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FEATURE: ‘MUMBO JUMBO’ BY ISHMAEL REED: AN INFECTIOUS MASTERPIECE OF BLACK LITERATURE

By Eye Candy
April 15, 2015

It’s 1920 and Harlem is in havoc, thousands around the city are “suffering” from “Jes Grew”, the mysterious “disease” that’s got people out in the streets jumping, bouncing, and feverishly thrusting their bodies in a superhuman trance. No one can contain this epidemic; it’s sweeping across the nation, infecting thousands of people and forcing them into a sudden and unpredictable dance craze. They lose control of their bodies and can’t help but groove and shake rhythmically to its beat—this is the lively backdrop of Ishmael Reed’s mystifying 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo.

By Damola Durosomo, AFROPUNK Contributor


Mumbo Jumbo is a satirical masterpiece, a critical analysis of Western culture and its blatant disregard for Africa and the meaningful contributions of its people. Reed shifts back and forth between various historical time periods and presents an array of quirky, archetypical characters, each symbolic of certain religious, social and political ideologies. PaPa LaBas is the head of the Jes Grew Kathedral, he calls himself a “Neo-HoDoo therapist”, who is dedicated to conserving traditional African religions and is a staunch supporter of Jes Grew. According to PaPa LaBas, Jes Grew is far from a deadly disease, rather it is an extremely pleasurable and freeing mental and physical state for those it inhabits, encouraging them to move about freely and search for truth and meaning. He makes it his mission to preserve and spread Jes Grews to all non-Westerners. He does so with the help of the radical Jes Grew organization Mu’tahfikah, a group of Jes Grew carriers who go about sharing Jes Grew and raiding museums in order to reclaim African and Asian cultural artifacts and return them to their places of origin. In Mumbo Jumbo, Papa LaBas and his crew are meant to exemplify black consciousness and a purely Afrocentric worldview, a firm belief in the idea that black people are purveyors of culture who have made invaluable contributions to society that Western culture has tried to either steal or suppress. PaPa LaBas and Mu’tahfikah attempt to counteract this by disseminating Jes Grew and awakening the masses.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have Hinckle Von Hampton, the owner of the sacred Jes Grew text, written by ancient Egyptians, which posses the power to control the epidemic. Von Hampton and his team, the Wallflower Order, go to great lengths to avert the increasing influence of Jes Grew. The most bizarre of these attempts is their disgraceful effort to create what they refer to as a “Talking Droid” modeled after a charming, well-educated black man that will trick black populations into believing that Jes Grew is harmful and dangerous to them. By endeavoring to subdue Jes Grew—a discernable and instrumental product of black culture—Hinkle Van Hampton serves as an emblem of the Western world and the efforts made by the media—as well as social and political institutions—aimed at obscuring the achievements of people of the African diaspora in order to maintain the flawed perception of Western cultural superiority. Jes Grew promotes black culture and enlightens its victims; making it a threat to white, Western rationalistic thought. Therefore, it must be “cured”.

Reed’s style is amusing and unconventional. Mumbo Jumbo reads almost as a movie script with seemingly random black and white photographs and catchy newspaper headlines in between. Ishmael’s brilliant use of satire gives Mumbo Jumbo the rare quality of being subtle and blunt at the same time. Through this, Reed provides remarkably sharp and thought-provoking racial commentary.

Though written in 1972, the central motifs discussed in Mumbo Jumbo are still incredibly relevant. Cultural appropriation on the part of white America is ever-present and media portrayal of young black men and women is habitually misconstrued. White people continue to dominate social, economic and political affairs and Western culture remains the prevailing global standard while the immeasurable contributions of black, African people continue to be undermined and overlooked; these are the things that need to be “cured”. There are definite parallels between the events that take place in Mumbo Jumbo and current events. Just like in the colorful streets of Harlem in 1920, a Jes Grew epidemic—a widespread condition of physical, intellectual and spiritual liberation—may be just what we need.


