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Mumbo Jumbo
The Classic Freewheeling Look at Race Relations Through the Ages
Mumbo Jumbo is Ishmael Reed's brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.
Mumbo Jumbo is Ishmael Reed's brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.
224 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1972
About the author
Ishmael Reed
139 books399 followersIshmael Scott Reed is an American poet, essayist, and novelist. A prominent African-American literary figure, Reed is known for his satirical works challenging American political culture, and highlighting political and cultural oppression.
Reed has been described as one of the most controversial writers. While his work has often sought to represent neglected African and African-American perspectives, his energy and advocacy have centered more broadly on neglected peoples and perspectives irrespective of their cultural origins.
Reed has been described as one of the most controversial writers. While his work has often sought to represent neglected African and African-American perspectives, his energy and advocacy have centered more broadly on neglected peoples and perspectives irrespective of their cultural origins.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 390 reviews
July 14, 2013
Reed is the sort of impish satirical crank whose Promethean intellect and restlessly zesty creativity tingles my funnybones, but whose books always leave me yearning for more logic, understanding and clarity. No exception here. This one is your all-out postmodern “metatext,” splicing citations and references and photos from other texts into the body of the main text—a satire about a dancing pandemic called Jes Grew—and despite the presentational panache of the novel, nestling beneath is really another relentless absurdist farce, albeit one written by a dazzling hyperbrain. More to the point: the references of whatever African-African late 60s cultural moment under analysis are entirely lost on a 26-year-old whitey from Backwoods, Scotchland, so the book deserves a more clued-in reader. In terms of the language, Reed has dropped the wizardry from his first two books Yellow Radio and Freelance Pallbearers, which is a shame, because his skill in that regard is nonpareil.
July 1, 2014
Mumbo Jumbo is an innovative novel with it's own original voice, which unfortunately turns rather clunky somewhere in the middle, and doesn't quite recover in the end. The strength of the novel is in its playfulness. There are some good parodic moments, and while the book indulges in some far flights of fancy in developing its conspiracy theories, it knows how to have fun with its own conceits, rather than deliver its material too dryly.
There are certainly messages of social relevance within the work. In that way it's a kind of coded text (though you don't need an enigma machine to puzzle it out... think something more like Pig Latin). While I'm sure we're not meant to take it as literal truth, with 1000 year old white Knights Templar plotting in a grand conspiracy to keep the black man down because of the danger inherent in his dance, there's certainly plenty of fair criticism of:
-art institutes as a form of cultural piracy,
-patronizing patrons who damn with faint praise,
-generational disconnect that prevents the youth from learning from the legacy of their elders,
-white America's contempt for Haiti and ignorance of its history,
-wishy-washy white do-gooders whose sympathy is suspect and unreliable,
-the indoctrination of some black folks to have contempt for their own race once they've been given a chance to rise one or two steps above their brethren,
-and the hypocrisy of belittling native Afro-Caribbean spiritualism in favor of the white man's goofy Bible or Quran, as though those religious traditions were less "primitive" for the virtue of having been blessed by contact with Western Culture.
So, okay, there you have it. Depending on your perspective, you may feel the book scores some points, or you may find its reliance on archetypes and some of its cartoonishness to be a little off-putting.
Then, there's the important theme, perhaps the more poignant one, of the elder who's seen it all, but can't get the kids of today to understand the nature of the conflict and the struggle that he's been through. He's a celebrated relic of sorts, respected in a token way, but not really understood, and his culture will not be passed on. The historic struggle of soul vs. no-soul is sure to rise again, and the hope resides in the fact that the next generation will write its own texts and find its own solutions. Since they can't grasp their own history, we can just anticipate that the old struggle will return as the new struggle.
Our crumbling bridge between past and future, PaPa LaBas, was already suffering from a degree of self-doubt and disconnect from his own roots, so his position seems to be a mix of tragedy and hope. He knows a lot about what has been lost, and what is being lost, while he can only guess at what will come to replace it. And he has reason for anxiety, knowing that dangers lurk, which the too credulous and apathetic new generation doubts or fails to suspect deeply enough, so that they remain unarmed.
So, hey, that sounds mostly good, so where's the downside? Well, the book succumbs to the author's temptation to explain a bit too much, and to take some of the book's fancies a little more seriously than we might have expected from the earlier developments. Not that the book "explains" in the way I have done here (yeah, I'm dry and not fun, and I'm secretly a member of the Wallflower Order), but rather there's a long expository section in which the details of a conspiracy spanning all of human history are laid out. Along the way, some of the humor gets a bit sour, as the author indulges in intentional anachronisms that for some reason don't seem to fit the tone of what surrounds them (e.g., having the ancient Egyptian prince/god Set order his authorities to pull over carriages on the side of the roads and issue tickets and warrants in a parody of modern America's police harassment of black motorists). It's not that I object to such things on principal, but as I characterized it at the beginning of this review, "clunky" is the best way I can think to describe this section of the book that brings a halt to the semi-mystery/caper novel we were reading before.
I had a feeling that the author would have better pursued one of two contrary options:
-Best would be Option A: Leave out almost all explanation. Keep it in your head as a secret key to the novel which doesn't need to be exposed to the reader.
-Second Best would be Option B: Go Whole Hog. Develop and expand that whole expository section into an engaging, sprightly narrative on par with what came before, don't worry about the fact that it swells the novel to twice its current size, and still don't explain everything. Maybe find a way to weave it more seamlessly into the framing narrative.
But the least good option, Option C, is the way the book went, which was to just tell everyone what your idea was, even though the narrative progress is brought to a grinding halt. And then we discover that the plot that we thought was still developing is now shortly terminated. Then we get a confusing epilogue which gets across the theme mentioned above relating to PaPa LaBas as the bridge...
Ultimately, it was a good read, something I'm glad to have given my time to, but reading it involved some frustrations and disappointments too. I'm hoping that I'll find another Ishmael Reed book that I can embrace more enthusiastically, with less reservations.
Final point: Ishmael Reed cleverly set out to make me feel guilty for criticizing his book before I had the opportunity to do so. This book, and some of the author's comments outside of this book, criticize the critic who imposes conventional, conservative expectations upon a work, one who is too ready to slight the accomplishment of a black artist who takes risks to express himself in a mode outside the mainstream. That plus the fact that I can't dance basically makes me a soulless sucker, but as an Atonist, I just can't deny my own legacy.
There are certainly messages of social relevance within the work. In that way it's a kind of coded text (though you don't need an enigma machine to puzzle it out... think something more like Pig Latin). While I'm sure we're not meant to take it as literal truth, with 1000 year old white Knights Templar plotting in a grand conspiracy to keep the black man down because of the danger inherent in his dance, there's certainly plenty of fair criticism of:
-art institutes as a form of cultural piracy,
-patronizing patrons who damn with faint praise,
-generational disconnect that prevents the youth from learning from the legacy of their elders,
-white America's contempt for Haiti and ignorance of its history,
-wishy-washy white do-gooders whose sympathy is suspect and unreliable,
-the indoctrination of some black folks to have contempt for their own race once they've been given a chance to rise one or two steps above their brethren,
-and the hypocrisy of belittling native Afro-Caribbean spiritualism in favor of the white man's goofy Bible or Quran, as though those religious traditions were less "primitive" for the virtue of having been blessed by contact with Western Culture.
So, okay, there you have it. Depending on your perspective, you may feel the book scores some points, or you may find its reliance on archetypes and some of its cartoonishness to be a little off-putting.
Then, there's the important theme, perhaps the more poignant one, of the elder who's seen it all, but can't get the kids of today to understand the nature of the conflict and the struggle that he's been through. He's a celebrated relic of sorts, respected in a token way, but not really understood, and his culture will not be passed on. The historic struggle of soul vs. no-soul is sure to rise again, and the hope resides in the fact that the next generation will write its own texts and find its own solutions. Since they can't grasp their own history, we can just anticipate that the old struggle will return as the new struggle.
Our crumbling bridge between past and future, PaPa LaBas, was already suffering from a degree of self-doubt and disconnect from his own roots, so his position seems to be a mix of tragedy and hope. He knows a lot about what has been lost, and what is being lost, while he can only guess at what will come to replace it. And he has reason for anxiety, knowing that dangers lurk, which the too credulous and apathetic new generation doubts or fails to suspect deeply enough, so that they remain unarmed.
So, hey, that sounds mostly good, so where's the downside? Well, the book succumbs to the author's temptation to explain a bit too much, and to take some of the book's fancies a little more seriously than we might have expected from the earlier developments. Not that the book "explains" in the way I have done here (yeah, I'm dry and not fun, and I'm secretly a member of the Wallflower Order), but rather there's a long expository section in which the details of a conspiracy spanning all of human history are laid out. Along the way, some of the humor gets a bit sour, as the author indulges in intentional anachronisms that for some reason don't seem to fit the tone of what surrounds them (e.g., having the ancient Egyptian prince/god Set order his authorities to pull over carriages on the side of the roads and issue tickets and warrants in a parody of modern America's police harassment of black motorists). It's not that I object to such things on principal, but as I characterized it at the beginning of this review, "clunky" is the best way I can think to describe this section of the book that brings a halt to the semi-mystery/caper novel we were reading before.
