(upbeat music) - [Alison] This week on "The A list," I sit down with a groundbreaking writer who has forged a lengthy career as a literary disruptor.

- Well, we all thought we were gonna be experimental, and unlike a former generation who catered to a liberal readership, 'cause the idea was that whites were the only ones to buy books, we turned our back on that.

And "Mumbo Jumbo" was sort of like a thumb in the nose to the reader saying, you know, I don't care whether you read this or not, just consider it mumbo jumbo, where the former generation would always cast themselves as apprentices to masters.

- [Alison] Join me as I sit down with author and poet Ishmael Reed, coming up next on "The A list."

(upbeat music) Over the course of six decades, Ishmael Reed has made an indelible mark on the literary world with more than 30 books of prose, poetry, plays, and essays.

He is also a prolific songwriter, editor, and publisher who has continuously championed other writers through the founding and co-founding of several print and online journals, magazines, and small presses.

Challenging the status quo through parody and satire has earned him a reputation as a literary troublemaker.

It has also made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a National Book Award nominee.

In March of 2025, the city of Chattanooga's Office of Arts Culture and Creative Economy invited Ishmael back to the city of his birth and gave Chattanooga's the chance to hear from this celebrated cultural critic.

Ishmael, welcome to the A-List.

- Well, thank you.

- And welcome back to Chattanooga.

- Absolutely.

Yes.

- How often do you get back here?

- Well, we come every, I don't know, eight years or so.

This is my third trip since I moved to California.

- Okay.

And talk to me about your childhood here.

- Well, I think I've gotten a lot of ideas from being in Chattanooga at a very early age.

We left when I was about four years old for the North.

It was like the Ukrainians, you know, leaving the Russians at that time.

But as fate goes, my brothers moved back to Tennessee where we tried to escape from, and they lived very prosperous lives in Nashville.

And so we have a lot of great memories here.

Our ancestors are here.

They came from Georgia and North Carolina.

And my mother and my grandmother had some very good jobs here, because at that time, I think in 1900, 70% of Black women worked as domestic servants.

But they had great jobs on Signal Mountain and Lookout Mountain with the Grody family and the Spencer family.

So I think the mayor saw an article I wrote in political magazine about the two Tennessees, you know, and my mother's Southern strategy.

Her Southern strategy was that the good white people will save you from the wicked ones.

And she carried that strategy to the North.

I brought her book down here.

She wrote a book about growing up in the 20s and 30s.

89 years ago she graduated from Howard High School.

And I mentioned that in a poem I wrote called "Chattanooga."

- Well, speaking of the poem, "Chattanooga," you wrote that more than 50 years ago.

And even today, it feels like you could have written it yesterday, and it feels like you are capturing an essence of a community, but moreso you're pushing back on something having to be an either/or.

And I think that poem, and all of your work, is really about embracing the both/and.

- Oh, yeah.

I think that life is ambiguous.

There are no, you know, no Blacks, no whites, so to speak.

And the older you get, the more you understand that, gain some wisdom, you're no longer foolish.

Matter of fact, I just sold a poem to the New Yorker magazine about growing old, taking W. B. Yeat's line, an aged thing tied to a dying animal.

And I'm saying, well, even dying animals can cost you an arm and a leg all the stuff you have to pay for.

X-rays, you know.

(both laughing) I don't have to tell people my age that, you know, it's really...

I told my wife, I said, "Why don't we just move next door to the hospital there?

We all go there two times a week."

So the more that you, the older you get, the more that you realize that things are not certain, and that in an earlier time when you made easy decisions, you're much more cautious.

- Now, I understand it was your mom who commissioned your first poem.

- Yes.

Well, she was a, my mother was a agitator.

As a matter of fact, she organized two strikes without benefit of a union that improved the working conditions of Black women.

First at a hotel where she said, now this is an old image, she said, the supervisor of the women was like Hitler, you know, and we all grew up in 1940s so you could understand what that meant.

Tyrannical woman.

She organized a strike and it wasn't broken.

And so they improved the wages of the domestic help at the hotel in Buffalo.

And then she got a job at a department store, and the Black women were consigned to being stock girls.

And she insisted that they become salespersons.

And she won.

And I have a photo of her dining with these mostly Polish-American women who were working there.

And she commissioned me to write a poem for one of the workers who's having a birthday.

I'm a rhymer.

You know, that's supposed to be like old fashioned.

You go to school, they said, "No, no more rhyme."

I said, "Well, I love to rhyme."

I write songs, Taj Mahal, Cassandra Wilson, Macy Gray, all these people have done my songs, but they rhyme.

