INDIA

Odisha: The Harsh World of Soft Cotton in Kujasingh Village

Shubham Kumar | 23 Oct 2024

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Cotton farming (Bt cotton) to cater to the demand of Andhra Pradesh in this border village is impacting the health of tribal farmers as well as the soil.

Kujasingh is a village of backward tribals in coastal Gajapati district of Odisha. As part of work, one needed to check the library in the village school. It was a dilapidated building, consisting of eight rooms. In one room, there were 19 children, aged 10-12 years, sitting on the ground in an almost half-naked state. This writer tried talking to the children in Hindi but got back blank stares as they were not able to understand anything. They understood a bit of Oriya, but not Hindi. Still, when asked: “Do you people get books?”, the children shook their heads in unison.

The faces of many of those children bore some marks. When asked, their teacher (Jayanti), who was standing nearby, mumbled in a low voice, “Cotton is cultivated here. Adults have to bend down to pluck cotton, so it takes them a lot of time. It is also a bit of boring work. So, farmers deploy small children to do this work, as they are short and don’t have to bend down to pluck a lot of cotton. They get these marks on their faces while plucking cotton”.

Jayanti’s statement sounded illogical. Cotton is grown in other parts of the country and one had not heard of such a thing till date.

 When prodded further, Jayanti, said, “We are adivasis, should we look at our face or our stomachs? Actually, this is not a cotton land; we don’t even know how to grow cotton. The people of Andhra have ruined us by luring us with money”.

The teacher's words sounded puzzling. This writer left the classroom with a heavy heart, recalling how in childhood, cotton was known as “white gold”.

 While descending the stairs of that dilapidated school, one could see cotton wool floating around in the air. It was a thrilling sight.

 

‘Thighs Without Veins’

This is the living story of people sowing cotton seeds on a mountain. Gajapati is a tribal district, which was carved out of Ganjam district in 1992. The headquarters of this coastal district is at Paralakhemundi, on the Andhra Pradesh border. It used to be the parliamentary constituency of former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections.

In Mahendragiri mountain in the district, there is a belief, as per the Mahabharata, that the Pandava brothers lived on this mountain during their exile. A river named Mahendratanaya flows from the chest of this mountain. This river marks the border of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

Kujasingh village, located in Gumma block of Gajapati district, has 40 houses, located in the lap of a mountain. The Joraswar tribal community lives in this village. There is forest above and fields below. The main food consumed by the villagers is water and rice. And along with it, there is hand-made liquor. The village also has a pet python, which villagers said keeps lying on the road.

 There are many hilly villages in these areas of Odisha where cotton is cultivated. Kujasingh is one of them. If one looks down the slope from Kujasingh, it looks like a land covered with white flowers. Seeing those cotton fields for the first time, one was reminded of a line from Kedarnath Singh's poem:

Yah jo aapki kamiz hai

Kisi ke kheton mein khila kapas ka phool hai

 (This shirt of yours is a cotton flower blooming in someone's field)

Recently, while conducting a survey for a government scheme, one visited this village. It was raining heavily that day. At the panchayat office, one by one, old women started coming. Almost all of them were limping. When asked, the medical officer sitting there said,

“Cotton is cultivated here. When the cotton is plucked, before selling it in bulk, the old women keep a few sacks for themselves. Throughout the year, they rub it on their thighs with their hands to make wicks for lamps used for worship. These are sold in abundance in the temples of Andhra Pradesh. These women have been doing this work for 20–25 years. Due to this, the veins of their thighs are damaged.”

 These women get Rs. 4 for making a packet of wicks, which is sold in the market for Rs.12-15, and in some places even for Rs.20. Although younger women have stopped doing this work, the older women continue doing it for survival.

 This was the second imprint of “white gold” that one saw on the bodies of people of the area.

 The Cotton Trap

Cotton entered like an 'angel' in some districts of south-western Odisha. In these districts -- Kalahandi, Rayagada, Gajapati, and some hilly areas of Koraput -- farmers planted cotton crops for the first time in the 1990s, leaving aside their traditional hill farming.

