Mumbo Jumbo (novel)

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Mumbo Jumbo
OCLC
35158152
Preceded byYellow Back Radio Broke-Down 
Followed byThe Last Days of Louisiana Red 

Mumbo Jumbo is a 1972

Penguin Modern Classic
in 2017.

Text

Set in 1920s

houngan PaPa LaBas and his companion Black Herman racing against the Wallflower Order, an international conspiracy dedicated to monotheism and control, as they attempt to root out the cause of and deal with the "Jes Grew" virus, a personification of ragtime, jazz, polytheism, and freedom. The Wallflower Order is said to work in concert with an extant[1] Knights Templar
Order to prevent people from dancing, to end the dance crazes spreading among black people. The virus is spread by certain black artists, referred to in the novel as "Jes Grew Carriers" or "J.G.C.s."

Historical, social, and political events mingle freely with fictional inventions. The United States' occupation of

Irene Castle, and the Harlem Renaissance authors James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a veiled reference to Malcolm X
.

Additionally, in his project of blending the "real" and the "invented," Reed, through Papa LaBas, recites a counter history of

The Bible, whose content transforms the normative understanding of Judeo-Christian roots. Featuring Osiris, Set, Moses
and other important figures in both Egyptian and Judeo-Christian mythology, Reed re-imagines an entirely alternate past, evidenced by the Templar conflict that takes place in the novel.

Magical elements

Given that the protagonists of the novel are Voodoo practitioners, the novel itself contains a great deal of Voodoo terminology. In the novel, Voodoo is an effective art: PaPa LaBas practices from his Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral, and at one point his assistant is taken over by a

Petro aspect of the Voodoo secrets from Isis. Other classic mythological figures include Dionysus, who is portrayed as a follower of Osiris, and Faust
, who receives his magic not through a deal with the devil but through connections with black Voodoo practicitioners.

Background

Mumbo Jumbo draws freely on conspiracy theory,

hoodoo, and voodoo traditions, as well as the Afrocentric theories of Marcus Garvey and the occult author Henri Gamache, especially Gamache's theory that the Biblical prophet Moses was black. The book's title is explained by a quote from the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary deriving the phrase from Mandingo mā-mā-gyo-mbō meaning a "magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away."[2]

Format

The format and typography of Mumbo Jumbo are unique and make allusion to several typographic and stylistic conventions not normally associated with novels. The text begins and ends as if it were a movie script, with credits, a fade-in, and a freeze-frame followed by the publication and title pages which occur after chapter one. This is followed by a closing section that mimics a scholarly book on social history or folk magic by citing a lengthy bibliography. In addition, the tale is illustrated with drawings, photographs, and collages, some of which relate to the text, some of which look like illustrations from a social-studies book on African-American history, and some of which seem to be included as a cryptic protest against the Vietnam War.

Reed uses various conspicuous devices that remind readers of his presence as the author, such as brief parenthetical commentaries signed "I.R."[3] and footnotes to books published after the action of the story, such as Castles in the Air,[4] a 1958 memoir by Irene Castle. Reed is also credited for the photograph on the first and some later editions of the novel, in which symmetrical images of a nude dark-skinned woman with greased down hair are transposed over a blown-up rose.[5]

Mumbo Jumbo both depends on and fosters the disorientation of the reader. Rather than stick to any semblance of a novel's conventions, Reed supplies us with a hodgepodge of hand-written letters, radio dispatches, photographs, various typefaces, drawings, and even footnotes. With the first and second chapters interrupted by copyright and title pages, we even get the sense we're looking at a cinematic title screen. This is all to say that Reed is constantly blurring the lines of those things traditionally understood as distinct—in this case, form. In this vein he seems adamant to defamiliarize the familiar.

Literary criticism

Scholars such as

Afrofuturist text because of the synchronization of voodoo tropes and technology which contributes to its unique form. "Reed's synchronous model defies the progressive linearity of much recent technocultural criticism" (Nelson 8).[6] The non-linear narration, which is cinematic, plays on Afrofuturism's relationship between technology, black magic, and race—to whit: Also, Nelson deals with Reed's use of technology and its functionality in the text. The "…technologies from the setting's future and the author's present inhabit a story situated in the past", in Mumbo Jumbo allows for the emergence of African diasporic technologies in the text.[7]
This "anachronistic" nature of Mumbo Jumbo troubles widely accepted conceptualizations of technology, especially in thinking about "when" cultural innovations were created and by "whom".

James A. Snead sees the novel's structure as engaged of the African-American musical and rhetorical trope of "the cut", an interruption that disrupts the linear temporality of the work, looping back to an earlier textual moment.

Henry Louis Gates posits that Reed's novel opens up a narrative space in which the intricate relationship between black and Western literary forms and conventions are critiqued.[10] Pushing Gates' notion of "signifying pastiche" into the realm of the Afrofuturism, Alondra Nelson holds that Mumbo Jumbo imagines a version of African Diaspora that refuses to detach from tradition as it navigates modernity. For instance, PaPa LaBas make sense of the nuances of black modernity through his use of Haitian "Hoodoo" practices. As such, Reed mobilizes a "future-primitive perspective",[11]
which animates the past through the future.

