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
brooklyn-bridge bridges america
If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.
art new-york book
The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.
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.
music eye light
We not only grew up on Be-Bop; Be-Bop raised us. For my generation, Be-Bop came on like a light bulb going flash behind the eyes.For us, it was not only an intellectual movement, but a way of life. We walked, dressed, and rapped Be-Bop.
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.
sex way culture
We learn about one another's culture the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.
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."