I had a feeling that the author would have better pursued one of two contrary options:
-Best would be Option A: Leave out almost all explanation. Keep it in your head as a secret key to the novel which doesn't need to be exposed to the reader.
-Second Best would be Option B: Go Whole Hog. Develop and expand that whole expository section into an engaging, sprightly narrative on par with what came before, don't worry about the fact that it swells the novel to twice its current size, and still don't explain everything. Maybe find a way to weave it more seamlessly into the framing narrative.
But the least good option, Option C, is the way the book went, which was to just tell everyone what your idea was, even though the narrative progress is brought to a grinding halt. And then we discover that the plot that we thought was still developing is now shortly terminated. Then we get a confusing epilogue which gets across the theme mentioned above relating to PaPa LaBas as the bridge...
Ultimately, it was a good read, something I'm glad to have given my time to, but reading it involved some frustrations and disappointments too. I'm hoping that I'll find another Ishmael Reed book that I can embrace more enthusiastically, with less reservations.
Final point: Ishmael Reed cleverly set out to make me feel guilty for criticizing his book before I had the opportunity to do so. This book, and some of the author's comments outside of this book, criticize the critic who imposes conventional, conservative expectations upon a work, one who is too ready to slight the accomplishment of a black artist who takes risks to express himself in a mode outside the mainstream. That plus the fact that I can't dance basically makes me a soulless sucker, but as an Atonist, I just can't deny my own legacy.
Read
June 16, 2014Dionysian counter=punch to the Apollonian order enjoyed by all Atonists. It swings! To say we have it coming is an understatement. I had it coming, what with after all that faith=in=fiction mumbo jumbo I was jiving upon reading my Mano Mano Mano. Makes no difference what I say. Jes Grew is upon you. You know I’ll tell history different. But that’s cuz I’m a stuff’d shirt. Besides, Osiris is no more dead or alive than Odin and Zeus ; and ancient Egypt still makes for great fiction, and fiction --- fiction is where it’s at. You know what Emma says about revolutions and dancing? Yeah, it’s like that. Bread, sure, but Roses too and there’s no need to insist upon your dialectic. More Reed please.
January 8, 2022
Proto-Pynchonalia. What a trip. Pynchon’s prose is almost always more opaque and flowery, but this is obviously one of his biggest influences; really cool to see. And kudos to Pynchon for owning up to this influence within one of his own texts (GR). This book is a must for anyone seeking out Pynchon’s influence, but it is, of course, a fantastic and important novel in and of itself. Saddened, in a way, that I might not have come across it if it had not been for Pynchon, but I’m glad I did, anywho.
October 31, 2022
This was great, but challenging satire. I say challenging because Reed takes you through 20th century history. Much of what happens requires knowledge of the timeframe, specifically black history but also, American and world history. He particularly takes license with President Harding a rather obscure to most folks niche. He talks of James Weldon, WEB DuBois, George Schyler, Alain Locke and others. He travels in Egyptian history as well as Jamaican. He even injected himself in the story. And he does it in a remarkably effective way. I felt like I was learning history while he was lampooning it. This was a very complex novel that I will no doubt read again. The is a lot that I missed and or didn't understand. I truthfully haven't fully processed it and honestly don't think it's possible with just one read. But I know what Jas Grew is and that it has never gone away!
4+ Stars
Listened to Audible. David Sadzin was fantastic!! But the novel is so complex that it was very hard to understand everything fully.
4+ Stars
Listened to Audible. David Sadzin was fantastic!! But the novel is so complex that it was very hard to understand everything fully.
August 1, 2015
I'm often leery when friends of mine lend me their favorite books. How soon do you expect me to read this? You know I have a stack of books the size of an end table still to read, right? What if, though this has never before happened in the 25+ years I've been a regular reader, I should lose or damage the book? Most intimidating of all, what if I don't like the read or what if I find it to be so bad that my opinion of you as a friend is changed due to your devotion to these pages? After more than a few heated arguments about the merits of a particular book with friends I've had to place myself at a bit more of a remove from things. It's this same reason why I never recommend my favorite books for monthly book club reads. I take reading more personally than most, apparently.
So it was with much trepidation and nervousness that I accepted my friend James' copy of this book. Battered and well worn, with passages underlined and bracketed from multiple read-throughs, this was obviously a well-loved book. I felt as though we were at a turning point in our friendship and this slim volume would be the pivot upon which the whole relationship would turn. So I guess it's a good thing that I ended up rather enjoying this light-hearted romp.
Taking place in Prohibition-era New York City, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo charts the rise of ragtime and jazz as an infectious thought meme of liberation and fertility called Jes Grew beating its tattoo of freedom from hierarchical society straight from the heart of ancient Egypt. Regular readers of science fiction will recognize many similarities with the idea of the Sumerian namshub that Neil Stephenson used with such aplomb in his seminal work, Snow Crash. Arrayed against this meme are all the conspiratorial powers of white society, from the simple Freemasons to the Knights Templar, who will stop at nothing to discredit and destroy this nascent movement before it infects New York at large and undoes centuries worth of work at bringing order to society and keeping the dark races under their thumb.
I know, this sounds so very much like every other work of conspiracy fiction ever published and I would have rolled my eyes so hard at some points that they would have dropped from my head and onto the table, if Reed's style weren't so whimsically refreshing. He doesn't take his words too seriously and neither should the reader. Throwing in a great amount of history with references to Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement and cameos from major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Reed paints an eminently enjoyable take on race in Western history and, between bits of buffoonery, offers a solid critique of the subtle racism that infects so many of our actions to this day. I especially enjoyed his group of art thieves who would liberate indigenous icons from those graveyards of culture, museums, and return them to their rightful homes among the tribes of Borneo or the descendants of the Olmec. I kept hoping for an Indiana Jones moment where a character could say that "it belongs in a museum" only to get pistol-whipped and told that it belongs to the people who created it.
There are a lot of references packed into this slim volume and one reading can not hope to catch all of the nuance of Reed's work. I see now why James had so thoughtfully underlined many of his favorite passages, it's a great book to quote in conversation and one that I've found myself thinking about quite often in the days since finishing it. I'd never read any Ishmael Reed prior to Mumbo Jumbo but he's certainly an author I'll be on the lookout for in the future.
So it was with much trepidation and nervousness that I accepted my friend James' copy of this book. Battered and well worn, with passages underlined and bracketed from multiple read-throughs, this was obviously a well-loved book. I felt as though we were at a turning point in our friendship and this slim volume would be the pivot upon which the whole relationship would turn. So I guess it's a good thing that I ended up rather enjoying this light-hearted romp.
Taking place in Prohibition-era New York City, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo charts the rise of ragtime and jazz as an infectious thought meme of liberation and fertility called Jes Grew beating its tattoo of freedom from hierarchical society straight from the heart of ancient Egypt. Regular readers of science fiction will recognize many similarities with the idea of the Sumerian namshub that Neil Stephenson used with such aplomb in his seminal work, Snow Crash. Arrayed against this meme are all the conspiratorial powers of white society, from the simple Freemasons to the Knights Templar, who will stop at nothing to discredit and destroy this nascent movement before it infects New York at large and undoes centuries worth of work at bringing order to society and keeping the dark races under their thumb.
I know, this sounds so very much like every other work of conspiracy fiction ever published and I would have rolled my eyes so hard at some points that they would have dropped from my head and onto the table, if Reed's style weren't so whimsically refreshing. He doesn't take his words too seriously and neither should the reader. Throwing in a great amount of history with references to Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement and cameos from major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Reed paints an eminently enjoyable take on race in Western history and, between bits of buffoonery, offers a solid critique of the subtle racism that infects so many of our actions to this day. I especially enjoyed his group of art thieves who would liberate indigenous icons from those graveyards of culture, museums, and return them to their rightful homes among the tribes of Borneo or the descendants of the Olmec. I kept hoping for an Indiana Jones moment where a character could say that "it belongs in a museum" only to get pistol-whipped and told that it belongs to the people who created it.
There are a lot of references packed into this slim volume and one reading can not hope to catch all of the nuance of Reed's work. I see now why James had so thoughtfully underlined many of his favorite passages, it's a great book to quote in conversation and one that I've found myself thinking about quite often in the days since finishing it. I'd never read any Ishmael Reed prior to Mumbo Jumbo but he's certainly an author I'll be on the lookout for in the future.
November 14, 2022
Holy Loa - That was some fun reading!
More page to page fun and excitement than I've had from a novel in a long time. And so very much in lineage with other novels and authors very much instrumental in my literary development. How have I ignored this novel and author for so long? Why, when I have seen it on shelves for more than 30 years did I never feel impelled to read the first 3 pages? Maybe it was something about the standard original Penguin cover that never quite drew me in?