Words by EYE CANDY

https://afropunk.com/2015/04/feature-mumbo-jumbo-by-ishmael-reed-an-infectious-masterpiece-of-black-literature/

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo through Confucianism

Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature pp 157-175| Cite as
Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo through Confucianism
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Authors and affiliations

Yupei Zhou
Chapter

Abstract

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo has been widely accepted as a postmodern novel. Most critics define the novel as postmodern on the basis that it is, both formally and thematically, a postmodern deconstruction of modern epistemology and politics and that it offers and experiments with artistic forms and epistemological paradigms alternative to the modern categorization of African American art and African Americans as the other. For most critics, the formal implies, explicates, expresses, or mediates the epistemological. The formal and the epistemological constitute a multicultural as well as oppositional discourse. As W. Lawrence Hogue states, “deconstructing the novel becomes a metaphor for deconstructing metaphysics” for Reed (“Postmodernism” 182). Hogue’s discussion of Mumbo Jumbo’s paradigm of postmodern epistemology takes the formal as his analytic framework. Likewise, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. points out that Mumbo Jumbo, by way of such formal strategies as pastiche, parody, doubling, and signifying, not only revises the Western idea of writing and reading but also critiques “the notions of closure” that are both obvious in Western metaphysics and “implicit in the key texts of the Afro-American canon” (226–27).


https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9780230119123_8

Keywords African American Study Critical Stance Binary Opposition Dialectic Relationship Supernatural Power 

Works Cited

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Chapter 2  Amalgamation of Cultures: Differences Embraced 

 It is my habit as a born-again pagan to lie on the earth in worship -Alice Walker

Ishmael Reed‘s Mumbo Jumbo is about the crisis of culture that refuses to
acknowledge itself, exposing the fallacies and limitations of the Western
monotheistic tradition. The novel also explores as an alternative, the libratory
possibilities of ancient pantheistic nature-based religions. In this polyvocal novel,
the environment speaks through the mythic and contemporary figures of Osiris
and PaPaLaBas, one a deity and the other a houngan, both of whom are affiliated
closely with the natural world. Reed sees affinities between African and native
American tribes in terms of both their systems of belief and their victimizations by
European and American political, cultural and religious imperialism. He asserts
that tribal people could be mutually useful in mounting a counter attack on
western civilization, particularly by empowering themselves through the ancient
stories and practices.

 As an accomplished novelist, Multiculturalism stands out as an integral part
in Reed‘s writing. Reed himself has defined multiculturalism as― an amalgamation of
perspectives, art forms and lifestyles from different cultures, past and present‗‗
(Jesse 5).Papa La Bas begins his reconstruction with ‗well if you must know, it all
began thousands of years ago in Egypt, acceding to a high up, murder in the
Haitian aristocracy‗(160.) Reed delves deep into Egyptian mythology of Osiris,
and Isis. They become the progenitors of multiculture and the Mumbo Jumbo
Cathedral. At the same time, Set becomes the symbol of monoculture and the
Wallflower Order. Gradually, Papa La Bas brings together Moses and Jethro,
unifying Egyptian myth with Biblical mythology. This leads to the Medieval
Knight Templar and takes the reader to the Current Wallflower Order. He presents
Egyptian culture as a unique combination of both monoculture and multiculture.
Moses is portrayed as the incarnation of monoculture and Jethro stands out as the
symbol of multiculture.

 In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed makes reference to Egyptian mythology and Old
Testament. He admits that he is engaged in synthesizing and synchronizing.
He synthesizes by blending similar ones and synchronizes by putting together
disparate elements into the same, which is an excellent example of multiculturalism.
Thus, thematically and structurally Mumbo Jumbo is a telling example of
multiculturalism. Another instance of multiculturalism is to be seen in Reed‘s
highlighting of Jazz and Voodoo as representation of multiculture. Being an
accomplished craftsman, Reed makes his Mumbo Jumbo as the platform for his
multicultural through amalgamation and improvisation. An epidemic called Jes
Grew creeps into U.S.A from Haiti and slowly engulfs the nation. Jes Grew
represents the music, dance and rebellion against the status quo. It is also a
metaphor for multiculturalism. It is born out of the subordinate cultures and
inspires people to participate in the new cultural activities. But the Wallflower
Order is threatened by the new freedom and views it as rebellion. In fact, the
Wallflower Order is a metaphor for any part of the dominant culture that fears new
ideas, or tries to preserve its old ways to the detriment of marginalized culture.

