The N-Word of God

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. published The Signifying Monkey in 1988, laying out the two main types of Signifyin(g): cooperative (or unmotivated) and oppositional (or motivated). Cooperative Signifyin(g) comes from building on a tradition, “encod[ing] admiration and respect,” while also reshaping the stories that have come before. Oppositional Signifyin(g) “functions as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition.” However, later scholars and writers have shown how authors can go beyond the African-American literary tradition and Signify on any work of literature, much like how Toni Morrison’s Beloved Signifies on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as a way of taking a narrative back from the majority culture. (See Joanna Wolfe’s article, “Song and Narrative Revision in Morrison’s Beloved,” where Wolfe writes that Morrison “transforms Twain’s text into a story of birth, healing, and maternal subjectivity that reveals the interdependence of black and white cultural traditions.”)

Mark Doox draws on both types of Signifyin(g) in The N-Word of God, mixing and matching them to create something new to talk about race to a diverse audience in ways they can all understand. Doox draws on Christian iconography and mythology, as well as the African-American literary tradition, then mixes those with racist stereotypes and assumptions, all to show the ways in which African-Americans have had to survive in the past, before shifting to the racism that continues to manifest in American society today.

The first two-thirds or so of the work mimic the Bible, moving from the creation of racism to its apotheosis, primarily by following Saint Sambo, an anti-Christ figure who preaches a gospel based on providing whites what they want to hear. Not surprisingly, given his name, Sambo plays on every racist stereotype leading up to and through the 20th century. Doox draws
him in blackface, with an exaggerated grin that mimics those of minstrel shows, referred to as the “watermelon grin of grace.” Doox often includes a slice of watermelon in the art as well, especially as Saint Sambo uses watermelon as a metaphor for communion, the watermelon’s red flesh serving as the blood and the black seeds as Sambo’s Black body. Sambo points out that he existed before Harriett Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and even Kunta Kinte, using the comparison with Jesus’ eternal existence to show that racism existed before and after slavery.

Doox’s title refers to the mirror image of Sambo and Christ, as Sambo points out that the Word of God is different from the N-Word of God – essentially, the ways in which people have used Christianity as a validation for racist ideology. Sambo then, seems to present a message that would prevent Black people from making any progress. In actuality, however, he represents all they have had to suffer to survive in an openly white supremacist society. In fact, Sambo clearly refers to white privilege, which he sees in a vision in the Ass Holy of Holy. Doox is Signifyin(g) on the verse in Exodus where God says that Moses is unable to see God’s face, but can only see God’s “backside” (in some translations). Doox takes that idea literally, then uses it to show where White privilege resides.

Near the end of Saint Sambo’s life on Earth, Doox delves deep into African-American tradition to explore the idea of capitulation to whites as one of the only means of survival. He uses a picture of Frank Embree, a Black man arrested for allegedly assaulting a white girl in Fayette, Missouri, in 1899. Through both the art—such as a hat on the picture of Embree that says, “By Any Means Necessary” — and the writing, Doox brings in both Ralph Ellison and Malcolm. While Malcolm X represents the more militant response to injustice, Ellison is more complicated, as other authors and thinkers of his time criticized him for not being political enough. In Invisible Man, the grandfather gives his son advice, which the narrator overhears: “Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”

Rather than waiting for the crowd to decide to lynch him, Embree confessed to the crime and told them stop torturing him and kill him, which initially sounds like giving in, but such an action was the only way he could have agency in the situation. Saint Sambo seems to give similar advice as the grandfather and as Embree when he tells his disciples that Embree “still makes his point about ‘Black’ individual identity, iffy American justice, and the super heroic struggle under the pervasive and insidious Ellisonian Black Invisibility of this nation.” If one cannot defeat those in power, one is left with the choice between the death the Embree faces or the grandfather’s advice to acquiesce.

However, Doox pivots after Sambo is crucified on the Burning Cross of Liberty, as he encounters the Unknown American God who is “greater than the Divine White Booty and its Ass Holy of Holy!” Sambo knows that this deity is “the God called ‘A Love Supreme!’” Here again, Doox Signifies on African-American tradition, using John Coltrane’s 1964 album (it’s no surprise he uses Coltrane, given that Doox has created icons for Saint John Coltrane Church in San Francisco for years) that most critics and jazz aficionados believe to be his greatest, to point to a higher truth than the white Christianity that has dominated America since the colonization of the continent. Sambo realizes that the Divine White Booty is actually Yaldabaoth — a malevolent God and, more importantly, the demiurge (creator of the material world) — in some Gnostic sects. Whites, therefore, have created this tangible world where racism runs amok, but there is another world, a higher, better world, where love reigns supreme.

At this point in the work, Saint Sambo becomes Satan Sambo and begins teaching the truth about race, or, as Book Four is titled, “The Book of the Great Gnosis of the White and Black Binary Reality of the Standard American Psyche.” (Side note: gnosis literally means a deeper wisdom or knowledge of spiritual truth; the Gnostics were a loose group of Christians and Jews in the first century who believed there was a hidden knowledge beyond this material world. It's more complicated than that, but you get the point.)

Doox begins deconstructing the binary of race in America, starting with the idea that race is nothing more than a social construct that Whites developed in order to establish their power and dominance. Doox shifts to more text in this section of the work, putting one or two sentences per page, as if driving home the simplicity of the idea. In fact, Satan Sambo’s solution to this problem is to simply change the terms one uses when talking about people. He Signifies on the Buddha’s quote that “With our minds, we make up the world” to develop, “With our words, we make up our minds.” Instead of using “Black” or “White,” Satan Sambo encourages the reader and his disciples to use “Various Shades of Brown” and “Light Pink or Beige” to show the absurdity of the Black/White binary. If words shape the world, changing the words one uses changes the way one sees the world.

By the end of the work, then, Sambo has transformed from a supposed anti-Christ who preaches acceptance of racism to a Satan who is actually preaching the truth (and has been all along). Even in the early parts of the work, Doox uses the contrast between the artwork of Christian iconography and the stereotypical imagery of African-American culture to point out where Christianity and America have fallen short of their ideals. There are references to gang members and pimps, Black neo-conservatives and Uncle Toms, but there are also portrayals of the Black Panthers and Ferguson, Missouri, Black Wall Street and white welfare. Doox refers to his artwork as “Byzantine Dadaism,” an apt description of his attempts to use traditional artwork to subvert the power structures and the reader’s expectations. By using such canonical iconography, Doox both elevates his subject matter to that of religion, while also mocking the very religion he seeks to question.

The N-Word of God is a funny, angry, bitter, good, necessary work. Doox wants readers to laugh at Saint Sambo and the absurdity of the juxtaposition of Sambo and traditional Christian imagery. Doox knows that laughter can open the door to the much harsher truths he wants to convey to the reader; perhaps, through a change in imagery and a change in language, he can reach those who don’t yet know the truth about race in America. Doox takes on the role of a prophet bringing good news, of a sort, to a crowd that might not yet have ears to hear. The good news isn’t that White supremacy is finished or even that race is nothing more than a construct; the good news is that there is a higher truth, that of true love and equality. If only more people would convert.

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