I could be sad about it taking me so long to come to this novel, but instead I decided to coin a German phrase to describe my feelings: Freude für späte Erfahrung. "Joy for Late Experience." I hear the phrase is catching on from New Orleans to New York City!
When I write that for me it falls in a lineage, it's the themes and feelings-while-reading of the following that I was immediately put in mind of:
Thomas Pynchon (Lot 49, GR)
Tom Robbins (especially Jitterbug Perfume)
Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five).
Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminatus! trilogy)
Jim Dodge (Stone Junction)
William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads)
Not only is this what I would call a rollicking good time of a story, its mix of fact and fiction, history and fabulation, social and racial commentary, mythology, comedy and downright joyful invention manages to say quite a few very real things about quite a few very important topics. The 50-60 page alternative history of civilization near the end really won me over and in some sense convinced me of its truths, if not in the sense of real physical history, then certainly in the sense of felt and experienced symbolic/psychic history. In other words, it may not all be Fact but it most certainly is all very True.
Highest recommendation!
What are you still doing here?
Stop reading this and start reading Mumbo Jumbo NOW.
More page to page fun and excitement than I've had from a novel in a long time. And so very much in lineage with other novels and authors very much instrumental in my literary development. How have I ignored this novel and author for so long? Why, when I have seen it on shelves for more than 30 years did I never feel impelled to read the first 3 pages? Maybe it was something about the standard original Penguin cover that never quite drew me in?
I could be sad about it taking me so long to come to this novel, but instead I decided to coin a German phrase to describe my feelings: Freude für späte Erfahrung. "Joy for Late Experience." I hear the phrase is catching on from New Orleans to New York City!
When I write that for me it falls in a lineage, it's the themes and feelings-while-reading of the following that I was immediately put in mind of:
Thomas Pynchon (Lot 49, GR)
Tom Robbins (especially Jitterbug Perfume)
Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five).
Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminatus! trilogy)
Jim Dodge (Stone Junction)
William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads)
Not only is this what I would call a rollicking good time of a story, its mix of fact and fiction, history and fabulation, social and racial commentary, mythology, comedy and downright joyful invention manages to say quite a few very real things about quite a few very important topics. The 50-60 page alternative history of civilization near the end really won me over and in some sense convinced me of its truths, if not in the sense of real physical history, then certainly in the sense of felt and experienced symbolic/psychic history. In other words, it may not all be Fact but it most certainly is all very True.
Highest recommendation!
What are you still doing here?
Stop reading this and start reading Mumbo Jumbo NOW.
March 25, 2008
For various and sundry reasons, it took me over twenty years after finding out about it to read this book. I advise you not to procrastinate as long as I did. Challenging, hilarious, thought-provoking, and still utterly relevant, MUMBO JUMBO leaves you wondering where "Jes' Grew" is growing now, and just how off the tracks our cultural train may be running. If I could find Mr. Reed's contact info, I'd write him; the book will foster loads of questions. If you have read it, I suggest you check out any of Kip Hanrahan's CONJURE recordings, in which a stunning variety of black musicians (Allen Touissaint, Alvin Youngblood Hart, David Murray...that ain't close to all) bring many of the elements of MUMBO JUMBO to life, often with Mr. Reed reading over them. These recordings may be hard to find in hard copy form. If you don't mind subscription downloads at a super-cheap price, eMusic carries them.
Read
May 20, 2008Ishmael Reed takes a lot of Pynchonian ideas (massive conspiracy theory, fundamental novelty) and puts a distinct Afro-futurist spin on them, and the result is phenomenal. What makes "Mumbo Jumbo" unique is its remarkable merger of formal experiment (incorporation of visual material, novel typography, freewheeling plot structure) and sheer enjoyment. I've never had more fun demanding the downfall of static white society.
July 26, 2014
Some great, witty, justifiably angry writing here, and some wonderful use of fragmentation and sampling but somehow it never cohered for me and, at times, I did actually find my interest waning a little, which is not a good sign for such a short book...
October 28, 2007
Another one of those life-altering books. Takes two of my favorite things, satire and history, and completely turned it on its head. I don't know what kind of writer I'd be without Ishmael Reed.
October 17, 2015
When will white people stop expecting black writers to write like white writers?
September 6, 2019
Not only was this the book my in-person book club decided to read for the month of August, it also made an appearance in the Toni Morrison documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019). That seemed providential, the spirit of Toni Morrison (who had died earlier in the week when I saw the documentary) shining down on us. Like, yeah, bitches, read this book by Ishmael Reed.
Evidently Harold Bloom called Mumbo Jumbo one of the 500 most canonical books in Western literature. I don't know I've ever actually read anything by this Bloom guy, and my feelings are that he focused a lot of his energy on primarily dead white dudes, but hey, Reed isn't a dead white dude, so there's a strong possibility that Bloom isn't full of shit. Entirely.
Not gonna lie, though, I don't think I had heard of this title until Rayroy from book club recommended it, so high five to him (I guess). It was just the two of us at the discussion, actually, but maybe that was okay because I was able to hear right from him why he wanted us to read this book. Because, also not gonna lie, most of the time I was reading this, I was ready to flush Rayroy down the toilet.
It's not that I didn't get the book, but I also didn't get the book. It's probably too smart for me, to be real, and I actually benefited from Rayroy's thoughts on it. This was his second time reading it and he gave me things to think about that I either missed entirely in my reading, or didn't think about deeply enough. We went through the text and he pointed out some of his favorite passages, or the ones that spoke to him, and because I'm shameless I sticky-noted those bits and now I'll share them as though they were my own original thoughts:
This is pure 1970s hoodoo/voodoo-laden, musical and historical and Afrocentric, well, mumbo jumbo. On one hand it's incredibly fascinating, especially the way Reed puts all these words down on paper as though the words themselves are musical notes, a rhythmic jazz, maybe, with sudden surprises like characters who say things like:
This is also a frustrating read because it's just not how my mind works. Rayroy said his girlfriend (who is no academic slouch either) compared it to the frustration she felt reading Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I too have read A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I get her point. But even that one worked for me more than this one, the difference probably being Deleuze and Guattari's book is something like nonfiction (for lack of a better word, lawl) and Reed's book is fiction (though with historical components). I don't even know what I'm trying to say about that now. I just wrote myself in a circle.
Evidently Harold Bloom called Mumbo Jumbo one of the 500 most canonical books in Western literature. I don't know I've ever actually read anything by this Bloom guy, and my feelings are that he focused a lot of his energy on primarily dead white dudes, but hey, Reed isn't a dead white dude, so there's a strong possibility that Bloom isn't full of shit. Entirely.
Not gonna lie, though, I don't think I had heard of this title until Rayroy from book club recommended it, so high five to him (I guess). It was just the two of us at the discussion, actually, but maybe that was okay because I was able to hear right from him why he wanted us to read this book. Because, also not gonna lie, most of the time I was reading this, I was ready to flush Rayroy down the toilet.
It's not that I didn't get the book, but I also didn't get the book. It's probably too smart for me, to be real, and I actually benefited from Rayroy's thoughts on it. This was his second time reading it and he gave me things to think about that I either missed entirely in my reading, or didn't think about deeply enough. We went through the text and he pointed out some of his favorite passages, or the ones that spoke to him, and because I'm shameless I sticky-noted those bits and now I'll share them as though they were my own original thoughts:
Deluxe Ice Cream, Coffee, 1 cent Pies, Cakes, Tobacco, Hot Dogs and Highways. Highways leading to nowhere. Highways leading to somewhere. Highways the Occupation used to speed upon in their automobiles, killing dog pigs and cattle belonging to the poor people. What is the American fetish about highways?Since I missed that entirely the first time until Rayroy pointed it out, it wasn't until like yesterday that I realized how that reminds me of a lot of what Henry Miller cracked on about in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. (Oh, look, a dead white dude.)
They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.
Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.
But what is after them?
They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress. We call it Haints. Haints of their victims rising from the soil of Africa, South America, Asia.
(p135)
This is pure 1970s hoodoo/voodoo-laden, musical and historical and Afrocentric, well, mumbo jumbo. On one hand it's incredibly fascinating, especially the way Reed puts all these words down on paper as though the words themselves are musical notes, a rhythmic jazz, maybe, with sudden surprises like characters who say things like:
I was in Harlem watching the little colored waifs play in the school yard. Some of them dropped their notes which I immediately swept into my briefcase and they would bawl but then I appeased the little chocolate dollops by awarding them peppermint candy.We also spent a good chunk of book club looking at the illustrations and photographs in each of our editions. Some of the ones I had in my book were replaced by different images in Rayroy's copy, and I can't imagine why that might be unless maybe copyrights or something. I have to say that most of the images in my copy were better than the one in his, not that that means anything. I'm just saying that if you read any copy of this book, you may have different images throughout.
