 21st century reader through its egalitarian beliefs and conceptions. Through these it gains a universality and timelessness which transcends its immediate historical basis, making it an enjoyable and worthwhile reading for a white, European, 21st century critic with no personal connections to 1960s Black politics. To develop its egalitarian vision, the novel contrasts the eclectic concept of Neo-Hoodoo, the politics and aesthetics of which both Reed and his protagonist, the Loop Garoo Kid, develop throughout the novel, with the Manichean thought patterns of the Kid’s antagonists.2 Despite its anger

                                                                                                               2 Despite the general thrust in Reed’s work to uncover and ridicule op-

pressive structures and thought patterns, there is one aspect which will not be discussed in my reading, but which needs to be at least briefly mentioned: as so often in Reed’s work, women are not equal parts of his egalitarian world. As Michele Wallace writes:

[A]lthough Neo-Hoodoo, as it occurs in Reed’s poetry, fiction, and essays, rejects the stifling duality and reification of Western ration-alism in order to question the automatic devaluation of the black male, as well as other nonwhite males […,] it does not confront the preeminent social instance of binary opposition: gender role. (183)

Indeed, all women in YBRBD are either manish, threatening and unsa-vory like Drag’s zombie wife or the big-talking, moose-hunting Big Lizzy, or sexually omnivorous and untrustworthy like Back Diane/Mustache Sal/Mary, the mail-order bride, threatening the Black male, Loop. The only exception to this rule is Zozo Labrique, who dies very early in the novel. While feminists have criticized Reed for a long time (not infre-quently without actually reading him), YBRBD’s male gender roles are equally problematic. As Patrick McGee writes, Reed “appears to share with [the Black Power and Black Arts movement] an overprivileging of masculinity as the signifier of political freedom” (69). In YBRBD this means that while Loop and Chief Showcase shine through their sexual prowess, their opponents are portrayed as effeminate “sissies,” impotent, homosexual or both, who spend their time either crying or ogling at the ethnic “super-lovers.” This characterization of Drag (whose ranch is called the Purple Bar-B), Doompussy and others suggests “both gender bias and homophobia,” as Todd Tietchen has pointed out, and “risks reproducing the bias against homosexuality present in the classic West-ern [Reed] hopes to critique” (338). Unfortunately YBRBD does not es-cape the gender troubles of Reed’s writings which has often threatened to obscure not only the many positive aspects of his work, but also Reed’s personal involvement in publishing, his community and his pat-

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and radicalism, the novel does not, however, develop Black politics in a direction where slitting the throats of all White people is the only possibility, as proclaimed four years earlier by Clay in Amiri Baraka’s drama Dutchman (1964). Instead YBRBD distrusts all monoglossic and generalizing concepts, whether ‘white’ or ‘black,’ juxtaposing them with the reli-gion/magic/philosophy/groove/way of life of Neo-Hoodoo, which, although essentially black in origin, unlike similar white institutions does not exclude others on account of their race, as one of the novel’s opening ‘quotations’ (most likely one of Reed’s own invention) makes clear:

America … is just like a turkey. It’s got white meat and it’s got dark meat. They is different, but they is both important to the turkey. I figure the turkey has more white meat than dark meat, but that don’t make any difference. Both have nerves running through ‘em. I guess Hoo-Doo is a sort of nerve that runs mostly in the dark meat, but sometimes gets into the white meat, too. (YBRBD 5, my emphasis)

This is not to suggest that Reed is not first and foremost an African American radical; in 1971 Nick Aaron Ford called Reed the “most revolutionary black novelist who has appeared in print thus far” (216), and indeed Ford might be correct in this respect: Reed is indeed more radical and revolutionary than a great number of his contemporaries. In fact, what makes Reed so radical when compared with his contemporaries is his

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         ronage of both male and female writers. I wish to point the interested reader to Patrick McGee’s more general examination of women and gender roles in Reed’s work in his Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race, 46 ff. and 58ff. What makes McGee’s account more valuable than many is his obvious appreciation of Reed’s prose and his simultaneous uneasiness about the treatment of gender issues in Reed’s novels. Rather than ac-cepting the easy answer of condemning Reed straight out as a misogynist whose work should be avoided, McGee explores and tries to understand the gender aspects in Reed’s fiction.

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wide and differentiated understanding of race and social posi-tion in his writing. As Patrick McGee points out: “For Reed, ‘blackness’ is a dimension of a larger cultural process or for-mation that he sometimes identifies as multiculturalism” (10). And later: “For Reed, the term ‘Afro-American’ is less an eth-nic marker than a political one which entitles the subject to align him- or herself with a formation that is international and multicultural” (24).

Starting from this understanding of Reed’s ‘Black art,’ I want to approach Reed’s work, focusing on YBRBD but also refer to ideas and aspects expressed more clearly in Reed’s oth-er works, his novels, poetry, and essays, to work out a more programmatic understanding of his concept of resistance, a concept which many of Reed’s early works develop. Through-out this article I will then try to work out the philosophical and/or cultural implications of Reed’s texts, approaching Reed’s work as possessing a serious center, although one brought forth in a mocking and often parodic and grotesque manner. This particular combination is essential to the novel’s objective and, as Bakhtin has shown in his examination of the “history of laughter,” often at the heart of subversive humor:

True ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter puri-fies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petri-fied; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naïveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from senti-mentality. Laughter does not permit seriousness to at-rophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness. Such is the function of laughter in the historical development of culture and literature. (Rabelais 122 f.)

Any reading of the sometimes silly, sometimes adolescent, and often hilarious elements in Reed’s writing with the serious tone

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of academic discourse, must obscure not only—as scholarly literature not infrequently does—part of what makes Reed’s work worth reading (the author’s sometimes strange, often straightforward, and bawdy humor), but also occasionally result in what seems like unintentional comedy on the critic’s part, a predicament Robert Murray Davis has expressed in his article: “Giving a plot summary of this kind of book [YBRBD] is a sure way to sound like an idiot at best and a pedant at worst” (412).

The main focus of my reading of the novel’s underlying ideology will be the idea of multiculturalism and the mistrust of monologic meta-narratives, as expressed in Reed’s concept of Neo-Hoodooism. Although I want to focus primarily on Neo-Hoodoo as a political and metaphysical system, Neo-Hoodoo is also closely reflected in Reed’s formal approach to writing from YBRBD onwards. It is thus almost impossible to pin Reed’s writing down to one clear position. Even within the same novel, trickster characters like Chief Showcase or the Loop Garoo Kid change positions as easily as other characters change their speech patterns; elements of the plot are taken up again and reused, altered or dropped as the novel progresses. This makes any given reading of the novel for a clearly defined ideology problematic, as the novel continually slips away, if only in points of detail, from any particular reading. In the following I nevertheless want to suggest one possible reading, while at-tempting not to gloss over the breaking points provided by the novel.