When asked where and how cotton first entered these areas, many villagers said they did not know how cotton reached them. One person said his father used to do cotton farming, so they also started doing it. An old farmer (Devvrat) sounded most convincing. A retired teacher, he also used to do farming. “It (cotton) came to us from Andhra Pradesh around 1990; there were many cloth factories in Andhra where cotton was needed. Gajapati is very close to Andhra, so its cultivation started here first,” said Devvrat.

After pausing for a while, he added, “Doing such farming destroys the land, and don't even ask about the diseases. The people of Andhra were clever; they ruined us by luring us with money”.

Things became a bit clearer now. Cotton has become a bone stuck in the throats for the people here. They are neither able to swallow it nor spit it out.

On a terraced cotton field, surrounded by mountains from all sides, one could see the crop being picked. A large number of children were seen working. This field belonged to Raghu, 46, the sarpanch of this tribal village.

When this writer asked Raghu (who as plucking the plants) in Hindi to explain how cotton farming was done, jokingly adding that it looked like a promising venture, he said, “Don't do cotton farming. The land gets spoiled”.

 The school teacher (Jayanti), who was standing nearby, told Raghu in Oriya that we had come to learn about cotton and he should tell us whatever he knew. After remain silent for a while, he said, "The kappa (cotton) crop came to us; before that, we used to cultivate mandia (millet), arhar (pulses), and rice. In the beginning, Bt (a type of GM (genetically modified) cotton) seeds were very rare. When someone used to go to Andhra Pradesh, he used to bring it. Later, it turned into a seed business. When I did cotton farming for the first time, I made a lot of profit. It did not require as much hard work as rice. But now everyone has started growing it here. Now there is no benefit. On the contrary, our debts are increasing one after the other.”

On being asked why they don’t stop cultivating it if there is no profit, Raghu tearfully said, “Now nothing will grow on this land except cotton”.

 “When we planted cotton, we did not know that it would make the field favourable only to itself. Traders from outside used to give us seeds and fertilisers. Last year, I planted pigeon pea, but it remained in the ground. This time, we have planted only cotton,” he explained.

Raghu would have told us some more things, but by then his daughter had brought food for him. He sat down have his food at the edge of the field. 

As we walk away, Jayanti asked, “Bhaina (brother in Oriya), why do you want to know about cotton? Will the government run any schemes?”

 With no proper answer, I asked, “Who buys this cotton?” “My uncle buys the cotton of the whole village,” I was told. I said, I want to meet him. At first Jayanti hesitated, then said “We will meet him on Sunday.”

Labour brokerage

 On Sunday, we reached Jayanti's uncle's house, a big and beautiful house with various types of wooden dynasty frames, a statue of Gandhiji, and a statue of Lord Jagannath. It didn't feel like being in a tribal area. There were more than 50 cotton sacks lying in the verandah, while other sacks were being loaded on a small truck. Jayanti's uncle Loknath was counting the sacks.

After a while, he came in an attire like that of people from Andhra. In this part of Odisha, which adjoins Andhra, most of the affluent people are more influenced by the lifestyle of the people of Andhra Pradesh and want to live like them. 

When told that I wanted to know and understand about cotton and why many villagers were troubled by it, Loknath began by abusing cotton-cultivating farmers in Oriya. Then he said, “Who had a house in this area earlier, whose children used to wear clothes? Everything that is visible here is because of kappa. Now, we will have to pay the price.”

When asked where the seeds of cotton were coming from, he said,

“Don’t ask; the whole problem is about the seed; this Bt (cotton variety) has been banned by Andhra people. Cotton cannot be grown there, but there is a high demand for cotton there. So, they give the seed, and cotton is grown in the border area.”

Incidentally, Andhra Pradesh has not banned Bt cotton – it has just prohibited cultivation of some types.

 When asked who brought in the seeds from Andhra Pradesh went silent for a while. Jayanti piped up, “Actually, uncle brings the seed from there; he provides the fertiliser. And when the crop comes, all the farmers give the crop to uncle”.

