SELF-REFLEXIVITY AND HISTORICAL REVISIONISM
IN ISHMAEL REED'S NEO-HOODOO AESTHETICS

Santiago Juan-Navarro
Florida International Uniuersity

Abstract

Throughout his literary career, African American novelist Ishmael
Reed has shown constant concern for historical issues and for their
expression through reflexive narratives. This blend of the historical and
the aesthetic is one of the many amalgamations that are achieved in
his texts. In terms of both form and ideology his work is characterized
by syncretism. In form, all novels he has published to date overstep
the boundaries among genres, as well as the gulf between academic
and popular culture; in ideology, Reed supports multiculturalism as
an expression of the plurality that constitutes US society. This essay
explores how Reed's novels seek to produce a narrative hybrid that
blends fiction and reality, satire and mysticism, the mass media and
the African and Western literary traditions.

Key words: self-reflexivity, metafiction, history, revisionism, NeoHooDoo, aesthetics, satire

http://www.sjuannavarro.com/files/ishmael.reed.pdf

Introduction 
FUTURE TEXTS

Alondra Nelson

We will make our own future Text. —Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo 

on to post now post new —Amiri Baraka, “Time Factor a Perfect Non-Gap” 

In popular mythology, the early years of the late-1990s digital boom were characterized by the rags-to-riches stories of dot-com millionaires and the promise of a placeless, raceless, bodiless near future enabled by technological progress. As more pragmatic assessments of the industry surfaced, so too did talk of the myriad inequities that were exacerbated by the information economy—most notably, the digital divide, a phrase that has been used to describe gaps in technological access that fall along lines of race, gender, region, and ability but has mostly become a code word for the tech inequities that exist between blacks and whites. Forecasts of a utopian (to some) race-free future and pronouncements of the dystopian digital divide are the predominant discourses of blackness and technology in the public sphere. What matters is less a choice between these two narratives, which fall into conventional libertarian and conservative frameworks, and more what they have in common: namely, the assumption that race is a liability in the twenty-first century—is either negligible or evidence of negligence. In these politics of the future, supposedly novel paradigms for understanding technology smack of old racial ideologies. In each scenario, racial identity, and blackness in particular, is the anti-avatar of digital life. Blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress. That race (and gender) distinctions would be eliminated with technology was perhaps the founding fiction of the digital age. The raceless future paradigm, an adjunct of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” metaphor, was widely supported by (and made strange bedfellows of) pop visionaries, scholars, and corporations from Timothy Leary to Allucquère Rosanne Stone to MCI. Spurred by “revolutions” in technoscience, social and cultural theorists looked increasingly to information technology, especially the Internet and the World Wide Web, for new paradigms. 

https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/sociology/pdf/FutureTexts.pdf

Social Text 71, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press

ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE AND REPRESENTATION IN THE WORKS OF ISHMAEL REED

Jason Andrew Jackl
San Francisco, California2018
MA Thesis
http://dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3/203713/AS362018ENGLJ33.pdf?sequence=1

This thesis demonstrates the ways in which Ishmael Reed proposes incisive counter narratives to the hegemonic master narratives that perpetuate degrading misportrayals of Afro American culture in the historical record and mainstream news and entertainment media of the United States. Many critics and readers have responded reductively to Reed’s work by hastily dismissing his proposals, thereby disallowingthoughtful critical engagement with Reed’s views as put forth in his fiction and non­fiction writing. The study that follows asserts that Reed’s corpus deserves more thoughtful critical and public recognition than it has received thus far. To that end, Iargue that a critical re-exploration of his fiction and non-fiction writing would yieldprofound contributions to the ongoing national dialogue on race relations in America.