The champions of Wallflower Order preach the virtues of Homer, but reject
the modern black writers. The Wallflower Order tries to contain Jes Grew. It resorts
to censoring and co-opting this cultural phenomenon. Gradually, Jes Grew is
searching for its text or doctrine. Once Jes Grew finds its text, it becomes part and
parcel of American culture. Consequently, all the new ideas symbolized by the
jazz age will be accepted by the mainstream society. Throughout Mumbo Jumbo,
Jes Grew is associated with black expressive cultures such as Voodoo, dance, jazz
and blues, and as such seems to function like the blues which according to
Houston A. Baker, comprises ―a meditational site where familiar antinomies are
resolved (or dissolved) in the office of adequate cultural understanding.

 A glance at the reviews and articles reveal how Reed has challenged
literary critics, some of whom have failed to fully understand the black expressive
culture of Vodun that continues to inform Reed‘s writing.

 In an interview given
after Mumbo Jumbo was published, Reed discusses his concerns in the novel:
I want to go into the mysteries of the American civilization. The
American civilization has finally got its rhythm; looking into the
past you can see the rhythms of this civilization. So, I stepped back
to an age that reminds me of the one I‘m writing in. I stepped back
to the twenties. Instead of Nixon, I invoked Harding. The parallels
between the two are remarkable. (Bellamy 133-34)

 To probe the mysteries of the civilization, it is appropriate that Reed uses the
detective genre, essentially a novel of suspense, to structure the novel. The conventions
of this genre enable Reed to depict a world of conflicting powers which the
detective must investigate and explain.

READ THE REST HERE https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/37140/2/chapter2.pdf

Mumbo Jumbo

By Alan Friedman
Aug. 6, 1972
Credit...The New York Times Archives

See the article in its original context from

August 6, 1972, Section BR, Page 1
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/06/archives/mumbo-jumbo-by-ishmael-reed-illustrated-223-pp-new-york-doubleday.html

“The Norton Anthology of Poetry” spans the centuries from Chaucer to Reed. Whether he likes it or not, Ishmael Reed has for some time now occupied a black outpost in a white landscape. To judge from his new book, he doesn't like it much. His latest work, written with black humor, is a satire on the unfinished race between the races in America and throughout history. It is a book of deliberate unruliness and sophisticated incongruity, a dazzling maze of black‐and‐white history and fantasy, in‐jokes and outrage, erudition and superstition. Not only to white readers like myself wilt the way into and out of this maze be puzzling. For though it's a novel, the author's method is not novelistic. Wholly original, his book is an

unholy cross between the craft of fiction and witchcraft.

I don't mean merely that “Mumbo Jumbo” is about such mysteries as HooDoo or VooDoo. “Black Herman walks to the bed, picks up her scarf, and casts it to the floor where it becomes a snake.” I mean that it attempts, through its deadpan phan tasmagoria of a plot, and through the black art of the Magus as storyteller, to achieve the kind of hold on the reader's mind that from ancient times and in primitive contexts has always been associated with the secret Word, the sacred Text.

The plot of “Mumbo Jumbo” is mind ‐ boggling. In the 1920's an epidemic called Jes Grew begins to infect the United States, especially its black citizens. Topsy said he “jes' grew,” but Reed traces the origins of the Jes Grew infection back to the Egyptian god Osiris. As the plague spreads in the 1920's, a worldwide conspiracy, the “Mu'tafikah(?),” be gins to seize African, Oriental, and native American art treasures from white museums “of Art De tention” in order to return them to the peoples who created them. Locked in deadly combat with this “Black Tide of Mud” are “an ancient society known as the Atonist Path” (Aton, the Sun God), “its military arm the Wallflower Order,” and the medieval Knights Templars. As someone in the book notices, “It has been an interesting 2000 years.”