Furthermore, I will discuss Reed’s writing and politics in YBRBD as expressions of a popular counter-culture undermin-ing serious hegemonic discourses, standing in a grotesque and carnivalesque folk tradition which Mikhail Bakhtin describes in his Rabelais and His World. A number of critics have pointed out that Neo-Hoodooism is a concept with similarities to Bakthin’s thoughts as expressed in his The Dialogic Imagination (cf. Ludwig “Dialogic”; Tàbori), however, to my knowledge only Kathryn

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Hume has commented on the novel’s proximity to Bakhtin’s thoughts in Rabelais and his World: “[M]uch of what Bakhtin says about the carnivalesque in the medieval world bears Reed out” (Hume 510). Unfortunately Hume does not further pursue this thought. While Reed’s writing obviously does not adhere in every detail to what Bakhtin describes in his exploration of Re-naissance “grotesque realism,” a Bakhtinian reading can point to some of the aspects and functions of Reed’s own way of un-dermining dominant ideologies.

Whereas for Bakhtin the carnivalesque is primarily the product of a subversive folk culture, New Historicists have pointed out its functions as a social stabilizing force resulting ultimately in a preservation of power relations within a domi-nant system (cf. Volkmann). While ridicule is indeed always subversive to a degree, as Bakhtin argues, laughter is not neces-sarily the same as resistance: laughing at a thing does not au-tomatically overcome it. In contrast to the caveats brought up by New Historicist critics and Bakhtin’s own assessment of Rabelais’s grotesque realism as bearing a strong element of death and rebirth, Reed adopts a more directly oppositional approach, striving more clearly for a radical replacement of an old system.3 Reading YBRBD in light of Bakhtin’s examination of the carnivalesque furthermore serves to link Reed’s writing to folk culture, a connection which is often not adequately re-flected in the examination of Reed’s Vodoun roots, considering that Vodoun itself is after all a tradition with strong roots in (Black) folk traditions.4                                                                                                                3 Cf. for instance, Bakhtin: “Medieval parody, especially before the twelfth

century, was not concerned with the negative, the imperfection of specif-ic cults, ecclesiastic orders, or scholars which could be the object of deri-sion and destruction. For the medieval parodist everything without ex-ception was comic” (Rabelais 84). Reed on the other hand is very much interested in using parody as a political weapon, even if it is a parody in-formed by an understanding of the grotesque.

4 It seems customary for critics to put a footnote here and explain their use of Voodoo, Vodoun, Vodou etc. and these words’ various problems,

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Reed himself touches on the carnivalesque in the title es-say of his collection Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, in which he links Mardi Gras to Vodoun:

[Like Vodoun] Mardi Gras is also of ancient origins, when it was a celebration involving fornication, self-castration, human sacrifice, and flagellation with goat-skin whips. Therefore, it’s appropriate that it takes place in the South, where, in a former time, whipping was the chief entertainment. Mardi Gras is polytheistic, just as Vodoun is; it involves drumming and dancing as in Vodoun; both ‘religions’ include ritual masking and cos-tuming. Heathen and Christian rites blend. (11)

Reed sees Mardi Gras as a carnivalesque institution, one he is clearly fascinated by, while, at the same time, dismissing its current form as influenced in large parts by what he calls a “Confederate” ideology. There remain some truly carni-valesque tendencies in Mardi Gras, however: “Mardi Gras is the one American art I have witnessed in which the audience doesn’t sit intimidated or wait for the critics to tell them what to see. The Mardi Gras audience talks back to the performers instead of sitting there like dummies, and can even participate in the action” (32). This observation rings strongly with a cen-

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         negative, neutral or other implications. In this paper I will use Vodoun to refer to the traditional (Haitian) Voodoo/Vodoun practices, which Reed draws on, while using (Neo-)Hoodoo(ism) (a word whose spelling varies widely within Reed’s work) to describe Reed’s postmodern varia-tion of this folk religion and its actualization in his writing. “Hoodoo,” claims Reed, “might be called Vodoun streamlined” (Shrovetide 10), yet what Helen Lock writes seems more historically accurate:

When Voodoo arrived in the southern United States, it became HooDoo: Voodoo in a diluted form, still operating under a Catholic ‘front.’ In Ishmael Reed’s hands it became Neo-HooDoo, a rediscov-ery of the fundamental Voodoo aesthetic translated into a specifically North American context. Neo-HooDoo retains the subversive func-tion of Voodoo culture, but in literary rather than primarily visual terms. (69)

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tral aspect of the carnivalesque Bakhtin stresses: the anarchic obliteration of the borders between the carnival and regular life, which, according to Bakhtin, ceases for the duration of the fes-tivities:

Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Car-nival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embrac-es all the people. While carnival lasts there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a uni-versal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. (Rabelais 7)

Just as the carnival undermines the seriousness of the outside world, Vodoun, Reed argues, undermines the “Confederate” attempts to police Mardi Gras through a technique which now would be described as “mimicry” in Postcolonial discourse:

… the Zulu parade involves an ancient African-American survival form. Adopting the oppressor’s par-ody of themselves and evolving, from this, an art form with its own laws. I call this process loa-making. If the whites had their king, Rex; we had our King, Zulu, a savage from the jungle like you say he is. While you’re laughing at us we’re laughing with you but the joke’s on you. (29)

In YBRBD Reed uses a similar technique to hijack the Western, a genre traditionally associated not only with conservative ide-ology but also with whiteness.