(p141)
This is also a frustrating read because it's just not how my mind works. Rayroy said his girlfriend (who is no academic slouch either) compared it to the frustration she felt reading Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I too have read A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I get her point. But even that one worked for me more than this one, the difference probably being Deleuze and Guattari's book is something like nonfiction (for lack of a better word, lawl) and Reed's book is fiction (though with historical components). I don't even know what I'm trying to say about that now. I just wrote myself in a circle.
August 10, 2012
A challenging and jubilatory postmodern (re)vision of the mythical powers that be, MJ is a short but intense ride through the underbelly of the jousting hidden forces shaping history, religion, culture, and race relations, and it all comes to a head in the jazzy arena of 1920's Harlem:
After a first flair-up in 1890's New Orleans, HooDoo/Voodoo forces are once again alive and on the rise as Jes Grew, the 'psychic virus' spreads and infects its carriers with the irresistable urge to jam, dance, and otherwise just get funky. But the staid Atonist watchdogs, the Wallflower Order of the Knights of Templar, are vigilant and they intend to put a stop to the epidemic before it gets the upper hand... And so begins a riotous and keen-eyed romp from Harlem to ancient Egypt via Haiti, jam-packed with real and fictional characters, references, and imagery.
As bizarre as the synopsis sounds, IR manages to inject even more weirdness in his novel by prankishly fiddling with the form: merging text with paratext, inserting seemingly random and/or displaced photos and graphics throughout, experimental punctuation... Some readers might find this to be pure 1970's (oblige) gadgetry, but I loved the photos and graphics, which I found mostly oblique and off-center, but not unrelated.
As a whole, this novel was a unique and engrossing reading experience for me; while some parts were definitely rough going and had to be read and (what the?) reread, and, to be sure, the multitude of references was daunting, it was worth the effort. I'd take a half star off because there was some suffering involved, but I can't , so I'll go for the big five!
Finally, a few quotes for the sheer pleasure of some very irreverent humor:
"To blazes with your election, man! Don't you understand, if this Jes Grew becomes pandemic, it will mean the end of Civilization as We Know It?"
"People hated Set. He went down as the 1st man to shut nature out of himself. He called it discipline. He is also the deity of the modern clerk, always tabulating, and perhaps invented taxes."
"Lazarus was a zombie!"
After a first flair-up in 1890's New Orleans, HooDoo/Voodoo forces are once again alive and on the rise as Jes Grew, the 'psychic virus' spreads and infects its carriers with the irresistable urge to jam, dance, and otherwise just get funky. But the staid Atonist watchdogs, the Wallflower Order of the Knights of Templar, are vigilant and they intend to put a stop to the epidemic before it gets the upper hand... And so begins a riotous and keen-eyed romp from Harlem to ancient Egypt via Haiti, jam-packed with real and fictional characters, references, and imagery.
As bizarre as the synopsis sounds, IR manages to inject even more weirdness in his novel by prankishly fiddling with the form: merging text with paratext, inserting seemingly random and/or displaced photos and graphics throughout, experimental punctuation... Some readers might find this to be pure 1970's (oblige) gadgetry, but I loved the photos and graphics, which I found mostly oblique and off-center, but not unrelated.
As a whole, this novel was a unique and engrossing reading experience for me; while some parts were definitely rough going and had to be read and (what the?) reread, and, to be sure, the multitude of references was daunting, it was worth the effort. I'd take a half star off because there was some suffering involved, but I can't , so I'll go for the big five!
Finally, a few quotes for the sheer pleasure of some very irreverent humor:
"To blazes with your election, man! Don't you understand, if this Jes Grew becomes pandemic, it will mean the end of Civilization as We Know It?"
"People hated Set. He went down as the 1st man to shut nature out of himself. He called it discipline. He is also the deity of the modern clerk, always tabulating, and perhaps invented taxes."
"Lazarus was a zombie!"
February 2, 2022
Energiczna, postrzelona powieść, w której w jazzującej Ameryce lat 20 XX w. w oparach harlemskich cygar voodoo spotyka elokwentne androidy, egipscy bogowie Freuda, Krzyżacy i Templariusze astrodetektywów, a głównym motorem napędowym tej szalonej historii jest antypandemia Dżes Gru, której jednym z objawów jest nieposkromiona chęć do dziwacznych tańców.
Reed w swojej najbardziej znanej, posiadającej już status kultowej, powieści sprawnie zaciera granice między rzeczywistością, a fikcją. Faktyczne wydarzenia historyczne, przemiany oraz ruchy społeczne i polityczne zgrabnie mieszają się z tymi zrodzonymi w rozbuchanej wyobraźni autora.
“Mambo Dżambo” poza unikatową, wariacką konstrukcją i fabułą ma do zaoferowania znacznie więcej. Reed pod płaszczykiem okultystyczno-konspiracyjnej opowieści przemyca gorzką satyrę na rasizm i ideologię białej supremacji.
Nieprzeciętnie zwariowana eksperymentalna proza. Z początku orzeźwiająca i zachwycająca dziwaczność stylu, formy i konstrukcji na dłuższą metę zaczęła mnie męczyć, jednak nie mogę nie docenić pomysłowości, nowatorstwa i ogromnego wkładu w amerykańską literaturę i kulturę Afroamerykanów. Osobliwe i ciekawe czytelnicze doświadczenie, ale to nie do końca moja literatura.
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Reed w swojej najbardziej znanej, posiadającej już status kultowej, powieści sprawnie zaciera granice między rzeczywistością, a fikcją. Faktyczne wydarzenia historyczne, przemiany oraz ruchy społeczne i polityczne zgrabnie mieszają się z tymi zrodzonymi w rozbuchanej wyobraźni autora.
“Mambo Dżambo” poza unikatową, wariacką konstrukcją i fabułą ma do zaoferowania znacznie więcej. Reed pod płaszczykiem okultystyczno-konspiracyjnej opowieści przemyca gorzką satyrę na rasizm i ideologię białej supremacji.
Nieprzeciętnie zwariowana eksperymentalna proza. Z początku orzeźwiająca i zachwycająca dziwaczność stylu, formy i konstrukcji na dłuższą metę zaczęła mnie męczyć, jednak nie mogę nie docenić pomysłowości, nowatorstwa i ogromnego wkładu w amerykańską literaturę i kulturę Afroamerykanów. Osobliwe i ciekawe czytelnicze doświadczenie, ale to nie do końca moja literatura.
November 20, 2023
Modern-day America sees the blatant oppression of black culture and black communities. There are clear groups dedicated to this action who are outright in their intentions. But if it were only these less subtle groups acting against the black community, would they be so successful in their oppression? In Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, he argues that it is not only those overt groups who are a part of this act but that American society at large is built on a foundation of conspiracy and mythology dedicated to reinforcing the superiority of their own race. It's a brilliant postmodern novel that should be read along with the more well-known authors of the movement. Even Pynchon himself breaks the fourth wall in his masterpiece to recommend Reed as someone who knows far more about American myth than he ever could.
May 7, 2018
Thomas Pynchon's freewheeling narrator of
Gravity's Rainbow
(1973) tells us, "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.)" Similarly, the underground cult classic compendium of conspiracy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy (an important influence on both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison) opens with this epigraph from Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo: "Someone once said that beneath or behind all political and cultural warfare lies a struggle between secret societies." Anyone seeking the crossroads where modern or postmodern literature, the occult, and fringe politics converge should acquaint themselves with Reed's strange and brilliant book.
Mumbo Jumbo is set during the 1920s, "[t]hat 1 decade which doesn't seem so much a part of American history as the hidden After-Hours of America struggling to jam. To get through." America is experiencing an outbreak of the phenomenon ("an anti-plague") called Jes Grew, essentially Reed's name for the culture of the black diaspora, especially as expressed through music, whether ragtime, jazz, or blues (the name derives from an epigraph attributed to James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry: "The earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, 'jes' grew,'" both an ironic appropriation of a racist artifact [Uncle Tom's Cabin] and a refusal of individualist proprietary attitudes toward culture). As in the 1890s with its ragtime vogue, the Jazz Age threatens to overwhelm "Western Civilization" with a pleasure-loving and peaceable way of life opposed to the sterile and exploitative lifeworld of, locally, "neuter-living Protestants," or those whom Reed more broadly calls Atonists, or monotheists (worshippers of the sun):
On the pro side, there is the novel's hero, the Harlem houngan PaPa LaBas, proprietor of the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral. He teams with a cadre of magicians from Haiti—itself under U.S. occupation—stationed on a Marcus Garvey ship in New York harbor as they strive to recover the fragmentary text or scripture of Africa's diaspora magic, dance-dictated in the night of time by Osiris to Thoth. In the absence of this book, Jes Grew is only an aural, oral, and bodily tradition and is therefore at a disadvantage under monotheism's textual onslaught, its Bibles, Korans, Constitutions, Interpretations of Dreams, Communist Manifestoes, academic treatises, high literary traditions, and yellow journalism. Similarly, the novel also bears a significant subplot about a group of art "thieves" who strive to liberate the works of the global East and South from Europe's and America's museums; in his portrait of this multicultural group, Reed charts some of the fissures and fractures among people of color, noting that, for instance, a common enemy in European empire does not necessarily make for frictionless comity between black and Asian peoples.
