Brazil legends rebuke Jair Bolsonaro for 'irresponsible' Covid-19 policy


Raí and Mauro Silva won the World Cup together in 1994. Now they are standing together to oppose the country’s president
By Tom Sanderson for Yellow & Green Football


Tom Sanderson
THE GUARDIAN
Wed 13 May 2020

 

São Paulo general manager Raí says Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro should resign. Composite: Getty Images

The coronavirus outbreak has yet not reached its peak in Brazil, but firebrand president Jair Bolsonaro – who caused outrage last month when he responded to news of increasing death tolls by saying “So what?” – is already attempting to rush the country’s footballers back to the field. “There are a lot of people in football who are favourable to a return because unemployment is knocking on clubs’ doors,” said Bolsonaro. “Footballers, if infected with the virus, have an infinitely small chance of dying. That’s because of their physical state, because they are athletes.”

Bolsonaro has been continually blasé about coronavirus, calling it a “little cold” exaggerated by media “hysteria”. During a failed attempt to get Brazilians to resume everyday life in late April, he told the nation that only old people are at risk. Bolsonaro is 65 years old but does not include himself in that group as he says he has the “history of an athlete”.

This bold claim opened him up to ridicule and prompted the resurfacing of a video taken last year in which Bolsonaro, a former military man who feeds off a supposed macho image, struggles comically through a set of press-ups. The video is particularly galling for Bolsonaro as it shows João Doria, the São Paulo state governor, performing the press-ups alongside him with ease. Doria was a Bolsonara ally during the campaign trail in 2018, but he is now a sworn enemy given his stricter views on lockdown restrictions.

air Bolsonaro says footballers in Brazil have ‘a small chance of dying’ from Covid-19

Bolsonaro is powerless to override the authority of individual states when it comes to isolation and, by sticking his nose in footballing matters, he has irked the director of football at one of Brazil’s biggest clubs. Raí, the legendary World Cup-winning midfielder who played for PSG in the 1990s and now runs São Paulo FC, criticised Bolsonaro for being “irresponsible” and flouting WHO guidelines. In a video interview with Globoesporte, Raí called for Bolsonaro’s resignation and blamed him for instigating “political crises” in the middle of a pandemic.

Bolsonaro has his supporters within the game. Caio Ribeiro, a former São Paulo and Brazil player who now works as a commentator, defended the president, saying he “didn’t like Raí’s speech” because he spoke “very little about sports and talked a lot about politics”. “He has to talk about sports,” said Ribeiro. “When he talks about resignation, public hospitals and all that, it seems to me that he has political connotations in relation to his preferences.”

Ribeiro’s suggestion that footballers and should stick to their primary field of expertise and not be outspoken on political matters sparked a debate, with Walter Casagrande – a highly respected pundit who played alongside Sócrates, Raí’s elder brother – defending the São Paulo director. “I think the exact same as Raí,” said Casagrande in an impassioned Instagram post. “I’m against the return of football at this moment. Every day the death toll rises in the country. It’s absurd to think about this.


“In a democracy, everyone can and should express their opinions, about every subject, independent of their profession. Nobody can wish to censor the speech of others and determine which subject they can talk about. Ultimately, Raí represented his brother Sócrates with pride and I have no doubt that he would say the same thing. People in football are pressed a lot for their lack of participation and opinion. Raí is one of the few who has taken a position. Congratulations, Raí!”


Luiz Felipe Scolari: 'Everything I did as a manager, I learned as a teacher'
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Casagrande added that Raí would be a “a great companion in Democracia Corinthiana” – the movement led by his brother Sócrates in the mid-1980s that challenged the military dictatorship to which Bolsonaro and his supporters long to return.

Speaking exclusively to Yellow and Green Football, Raí responded to Ribeiro by saying: “Before anything in life, we are citizens. I am radically in favour of the free manifestation of ideas. Although I am not a controversial person, I am attentive to politics and social reality. When I perceive great injustices, ideological absurdities, or actions that can massacre the unfortunate [in society], indignation takes over and I manifest myself more strongly.”

Raí says he “doesn’t care” about the abuse he has received from Bolsonaro’s supporters and that he has “ignored them and the smell of their bigotry”. Regarding how his brother would feel about Bolsonaro’s behaviour and intentions, he agrees with Casagrande, saying Sócrates would “surely also be outraged and revolt – imagine Dr Sócrates! The way he would react!” Raí insists he will only consider allowing his club’s players to return to the pitch once the “health and sanitary authorities – the governor, mayor and secretary of health – have authorised it, preferably when the curve of deaths and number of infected citizens has been reversed”.

The Brazil team that won the World Cup in 1994, including Rai and Mauro Silva. Photograph: Colorsport/Rex/Shutterstock


Mauro Silva, who won the World Cup alongside Raí in 1994 and is now vice-president of the São Paulo state football federation, is backing his old teammate. Silva says the federation has decided “unanimously” that football should only return once the state authorities allow it. “The supreme federal court decided that states and municipalities have the autonomy to define isolation measures. So this is how we at the federation are working,” he said. He also offered his own personal support for Raí, saying: “Everyone has the right to speak out on whatever they want.”

Bruno Guimarães was ready to quit football. Now he is a Brazil player

Yet the government ploughs on with its hard-headed approach. The ministry of health – which is now being fronted by Nelson Teich after Luiz Henrique Mandetta was fired for opposing Bolsonaro’s lax views on coronavirus – sent a report to Brazil’s football federation in which they effectively concluded that football was too important to stay closed down. The ministry said they were “favourable” to a return as because they recognised that “football is a relevant sporting activity in the Brazilian context and that its resumption may contribute to measures to reduce social displacement through the transmission of games.”