Whereas many of the attacks on the genre, starting with the novel’s title (discussed by Fabre 22), are parodic in nature, the novel starts out by developing a positive alternative to an oppressive Western society. The opening pages of YBRBD pre-

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sent two alternative societal concepts: a circus and, in a thinly disguised reference to the hippies, a city taken over by children, who have chased away all the adults because, as they say, they were tired of marching for them (a reference to America marching its children off to the Vietnam War). Both the circus and the ‘liberated’ town are described as nonhierarchical, al-ternative societies: “[W]e have no leaders holy men or gurus either,” Jake the Barker tells the children (YBRBD 18). Only the circus, however, provides a truly egalitarian alternative to socie-ty, akin to the one Bakhthin associates with the carnival. A true lack of hierarchy only exists in the circus, where all members jointly reach a decision, living, in truly carnivalesque fashion, “outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 255). While this is also an ideal the children aspire to, there are a number of crucial differences between the circus, which pre-sents an alternative to the hierarchical system that Drag and the other ‘adults’ in Yellow Back Radio stand for, and the chil-dren. Whereas the kids are neither taken seriously by the novel nor by their opponents, the circus poses a threat to the stability of the community from the beginning, as evidenced in the murder of their advance man. Despite the fact that the circus has been invited by “Mister Happy Times,” a pseudonym Drag Gibson uses to “divert the kids so’s we could ambush them” (YBRBD 20), Drag’s cowboys rightfully identify the circus as dangerous “heathens” (20) when they first encounter the ad-vance man. “Heathen” in Reed’s understanding stands in con-trast to Christianity (explored below) and thus takes on a posi-tive connotation in the novel, but certainly not for Drag’s cow-boys. The lack of authenticity the children suffer from, in con-trast, can already be seen in the charade of their attempts to dress “in the attire of the Plains Indians.” While the black pro-tagonist, the Loop Garoo Kid, enjoys a true connection to his Native American counterpart Chief Showcase, the hippies end

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up looking “as if cows had shucked and their skins passed to the children’s nakedness” (15). What is more, the children have a “spokesman,” who, as one of the children complains and in spite of the supposed rejection of all authority they stand for, constantly tries “to be the leader just like those old people we ran into the hills” (18).

The novel’s representation of the children, and thus im-plicitly of the hippies and rebelling students of the 1960s, is—while it is not entirely unsympathetic—ultimately devastating. Their incompetence not only destroys themselves but also the circus, the novel’s first symbol of Black resistance. Although the children are aware of Drag’s plans to attack (having been warned by Chief Showcase), they fail to remain on guard, be-ing distracted not only by the circus, as Drag had planned, but brought down by their own hubris. “We think they’re prepar-ing to launch some kind of invasion but we’re ready for them,” one child claims (17), but nothing could be further from the truth: shortly thereafter a massacre ensues from which only a few of the children escape, only to return towards the end of the novel enthralled by the idea of the “anarchotechnological paradise” promised by the Seven Cities of Cibola (24), a fantasy that turns out to be a “really garish smaltzy” place represented by a “Chicken Delight” truck (170). The egalitarian principle the children claim to pursue thus drowns in the grease of the postmodern (understood here in Frederic Jameson’s sense as “late Capitalist”) promise of a consumer culture in which oth-ers do the work for you.

The idea of egalitarianism in the circus, on the other hand, remains mostly unimpaired.5 Looking at their organiza-tion and internal dynamics, one is indeed reminded of Bakh-                                                                                                                5 Once again Reed’s skepticism against easy solutions and monocultural

idealizations manifests itself. Not only is it suggested that the circus is on-ly a temporary formation, soon to disband, Jake the Barker, a member of the circus, is the first to fall for the promise of the Seven Cities of Ci-bola (see below).

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tin’s idea of the carnival. As Bakhtin explains, “all were consid-ered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profes-sion, and age” (10). Not only does the circus not have leaders or “gurus,” its members furthermore connect without the quarrel and power struggles the children’s supposedly ‘liberated’ society suffers from.

More importantly, however, the ideals of the carnival govern not only the social interaction within the circus, which only exists for the briefest period of the novel, but those of Hoodoo, which Loop learns from Zozo Labrique, a “charter member of the American Hoo-Doo church” (10). Zozo not only gives Loop the mad dog’s tooth, which later makes him invincible to Drag’s attempts to capture him, but also teaches him about the secrets of Hoodoo, “the gris gris, the mojo, the wangols” (26). Like the dialogic novel and the carnival, the concept of Neo-Hoodooism incorporates influences from nu-merous sources and discourses and distrusts essentialist (in Bakhtin’s words, “monologic”) claims to one truth, making it central to the novel’s egalitarian vision. As in the carnival, a “free and familiar contact” is at play in Hoodoo between the various elements incorporated into the system, as Reed ex-plains in his “catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church” and other poems:

DO YR ART D WAY U WANT ANYWAY U WANT ANY WANGOL U WANT ITS UP TO U/ WHAT WILL WORK FOR U.

so sez d neoamerican hoodoo church of free spirits who need no monarch

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no gunghoguru no busybody ray frm d headahopper planet of wide black hats & stickpins. … (Conjure 41-42).6

In YBRBD this mix of sources is evident throughout the book: not only is the novel itself a Hoodoo Western with strong ele-ments of a black vernacular, science fiction elements, and ama-zons who mysteriously show up and vanish after the novel’s climactic destruction of the oppressive forces, “prefer[ing] their own thing” (175), Loop also wildly combines elements, “scat-ting arbitrarily” and “improvising as he goes along” (154). Loop combines his mad dog’s tooth with an incantation of the “Black Hawk American Indian houngan of Hoo-Doo” (64); his personal loa is Judas Iscariot, “the hero who put the finger on the devil” [i.e. denounced Jesus Christ] (61), and so on. As a Reedian houngan (Hoodoo priest) Loop thus employs what Reed has throughout his work held up as the main strength of Hoodoo: its flexibility. This strength is exemplified not only by the “women priests [who] name Loa after their boyfriends” (153) but finds its expression elsewhere in the figure of Julia Jackson, who “make[s] all [her] own stuff. It saves money and it’s as good. People who has to buy their stuff ain’t using their heads” (Reed, Conjure 21).

Like the carnival, Hoodoo combines all sorts of non-official discourses, making it subversive and ultimately impossi-ble to pin down. Hence what Patrick McGee writes about the setup of Reed’s first novel The Free-Lance Pallbearers similarly applies to the setup of YBRBD and specifically the concept of Hoodoo and its antagonists:

… the symbolic father of the nation [Uncle Sam, as HARRY SAM in The Free-Lance Pallbearers] and the state

                                                                                                               6 The close connection between art, life and hoodoo is expressed in

Reed’s “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto”: “Neo-HooDoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest” (Conjure 21).