Against Jes Grew's supporters is the Wallflower Order, who are in their time of Jazz Age extremity forced to call in white intellectual and ageless Knight Templar Hinckle von Hampton (Reed's satire on white Harlem Renaissance impresario Carl Van Vechten), who plans to defeat black insurgency by coopting it. He starts a little magazine called The Benign Monster, the title itself suggesting the intelligentsia's gentrification of radical energies, and seeks a "Talking Robot"—i.e., a black intellectual who will mislead black audiences back to the monotheistic path of Atonism. Hinckle's pathetic struggle is actually portrayed with some sympathy amid the satire—I got the sense that, racial polemics aside, Reed knows he has more in common with a modernist literary intellectual than with a Voodoo magician. Nevertheless, Reed unsparingly excoriates European literature from Milton to Freud to Styron:
The conflict between Jes Grew and the Atonists dates back to the fraternal quarrel between Set and Osiris in the Egyptian pantheon: Osiris learns the arts of peace and plenty at college from Ethiopian and Nubian students, and he disseminates this gnosis throughout the world, particularly to Native Americans. Set, by contrast, is "the stick crook and flail man," advocates for discipline and thus eventually ends up worshipping Aton, the transcendent sun god, and beginning the monotheist cult that in various iterations—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and capitalist—would war throughout history on Jes Grew and the liberation it stands, or dances, for. Moses himself is revealed to have effectively swindled the secrets of Osiris for himself, which resulted in his getting only the negative side of the magic; this negative side became monotheism as we know it, everything that "the people of the book" have wrought.
In other words, all human culture, like the human race itself, comes out of Africa: European cultures are without autochthony or autonomy and are only offshoots, even where they are most racist or conservative, of one or another side in an intra-African quarrel, the latest round of which is presumably Kanye West vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates.[1]
Which brings us around to the perhaps less salubrious politics of the novel. Mumbo Jumbo is not really "woke" or "PC" or whatever we're calling it now. For one thing, it expresses sufficient quantities of anti-Islam sentiment to get Reed brought up on hate speech charges in Europe, as he seems to think that Islam is, no less than any other form of religious or secular monotheism, an attempt to repress the authentic black mysteries. It is the black Muslim intellectual Abdul who comes into possession of the scripture that is the novel's quest object, and he burns it: "Censorship until the very last." And despite the attractions of Reed's emancipatory occultism, what does his displacement of Hebrew religion with Egyptian magic, his execration of Moses, Marx, and Freud imply? A reader can surely be forgiven for detecting a classically anti-Semitic subtext here. And, as befitting the work of a male author who has been known to worry that feminism is a tool of the white power structure used to disarticulate black and brown traditions and scapegoat men of color, the novel's female characters tend to be either helpmeets or harridans (or both), even the goddesses Isis and Erzulie.
On the other hand, the lessons of Mumbo Jumbo might well be applied to today's cultural appropriation debate. Reed's position is quite subtle: he mocks and derides cultural exploitation and co-optation at the level of production, which is the point of his satire on modernist literary culture's attempts to capture and neutralize the energies of black rebellion; on the consumption side, however, Reed seems to see the diffusion of Jes Grew as humanity's only salvation—to see black culture as a force that, at the level of the dancing body, takes over whites rather than being taken over by them. The novel, I therefore take it, counsels against castigating every white person who takes a selfie while wearing an item of non-western origin, even as it also takes aim at corporations, universities, and other institutions profiting from the creativity of populaces they exclude and exploit.[2]
Finally, I have not yet mentioned the novel's form. I have made it sound too linear, too much like a thriller with philosophical weight. But it is rather a collage and a montage, written in telegraphic prose, splicing in quotations and images, doing without quotation marks, transitions, or the pretense of God-like objectivity. One of its dedicatees is "George Herriman, Afro-American, who created Krazy Kat," and the novel's style of radical juxtaposition and teasing polyglot wordplay is a fitting homage to Herriman's brilliant Jazz Age achievement in comics. Reed's ludic style protects his conspiracy theory from seeming like the work of a mere crank, though I'm sure he believes the spirit, if not the letter, of it. The novel promotes play and humor as against the droning solemn seriousness of monotheistic religion and literary culture:
______________________
[1] Note that, by the terms laid out in Mumbo Jumbo, Coates, despite a superficially Reedian invocation after Zora Neale Hurston of "the bone and drum," is arguably the authoritarian Atonist, promoting the traditional cypto-montheist political left as the black man's salvation in a white man's magazine, while West disseminates magickal-musical thinking far and wide in a popular idiom on a populist platform, even quoting Carl Jung's contemporary avatar Jordan Peterson just as Reed approvingly quotes Jung. My point is not to side with West over Coates or Reed over the western world, but to get the tally right; I will say that "left" and "right" are becoming ever less reliable guides to cultural politics, though the comrades tell me that that is itself a right-wing position. "[A]s gloomy as a prison guard" indeed.
[2] Speaking of appropriation, Ted Gioia notes all the elements E. L. Doctorow seems to have lifted from Mumbo Jumbo for his own Ragtime, published just three years later. It's not for me to judge who has the right to what; I will only suggest that Reed's novel is about a hundred times more interesting than Doctorow's.
Mumbo Jumbo is set during the 1920s, "[t]hat 1 decade which doesn't seem so much a part of American history as the hidden After-Hours of America struggling to jam. To get through." America is experiencing an outbreak of the phenomenon ("an anti-plague") called Jes Grew, essentially Reed's name for the culture of the black diaspora, especially as expressed through music, whether ragtime, jazz, or blues (the name derives from an epigraph attributed to James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry: "The earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, 'jes' grew,'" both an ironic appropriation of a racist artifact [Uncle Tom's Cabin] and a refusal of individualist proprietary attitudes toward culture). As in the 1890s with its ragtime vogue, the Jazz Age threatens to overwhelm "Western Civilization" with a pleasure-loving and peaceable way of life opposed to the sterile and exploitative lifeworld of, locally, "neuter-living Protestants," or those whom Reed more broadly calls Atonists, or monotheists (worshippers of the sun):
The Atonists got rid of their spirit 1000s of years ago with Him. The flesh is next. Plastic will soon prevail over flesh and bones. Death will have taken over. Why is it Death you like? Because then no 1 will keep you up all night with that racket dancing and singing. The next morning you can get up and build, drill, prowess putting up skyscrapers and…and….and…working and stuff. You know? Keeping busy. [Reed's ellipses.]The novel, though relatively short, tells the labyrinthine story of the agencies trying to advance or stop the spread of Jes Grew.
On the pro side, there is the novel's hero, the Harlem houngan PaPa LaBas, proprietor of the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral. He teams with a cadre of magicians from Haiti—itself under U.S. occupation—stationed on a Marcus Garvey ship in New York harbor as they strive to recover the fragmentary text or scripture of Africa's diaspora magic, dance-dictated in the night of time by Osiris to Thoth. In the absence of this book, Jes Grew is only an aural, oral, and bodily tradition and is therefore at a disadvantage under monotheism's textual onslaught, its Bibles, Korans, Constitutions, Interpretations of Dreams, Communist Manifestoes, academic treatises, high literary traditions, and yellow journalism. Similarly, the novel also bears a significant subplot about a group of art "thieves" who strive to liberate the works of the global East and South from Europe's and America's museums; in his portrait of this multicultural group, Reed charts some of the fissures and fractures among people of color, noting that, for instance, a common enemy in European empire does not necessarily make for frictionless comity between black and Asian peoples.