Yet many in the game have reasons to disagree. Thirty-eight employees, including three players, have tested positive for coronavirus at the Série A champions Flamengo. Just like Brazil’s battle with the disease, the row between its leaders and those in the game has not yet reached its peak.

World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year – half of it by US

Spending by nine nuclear-armed states rose 10%

Trump boosted nuclear funding but cut pandemic prevention
Julian Borger in Washington THE GUARDIAN Wed 13 May 2020
 

An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile is launched during a test on 5 February 2020, at Vandenberg air force base, California. Photograph: Clayton Wear/US Air Force/AFP via Getty Images
The world’s nuclear-armed nations spent a record $73bn on their weapons last year, with the US spending almost as much as the eight other states combined, according to a new report.

The new spending figures, reflecting the highest expenditure on nuclear arms since the height of the cold war, have been estimated by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), which argues that the coronavirus pandemic underlines the wastefulness of the nuclear arms race.

The nine nuclear weapons states spent a total of $72.9bn in 2019, a 10% increase on the year before. Of that, $35.4bn was spent by the Trump administration, which accelerated the modernisation of the US arsenal in its first three years while cutting expenditure on pandemic prevention.

“It’s clear now more than ever that nuclear weapons do not provide security for the world in the midst of a global pandemic, and not even for the nine countries that have nuclear weapons, particularly when there are documented deficits of healthcare supplies and exhausted medical professionals,” Alicia Sanders-Zakre, the lead author of the report, said.

The report comes at a time when arms control is at a low ebb, with the last major treaty limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons, New Start, due to expire in nine months with no agreement so far to extend it.

Russia, which has announced the development of an array of new weapons – including nuclear-powered, long-distance cruise missiles, underwater long-distance nuclear torpedoes and a new heavy intercontinental ballistic missile – spent $8.5bn on its arsenal in 2019, according to Ican’s estimates. China, which has a much smaller nuclear force than the US and Russia but is seeking to expand, spent $10.4bn.

Those expenditures were far overshadowed by the US nuclear weapons budget, which is part of a major upgrade also involving new weapons, including a low-yield submarine-launched missile, which has already been deployed.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of the US programme over the coming decade will be $500bn, an increase of nearly $100bn, about 23%, over projections from the end of the Obama administration.

Congressional Democrats failed in an attempt to curb the administration’s nuclear ambitions, but Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said budgetary constraints in a coronavirus-induced recession, could succeed where political opposition failed.

“There’s going to be significant pressure on federal spending moving forward, including defense spending,” Reif said. “So, the cost and opportunity cost of maintaining and modernizing the arsenal, which were already punishing, will become even more so.”

AMERICA RUNS ON A PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY

OBJECTS AND IMMORTALS: THE LIFE OF OBI IN IFA-ORIṢHA RELIGION

A dissertation presented
by
Funlayo Easter Wood
to
The Department of African and African American Studies
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of
African and African American Studies
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
April 2017
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/41140237/WOOD-DISSERTATION-2017.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

ABSTRACT

The kola nut is a ubiquitous presence in Yoruba culture. Whether being presented by
the basketful to a potential bride's family, shared as a snack amongst friends, or offered to
the spirits, obi—as it is called in Yoruba language—serves at once as food, medicine, and
currency. As an object, obi bridges relational chasms, helping to forge and strengthen bonds
amongst human beings; at the same time, obi is regarded as one of the original immaterial
and immortal divinities in the universe, known in Yoruba as irunmole. It is this bipartite
nature that renders obi a centrifugal force around which much Ifa-Oriṣa practice revolves; so
important are its duties that no ritual can proceed without obi's presence or the presence of a
suitable substitute to stand in its stead.
This dissertation will interrogate the uses and meanings—the “life”—of obi in IfaOriṣa religion. It will examine obi’s physical and spiritual origins, the duties it fulfills while
on earth— including its role as the most frequently used divination medium in Ifa-Oriṣa
practice—and the ways in which it dies or sheds its material body and returns to its
immaterial, immortal form as an irunmole. Through excavation of ritual, material culture
items, sacred narratives, proverbs, divination orature, and personal narratives, the
dissertation will describe and analyze the ways in which characterizations of and
interactions with obi reflect important religio-philosophical perspectives, particularly those
of an ontological, epistemological, ethical, and existential nature. Using obi as a conduit,
and employing theories and methods from within religious studies, comparative religion, 
iv
Africana philosophy, philosophy of religion, theology, anthropology of religion, semiotics,
and philosophy of science, the dissertation will argue for the importance of kinesthetic and
aural ways of knowing in the formation of the Ifa-Oriṣa world-sense. While these ways of
knowing are often subordinated to the visual and oral, I will argue that adequate engagement
with movement and audition are of paramount importance to the understanding of Ifa-Oriṣa
and, by extension, other cosmologically similar African and Diasporic religions. 

Ethnologies
Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an
Afro-Cuban Religion. By David H. Brown. (Chicago, University
of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. 413, illustrations, photos, plates,
notes, appendices, bibliography, index, ISBN 0226076105)
Michael Marcuzzi
Passages
Volume 31, Number 1, 2009
URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/038516ar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/038516ar
See table of contents
Publisher(s)
Association Canadienne d'Ethnologie et de Folklore
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ethno/2009-v31-n1-ethno3558/038516ar/

SERPENTWITHFEET 

Oshun, Yorùbá Orisha of Love and the Sweet Waters

www.thaliatook.com › AMGG › oshun

Oshun is the Yorùbá Orisha (Deity) of the sweet or fresh waters (as opposed to the salt waters of Yemaya). She is widely loved, as She is known for healing the ...

