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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 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.

'Fits For Your Head': The Memory of Africa in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo mobilises a history of culture which

recognises African antecedents to a specific African-American tradition, but as this

history of culture focuses on the notion of 'possession', as exemplified by the Afrodiasporan system of voodoo, the notion that an African history could constitute a history

of' origins' is revealed to be rather ridiculous. The figure of being 'possessed', or of

'going out of one's head' is used equally well in this novel to indicate vodoun rites as it is

to signify the function of memory, and similarly, emphasises the fluidity of any perceived

'difference' between these concepts. Reed's figure of 'Jes Grew' may be imagined to be

a collective term for possessive forces, as well as for the state of being possessed, and

while it is linked to a tradition specific to African-American, Caribbean and African

cultures, it is also a state which may be known to anyone who is able to present the right

frame of mind to receive it. As a memory of Africa can be 'remembered' within the

terms of a linear history, then, memory also functions as 'possessive' action, allowing a

connection to Africa to arise at any given moment. Reed draws a history of culture back

to Ancient Egypt in this novel, thereby presenting a tradition, but at the same time sends

up any tendency to attach this tradition to the sign of 'blackness', as indicative of a

narrow, "Atonist", notion of signification which perceives the relationship between

language and memory as purely linear. Reed makes a profoundly comic commentary

upon the notion of African 'origins' here, as he situates Africa not as the site of the

33 

origins of African diasporan culture, but of the' Atonist' perspective itself which he

figures as a particularly Euro-American neurosis toward tradition and the past.

As the novel's "anti-plague",l Jes Grew is figured in the novel as both a distinct tradition

and a possessive force which appears in discrete historical moments, and Reed "turn[s] to

Egypt not just as proof of a black African past but as a model for contemporary

spirituality and culture", and imagines "each moment [ ... ] in a kind of continuous

awareness of and interdependence with the others".2 In this novel which spoofs the hardboiled detective story genre,3 not least by drawing 'back to Africa' an extremely

convoluted history of a plague which manifests itself in instances of "suggestive bumping

and grinding" and "wild abandoned spooning" (22), Reed must be seen to be responding

with laughter to earnest attempts to discover something 'meaningful' about culture by

way of deciphering histories of 'origins'. So J es Grew is shown to characterise the 1920s

'Harlem Renaissance' - "The Blues is a Jes Grew, as James Weldon Johnson surmised.

Jazz was a Jes Grew which followed the Jes Grew of Ragtime. Slang is a Jes Grew too."

(214) It is also shown to be both a repetition of and a parallel to previous eras, as the end

of the novel also depicts the 1970s as a time when "Jes Grew was [again] latching onto

its blood" (216), and its lineage is furthermore charted to an Ancient Egyptian "theater 

accompanying [ ... ] agriculturalists' rites" (161). Even as Jes Grew is shown to be

illustrative of an African-American and African tradition, it is also a possessive force-

"'Jes Grew is life" (204) itself - and the novel shows that it can arise at any given

moment, and is available to anyone who presents the frame of mind to receive it. The

memory of Africa is thus felt to be intrinsic to an African-American tradition, to be the

site of a form of life depicted as 'natural', and yet also to be the site of a confrontation

between a fluid form of memory, and what is presented as the 'unnatural' attitudes

toward the past represented by Atonism. 

Reed's perspective in this novel is rooted in a tradition he calls "N eo Hoodoo because it doesn't begin with me", 4 and which is related to voodoo, which Reed regards as a "common language" which "not only united the Africans but also made it easier for them to forge alliances with those Native Americans whose customs were similar".5 Explaining that "hoodoo involved art [ ... ,]dancing, painting, poetry, it was multimedia",6 Reed understands it to be "what Black Americans came up with", "as opposed to Obeahism in Jamaica and other islands and Voodooism in Haiti", 7 but that it is still "based upon African forms of art". 8 For Reed, Helen Lock explains, Neo-HooDoo's purpose is to give new life to marginalized and apparently moribund cultural sensibilities, as Jes Grew had become, by fusing African and Euro-American  aesthetic traditions into a new African-American aesthetic, according to which orality and

literacy, past and present, fonn and spirit are all equally privileged, and cultural integrity

both preserved intact and enriched. "This is what my writing is all about. It leads me to

the places where I can see old cultures resurrected and made contemporary. Time past is

time present".

CONTINUE READING CHAPTER ONE
http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4110/1/WRAP_THESIS_Kamali_2007.pdf

Spectres of the Shore: The Memory of Africa in
Contemporary African-American and Black British
Fiction
by
Leila Francesca Kamali
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for
the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
In
English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick,
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

May 2007 

• HISTORY OF BLACK SCIENCE FICTION

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

Nisi Shawl

Wed Oct 11, 2017 

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

JES GREW

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

SF OR F?

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

TRUE LIES, GRAPHIC CONTENT, SACRED SLANG

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

SOME SORT OF CONTEXT

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

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

Who’s to say it didn’t?

PROMINENT J.G.C.s

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

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

GUN BARREL INFO DUMP

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

HOW MANY YEARS TO GO?

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

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

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

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

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

73 pp.

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

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

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

Roxanne Harde

Pages 361-377 | Published online: 26 Mar 2010

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

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


Abstract

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

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

Myungsung Kim

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

• Abstract
 
• Full Text
 
• References
 
• PDF

Abstract

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

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

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

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