"Dualism" may be my favorite poem by Ishmael Reed.
His humor, ear for everyday conversation and gift for packing big ideas into few words is on full display in "Dualism." The poem is in a collection titled "Conjure" that was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. It is so concise that I can quote it in full here:
i am outside of
history.
i wish
i had some peanuts, it
looks hungry in there in
its cage
i am inside of
history.
its
hungrier than i
thot
It's hard to read a title such as "Dualism" by an African American poet and not think of WEB DuBois's "double consciousness." That was DuBois’s term for the challenge of African Americans who saw themselves as fully human, but had to live in a world in which white Americans perceived them as lesser. DuBois wrote that "one ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
But Reed refers in his “Dualism” subtitle to “ralph ellison’s invisible man,” not Dubois’s “The Souls of Black Folk.” In his biography of Reed, Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes “Dualism” as a response in which Reed insists on "more choices than the paltry two afforded Ellison's protagonist." Reed is hungry for infinite, complex, overlapping perspectives and experiences, not just Black and white, literary and folk, us and them, inside and outside, good and evil.
Gates writes that "what Reed deplores is that the narrative of Black freedom and liberation travels one road," and that Reed is as resistant to what he sees as the limitation of accepted or expected Black art as he is to broader Western literary traditions, illustrated by his idiosyncratic grammar and spelling.
I say that "Dualism" may be my favorite Reed poem. I have one other major contender: "Skydiving."
Reed is a writer who is interested in many forms of creativity, including the visual arts. In "Skydiving," he conjures a shift in mood with a deft description of a painting by Archibald Motley of a Harlem restaurant and jazz club that was famous during the Depression. Reed could be brutally funny, as with his indelible image of a failed skydiver "spread out on the field like scrambled eggs."
Reed is also a musician. The jazz luminaries who came together for albums based on his poetry and prose showed the high regard in which he was held -- Allen Toussaint, David Murray, Lester Bowie, Carla Bley among others. Taj Mahal sings a version of "Skydiving" set to music on a 1985 album. I imagine musicians hear their own banter in the rhythms of Reed's words.
Reed writes in "Skydiving" about never having "much use for a real father." Reed, born in 1938 in Tennessee, was never acknowledged by his biological father, who had raped his mother. He and his mother moved when he was four to New York, where she married Bennie Reed. Reed loved his stepfather, taking his last name long before he was formally adopted. But the two were very different. Bennie Reed was a semiliterate factory worker. He was wary of filling out the paperwork when his son was offered a college scholarship, so the scholarship never came through. Reed said that he understood the wariness, knowing of the bitter experiences of poorly educated Black men robbed by white criminals. Reed never graduated from college, but went on to teach at several universities after educating himself by reading widely in his hometown library and reaching out to other artists in New York and later California.
Reed admired men who, while they may not have been his "real" fathers, were beloved mentors. Among them was newspaperman AJ Smitherman, a refugee from the 1921 Tulsa massacre who founded The Empire Star, a Buffalo weekly for which Reed worked first as a delivery boy and then as a jazz columnist. After Reed moved to New York City he met Langston Hughes, who included his work in an anthology and introduced him to a Doubleday editor who published his first novel, "The Freelance Pallbearers."
I admire “Dualism” for its cool intelligence. “Skydiving” has a more personal appeal.
I see a lot of Reed in my father. The two men were born just a few years apart, both Black Southerners who escaped to the North and then to the West, and who loved storytelling and libraries.
My Daddy once confided in me that because he was just nine when his father died, he always worried that he wasn't a good parent because he had not had a role model. But, like Reed, my father had mentors, among them his mother's brother John Wesley Downs, whom my father called Uncle Bobo, an Army chaplain.
Even though I was just a teenager when my father told me about questioning his parenting skills, I understood it was a privilege for me to hear such vulnerability, and that he expected a lot of himself because he loved me and my sister (Reed also had two daughters). When I became a mother, I was able to look on his words and understand that it's natural to worry about getting parenting right.
My kid as a teen-ager spent a day patiently giving me a ski lesson. I thought of this passage from "Skydiving" as my instructor and offspring skied backward just ahead of me, watchful as a parent, giving me tips on how to take the inevitable tumbles without injuring myself:
In these downhill days of a hard-hearted decade
Jetting through the world, our tails on fire
You can't always count on things opening up for you
Know when to let go
Learn how to fall.