The History of Yemaya, Santeria's Queenly Ocean Goddess ...

https://www.teenvogue.com › story › the-history-of-yemaya-goddess-mer...

Jul 9, 2019 - Yemaya is perhaps the most nurturing of all the Orishas, and it's believed that all of life comes from her deep nourishing waters. Her strong and ...

How to Invoke Oshun, the Yoruba Goddess of Sensuality and ...

https://www.vice.com › en_us › article › how-to-invoke-oshun-yoruba-go...

Apr 20, 2018 - We're said to share personality traits with our Orisha, who ultimately helps us ... and all the qualities associated with fresh, flowing river water.

Where the Water Meets the Water. Oshun & Yemaya | Orisha ...

https://www.pinterest.com › pin

Yemaya is the Yoruba (West African) goddess of water and life. In the Yoruba religion, Yemaya is an orisha, an animistic deity who is a manifestation of one part ...

INTERVIEW EXCERPT

https://afropunk.com/2020/05/serpentwithfeet-interview-apparition-ep/

I’m looking at the cover art of the project now, and I would love to get into the thematics of the work. Who is the phantom? Are you the phantom, are you looking at the phantom, are you giving up a ghost?


All of those, all of the above. The cover art was shot by the brilliant Kadeem Johnson, so shout out to him.


For this EP thematically, I was thinking about what ghosts do we allow into our homes. Are they unholy ghosts? Are they holy ghosts? Are they skeptical ghosts? Are they pessimistic ghosts? Are they friendly ghosts? What kind of ghosts are we welcoming? I believe for myself that I carry ghosts with me every day and I’d like to think most of them are beneficial.


At times when we experience unbearable pain or when we experience things that feel so out of the ordinary to us, we have to wonder, where does that come from. And I think as a Black gay man I’m constantly vetting my feelings, and the TV shows I watch, and the movies I go see, and the kind of music I listen. I understand that they can and will impact the way I navigate the world. And I don’t have the privilege to carry extra shit with me. If you listen to a lot of misogynistic music, well fuck, you’re going to regurgitate that somewhere. If you watch a lot of homophobic, transphobic television you’re going to regurgitate that somewhere. So I think it’s really important to understand where these ghosts are coming from and are these ghosts mine. Do I want them in my mind, do I want them in my home? You get to choose.


That’s the journey of the EP, where I’m trying to figure out what is mine, what do I want to keep, and what ideas serve me. I think it’s really simple. I call it Apparition but it’s a really simple concept of what serves me and what doesn’t. You take your ghosts because I want to keep mine. Take yours and go and I’ll keep mine. I don’t want yours and you don’t get to have mine. 

And I know you think a lot about home and soil and roots. I’m very curious as to what your current spiritual practices are. Are you someone who worships Orishas for example?


If anything my religion is silence. I think silence is the thing that anchors me most. There is this version of the song “a Quiet Place” that’s just absolutely beautiful and I play it often —I think you might enjoy it. That song completely sums up what my religious stance is, and that’s quiet time. And that was part of the reason I moved to LA because I needed quiet. I’m 31 years old now and when I was younger I could deal with the noise of the world. I’m not interested in living in a bubble, that’s not exciting to me but I do understand now that I do need a significant amount of silence. Sometimes I wake up and play music, then sometimes I wake up and I just want quiet. I don’t want to hear anything but the birds, just the birds. I don’t want to hear neighbors, I don’t wanna hear nobody. In New York, it’s not so possible. 

But in LA, since I moved here, I wake up and it’s quiet. 

One thing I really appreciate about your work is that the queerness is not the spectacle. The emotional grandeur is the spectacle. Would you agree with that? Is that intentional from your part?


Well thank you, that’s pretty flattering. I appreciate that. Since the first EP in 2016, my intention was to be as honest as I could be. To be as direct and piercing and ornate as I could be. A lot of my favorite writers do that,- they are very straight forward but it’s also the language, it’s so ornate. I wanted to try that. If the effect is what you just said, emotional grandeur, then that’s pleasing to hear. My intention was just to be honest. It could have been very tempting to make music where I didn’t say the word “he” talking about my lover or I could have been more elusive that I was singing about men. But I didn’t want to be. I guess maybe it was arrogance or maybe it was desperation but I knew I didn’t want to make music as someone who just “happens to be gay.” Me being queer, and more specifically me loving Black men informs the way I walk down the street, informs the joke that I crack, informs the song that I like to sing along to in the house. When you create a very detailed document, that document can become very universal. The more specific you are, the more universal the narrative becomes. 

And that honesty, as universal as it can be, is so scary because it can be ugly. It can be raggedy. It can be desperate if desperate is the truth. How did you find the bravery to give that honesty to the world?


I had to do it for myself. I just want to make sure I’m giving to myself what I ask from other people. If I’m asking the men I share space with romantically, my friends, the people in my life, to be honest then I owe it to myself. I wanted to be my own hero first before I asked someone else to be my hero. 

You had a very strict, religious upbringing. How were you able to see the God within your romantic relationships? How did you retrain yourself to see Black queer love as divine?


By just experiencing it. I have met wonderful men. I know I write a lot of heartbreak songs but that’s because sometimes you just gotta do that. But more often than not, I have experienced really, really thoughtful and intuitive and loving Black men. And that’s actually what inspired me to start serpentwithfeet to begin with. I knew when I started making this music, even before I started working on my first EP — when I was thinking about how I wanted to take up space sonically, I knew what the intention was. I wanted my work to really focus on my relationship to Black men — and not just romantically, but with my friends, men I meet on the street. I’ve met so many dynamic Black men. I gave up the religion shit a long time ago anyway. It wasn’t hard to see the divinity in that love because I experienced it, and I didn’t have anything telling me it wasn’t anymore.

