![]() Reed met Sun Ra, who contributed to Umbra’s third issue, and befriended fellow workshop members Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson, and Askia Touré. Its members met weekly at the 2nd Street apartment of the group’s cofounder, New Orleans-born poet Tom Dent, where they workshopped poems and delved into African traditions from Caribbean obeah to the epics of Malian griots.Īncient Egypt, too, was in the air. There, he found fellow travelers in the Society of Umbra, an underground magazine and writers’ collective that decisively influenced the Black Arts Movement. ![]() Determined to become a writer, he moved to New York City in 1962. Dubbed the “godfather of Black postmodernism” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he was born in 1938 in Chattanooga and grew up in Buffalo, where he married young and worked as a hospital orderly. Reed began experimenting with the Egyptian cowboy in the mid-1960s, when he was a young poet living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Sun Ra on the set of Space is the Place, Oakland, California, 1972 In a 1972 interview with John O’Brien, founder of the Dalkey Archive Press, Reed described the novel as “artistic guerrilla warfare against the Historical Establishment.”Īlton Abraham, collection of John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis ![]() Their cartoonish strife draws inspiration from Egyptian mythology, skewering the mystique of the Old West through surreal pastiche and slapstick. Its hero is the Loop Garoo Kid, “a desperado so onery he made the Pope cry,” who fights to liberate the frontier town of Yellow Back Radio from a malevolent cattle baron and his venal cronies. Published in 1969, Reed’s sophomore novel is a Western-style showdown over the origins of “Western” civilization. But he may have been the first writer to synthesize their iconographies-a feat he accomplished, to great comic effect, in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. Ishmael Reed didn’t invent the black Western or the Afrocentric vogue for Ancient Egypt. The Negro who Speaks of Rivers seemingly faces a decision: Nile or Rio Grande? Then again, it may have been inevitable that someone, eventually, would imagine a world where, to paraphrase scripture, “Cowboys shall come out of Egypt.” Yet they also point in opposite directions, one toward the collective reclamation of African heritage and the other toward entrepreneurial savvy in the free-for-all of American life. Both tropes offer iconic headgear and fantasies of racial empowerment. The black cowboy’s appeal is similarly venerable, starting with Nat Love, who rose from slavery to become a famous gunfighter and chronicler of the Old West, and continuing through a century of Hollywood movies, from Harlem on the Prairie (1937) to 2021’s action blockbuster The Harder They Fall. ![]() I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.” Du Bois wasn’t immune to Ancient Egyptian drag in 1913, he staged an elaborate historical pageant that featured crowds of worshippers thronging a replica Sphinx. Langston Hughes captured the time-traveling allure of neo-Egyptian identity in his poem “The Negro”: “Under my hand the pyramids arose. Who could forget Michael Jackson in the video for “Remember the Time,” shimmying before the pyramids to the delight of a Nefertiti-crowned Iman? Or Sun Ra in Space is the Place, wandering earth with his entourage of deities in a striped headdress? Ra, who exchanged his “slave name” for a divine moniker, famously declared that black Americans were “myths.” Yet even a sober sociologist like W. Of the many armored costumes black artists have worn in America, the pharaoh and the cowboy are perennial favorites. Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God Psalm 68:31
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