Portrayal of Habituation in Ishmael Reed‘s Mumbo Jumbo 

Swathi.C MA, MBA, M.Phil (English), (P.HD) Assistant Professor, Department of English, Dr. G.R.Damodaran college of Science, Coimbatore, India 

http://www.ijtrd.com/papers/IJTRD10885.pdf

Special Issue Published in International Journal of Trend in Research and Development (IJTRD), ISSN: 2394-9333, www.ijtrd.com International Conference on Active vs Reactive Texts: Literature, Language, Criticism, Theory and Translation (ICART-17) organized by Department of English, N.G.M. College, Pollachi, 4th and 5th Aug 2017 18 | P

Abstract: 

This research investigates the preferences of Habituation in the major and the minor characters of the fiction Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Scott Reed. The characters who prefer to change their mindset, overcome the struggle in the limited time period. This research also examines the characters who could not adapt to the surrounding in which they exist; such character generally gets in to a doomed fate. The author stresses on the impact of the characters in his fiction, through their mindset to prioritize their needs, based on that they decide to habituate certain happenings in their surroundings. It will help each individual to change even the most negative vibration around them in to an optimistic one. The Psychic plague or the disorder which is discussed in this fiction, formulates both positive and negative paradigm on its host. The author has introduced a unique style by inventing and spreading this typical disease in his work. New Orleans, Harlem and Haiti are the places which plays the major role throughout the fiction. On the whole the author portrays the culture of Africa, through this epidemic, in the American land, which itself proves the title of this article Habituation. Keywords: Epidemic, Jes Grew, Plague, Talking android, Habituation, Pacification, Loa

“We will make our own future Text”: Allegory, Iconoclasm, and Reverence in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Roxanne Harde

Pages 361-377 | Published online: 26 Mar 2010

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 
Volume 43, 2002 - Issue 4

Download citation
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111610209602190


Abstract

After seeking the Book of Thoth throughout Mumbo Jumbo, PaPa LaBas, the novel's priest-detective-reader, discovers that the precious Text of the Work has been destroyed. Equal parts detective novel, conspiracy thriller, black manifesto, theological tract, exhibition catalogue, and alternative history, Mumbo Jumbo works allegorically with each of these, its pretexts. In addition, the novel grounds each pretext in icon and sets for each its own object of particular admiration, its own representative symbol. Having found the symbol at the center of each pretext, the novel then transforms its use of allegory into iconoclasm and attacks the symbol and worship behind the icon.1 Still, Mumbo Jumbo's impulse is not that of the fascist, to do away with history in the name of history, but rather to revise, to breathe new life into language. If allegory clings to things, then Reed, as iconoclast, deflates the thing with the allegory and destroys to rebuild by using the corpse of the old text as his locus of new meaning.2 I argue that Mumbo Jumbo is a tightly controlled allegory that draws from modernism its weapons, from postmodernism its tools, and negotiates, within the form, a hermeneutic of reverence for language's spiritual impulse.

The Grapevine Telegraph "Jes Grew": Sonic Materialism, Afrofuturism and Information Theory in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Myungsung Kim

https://doi.org/10.3138/topia.39.05

• Abstract
 
• Full Text
 
• References
 
• PDF

Abstract

Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo situates the history of African American culture in the language of genetics, information theory, biocultural evolutionism and sonic/vibrant materialism. Reed's motif of “Jes Grew,” as an evolving acoustic entity vibrant through radio technology, signifies a codified medium of information storage and transfer; it stores and transfers black cultural information in a viral form, articulating it to the physicality and orality of the antebellum grapevine telegraph. Such a biosonic construction of African American experience provides fertile terrain to explore the marginalization and rehabilitation of black ontological forces. By dramatizing the production and transmission of black tonality, Reed's trope of “Jes Grew” signals vibrational forces that counteract Western, white cultural norms. Thus Mumbo Jumbo's trope of the Jes Grew virus participates in, and advances, the aesthetic politics of Afrofuturism, in which Jes Grew's bio-sonic effects enable us to contest the narrow humanism of Eurocentric biopolitics with an Afrofuturist sonic materialism. By the same token, the novel's description of 1920s Harlem revolves around an epistemological framework of modern technoculture in which biological research becomes a textualization of nature and DNA becomes an information storage and transfer system. Mumbo Jumbo perceives the biological human body as an outcome of dynamic interactions in which information networks and social, cultural and biological relations are scripted in textual and coded platforms of sonic materialism.

