THEORY & PRACTICE IN ENGLISH STUDIES
VOL. V, ISSUE 1, 2012
ERASING THE BINARY
OPPOSITIONS (?)
THE POSITION OF WOMEN CHARACTERS
IN ISHMAEL REED’S JAPANESE BY SPRING
Jiří Šalamoun
I. Introduction
The Raven myths of the Pacific Northwest are comic,
but they deal with serious subjects: the creation of the
world and the origin of Death. The major toast of the
Afro-American tradition, “The Signifying Monkey,” is
comic, but it makes a serious point: how the weak are
capable of overcoming the strong through wit. The calypso
songs of Trinidad may be comic, but they deal
with serious subjects [...] My work is also comic, but it
makes, I feel, serious points about politics, culture, and
religion. (Ishmael Reed 1988: 140)
ALTHOUGH Ishmael Reed is the author of nine novels, six
collections of poetry, and nine collections of essays, not
many readers know what to expect when they happen to
hear his name. However, the title of Reed’s third book of
essays, Writing Is Fighting: Thirty-seven Years of Boxing on Paper,
combined with the passage quoted above, should give
one a succinct image of Reed’s style, writing technique, and
approaches adopted in writing. All of Reed’s novelistic endeavours
can be encapsulated in the following plot line: a
much weaker individual challenges an oppressive force
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which negatively influences the lives of many other individuals,
the proverbial Others. Through the continuing
struggle of the individual, the prime position of this oppressive
force is deconstructed, and its power wanes until it
ceases to threaten those Others.
Throughout his prolific writing career, Reed has taken
on many heavy-weight opponents; and, thus, Afro-centrism,
white racism, the European paradigm of the Enlightenment,
and the Western literary canon have all been deconstructed
in his literary boxing-ring. Since Reed is very careful not just
to switch the binary opposition of the Oppressor/Oppressed
equation, but also to erase, as best he can, instances of such a
system (Hogue 2009: 145), his works have been lauded as a
key example of postmodern, multicultural writing. But
Reed’s later work has been doubted by many who have been
concerned with the position of men and women in his novels.
Since some critics have pointed out the unbalanced position
of men and women in his oeuvre (Hume 1993: 511;
Womack 2001: 237), this article will examine the position of
women and men in Reed’s latest novel, Japanese by Spring, in
order to discover whether it is aligned with Reed’s attempts
to erase binary oppositions or not. It will argue that, while
the position of women in Reed’s early fiction is not in alignment
with his attempts to deconstruct binary oppositions,
this situation changes dramatically in Japanese by Spring,
where women hold better positions than men.
But first, I will summarise the position of women in
Reed’s early, seminal works, in order to create a literary
backdrop for the main analysis.
II. The Context: The Position of Women in Reed’s
Mumbo Jumbo and Reckless Eyeballing
Since the mid-eighties, a consistent question marks
Reed criticism: how to reconcile the gleefully postmodernist
“early” Reed with the bitterly anti-feminist “late
Reed.” (Andrew Strombeck 2006: 299)
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In this part of the article, I will discuss the role of women in
two of Reed’s texts, Mumbo Jumbo and Reckless Eyeballing.
Mumbo Jumbo was chosen because it is the pinnacle of his
early works and because it is the most well-known of all his
novels. Reckless Eyeballing is a case in point of his later writing,
which is often perceived negatively, and not only because
of its stereotypical portrayal of women: “[Reckless Eyeballing
is] an instance of the diminution of power his work of
the 1980s has manifested, compared to his truly innovative
work of the 1960s and 1970s” (Fox 1987: 78). Both novels,
thus, paint a succinct literary landscape which introduces the
reader to all the types of women characters Reed creates.
Mumbo Jumbo tells the story of Jes Grew, a mystical
plague which is “electric as life and is characterized by ebullience
and ecstasy” (Reed 1972: 9), a plague that threatens
all instances of white hegemonic culture and monotheism
personified by the Wallflower order. The plague seeks its
“Text” without which it will “strangle on its own ineloquence”
(Reed 1972: 34) and fade away.
