Comments on Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

“What does white follks business have to do with me, Showcase said lifting her long black skirts and placing his hand upon her creamy thighs. The white man has the brain of Aristotle, the body of Michelangelo’s David and the shining spirit of the Prime-mover, how would it look for a lowly savage and wretch such as me meddling in his noble affairs?” (109)

Wow...Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is something else. It’s harder to read than Mumbo Jumbo, his next novel, and in my opinion, tries too hard to cover everything. It shares certain stylistic and thematic similarities with Mumbo Jumbo, but I find it much more difficult. The writing style is not a strict accordance with the ‘rules’ of grammar and English writing, so many readers may be turned off after a few pages. Regardless of the difficulty in reading the text, it does have many fascinating characteristics and themes: parody of Westerns, repudiation of so-called Western civilization, elements of science fiction, conspiracy theories, and alternate history, and satire. The main protagonist, Loop Garoo Kid, a Voodoo/hoodoo cowboy, a name which refers to the ‘werewolves’ of Haitian mythology who turn into monsters and eat people, has to exact vengeance on Drag Gibson, an evil capitalist who embodies America’s westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, for killing the people in the circus group he traveled across the country with. In the process of doing so, the reader is treated to several historical allusions to famous people of the 19th and 20th century (Thomas Jefferson, Lewish & Clark, Marie Laveau, the Voodoo queen of New Orleans, John Wesley Hardin), and anachronisms everywhere, including Chief Showcase’s helicopter and Drag’s television. Like Mumbo Jumbo, Reed critiques the fictional history of the Old West that omits people of color (Indians, Chinese, African-Americans, Mexicans) who were always part of the West (western United States, not “Western’ civilization) and demonstrates the importance of including non-whites in the greater history of the region besides Lewis and Clark, Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, and romanticized, whitewashed cowboys.

The most prominent ways in which the multicultural origins of the Western US are illustrated in the text are the plethora of non-white characters. Chief Showcase, the only surviving Indian in the town the whites created after defeating his people, is reduced to being a servant for Drag. However, Chief Showcase demonstrates the essential and often advanced contributions of Native Americans to the United States in agriculture, food preparation, and even technology. Moreover, Chief Showcase character serves as a permanent reminder of how White Americans ‘acquired’ the West, through extreme violence, trickery, and exploitation. Drag’s Chinese servants also appear in novel to remind the reader of the numerous Chinese immigrants, forced into exploitative labor relations for wealthy whites, also contributed to the multicultural world of the Old West.

African-Americans, however, are given the most prominent role as non-whites in America’s westward expansion. Loop Garoo Kid, a black hoodoo-practicing cowboy, is an important character for several historical and cultural factors. First, a disproportionate number of cowboys actually were black, unlike the whitewashed, romanticized cowboys omnipresent in American popular culture and consciousness. Loop Garoo’s practice of New Orleans-derived voodoo/hoodoo becomes relevant as an alternative to the capitalist, destructive forces of Drag, the United States, and ‘Western’ civilization. Loop Garoo’s invocation of the loas (deities of vodou) leads to his transformation into a hoodoo trickster character, thereby overturning all of Drag’s economic and political power in Yellow Back Radio. Loop Garoo’s calling of the loas leads to a complete change in the town once his curses destroy Drag’s wealth (cattle, mines). A new world, represented by the white python of Loop Garoo’s that symbolizes Damballah, loa of creation, and destroys Drag’s wealth, shows the importance of establishing a world founded in mutual love and respect for all cultures. Voodoo’s potential to become a universal way of life is rooted in it’s ability to incorporate so many influences, including European and Native American cultures. By encouraging the people to Yellow Back Radio to turn away from the exploitative and destructive forces inherent in capitalism and Christianity, Loop Garoo paves the way for the children of the town to find the Seven Cities of Cibola, an anarchist technological paradise where machines have freed humans from reliance on hierarchical structures. In addition, Loop Garou’s loa, Judas Iscariot, shows fundamental issues in Christianity because Loop Garoo belives Jesus Christ was an arrogant, inferior version of Buddha and other religious leaders, thus Judas Iscariot betrayed a false Messiah. Loop Garoo essentially acts as Judas Iscariot to betray the false Christ of ‘Western’ civilization in the United States.

In addition to demanding an acknowledgement of the multicultural origin and present of the United States, Reed criticizes many of his contemporaries within the Black Arts Movement and American intellectuals in general. Many African-American (and other writers) were caught up in neo-social realist literature, that in the words of Bo Shmo, “All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.” Reed, like Loop, believes “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” (36). Reed here is saying that artists should have complete liberty to write or create anything they want, and should not be pigeonholed into only producing literature that focuses on black liberation or any other specific political agenda. Indeed, Reed is countering many long held beliefs about black writers among African-American and white critics and intellectuals, who are limiting the ability of blacks to freely express themselves. One still finds this tendency among literary critics and the media, which usually have a very narrow focus on what constitutes ‘great’ African-American literature or art. In the novel, Reed successfully deconstructs the novel form to show how innovative and free artists should feel to experiment in their work, instead of clinging to social realism. By freeing himself from the confining form of the novel, and expectations of black artists that are never leveled against whites, Reed succeeds in crafting a fascinating treatise on the West  that dismantles myths constructed by white Americans to be ‘real’ history. Indeed, Reed expands the American West to the “Western tradition,” featuring a Pope who acknowledges Christianity and Europe’s debt to Black Egypt, and Africa, for the black St. Augustine and other Church figures, popes, etc. White America’s tendency to fetishize the “West” is also critiques through characters such as Thomas Jefferson for not creating their own independent aesthetics and philosophy.

Overall, I would rate Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down a 3.5 stars out of 5. I unquestionably missed a lot in my reading of the text, due to what I find to be sometimes excessively difficult passages and too many themes tackled simultaneously. As previously stated, the satire of the Western genre serves to illustrate the multicultural origins of the region, along with critiques of American and Western European standards of religion and civilization. Indeed, as Loop Garoo says in his calling to the Gods, “O Black Hawk American Indian houngan of Hoo-Doo please do open up some of these prissy orthodox minds so that they will no longer call Black People’s American experience “corrupt” “perverse” and “decadent.” Please show them that Booker T and the MG’s, Etta James, Johnny Ace and Bojangle tapdancing is just as beautiful as anything that happened anywhere else in the world” (64). His emphasis on hoodoo/vodoo as a potential source for collective human liberation and alternative to the “West” but does not totally reject it is reflected in Loop Garoo Kid’s character, a trickster rooted in black folk tradition that paves the road to liberation by setting up the destruction of Drag’s capitalist, murderous regime of western expansion. Feminists will likely have problems with Mustache Sal, an olive-skinned beauty from the East (eastern US) who marries Drag for his money and has sex with nearly every man. She is likely a critique of feminists from the 1960s and 1970s who challenged the double standard imposed on female sexual activity but worked in favor of patriarchal social relations for their own material benefit. I suppose one would have to read the book for oneself to make your own decision, particularly since the novel is fiction and black and white feminists have made well-publicized attacks on Reed for ‘misogyny.’