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that he embodies cannot tolerate difference, as a chal-lenge to authority because difference discloses the ‘NOTHIN’ which is ME,’ the void at the heart of any social norm. The uncontrollable difference of ‘what ain’t like us’ forces into consciousness the vulnerability of the sovereign subject, which finds its autonomy threatened and its morality exposed. (19-20)

Both Loop and the novel itself laugh at the seriousness of their opponents, the hegemonic discourses of the Western world. When Loop dresses as a cowboy, but wears black buckskin with pink fringes (81), he ridicules the serious cowboy as a national hero, mirroring the role Bakhtin ascribes to the clown: “Civil and social ceremonies and rituals took on a comic aspect as clowns and fools, constant participants in these festivals, mim-icked serious rituals …” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 5). Not only Loop’s dress, his behavior, too, is different: his weapon is not the six-shooter of so many Westerns, but a bullwhip and, more im-portantly, his sharp tongue with which he exposes and brings down what Bakhtin would call “intolerant, dogmatic serious-ness” (121); with it he formulates his Hoodoo curses, which, as one of Reed’s artist/sorcerers, he brings forth in the form of poems (60). The potential for transformation and a versatility that resists any dogmatic stability he gains through his connec-tion with Neo-Hoodoo can already be seen in the Loop Garoo Kid’s name (an altered version of the “Loup Garou Kid” of Reed’s earlier poem “I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” Con-jure 17-18). His name is a version of the French loup garou (werewolf), that is a shape-shifter. Loop’s characteristic as a shape-shifter is apparent in his changing roles throughout the book. As the novel’s first pages informs us “he wasn’t always bad … Once a wild joker he cut the fool before bemused Egyp-tians, dressed like Mortimer Snerd and spilled french fries on his lap at Las Vegas’ top of the strip” (9), but when the travel-ing circus in YBRBD is attacked and most of its members are

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killed, the Loop Garoo Kid “comes back mad” (29) and, with the aide of the more secretive Chief Showcase, turns the town of Yellow Back Radio into his arena. Loop’s actions take on a serious quality (though one often brought forth with a mocking undertone), and now threaten the system rather than being contained within it. Rather than playing the fool, he upsets Drag’s rigid social system of control. In the process he destroys hierarchies by “uncrowning” (cf. Bakhtin, Rabelais 197 and chapter three) the dignitaries of Western society, continually subjecting them to ridicule. In the end he thus defeats or chases away the forces of social oppression and Manichean thought, before eventually leaving the scene himself. Loop’s ability to expose serious rituals culminates in his ‘masterpiece,’ an attempt at a Hoodoo version of the crucifix-ion: “How do you like this parody on his passion, you old Codger,” Loop challenges God, “staring skyward.” As the nov-el informs us: “Everyone got a chuckle out of that and even Loop smiled as Drag started to send the [guillotine] blade to split his head from his torso” (170). In the face of death Loop thus turns one of the central beliefs of Christian faith into a parody. Once again this is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s words about the power of laughter: “It was understood that fear [one of the bases of a conventional Christian faith, J.F.] never lurks behind laughter” (Rabelais 95), instead “festive folk laughter presents an element of victory not only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and re-stricts” (92). By laughing both at Drag’s attempts to kill him and his heavenly opponent who commands the threat of eter-nal damnation, fear, the ultimate weapon of all oppressive re-gimes, is mitigated, and the Kid comes out victorious. While Loop thus plays the role of the Bakhtinian fool who exposes and destabilizes atrophied and dogmatic social institutions, a lot of the truly grotesque elements in Reed’s nov-

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el are not so much centered around its protagonist, who through large parts of the novel operates on the periphery, as found in other aspects of the novel. As in the Mardi Gras Zulu parade, Loop may act as jester, but the townspeople of Yellow Back Radio, and especially those in hierarchical positions, are the real laughing stock: after their first appearance, the digni-taries of the town tumble down the hill, “the Banker roll[ing] over a couple of times” (22) as they retreat from Drag’s ranch, a slapstick image which sets the tone for much of the novel. Drag and his guests are continually insulted by Drag’s ‘servants,’ but do not notice that the joke is on them: Chief Showcase in his militant poetry proclaims “eat out of me back-wards paleface!” (79) to general applause, and no one notices his role as triple agent before he eventually arranges for the annihilation of the town by Field Marshal Theda “Doompussy” Blackwell and his men, beating the white man at his own game, as he had earlier declared: “Foment mischief among the tribes and they will destroy each other” (40). “Chinaboy,” Drag’s manservant, serves Drag piss instead of beer (87) and throws tea in the doctor’s face when the doctor visits to fill out yet an-other death certificate for yet another of Drag’s deceased wives (56). It is especially Chief Showcase, however, who time and again subverts white Americas’ authority, arranging for the mutual annihilation of Drag and the government while keeping both happy with his “savage’s” comments whose irony his ad-dressees (unlike the reader) fail to grasp: “The white man has the brain of Aristotle, the body of Michelangelo’s David and the shining spirit of the Prime-mover, how would it look for a lowly savage and wretch like me meddling in his noble affairs?” (109). While YBRBD and the Hoodoo religion/aesthetic are directed most clearly at ‘White’ monocultural thinking, which is represented most openly by Christianity as an expression of Western essentialism, opposing it with a ‘Black’ multicultural-

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ism, Reed is anything but a racial idealist. In an interview Reed has stated his refusal of seemingly easy answers to racial prob-lems: “Life is very easy when you can blame everything on white people. It induces a real laziness, I think, intellectual lazi-ness and a lack of sophistication. I find that there are black slave masters, too” (Northouse 14). Consequently, in YBRBD not all African Americans are automatically right or just, a be-lief that would result in the same monocultural bias the novel is directed against—this time just with the colors reversed This skepticism is manifested in various instances. It is Jake the Barker, a member of the circus, for example, who first falls for the idea and the promises of the “anarchotechnological para-dise” of the Seven Cities of Cibola

where robots feed information into inanimate steer and mechanical fowl where machines do everything from dig irrigation ditches to mine the food of the sea help old ladies across the street and nurture infants […]. A place without gurus monarchs leaders cops tax collec-tors jails matriarchs patriarchs and all other galoots who in cahoots have made the earth a pile of human bones under the feet of wolves. (24-25)

What Jake overlooks in his enthusiasm is not only his descrip-tions’ eerily close proximity to what plantation life must have seemed like to a Southern slave owner, but also that in the cir-cus he has already found a place that is as close to an ideal so-ciety as he is ever likely to find. Jake thus partakes in exactly the intellectual laziness Reed distrusts; he blames the disbelief in the Seven Cities of Cibola (the result of a misinterpretation by the white Spaniard Marcos de Niza) on white people: “stupid historians hired by the cattlemen to promote reason, law and order—toad men who adore facts—say that such an anar-chotechnological paradise … is as real as a green horse’s nightmare” (25)—and is wrong, but in a very roundabout way.