While writing the novel, Reed drew heavily on Egyptian
and Haitian mythology; hence, its characters are often
the personifications of various gods and deities (Gates 1988:
221-223). This is important for two reasons. Firstly, the male
protagonist, Pa Pa La Bas, is directly related to the Haitian
god Papa Legba, who serves as the intermediary between
the gods and humans in Haitian lore (Swope 2002: 612,
Hurston 1995: 393-97). Although many binary oppositions
and (even African American) certainties are erased by the Jes
Grew, Pa Pa La Bas’s position is never questioned in the
novel. Even when he is possessed by another Haitian god,
not a single character bothers to exorcise or shun this god
away. This is especially interesting when compared to what
happens to La Bas’s daughter when she becomes possessed
by the love goddess Erzulie, who is considered to be the
most important lwa, or pantheon deity, of Haitian lore.
When Erzulie, who is characterised by “her physical
beauty, her barrenness, her focus on erotic love, and the lack
of permanence in her relationships with men” (Collins 1996:
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140), takes over Earline and subsequently seduces an African
American male, Pa Pa La Bas decides to exorcise her,
which reveals a serious flaw in Reed’s attempts to erase binary
oppositions. This is emphasised by La Bas’s speech to
the seduced male: “You couldn’t help yourself. If you hadn’t
given in to her request she would have killed you” (Reed
1972: 126). The position of Erzulie, which poses a threat to
masculinity and has to be eliminated, is in stark contrast to
Pa Pa La Bas’s unquestioned authority, which he is free to
exercise as and when he wishes throughout the novel. As
Strombeck observes: “Reed may everywhere deconstruct
authority, but he reserves for La Bas authority that he denies
[to others]” (2006: 302). Thus, for Reed, it matters little if
the most important lwa appears in his text, Erzulie is banished
the moment she mounts Earline, so that Pa Pa La Bas
can dedicate himself to the process of erasing binary oppositions.
Banishing Erzulie is a substantial price to pay for the
destruction of the Wallflower order and white hegemony.
Reckless Eyeballing was published fourteen years after
Mumbo Jumbo and just seven years before the publication of
Japanese by Spring. When Reckless Eyeballing went to press,
Reed suggested that he had been harmed by the feminists
who were running the publicity department of the publishing
house, feminists who had supposedly under-promoted
another of his novels, Flight to Canada (Reed 1978: 231).
This incident might have incited him to re-cast the role of
the oppressive force, making it a group of feminists. Thus,
Ian Ball, the book’s male protagonist, fights the Lilith Gang
(instead of the Wallflower order), a group of feminists who
harm creative African American males by under-promoting
their books and by having negative reviews written.
It could be expected that opposition would arise to this
oppression, and it indeed does, in the form of a phantom that
traces the vilest of the feminists and shaves their heads bare.
At the end of the novel, readers are perhaps surprised when
they realise that the phantom is, in fact, the male protagonist,
who is suffering from split-personality syndrome and is
unaware of his own condition.
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The novel brought about a strong, negative reaction,
which condemned Reed as a misogynist. While some critics
defended the novel by saying that “Reed paints a more unflattering
portrait of the male African-American artist than
can be found in any novel by a black feminist” (McGee
1997: 57), and by suggesting that Reed’s subversion of the
feminist movement is only another expression of his fight
against oppressive forces, the sense that he is a misogynist
was strengthened by the book.
However, one also has to bear in mind that Reed is fascinated
with trickster lore and produces complex, multifaceted
texts to which one is at a loss to ascribe a fixed interpretation,
even to a certain portion of the text. Reed himself
suggests this, in one of his essays: “[Feminists] complain
about Tremonisha Smarts, of Reckless Eyeballing, because,
toward the end of the novel, she leaves New York for California,
to have babies and to ‘write, write, write,’ which isn’t
incompatible with the announced goal of a new generation
of feminists: to have it all, a career and a family” (Reed 1988:
149). Surely, allowing the arch-feminist of the novel “to have
it all” does not appear a very misogynistic act. Combined
with the fact that Reed publishes African American feminist
fiction in his publishing house—the Before Columbus
Foundation—one again realises that there is more to Reed’s
writing than meets the eye.