Themes

Reclaiming history

Throughout the novel, Reed seeks to deconstruct the fundamental foundations upon which white, western civilization rests. This is exemplified by the Mu'tafika, an organization whose sole purpose is to steal historical artifacts from Western museums and return them to their place of origin. Additionally, the primary manifestation of this occurs in Papa LaBas' 30-page story of The Work (the original practice emanating from the text from which Jes Grew came) and its Egyptian roots. Reed uses this history to explicitly undermine the legitimacy of the monotheistic religions on which Western civilization rest. More important, though, is the fact that it does not matter whether or not the reader believes the tale to be true; what matters instead, for Reed, is the fact that an entire population was denied the right to hear his history and the right to choose to believe it. With the framework of Jes Grew already established as a real phenomenon in the novel, Reed's 30-page history imagines a powerful origin and meaning that has, in the course of the African-American slavery experience, been strategically precluded.

Jes Grew

In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed speaks of the creation of an intrinsically "black text", which is manifested in "Jes Grew". "Jes Grew", Reed's "virus", alludes to the dissemination of uniquely African-American culture in the 1920s that "traversed the land in search of its Text: the lost liturgy seeking its litany".[12] The "Jes Grew" virus influences people to listen to music, dance, and be happy. In many ways Jes Grew is like the funk. The infectious virus ultimately gets suppressed at the end of the plot of the novel. However, at the end of the novel, when Papa Labas is speaking to a college classroom in the 1970s, he talks about how the '70s are like the '20s again.[13] He believes this is the time for Jes Grew to rise. In this instance Papa Labas taps into a similarity between the styles of music that Jes Grew needs to grow; '20s jazz and '70s funk share an aesthetic that calls people to dance. Jes Grew needs the physical expression of music to grow.

The phrase "Jes' Grew" alludes to the character of Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, who did not know when or how she was born but expected sje "jes' growed" ("jes' grew," in the drama adapted from the book, and often elsewhere).

Editions

Mumbo Jumbo was first published in hardback in 1972 by

Scribner's released a new edition of Mumbo Jumbo, cited by Harold Bloom
as one of 500 great books of the Western canon. It includes a new introduction by Reed.

Influence and legacy

The ZBS Foundation dramatized the novel for a 1980 radio drama of the same name directed by Thomas Lopez.

Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton has cited Mumbo Jumbo as a primary source of inspiration for his P-Funk mythology.[16]

In Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow, a remark by the narrator places Reed in the heart of postmodern intertextuality, saying: "Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you will ever find here.)"[17]

In 2017, Mumbo Jumbo was reissued as a

Penguin Modern Classic.[18]

Further reading

References

  1. ^ The Knights Templar order was in fact disbanded in 1312.
  2. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. New York: American Heritage Publishing. 1969. p. 862. mā-mā, grandmother + gyo, trouble + mbō, leave.
  3. ^ Reed, Ishmael (1972). Mumbo Jumbo. p. 148. (In this way, he points his finger at his killers. Few historians have understood this clue.—I.R.)
  4. ^ Reed, Ishmael (1972). Mumbo Jumbo. p. 21.
  5. ^ Reed, Ishmael (2017). Mumbo Jumbo. Back Cover: Penguin Classics. Cover Photograph © Ishmael Reed
  6. doi:10.1215/01642472-20-2_71-1
    . Retrieved September 8, 2011.
  7. ^ Nelson, Alondra; Ron Eglash; Anna Everett; Tana Hargest; Nalo Hopkinson; Tracie Morris; Kalí Tal; Fatimah Tuggar; Alexander G. Weheliye (2002). "Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text". Social Text (71): 8. Archived from the original on June 21, 2013. Retrieved March 25, 2013.
  8. ^ Snead, James A. "On Repetition in Black Culture." Black American Literature Forum, No. 15, Vol. 4, Black Textual Strategies, Vol. 1: Theory (Winter 1984). 146–54.
  9. JSTOR 440731
    .
  10. ^ a b Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., "The 'Blackness of Blackness': A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 4 (June 1983), pp. 685–723.
  11. ^ Nelson, Alondra. "Introduction Future Texts", Social Text, 71 (Vol. 20, Number 2), Summer 2002, pp. 1–15.
  12. ^ Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 1972, p. 211.
  13. ^ Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 1972, p. 218.
  14. ^ Reed, Ishmael (December 12, 1976). "Remembering Josephine". The New York Times. Retrieved February 14, 2023.
  15. ^ "Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo at Fifty | Covers". Online Exhibitions | University of Delaware. Retrieved February 14, 2023.
  16. ^ Vincent, Rickey (1996), Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, p. 177.
  17. ^ Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow, London: Penguin Books, 1995, p. 588.
  18. ^ McAloon, Jonathan (August 1, 2017). "Mumbo Jumbo: a dazzling classic finally gets the recognition it deserves". The Guardian.

External links

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