Against Jes Grew's supporters is the Wallflower Order, who are in their time of Jazz Age extremity forced to call in white intellectual and ageless Knight Templar Hinckle von Hampton (Reed's satire on white Harlem Renaissance impresario Carl Van Vechten), who plans to defeat black insurgency by coopting it. He starts a little magazine called The Benign Monster, the title itself suggesting the intelligentsia's gentrification of radical energies, and seeks a "Talking Robot"—i.e., a black intellectual who will mislead black audiences back to the monotheistic path of Atonism. Hinckle's pathetic struggle is actually portrayed with some sympathy amid the satire—I got the sense that, racial polemics aside, Reed knows he has more in common with a modernist literary intellectual than with a Voodoo magician. Nevertheless, Reed unsparingly excoriates European literature from Milton to Freud to Styron:
John Milton, Atonist apologist extraordinary himself, saw the coming of the minor geek and sorcerer Jesus Christ as a way of ending the cult of Osiris and Isis forever. […] Another Atonist; that’s why English professors like him, he’s like their amulet, keeping niggers out of their departments and stamping out Jes Grew before it invades their careers. It is interesting that he worked for Cromwell, a man who banned theater from England and was also a hero of Sigmund Freud. Well the mud-slingers kept up the attack on Osiris, a writer Bilious Styronicus even rewriting Osirian history in a book called the Confessions of the Black Bull God Osiris in which he justified Set’s murder of Osiris on the grounds that Osiris made “illicit” love to Isis who, he wrote, was Set’s wife. He was awarded the Atonists’ contemporary equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for this whopper.In fact, an overhasty reading of Mumbo Jumbo might lead one to expect that its ideological conflict is a matter of black vs. white—because in modern Europe and America, it is. But Reed's most ambitious joke is delivered in a climactic thirty-page summing-up that parodies detective-novel exposition resolutions, conspiracy theories, and religious revelations all at once. PaPa LaBas, attempting to arrest Hinckle von Hampton, explains to a Harlem society gathering that, "if you must know, it all began 1000s of years ago in Egypt."
The conflict between Jes Grew and the Atonists dates back to the fraternal quarrel between Set and Osiris in the Egyptian pantheon: Osiris learns the arts of peace and plenty at college from Ethiopian and Nubian students, and he disseminates this gnosis throughout the world, particularly to Native Americans. Set, by contrast, is "the stick crook and flail man," advocates for discipline and thus eventually ends up worshipping Aton, the transcendent sun god, and beginning the monotheist cult that in various iterations—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and capitalist—would war throughout history on Jes Grew and the liberation it stands, or dances, for. Moses himself is revealed to have effectively swindled the secrets of Osiris for himself, which resulted in his getting only the negative side of the magic; this negative side became monotheism as we know it, everything that "the people of the book" have wrought.
In other words, all human culture, like the human race itself, comes out of Africa: European cultures are without autochthony or autonomy and are only offshoots, even where they are most racist or conservative, of one or another side in an intra-African quarrel, the latest round of which is presumably Kanye West vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates.[1]
Which brings us around to the perhaps less salubrious politics of the novel. Mumbo Jumbo is not really "woke" or "PC" or whatever we're calling it now. For one thing, it expresses sufficient quantities of anti-Islam sentiment to get Reed brought up on hate speech charges in Europe, as he seems to think that Islam is, no less than any other form of religious or secular monotheism, an attempt to repress the authentic black mysteries. It is the black Muslim intellectual Abdul who comes into possession of the scripture that is the novel's quest object, and he burns it: "Censorship until the very last." And despite the attractions of Reed's emancipatory occultism, what does his displacement of Hebrew religion with Egyptian magic, his execration of Moses, Marx, and Freud imply? A reader can surely be forgiven for detecting a classically anti-Semitic subtext here. And, as befitting the work of a male author who has been known to worry that feminism is a tool of the white power structure used to disarticulate black and brown traditions and scapegoat men of color, the novel's female characters tend to be either helpmeets or harridans (or both), even the goddesses Isis and Erzulie.
On the other hand, the lessons of Mumbo Jumbo might well be applied to today's cultural appropriation debate. Reed's position is quite subtle: he mocks and derides cultural exploitation and co-optation at the level of production, which is the point of his satire on modernist literary culture's attempts to capture and neutralize the energies of black rebellion; on the consumption side, however, Reed seems to see the diffusion of Jes Grew as humanity's only salvation—to see black culture as a force that, at the level of the dancing body, takes over whites rather than being taken over by them. The novel, I therefore take it, counsels against castigating every white person who takes a selfie while wearing an item of non-western origin, even as it also takes aim at corporations, universities, and other institutions profiting from the creativity of populaces they exclude and exploit.[2]
Finally, I have not yet mentioned the novel's form. I have made it sound too linear, too much like a thriller with philosophical weight. But it is rather a collage and a montage, written in telegraphic prose, splicing in quotations and images, doing without quotation marks, transitions, or the pretense of God-like objectivity. One of its dedicatees is "George Herriman, Afro-American, who created Krazy Kat," and the novel's style of radical juxtaposition and teasing polyglot wordplay is a fitting homage to Herriman's brilliant Jazz Age achievement in comics. Reed's ludic style protects his conspiracy theory from seeming like the work of a mere crank, though I'm sure he believes the spirit, if not the letter, of it. The novel promotes play and humor as against the droning solemn seriousness of monotheistic religion and literary culture:
LaBas could understand the certain North American Indian tribe reputed to have punished a man for lacking a sense of humor. For LaBas, anyone who couldn't titter a bit was not Afro but most likely a Christian connoting blood, death, and impaled emaciated Jew in excruciation. Nowhere is there an account of Christ laughing. Like the Marxists who secularized his doctrine, he is always stern, seriously and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does 1 see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised, or certain African loas, Orishas.So, if you are looking for a serious laugh, I highly recommend Mumbo Jumbo.
______________________
[1] Note that, by the terms laid out in Mumbo Jumbo, Coates, despite a superficially Reedian invocation after Zora Neale Hurston of "the bone and drum," is arguably the authoritarian Atonist, promoting the traditional cypto-montheist political left as the black man's salvation in a white man's magazine, while West disseminates magickal-musical thinking far and wide in a popular idiom on a populist platform, even quoting Carl Jung's contemporary avatar Jordan Peterson just as Reed approvingly quotes Jung. My point is not to side with West over Coates or Reed over the western world, but to get the tally right; I will say that "left" and "right" are becoming ever less reliable guides to cultural politics, though the comrades tell me that that is itself a right-wing position. "[A]s gloomy as a prison guard" indeed.
[2] Speaking of appropriation, Ted Gioia notes all the elements E. L. Doctorow seems to have lifted from Mumbo Jumbo for his own Ragtime, published just three years later. It's not for me to judge who has the right to what; I will only suggest that Reed's novel is about a hundred times more interesting than Doctorow's.
January 26, 2021
Likely his masterpiece, though I’d thrill at being proven wrong. Jes Grew, JGC for life.
May 13, 2017
The writing in here is impressive on a language level, and it is definitely thought provoking at the same time that it's entertaining. I had a bit of an easier time with this one than The Free-Lance Pallbearers. That, of course, doesn't speak to the quality of the work or how interesting it is, just how approachable it was for me. Both books make me intrigued about Ishmael Reed as a writer and I'll definitely pick up something else of his at some point. A very skilled writer with significant things to say.
July 8, 2016
"Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around." Mumbo Jumbo be our current politic or realpolitik and Jes Grew and it Templars still banging in da streets all over dis land, lordy we gots troubles many don't kid yerselves shit going down. Da pendulum done swung and we swamped like this here book will eat yer lunch and spit it out. Readit and weep. Out ya'll.
June 12, 2022
Americans will not tolerate wars that can't be explained in simple terms of economics or the White man's destiny.Once upon a time, I aspired to committing to a long and fruitful relationship with a little old, semi known author named Thomas Pynchon, one who happens to explicitly namedrop Reed in his most iconic composition. Later on, I fell down several Tumblr holes devoted to detailing the trials and tribulations of Black culture and learned about a certain sector of virulent machismo bred on certain conspiracies regarding Ancient Egypt and its modern incarnations whose members are sometimes derisively and pejoratively referred to as "Ankh Ni**as'. Here and now I find myself at an unexpected intersection between the two, an uneasy mix when I consider my customary efforts to rescue non-white source material from their overbearing white "adaptors" alongside my goal to not ignore the complexities of intersectional social justice. In the end, I let my more "objective" reaction to how Reed chose to weave his text determine where I fell on the scale, and while the beginning was rather glorious in its gallivantingly ribald pacing and irrepressible webs upon webs of historical fact and tenuous connection, the end had far too much world building walls of text to successfully undercut the ever increasing chauvinism in its creative choices. I may waffle more positively on the rating in the future, but for now, in light of all that I've read in nearly half of this current year, two stars accurately sums up my reception: great idea, far too self-absorbed an execution, and when a text is attempting to write out a millennia of alternate history, it really can't afford any sort of myopia in its bias.
There's one or two videos I watched on YouTube a dog's age ago that centered around connecting various mythologies and contemporary systems of beliefs together in what was probably some sort of propaganda for New Atheists that I at my age lapped up more than willingly. Take that and put an Afrocentric/Harlem Renaissance spin on things, add some "Atonist"/white supremacist Templars/Masons/etc to balance into an age old good vs evil battle of the ages, and you have the basic premise of this work. It's the sort of read that is almost deadpan in its delivery and has a little over 100 items in its bibliography, but can't be described as anything other than rollicking, especially with its included images, handwritten excerpts, and general bits and bobs that take the meaning of whatever text they fall alongside to the next contextual level. It has the potential for being a good deal of fun for anyone who hasn't heard much of this before and has a head for its style of discombobulated interweavings. For me, the problem lay in having heard much of the cool stuff before and having additional knowledge of how easily this particular trend of thought can turn into sanctimoniously misogynistic nonsense that still gets spewed out by certain corners of the Black pop culture scene, so there was less positive distraction and more noticeable negative reinforcements. I still think that anyone who has ever called themselves a fan of Pynchon/Pynchonian/that whole rabble should be made to read this one way or another, but for all its head-spinning frolicking through time and space, it's still an introductory text to certain seemingly revolutionary but in actuality highly reactionary breeds of thought, and it doesn't seem to me that the satire went as far as it could have when it came to self awareness.