To sum up, even at the height of his creative process,
Reed’s fiction was susceptible to emphasising male roles
over women roles (i.e., the banishing of Erzulie) in order to
promote deconstruction of white hegemony. Because Reckless
Eyeballing brought much critical attention, and because
Reed’s position in regard to women is rather difficult to decipher,
his latest book, Japanese by Spring, was eagerly expected
to shed some light on this puzzle. The next section
of the present article will analyse whether, in this respect,
Reed’s approaches to women remain complexly tricksterish,
even at the end of his novelistic career, and concludes that
they change dramatically in favour of female characters.
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III. The Position of Women in Japanese by Spring
Like the black bear and the North American wolf, the
black male in the United States has been the subject of
dangerous myths that often, as in the case of the bear
and the wolf, lead people to shoot first and ask questions
later. (Ishmael Reed 1988: 145)
At this point, two things about Japanese by Spring should not
come as a surprise: (i.) the protagonist of the novel is again
male, and (ii.) the position of women characters is, yet again,
complex, for they are depicted both positively and nega-
tively.
In his continual quest to rehabilitate the position of the
African American male, Reed allows the readers of Japanese
by Spring to peep in on a few months of the life of an African
American professor, Charles Putbutt, who is known as
“Chappie” to the students of the Jack London University
where he works: “While the white students called their
other professors Professor this, or Mr. That, they called him
Chappie. It took them about a month to recognize him as a
member of the human species” (Reed 1994: 12). The diminutive
of his name succinctly hints at how much respect
Putbutt receives from his students, and from his colleagues
as well.
Coming from a family where both parents hold high positions
in the United States Army, Putbutt is a disappointment
to them, especially since he was expelled from the Air
Force Academy because “he had tried to organize a Black
Panther chapter among the few black cadets who were enrolled
there” (Reed 1994: 4), and because he chose to study
and teach literature instead. Since Putbutt received his M.A.
from a small college in Utah, he is not perceived as equal by
his colleagues or the heads of the various departments, and
has to undergo the embarrassment of re-applying for a few
hours to teach every year. Hence, the major motivating factor
of all Putbutt’s actions is his wish to receive tenure.
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In order to do so, Putbutt completely remodels himself
and changes from a radical teaching assistant with a huge
afro—one who was “addicted to blackness” (Reed 1994:
14)—into the most fervent denouncer of affirmative action
on his college campus and the author of a book entitled
Blacks, America’s Misfortune.
Hence, Putbutt is portrayed as a man with no moral
standing: “When the Black Power thing was in, Putbutt was
into that. When the backlash on Black Power settled in, with
its code words like reverse discrimination, he joined that.
He’d been a feminist when they were in power. But now
they were on the decline [...] and so for now he was a neoconservative”
(Reed 1994: 48-49). This significantly undermines
the importance and authority of the main male character
in the novel. In fact, since he possesses neither authority
nor power, Putbutt cannot even remotely be compared to Pa
Pa La Bas or Ian Ball, and he has no wish or capacity to harm
women.
Nevertheless, even in this novel Reed continues to deride
feminists; but, since Putbutt is not exactly an apt example
of a dominant male character, the attempts at ridicule are
more or less of the playful kind. This is apparent in the following
scene, where Putbutt comments on not commenting on
the body of a female colleague from his department:
Her clothes were modest. Chappie never went into details
when describing women. The feminist movement
had accomplished one thing. Eliminated the need for
long and unnecessary and embarrassing descriptions of
female anatomy in novels by men. He took a note to remind
himself to suggest this as a topic for a future panel
at the MLA. (Reed 1994: 27)
Such a light-weight punch thrown in the direction of the
feminist movement cannot match with Ian Ball’s feminist
chases; however, Reed’s male characters have not left the
literary boxing-ring of Japanese by Spring quite yet.
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What first begins as mere ridicule of Jack Milch—the
chair of the English department and also its leading black
feminist, especially for his decision to close the department
for a day after a woman loses a court case “whose prize was
the black man’s genitals” (Reed 1994: 23)—becomes incredibly
dark after the reader discovers that the same Jack
Milch “had been arrested for keeping his wife and child [in a
basement doghouse] for ten years” (Reed 1994: 190). However,
this is one of the last attempts, in the novel, to ridicule
the feminist movement. Reed devotes much more time to
debunking the position of Putbutt than to questioning the
radical side of the feminist movement.