Roman d'Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo ancre l'histoire de la culture afro-américaine à la croisée de la génétique, de la théorie de l'information, de l'évolutionnisme bioculturel et d'un matérialisme sonore dynamique. Nous y croisons le « Jes Grew », une entité acoustique mouvante qui circule par technologie radio. En fait, c'est un moyen codifié d'emmagasiner les renseignements de la culture noire et de les faire circuler de manière virale, leur conférant la dimension à la fois orale et physique du bouche à oreille de l'époque de la guerre de Sécession. Cette construction biosonore de l'expérience afro-américaine est un terrain fertile pour qui veut explorer la marginalisation et la restauration des forces ontologiques noires. En métaphorisant ainsi la production et la transmission d'une tonalité noire, le Jes Grew nous indique que des forces vives tentent de faire contrepoids aux normes culturelles de l'homme blanc occidental. Ainsi, ce virus au cœur de Mumbo Jumbo sert la politique esthétique de l'afrofuturisme : ces effets biologiques des sons, c'est le matérialisme sonore qui remet en question l'humanisme étroit d'une biopolitique eurocentriste. Par ailleurs, la description du Harlem des années 1920 que propose le roman exploite l'épistémologie de la technoculture moderne, où la recherche biologique devient mise en texte de la nature et l'ADN, un système de stockage et de transfert d'information. Ainsi, pour Mumbo Jumbo, le corps humain biologique est le résultat d'interactions dynamiques, les réseaux d'information et les relations sociales, culturelles et biologiques s'incarnant sur les plateformes textuelles et codifiées du matérialisme sonore.

Keywords : Ishmael Reed, Afrofuturism, bioinformatics, biopolitics, sonic materialism, black ontology

Infecting the Academy: How Reconfigured Thought Jes Grew from Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. (2011)

PIATKOWSKI, PAUL DAVID, M.A.https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Piatkowski_uncg_0154M_10848.pdf

73 pp.

The world of academic study and university education privileges a so-called
“global” process of thinking as universal, but this process actually relies on practices with
a European centrality. This thinking process gets taught to individuals and “programs”
the manner of thinking for the majority of the world’s population, serving a neocolonial
purpose in global conversations. After first revealing that Western civilization’s
institutions of learning propagate a disorienting perspective for other ethno-cultural
viewpoints, Ishmael Reed utilizes a discursive process called Jes Grew that parasitically
rewrites the institutionalized hegemony of the Western academy and its influence on the
arts, thoughts, and actions of other ethno-cultural groups.

In his novel Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed uses Jes Grew, a type of infovirus, to
recode both the reader of the text and the academy itself through de-centering and
deconstructing academic practices and texts of Western civilization, and then
reconstructing and rewriting these into a more fluid, unbound academic system not
circumscribed within the confines of Eurocentric hegemony. Reed accomplishes this task
with the construction and implementation of Jes Grew that he first seeds in the imaginary
and then extends out into physical, lived reality. Through a deconstruction of the physical
and fictional text and an analysis of Reed’s structural approach in Mumbo Jumbo, it
becomes clear that his target hosts for Jes Grew infection are academic readers. Reed
begins his process by shifting a European paradigm to an African one, and through this
process he de-centers the “universal” centrality of Western culture. Reed’s Jes Grew
rewrites thinking into a system of thought that equally privileges multiple ethno-cultural
viewpoints by de-centering and deconstructing the infected reader and re-centering the
academic manner of processing information. This process de-privileges a Western
manner of thinking and creates, instead, a fluid, unbound method of processing
knowledge. Jes Grew reconfigures thinking itself in a manner that decolonizes the global
psyche

Ishmael Reed’s Use of Detective Novel Prototypes
Yves Bonnemère

p. 29-37 

“POLAR NOIR”: READING AFRICAN-AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION

  | 

Alice Mills

, 

 Claude Julie

ABSTRACT

Ishmael Reed uses detective novel prototypes to debunk white men’s “superiority”. Gang warfare depicts an age-old worldwide fight between polytheism and monotheism. Based on the founding myth of ancient Egypt, white men are portrayed as the heirs of Seth, an animal-like god, whereas black men resemble Osiris, Seth’s brother, the anthropomorphic god. Reversing the stereotypes attached to Ham’s sons, Reed turns white men into the members of an accursed family, forever doomed to depravity and perversity.

