Mumbo Jumbo (novel)

Last updated
Mumbo Jumbo
Mumbo jumbo.jpg
First edition
Author Ishmael Reed
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Doubleday
Publication date
1972
Media typePrint
ISBN 0-385-05675-3
OCLC 35158152
Preceded by Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down  
Followed by The Last Days of Louisiana Red  

Mumbo Jumbo is a 1972 novel by African-American author Ishmael Reed, originally published by Doubleday in New York. The novel has remained continuously in print in the decades since its first edition. It was first published in the UK by Allison and Busby, and has been published in translation in several languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, as well as a Chinese translation in 2019. The novel was released as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2017.

Contents

Text

Set in 1920s New York City, the novel depicts the elderly Harlem houngan PaPa LaBas and his companion Black Herman racing against the Wallflower Order, an international conspiracy dedicated to monotheism and control, as they attempt to root out the cause of and deal with the "Jes Grew" virus, a personification of ragtime, jazz, polytheism, and freedom. The Wallflower Order is said to work in concert with an extant [1] Knights Templar Order to prevent people from dancing, to end the dance crazes spreading among black people. The virus is spread by certain black artists, referred to in the novel as "Jes Grew Carriers" or "J.G.C.s."

Historical, social, and political events mingle freely with fictional inventions. The United States' occupation of Haiti, attempts by whites to suppress jazz music, and the widespread belief that president Warren Harding had black ancestry are mingled with a plot in which the novel's hero, PaPa LaBas, searches for a mysterious book that has disappeared with black militant Abdul Sufi Hamid (whose name reflects that of the Harlem street corner radical preacher Sufi Abdul Hamid, a.k.a. Eugene Brown, an early black convert to Islam), as a group of radicals plans to return museum treasures looted from ancient Egypt to Africa, and the Atonists within the Wallflower Order are trying to locate and train the perfect "Talking Android", a black man who will renounce African-American culture in favor of European American culture. One of the supporting characters, an ally of PaPa LaBas, is Black Herman (Benjamin Rucker, 1892–1934), an actual African-American stage magician and root doctor. Another touch of realism is the inclusion of a mysterious ocean liner that is part of the Black Star Line, a shipping line incorporated by Marcus Garvey, who organized the United Negro Improvement Association. Portions of the action take place at the "Villa Lewaro" mansion built by Madame C. J. Walker overlooking the Hudson River and at the Harlem town house of her daughter A'Lelia Walker, known as "The Dark Tower", located at 136th Street near Lenox Avenue. Other famous people who appear in the novel include the dance instructor Irene Castle, and the Harlem Renaissance authors James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a veiled reference to Malcolm X.

Additionally, in his project of blending the "real" and the "invented," Reed, through Papa LaBas, recites a counter history of The Bible, whose content transforms the normative understanding of Judeo-Christian roots. Featuring Osiris, Set, Moses and other important figures in both Egyptian and Judeo-Christian mythology, Reed re-imagines an entirely alternate past, evidenced by the Templar conflict that takes place in the novel.

Magical elements

Given that the protagonists of the novel are Voodoo practitioners, the novel itself contains a great deal of Voodoo terminology. In the novel, Voodoo is an effective art: PaPa LaBas practices from his Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral, and at one point his assistant is taken over by a loa whom she has neglected to feed. Voodoo itself is traced back to sharing a common ancestor with Judeo-Christianity in ancient Egypt, with Osiris as the first recipient of Jes Grew, whose effects and powers are interchangeable with that of Voodoo. Moses steals the Petro aspect of the Voodoo secrets from Isis. Other classic mythological figures include Dionysus, who is portrayed as a follower of Osiris, and Faust, who receives his magic not through a deal with the devil but through connections with black Voodoo practicitioners.

