The Master Trickster

While on holiday last week I re-read the toast of the Signifying Monkey (here), an African-American reworking of African mythology depicting the survival strategies of the trickster (the titular monkey) attempting, in the face of oppression and discrimination to defuse the powers of exploitation and undermine (racial) misrepresentation. He does so not through violence or aggression but cunning and wit. It is a powerful poem with a strong resonance in the African-American political struggle. Signifying, in the non-folkloric sense, is the creation of new “language”, a “way of saying one thing but meaning another”, and is a trope that can be found in music, particularly in blues and jazz, in the improvisations of Coltrane, Monk and others, and in soul music, in testifying and calling out (see the music of James Brown especially.) Here, though, it reminded me of Muhammad Ali.

Ali was the great urban trickster of sixties and seventies America and, arguably more than any other popular black performer (Ali was as much a performer as a brilliant athlete) epitomised the guile of the Signifying Monkey. Basing his flamboyance and showmanship on the outrageous wrestler Gorgeous George, Ali was famed for his self-aggrandisement (invariably proven when in the ring) and trash talking. No opponent, black or white, was immune to the sharpness of Ali’s tongue, nor any sports journalist or newscaster (most notoriously the self-regarding US TV reporter Howard Cossell) as he sought to manoeuvre situations and circumstances to his favour.

In his 1964 heavyweight title fight, and first of two bouts against the feared Sonny Liston (the metaphorical lion and king of the jungle), Ali, then Clay, played the role of goading “monkey” with relish. His manipulation of his natural role as the lesser fighter in the unfolding drama – lighter (although taller), weaker, less experienced – by provoking Liston with innuendo, abuse and contempt was a master class in self-empowering mockery. Like a jazz performer dropping elisions or pendular and blue thirds in to a standard, his improvisations and unorthodox strategy, both in and out of the ring, created mayhem and diversion.

Driven to a state of apoplexy by the young upstart, Liston, the archetypal, glowering “bad” negro and one of the most feared and hard-hitting heavyweights in a long history of heavy hitters, was no longer just expected to win but to annihilate the “Louisville Lip” in an affirmation of his superiority and masculinity. Yet under the intense scrutiny of the press, who were both bewildered and delighted by Clay’s antics, and the overwhelming expectation of victory, Liston was unable to impose himself on his faster and more agile opponent. The younger fighter shuffled, danced and darted around the ring making the once domineering Liston appear unwieldy and one-dimensional. Despite an agonising burning in his eyes in rounds four and five, brought about by astringent either from an application to Liston’s cuts or perhaps, more suspiciously, applied deliberately to his gloves (now half blinded he had to dance twice as smartly to avoid the stalking, bloodthirsty Liston - another moment of theatrical cunning), Clay was able to pick off the bigger man with powerful jabs and eventually the champion, claiming a disabling shoulder injury but possibly as much humiliated into defeat, refused to answer the bell for the seventh round. Hurtling around the ring, leaning over the ropes and pointing at the crowd and gathered ringside reporters, Clay’s frenzied reaction to his epic victory was a moment of pure theatrical brilliance

“I am the greatest…I don’t have a mark on my face…I upset Sonny Liston…I just turned twenty-two years old…I must be the greatest…I showed the world…Tell the world…I talk to God every day…the real God…I’m the King of the world…I shook up the world…I am the prettiest thing that ever lived…”

The world had seen nothing quite like it. The monkey had outwitted the lion.

Throughout his career Clay/Ali assumed this role, manoeuvring his opponents into the position of unwitting dupe against whom he would fling insults, jibes and humiliations to simultaneously belittle theirs and enhance his own reputation. Where Liston was the “big ugly bear” who he goaded with a hunting trap at his hotel at midnight, the genial Floyd Patterson became “a rabbit”, “an old Negro” and “a Tom” and in 1965 (the year of the LA riots and Martin Luther King Jnr’s Selma to Montgomery march*) he was subjected to the cruellest of beatings for his refusal to acknowledge Clay/Ali by his new chosen, Muslim name. It was an act of barbed cruelty reminiscent of the deliberate, unforgiving kind administered to white opponents by that other great trickster, and the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, and one that he would repeat in 1967 against Ernie Terrell.

Joe Frazier, with whom Ali would fight a triptych of career-defining bouts, was labelled an “ugly gorilla” - “Joe Frazier is so ugly he should donate his face to the US bureau of wildlife.” Ali lost to an enraged and relentless Frazier in the “Fight of the Century” in New York, 1971, knocked out in the fifteenth round despite pre-fight predictions that he was simply too fast and “too pretty” to be beaten. However, perhaps predictably in the near-perfect narrative of his fighting career, he avenged that defeat twice, most thrillingly in the devastating “Thrilla in Manila” in 1976 when Frazier, exhausted and all but blind from a swelling over his left eye, was unable to answer the bell for the final act.

In Zaire in ’74 out of the ring the brutal, surly monolith George Foreman became “The Mummy”, a slow and unimaginative one-dimensional brute. In the ring Ali executed one of the greatest sporting “hustles” of all time. Baiting the powerful Foreman by playing what he termed “rope-a-dope” Ali, leaning far back on the ropes and covering his face and kidneys, forced his opponent to expend all his energy by pounding his arms and shoulders like a human wrecking-ball. Vastly experienced and tactically more acute than his detractors had given him credit Ali dragged the unwitting Foreman to the brink of exhaustion and, with his in-fight, emasculating mockery, to distraction (“Is that all you got, George? They told me you could punch harder than Joe Louis!”) In the eighth round, spinning his larger opponent round like a top, he knocked him to the canvas and regained the heavyweight crown to become champion for an unprecedented second time.

Ali’s freeform heterodoxy in the ring can be seen as an extension of his showmanship out of it. Or, indeed, visa versa - the two were irrevocably enmeshed. A trainer’s nightmare, he boxed with his hands low, his head high, often moving backwards and with his weight habitually on either his front or back foot but never, as accepted convention suggests, spread between both. Not only that he had the audacity, and inherent skill, to throw right hand leads – the longest punch an “orthodox” (as opposed to southpaw) fighter can throw. Just as Coltrane, Mingus and Monk liberated jazz from the oppressive orthodoxy of perceived musical wisdom, Ali demonstrated that there could be beauty and inspiration in eccentric individuality in boxing, too. Yet each was so much more then merely practitioners of their art forms. They were political liberators.

Ali was the beautiful trickster of late twentieth century age, a man who mesmerised with his ingenious and phaneric displays of cunning. He was the Signifying Monkey incarnate.

*1965 was also a hugely significant year in jazz. Miles Davis recorded the epic E.S.P while Coltrane’s prolific studio output included Ascension, Om, Kele Su Mama, Meditations and Sun Ship. It is also widely accepted to be the year that Free Jazz, following from Hard Bop, was acknowledged as the next phase in jazz’s evolution.