 When are the crops planted? Seed sowing starts in May-June, and the crop starts coming out in November.  Do you use any manure or fertiliser? The farmers were saying the seeds are expensive and the chemicals are even more expensive.

 After all these questions were fired at him, Loknath got up and said, “What expensive? Glycophosate is a little expensive. There is a ruckus over it. Doctors are saying that due to its spraying, cotton farmers are getting cancer, kidney failure. Everybody wants to starve the tribals by spreading rumors here”.

Glycophosate or glyphosate is the herbicide to which Bt cotton is tolerant. So, if you plant Bt cotton you can spray glyphosate freely without fear of the cotton plants getting damaged.

 “This time, I have bought it for Rs.6,200; last time, it was Rs.5,600 per quintal,” he said.

 When asked why he himself doesn’t plant cotton, Loknath said, “Who wants to die, brother?”

 A medical officer, requesting anonymity, admitted glyphosate was a problem. It is sprayed before sowing seeds to kill weeds.

“But it is the root cause of cancer, and if it enters the body by mistake, then kidney damage is certain. Patients are coming to the hospital every day. The government has banned it. But people don't listen. Dealers secretly bring it from Andhra and sell it”, he said,

 An officer in the agriculture department said cotton had “made the weather and climate here worse; the temperature in summers reaches 42 degrees and it is raining.”

 “Now you will see that after a few days there will be no cotton. Kappa cannot withstand the onslaught of weather; the change in weather here is not favourable for cotton. The government is working, but there is no improvement visible anywhere”, he added.

 So, this is the story of that white-looking flower, which has the scratched the faces of children, left thighs of old women damaged, and several bodies struggling with cancer. The souls of these illiterate tribals are wounded, all because they were lured with a few rupees and decided to turn away from traditional farming to commercial farming. Allowing themselves to be exploited continuously. 

It is said that many people are involved in this “conspiracy”, and to some extent, even some among these tribals.

So, allow this writer to change poet Kedarnath Singh’s lines:

Yah jo aapke diye ki bati hai

Kitno ke jangh ki nas kha jati hai

 (This wick of your lamp 

It eats away the veins of so many people's thighs)

 

The writer studied at Banaras Hindu University, Uttar Pradesh. He is currently working as a fellow in Koraput, Odisha. The views are personal.

4,400-year-old shaman's 'snake staff' discovered in Finland

Researchers said the carved, wooden lifelike snake matches “magical” staffs portrayed in ancient rock art from the region.
Archaeologists in Finland have unearthed a 4,000-year-old life-size wooden carving of a snake believed to be a ritual staff of a Neolithic shaman.Satu Koivisto

June 29, 2021, 
By Tom Metcalfe

A 4,400-year-old life-size wooden snake unearthed in Finland may have been a staff used in “magical” rituals by a Stone Age shaman, according to a study released Monday.

The lifelike figurine, which was carved from a single piece of wood, is 21 inches long and about an inch thick at its widest, with what seems to be a very snake-like head with its mouth open.


It was found perfectly preserved in a buried layer of peat near the town of Järvensuo, about 75 miles northwest of Helsinki, at a prehistoric wetland site that archaeologists think was occupied by Neolithic (late Stone Age) peoples 4,000 to 6,000 years ago.

It’s unlike anything else ever found in Finland, although a few stylized snake figurines have been found at Neolithic archaeological sites elsewhere in the eastern Baltic region and Russia.

“They don’t resemble a real snake, like this one,” University of Turku archaeologist Satu Koivisto said in an email. “My colleague found it in one of our trenches last summer. … I thought she was joking, but when I saw the snake’s head it gave me the shivers.”

“Personally I do not like living snakes, but after this discovery I have started to like them,” she added.

The wooden carving of a snake is unlike anything else ever found in Finland.Satu Koivisto

Koivisto and her colleague Antti Lahelma, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, are the co-authors of the study on the wooden snake published in the journal Antiquity.

They think it may have been a staff used in supposedly magical rituals by a shaman — someone who communicated with spirits in a similar way to the “medicine people” of traditional Native American lore.