Background

Mumbo Jumbo draws freely on conspiracy theory, hoodoo, and voodoo traditions, as well as the Afrocentric theories of Marcus Garvey and the occult author Henri Gamache, especially Gamache's theory that the Biblical prophet Moses was black. The book's title is explained by a quote from the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary deriving the phrase from Mandingo mā-mā-gyo-mbō meaning a "magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away." [2]

Format

The format and typography of Mumbo Jumbo are unique and make allusion to several typographic and stylistic conventions not normally associated with novels. The text begins and ends as if it were a movie script, with credits, a fade-in, and a freeze-frame followed by the publication and title pages which occur after chapter one. This is followed by a closing section that mimics a scholarly book on social history or folk magic by citing a lengthy bibliography. In addition, the tale is illustrated with drawings, photographs, and collages, some of which relate to the text, some of which look like illustrations from a social-studies book on African-American history, and some of which seem to be included as a cryptic protest against the Vietnam War.

Reed uses various conspicuous devices that remind readers of his presence as the author, such as brief parenthetical commentaries signed "I.R." [3] and footnotes to books published after the action of the story, such as Castles in the Air, [4] a 1958 memoir by Irene Castle. Reed is also credited for the photograph on the first and some later editions of the novel, in which symmetrical images of a nude dark-skinned woman with greased down hair are transposed over a blown-up rose. [5]

Mumbo Jumbo both depends on and fosters the disorientation of the reader. Rather than stick to any semblance of a novel's conventions, Reed supplies us with a hodgepodge of hand-written letters, radio dispatches, photographs, various typefaces, drawings, and even footnotes. With the first and second chapters interrupted by copyright and title pages, we even get the sense we're looking at a cinematic title screen. This is all to say that Reed is constantly blurring the lines of those things traditionally understood as distinct—in this case, form. In this vein he seems adamant to defamiliarize the familiar.

Literary criticism

Scholars such as Alondra Nelson have considered Reed's text as an Afrofuturist text because of the synchronization of voodoo tropes and technology which contributes to its unique form. "Reed's synchronous model defies the progressive linearity of much recent technocultural criticism" (Nelson 8). [6] The non-linear narration, which is cinematic, plays on Afrofuturism's relationship between technology, black magic, and race—to whit: Also, Nelson deals with Reed's use of technology and its functionality in the text. The "…technologies from the setting's future and the author's present inhabit a story situated in the past", in Mumbo Jumbo allows for the emergence of African diasporic technologies in the text. [7] This "anachronistic" nature of Mumbo Jumbo troubles widely accepted conceptualizations of technology, especially in thinking about "when" cultural innovations were created and by "whom".

James A. Snead sees the novel's structure as engaged of the African-American musical and rhetorical trope of "the cut", an interruption that disrupts the linear temporality of the work, looping back to an earlier textual moment. [8] Neil Schmitz's investigates the Reed's experimentation with Neo Hoodoo where the writer does not use it as a literary form but as a "characteristic stance, a mythological provenace,[ clarification needed ] a behavior, a complex, of attitudes, the retrieval of an idiom..." (Schmitz 127). [9] Analyzing Mumbo Jumbo as a "signifying pastiche of Afro-American narrative tradition", [10] Henry Louis Gates posits that Reed's novel opens up a narrative space in which the intricate relationship between black and Western literary forms and conventions are critiqued. [10] Pushing Gates' notion of "signifying pastiche" into the realm of the Afrofuturism, Alondra Nelson holds that Mumbo Jumbo imagines a version of African Diaspora that refuses to detach from tradition as it navigates modernity. For instance, PaPa LaBas make sense of the nuances of black modernity through his use of Haitian "Hoodoo" practices. As such, Reed mobilizes a "future-primitive perspective", [11] which animates the past through the future.