It's considered corny.

And so I wrote my first poem, commission poem was a rhyme.

And so I've gotten commissions since then.

For example, Mayor Brown, Jerry Brown commissioned me to write his inaugural poem.

My poems are on the streets.

Like Robert Hass, the US Poet Laureate, got a commission to hire a poet to write poems for the sidewalks.

My poems are a part of installment at the BART.

I got the Bay Area Rapid Transit commissioned me to write poem that greets the Richmond people, Richmond citizens who are commuters.

So it's a big box as they go into the subway.

So I consider myself a public poet, and one of my poems are on the buses in New York.

So, you know, Kilroy was here.

You know that idea?

So my stuff is all over the country.

Sidewalks, walls, you know, all kinds of places.

Even in a mom and pop store near where we live, there's one of my poems on the wall.

(relaxed music) - [Alison] From the sidewalks to the printed page, Ishmael is comfortable outside the mainstream, often advocating for overlooked writers.

His impulse to challenge and recreate was born from early opportunities to confront new cultures and ideas.

It seems like there are many cities, specifically, throughout your life that have had an impact.

And the first one I wanna talk about is your trip to Paris.

- Oh, that changed my whole view of things.

Ironically, we were sent there for a Bible convention, the YMCA.

- How old were you?

- I was 17.

We spent a lot of time in nightclubs, you know what I mean?

Jazz clubs.

(laughing) First time I spent out all night.

I mean, it was like amazing.

I was hanging out with these kids from Long Island, these hip white kids.

And we were trying to be Parisian.

You know, I had put on Parisian clothes, I had my glasses and everything and we were sitting in this nightclub, all cool, and being Parisian.

And Robert Mitchum walks in, and everybody got up, ran, "Oh, Mr. Mitchum!

"Oh, please, sign my autograph," you know.

Became American kids again.

But what I noticed there was that the Africans I met in Paris were not like the ones that are depicted in popular culture and in the curriculum.

They were students at the Sorbonne.

And there were, you know, there was a sort of like a Pan-African movement in literature going on there in Paris.

And there were signs all over town.

The Ballet African.

I mean the culture.

So when I came back, I dropped outta high school.

I said, "They're lying about that.

What else?"

So I went to work in the library, and, you know, read a lot of books.

And as a matter of fact, it was my first encounter with James Baldwin, with whom I had a problematic relationship because we saw him as old fashioned.

We were the avant-garde.

But I really learned a lot working in the library.

- So what about your move to New York City?

- Well, I say in, this is the 50th anniversary of one of my books.

And Scribners is bringing out a 50th anniversary edition "Flight to Canada" I wrote.

And I say, my two best decisions were going to New York and leaving New York (Alison laughing) because, I don't know, there's something, there's something really...

I said when, when Bosnia broke out, I understood New York.

The attitude is it's just not a comfortable place for us.

And I felt there was a lot of cutthroat competition there and all that.

But I think there's something, you know, coming up in Chattanooga and coming up in the Buffalo, which is a working-class town, which is like the same kind of industries that we have in Chattanooga, you get suspicious of adulation, you know?

So if you're in New York and you're talented, they have that old European attitude toward artists.

And so I was flattered to death.

I said, if I'd remained in New York, I would've died of an overdose of affection because, you know, all these French restaurants and all this whole kind of stuff and the name.

So I said, "I gotta get outta here."

I said I wanted to go to the most barbaric place in the country.

So I went to Los Angeles, you know, spent the summer.

Spent the summer in an apartment there in Los Angeles, - Which has to be unusual for an artist, especially, to finally land someplace where you feel beloved and celebrated and think, "Oh, I'll get bored.

I'll get stifled."

- Well, I think the thing thing about New York, I was a token in waiting, and you see two or three guys, maybe two divas and divos, we call 'em, get a lot of publicity.

And as an anthologist, I've read thousands of manuscripts.

And what I've discovered is that for every prominent devo or token, there are 10 writers who write as well, just reading a lot of manuscripts.

So the token knows, and the token person who gets a lot of publicity and becomes famous, a Black person or Hispanic, they're always a suspect of why they arrived there.

And, you know, Black communities and ethnic communities have a different way of looking at these tokens that get a lot of press than, you know, the actual communities.

For example, a Jewish-American club designated the best Jewish-American writers of the 20th century, and Philip Roth and Mailer and them didn't make the list because... Had the same thing with the Blacks.

I went to, we have something called the Audelco Awards, which is the highest award in Black theater.

The most famous director at the time in the American press in the New York Times, Lloyd Richards, who directed August Wilson's plays, he came, he showed up, nobody recognized him but me.