This makes me think of cherubim. When I found out the definition of the word, I was mind-blown. With that song, were you saying that loving someone is equivalent to loving God or was it harmful loving someone that much?

I think my response would vary depending on the day. I think we choose our Gods, and maybe, more importantly, we design our Gods. That’s the way I feel. If you have a nickel at your house, and you say it’s a special nickel and you charge that nickel, you have it at your altar and you put your intention to it – that nickel is going to be whatever you make it out to be. It’s your lucky nickel, your revenge nickel, your ‘get a job’ nickel. That nickel is going to fulfill a purpose because you charged it that way. So our Gods are whoever we make them out to be. For some people, their God is shopping or their God is money. It depends on what you charge.

One of my Gods might be relationships, both friendship and romantic, and really wanting to master how I engage with people and how I communicate.

At that time, I was putting a lot of energy into my romantic relationship and it was really exciting to me. And the danger is it can be a bit fanatical. So it’s a balance thing like anything else. You’ve seen the soccer moms who are a little bit too pressed. Or with Tiger King, people got a little bit too pressed. The same thing can happen in romantic love, there’s a line. I’m always analyzing what my relationship is to that. “cherubim” was an exploration of that line. 

How has serpentwithfeet evolved? How are we going to meet serpentwithfeet in this new EP?


I think I’m a lot less stressed now, to be honest. I have a lot more space to think. I feel a lot more closer to myself — which is obviously a very abstract thing to say because I’ve always been with me but I just feel more connected to myself. The work is going to reflect that. There is a different calm in my life now that didn’t really exist four years ago. And I’m really thankful for it. And I’m thankful for that time – I definitely appreciate the wildness that was my life and the uncertainty that was my life all those years ago. But right now I’m very thankful for the calm and a lot of the new work is an expression of that.

Words by AFROPUNK

1. The development of gratitude in Brazilian children and adolescents

2. UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)

   Jonathan R. Tudge, Professor (Creator)

   Institution

   The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )

   Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

   Abstract: This study aimed to examine age-related changes in gratitude expression and spending preferences and the associations between children’s greatest wish and gratitude expression. Participants were 285 children of ages 7 to 14 (M = 10.87, SD = 2.27, 54% girls) from public and private schools in Porto Alegre, a large urban center of Brazil. We found that verbal gratitude was the most common type of gratitude expression. Older children were more likely to express verbal and less likely to express concrete gratitude than were younger participants; they were also more likely to choose saving money for the future and less likely to choose donating to the poor. We also found a positive correlation between hedonistic wishes and concrete gratitude and between social well-being wishes and connective gratitude. Our results suggest that gratitude is linked to the ability of thinking about others, and may be hindered by a focus on im

Theoretical and methodological assumptions of Bioecological ...

https://www.scielo.br › scielo

Edinete Maria Rosa ... Bioecological Theory of Human Development: theoretical-methodological assumptions. According to), BTHD, developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner, can be divided into three phases. ... According to), the evolution of the term “ecology” to “bioecology” is related to the recognition of the structural and ...

1. Implicit vs. explicit ways of using Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory: Comments on Jaeger by Tudge, Jonathan R. (2017)
2. 
   
3. Still misused after all these years? A re-evaluation of the uses of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory of human development by Tudge, Jonathan R. (2016)
4. 
   
5. The virtue of gratitude: A developmental and cultural approach by Tudge, Jonathan R. (2016)
6. 
   
7. Wishes, gratitude, and spending preferences in Russian children by Tudge, Jonathan R. (2018)
8. 
   
9. Methods for studying the virtue of gratitude, cross-culturally by Tudge, Jonathan R. (2018)
10. 
    
11. Envolvimento paterno aos 24 meses de vida da criança [Paternal involvement with 24-month-old children] by Tudge, Jonathan R. (2017)
12. 
    
13. If children won lotteries: materialism, gratitude and imaginary windfall spending by Tudge, Jonathan R. (2016)
14. 
    
15. Relações entre desenvolvimento da gratidão e construção de valores em jovens [The relations between the development of gratitude and the construction of values in youth] by Tudge, Jonathan R. (2016)
16. 
    
17. Wishes and gratitude of students from private and public schools by Tudge, Jonathan R. (2016)

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URIE BRONFENBRENNERS BIOECOLOGICAL THEORY OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo as Neo-Hoodoo Detective Fiction: A Bhabhaesque Mimicry of Mimetic Eurocentric Representation

Article PDF Available

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331820725_Ishmael_Reed's_Mumbo_Jumbo_as_Neo-Hoodoo_Detective_Fiction_A_Bhabhaesque_Mimicry_of_Mimetic_Eurocentric_Representation

December 2016

Zohreh Ramin

Farshid Nowrouzi

The relationship between dominators and the dominated has always been strained. Naturally, dominators struggle to bolster their grip on power and the dominated try to resist the prevalent hegemony. Before the rise of postmodernism in the second half of the twentieth century, the oppressed groups mostly resorted to direct violent confrontation with the supremacists in an attempt to undermine the discriminatory hierarchy. Nevertheless, postmodernism caused a drastic metamorphosis in the survival strategies adopted by the subalterns. Likewise, recent postcolonial critics have opted for a different plan of action than the costly and ruinous choice of violence. Homi Bhabha, for instance, posits the notion of mimicry to combat the hegemonic and repressive discourses. According to the Indian thinker, mimicry is the playful and subversive imitation of the dominant norms and discursive practices carried out only to puncture the autocratic power structure. Ishmael Reed, the contemporary African American writer, employs Bhabha's recommended strategy of mimicry in many of his works. In his renowned novel Mumbo Jumbo, he mimics the classic genre of detective fiction and its mimetic mode of realistic representation in order to divulge the contradictions and discriminations embedded in the Western thought system. Reed's aesthetics also attempts to promote the black hoodoo tradition as an eclectic system to counter the "Atonist" weltanschauung. This paper tries to analyze Reed's revisionist strategies in Mumbo Jumbo and how they dismantle both the novel of detection (as a cherished genre in the Western literary canon) and the Eurocentric worldview.