FULL TEXT

In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, the central character, the Loop Garoo Kid says that a novel “can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons” (YB, 40).1 If one applies Reed’s aesthetic theory to the detective novel, the latter is only a starting-point, a structure, a formula.

Elements of mystery stories, of classical and hard-boiled detective novels are resorted to for the writer to convey his own views of culture and religion. His purpose is not to hold the reader in suspense or to entertain him for the mere sake of entertainment. He often uses parody and satire because they are his religious and cultural weapons. In Reed’s work, gang warfare takes on world-wide dimensions. It illustrates two contending principles that have been at war for hundreds of centuries, and the Egyptian legend of Osiris and Seth is the founding myth underlying this world war.

Reed borrows elements from detective novels but doesn’t really write detective novels in so far as he doesn’t stick to standard formulas. For instance, a character like the Loop Garoo Kid appears in a comic epic, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. The action is set in the Wild West. The novel itself is a take-off of conventional westerns, of yellow backs. It features the Loop Garoo Kid, an avenger defending the oppressed —children and black people— against the rich and adults (Drag, a cattle baron and the inhabitants of Yellow Back Radio). Unlike western heroes who use their guns, Loop Garoo triumphs over the villains thanks to his hoodoo powers only. He defends the same cause as PaPa LaBas in Mumbo Jumbo, Reed’s closest book to a detective novel. Like the black cowboy, PaPa LaBas is the writer’s spokesman though he isn’t an avenger but a houngan (a hoodoo priest in Haïti) and jacklegged detective both in Mumbo Jumbo and The Last Days of Louisiana Red. He voices the hoodoo counter-tradition whose champion the author is.

Set in the 1920s, in the days of prohibition, Mumbo Jumbo refers to gang warfare at that time, and urban violence reminds us of Dashiell Hammett portraying corruption in American cities in his hard-boiled detective novels. A black character, Bud Jackson, has control over speakeasies in Harlem and is involved in fights against white gangsters. Biff Musclewhite, an ex-policeman with racist ideas and nominally curator of a famous New York Art Museum is actually a hired killer. He works for people heading white secret societies such as the Wallflower Order and its military organization, the Knights Templar whose leader is Hinckle Von Vampton, a defender of western values, and of the white man’s law and order. These white societies hire dubious characters who resist or attack the symptoms of “Jes Grew”", a black cultural and religious (hoodoo) movement in the twenties, in the Jazz Age.

Starting from New Orleans, the Mecca of African American polytheism (hoodoo), Jes Grew, through music and dancing, spreads to the whole of the USA. White authorities are afraid lest Jes Grew should undermine white values and get the better of white-dominated American culture. The Wallflower Order and one of the major characters in Mumbo Jumbo —Von Vampton, Labas’s opponent— try to curb the power of Jes Grew and fight against dancing, music, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, etc. Von Vampton has recourse to a variety of means: first, murder, that of Abdul Hamid, a Black Muslim, second the press: as the editor of The Sun, a New York paper, he defends Atonism, Reed’s word for monotheism, against the revival of hoodoo (polytheism) in the U. S. A. Third, he wages a cultural war: he acts as if he were interested in black artists and writers but he creates a black Android (“Safecracker” Gould, a white man disguised in blackface and who passes himself off as a black poet). His purpose is to undermine and put an end to Jes Grew’s power considered as a threat to the white man’s power and culture. Fourth, Von Vampton wants to retrieve the Jes Grew text, a sacred text, stolen by Moses, hidden in Solomon’s Temple (later on, the Templars’ headquarters). Hinckle Von Vampton, who is hundreds of years old, found it centuries ago in Jerusalem. The text is supposed to be a book written by Thoth, the patron of scribes in Egypt. It contains the essence of Osirian rites (polytheism). Reversing stereotypes, Reed portrays Von Vampton (a one-eyed man) and his companions as robbers, pirates, not only of things but also of black culture. Metaphorically, he is the vampire (Vampton) endeavouring to drain black Americans of their blood and of their distinctive culture.

