His old friends say he was born with his persona. His new friends say his old friends are probably right. Slim, trout-eyed, dread-topped and dapperly dressed, Darius James, author of the novel, Negrophobia (St. Martin's), is a multi-media presentation in one diminutive package. He reads theatrically, he uses make-up evocatively and he's weirdly photogenic. His impersonation of a black light minstrel for the cover of his book is simultaneously a pun, a literary marketing strategy and crossover self-promotion.Like its author, Negrophobia is a streaker grazing the turnstile between literature and other mediums.

The protagonist of Negrophobia is a teen-aged blonde named Bubbles Brazil. To be free of racism, she must literally eat her parents in order to puke them up. Unfortunately for Bubbles, her parents are legion. Throughout the book, James conjures armies of cartoons whom Bubbles must excrete.

Currently at work on a semi-autobiographical history of the black exploitation film, That's Blaxploitation!, James is now dealing with racist caricatures from a historical standpoint.

Q. You ended Negrophobia with two pages of acknowledgments and began it with quotes from mentors Steve Cannon and Michael O'Donoghue. Do you think it's important to give credit to friends and influences?

A. I think so. Even though writing is generally characterized as a lonely profession, it is to a large extent a matter of finding your way through a jungle of language and story structure--which I have no knowledge of, personally [laughter]--BUT, UM--it's important for your survival to maintain a network and community of writers and friends: writers, in terms of support for your various ideas; friends, to support you, period...especially friends. You know, I never had a regular job for years. My last job was in 1985, which lasted about two months, at the Strand Bookstore. And prior to that, I'd just been bouncing back and forth between New Haven and New York City--and again, I didn't work. There were just a variety of people who were willing to put up with me for a few nights on their floor. And so it comes out of a couple of things: one was Henry Miller's Book of Friends--my acknowledgment page was like a miniature Book of Friends--Ścause he wasn't able to repay the people he had borrowed money from. Also, Abbie Hoffman used to do it in books. He'd just have pages and pages of these bizarre people who were essentially his sons.

Q. This is the second time I've heard you make reference to Abbie Hoffman.

A. Abbie Hoffman was a social and political activist with a sense of humor. He understood the power of humor in terms of confronting authority.

Q. In Negrophobia, you created a pantheon of cartoons: a pyramid of racist stereotypes with supernatural powers. Was this in reference to some preexisting belief-system?

A. All the caricatures in the book are aspects of Ghude in his petro incarnation. Ghude is the master of Death, he is the wife of Death. He is also noted for having a rather dopey sense of humor and using one's sexuality against one to get one to see truth.

Q. In which case, your book is actually summoning those cartoons.

A. That's essentially my intent, because these cartoons in and of themselves aren't intended to perpetuate racism. Rather, they were designed to subvert it. The idea of Aunt Jemima jumping off the pancake box and suffocating an entire suburban family by force-feeding them flapjacks, that's the idea. One of the ideas for me was that the reader himself, who might have a racist thought after reading Negrophobia, would become ill and throw up. But magically, I would like the reader to step back and look at the absurdity of these images and laugh: laugh at the images, laugh at their own racism and not feel cowed by it. And also, black people should laugh at these images and realize that these images are not reflections of black people but rather a reflection of some diseased mind, which is a real distinction. Because some people--and not a lot of them--become critical of the book because they confuse what I'm writing about with the actual lives of black people. My book has nothing to do with the real lives of black people. It has to do with mapping out the terrain of a racist psychology and making fun of that.

Q. Did you ever read Why Black People Tend To Shout?

A. Yeah, Ralph Wiley. We both have the same editor.

Q. Wiley says white people shouldn't be offended by the idea that their minds contain traces of racism. That just means white people grew up looking at the same billboards as everyone else. To varying degrees, those archetypes tyrannize us all.

A. They do. But I think one of the keys is being aware of the insidious power of archetypes. I mean, television isn't real. Movies aren't real. Books aren't real. But people behave on the basis of this cultural mythology as if it were real. But that's a problem of language, too, 'cause those mythologies are inherent inside the language. My problem in writing Negrophobia was trying to express things outside of spoken and written language. Its essence is not only about me being at war with racist imagery, it's about me being at war with English. To me, English is a colonial language. Theoretically, I was not intended to speak it. I'm supposed to speak some variation of Indian, Native American or African. So I'm working with concepts that are opposed to me. So I wanted to work with forms and language in a way that was contrary to how we normally process information.