It’s thought the ancient peoples of this region practiced such shamanic beliefs, in which the natural world is inhabited by multitudes of usually unseen supernatural spirits or ghosts — a traditional belief that persists today in some of the remote northern regions of Scandinavia, Europe and Asia.

Ancient rock art from Finland and northern Russia shows human figures with what look like snakes in their hands, which are thought to be portrayals of shamans wielding ritual staffs of wood carved to look like snakes. Lahelma said snakes were regarded as especially sacred in the region.

“There seems to be a certain connection between snakes and people,” Lahelma told Antiquity. “This brings to mind northern shamanism of the historical period, where snakes had a special role as spirit-helper animals of the shaman … Even though the time gap is immense, the possibility of some kind of continuity is tantalizing: Do we have a Stone Age shaman's staff?”
Archaeologists work at an excavation site in Finland.Satu Koivisto

The figurine from Järvensuo certainly looks like a real snake. Its slender body is formed by two sinuously carved bends that continue to a tapered tail. The flat, angular head with its open mouth is especially realistic. Koivisto and Lahelma suggest it resembles a grass snake or European adder in the act of slithering or swimming away. The place where it was found was probably a lush water meadow at the time when it was “lost, discarded or intentionally deposited,” the researchers wrote.

Wood usually rots away when exposed to oxygen in the air or water, but sediments at the bottoms of swamps, rivers and lakes can cover some organic objects and preserve them for thousands of years.

The site near Järvensuo is thought to have been on the shores of a shallow lake when it was inhabited by groups of people in the late Stone Age. Recent excavations have yielded a trove of organic remains that have enabled archaeologists to create a more complete record of the site, Koivisto said. The finds have included a wooden tool with a handle shaped like a bear, wooden paddles and fishnet floats made of pine and birch bark.

“What a remarkable thing,” said Peter Rowley-Conwy, an archaeologist and professor emeritus of Durham University in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the research. “The ‘head’ appears definitely to have been carved to shape.”

But he was cautious about ascribing greater meaning to it: “A skeptic might wonder whether the sinuous shape was deliberate, or an accidental result of four millennia of waterlogging,” he said in an email. “I have worked on various bog sites with preserved wood, and wood fragments can be considerably distorted.”

Koivisto warns that artifacts like the “snake staff” may be lost as many wetland archaeological sites dry up.

“Wetlands are more important to us than ever before, because of their vulnerability and degradation of fragile organic data sources [from] drainage, land use and climate change,” she said “We have to hurry, before these valuable materials will be gone for good.”

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PYTHON WORSHIP 

DIE VURM IS AN ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY EVEN IN THE NORTH OF EUROPE

World's oldest python fossil unearthed

The python fossils indicate these snakes 

evolved in Europe.


The 48 million-year-old fossil python discovered in Germany.
(Image: © Copyright Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung)


Scientists have discovered fossils of the oldest python on record, a slithery beast that lived 48 million years ago in what is now Germany.


Found near an ancient lake, the snake remains are helping researchers learn where pythons originated. Previously, it wasn't clear whether pythons came from continents in the Southern Hemisphere, where they live today, or the Northern Hemisphere, where their closest living relatives (the sunbeam snakes of Southeast Asia and the Mexican burrowing python) are found. But this newfound species — dubbed Messelopython freyi — suggests that pythons evolved in Europe.

"So far, there have been no early fossils that would help decide between a Northern and Southern Hemisphere origin," study co-researcher Krister Smith, vertebrate paleontologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, told Live Science in an email. "Our new fossils are by far the oldest records of pythons, and (being in Europe) they support an origin in the Northern Hemisphere."

Related: Image gallery: Snakes of the world

VIDEO https://www.livescience.com/oldest-python-snakes-on-record.html?jwsource=cl

The M. freyi fossils were found at Messel Fossil Pit, near Frankfurt, Germany. Formerly an oil shale mine, this site almost became a garbage dump in the 1970s. ("A big hole in the ground is a valuable commodity," Smith said.) But by then, the site was already known for its remarkable fossils dating to the Eocene epoch (between 57 million and 36 million years ago). So, in 1995 it became a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) site. Fossils unearthed there include a pregnant mare, mating turtles and shimmering beetles.