To grasp the scope and complexity of his misunderstand-

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ing one has to further explore the joke of the “green horse’s nightmare,” which recurs throughout the entire novel: the nightmares are very real in YBRBD as we have already learned at this point. Earlier we were told that the green mustang Drag Gibbon likes to French kiss “had turned green from old night-mares” (19). Yet the message is trickier; it turns out to be self-contradictory: the “paradise” Cibola does exists, but it turns out to be repulsive rather than paradisiacal, a smaltzy, capitalist travesty of a paradise, rendering ultimately both Jake and the historians wrong and right at the same time. The horse’s nightmares are thus a fitting symbol for the complexities of and connections within the novel, complexities which most charac-ters fail to grasp: at a later point the horse’s nightmare is re-vealed, a dream in which Germans with battle axes and horned helmets come down from the hills like stereotypical “savage Indians” (66 ff.). This is not only part of the bigger joke of the horse’s nightmares, but also an intratextual comment on Bo Shmo’s earlier quip that Loop “can’t create the difference be-tween a German and a redskin” (36). The green horse joke, and the lack of judgment associated with it, finally returns when Drag dismisses “the idea of another tribe inhabiting” the hills around Yellow Back Radio as having “about as much au-thenticity as a horse’s dream” (92); shortly thereafter the Ama-zons descend from the hills to slaughter Field Marshal Doom-pussy and his government troops.

Whereas Jake might only be a “fool” blinded by the ap-peal of “eros,” as he himself allows (25), Loop’s Black assistants, the “pseudo-Black pseudoartists” (Davis 412) Jeff and Alcibia-des, are more problematic characters. They do not believe in Loop’s power as a houngan or the power of Hoodoo, ridiculing its rituals, and finally betray him. Unlike Loop they “comb [their] hair”—a symbol of Black acceptance of and attempt to follow White aesthetic standards—scoffing that Loop’s hair “[l]ooks like buckwheat or alfalfa” (61). As Alcibiades, falling

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out of character and into an analysis of his own role in the nov-el, explains: “With gossip columnists invading our skulls you should not be surprised that we ridicule anything we can’t un-derstand” (65). Jeff and Alcibiades thus become symbols for the unthinking, easily manipulated parts of (African) American society. They eventually sell Loop for ten dollars, a bottle of cheap wine and a stagecoach ticket East, where they hope to create some more of their pseudoart. As the novel announces at its opening, they “call him brother only to cop his coin and tell malicious stories about his cleft foot” (9). They are thus used to expose the illusion of a collective solidarity based on skin color alone.

In YBRBD, the superiority of Hoodoo is most clearly demonstrated by contrasting it with “Christianity the Cop Re-ligion” (Conjure 23), represented most clearly by a Protestant preacher and the Pope, who both support Drag, the symbol of a conservative man in power who opportunistically uses reli-gion to support his position. When Loop appears in the saloon, the town’s preacher, Reverend Boyd, tries to hold him at bay with his crucifix, but Loop “lashe[s] the crucifix from his breast without tearing the man’s flesh. The crucifix drop[s] to the floor and the little figure attached to it scramble[s] into the nearest moose hole” (YBRBD 102).7 What follows is a truly car-nivalesque lashing. As Bakhtin explains, the ritual lashing in grotesque literature “reveals the other, true face of the abused,

                                                                                                               7 The use of the word “moose” here refers not only to the fact that in this

scene there is indeed a hole made by a moose in the wall of the saloon, but also calls to mind an earlier episode during which the bartender had tried to reduce the linguistic arbitrariness and confusion of the world by imposing grammatical rules, using meese as the plural form of moose: “Goose is to geese as moose is to meese.” His aim is to defend the cor-rect use of the language: “I know we’re out in the old frontier but every-thing can’t be in a state of anarchy, I mean how will we communicate?” (53), but of course his ignorance further confuses rather than improves communication, just as Reed’s variations upset the Western’s rigid genre formulae.

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it tears off his disguise and mask. It is the king’s uncrowning” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 197 ff.). At the end of Loop’s lashing the Rev-erend lies “on the floor a quivering mumbling heap” (103), his power is broken and he poses no further threat to the Kid or Neo-Hoodoo.

After Drag, always the practical sort, realizes that neither the Reverend Boyd, the symbol of Protestantism, nor his fellow racist, the gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, the “baddest coon skinner of them all” (114), can handle the Loop Garoo Kid, he turns to another, more powerful religious figure, the Pope. The Pope, the symbol par excellence of organized Christianity, a reli-gion “which Reed consistently identifies with Western Civiliza-tion’s desire to universalize itself” (Tietchen 325), proves to be Loop’s real adversary. While the Pope prides himself with Ca-tholicism’s popular appeal (“[Protestantism] was no threat for us. We hand out them wafers, and swing the censers, lot of loud singing, organs, processions. They like it that way” [151]), both Drag and the Pope have to realize that Christianity’s appeal is no match for Hoodoo’s; a situation the Reverend Boyd had already admitted earlier: “What the church lacked in aesthetic it couldn’t even make up in pyrotechnics” (52). Eventually even the Pope has to admit in one of his lectures his religion’s power-lessness in the face of African Vodoun turned American Hoo-doo: “[W]e Catholics attempted to change their pantheons, but the natives merely put our art alongside theirs. Our insipid and uninspiring saints were no match for theirs: Damballah, Legba and other deities which are their Loa” (153).

Consequently the Pope’s arrival in Yellow Back Radio, meant to alleviate spirits and boost the morale of the shaken town, turns out to be a display of hierarchical power. The arri-val of the Pope, who rides into town on a “loud red bull” fol-lowed by a “great stagecoach full of attendants, with footmen on each side” (147), shows what Drag and the Western world understand as a raving festivity, but the parade is unintention-

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ally grotesque, made even stranger by the absence of the chil-dren, who—as the reader recalls—were killed earlier to main-tain the hierarchy in Yellow Back Radio:

The people of Yellow Back Radio, still high out of their minds from devil’s pills and accustomed to fantasy in their lives, stood on the sidelines and cheered for this gigantic whopper now appearing before them. […]. No children in sight, the Pope distributed pennies to the townsfolk. The people scrambled about in the dust for them, except for those too mind blown to move. (147)