I'm rather disappointed in my first engagement with Reed, to the point that I'm rather committed to reading at least one more of his works before deciding whether he's yay or nay in my book. Goodness knows satire does far more misses than hits in my persnickety book, and despite my familiarity with certain base level themes and historical contexts this book hinges upon, it may be another case of how it went with Beatty's The Sellout: I could reel off the textbook summary well enough, but the lacked lived experience made for a rather week communication between author and reader. In any case, this is about as singular a text as one can get from the 1970's that isn't more white bread rigmarole, so if you'd like some of that so often slung around "postmodern" and/or "experimental literature" written in a far more singular vein (and somewhat more accessibly due to being grounded in all too real tenets of cultural history), this is a rather uproarious introduction to such. I'll be leaving it behind for now with a rather regretful backwards glance, but considering the chaotic nature of the last few weeks of my life, recognizing the need to come back to at least another of Reed's works when my personal scene is far more settled is probably the best choice I can make at the moment. One more thing: 'Mumbo Jumbo' has remained in print since its first publication and comes in French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. I'm obviously not a representative of the more appreciative side of its audience, but I'm glad they're there to make up for my lacklusterings.
[O]ur nation did not heed the prophecies of its artists and it paid dearly. We will never make that mistake again.
September 4, 2020
An infectious dance craze as the soul of Blackness in an alternate history of civilization truer than the "official" records, none of the dad-joke flopsweat of Pynchon and more densely well read too, with the same premonitory vision of America's conspiratorial soul, but deeper and more fraught, both metaphor for and example of racism and suppression of Black accomplishment, hardly more than 200 pages with illustrations but encompassing all of recorded history, and enough packed in to give a different reading every time. If you believe that great American writing is destined to fulfill the world's myths with the outsider vernacular of our culture, what you see in books like Moby Dick or The Making of Americans or Libra then this is maybe the Great American Novel; Dionysian Afrocentrism revealed as the pendulum controlling time. Offhandedly hilarious and incisively observant of the American situation, as relevant tomorrow as it was fifty years ago.
November 14, 2017
What a tasty gumbo MUMBO JUMBO by Ishmael Reed is! It’s so thick I’m tempted to eat it with a fork, but I’m going a use a spoon, so I can get every last drop! It’s chock full of story, images, excepts, news items, memos, letters, history, mystery, myth, all glued together with hoodoo, which is to say magic. It reads like John Dos Passos’ USA TRILOGY, with its kaleidoscopic collage technique, but it’s a lot funkier and funnier. Who says you can’t laugh at white supremacy? This is the history of a race that has had its history erased. It should be required reading.
April 11, 2008
Here is the template for Conspiracy Operas like Illuminatus! and Foucault's Pendulum. A fast, funny, poetic read that offers yet another parable for the Way Things Work Behind the Scene. This is the novel that set the pace. The idea of Jes Grew is so convincing that I think I may have been stricken with it. That's all- gone muggin'.
February 8, 2023
Read this for class and still not sure what it was. Really interesting and afro-futuristic though. Might read again when I have nothing else to do and can dedicate every brain cell to unpacking this topsy-turvy narrative. Also the depiction of Moses in this book is truly wild and would recommend just for that reason alone.
July 8, 2018
Never has a novel been gifted a more appropriate title.
For me, it's like the work of William Burroughs: important, perhaps, but hardly enjoyable.
For me, it's like the work of William Burroughs: important, perhaps, but hardly enjoyable.
August 29, 2018
Great concept and style but I don’t think I’ve been in the right mood for this kind of book.
December 8, 2021
Z Ishmaelem Reedem mogli się Państwo spotkać prawie dwadzieścia lat temu na łamach "Literatury na Świecie", w której ukazał się krótki fragment przekładu jego powieści "Mumbo Jumbo" autorstwa Tadeusza Pióro. W końcu doczekaliśmy się przekładu całej książki, która - już pod tytułem "Mambo Dżambo" - ukazała się właśnie w Ha!Arcie dzięki trudowi Teresy Tyszowieckiej Blask!.
Opublikowana w 1972 roku powieść amerykańskiego pisarza to szalona historia, której opowiedzenie w poście na fejsie będzie równie trudne jak próba jej streszczenia przez wydawcę w okładkowym opisie. Jest początek lat 20. XX wieku, a my jesteśmy w Nowym Orleanie i Nowym Jorku. Zaczynamy na Południu, gdzie "to Coś zerwało się z uwięzi”. Zarażeni tym Czymś ludzie “zachowują się w ‘sposób bezrozumny i wyzywający’, dostają białej gorączki, miotają się jak ryby, wykonują ruchy taneczne o nazwie ‘orle skrzydła’ czy ‘rajcowny zderzak’”. Wirusem, który zaczyna się panoszyć w Nowym Orleanie jest “Dżes Gru”, a ogniskiem zapalnym plac Congo. Światu grozi pandemia. Lekarze wieszczą “Koniec Cywilizacji, Jaką Znamy”. Skąd my to znamy?
Jakie są efekty wirusa? Ludzie zachowują się jak opętani przez demony i nie pomoże nawet ksiądz, którego też dopadło. “Wrzeszczał i grzał w bębenek jak stara Murzynka”. Zarażeni widzą “zuluskie N’Kulu Kulu [tak miał się nazywać zuluski bóg - WSZ], do tego wielką lokomotywę z czerwono-czarno-zielonym pytonem na przedzie i Johnny’ego Canoe [legendarny czarny handlarz walczący z kolonializmem - WSZ], jak płynie pod prąd po torach”. Do tego “twierdził, że czuje się jak trzewia, serce i płuca Matki Afryki”, “słyszy piszczałki, drumle , dudy, flety, konchy, bębny, banjo i kazoo”.
“A tłumy chrześcijańskiej młodzieży, która buduje baraki dla zarażonych gromadzi się wokół nich i śpiewa “Give me fever!”
Dżes Gru - jak informuje Louis Armstrong (!) - było “antyplagą”. “Wiele chorób skutkuje wyniszczeniem ciała; Dżes Gru dodawał animuszu”, komentują obserwatorzy. I wtedy na scenę książki Reeda wkracza jej główny bohater, PaPa La Bas, który miał być reinkarnacją "słynnego Maura z Krainy Wiecznego Lata", któremu według wierzeń sufich "nie umiała się oprzeć żadna z czarownic Europy".
Dziadek PaPy LaBasa "przypłynął do Stanów Zjednoczonych na statku niewolników odpowiedzialnych za przeszczep afrykańskich religii na grunt obu Ameryk", a każdy biały właściciel rodziny LaBasa popadła w obłęd, pijaństwo, czy zwyczajnie się wieszał bez żadnych zapowiedzi. Dżes Gru przenikał LaBasa na wskroś, "jak DNA".
To PaPa LaBas jako pierwszy oznajmia, że epidemia zmierza w kierunku Nowego Jorku, w co powątpiewa jego córka. "Wasze pokolenie Nowych Czarnych chyba straciło niektóre zmysły, z jakimi przybyliśmy do tego kraju" - mówi do niej ojciec, co zwiastuje, że książka jest zarówno dziką fantazją, jak i opowieścią o przemianach zachodzących wśród czarnych mieszkańców Stanów. Papa LaBas wraz z Czarnym Hermanem, słynnym okultystą stawi czoła tajemniczemu zakonowi, a w tej szalonej książce znajdzie się też miejsce na rozważania o przyszłości i miejscu Afryki i czarnych Amerykanów w kulturze i historii.
Reed z niezwykłą swobodą miesza w swojej książce wydarzenia historyczne z szaloną wyobraźnią. "Mambo Dżambo" łączy w sobie zarówno tradycyjną narrację, jak i falsyfikaty - cytaty z prasy, komentarze uczestników wydarzeń, elementy scenariusza filmowego, opowieść fantasy. To szalona przygoda, podczas której czytelnik spotyka się zarówno z historią okupacji Haiti przez Amerykanów, opowieściami o powstawaniu muzyki jazzowej, wizytą Freuda w Nowym Jorku w 1909 roku, ale też teoriami spiskowymi, afrykańskim okultyzmem, czy egipską mitologią.