This is made clearer when Putbutt’s quest to attain
tenure proves unsuccessful, and April Jokujoku, “a firebrand
radical lesbian ecologic activist” (Reed 1994: 11), is appointed
full professorship instead of him. At this point, Reed
allows himself to enter the story as a literary character, only
to question the value of Putbutt’s work: “[He] was still trying
to get through his book Blacks, America’s Misfortune that
was so full of the critical jargon and Victorian diction of
which some nineties black critics were so fond” (Reed 1994:
129). His wish is to stop talking to Putbutt quickly.
Towards the end of the novel, Putbutt’s character becomes
increasingly less important as Reed’s character gains
prominence. Reed had already resolved his own issues with
radical feminism at the beginning of the novel:
Ishmael Reed said somewhere that he agreed with
Norman Mailer’s assessment of Ms. Magazine, the headquarters
for black male antipathy, as a “totalitarian
sheet.” He had been attacked by one of their black
house feminists in the January 1991 issue. She said that
Ishmael Reed was “the ringleader” of black men who
were opposed to black women writing about black male
misogyny and that he was calling such black women traitors
to the race. Ringleader Ishmael Reed has never
called anybody a traitor to anybody’s race and not only
hasn’t opposed black women writing about black male
misogyny but published some of it. (Reed 1994: 24)
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Having countered his opponents, Reed’s literary alter-ego is
now free to uphold the position of the normal African American
male who has normal relationships with women.
Before moving on to the positive portrayals of women in
Japanese by Spring, let me stress again that, apart from Reed’s
vindication of his approach to the radical side of the feminist
movement, the only character capable of commenting on the
position of women within the novel is Putbutt—the weakest
of all of Reed’s male protagonist—one whose moral standing
is heavily undermined, such that even the author’s literary
alter-ego avoids him. This further undermines Putbutt’s
credibility; hence, his remarks about and to women are rendered
harmless or forceless.
Up to this point, I have been focusing solely on feminist
characters of the novel and how Reed portrays them. Nevertheless,
it is essential to state that, once Reed moves away
from the feminist realm, he is more than capable of creating
strong and positive women characters. This is illustrated
aptly in the case of two female characters: Putbutt’s mother
and Jingo, the ex-lover from his radical youth. Both have or
had a powerful influence over him.
The suggestion that Putbutt’s mother is a strong woman
is echoed several times throughout the novel. She is either
described as a “hardworking and disciplined” member of the
United States Army, one who makes her country proud of
her (Reed 1994: 41), or as a strong woman with a rather peculiar
approach to education. When Putbutt is asked if he remembers
his mother throwing him into a swimming pool, he
responds with the following: “I nearly drowned. Her idea of
teaching me how to swim. I haven’t been able to swim. I
haven’t been able to go near a beach since then. I was really
traumatized” (Reed 1994: 54). It is obvious that his mother
was capable of exerting mastery over her son, and it seems
likely she could easily influence him again—had she not
(with a touch of Reed’s novelistic humour) been abducted
by Arab terrorists.
However, as readers later learn, Putbutt’s mother is capable
of mastering men even in her captivity. She reappears
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onto the scene towards the end of the novel, and Putbutt
realises that her powers to master men have not diminished:
Later he saw his mother on CNN. She was walking
down the stairs of an air force plane. She’d lost some
weight. She looked trim and without some of the weight
she sometimes carried in her face, beautiful even. [...]
They showed some footage of his mother’s captors.
They were crawling on their knees and kissing the
hands of their American rescuers. So relieved were they
to be delivered from “that woman” as they said. They’d
captured her all right, but shortly after being seized she
had turned the tables on her tormentors and they became
her prisoners. They had photos of their ordeal.
One showed his mother, sitting at a piano, playing “Onward
Christian Soldiers,” as the terrorist stood, singing.
His mother was smoking a cigarette and had a shotgun
lying across her lap. She could have taken her freedom
at least a year before her release, but she had vowed not
to abandon her captors until they become fine Christian
gentlemen. (Reed 1994: 202)
Although Reed relies on his trademark wit to craft the extract
just quoted, it nonetheless displays a powerful female
character, one endowed with far more moral and practical
authority than any of the male characters in the novel. This
is emphasised, yet again, at the end of the novel, when Putbutt’s
mother persuades him to leave his teaching profession
behind and to go to Japan to translate Japanese materials for
her (Reed 1994: 205). Again, a parallel situation can be found
in neither Mumbo Jumbo nor Reckless Eyeballing.