Once again the grotesque—although carefully banned from the official festivities (cf. Bakhthin: “[L]aughter … remained out-side all official spheres of ideology and outside all official strict forms of social relations” [Rabelais 73])—enters the picture: the town’s welcome gift, a jumbo-size cheeseburger, a “big beef between two half-done buns,” outrageous enough in itself, only marks the beginning. The Pope accepts his gift with indulgence and barely masked disgust, and makes a short, bizarre speech, in which he confuses Spanish and Italian: “[I]n other words howdy pardners before I’m-a adios everything will be really fine as wine in the summertime” (148). Nevertheless, the townspeople, used only to Drag’s unfunny jokes about his ex-wives, are impressed: “Wow, everybody said, what a showman this Pope is, man-o-man” (148). But the situation becomes in-creasingly grotesque when Drag makes a fool of himself by fall-ing on his face in an attempt to bow. This time even the dull townspeople laugh at their superior’s clumsiness. Furthermore as Drag tries to remove the Pope’s headgear, the Pope starts “to slap Drag around the arms,” further damaging both digni-taries’ image before they finally recede to Drag’s ranch (149). Drag’s attempt at a big celebration in the evening is neither less ill-fated nor less hierarchical: the Pope sits on a giant throne with Drag “next to him looking important,” and in the middle of the festivities the preacher-turned-giant-insect bursts in and

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tries to attack the Pope, but is finished off by Innocent with a giant can of DDT his aide happens to have handy (149). All in all the festivities have nothing of the liberated exuberance of the carnival, but are an awkward mix of hierarchy and failed attempts at pompous displays by the various parties which inev-itably end in ridiculousness and embarrassment.

The Pope’s explanations of Vodoun and Christianity’s at-tempts to suppress it, which long sections of the last part of the book are devoted to, make the opposition of the two reli-gions/world views even clearer. As the Pope explains, the ap-proach of Christianity has always been to suppress potentially insurgent forces like Vodoun: “… when we were threatened by the Albigenses, the Waldenses and other anarchists way back there when we couldn’t absorb them we burned or hanged them” (151). In the face of Vodoun this violent oppression of difference is not only an expression of inferiority (“Our insipid and uninspiring saints were no match for theirs” [153]), but of downright fear, as the Pope explains: “It is important that we wipe it out because it can always become a revolutionary force” (154). Yet, as he realizes, Christianity will ultimately not be able to suppress Vodoun/Hoodoo, which is one of the reasons he attempts to convince Loop, who is now identified as the cloven-hoofed devil and the first son of God (164), to return to heaven together.8 Loop, however, sees the times changing to his and Neo-Hoodoo’s benefit and refuses: “Seems to me that people are getting sick of daddies. You know—‘thou shalt have no other before me’—Tsars, Monarchs, and their deadly and in-sidious flunkies” (165). Finally the time for an egalitarian alter-native like Neo-Hoodoo seems to have arrived.

Indeed there is a change underway in heaven: “… the ol

                                                                                                               8 The other reason is that the ‘Virgin’ Mary—like all women—lusts for

Loop’s sexual prowess. Loop is supposed to “satisfy the wench” (166): “She wants you to come back Loop. Ever since her ascension she’s been with the blues” (161).

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man [God] wanted us to come blasting like before, you know how ill tempered he is—belligerent chariot fleets, thunder storms, earthquakes. But she [the Virgin Mary in one of her many forms] overruled him, gave him a headache. At times it seems she’s about to take over” (163). Now Mary seems to threaten the stability in heaven, mirroring Loop’s actions in the West, as she begins to turn herself into a priestess. Her methods such as causing headaches (if read in a literal rather than an idiomatic sense) take the form of Hoodoo curses, and she has even gained some of Vodoun’s regenerative power. She “ab-sorbs” God’s curse like Vodoun absorbs Christianity’s influ-ence: “[God] even put a curse on her but she found a way to absorb that. Matter of fact she’s getting a following up there. Both of them [most likely referring here to God and Jesus, J.F.] are afraid she might start something that’ll make your [i.e., Loop/Lucifer’s] uprising look quite small” (165). Indeed, the situation seems so far advanced that by the end of the book even the Pope begins to lose his faith, lamenting heaven’s lack of Hoodoo’s carnivalesque energy: “Some days I can’t stand the place. People singing the same old hymns and he sits there performing the familiar spectaculars—every day. I miss St. Peter’s chug-a-lugging fine brandy with the gang and jamming some strumpets” (166).

Before the Pope leaves Yellow Back, having failed to con-vince or defeat Loop, he snaps at Drag, the other symbol of the Western world’s establishment, who triumphantly wants to celebrate his execution of the Loop Garoo Kid: “If you think you can do away with him then you Americans are stupider meatheads than the rest of the world gives you credit” (167). Indeed, Loop/the Devil has at this point long become the per-sonification of Neo-Hoodoo, just as the Pope has turned from a human being into a personification of Christianity, and Drag into the system of the American ruling class, dead and reeking of formaldehyde. This symbolic reading not only makes it pos-

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sible for the Pope to come at the same time from Rome and from heaven (and return to one or the other), but it also allows him to be responsible for the Malleus Maleficarum written in 1486/87, and at the same time up to date on the current events in heaven, and a witness of its history, having apparently seen Lucifer’s rebellion (which as Loop claims did not happen, he simply “got sick of the setup and left” [165]). Having become an abstraction, Loop, too, might die as an individual, as he aspires to through his parody of the crucifixion, but the princi-ple he stands for lives on. (Neo)Hoodoo is too resilient and sub-versive to be defeated, as the Christian world has to realize.

Above and beyond Reed’s obvious dislike for Christianity and Western (cultural) imperialism, there exists a more general basis for Reed’s skepticism, more general even than his mistrust of organized religion. In his non-fiction writing, Reed has re-peatedly addressed his refusal to subscribe to any one ideology or be instrumentalized by any one (monocultural) theory. In “Boxing on Paper,” for instance, he writes:

I don’t have a predictable, computerized approach to political and social issues in a society in which you’re ei-ther for it or agin’ it. Life is much more complex. And so for my early articles about black-on-black crime, I’ve been criticized by the left, and for my sympathy with some ‘left-wing’ causes I’ve been criticized by the right, though from time to time I’ve noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a dime’s worth of difference between the zealotry of the left and that of the right. (Writin’ 5)

In YBRBD this skepticism is reflected in the Loop Garoo Kid’s encounter with Bo Shmo and the “neo-social realist gang,” a group that—after realizing that Loop is not susceptible to their hollow phrases—resorts to totalitarian methods, trying to si-lence Loop by burying him to his head in the ground and feed-ing him to killer ants. Not only are Loop’s opponents’ methods Stalinist, so is their rhetoric, and their name seems to refer to