And then he was nominated for best director.

He lost.

So we have a totally different way of looking at things and those, you know, those entities that select who's the most favorite or who, who gets the most publicity.

- Well, speaking of that, I was at the New Orleans Book Festival in 2024, and it was the day that "The Atlantic" put out their top American novels of all time.

And they decided not to use an arbitrary number.

And they, I think landed on 136.

And then they asked the panelists on stage from "The Atlantic," who were the ones who compiled the list, whether the list is accurate or not, maybe up for the debate, but I remember I started writing down their top number one novel of all times.

And of the four up there, the first person said, "Hands down, 'Mumbo Jumbo.'"

- Well, that's a blessing and a curse, because when you hit the jackpot at 32, it goes downhill after that.

(laughing) - I mean, speaking of celebrating 50 years, it's been more than 50 years for that book.

- "Mumbo Jumbo" got a anniversary edition a couple years ago.

All my books are in print, but they were commercial failures in the beginning.

So I tell younger writers, you know, stick it out.

Just, if your book's not commercially successful, you know, just have patience, because those books are failures.

"Mumbo Jumbo," my lawyer and I thought we could go back to Doubleday and get another contract for a novel.

And they said, "Well, 'Mumbo Jumbo' didn't sell, right?

It's been selling for 50 years all over the world, so we want you to write a book about Jimi Hendrix."

I said, "No, I wanna write novels."

So I selected, or I suggested someone who could write one about Jimi Hendrix, and that that book sold 500,000 copies.

You know, the guy lives off of that book.

So I went to Random House, and they decided, Random House, "Flight to Canada," which is 50 years old, you know, next year, didn't sell.

And so then I went to McMillan, and that's a long story.

I talk about in the introduction to "Flight to Canada's" new edition.

So now I'm, this is ironic, I'm published in Canada.

(both laughing) - I hope they sell it in Canada.

- I said, "I wrote "Flight to Canada" in 1976, and now I'm getting published in Canada.

It's crazy.

We go to Montreal and Toronto.

So, you know, I'm published by a French publisher in Montreal, my novels.

Because they're hard to read.

- They're hard to read.

- They're hard to read.

- Purposely though.

- Well, no, I mean, I think that you shouldn't talk down to the reader, and- - Well, there's an expectation that the reader has to be an active participant.

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

- Especially in "Mumbo Jumbo," where every time, instead of writing out the word one, it's the number 1, and it's jarring.

I mean, it makes you stop and reread that word, the sentence over again.

- Well, we all thought we were gonna be experimental.

And unlike a former generation who catered to a liberal readership, because the idea was that whites were the only ones to buy books, we turned our back on that.

And "Mumbo Jumbo" was sort of like a thumb in the nose to the reader saying, "You know, I don't care whether you read this or not, just consider it mumbo jumbo."

Where the former generation would always cast themselves as apprentices to masters.

So for example, James Baldwin picked up the sentence structure of Henry James, and then Ralph Ellison was always saying, you know, Ernest Hemingway was his master.

We rejected all of that.

And so "Flight to Canada" was influenced by two Black writers of the 19th century that we didn't come across in our education.

So one is from Henry Bibb, B-I-B-B, who went to Canada, and his master, I think his name was Stratford, wrote him a letter saying, you run away, you gotta return.

So, excuse me, Henry Bibb writes this great letter about what the master can do with the request, and he's living well.

And if you come to Canada, come visit, and all this kinda stuff.

So I did a parody to that.

And the parody I thought was, you know, it's like striking disparity.

So I wrote a whole novel around the poem.

And the other writer from the 19th century was William Wells Brown.

Now, this is interesting.

We had an Anglo education, we lived in Buffalo, and nobody told me that William Wells Brown lived in Buffalo my the hometown, or, you know, second hometown, for nine years.

And nobody told us about this big anti-slavery movement in Buffalo and Frederick Douglass and all these people showing up.

I had to learn that in the streets.

We had to learn that about Black history in the streets.

And so William Wells Brown wrote a play.

I said, this has gotta be the most radical novel written, "Flight to Canada."

He beat me to it by, I don't know, 100 years or so, he wrote a play called "Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom."

It was funny.

And he was right there, lived on a plantation, and he's got all these characters and these plantation figures.

It's very funny, but it makes a serious point.

His play was finally performed maybe a few years ago.

He never saw it performed in his lifetime.

He read from it.

He was the anti-slavery orator, so he read from his work, and then he went to places like Ireland and England.

These treated as slaves like Douglas, they went abroad and read their work.