Q. Was the Gestapo Disney section of Negrophobia a parody of Maus?

A. Negrophobia originally started out as this weird fantasy about Disneyland taking over America and establishing this Gestapo state. Which they've already done--they have their own government down in Florida, they print their own money, they make their own laws. That's where it originally started; but obviously, I realized I didn't want to try to sustain an entire novel about how evil Mickey Mouse is.

Q. You've said that when the old archetypes come back, they'll do it in a more vengeful way. Do you find the seeds of that ascendancy in racist cartoons?

A. I do believe that so-called racist stereotypes in American culture are actually images from African art. But they've been corrupted and diseased by a white racist imagination. And my thought was that I would simply take back those images--those are...my...images--and redefine them. The idea of the gods dying and being reborn is celebrated in all cultures. It's even in our own culture, in the cartoon fashion of the old year and the new year. That's the cycle: the god being born anew. Again, I'm taking a cue from Ishmael Reed in Mumbo Jumbo: the old gods are being remanifested. Rather than calling them up with drums, we call them up with drum machines and computers and sampling. I mean, it's a beat...but it's also this electronic wave, right? They're electronic beings...and so...(holds out his palms)

Q. A friend from Senegal told me that hip-hop rhythms were quotes from the Talking Drum language, and that he was sometimes annoyed because the people who programmed the rhythms didn't know what they were saying.

A. Yeah, that's the interesting thing: those gods have manifested and asserted themselves without people actually realizing that they're here, okay? I mean, look at the hip-hop culture from the early eighties. Graffiti looks like Poppa Loas ground drawings, with the cornflower and all that. The cornflower's been replaced by spray paint. Or breakdancing, okay? That looked like possession, all right? Breakdancing looked like possession. So the group of people that I've been associated with who deal with Voodoo are trying to view Voodoo in a modern context. The group that I'm associated with--they've incorporated Throbbing Gristle and industrial noise into their ceremonies. So basically, you get industrial Voodoo. And judging from some reading I was doing in the Chaos magic cult, they've begun to incorporate African rhythm into their shit, right? And my group here has been doing that for years. They've associated with the Temple of Psychic Youth and all that stuff.

Q. But if archetypes are appearing in people's minds, then we're really affirming what Robert Graves said in The White Goddess. These images surface not only in art, but in people's minds regardless.

A. That's interesting. Let me think about that for a moment...well, yeah. They're just different masks. I mean that's all it is--a different mask, I guess. This common cultural unconscious jumbling of, you know, stuff: these forces. And they take on different masks in terms of different cultures.

Q. Do you feel that Voodoo is a truer reflection of African spirituality than the Muslim religion?

A. I would think so. I've said that. I mean, I can't really discuss Islam at any great length, only because I've always regarded it with a lot of amusement. And that has to do with the fact that, when I was growing up, Muslims were the only game in town. You'd see those bow-tied street salesmen knocking on door after door to, like, Jehovah's Witness...[laughter]...among white people, right? And these guys were nuts! But I bought the papers Ścause I read the cartoons. I really like those White-Man-Is-The-Devil cartoons. I mean, they're hysterical. But that amusement came later. I got some perspective on it with the rise of the Black Panther cult. You know, in terms of their thinking and Huey Newton's thinking about Nationalism, and what he later referred to as Revolutionary Intercommunalism. He said that nationalism was inherently a racist idea, and that the Black Panther Party was about promoting Revolutionary Intercommunalism. Now, cynics would say he stated that as his position because the Black Panther Party was in trouble financially and he was trying to appeal to rich white liberals to help the Panthers with their legal costs. But to me, that's neither here nor there, 'cause I think the actual thought is good. That was the whole thing with the Youth International Party and my interest in it: it was inclusive as opposed to exclusive. Voodoo is inclusive.

Q. Newton was saying: if you include people, you avoid self-ghettoization. Which was the logical thing to do. If you ghettoize your party, you limit your base.

A. Right.

Q. Which is the point of having a pantheon rather than a single god. In the Crusades, Christian soldiers would kill or convert when they went to a distant continent. But the Hindus in India who found someone worshipping a stream would incorporate that stream god into their Stream of Gods.

A. Huh. I never knew that because I don't think about Hinduism, and I never did much research investigation into it. But it sounds a lot like what Voodoo is. Or Yoruba. Or African religions that are syncretic in that they're inclusive. If one tribe was conquered by another, they naturally assumed that the gods the conquering tribe worshipped were more powerful, so let's incorporate them with our own gods. That's interesting. But what you're talking about, too, from what I understand is, in Hinduism, there's this basic appreciation of god nature. Being able to recognize that and appreciate other people's god nature. If that stream is God to that person, it must be God, so therefore, we'll incorporate into a pantheon.