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the prescribed, supposedly revolutionary “art form” of Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Furthermore their or-ganization is—despite its supposed equality—strongly hierar-chical, bringing the neo-social realists in close proximity to Loop’s other opponents, particularly Christian religion. Bo Shmo does “all the thinking for [… his sidekicks]. Their job was merely to fold their arms and look mean at the hoedowns or rather the shakedowns” (35). Bo Shmo does the talking, thinking, and lays out the ideological direction. His henchmen’s only function (like that of Drag’s men) is to cheer him on and provide the necessary muscle to subdue opponents who are too intelligent and independent to be won over by Bo’s platitudes. Despite their strong Stalinist overtones, the real-world target of Bo Shmo seems not so much a relatively distant principle en-forced in another country, as parts of certain literary circles at the time of Reed’s writing. Tracy Guzzio identifies the neo-social realists as “a description of the Black Arts Movement,” and Robert Eliot Fox remarks: “Bo Shmo’s position is essential-ly the one promulgated in LeRoi Jones’s famous poem ‘Black Art’” (Conscientious 48). Madge Ambler, on the other hand, in her somewhat unsatisfactory allegorical reading of the novel interprets the same instance as “a deliberate parody of the way the Communist Party used the black writers until the writers found that the Party did not care about their welfare” (127), while Michel Fabre sees it as satirizing “whoever would dictate what the writer ought to write, including black nationalist crit-ics” (25).

Whoever the immediate target might have been, the ex-change between Bo Shmo and Loop is more than an attack on certain writers, critics or politicians who want to confine black writers to the same ‘revolutionary’ proclamations or Realist depictions of their suffering, an attitude Reed has repeatedly attacked in interviews.9 It also bears closer examination within                                                                                                                9 Cf. for instance in his 1997 interview with Bruce Allen Dick (244).

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the context of Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo concept. Bo Shmo’s reduc-tionist art is defined not only by its utter lack of originality, but also by his willingness to sell out by playing the clown, in the negative, non-subversive sense of the word, for his audience: “He made a big reputation in the thirties, not having much originality, by learning to play Hoagland Howard Carmichael’s ‘Buttermilk Sky’ backwards. He banged the piano and even introduced some novel variations such as sliding his rump across the black and whites for that certain affect” (34). Loop, whose art Bo Shmo does not understand, is labeled an “alien-ated individualist” and Shmo considers him “a deliberate at-tempt to be obscure. A buffoon an outsider and frequenter of sideshows” (34).

Loop’s defense of his work against Bo’s dogmatic zeal is very much Reed’s own. Invoking, once again, the image of the circus as a symbol of freedom and liberation from ideological pressures, Loop retorts: “… what if I write circuses? No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons” (36). YBRBD thus contrasts Bo’s wooden ‘Marxist’ (or rather Stalinist) approach with Loop’s anti-essentialist, playful ‘circus’ approach, typical of Neo-Hoodooism.

When he charges Loop, the “[c]razy dada nigger,” with being “too abstract,” Bo Shmo is identified by the text as a “part time autocrat monarchist and guru” (35). In being labeled an auto-crat, a monarchist, and the neo-socialist’s guru, Bo is associated with a group of people who—in Reed’s view—bear the nega-tive connotations of blindness. Following a doctrine or a guru ultimately results in the unthinking and automatic adherence to one ideology or one person’s whims—the guru’s position as an unquestioned leader to his abuse of power. Whereas the circus, the novel’s alternative to hierarchical society has no gurus, Bo

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Shmo’s school thus stands for unthinking obedience to one doc-trine. Bo, the “collectivist” (35) whose main collective trait is that he expects everybody to follow him blindly, proclaims in his supposed attempt to liberate the masses: “We can’t afford the luxury of individualism, gumming up our rustling. We blast those who don’t agree with us” (36). This authoritarian ap-proach links Bo to the Pope who, many pages later, describes Christianity’s methods and attitudes to quell opposition in simi-lar words. The Pope’s and Bo’s respective approaches are thus essentially identical, even if they come from different ideologi-cal directions.

This exchange between Loop and Bo, as well as Loop’s defense of his art, again show the novel’s mistrust of ideological zealots of all colors, an attitude Reed has famously labeled “Atonism” in his novel Mumbo Jumbo. Sämi Ludwig explains: “Basically, Atonims is monotheistic hermeneutics and the insti-tutions supporting it; it is mainly ‘Christianity’ … or ‘Western Civilization.’ Thus it stands for a monopolizing of power, which is also represented in a monopolizing of mythology or discourse” (Ludwig, Concrete 335). Despite its reference to an-cient Egyptian religious history, to “the follower[s] of Aton, the One God that Akhenaton (Amonhotep IV, 1379-1372 B.C.) imposed upon his pantheistic subjects” (cf. Fox, Conscientious 53), Atonism is not necessarily religious in nature. As Reed’s works continually make clear, “Atonists” (even if they are not thus named) are found on all sides and in all camps, religious or political. Their defining characteristic, as that of the followers of religion or neo-social realism in YBRBD, is their unerring belief in one truth and one solution: “There are many types of Atonists. Politically they can be ‘Left,’ ‘Right,’ ‘Middle,’ but they are all together on the sacredness of Western Civilization and its mission. They merely disagree on the ways of sustaining it” (Mumbo Jumbo 136). In YBRBD the “Atonists” also come from various camps: Drag and the Pope—the latter at least

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before falling out of his role and becoming a preacher for Neo-Hoodooism—are as “Atonist” as their alleged adversary Bo Shmo, who claims that “[a]ll art must be for the end of liberat-ing the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree” (36). Loop’s (and Reed’s) an-swer to these zealots is a multi-cultural assembly so diverse and in places contradictory as to seem to some critics “not […] worth taking seriously” (Howe).