IV. Conclusion
This article attempted to answer the question whether Ishmael
Reed’s latest novel is in alignment with his credo to
erase binary oppositions. It concludes that, while women
characters are either easily influenced by men in Mumbo
Jumbo or mastered by them in Reckless Eyeballing, similar
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examples of the dominance of female characters cannot be
found in Japanese by Spring. This is not surprising, as mastery
comes, in Reed’s novels, hand in hand with the strength of a
character. The male protagonist of Japanese by Spring is neither
strong nor determined to harm women; but, most importantly
here, he lacks any desire to do so. Instead, Reed’s
latest novel introduces women characters who outclass the
men—be it April Jokujoku, whose literary skills help her to
attain a full professorship instead of Putbutt, or Putbutt’s
mother, who is not only capable of influencing Putbutt but
also her terrorist captors. Since Putbutt’s mother is the
strongest female character Reed has ever penned, I must
conclude that even though Reed strayed from his intent to
erase boundaries in Mumbo Jumbo and Reckless Eyeballing,
equality between female and male characters is restored in
Japanese by Spring.
References
Collins, Derek (1996) “The Myth and Ritual of Ezili Freda in
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Western Folklore
55 (2): 137-154.
Fox, Robert Elliot (1987) Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist
Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and
Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood Press.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of
African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Hogue, Lawrence W. (2009) Postmodern American Literature and Its
Other. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale (1995) “Tell My Horse.” In: Folklore, Memoirs,
& Other Writings. New York: The Library of America.
Hume, Kathryn (1993) “Ishmael Reed and the Problematics of
Control.” PMLA 108 (3): 506-518.
McGee, Patrick (1997) Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
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Reed, Ishmael (1972) Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Doubleday.
Reed, Ishmael (1978) Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. New York:
Doubleday.
Reed, Ishmael (1986) Reckless Eyeballing. New York: St Martin’s.
Reed, Ishmael (1988) Writin’ is Fightin’: Thirty-seven Years of Boxing
on Paper. New York: Athenaeum.
Reed, Ishmael (1994) Japanese by Spring. London: Allison & Busby.
Strombeck, Andrew (2006) “The Conspiracy of Masculinity in
Ishmael Reed.” African American Review 40 (2): 299-311.
Swope, Richard (2002) “Crossing Western Space, or the HooDoo
Detective on the Boundary in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo
Jumbo.” African American Review 36 (4): 611-628.
Womack, Kenneth (2001) “Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural
Project: Ethical Criticism and Ishmael Reed’s Japanese
by Spring.” Melus 26 (4): 223-243.
Abstract
Ishmael Reed is known for writing original postmodern works
which challenge white hegemony and control. His novels are
praised not only for a mere deconstruction of such instances but
also for erasure of the binary opposition of the oppressor/oppressed
equation.
However, although Reed uses his novels to deconstruct said
instances of oppression, these attempts have been questioned by
some critics who suggest that Reed not only does not deconstruct
the opposition of male and female characters but also favours the
position of male characters at the expense of female ones.
This article then sets out to answer the question whether the
position of women in Reed’s latest novel, Japanese by Spring, is in
alignment with his intent to deconstruct binary oppositions or not.
The article concludes that, while Reed is susceptible to emphasising
male roles over female roles in his early fiction, in order to
promote deconstruction of white hegemony his latest novel is endowed
with powerful female characters and successfully deconstructs
said binary oppositions.
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About the Author
JIŘÍ ŠALAMOUN is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of English
and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University.
His dissertation examines satirical tropes in the oeuvre of Ishmael
Reed that disrupt some of the negative representations of African
Americans persistent in literary and cultural spheres. His research
interests include the context of the contemporary American novel
as well as post-colonial and multi-cultural literature.
Mgr. Jiří Šalamoun
Department of English & American Studies
Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University
Arna Nováka 1
602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
salamoun@phil.muni.cz
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