Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Scott Reedis an American poet, novelist, essayist, songwriter, playwright, editor and publisher, who is known for his satirical works challenging American political culture, and highlighting political and cultural oppression...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 February 1938
CityChattanooga, TN
CountryUnited States of America
mother children years
Hateful material travels the globe. A few years ago, CNN, America's Der Sturmer, ran a story about Black parents being so low down that they abandoned their children and the children had to eat rats. I was at a University in Wisconsin at the time and the mother of a student from South Africa called to see whether the story was true. She had seen it all the way over there. The story was untrue. The children lied. CNN never corrected the story.
education hurt cancer
I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of deathamong Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.
trying done
I try to do what has never been done before.
writing world engaged
I have T.V. on all the time when I'm writing. I have music on. I'm engaged with the world.
baseball united-states chicago
Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.
country makeup taste
In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.
men smoking devil
In Haitian mythology there is the figure Ghede, who in West Africa, is Iku, whose role is to show "each man his devil." He's represented by a figure wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. That's my gig.
writing imagination poetry
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
education race african-american
The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.
thinking style use
I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."
kings mean night
What I can't understand why Blacks can't achieve royal status when it comes to forms that they have largely created? I mean there's a White King of Rock n' Roll, there's a White King of Jazz, how come we can never achieve titles of royalty in these fields we are supposed to prevail in? They held a so called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the other night, where White judges credit people who resemble them with the invention of Rock and Roll. I didn't even see Blacks in the audience.
education sex civilization
American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.
men wild-man want
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.
men white-man black
During the last decades, films about the black experience have been produced, directed, and even scripted by white men. Some of them are excellent. But most reflect George Bernard Shaw’s warning that 'if you do not tell your stories others will tell them for you and they will vulgarize and degrade you.'