Confronting Von Vampton is PaPa LaBas, a figure close to the Haitian god Legba (or Eshu), a messenger between our world and the supernatural world. Like Hinckle, he is also in search of The Book of Thoth. He thinks he needs it for Jes Grew to fulfil its mission, for black culture to prevail. Like the detectives of classical detective stories, he makes use of reasoning and deduction and, after managing to decode a secret message, finds out The Book of Thoth under the Cotton Club in Harlem. Yet, he is unlike a Hercule Poirot because he also combines ratiocination with his occult knowledge, voyance. He is a voodoo priest at the head of the Mumbo Jumbo Cathedral and his hoodoo powers give him an insight into the problems he has to solve. Hoodoo helps him along with his inquiries.

Although he is a central character in Mumbo Jumbo, he doesn’t always act on his own. He works with Haitians (one of whom is Benoit Battraville) fighting against the American occupation of Haiti in the days of the Harlem Renaissance. If LaBas appears for the first time in Mumbo Jumbo, he reappears in The Last Days of Louisiana Red, this time to fight against discord among blacks on the West Coast in the 1960s. Louisiana Red embodies the evil forces disrupting the black community. Reed refers here to Marxistinfluenced groups like the Black Panthers in the 60s. He calls them Moochers since he regards them as spongers, parasites. LaBas’s role is to investigate them and also to support the Work, an organization whose proponents defend hoodoo knowledge, a remedy whose healing power is supposed to cure the black community, to ward off the evil which besets it and to restore order and harmony among the blacks.

So, all these remarks about some of Reed’s novels emphasize the fact that his fiction bears little resemblance to standard detective novels. Actually, detective novel formulas help him to depict and reconstruct various periods of American history from the black man’s point of view. The characters he uses are more types or archetypes than true-to-life characters.

Robbers, pirates, perverts are recurrent characters so far as whites are concerned, and most of the time, he makes use of irony or its black version, signifying, to expose the white man’s cowardice in hilarious passages that entertain the reader more than suspense does. Nevertheless, irony isn’t only used to make us laugh but also to indict and satirize the white man’s power and culture, and also to deliver a message. The novelist’s aim is to assert the power of African American culture, a counter-culture, as superior to white culture. However, Reed makes the most of a white author to achieve his purpose, I mean Edgar Allan Poe. He often does a pastiche of parts of Poe’s tales. For instance, he is indebted to him for his parodic imitation of the atmosphere of Gothic novels when depicting the South in Flight to Canada. Some characters like Raven Quickskill or Lenore, Alfred’s fiancé, in The Free-Lance Pallbearers, are echoes of Poe’s “The Raven”. Besides, themes like perversity and depravity recur in each of Reed’s novels to characterise his villains, whites like Drag, the cattle baron in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Swille the Southern planter in Flight to Canada, Harry Sam, the president in The Free-Lance Pallbearers. One may trace the literary influence of the theme of depravity back to Poe’s Imp of the Perverse, although Reed also connects it with the myth of Seth, the Egyptian god embodying death and evil. So, when Reed plays up the Egyptian heritage of black Americans, one may not see the influence of white authors in his work and at times, he appears to be a trickster attempting to outwit his reader.

READ ON https://books.openedition.org/pufr/5780?lang=en

“POLAR NOIR”: READING AFRICAN-AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION

Alice Mills and Claude Julien (ed.)

Cahiers de recherches afro-américaines : Transversalités

…

FRANÇAIS ENGLISH

Curiosity and the desire to grasp the specificity of an abundantly read African American genre born as the 20th century was beginning are the research intentions that inspire this volume. Indeed, only recently has African-American detective fiction drawn the attention of scholars in spite of its very diverse blossoming since the 1960s. Diverse, because it has moved out of its birth place, East coast cities, and because female novelists have contributed their own production.