ISHMAEL REED’S HOODOO DETECTIVE

The 1972 cult crime novel that explores Black identity, African religion, civilizations at war, and all of recorded history.

APRIL 6, 2020 BY SCOTT ADLERBERG

https://crimereads.com/ishmael-reeds-hoodoo-detective/

Most detective novels tell a story about a local crime. But what about the crime stories much bigger? I don’t mean stories, say, about government corruption or drug smuggling or international human trafficking. These tales present us with crimes grave and damaging enough, but every so often, in a mystery novel, you’ll find a detective coming up against something even larger in scope. Ishmael Reed’s 1972 book, Mumbo Jumbo, provides one such example. You might say the novel’s criminal is nothing less than recorded history. Yes, history itself is the culprit in these pages, and the specific crime is the oppression, the stifling, the diminishment, of one civilization by another. It takes an unusual type of detective to investigate a case with implications so broad, and that’s where Reed’s investigator, PaPa LaBas, described as an “astro-detective”, comes in.

It’s the early 1920s, in New York City. Papa La Bas works out of Harlem, his office located in a two-story building named The Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral, and his purported strong ties to Africa are clear in how he’s introduced:


“Some say his ancestor is the long Ju Ju of Arno in eastern Nigeria, the man who would oracle, sitting in the mouth of a cave, as his clients stood below in shallow water.”

“Another story is that he is the reincarnation of the famed Moor of Summerland himself, the Black gypsy who according to Sufi Lit, sicked the Witches on Europe. Whoever his progenitor, whatever his lineage, his grandfather, it is known, was brought to America on a slave ship mixed in with other workers who were responsible for bringing African religion to the Americas where it survives to this day.”

Papa La Bas is enigmatic even to his friends and acquaintances, but what is important to know about him, as the narrator states, is that he carries “Jes Grew in him like most other folk carry genes.” Since the case he tackles will concern the powerful force called Jes Grew and the efforts by its enemies to suppress it, LaBas is both qualified for the job at hand and eager to do it. Nobody has to pay him to take it on.

But what exactly is Jes Grew?

As Mumbo Jumbo lays it out, Jes Grew is a virus. It’s a plague that has struck different parts of the United States over the years. At times, it has hit Europe. But unlike other plagues, Jes Grew doesn’t ravage the affected person’s body; it enlivens the host. It’s described as “electric as life” and “characterized by ebullience and ecstasy.” And wouldn’t you know it, the reason it came to America had to do with cotton. It arrived with the people brought to this country to pick the crop Americans, inexplicably, wanted to grow.

When Mumbo Jumbo opens, during the Warren Harding presidency, a new Jes Grew outbreak has flared. It had swept through the United States in the 1890s, around the time Ragtime became popular, but authorities managed to squelch it. Now it’s back, in a stronger variant, having begun in New Orleans and then gone on to tear through cities throughout the country. From how it makes people behave, there can be no doubt what it represents. And it’s no surprise why people quoted as fearing it—a Southern congressmen, Calvinist editorial writers—do regard it as a scourge. Jes Grew is life-affirming; it fosters a love of jazz, dancing, sexuality, pleasure. It doesn’t respect any monotheistic god, but more like vodoun, encourages an embrace and acceptance of “the gods.” It sharpens one’s senses, a Jes Grew patient says, and he declares that with Jes Grew “he felt like the gut heart and lungs of Africa’s interior. He said he felt like the Kongo: ‘Land of the Panther.’ He said he felt like ‘deserting his master,’ as the Kongo is ‘prone to do.’” Jes Grew, in other words, as its enemies see it, is a germ equated with Africa and blackness and African-American creativity. With the advent of the new outbreak, millions in the country are at risk, a situation the authorities consider dire. The United States itself is in grave danger, and perhaps all of Western Civilization.

* * *

If this does not sound like the plot material for a detective novel, that’s because Mumbo Jumbo is an unconventional one. In a 50-plus year career that includes poetry, playwriting, scriptwriting, essays. literary criticism, librettos, and songwriting, Ishmael Reed has produced eleven novels, and in none of them does he check his irreverence or follow orthodox narrative arcs. He satirizes westerns in Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1970), the fugitive slave narrative in Flight to Canada (1975), the campus novel and American academic life in Japanese By Spring (1998). He critiques the media and everything related to the fallout from the OJ Simpson trial in Juice! (2011) and takes on the Trump era and relations between Indian Americans and African Americans in Conjugating Hindi (2018). In short, over six decades, Reed’s list of targets in American social and political life has been vast, his weapons for attack fearless humor and prodigious scholarship. He is a writer who weaves disparate elements into his novels: photos, cartoons, film allusions, oral histories, music, political rhetoric, boxing knowledge, folklore, citations from obscure historical tomes. Not unlike a writer similarly encyclopedic, Thomas Pynchon, who mentions Reed in Gravity’s Rainbow (“check out Ishmael Reed” Pynchon’s narrator tells us on page 588 of that book), Reed is a postmodernist, a master of literary bricolage. He never ceases to twist, parody, and subvert the tropes of the genre he’s using. So it goes in Mumbo Jumbo, where Reed makes it clear this is not a private eye novel like Raymond Chandler or his ilk would write. Still, for all Reed’s playfulness, his destabilization of a form, he does give the reader a real detective story. Reed says so himself, as Stephen Soitos writes in his book, The Blues Detective. In his essay “Serious Comedy in African-American Literature”, from Writin is Fightin, Reed says, “If there exists a body of mysteries in Afro-American oral literature, then included among my works would be mysteries like Mumbo Jumbo, which is not only a detective novel, but a novel concerning the mysteries, the secrets, of competing civilizations.”