Miejscami jest powieść Reeda przejmującą książką o wymazaniu przeszłości czarnych bohaterów, którzy jak Papa La Bas muszą wyobrazić sobie swoje pochodzenie. A skoro muszą wymyślać, to czemu nie uznać się za potomków bogów i herosów? Afrofuturyzm przeplata się tu z wieloma innymi tradycjami literackimi, a dla tych, co czytali Marlona Jamesa czy Ta-Nehisiego Coatesa to lektura obowiązkowa.
Niestety z trudnych do zrozumienia przyczyn w polskim wydaniu nie ma ilustracji i zdjęć, które stanowią integralną część oryginału. Niektóre z nich nawiązywały bezpośrednio do historii opowiadanej przez Reeda, niektóre do historii Afroamerykanów, czy protestów przeciwko wojnie w Wietnamie, tworząc dodatkową warstwę tej powieści. Być może jest to kwestia praw autorskich, ale polskie wydanie jest o wiele przez to uboższe.
Na koniec zaś najważniejsze - Teresa Tyszowiecka Blask! kolejny raz udowadnia, że nie ma sobie równej w przekładzie szalonych fraz, do których trzeba mieć giętkość języka niczym Tuwim, wielką wyobraźnię i sporą ciekawość świata. “Zuzu upija kusztyczek i dalej mości się w najlepsze na kolanach dostojnika, kokietując bezwstydnie. Z wystudiowanym wyuzdaniem zaciąga się dymem z chesterfielda”. Czyż to nie wspaniała fraza? Sporo tu tego. Inna sprawa, że Tyszowiecka ma mnóstwo odwagi translatorskiej i wiele razy miałbym ochotę na gorące spory.
Domyślam się, że nie sięgnięcie tłumnie po “Mambo Dżambo”, a szkoda, bo warto powalczyć ze swoimi przyzwyczajeniami literackimi i zobaczyć jaka jeszcze może być literatura. W kraju, w którym Bawołek robi za awangardę, bardzo potrzebujemy Reeda.
Opublikowana w 1972 roku powieść amerykańskiego pisarza to szalona historia, której opowiedzenie w poście na fejsie będzie równie trudne jak próba jej streszczenia przez wydawcę w okładkowym opisie. Jest początek lat 20. XX wieku, a my jesteśmy w Nowym Orleanie i Nowym Jorku. Zaczynamy na Południu, gdzie "to Coś zerwało się z uwięzi”. Zarażeni tym Czymś ludzie “zachowują się w ‘sposób bezrozumny i wyzywający’, dostają białej gorączki, miotają się jak ryby, wykonują ruchy taneczne o nazwie ‘orle skrzydła’ czy ‘rajcowny zderzak’”. Wirusem, który zaczyna się panoszyć w Nowym Orleanie jest “Dżes Gru”, a ogniskiem zapalnym plac Congo. Światu grozi pandemia. Lekarze wieszczą “Koniec Cywilizacji, Jaką Znamy”. Skąd my to znamy?
Jakie są efekty wirusa? Ludzie zachowują się jak opętani przez demony i nie pomoże nawet ksiądz, którego też dopadło. “Wrzeszczał i grzał w bębenek jak stara Murzynka”. Zarażeni widzą “zuluskie N’Kulu Kulu [tak miał się nazywać zuluski bóg - WSZ], do tego wielką lokomotywę z czerwono-czarno-zielonym pytonem na przedzie i Johnny’ego Canoe [legendarny czarny handlarz walczący z kolonializmem - WSZ], jak płynie pod prąd po torach”. Do tego “twierdził, że czuje się jak trzewia, serce i płuca Matki Afryki”, “słyszy piszczałki, drumle , dudy, flety, konchy, bębny, banjo i kazoo”.
“A tłumy chrześcijańskiej młodzieży, która buduje baraki dla zarażonych gromadzi się wokół nich i śpiewa “Give me fever!”
Dżes Gru - jak informuje Louis Armstrong (!) - było “antyplagą”. “Wiele chorób skutkuje wyniszczeniem ciała; Dżes Gru dodawał animuszu”, komentują obserwatorzy. I wtedy na scenę książki Reeda wkracza jej główny bohater, PaPa La Bas, który miał być reinkarnacją "słynnego Maura z Krainy Wiecznego Lata", któremu według wierzeń sufich "nie umiała się oprzeć żadna z czarownic Europy".
Dziadek PaPy LaBasa "przypłynął do Stanów Zjednoczonych na statku niewolników odpowiedzialnych za przeszczep afrykańskich religii na grunt obu Ameryk", a każdy biały właściciel rodziny LaBasa popadła w obłęd, pijaństwo, czy zwyczajnie się wieszał bez żadnych zapowiedzi. Dżes Gru przenikał LaBasa na wskroś, "jak DNA".
To PaPa LaBas jako pierwszy oznajmia, że epidemia zmierza w kierunku Nowego Jorku, w co powątpiewa jego córka. "Wasze pokolenie Nowych Czarnych chyba straciło niektóre zmysły, z jakimi przybyliśmy do tego kraju" - mówi do niej ojciec, co zwiastuje, że książka jest zarówno dziką fantazją, jak i opowieścią o przemianach zachodzących wśród czarnych mieszkańców Stanów. Papa LaBas wraz z Czarnym Hermanem, słynnym okultystą stawi czoła tajemniczemu zakonowi, a w tej szalonej książce znajdzie się też miejsce na rozważania o przyszłości i miejscu Afryki i czarnych Amerykanów w kulturze i historii.
Reed z niezwykłą swobodą miesza w swojej książce wydarzenia historyczne z szaloną wyobraźnią. "Mambo Dżambo" łączy w sobie zarówno tradycyjną narrację, jak i falsyfikaty - cytaty z prasy, komentarze uczestników wydarzeń, elementy scenariusza filmowego, opowieść fantasy. To szalona przygoda, podczas której czytelnik spotyka się zarówno z historią okupacji Haiti przez Amerykanów, opowieściami o powstawaniu muzyki jazzowej, wizytą Freuda w Nowym Jorku w 1909 roku, ale też teoriami spiskowymi, afrykańskim okultyzmem, czy egipską mitologią.
Miejscami jest powieść Reeda przejmującą książką o wymazaniu przeszłości czarnych bohaterów, którzy jak Papa La Bas muszą wyobrazić sobie swoje pochodzenie. A skoro muszą wymyślać, to czemu nie uznać się za potomków bogów i herosów? Afrofuturyzm przeplata się tu z wieloma innymi tradycjami literackimi, a dla tych, co czytali Marlona Jamesa czy Ta-Nehisiego Coatesa to lektura obowiązkowa.
Niestety z trudnych do zrozumienia przyczyn w polskim wydaniu nie ma ilustracji i zdjęć, które stanowią integralną część oryginału. Niektóre z nich nawiązywały bezpośrednio do historii opowiadanej przez Reeda, niektóre do historii Afroamerykanów, czy protestów przeciwko wojnie w Wietnamie, tworząc dodatkową warstwę tej powieści. Być może jest to kwestia praw autorskich, ale polskie wydanie jest o wiele przez to uboższe.
Na koniec zaś najważniejsze - Teresa Tyszowiecka Blask! kolejny raz udowadnia, że nie ma sobie równej w przekładzie szalonych fraz, do których trzeba mieć giętkość języka niczym Tuwim, wielką wyobraźnię i sporą ciekawość świata. “Zuzu upija kusztyczek i dalej mości się w najlepsze na kolanach dostojnika, kokietując bezwstydnie. Z wystudiowanym wyuzdaniem zaciąga się dymem z chesterfielda”. Czyż to nie wspaniała fraza? Sporo tu tego. Inna sprawa, że Tyszowiecka ma mnóstwo odwagi translatorskiej i wiele razy miałbym ochotę na gorące spory.
Domyślam się, że nie sięgnięcie tłumnie po “Mambo Dżambo”, a szkoda, bo warto powalczyć ze swoimi przyzwyczajeniami literackimi i zobaczyć jaka jeszcze może być literatura. W kraju, w którym Bawołek robi za awangardę, bardzo potrzebujemy Reeda.
November 25, 2020
This book remain me of when Pan-Africanist John Coltrane was like "MMMMOOOOOBOOOOOOODOOOOEDEEEEEDOOOOO" on the sax or somethin' .
September 5, 2022
Ishmael Reed writes:
"This was no ordinary commission. When an extraordinary antipathy challenges the Wallflower Order, their usual front men, politicians, scholars and businessmen step aside. Someone once said that beneath or behind all political and cultural warfare lies a struggle between secret societies. Another author suggested the Nursery Rhyme and the book of Science Fiction might be more revolutionary than any number of tracts, pamphlets, manifestos of the political realm."
"This was no ordinary commission. When an extraordinary antipathy challenges the Wallflower Order, their usual front men, politicians, scholars and businessmen step aside. Someone once said that beneath or behind all political and cultural warfare lies a struggle between secret societies. Another author suggested the Nursery Rhyme and the book of Science Fiction might be more revolutionary than any number of tracts, pamphlets, manifestos of the political realm."
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