Nevertheless, there is, as I have tried to demonstrate, method to what at first seem like Reed’s formal madness. The result of Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo postmodernism is in places quite close to the carnivalesque as described by Bakhtin. While Reed has always argued that some of his roots lie in the African-American folk traditions, when seen in this light his work gains a link to another folkloric and, according to Bakhtin, universal tradition: that of folk humor as a means of resistance to rigid social systems, a resistance expressed in the grotesque and the carnivalesque. Thus what Bakhtin says about Rabelais also applies to the network of Neo-Hoodoo which runs through Reed’s work:

Rabelais’ images have a certain undestroyable nonoffi-cial nature. No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and pol-ished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook. (3)

Confronted with such Rabelaisian subversion, both Bo Shmo and the Pope have to flee the scene. Yet this would apparently be too easy, for there is a final twist to YBRBD’s ending which has led to widely differing readings: after the Pope’s heavenly mission turns out “a failure” (167), as he cannot convince the Loop Garoo Kid/Satan to return to heaven on God’s terms, he is pursued by Loop, the symbol of the new subversive religion of Neo-Hoodoo, in the

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novel’s puzzling last sentences: “The Pope chomping on a ha-vana rushed to the ship’s railing. Well I’ll be damned, and hal-lelujah, here comes the Loop, the Pontiff smiled. Thomas Jef-ferson was out of a job but that was O.K. too” (177). Suddenly the antagonists, who had before shared a bond of common experience and maybe mutual respect, but certainly had no love for each other,10 are reunited and seem of one heart and one soul. Reed himself has explained this as follows: “[It] is both a quasi-anarchic and Tom Mix ending, the symbols of religion, the gods, return to art. […]. Some people interpreted it as Loop Garoo going back to Rome. But all the events that Pope Innocent VII was talking about were taking place in art. And what happens is that people are on their own and Loop Garoo and the Pope return to art” (quoted in Davis 413).11 Davis interprets the ending as a “ship headed heavenward” (413), based on the Pope’s suggestions that he will be in trouble when he returns to heaven. While this seems fairly plausible with regard to the pope, it remains unclear why Loop would suddenly want to go to heaven after repeatedly refusing Inno-

                                                                                                               10 Shortly before the end of their conversation Loop attacked the Pope:

“You and your crowd are the devils” (165). 11 It should be noted that either Davis misquotes or Reed confuses his

history and therefore gives ‘his’ Pope the wrong number. Pope Innocent VII was only Pope for two years and was relatively unremarkable in the greater history of the church. The Innocent in the novel more likely is a mélange of the various Innocents, who time and again played important roles in the church’s fight against heresy and the establishment of the In-quisition. Two likely models are Innocent III, who as Tietchen reminds us was not only responsible for the Fourth Crusade but is also “remem-bered for being particularly intolerant of heresy and is responsible for the ‘minor’ Crusade against the Albigenses which laid the groundwork for the Inquisition” (330), and even more so Innocent VIII who was of equal intolerance against ‘heretics’ and who was not only responsible for the Crusade against the Waldensians (the second group mentioned in the book), but also for issuing a bull to Jacobus Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, which ultimately resulted in their writing the notorious Malleus Maleficarum. Both the Malleus Maleficarum and the crusade against the Al-bigenses and Waldensians are mentioned in the novel.

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cent’s earlier invitations. Madge Ambler suggests that “Loop goes with [the Pope] in the end—to destroy from within as Chief Showcase did to Theda and Drag,” an approach only open to him, according to Ambler, after he has lost the mad dog’s tooth, which “had to be removed from Loop’s neck so he might think rationally” (130). Such a tactic would indeed be a fitting actualization of Vodoun practices, which in Hawaii “made a virtue of necessity by developing an aesthetic capable of appropriating the forms of the Catholic tradition while transforming their meaning” (Lock 69, emphasis in original), given the Pope’s deep insight into Vodoun practices, the tooth’s origin as a gift from Zozo Labrique, and the fact that both Loop and Innocent have, as mentioned above, turned entirely into abstract principles in the earlier cause of the novel, something like the return to art Reed has suggested seems to make more sense—even if it is not en-tirely satisfying for the reader. This, however, might be the ul-timate point of this “Tom Mix ending.” In my reading, then, Reed refuses his readers a clear and easily digestible ending with a clear moral or a clear hero: Loop leaves with his former antagonist, the symbol of oppres-sive Western culture, while Chief Showcase, the ‘other’ (and maybe even more successful) hero of the novel, after having through his cunning brought down both Drag and the gov-ernment forces, falls for the cheap promises of Cibola. Only the amazons (and, for that matter, the executioner’s swine) with-stand this post-industrial, post-human “paradise.” They retreat into the forest, where in the spirit of Hoodoo they will “have a celebration tonight. There would be much wine drunk, dancing and messages sent out to other liberated tribes” (175). Maybe this then is the message: Neo-Hoodoo mistrusts holy men as much as it mistrusts holy books, and while the leaders and/or visionaries Loop, Zozo Labrique, Jake the Barker, and Chief Showcase, are either discredited or disappear sooner or later,

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the spirit of Hoodoo is kept alive going from one place to the other—or in the language of Vodoun—riding one horse and then the next. NeoHoodoo thus gains a universality which trans-cends the individual; it too has no leaders holy men or gurus. Instead, it constantly reinvents itself, always incorporating new aspects, and thus gives birth to itself in a new form, a feature Bakhtin has identified as characteristic of folk culture in gen-eral:

The victory of the future is ensured by the people’s immor-tality. The birth of the new, of the greater and the better, is as indispensable and as inevitable as the death of the old. The one is transferred to the other, the better turns the worse into ridicule and kills it. (Rabelais 256)

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Dick, Bruce. “A Conversation with Ishmael Reed.” The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Ed. Bruce Allen Dick. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. 227-49. Print.

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Ford, Nick Aaron. “A Note on Ishmael Reed: Revolutionary Novelist.” Studies in the Novel 3.2 (Summer 1971): 216-218.

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Print. Fox, Robert Eliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist

Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York et. al.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Print.

—. “Reed, Ishmael.” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. 624-26. Print.

Guzzio, Tracie Church. “Ishmael Reed.” Encyclopedia of African-American Literature. Gen. Ed. Wilfred D. Samuels. 20 Nov 2009. <http://web.utah.edu/20thcenturyafricanamericanwriters/reed.htm>. Web.

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—. “Dialogic Possession in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo: Bakhtin, Voodoo, and the Materiality of Multicultural Discourse.” The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Eds. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994. 325-36. Print.

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Northouse, Cameron. Ishmael Reed: An Interview. Dallas: Con-temporary Research Press, 1993. Print.

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Tietchen, Todd F. “Cowboy Trickster and Devilish Wangols: Ishmael Reed’s Hoodoo West.” Western American Literature 36:4 (2002): 325-42. Print.

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Wallace, Michele. “Female Troubles: Ishmael Reed’s Tunnel Vision.” The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Ed. Bruce Al-len Dick. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 183-91. Print.