"A Man's Story Is His Gris-gris": Ishmael Reed's Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic and the African-American Tradition

Abstract

The story is the gris-gris is the self: this equation by Raven Quickskill, fugitive poet of Flight to Canada, lies at the heart of this attempt to locate Ishmael Reed within the African-American literary tradition. Superficially, Reed's metafictional and satirical novelistic techniques2 seem to ally him more closely with the postmodern mainstream than with the lyricism and search for community which has characterized so much recent AfricanAmerican literature. My contention here, however, is that this superficial dissimilarity is precisely what places Reed firmly in the African-American tradition. His aesthetic could be called as subversion, in that it takes the superficial forms of a dominant culture and transforms their meaning while leaving the forms themselves intact: a polemical approach which has been fundamental to African-American writing since its inception. Reed's formulation for this transformation of meaning is Neo-HooDoo,3 in which the story, the gris-gris, and the self become equated in a way that accords with the African understanding of the nature and function of art, but which redefines this understanding in a North American context. Since Neo-HooDoo has its origins in Voodoo,4 this examination of Reed's linguistic acts of subversion will begin in Haiti, or, more specifically, with a brief consideration of the nature and function of Voodoo art as it influences