Image 1 of 2


The first discovered fossil belonging to the newfound species Messelopython freyi. (Image credit: Copyright Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung)



A sketch (left) and photo of a skull (right) of one of the newly analyzed python fossils. (Image credit: Copyright Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung)


M. freyi would have been about the same size as today's small pythons, reaching nearly 3.2 feet (1 meter) in length and sporting about 275 vertebrae, the researchers said. The ancient python also sheds light on its relationship with boa constrictors.

In effect, the discovery shows that this early European python lived alongside boa constrictors, a startling find given that boas don't live anywhere near modern-day pythons. In general, boas live in South and Central America, Madagascar and northern Oceania, whereas pythons inhabit Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia. "This is one of the most exciting and intriguing aspects of the discovery of Messelopython," said study co-researcher Hussam Zaher, professor and curator of vertebrates at the Museum of Zoology at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil.

Researchers already knew that boas lived in Europe during the early Paleogene period, which lasted from 66 million to 23 million years ago. Now that it's clear pythons lived there too, it raises questions about how these "direct ecological competitors," which both squeeze prey to death, coexisted, Zaher told Live Science in an email.

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This question may be answered by finding more early python and boa fossils, especially those with preserved stomach contents, he said. In addition, researchers can look to southern Florida, where python (Python molurus bivittatus and P. sebae) and boa (Boa constrictor) species coexist as invasive species. It's not yet clear whether the P. molurus bivittatus and B. constrictor living in the Sunshine State "are competing over resources or may be using slightly different microhabitat and preys," Zaher said. "A similar situation may have happened in Europe during the Eocene."

The study was published online Wednesday (Dec. 16) in the journal Biology Letters.

Originally published on Live Science.

PYTHON WORSHIP WAS THE FIRST RELIGION 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PYTHON WORSHIP WAS THE FIRST RELIGION (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

Nina Paley's ‘Seder-Masochism’ Film Explores Patriarchy in the Book of Exodus Through Animated Ancient Idols

Screenshot from the song sequence “You Gotta Believe” by Nina Paley on Vimeo.

Global Voices interviewed American free culture activist and filmmaker Nina Paley about her new animated film “Seder-Masochism.” It is loosely based on the Book of Exodus from the Torah/Bible and exposes the veiled patriarchy in the religious text.
Creative Commons licenses

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Paley is the director of the 2008 full-length animated film “Sita Sings the Blues” which she released to the public domain in 2013. The film narrated the Indian epic poem Ramayana by using the 1920s jazz songs of Annette Hanshaw. It brought Paley worldwide fame because of its feminist interpretation of the epic and her long battle against the copyright claims tied to the songs of Annette Hanshaw used in the movie. Paley had to pay a negotiated amount of at least US$50,000 by loaning the sum. She eventually reclassified the film’s license from Creative Commons Attribution-Share-alike 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-SA 3.0) to Creative Commons CC0 (equivalent to public domain).

In an interview with Jewish podcast station Judaism Unbound, Paley said that “Seder-Masochism” is her take on the Exodus, which she first learned during Passover Seders. The Passover Seder is a Jewish ritual that involves the retelling of the liberation of Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. She added in the interview that “she identifies herself as a “born-again atheist” and explains the ways in which her recent study of the Book of Exodus has left her uncomfortable.

Several songs and scenes from the film “Seder-Masochism” have been uploaded by Paley to the Internet including the song sequence “You Gotta Believe” which turns Minoan stone goddess idols into flash animation. It features Moses and “singing” ancient goddesses who find themselves about to be defeated by patriarchy.

Global Voices reached out to Paley to learn more about her second film.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): First of all, congratulations on your upcoming work. What are the roles you're playing in the entire production? What is the movie about?

Nina Paley (NP): Once again I'm producing, directing, writing, animating, everything-ing…I'm hoping the sound designer for “Sita Sings the Blues“, Greg Sextro, is able to do more sound design for Seder-Masochism. The music is all “found” and used without permission [at the moment]. Much or all of my use is Fair use, but ultimately that can only be determined in court.