At the hear...

 Read more

• Publisher : Presses universitaires François-Rabelais
 
• Series : Cahiers de recherches afro-américaines : Transversalités | 2
 
• Place of publication : Tours
 
• Year of publication : 2005
 
• Published on OpenEdition Books : 20 juin 2017
 
• EAN (Print version) : 9782869062146
 
• Electronic EAN : 9782869065130
 
• DOI : 10.4000/books.pufr.5770
 
• Number of pages : 224 p.

• Contents
 
• Presentation
 
• About the author

FRANÇAIS | ENGLISH

Curiosity and the desire to grasp the specificity of an abundantly read African American genre born as the 20th century was beginning are the research intentions that inspire this volume. Indeed, only recently has African-American detective fiction drawn the attention of scholars in spite of its very diverse blossoming since the 1960s. Diverse, because it has moved out of its birth place, East coast cities, and because female novelists have contributed their own production.

At the heart of this popular genre, as novelists Barbara Neely, Paula Woods and Gar Haywood tell us, is black existence: black memory, black living places and the human environments that build the individual - hence a détour to the French Caribbean.

• HISTORY OF BLACK SCIENCE FICTION

Expanded Course in the History of Black Science Fiction: Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

Nisi Shawl

Wed Oct 11, 2017 

In February of 2016, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination published an essay by me called “A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.” Since then Tor.com has published my in-depth essays on nine of the 42 works mentioned. The original “Crash Course” listed those 42 titles in chronological order, but the essays skip around a bit. This tenth one talks about Ishmael Reed’s magnum opus, Mumbo Jumbo.

JES GREW

Mumbo Jumbo is the story of a life-giving epidemic known colloquially as “Jes Grew,” a spiritual cure-all for soullessness sweeping across the continental U.S. during the 1920s. If the book has a human hero it’s Papa LaBas, a self-anointed houngan—that is to say, a priest of ancient African mysteries. LaBas searches alongside Jes Grew for its long-lost sacred text in the hope of grounding and legitimizing it, and thus defeating the prudish rulers of the status quo. Jes Grew is a natural force manifesting as music, love, literature, gardening, art, sex, cooking—manifestations that are the province, in my religious tradition, of Oshun, the deity in charge of luxury and abundance. And also of sudden evolutionary advancement—Oshun shows up on the scene and the universe expands to include divination, poetry, and other powerful improvements. Sans text, though, Jes Grew’s operation is limited to frivolous realms: dance crazes, fashion trends, and so forth.

SF OR F?

If there was ever a narrative that questioned received wisdom as to what constitutes stories of “magic” versus stories of “science,” Mumbo Jumbo is it. Challenging the validity of expectations for detachment and standardized replication associated with the scientific method, Reed makes a strong case that participation is a form of observation and variation on what’s observed is normal. Is his version of 2000 years of cultural trends and conspiracies based on a testable hypothesis? No. And yet he does examine the effects of the belief in and practice of magic on its adherents and opponents. Within the pages of Mumbo Jumbo, adherents of notoriously squishy social sciences such as anthropology Charleston madly with farmer-priests versed in divine agronomy; tracing the influence of Isis-and-Horus worship through reverence for Christianity’s Virgin Mary, the author arrives at surprising conclusions about the supposedly-objective Dr. Sigmund Freud’s bias towards the importance of the bonds between mother and child.

TRUE LIES, GRAPHIC CONTENT, SACRED SLANG

Mumbo Jumbo jumps back and forth over other boundaries besides those dividing the rational and the mystical. Illustrations liberally adorn its main body, free of captions, unrestricted to appendices. They comment on the writing as much as the writing comments on them. Quotations from and appearances by historical figures wind themselves in and out of Reed’s account of Jes Grew’s exploits. And in a metatextual moment the author has a character refer to his own Prince-like orthographic irregularities: Black Mason and famed number banker Buddy Jackson points out during an armed showdown with the Knights Templar that “The Charter of Daughters of the Eastern Star as you know is written in our mystery language which they call slang or dialect.”