Like many a detective, Papa La Bas searches for a missing object. In this case, as suits a novel in part about historical interpretation, the object is a text. It is the Jes Grew Text, the alleged written document linked to the origins of the Afrocentric virus that has broken out. As the narrator tells us, “Jes Grew is seeking its words. Its text. For what good is a liturgy without a text?”


The Text has a history extraordinarily convoluted, and one can’t help but think that Reed, at least somewhat, is parodying novels like The Maltese Falcon, in which the desired object dates back centuries and has passed through numerous bloodstained hands. In Mumbo Jumbo, the Jes Grew Text is connected to the never-ending battle between those under the sway of Jes Grew and those determined to eradicate the plague, called Atonists. Atonists include The Wallflower Order, a secretive international society, its members devoted to control of others, psychological repression, and monotheistic belief. As the reader gleans, this battle between the Jes Grew people and the Atonists began millennia ago. In a nutshell, the two sides represent eros and thanatos, the life force and the death force, and as the history of Western civilization has shown, the Atonists have long been winning. But is winning without total victory enough for them? Wherever the Jes Grew Text has gone (and nobody seems to know who has owned it from century to century), the virus has followed. The Atonists have never stamped Jes Grew out completely, and this infuriates them. As they see it, if they could only get their hands on the Text and burn it, they would be able to wipe out Jes Grew forever.

While the search for the Text unfolds in Harlem, Ishmael Reed blends actual events from the 1920s with total fiction. The U.S. occupation of Haiti figures prominently, and much is made of the rumor, well-known at the time, that Warren Harding had black ancestry. Dancer Irene Castle and bandleader Cab Calloway pop their heads in. A group of art liberators, the Mu’tafikah, storm museums so they can return to Africa the artwork stolen from that continent, and a white man named Hinckle von Vampton is the editor of the Benign Monster, a magazine whose mission it is to destroy the burgeoning arts movements in Harlem. To this end, von Vampton pretends to be an ally of blacks, a Negrophile, and hires a young black guy from Mississippi to write a Negro Viewpoint column. At the same time, he employs a “talking black android”; that is, a white man done up in black face who will write subtly pro-white columns for the magazine and thus undermine black ideas and creativity. Von Vampton also happens to be a Knight Templar who was alive as far back as 1118, and the Knights Templar, for centuries, have somehow been intertwined with the missing Jes Grew Text.

It’s a heady mix of characters and events, of shadowy forces taking on other forces, but through it all, PaPa La Bas remains unfazed. Perhaps this is because, as a friend of his says, he already hews to a “hypothesis about some secret society molding the consciousness of the West.” His friend criticizes him for this conspiratorial outlook, saying there’s no empirical evidence for it, but La Bas is a person, and an investigator, who has his own way of reasoning:

“Evidence? Woman, I dream about it, I feel it, I use my 2 heads, My Knockings. Don’t your children have your Knockings, or have you New Negroes lost your other senses, the senses we came over here with?”

NOT A DETECTIVE IN THE WESTERN MODE, EITHER A RATIOCINATIVE-LITTLE-GREY-CELLS TYPE OR A HARDBOILED GUMSHOE TYPE, LA BAS SIZES UP “HIS CLIENTS TO FIT THEIR SOULS.”

Not a detective in the Western mode, either a ratiocinative-little-grey-cells type or a hardboiled gumshoe type, La Bas sizes up “his clients to fit their souls.” His critics call his headquarters the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral, but little do they know that mumbo jumbo is a phrase derived from Mandingo that means “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.” La Bas has a substantial impact; to heal his clients he works with “jewelry, Black astrology, charts, herbs, potions, candles, talismans.” He drives around Harlem in his Locomobile and does have the eccentric and distinctive appearance one might expect from a detective: “frock coat, opera hat, smoked glasses, and carrying a cane.” When Reed calls him “a noonday Hoodoo, fugitive-hermit, obeah-man, botanist, animal impersonator, 2-headed man, You-Name-It”, it’s to emphasize the dexterity, skills, and elusiveness of his character. As Stephen Soitos cogently puts it: “LaBas comes to us out of the African trickster tradition and resists definitive analysis”. The word Hoodoo ties LaBas to an amalgam of African religious practices brought to the United States by the enslaved and connects to what Reed calls his Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic. Neo-Hoodoo, as Reed formulates it, is a mixture of Hoodoo ritual, Afrocentric philosophy, and positive African American identity drawing on the past and the ever changing present. Reed states that “Neo-Hoodoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist is a priest. You can bring your own creative ideas to Neo-Hoodoo.”

* * *

In Mumbo Jumbo, Neo-Hoodoo is explicitly a means to resist the oppression and life-denying traits of the Atonists. La Bas and his ally and sometime sidekick Black Herman, an occultist, work using intuition, chance, and learning from non-Western sources. They embrace indeterminacy and do not elevate rationality, as countless detectives do, to a supreme value in and of itself. They do not work to restore a status quo that most detectives, through their use of deductive logic, wind up upholding. To quote the “Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto” again: “Neo-Hoodoos are detectives of the metaphysical about to make a pinch. We have issued warrants for a God arrest. If Jeho-vah reveals his real name, he will be released on his own recognizance and put out to pasture.”

