Yet the closest Reed comes to addressing that there might be some diversity of white people is in the scene where Biff Musclewhite is bound and speaking with Thor. Musclewhite, who is a Polish immigrant, says "I know you look down on me because I come from one of the European countries under domination by stronger Whites than my people. We were your n****rs; you colonized us and made us dirt under your heels." But Musclewhite isn't a good example, because he also says, "It was then that we realized you were all we had, the way you had cultivated a theater to keep us from them, a theater with scene shifts and a changing cast of characters but always squeezing out the Bronx cheer from your bought-off claque. Then we found out what you were doing. But we didn't let on, we decided to imitate you." And at another point he says, "We used to run alongside your carriages in bare feet when you drove though out neighborhoods, and you would splash mud in our faces violate our sisters flog our fathers; but we kept coming for more because we loved your beautiful cloths, your clean hair, the charming ladies riding beside you, the way you talked..."
And this passage makes any white people with what might arguably have a more Jes Grew-oriented background because of their social class or country of origin appear eager to imitate the Atonists, showing no integrity whatsoever.
But Reed also oversimplifies the other end of the spectrum. He creates this vague concept of the good guys centering in Africa and the Middle East (even though supposedly the whole battle started in Egypt), and he offers little explanation for how Islam would have anything to do with Jes Grew and yet he says in passing that the Atonists fought the crusades to further strengthen their hold on dark magic and suppress any inclinations toward Jes Grew. Whereas for every other part of the book, everything we know about Atonism would fit well into Islam. It's monotheistic, its stricter forms prohibit dancing and even music, and it shares many aspects in common with Judaism and Christianity, all three worshipping the God of Adam, stressing moral responsibility, Judgement Day, and eternal reward and punishment.
So why is Islam frequently exempt from the harsher criticism Christianity and Judaism receive in this book, even to the point where it is implied to be linked with Jes Grew that the Crusades tried to suppress? If this was a deliberate choice on Ishmael Reed's part, then I'm intrigued. Is there something that distinctly sets Islam apart and links it to Jes Grew? Or was it almost an oversight, Ishmael Reed growing comfortable in his dichotomy of what he defined to be the white world verses the black world, not bothering to look for more overlap between the two? The West has a clear Jes Grew presence with the influence of Celtic culture and certainly other Pagan traditions as well. And this vaguely defined Afro-centric part of the world has Islam which has been a growingly Atonist presence for a long time. And yet this is almost completely overlooked throughout the novel.
On the other hand, Reed's choice to so blatantly dichotomizes the world that this novel could possibly be perceived as a satire of itself, pointing out how impossible it is to divide people in this way, and making readers more aware of the ways in which they compartmentalize entire continents to the point where one part of the world fosters a population that can dance and sing and groove and the other part creates a population that worships a "famous sacrificial White child of the Red Sect rites" (Goya's paiting of Don Manuel Osorio de Zuniga).
The idea that white people all either want to defeat or appropriate/profit from Jes Grew also seems at odds with the whole "crisis" idea that the novel opens with: if the spread of this culture is indeed seen as a "threat" by the white/Atonist establishment, this must mean that the white people are "really" catching it, that it's changing them in some fundamental way, making their culture less "pure" (which is a *good* thing in this novel's taxonomy). But we don't actually see any white JGC's in the novel that aren't affiliated with the WO (or quick to betray their antiracist principles, like Thor).
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, you're talking about how the novel sets up a kind of allegory that doesn't quite stand up under pressure--and maybe all allegories oversimplify, or divide the world into too-simple categories, even a self-aware postmodern one.