But it was performed recently, maybe a few years ago.

But I mean, I had had not come across that in my education.

And when I read that, I said, "There's nothing new under the sun."

You'd think that you're doing something new and you look back 100 years, somebody else did it before.

- [Alison] That early dedication to interrogating the dominant narrative and seeking opportunities to expand his own awareness has clearly contributed to Ishmael's unique voice as a writer.

His legacy as a disruptor has been fortified by his experiences with some of his history's most notable figures.

Now, I think about like the three big M's in your life, if I could take that liberty.

One, "Mumbo Jumbo."

The other two, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.

What influence did they have on you and do they continue to have on you, as an artist, as a writer, as a disruptor?

- Well, Malcolm X taught us to be plain, to speak plainly.

When I met him, I was like, I always think about that movie, "The Gunfighter" where Gregory Peck plays this old gunfighter, and here comes this punk.

I don't know, if you haven't seen that movie, go see it.

So I was like, the punk, you know.

And so when we did a radio broadcast, he came in the room and the moderator said, "Well, we should talk about Black history."

I said, "Well, you know, Mr. X would say that Black history is distorted."

He said, "No, I'd call it cotton patch history.

I said, "What?"

And what he was saying was that the pictures that we get of slavery are people being submissive.

You know, they're planting cotton, or they're being whipped, or all this kind of stuff.

They don't talk about the resistance that begins in Africa.

Matter of fact, I was at that slave port in Ghana, and there was resistance from the beginning where the rebellious slaves were put in a isolated from the other population.

That continues to this day.

But we hadn't been taught that.

I had to learn about that when I went to New York.

I learned Black history when I went to New York, but we didn't know about the other side of that experience.

But that's what he was referring to.

But what impressed me most about him was that he was very scholarly.

That he had gone to a prison where somebody dedicated 2,000 books.

I think he read all of them.

So, even though he's depicted as Black Nationalist, he had read Virgil and he'd read Dante and he read all these books, 'cause I found out the hard way.

So I wrote a poem dedicated to him that was so bad I threw it away.

I remember some of the lines, but it was- - Say, some of the lines.

- Oh, I don't even talk about it.

I mean, even the title was stupid.

And he's very charitable.

He said, "It reminds me of Dante, it reminds me of Virgil."

I hadn't read Virgil, you know, so he knew his way around the classics, and I think if he had survived, he'd probably be the president of a small college or something like that because really interested in the language and scholarship.

- What did you learn from Muhammad Ali?

- Don't stay in the ring too long.

I mean, me saying that, that's, ironic.

But that's what happened to him, that he allowed himself to be exploited.

I interviewed one of the trainers, one of the trainers from the Krok Gym, Emmanuel Steward.

And he said he should had quit after the Foreman fight.

Because after that period where he was not fighting, he lost his speed.

And so, while before you couldn't hit him because he was so fast, he got hit a lot.

And he fought, according to Angelo Dundee, his trainer, whom I met down in Louisiana, he fought the last two fights with experiencing brain damage.

So it's like a sad story.

- So, people have called you and you've called yourself, a disruptor, a trickster, an iconoclast.

You're all about making sure you push back on mainstream narratives and creating your own story.

So what do you want people to know you as?

- Well, I'm 87 years old, so I don't know if I'm a trickster, or a brilliant, or all those other things when you get my age.

I think what I want to do is like, make a clean exit, 'cause I see a lot of American men make sloppy exits, and see that, you know, my extended family is taken care of.

And that maybe some of the fortune that I've experienced will be passed through to generations.

And I think that kept a living trust or having some way to provide for your descendants is a good idea.

And I don't think people do that, many people do that, they observe that.

So I'm still writing.

I got a series that nobody reads, which are, (laughing) excuse me, which I began as a 40 year project.

The Terrible series.

"Terrible One."

Terrible, excuse me.

"Terrible Twos," "Terrible Threes," "Terrible Fours."

So I'm writing "Terrible Five."

So I introduced a character name of Termite Control.

1989 I introduced this character, Termite Control.

And the first book, 1982, a Christian nationalist government takes over after invoking the 25th Amendment to get rid of the President.

But now they're in trouble.

Nobody gave Termite Control a chance to become President.

But now in "Terrible Fives," he's in a position to become President.

Anyway, it's a lot of fun.

I'm having a lot of fun writing it.

I don't know if anybody's gonna buy it.

- Well, I will say that it's very clear that you need to stay in the ring a little bit longer 'cause the fight's not over.

- Well, thank you very much.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Watch even more of the shows you love anytime with WTCI Passport on the free PBS app.

Download it today.