But just what is this potent infection the author calls Jes Grew? “Ask Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, your poets, your painters, ask them how to catch it. Ask those people who be shaking their tambourines impervious of the ridicule they receive from Black and White Atonists, Europe the ghost rattling its chains down the deserted halls of their brains. Ask those little colored urchins who ‘make up’ those new dance steps and the Black cook who wrote the last lines of the ‘Ballad of Jesse James.’ Ask the man who, deprived of an electronic guitar, picked up a wash board and started to play it. The Rhyming Fool who sits in Re'‐mote Mississippi and talks ‘crazy’ for hours. The dazzling paradizing pun ning mischievous pre‐Joycean style play for Cakewalking, your Calinda, your Minstrelsy give‐and‐take of the ultra‐absurd. Ask the people who put wax paper over combs and blow through them. In other words, Nathan, I am saying Open‐Up‐To Right‐Here.”

The book is like that, frankly and consummately freewheeling, part historical funferal, here a highbrow satire, here a low‐key farce, even roman a clef. The villain of the piece is a controversial book publisher named Hinckle Von Vampton who wears “a black patch on his eye from an old war wound.” But Hinckle Von Vampton also turns out to be thousand‐year‐old Crusader who has learned to cheat death through a secret diet. Reed loves to mix his elements: spiritualists with cops and robbers, literary criticism with caricature, “a little bit of jive talk and a little bit of North Africa,” romance and necromancy, Egyptology, etymology, bibliography, hagiography, poli tics, Teutonic knights, and marvelously bizarre headlines—“MUSCLE WHITE BAGS COON.”

Through all this, though he tells a fast‐paced story, the author plays fast and loose with the conventions of storytelling. For example, in the very midst of a kidnapping, the ten sion is interrupted to provide—as motive for the kidnapping itself — a long myth of Osiris, Moses and Jethro. Readers will find the ex perience rough, unless they are willing to put aside the usual ex pectations about what a novel is supposed to be, and the satisfaction it is rumored to provide. Ishmael Reed is unique, and he has other things to offer. If one stays with “Mumbo Jumbo,” uncannily, the book begins to establish its very own life, on its very own terms.

The terms are demanding. Reed wants to convince, not persuade. When William Golding unfolds his fable in “Lord of the Flies,” when Kurt Vonnegut spins his satire in “Cat's Cradle,” we are led to be lieve in the fantasy by a persuasive context: by tone, detail, characters, timing and drama. Disbelief is in fact easy to suspend because belief is what the audience craves and the storyteller loves to create. But Ish mael Reed, in the manner of William Burroughs, avoids persuasion, he in vites disbelief. Our very refusal (in ability) to lend credence to the lurid anti‐logic of “Naked Lunch” leaves us reeling—and then, if we can still turn pages at all, mesmerized by the novel's inner vision. Still, Bur roughs deals in junk nightmares, Reed in black ritual. “I . . . I don't want to be difficult with you, Hiero thant 1 says pressing the button so that 3 weird looking dudes in 3d Man Theme trenches enter through the doors leading to the round room. One carrys the ritual dagger on

Reed's tone here and elsewhere is curiously flat, opaque, hypnotic and carefully chosen. Earlier, in “The Freelance Pallbearers,” he displayed a prose style of considerable trans parency and brilliance. That first novel was a satire, too. A tale of slapstick and martyrdom; persua sive, but not convincing. His second novel, “Yellow Back Radio Broke Down,” was a Gnostic Western, a bizarre epic of cowpunching, hexing, execution and papal interven tion. So wild that there the question of belief could hardly arise. “Drag bent over and french kissed the animal be tween his teeth, licking the slaver from around the horse's gums.” “A novel,” the hero asserted after shooting his horse, “can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumbling of wild men saddled by demons.”

“Mumbo Jumbo” is all of these, but it is also sterner stuff than anything in his earlier books. The author is after bigger game now, and he has taken a risk. His terms in “Mumbo Jumbo” go beyond those of fiction. Beneath the passions of individual charac ters, beneath the conflict of blacks and whites, beneath every plague and blessing in the book, lies an opposition be tween the gods, between Osiris and Aton (compare Dionysos and Apollo). There is a prece dent, a novel at once satiric and holy: “The Golden Ass” of Apuleius written for the an cient sect of Isis. But that was long ago. And Reed sees the problem:

“A sacred Black Work if it came along today would be left unpublished.” It would be “the essential Pan ‐ Africanism . . . artists relating across contin ents their craft, drumbeats from the aeons, sounds that are still with us.” However, since the ancient Text is still missing, “we will make our own future text.”

