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1 Ishmael Reed "Southern Writer" Might Not Come to Mind When One

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1 Ishmael Reed 1 Ishmael Reed "Southern writer" might not come to mind when one thinks of author, playwright, publisher, and poet Ishmael Reed. Although born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1938, his stay in the south was short lived. Reed has spent the majority of his life in New York and California. East Tennessee, with memories of Lookout Mountain and the Tennessee River, is a place he rarely visits, but is the first of his several homes. He has written about Tennessee, but his writing is not regional. The words of Ishmael Reed break down barriers that divide Americans and celebrate "Americanness" in all its manifestations. Young Ishmael attended public schools throughout his adolescent education, where he gained interest in playing jazz instruments such as violin and trombone. Along with his musical gifts, his writing skills were always prominent. At the youthful age of thirteen, he began to write a short column on jazz for the Empire Star Weekly, where his knowledge of music melded with his love of writing. Reed attended evening classes at the then-private Buffalo University. During days he earned money by working as a secretary at a nearby public library where his writing abilities flourished. However, in 1960 Reed had to withdraw and end his formal higher education due to, in his own words in an interview with Henry Louis Gates, "a dire shortage of funds" and to get away from "artificial social and class distinctions." Those same financial problems forced him into Talbert Mall Housing Project in Buffalo, where he witnessed firsthand the extreme consequences of poverty and social injustice. Reed continued his work at the Empire Star Weekly, where the editor, Joe Walker, and Reed together "shook up the town, writing about segregated schools, police brutality, and local politics." He had a side-gig of co-hosting a community radio show, which was canceled after Reed conducted a rather controversial interview with Malcolm X. While the details of this event are unknown, it is not surprising that the interview be anything but controversial. This was the first time Reed met Malcolm X, and prompted by the disc jockey to discuss American history, the topic turned to the fallacies of "Black History." Being a rather precocious and outspoken twenty-one year 2 old, Reed felt the need to leave Buffalo: "I became convinced that New York was the place for me, if I wanted to meet people who were as hip as I thought I was." Malcolm X was one to help him make that decision, and in 1962 Reed relocated to New York City. Although he was "a green bumpkin in those days," he surrounded himself with writers in a city where words were "regarded with reverence and verbal inventiveness was admired...The town was electric with exciting debate." In New York City, Reed was in his element. Reed landed a job as an editor of a New Jersey weekly paper and helped establish the East Village Other, an "underground" newspaper--and one of the first of its kind. Reed also attended Umbra Writers Workshops, an organization, which allowed Reed to continue his interests in observing and writing about civil, social, and political problems. In 1967, Reed published his first work, The Freelance Pallbearers, a parody of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and an avant-garde novel about a liberal adventurer and his many run-ins with dangerous beatniks, cops, and black Muslims. The novel gained much attention for Reed and earned him a place within the literary circle. However, the attention was not always positive: "One prepublication review of my first novel said that the book should be flushed down the toilet along with the author." Still quite young, he was unaccustomed to the recognition that comes with being a published author: To be young, gifted and black in New York of the 1960's was to be overwhelmed with much affection. If I had remained there, I would have been loved and admired to death. One of the reasons I left, in the summer of 1967, for Los Angeles, was because my working-class background taught me to be suspicious of too much affection. In Los Angeles, Reed spent the summer writing his second novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-down, and continued to receive attention both positive and negative: "One critic said that I was living proof that the bacteria of pop culture had entered the literary world." Many critics viewed literature to be based on traditional European culture: "I wasn't a European, I was American." 3 Reed decided to move to Oakland, California, where he accepted a teaching position at University of California at Berkeley. He met and married his wife, Carla Blank. That same year Reed welcomed a daughter into the world. Her name showed her father's southern roots: Tennessee. In 1979 he again relocated, this time to an Oakland neighborhood that could be described as "inner-city." Here he found a new viewpoint from which to write. His writing became more direct in attacking the social problems he was living amid: "I was no longer distant, careening through a literary Milky Way, but was standing at Ground Zero as well." The early 1980's would mark his new "Writin' Is Fightin'" period with his novels The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes which confronted the Age of Regan and the government policies that greatly affected black neighborhoods. Over the years, Reed's works continued to possess underlying tones of social and civil issues, usually interjecting sarcastic humor to take the edge off these otherwise serious troubles. Reed was involved with the Black Arts Movement, but was interested in promoting the writing of any neglected voice not holding the same anti-white aesthetic values as others. As an avid promoter of African-originated modes of performance, Reed sees the hybrid nature of "Americanness" as being a valuable component of "black" art and key in multiculturalism. Along with his outspoken writing (fiction and nonfiction) and iconoclastic voice, Reed has always been a tremendous advocate in shedding light on social problems, whether they are political, racial, or sexist. In 1976 Reed formed the Before Columbus Foundation, which aimed to enlighten and illuminate ethnic diversity in American writing. The foundation aspires to accurately attach the term "multicultural" to all American literature. In a 2011 article in The Wall Street Journal, "Should Mark Twain Be Allowed to Use the N-Word?," Reed addressed the possibility of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn that would omit racially-sensitive language, such as "the n-word." Reed writes: "Instead of doing a gotcha search on Twain's Huckleberry Finn, I recommend that its critics read 4 it. They will find that Twain's Jim has more depth than the parade of black male characters that one finds in recent movies, theatre and literature, who are little more than lethal props...The fact that a critic has taken to tampering with Twin's great work is another sign that the atavistic philistinism that has taken hold of our politics and culture has found a place in academia." To further showcase his never-ending ambition and to continue his endeavors, Reed started Konch Magzine in 1990. Eight years later, it became an online magazine--"a publication for the rest of us," as Reed has put it, for those interested in celebrating the vast and diverse melting pot of writers--and artists in general--that inhabit the world. One of Reed's most recent articles in The Wall Street Journal, "Black Audiences, White Stars and 'Django Unchained'," followed up on Quintin Tarantino's popular and award-winning film, Django Unchained distributed by the Weinstein Company in 2012. Reed calls it a "stupid screenplay" and that "to compare this movie to a spaghetti western and a blaxploitation film is an insult to both genres. It's a Tarantino home movie with all of the racist licks that appear in his other movies." Reed addresses the age-old debate of who should tell the black story, but mainly attacks the film for being misinformed and misrepresenting the history of black resistance and slavery. Reed's texts and lyrics have been performed, composed, or set to music by numerous well known artists such as Albert Ayler, David Murray, Allan Touissant, Carman Moore, Taj Mahal, Olu Dara, Lester Bowie, among many others. Reed has been a significant figure in the longest ongoing music/poetry collaboration, know as Conjure projects. He was honored as Blues Songwriter of the Year from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame Awards in 2008. On September 11, 2011 at a Jazz à la Villette concert at the Grande Halle in Paris, the Red Bull Music Academy World Tour featured Macy Gray, Tony Allen, members of the Roots, David Murray and his Big Band, Amp Fiddler and Fela! singer/dancers in premiers of three new songs with lyrics by Reed. In 2012, SF JAZZ, the leading nonprofit jazz organization on the West Coast, appointed Reed as its first Poet Laureate during the San Francisco Jazz Festival. Reed spoke after the event, "I am honored to be named the first SF JAZZ Poet Laureate...Jazz 5 has given so much to me; maybe now I can give something back." 2013 marks the release of Macy Gray and David Murray's latest album, Be My Monster Love, with three new songs by Reed: "Army of the Faithful," "Hope is a Thing With Feathers," and the title track, "Be My Monster Love." Reed's latest novel, Juice! (2011) was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trials beginning in 1994. It was his first novel since Japanese By Spring (1993).
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