Seder-Masochism is about the Book of Exodus from the Torah/Bible, and indirectly the Quran (Moses is a prophet of Islam). My interpretation of Exodus is that it's the establishment of complete patriarchy, the elimination of any remaining goddess-worship from older times.

Some of clips from the feature-in-progress are here.

SP: What inspired you to start this project?

NP: Sita Sings the Blues was denounced by fundamentalists who called my collaborators “self-hating Hindus.” As a Jew, that rhetoric was familiar to me – Jews *invented* that “self-hating” nonsense. Since I'm not a Zionist, I've been called a “self-hating Jew” too. Also, the Hindutvadis called me a “white Christian woman who hates Hindus”, and sent hate emails saying “how would you like it if someone made a film about YOUR religion?!” Of course I love it when someone makes a good film about Abrahamism - Monty Python's Life of Brian is the best I can think of. I was (am) also frequently accused of “cultural appropriation“, implying that only those of Hindu/Asian descent are qualified to work with Hindu/Asian stories. So it seemed that everyone, right and left, wanted me to make a film about “my” religion, Judaism! I figured if they're offended by Sita Sings the Blues, they'll be REALLY offended by that. I printed up a Jew Card so I could “play” it for this project.

Ancient goddess LILITH gif by Nina Paley. 

Source: Nina Paley/Wikimedia Commons

SP: The song is hilarious! How did you bring the thousand-year-old stone idols to life?


NP: There are already goddesses in the Flash sections of Seder-Masochism I animated a couple of years ago. I needed to put more “goddess” into the film, and was tediously redrawing the Flash goddesses in Moho, the software I'm using now. It occurred to me that instead of redrawing them I could use the source images they're based on, I spent a few days finding the highest resolution images I could, and a few more days manually removing the backgrounds in GIMP. Moho can do things Flash can't, such as this type of animation with raster images. Anyway, they looked cool so I'm using them in the remaining Seder-Masochism scenes.

The goddesses in flash animation can be downloaded on Wikimedia Commons.

As Paley is producing the film on her own, she is also working with other free culture activists like the United States-based nonprofit QuestionCopyright.org to raise funds, apart from launching a Kickstarter campaign. She is uploading segments of the film publicly on the Internet as the film is being developed.

A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the origin of the goddesses. They are Minoan, not Egyptian.

Posted 4 February 2018 

Written by Subhashish Panigrahi

Written by Qurratulain (Annie) Zaman

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.

Another Croc

Another crocodile tale, except this monster turned out to be a bearded lizard. And proving once again that so called eye witness testimony is the flimsiest form of evidence, for science or justice.

Of course while relatively small the bearded lizard is commonly called a 'dragon'.

And as usual you can find out more about dragons, sea monsters and die vurm.
on my blog.

Sometimes a crocodile is just a lizard

IAN BAILEY

August 14, 2007

Vancouver -- A reported "15-foot crocodile" that drew a half-dozen police cars to a Vancouver backyard on Sunday night after panicked 911 calls from a resident turned out to fit easily into a shoe-box-sized enclosure when brought before the media yesterday.

Animal-shelter staff were looking after the bearded lizard thought to have wandered away from his owners' home.

"Sometimes they can be hard to handle, and will bite, but this guy's pretty gentle," said Paul Teichroeb, chief licence inspector for the City of Vancouver, holding up the sandy-coloured creature yesterday during a police news conference.

Police say they got a 911 call from a panicky homeowner who claimed there was a five-metre-long crocodile in his back yard.

Six officers were sent in, only to discover a 30-centimetre-long reptile called a bearded lizard.

Chief licence inspector Paul Teichroeb displays Bud a bearded dragon lizard found in a backyard on 14th Avenue.
Photograph by : Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun

SEE:

Strange Sea Creatures

I Thought I Saw A Putty Cat

Congo's Ghosts

The Fountain Of Youth

Turning Off The Nile

I Don't Do Mornings

Nessie was an Elephant?

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