So I suspect that for Ishmael Reed “Mumbo Jumbo” is some thing a good deal more than a novel. Through all the wild gy rations of its black comedy, he casts a nonfiction spell, he weaves an incantation with footnotes, he endows his Text with power. And if one reads it through, one risks succumbing to the Text . . . or as Reed once put it in a poem, disappearing into it.

The hunger of this poem is legendary it has taken in many victims.

Themes and Meanings

(LITERARY ESSENTIALS: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE)

https://www.enotes.com/topics/mumbo-jumbo/themes

As a novel of ideas and satirical criticism, Mumbo Jumbo works on a number of levels. Primarily, it is a postmodernist detective novel in the tradition of black detective fiction. It uses altered detective personas, black vernacular, double consciousness, and magic while parodying the detective form. Mumbo Jumbo’s metaphysical central mystery and its revisionist approach to history are additional indications of postmodern detective viewpoints.

On another level, it is a witty indictment of extreme behavior of all types. Characters representing many aspects of the ideological spectrum are shown to be buffoonish and narrow-minded. Abdul Hamid, sounding his clarion call of black power, is ridiculed in the end as a black puritan who burns the sacred text because it is, in his estimation, too lewd and scandalous.

On another level, the book suggests the ancient conflict between Eros and Thanatos. Put in its simplest terms, Mumbo Jumbo reflects humankind’s constant war with itself. On one side lie love and life, affirming revitalization; on the other side lie hate and self-destruction. Reed seems to suggest that the intensity of the conflict heightened as the world moved into the twentieth century.

The social and political structure of Western civilization, based on a death-seeking ethos, is portrayed as contemptible. An example of this occurs when the chief Atonist is overjoyed to see that the watercress darter has become extinct, further proof that the Atonist cause is winning the fight for control of the planet.

The continuous conflict between different ideologies and groups in the novel suggests a society as well as a world in conflict. Berbelang is a black revolutionary fighting the racist practices of institutions such as museums. There is even division among ranks, as the Knights Templar quarrel with the death-dealing Wallflower Order. Amid this chaos, there seem to be few manifestations of sanity and continuity.

A broad condemnation of Western civilization is constructed through the eyes of an educated, sensitive African American. The novel posits a positive approach to African American consciousness based on Afrocentric, not Eurocentric, worldviews. Reed accomplishes this by reinterpreting the entire history of Western civilization, redefining its myths and reconstructing its gods.

“Mumbo jumbo” in common vernacular suggests something unintelligible or mysterious. Reed concentrates instead on the positive aspects of the African mother tongue. Within the text itself, “mumbo jumbo” is defined as coming from the Mandingo language and means a “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.” Reed indicates by this example his intent to reconnect the African American community to African ancestors and to restore the African American identity by redefining the historical past.

Reed does this by creating, in this and other works, his own particular worldview, or Neo-HooDoo aesthetic, based on African American perception. Neo-HooDoo stresses the positive attributes of African American community and value systems. For example, PaPa LaBas is linked to the Haitian voodoo mysteries, since LaBas is a powerful Haitian spirit connected in turn to the ancient mysteries of African religion.

Reed’s revisionist interpretation establishes the Osiris/Set conflict at the very origins of human consciousness. Africa’s Egypt is seen in this sense as the progenitor of humankind, containing the seeds of both destruction and renewal. Jes Grew is Reed’s Neo-HooDoo terminology for the positive revitalization of the African American spirit that possesses the power to save all of humankind from total destruction. The term derives from James Weldon Johnson’s description of ragtime music and of the character of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): Both “jes’ grew.”

Positive attributes of African American culture are stressed through the repeated insertion of real figures from black history, black music, and..

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

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.

Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo
by Ted Gioiahttp://fractiousfiction.com/mumbo_jumbo.html

In my writings on music, I have sometimes compared the dissemination
of a new performance style to the spread of a disease. This isn't just a
fancy metaphor. The mathematical models used to study the diffusion
of innovations come from medical science, and were originally developed
to predict the spread of epidemics. (Check out the work of Everett Rogersfor insights into this field of forecasting and trend analysis.)

In my twenties, when I worked as a management
consulting with McKinsey and the Boston Consulting
Group, I applied these formulas to plot the success
of new product launches and forecast the impact of
technology shifts. Later I found that these same
mathematical models could help me understand
the early spread of jazz, blues and other musical
'epidemics' of the past and present. A new cultural
meme is a kind of germ, and often the very same
conditions that foster one also help spread the other.
In other words, it’s no coincidence that New Orleans,
the birthplace of jazz, was also one of the unhealthiest
cities in the US at the time that this music came of age.

I doubt that novelist Ishmael Reed ever practiced
management consulting, but apparently he learned the same lessons
about the diffusion of new musical styles. In his 1972 novel Mumbo
Jumbo, Reed writes the story of an 'epidemic' of black culture—song,
dance, slang and other elements—spreading into mainstream America.
He calls his plague 'Jes Grew' and it is spread by 'Jes Grew Carriers'
(or J.G.C.s) who are responsible for outbreaks throughout the US, and
in some locations overseas.

Reed sets most of his story in New York during the Jazz Age. An earlier
outbreak of 'Jes Grew'—associated with the rise of ragtime in the
1890s—had been effectively contained. But now a new, stronger bug
is sweeping northward from New Orleans, and threatens to subdue
most of the population. There are "18,000 cases in Arkansas, 60,000
in Tennessee, 98,000 in Mississippi and cases showing up even in
Wyoming." Workers are dancing the Turkey Trot during their lunch break,
and singing in the streets. The authorities are alarmed. People want to
catch this new disease. Those who are still healthy gather around those
already bitten by the bug, and chant "give me fever, give me fever."

But if everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon of the new black plague,
who is left to stop it. Here Reed outdoes himself, offering the grandest of
conspiracy theories. The Knights Templar, apparently disbanded in the
year 1312, are actually still hanging around, and waiting for a chance to
stop the Jes Grew epidemic. But they need to get in line. The Teutonic
Knights, founded in the twelfth century, also want to block the disease.
And some Masons, a former cop, yellow journalists, Wall Street,
politicians the folks at the Plutocrat Club, and a mysterious group
known as the Wallflower Order, dedicated to implementing the world-
view of an even bigger conspiracy group, known as the Atonists, all
have skin in the game (literally and metaphorically).

And this conspiracy has been around for a long, long time. Take the
aforementioned 'Atonists', for example. Back in ancient Egypt, they
worshipped the disk of the sun, known as Aton, but now they represent a
coalition of angry monotheists, with everyone from Christians to Freudians
offering their support.

How can you keep a conspiracy this big a secret? And continue to
keep it secret for thousands of years? Reed doesn't tell us. Fortunately
a few brave souls have figured out the dark, dirty truth, and are willing to
take on this enormous coalition of evil doers—in particular, Papa La
Bas of the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral, an upholder of African spiritualism,
and his ally Black Herman, a real-life African-American stage magician
who performed through the United States during the 1920s and early
1930s.

Other historical figures, from Warren G. Harding to King Tut, make
their appearance in cameo roles in this book. Three years after Reed
published Mumbo Jumbo, E.L. Doctorow released his novel Ragtime
to great acclaim, with particular praise lavished on that book’s mixture of
fictional characters and real personages from early 20th century America.
But Reed set the tone for this mashup up truth and fiction in his colorful
predecessor, and even anticipated Doctorow's reliance on black music
as an emblem for the flux and flow of the era.

If anything, Reed is more ambitious. He even includes footnotes and a
lengthy bibliography at the end of his novel—with citations of everyone
from Edward Gibbon to Madame Blavatsky. Photos and artwork are
also inserted into the text, which often seems intent on breaking free of
the constraints of the novel, and turning into a radical reinterpretation of
the last several thousand years of human society.