Q. Speaking of white people with horns, are you bothered by the anti-Semitism of certain Muslim leaders? Or the way in which blacks and Jews are pitted against one another, supposedly in the name of local expansionism?

A. I find the whole black/Jew debate pretty appalling because of the history of the civil rights movement, the left in this country in general, and the collaboration between black and Jewish artists, especially in the Lower East Side come the late fifties and sixties, which I think is real important. I've fantasized about writing a movie about a black/Jewish relationship centered in the Lower East Side in the late fifties--the whole beat thing--to talk about how, once upon a time, there was a point in New York City when blacks and Jews were friendly towards each other because they were mutually ostracized, in the sense that interracial couples used to be bashed in the West Village, on the streets of Little Italy, as late as sixty-five. So I have to talk about that at some point. For me, those have always been important bonds. They were important in terms of me understanding my own humanity because of the kind of social viciousness that took place where I grew up. There was a certain level of demonization going on in the kind of humor that we shared. Like the whole process of the adolescent game of playing the dozens, right? That's dehumanizing. I mean, it's fun, there's humor in it, but it's also dehumanizing. I grew up with that, but I needed something else, namely...there's this friend of mine whom I've known for years, this woman by the name of Sally Glassman, who also designed the New Orleans voodoo tool, and is head of a voodoo cult in New Orleans, which is the one that I'm associated with. She was real important for me during high school, which was the most troubled time in my life. I felt really alienated from everyone and she was one of the few people I could talk to with the kind of sensitivity that reaffirmed my own humanity. I wasn't thinking of it then in terms of the whole black/Jew thing. I've only recently begun to verbalize it, think about in that context, because I'm appalled by the anti-semitism in New York. 'Cause I'm aware of the fact that there are racist Jews, right?

Q. Like ex-New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

A. But that doesn't take away from the fact that some of the most progressive and vocal people in American culture are Jews! I mean, those are the people who are always talking about changing the culture. That whole anti-commie thing in the fifties--I simply saw that as code for get the Jews! I mean, it's weird: get the Rosenbergs.

Q. Dr. King once gave a speech about racism and anti-semitism--about how it was easy to understand the impetus created by social and economic disparities within the same neighborhoods, but that it had to be overcome, because both groups had more common ground than differences. But I was pissed off at the conservative Jewish community when I saw Dinkins get vilified for the Crown Heights riots. Yes, he fucked up. But I'd hoped some Jews would stand up and say, "I'm Jewish and I think this guy did the best he could and I'm voting for him in the next election." Think of the stuff Koch has said about questionable black leaders like Farrakhan. If Dinkins had said comparable things about Meier Kahane, he'd have gotten nailed.

A. I've been working on this idea--and I haven't come up with sci-en-TIF-fik dok-u-men-TA-tion tuh prove mah THESIS!--but what I discovered at the end of writing Negrophobia was that race as it's largely thought of in this culture is a myth. It's totally mythical.

Q. Color involves so few genes that it's ridiculous to make genetic distinctions between dark and light people. Yet the focus of most primetime inner city reportage still implies that dark pigmentation is atavistic.

A. Yeah. Which, if you believe that, is already a ticket to Disneyworld.

Q. What do you think about the attempt to suppress Negrophobia's first cover?

A. This was the situation. They were having a sales conference at Carol Publishing. And they were showing to their sales rep the covers of their new line of books. My book was among them. This was in their New Jersey warehouse. A woman by the name of Florence Washington saw the cover and was upset by it. The manuscript had not been made available to her because it was still being copy-edited. So she had no idea what the context of the book was. She overreacted and said that Carol Publishing, which is controlled by Jews!...[mutual laughter. Carol Publishing is, of course, controlled by Moonies]...ahem...was doing just like Leonard Jeffries said, you know, tryn'a bring back the Sambo image and say that all black men be Samboin'! But I wasn't upset by her. I had breakfast with her one Saturday morning and we talked about it. We disagreed, and we left on friendly terms. She wanted me to change the cover and I said, I'm not going to do that. The thing that disturbed me about the cover was actually the female character.

Q. Surely you don't mean the blonde in the low-cut dress?

A. You know, I understand the artist's thinking in terms of depicting the female that way in terms of Everyfemale, but I wasn't making that statement. Bubbles isn't any female, you know. She's a cartoon character like the rest of them--the characters in the book, I mean--but she's a special kind of female formula. Because Bubbles actually confronts her own racism. I mean, before you can banish a demon, you have to confront it. She had to confront the contents of her own mind. So it wasn't like she was a racist and was going to remain that way. She was actually engaged in this process of transformation. What's going to happen to her, I have no idea, Ścause I haven't written the follow-up to that yet. But where I left it was something for the reader to deal with: to deal with their own life, with the contents of their own mind. That's why I wasn't focusing so much on character development and story. I simply wanted to set up a situation where a reader had to confront his own racist thinking. And I wanted talk about this in the book: that his culture--that popular culture--is predicated on the fact that it finds black people funny.