In this passage, Reed is pitting his detectives against Christianity specifically, but in Mumbo Jumbo, his target is broader—a common type of reductive thinking that goes against the spirit of Neo-Hoodoo. When Hinckle Von Vampton advertises for his Negro Viewpoint columnist, one applicant says that his experience includes having read the 487 articles written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and that he knows them by heart. Von Hinckle thinks, “the perfect candidate…He doesn’t mind the shape of the idol: sexuality, economics, whatever, as long as it is limited to the 1.” To a sworn opponent of Jes Grew, these qualifications please Von Vampton. He hires the man.

Similarly, Adbul Hamid, black Muslim storefront proselytizer in Harlem, displays a rigidity that earns criticism. In a discussion with PaPa La Bas and Black Herman about the Jes Grew epidemic, Hamid says that black people have to stop their dancing and carrying on, “fulfilling base carnal appetites.” No matter that blacks have been dancing for thousands of years, as La Bas tells him, or that dancing is “deep in the race soul”—to Hamid, it’s all just twisting of butts and getting happy in the old primitive jungle ways. “Allah is the way, Allah be praised,” he says, threatening Hell for those who don’t choose the right path, which prompts La Bas to tell him that he is no different than the Christians he imitates. “Atonist Christians and Muslims don’t tolerate those who refuse to accept their modes.” And as La Bas asks, “where does that leave the ancient Vodun aesthetic: pantheistic, becoming, 1 which bountifully permits 1000s of spirits, as many as the imagination can hold.”

Humor is essential to La Bas’ perspective also, a trait he connects to Africa and that further ties him to his trickster lineage. About halfway through the novel, inside Abdul Hamid’s Harlem office, La Bas sees some African art depicting Whites in centuries past in Africa, lampoon carvings done by African sculptors. The works make him think about how Western tradition has stifled and misshapen something essential to the African spirit:

“The African race had quite a sense of humor. In North America, under Christianity, many of them had been reduced to glumness, depression, surliness, cynicism, malice without artfulness, and their intellectuals, in America, only appreciated heavy, serious works…They’d really fallen in love with tragedy. Their plays were about bitter raging members of the ‘nuclear family,’ and their counterpart in art was exemplified by the contorted, grimacing, painful social-realist face. Somebody, head in hands, sitting on a stoop.”

For La Bas, anyone who can’t laugh a little bit is “not Afro but most likely a Christian connoting blood, death, and impaled emaciated Jew in excruciation.” La Bas can’t recall ever seeing an account or picture of Christ laughing. “Like the Marxists who secularized his doctrine, he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard.” What a contrast that is to portraits one sees where Buddha is laughing or to “certain African loas, Orishas.”

La Bas is a detective who rarely has history far from his thoughts, and he uses his immense historical knowledge to make headway on his case. When he and Black Herman find Abdul Hamid dead in Hamid’s office, the search for the missing Jes Grew Text expands into a murder case, and the pieces start to cohere for La Bas.

Due to a note at the scene, a rejection slip, referencing a manuscript Hamid had, La Bas draws conclusions, and in classic mystery fashion, he finds a scrap of paper in Abdul’s fist that contains a clue. The writing on the paper says, “Epigram on American-Egyptian Cotton” and below that title, it reads:

“Stringy lumpy, Bales dancing

Beneath this center

Lies the Bird”

Somehow these words, without the reader quite knowing why, lead PaPa Las and Black Herman to Hinkle von Vampton, and they make a citizen’s arrest on von Vampton when Hinkle is attending a soiree in Westchester, New York. The guests don’t just allow La Bas, Herman, and the six tall Python men they’ve brought as muscle to take Hinkle, though. They want to know the meaning behind the seizure, what the charges against the accused are. Hinkle echoes this demand, and it’s here that La Bas gives the mystery novel explanation, the narrative by the detective that should clear up the preceding swirl of events. We sense it won’t be a typical explanation, however, when La Bas begins by saying, “Well, if you must know, it all began 1000s of years ago in Egypt.”

The story La Bas proceeds to tell runs thirty pages and puts forth a version of history the reader has never heard before. It criticizes and undermines the entire path Western civilization has taken. But history, as we’ve learned from this novel, needs major correctives. Those oppressed by history and denied their own narratives need to reclaim their history. PaPa La Bas explains, in language at once scholarly, colloquial, and funny, how the sought after Jes Grew Text derives from a sect that formed around the Egyptian god Osiris. If history had followed the example of Osiris, Western civilization would have taken a more nature-embracing and life-affirming path, but Osiris and his adherents were opposed at every turn and ultimately defeated by Set, Osiris’s brother. Set hated Osiris and Osiris’s popularity with the people. While Osiris would tour with his International Nile Root Orchestra, “dancing agronomy and going from country to country with his band,” Set fixated on taking control of Egypt. He attempted to banish music and outlawed dancing. He “went down as the 1st man to shut nature out of himself.” Set transformed worship in Egypt from the worship of multiple gods, “the nature religion of Osiris,” to the worship of one god, his “own religion based upon Aton (the sun’s flaming disc).” This crucial switch, to monotheism, would stand as the foundation on which the West developed. Equally ruinous, Set established the precedent of doing everything he could to erase Osiris’ work and spirit from history. Whether it has been the Catholic Church or poets such as John Milton or pillars of repression like Sigmund Freud, the Atonist cause has been advanced and defended, obliterating counter narratives. Atonists would have us believe that the course history has taken is the only way history could have gone.