This book is packed to the brim with symbols and vaguely coded
references. For example, the leader of the Knights Templar’s efforts
to stamp out Jes Grew is a journalist named Hinckle Von Vampton.
Students of American literary history will easily recognize a parody of
white Harlem Renaissance advocate Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964).
Reed describes Von Vampton as having one blue eye, and wearing a
black eyepatch over the other eye—typical of the extravagant symbolism
that shows up again and again in this book, and a fitting way of depicting
Van Vechten's role as an intermediary between white and black culture.
But how many readers also pick up on the reference to Warren Hinckle,
a flamboyant San Francisco journalist who was at the peak of his fame
when Mumbo Jumbo was published, and cut a striking figure in town with
a black eyepatch?

Toward the conclusion of Mumbo Jumbo, Reed abandons his main
characters for thirty pages of revisionist history, ("Well, if you must know,
it all began 1000s of years ago in Egypt…") The campy, over-the-top
style of delivery may convince you that Reed is offering a parody of
conspiracy theories. But his intensity and earnestness also send a
message that he believes in them too. This tension is unresolved,
and I suspect that choice is deliberate. Reed wants to have it both ways:
he demands us to take his Atonist conspiracy seriously, but also wants
to maintain the flamboyant, comic tone that makes it laughable as well.

Yet readers may be confused at the end result. Does Ishmael Reed
really believe that Scott Joplin was institutionalized and given electro-
shock treatments by enemies of black music? Does he really think
that Warren G. Harding was our first African-American president
before Barack Obama? Is he actually contending that the Roman
Emperor Julian was assassinated by Christians? Does he really
believe that space ships landed in pre-Columbian Mexico?

In other words, Reed has delivered a classic work in the literature of
paranoia. He joins an illustrious company, offering us a book that can
stand alongside—at least in terms of the breadth of its conspiracy
theories—Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Umberto Eco’s
Foucault’' Pendulum, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, Robert
Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus Trilogy, Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirensof Titan and other powerful literary evocations of our zeal to find hidden
enemies everywhere we look. Writers nowadays may do some things
better than their predecessors, but the generation that lived through
McCarthyism, the Cold War, Alger Hiss and Kim Philby had a much
better skill at capturing the exotic flavor of the paranoid mindset in
narrative form.

So you are best served if you come to this novel with a deep knowledge
of history—and not just American history, given the ever expanding
scope of Reed's concerns and conspiracies. The knowledgeable reader
will decipher many of the half-hidden references and apply good judgment
in deciding how many of Reed's "facts" can be believed. Others can
come along for the ride, and enjoy the color and pageantry of this novel.
But they need to remember the definition of mumbo jumbo, which (like
this novel, given that appropriate name) is a style of speaking in which
it's hard to separate gospel truth from good showmanship.


Ted Gioia writes on literature, music and popular culture. His most recent book is
The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire.

ISHMAEL REED BETWEEN AMIRI BARAKA 
AND GEORGE S. SCHUYLER

Ntongela Masilela
http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/NAM/general/essays/reed.pdf

In an essay written from Oakland, "Ground Zero," the novelist Ishmael
Teed predicts that the time is fast approaching when the Black working
class - 'people who've suffered all manner of degradation so that their
children might become achievers' - will have to take the offensive against
'Black terrorists . . . the brutal crack fascists.' Comparing daily existence in
East Oakland to the oppression in Haiti under the Tontons Macoutes . . .

-Mike Davis, "Los Angeles: Civil Liberties between the Hammer
and the Rock," New Left Review