Q. How do you rate the multiculturalist theorists who came to academic prominence in the eighties?

A. I think they're moral cowards. The people of my generation were moral cowards. The same people who did nothing for civil rights in the Seventies are now sitting in judgment over who's politically correct and who isn't, right? They don't have the right to judge anyone because they're the ones who did nothing.

Q. Does the transvestite have a special role in American culture?

A. Talking about Ru Paul and all of that, we arrive at the transvestite nature of culture. I could talk about the obvious thing of neutral shades, but the thing I thought was interesting about Paris Is Burning was the ability to chamelionize class. To give the appearance of being wealthy; of working as a stockbroker or whatever. When in fact you might just be a basketball coolie--up in the Bronx somewhere, right?--doing this shit. And the idea of the class transvestite plays itself out with Lower East Side trust fund babies who are quite well off and secure. But in order to give the appearance of being so-called hip and down with what's happening, they get into this whole downward mobility thing. A certain rap artist, who'll come from a secure, middle-class background, pretends to be street--to come, uh, straight outta Compton (or wherever you're supposed to come from these days)--and basically becomes his own stereotype.

Q. A week ago, Norman Douglas and I were standing in Max Fish [a bar on Ludlow Street] when copies of B. Kold's magazine were brazenly stolen by a trust fund girl masquerading as a poor person so she could impress her pseudo-impoverished friends. Norman just identified her: "You! With the trust fund! Give those back to the guy with the holes in his shoes!"

A. She was stealing copies of Peau Sensible [an earlier incarnation of the literary magazine, Sensitive Skin]?

Q. Yup. A. [Laughter] P-h-h-h-h-h-h-h! Bra-a-a-a-ck! Yeah-h-h! She could eat wit' dat!

Q. Negrophobia was written in the form of a screenplay. It also appropriates images from African art. Do you see the book as a stepping stone for work in other mediums?

A. Basically, writing is really inexpensive. It only requires a typewriter, a pen and paper of some kind, or a computer if you can afford it. Originally, as a child, I wanted to write, direct, and star in my own monster movies--which I did. I would do eight millimeter movies and things like that. I was known as the Werewolf of Winchester Avenue by my own playmates. Because of my father, I had wanted to become a painter; but because of the emotional relationship between my father and myself--whom I respect a lot, and whose work I admire to an enormous degree--I didn't want to get involved in a field that he could say something about. So instead, I've been in the process of teaching myself to paint with words. A lot of my writing is influenced largely by painting, more so than by other writers. I read language for techniques of humor. Steve Cannon was a major discovery for me in terms of letting me know there was a history to the kind of filthy pornography that I enjoy writing. That there was in fact a history to it; that I was part of a real tradition; that there were people I could go to and ask questions to get a stronger sense of who I was and what my roots were. I think it's just as important to know your roots as an artist as it is to know your roots as a human being.

Q. Apropos of painting and your father, a painter named Tom Corn told me your father is funny as hell.

A. That may be something that he expresses with other people. I like his sense of humor; he has a rather earthy, TACTLESS sense of humor which I draw on. But he doesn't find me especially funny [horse-laugh]--Ścause he's convinced I'm a Satanist.

Q. Really?

A. Yeah! We've fought about that for years, man! Which I don't understand, right? My father is, like, heavily into this clearly Voodoo-influenced art, man, he collects all these fuckin' masks, and the sculpture n' shit is strictly from Voodoo; he collects all these books on Voodoo--a lot of which I gave him--but because I deal with the imagery in a ritual context as opposed to a strictly art context, which is one and the same thing if you're talking in terms of the whole syncretic nature of west African thought. I don't see where he gets off, like, considering me a Satanist. Yeah, I'll read, like, Anton LeVey. That was de rigueur in the early Seventies: you had to read Anton LeVey along with Iceberg Slim (unintelligible laughter), y'know? Shit.

Q. In Negrophobia, is the section with Bubbles and the Satyr with the giant penis an homage to the film Vengeance Soul [a blaxploitation film in which a wrongly accused black prison escapee uses his giant penis to hypnotize the wives of the men who convicted him and finally to strangle the prosecutors themselves]?

A. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't find that movie until many years after I'd written that scene. That had to do with something I'd read in The Life And Times Of Mister Jive-Ass Nigger by Cecil Brown and the whole concept of the Devil in Western European thought. Before black people came into contact with white people, white people had the idea that the devil was black. They always depicted him as this oversexed creature who led people into evil, basically because--do I wanna say this?--white people are afraid of their own bodies. Uh...

Q. Of course they are. They came from England.

A. On the other hand, a couple of months ago, I was watching this woman walk down the street. She was a really attractive blonde and she was pissed off. The only explanation I could think of was that she had been harassed on the street and was really tired of it. I said to myself, her problem is, she's mad 'cause she's a WHITE BLONDE. Then I discovered she worked at the Village Voice and it all made sense. [laughter]

Q. I mentioned the Vengeance Soul connection because Bubbles is literally mesmerized by the Satyr's penis. In that context, Vengeance Soul takes on this amusing bad French ballet quality.

A. Yeah, well, I wanted that in there.

Q. The other reason I mentioned it is because I wanted you to talk about your current project, That's Blaxploitation!, a book-long study of blaxploitation films.

A. I've been working on it since last October. I've gotten interviews with Antonio Fargas, Melvin Van Peebles, and this woman, Yolanda Gilliam, who was in Shirley Clark's film, Cool World, which I consider the first modern black film. I like the idea of saying the grandmother of modern black cinema is a white woman. I did an interview with Yolanda--she played a teen-age prostitute in the film--and she only had wonderful things to say about Shirley Clark. She was a black Puerto Rican, right? And she played this black woman who grew up in Harlem. She explained how it was to work on the film with two heroin addicts. She grew up in the Bronx as an army brat and Shirley Clark and Canada Lee's son, Carl, made her spend time in Harlem so she could play this role relatively convincingly.

There are certain films that broadcast future stars, like America Graffiti for the Seventies. For black actors, it was the comedians. But for exploitation actors, Cool World was the film. Even it though it was shot in Ś63-64, a lot of established actors from the black exploitation period first started in that film, like Gloria Foster, Antonio Fargas, Clarence Williams III--y'know, Link from Mod Squad. So I want to give Shirley Clark her props, know what I'm saying?

Q. To distinguish between the original film and Bakshi's travesty of the same title.

A. The Ralph Bakshi disaster, yeah. Whose best film is from the black exploitation period: Coonskin. Coonskin is the most brilliant satire of American racism I've ever seen, which is why I made reference to it in the book. There was the possibility at one point that my agents were going to approach Bakshi about animating Negrophobia, if his Cool World had proven to be successful. But that didn't happen. One of Bakshi's big mistakes was hiring Milton Knight and letting him just do whatever he wanted.

Q. Since you're already a legend in New York, I wonder if you plan to appear in California.

A. I'm supposed to be in Los Angeles for about six months in January. John Cusack and Steve Pink, who have a motion picture deal with Paramount, and a theatrical company called New Crimes, which is out of Chicago, are supposedly going to have me flown out to LA to work on a live theatrical production of Negrophobia with musical assistance from the band, Fishbone. While I'm there, I plan to do a lot of reading in the Bay Area and possibly LA.

Q. What coffee houses do you frequent?

A. When I was in San Francisco, I spent a lot of time in Muddy Waters--just because I needed the money. There were like a jillion coffee houses. I dunno--I sort of like that idea we came up with when we were hanging out with Buddy Kold at Mark Amerika's reading: how, uh, readings should be turned into AA meetings. People should have them in coffee houses and the readings should substitute for Witnessing.

Q. Yeah, most Lower East Side poetry is like that.

A. I don't really go to coffee houses in Manhattan, or in Brooklyn, where I live, and I don't spend a lot of time in the spoken word scene these days--basically because it's been co-opted by Jean commercials, and what we're turning out now isn't necessarily poets but video stars. I mean, today's Lower East Side poets are basically writing ad copy.

Q. I agree. Nyorican Gap Rap.

A. I mean, they're just gonna sell the next pair of Gap Jeans--which is absurd, Ścause when I was friendly with Joie Lee [local poet], she did an ad for Gap, right, she only got paid five hundred dollars. So how much can you get paid for doing a jeans commercial? I mean, unless Max Blagg [local poet] had a book he was trying to hype, why even do the commercial?

Q. Speaking of espresso, I see you're wearing your Coffy t-shirt. I wonder if you've gotten to interview Pam Grier [the painfully beautiful star of Coffy and many other films, including the 1993 release, Posse] for your book?

A. I'm hoping to do one in the next couple of months. I have to call her mother, 'cause I understand she has her mother screen all of her calls.

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