A satire on relations between African Americans and Jews, as well as a topsy-turvy treatment of racial and ethnic shibboleths and stereotypes in American popular culture, Oreo is also a formally inventive picaresque novel written as a series of language games, comic translations, bilingual wisecracks, and arch etymological puns that call to mind crazily erudite vaudeville routines performed by comedian Professor Irwin Corey; elaborately constructed shaggy dog stories with absurdly far-fetched punch lines delivered with the raised eyebrow of Groucho Marx; the high hipster monologues of Lord Buckley; and the X-rated comedy of Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx, and Richard Pryor. Ross’s linguistic range stretches from scholarly wit and airy erudition to vernacular dialects and stand-up comedy shtick. The author’s etymological puns trace her tongue back to its Greek and Latin roots, at the same time that her novel updates an ancient myth with several new twists, including a heroic feminist protagonist whose Labyrinth is the New York subway system, and whose Minotaur is not a bull-headed man but a mannish bulldog named Toro. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, possibly one of its models, Ross’s novel is, on a smaller scale, a zesty, pun-filled parody of a classical myth.
Oreo’s tongue-in-cheek mimicry of the Greek hero underscores Ross’s cheekiness as an African American woman who travesties both James Joyce and the Greeks while blithely seeking her place in a Western literary tradition. Ross’s clever parody is wildly irreverent in many respects, drawing interesting parallels between the macho hero Theseus, who is credited with the invention of wrestling, and her militantly feminist heroine, Oreo, who uses verbal wit and martial arts to dispatch her male adversaries. Like Theseus, when Oreo comes of age, she sets off to find an absentee father who has left behind clues to the “secret of her birth” and tokens of a paternal legacy, “sword and sandals,” traditionally passed from father to son.
If Theseus’ entry into the Labyrinth suggests the masculine hero’s return to the womb followed by the rebirth of a new self through the feminine power of his guide, Ariadne, Oreo’s quest to meet her deadbeat dad suggests a feminist daughter’s claim to self-knowledge as well as her determination to challenge patriarchy and to contest the phallic power of the male. Unlike Theseus and the Minotaur, who owe their existence to the perverse promiscuity of gods and aristocrats, Oreo is the legitimate offspring of a middle-class couple who happen to be of different races and religions; and unlike other feminist heroines of the 1970s, Oreo remains virginal throughout her often risky adventures. Although Ross stirs racy jokes and spicy sexual innuendo into the mix of Oreo, it is perhaps because of conventional strictures on the sexual expressiveness of black women that Ross prefers to demonstrate her heroine’s physical and intellectual prowess in martial and verbal arts rather than in sexual adventures such as those of Erica Jong’s Isadora Wing in Fear of Flying, or Rita Mae Brown’s Molly Bolt in Rubyfruit Jungle, two novels published in the year before Oreo appeared.
As a literary heroine, Christine “Oreo” Clark is both particular in her individual and cultural identity and universal in her quest for self-knowledge. Though Oreo is a physically beautiful young woman, what is most striking is her ability to amuse herself in any situation, owing to her speculative intelligence and wry sense of humor. Her attention to verbal quirks and habits of speech defines her character and calls the reader’s attention to the artifice of language as a cultural construct, demonstrating the materiality as opposed to the transparency of the spoken and written word. Christine Clark, nicknamed Oriole (the bird), but called Oreo (the cookie), is the offspring of an African American mother and a Jewish father. Oreo’s parents divorce shortly after her younger brother is born, and she grows up knowing only the black side of her family: her African American mother, Helen, her brother, Moishe (called Jimmie C.), and her mother’s parents, James and Louise Clark. Each member of the family has a different idiosyncratic relationship to language, thus contributing to Oreo’s semiotic competence and opening the text to a variety of verbal experiments and variations on the spoken and written word.
James, Oreo’s black grandfather, is speechless following an immobilizing stroke that occurs minutes after hearing that his daughter “was going to wed a Jew-boy” (3). Her grandmother Louise speaks an almost incomprehensible southern dialect. Helen, Oreo’s mother, converses in standard English sprinkled with Yiddish she learned from her father, who before his stroke ran a mail-order publishing business selling religious publications to an exclusively Jewish clientele. Oreo’s mother is a gifted professional musician and eccentric amateur mathematician who ponders whimsical “head equations” whenever she suffers from boredom or distress. Oreo’s younger brother, Jimmie C., expresses himself with a secret musical language of his own invention, and prefers to sing rather than speak. When a neighbor’s tomcat loses a fight with an alley cat, the woman announces, “My cat’s a coward.” The sensitive Jimmie C., who has put his fingers in his ears during the cat fight, hears “Mah cassa cowah,” thus providing the family with a strange new idiolect:
Jimmie C. was delighted. He decided to use this wonderful new expression as the radical for a radical second language. “Cha-key-key-wah, mah-cassa-cowah,” he would sing mysteriously in front of strangers. “Freck-a-louse-poop!”
Oreo recognized the value of Jimmie C.’s cha-key-key-wah language over the years. For her, it served the same purpose as black slang. She often used it on shopkeepers who lapsed into Yiddish or Italian. It was her way of saying, “Talk about mother tongues — try to figure out this one, you mothers.” (42)
Ross’s novel can be read as a deliberate extension of the possibilities for expression, humor, self-defense, intellectual stimulation, and aesthetic pleasure in the various mother tongues or invented languages that the heroine can claim as her own, from the almost unrepresentable dialect of her African American grandmother to the code-switching “Yidlish” that is the lingua franca of several relatives on both sides of her family. In addition to the vernaculars of her own blood kin, Oreo can also claim fluency in the salty street talk of hustlers, pimps, and prostitutes, as well as the obscure erudition of cranky scholars.
Oreo’s ability to speak and communicate with a diverse cast of characters is a skill she cannot take for granted. Her grandfather is silent for much of the novel; her grandmother speaks a southern dialect alien to the northeast; her brother sings a secret invented language that resembles a cross between baby talk and the ooga-booga lingo of natives in old Tarzan movies. Oreo hears in his babbling a “radical” new language that serves as an extravagant means of self-expression and self-defense, like black slang or the arcane scat of bebop hipsters.