SOME SORT OF CONTEXT

Mumbo Jumbo was finished, per the note Reed made at its end, at 3:00 p.m. on January 31, 1971, and published in 1972. I was 16 years old. Much of what’s now labeled “the 60s” was actually the early 1970s. I am here to tell you that in “the 60s” we believed we were about to save the world. Yes, my mother told me that was a naïve attitude. In vain. Books like this one convinced me and my peers we were in the throes of a new Jes Grew manifestation: the Funky, Downhome Dawning of the Age of Aquarius—and if its original liturgical text had been lost perhaps, as Reed hinted, we could write a new one!

Or perhaps Mumbo Jumbo was it. Reed had already wowed readers with The Freelance Pallbearers in 1967 and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (a “hoodoo Western”) in 1969. This latest might be his greatest, and who was to say his greatest couldn’t help us willing Jes Grew Converts re-enchant the world?

Who’s to say it didn’t?

PROMINENT J.G.C.s

Today, dozens of novels, awards, grants, art installations, lectures, poetry collections, anthologies, songs, essays, plays, and film scripts later, Ishmael Reed is a mighty and continuing influence on writers everywhere. Me for sure. Renowned Black publisher, editor, and author Bill Campbell claims that if not for Mumbo Jumbo, his wildly iconoclastic novel Koontown Killing Kaper just plain wouldn’t exist.

Victor LaValle, Colson Whitehead (whose novel The Intuitionist is also part of my “Crash Course”), and Reed’s former student Terry McMillan have also been influenced by this genius. I’m sure there must be many more.

GUN BARREL INFO DUMP

Some call Mumbo Jumbo a hoodoo detective novel, a revamping of the genre akin to Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down’s revamping of the Western. Certainly it can be read that way, with Papa LaBas the somewhat anachronistic private investigator and Jes Grew his elusive client. In that light the 30-page info dump toward the book’s end is only a rather extreme rendition of a bit typically found at a mystery’s denouement—you know, the part in which suspects and survivors are treated to a summarizing disquisition at the point of a pistol? Only this summary starts millennia ago in Egypt and finishes up circa 1923.

HOW MANY YEARS TO GO?

Reed’s several references to a previous bout of Jes Grew in the 1890s imply that its cyclical resurgences can’t be anticipated with clocklike regularity. Roughly three decades pass between that round of the epidemic and the one Mumbo Jumbo recounts. Another five passed between the events the novel depicts and its publication at a time when it seemed like we were experiencing a new bout of this enlivening “anti-plague.”

When are we due for the next one? Let’s get ready for it as soon as we can.

Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. She is the author of Everfair (Tor Books) and co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies.

The Good Book: Reading Ishmael Reed’s

Mumbo Jumbo as Neo-Hoodoo’s Sacred Text

The Albatross / Volume 5.1 2015
REUBEN COPLEY

https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/albatross/article/view/13452/6092

Sacred - adjective \ˈsā-krəd\
worthy of religious worship : very holy : relating to
religion : highly valued and important : deserving
great respect
Text - noun \ˈtekst\
a verse or passage of Scripture chosen especially
for the subject of a sermon or for authoritative sup
port (as for a doctrine)
passage from an authoritative source providing an
introduction or basis (as for a speech)
source of information or authority
—Merriam Webster Dictionary

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo uses a bricolage of techniques,
forms, and styles to tell a tale of viral cultural and religious trans-
mission: the story of Jes Grew. Mumbo Jumbo is a trickster that
textually transmutes information (some true and some false) into
a sacred text detailing the influences and history of the Neo-Hoo-
doo.1 The text incorporates a large number of influences from a
diverse array of artistic and intellectual sources to make a case for
an alternative understanding of the cultural history of the world
that challenges the mountebank constructions of the White man:
the “White man will never admit his real references. He will steal
everything you have and still call you those names.

1 Neo-Hoodoo is a term coined by Ishmael Reed that refers to the growth of
traditional African religious practices within the modern context of American
culture and society: the religion of Dahomey translated and transported to
Haiti and then onwards to New Orleans.