Preface to Soul on Ice By Ishamel Reed

Books by Eldridge Cleaver

Soul on Ice / Post-Prison Writings and Speeches / Target Zero; A Life in Writing / Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver

Being Black / Education and Revolution / Eldridge Cleaver / Eldridge Cleaver Is Free

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“Preface” to Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice

By Ishmael Reed

On Malcolm & Black Male Rhetoric

Malcolm made wolfing and jive an art form, and though his battles were fought on television (Marshall McLuhan referred to him as ‘the electronic man’) and his weapons were words, he was a symbol of black manhood; our living ‘shining prince’ was the way Ossie Davis put it, in a eulogy delivered at Malcolm’s funeral.

Manhood—much on the minds of black men during the sixties . . . black children were blown to bits during church services in Birmingham, Alabama . . . the desperate cry of men whose women were being poked with cattle prods and beaten to the ground by white thugs in uniform [We were in need of an Avenging Angel].

That’s how we saw Malcolm. He would make them pay. Pay for the humiliations we suffered in a racist country. Young black intellectuals were out for revenge. They were in a Kikuyu warrior mode.

Elijah & Religious Rhetoric

Elijah Muhammad’s generation called whites devils, because they had come out of the Southern racist hell where the whites had shown themselves to be capable of the most fiendish acts.

Cleaver's Literary Development in Prison

Cleaver—in jail—reading, writing, meditating, and practicing his intellectual style of mentors, who was obviously no match for his probing, hungry intellect.

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“former career as a rapist” -- “a recovering racist” – “a former black muslim, who read and admired Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro.”

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[Cleaver's] recurring theme – “eternal struggle between the black supermasculine menial and the white omnipotent administrator—a struggle that continues in various forms, to this day"

White Male Backlash

while white males were on the receiving end of criticism by black writers during the sixties and early seventies, some white male writers and media commentators have since gotten even by bonding with the black feminist movement an criticizing the treatment of black women by black men.

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In this war, women are regarded as bargaining chips and loot for both sidea, the black one, Amazons, the white ones, gullible Barbie dolls.

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white men . . . regarded all white women as their property while black men feel that black women belong to them. Both groups were upset when the women declared that they owned their own bodies, their souls, and their minds. In Soul on Ice, the women are either madonnas or whores.

Cleaver & the Old Left

[Cleaver] published as a celebrity by the New York Old Left and its branches in Northern California and Los Angeles – “black prisoner as proxy in their fight against capitalism”

[Cleaver] “quintessential American” – in that he uses – “guile, wit, and flattery to accomplish their ends. – “You knew I was a snake.”

Cleaver the Trickster

[In Soul on Fire, Cleaver] worked his tricks too many times; the book was ignored and his description of his conversion to Christianity mocked (he said he joined the fundamentalists because they had brought him from exile, and if the Panthers had brought him home he would have sided with the,”

Cleaver & Panthers Pawns for White Left

[Cleaver and Huey Newton and the Panthers were] used as pawns in a struggle between the white Right, who destroyed them, and the white Left who piled an agenda on them that went way beyond their original community concerns, and who viewed them as cannon fodder

In this political and cultural environment Cleaver seems a has-been and the villain in his book . . . --in comparison the sinister crowd in power now—seem like populists from the quaint old days of the America Weimar

Cleaver & Panthers Abandoned by White Left

Former white allies that prove that prove that the authors were white nationalists all along because they omit, or give scant attention to, the role of blacks, who created the political and cultural matrix for that decade.

Importance of Soul on Ice

The reissue of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice will challenge the current bleaching out of the black influence on the cultural and political climate of the sixties. This book is a classic because it is not merely a book about that decade, regarded as demonic by some and by others as the most thrilling and humanistic of the century. Soul on Ice is the sixties. The smell of protest, anger, tear gas, and the sound of skull-cracking billy clubs, helicopters, and revolution is present in its pages.

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updated 25 February 2008

Ishmael Reed -- poet, essayist, and novelist -- was born in 1938 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was raised in Buffalo, New York, and attended the University of New York at Buffalo. Reed's first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, was published in 1967. That same year he moved to Berkeley, California, later relocating to the adjacent city of Oakland, where he currently resides with his wife, Carla Blank, a dancer and choreographer. They have a daughter, Tennessee. Reed also has a daughter, Timothy Brett, from a previous marriage.

Reed named his philosophy and aesthetic processes Neohoodooism. Hoodoo, the African American version of voodoo, appeals to Reed because of its "mystery" and its eclectic nature, thus provided him with a metaphor for his understanding and realization of art.

Reed's view of neohoodooism can be found in his first book of poetry, Conjure (1972)--especially "Neo-HooDoo Manifesto," "The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic," and "catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church"--while the most successful actualizations of neohoodooism as a practice are his novels Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969), the aforementioned Mumbo Jumbo, and Flight to Canada (1976).

Neohoodooism is an undeniable mix of ingredients in the New World. Instead of black essentialism, Reed argues for hybridity as a virtue. Immersion in blackness is simultaneously an immersion in Americanness. Africa helped to make America and there would be no America without Africa. America is a gumbo of cultures. Ishamel Reed's artistic vision is unique among American writers.

He is the author of five collections of poetry: New and Collected Poems (Atheneum, 1988), A Secretary to the Spirits (1978), Catechism of D Neoamerican HooDoo Church (1970), Chattanooga (1973), and Conjure (1972). Reed has also written nine novels including Japanese by Spring (1993), The Terrible Twos (1982), Flight to Canada (1976), The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969), and The Free-Lance Pallbearers. Among his plays are Mother Hubbard (1982) and The Ace Boons (1980).

He is also the author of four collections of essays: Airing Dirty Laundry (1993), Writin' is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper (1988), God Made Alaska for the Indians: Selected Essays (1982), and Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978).