Ishmael Reed, one of America's premier novelists today, is a real paradox: in his
critical and cultural essays, assembled in SHROVETIDE IN OLD NEW
ORLEANS (1978) and in GOD MADE ALASKA FOR THE INDIANS:
SELECTED ESSAYS (1982), he is capable of making the most nonsensical
political and historical statements; yet in his very impressive novels, especially in
the great MUMBO JUMBO, one encounters a most lucid historical imagination
inhabiting complex literary figurations. It is presumably this incomparable novel
which impelled Fredric Jameson to place Reed among the leading postmodernist
writers, in company with John Ashbery and others. 1 Though the postmodernist
constituents in literature have still to be precisely located, defined and theorized,
one cannot accept Harold Bloom's scorn and dismissal of the concept of
postmodernism, substituting for it the continuation of Emersonian Romanticism.
MUMBO JUMBO is remarkable not only for its convoluted literary structure, but
also for its historicity, in that it articulates its postmodernist nature against the
modernism of HEART OF DARKNESS. Jameson in THE POLITICAL
UNCONSCIOUS has taught us that it was in Joseph Conrad that modernism
constelated towards its unity, and it was in him also that it began the elementary
configurations of its configurations. The historical imagination displayed in
MUMBO JUMBO is deep, in that it not only disputes and challenges Conrad's
interpretation of African history and African civilization, but it also attempts to
postulate the cultural unity of the African world (in Africa and in the diaspora).
Elsewhere, in the context of attempting a critique of Houston A. Baker's
poststructuralist reading of African-American modernism and Henry Louis
Gates' poststructuralist mapping of black American postmodernism, we
attempted to indicate the importance of this here postmodernist novel. Here our
concern is Reed's critical imagination, or really, its profound absence.
f
If the historical imagination is bristlingly present in MUMBO JUMBO, it is
insufficiently present in his literary essays. It is this insufficiency which has been
at the center of Reed's political and intellectual reaction , so much fashionable
with neo-conservatives, who nearly exercise cultural hegemony in political habits
is profoundly disconcerting to someone from the Third World, especially to this
black South African exile. For instance, in an address to a National Conference
of Afro-American Writers given on November 9, 1974 in Howard University,
Reed seriously postulates: "Marx recognized man's material needs, but he didn't
recognize man's psychic needs. That's why the people come up with a Nixon
from time to time---' cause Nixon knows more about the people than Marx did;
and I suggest that just because Marx spent twenty years in the library, doesn't
mean he's all that smart. I used to work in a library, and a lot of people just came
in to get warm." How can one possibly respond to this supposed intellectual
comparison! In which way Nixon had a better grasp of human history that Marx,
a superior understanding of human culture than Marx, a finer intellectual culture
than Marx. Such a mediocre talent; but Reed is a man of outstanding literary
abilities, who has written a great novel, and has a potential of being a very great
writer. It is not by chance that Derek Walcott, whom Joseph Brodsky considers
to be the greatest poet in the English language today, considers Ishmael Reed to
be a writer of the first rank. Clearly then, a writer of such formidable literary
abilities, who comes from an oppressed and dispossessed national group, has a
historical and intellectual responsibility to educate , as Ngugi was Thiongo and
Chinua Achebe so well understood over twenty years ago, in the middle 1960's.
By expressing such a supposedly serious intellectual estimation, Ishmael Reed
mis-educates Ameri-people, especially the African-Americans, who are already
disadvantageously placed within American 'culture', i.e., the American social
structure is predicated on the mis-educating of African-Americans. Reed merely
compounds the problem, instead of providing solutions to it. In other words,
Reed mis-educates on behalf of the American ruling class. His uncritical
invective against Marxism knows no limits, for in another context, he writes:
"Notice how Solzhenitsyn recently referred to Marxism as a Western idea. As
Ionesco recently pointed out, Marxism is rooted in the Christian tradition.
Solzhenitsyn's remarks can be interpreted as those of a Russian pagan getting
back at the Church of Rome. . . . His (a 'black' social realist critic) calling it 'cute'
was one of the events that convinced me that you can't apply the Marxist reading
to what is happening here in this country. . . ." This text, "Ishmael Reed---Self
Interview", is so fundamental to understanding Reed's political, intellectual and
literary consciousness, that it will be necessary to return to it later in this sketch.
Suffice to say for the moment, that Ionesco and Solzhenitsyn are hardly the
authorities one can take intellectually serious on the matter of historical
materialism, because of their rabid anti-Communism and deep hatred of Marxism
as an intellectual tradition. What knowledge of Marxism, since it seems to come
to him from third sources, yet his denunciation of this great intellectual tradition

is with the pretence of authoritativeness.