And the Jes Grew Text? Where does that fit in? Written by Osiris’ helper Thoth, it apparently contains the essence of the rites Osiris practiced. Down through the centuries, it has moved around, a book deemed sacred and dangerous. La Bas discloses that Hinkle von Vampton, Knights Templar librarian, came upon the book in the Templar library in 1118, but hundreds of years later, after various intrigues, it wound up with Abdul Hamid in Harlem. Its presence in Harlem has led to the Jes Grew outbreak there, and when Hamid resisted von Vampton’s efforts to regain the book, Hinkle murdered him. This is the reason La Bas and Black Herman made their move to seize von Vampton.

* * *

The culprit in the case has been caught, and La Bas lets the assembled group know how he decoded the epigram Hamid left behind. Reminiscent of Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” in which the cracking of a cryptogram leads to the discovery of treasure beneath a tree, La Bas’ understanding of Hamid’s odd words led to an object below the ground. Using his Knockings and insight, La Bas interpreted the “Epigram on Egyptian-American Cotton” in a way a detective with a different background and consciousness might not. He takes the anagram’s title and its three cryptic lines to mean that Hamid buried the Jes Grew Text beneath a place where people dance (“dancing bales”) and where cotton somehow figures. La Bas, with his vision that encompasses history and the popular doings of the day, can see a link between dancing and cotton. They equate to black entertainment and the legacy of black slavery. That must mean the book is below the Cotton Club, the nightclub in Harlem, and sure enough, La Bas and Black Herman go there and dig. They do not find the book, but evidence says the book was there. Sadly, Hinkle von Vampton beat them to it. He got its location from Hamid before killing him, and in a deal he cut with the Atonists in their war against Jes Grew, Hinkle then burned the book.

Besides Poe, Reed seems to be alluding to the Conan Doyle story, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” a mystery that involves a cipher to be decoded, and the epigram’s reference to “The Bird”, again suggests a nod to The Maltese Falcon. More explicitly than anywhere else in the novel, Reed is locating La Bas in a detective fiction tradition while making it clear that La Bas is outside that tradition. Deductive reasoning worthy of Sherlock Holmes and toughness akin to Sam Spade’s have helped him crack this case, but he would never have been able to get to the bottom of what is going on without his African-infused Neo-Hoodoo sensibility.

That Reed has drawn as well on La Bas’ black detective forbears goes without saying. He describes one character as renting “a room above “Frimbo’s Funeral Home”, an allusion to Rudolph Fisher’s Harlem Renaissance era novel, The Conjure Man Dies. Fisher’s book was the first major detective novel ever published by an African American and his investigators, the physician John Archer and the New York City police detective Perry Dart, the first black detectives in a novel. Reed does not allude directly to Chester Himes in Mumbo Jumbo, but he has written extensively about Himes, above all in his essay collection, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. Published in 1978, years before the Himes revival began, Reed’s piece shows that he damn well understands the significance of the Harlem crime novels. He accurately predicts that “It won’t be long before Himes’s ‘Harlem Detective series,’ now dismissed by jerks as ‘potboilers,’ will receive the praise they deserve.” Among other things, the Harlem crime series, building on what Rudolph Fisher did, lay a groundwork for a black detective path in fiction. “The black tough guy as American soothsayer,” is how Gerald Early, in a review of Reed’s essay, describes what Himes unleashed, and Reed himself says in his piece that Himes “taught me the essential difference between a Black detective and Sherlock Holmes.”

GIVEN HIS POSITION IN THE WORLD AND HOW IT MAY DIFFER FROM THE POSITION OF A WHITE DETECTIVE, PROFESSIONAL OR AMATEUR, CAN A BLACK DETECTIVE RESTORE ORDER AND BALANCE IN A MYSTERY STORY IN THE WAY A WHITE DETECTIVE USUALLY DOES?

Given his position in the world and how it may differ from the position of a white detective, professional or amateur, can a black detective restore order and balance in a mystery story in the way a white detective usually does? And how about in Mumbo Jumbo, where secret societies exert power and the overall crime is so wide-reaching that restoring justice in any meaningful way seems impossible? For all the explaining Papa LaBas does, has he cleared everything up? With the Jes Grew Text burned, no one will know what it said, and the Jew Grew virus may fade away.

Reed opts for limited closure and an indeterminate conclusion. We will never know the actual words of the Jes Grew Text. It’s a frustrating ending, but not a despairing one. La Bas’ investigation has opened up a new awareness, a revisionist view of Western civilization’s wellsprings and conflicts. If the reader has been paying attention, that person will want to investigate further, become a kind of detective outside the book. It’s great that as far as Mumbo Jumbo’s murderer goes, the culprit was identified and caught, but there is plenty more to probe and reckon with beyond that.

And the Jes Grew virus itself. Will it indeed perish with its guiding text gone?

Not likely.

As Las Bas says to a younger person asking him questions:


“Jes Grew has no end and no beginning. It even precedes that little ball that exploded 1000000000s of years ago and led to what we are now. Jes Grew may even have caused the ball to explode. We will miss it for a while, but it will come back, and when it returns, we will see that it never left.”

History is cyclical, not strictly linear, and despite the struggles, the afflictions endured, the perversions of historical truth those in power disseminate, Reed’s detective remains optimistic.



Scott Adlerberg lives in Brooklyn. His first book was the Martinique-set crime novel Spiders and Flies (2012). Next came the noir/fantasy novella Jungle Horses (2014). His short fiction has appeared in various places including Thuglit, All Due Respect, and Spinetingler Magazine. Each summer, he hosts the Word for Word Reel Talks film commentary series in Manhattan. His new novel, Graveyard Love, a psychological thriller, is out now from Broken River Books.