Themes

Reclaiming history

Throughout the novel, Reed seeks to deconstruct the fundamental foundations upon which white, western civilization rests. This is exemplified by the Mu'tafika, an organization whose sole purpose is to steal historical artifacts from Western museums and return them to their place of origin. Additionally, the primary manifestation of this occurs in Papa LaBas' 30-page story of The Work (the original practice emanating from the text from which Jes Grew came) and its Egyptian roots. Reed uses this history to explicitly undermine the legitimacy of the monotheistic religions on which Western civilization rest. More important, though, is the fact that it does not matter whether or not the reader believes the tale to be true; what matters instead, for Reed, is the fact that an entire population was denied the right to hear his history and the right to choose to believe it. With the framework of Jes Grew already established as a real phenomenon in the novel, Reed's 30-page history imagines a powerful origin and meaning that has, in the course of the African-American slavery experience, been strategically precluded.

Jes Grew

In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed speaks of the creation of an intrinsically "black text", which is manifested in "Jes Grew". "Jes Grew", Reed's "virus", alludes to the dissemination of uniquely African-American culture in the 1920s that "traversed the land in search of its Text: the lost liturgy seeking its litany". [12] The "Jes Grew" virus influences people to listen to music, dance, and be happy. In many ways Jes Grew is like the funk. The infectious virus ultimately gets suppressed at the end of the plot of the novel. However, at the end of the novel, when Papa Labas is speaking to a college classroom in the 1970s, he talks about how the '70s are like the '20s again. [13] He believes this is the time for Jes Grew to rise. In this instance Papa Labas taps into a similarity between the styles of music that Jes Grew needs to grow; '20s jazz and '70s funk share an aesthetic that calls people to dance. Jes Grew needs the physical expression of music to grow.

The phrase "Jes' Grew" alludes to the character of Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, who did not know when or how she was born but expected she "jes' growed" ("jes' grew," in the drama adapted from the book, and often elsewhere).

Editions

Mumbo Jumbo was first published in hardback in 1972 by Doubleday in New York, with its cover featuring a photograph of Josephine Baker chosen by the author, who later recalled meeting Baker in the last year of her life and giving her a copy of the book. [14] The novel has remained continuously in print in the decades since its first edition. The first British edition was published in London by Allison and Busby, and the novel has also been published in translation in several languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. [15] To commemorate its 50 years in print, in 2022, Scribner's released a new edition of Mumbo Jumbo, cited by Harold Bloom as one of 500 great books of the Western canon. It includes a new introduction by Reed.

Influence and legacy

The ZBS Foundation dramatized the novel for a 1980 radio drama of the same name directed by Thomas Lopez.

Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton has cited Mumbo Jumbo as a primary source of inspiration for his P-Funk mythology. [16]

In Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow , a remark by the narrator places Reed in the heart of postmodern intertextuality, saying: "Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you will ever find here.)" [17]

In 2017, Mumbo Jumbo was reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. [18]

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hoodoo (spirituality)</span> Spiritual practices, traditions and beliefs

Hoodoo is a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs that were created by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities and elements of indigenous botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men or conjure women, and root doctors. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include rootwork and conjure. As a syncretic spiritual system, it also incorporates beliefs from Islam brought over by enslaved West African Muslims, and Spiritualism. Scholars define Hoodoo as a folk religion. It is a syncretic religion between two or more cultural religions, in this case being African indigenous spirituality and Abrahamic religion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ishmael Reed</span> American poet, novelist, essayist, songwriter, and playwright (born 1938)

Ishmael Scott Reed is an American poet, novelist, essayist, songwriter, composer, playwright, editor and publisher known for his satirical works challenging American political culture. Perhaps his best-known work is Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a sprawling and unorthodox novel set in 1920s New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black Arts Movement</span> 1960s–1970s art movement

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African American-led art movement that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. The movement expanded from the incredible accomplishments of artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Afrofuturism</span> Cultural aesthetic and philosophy

Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and history that explores the intersection of the African diaspora culture with science and technology. It addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through technoculture and speculative fiction, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Afro-diasporic experiences. While Afrofuturism is most commonly associated with science fiction, it can also encompass other speculative genres such as fantasy, alternate history and magic realism. The term was coined by American cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993 and explored in the late 1990s through conversations led by Alondra Nelson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mumbo jumbo (phrase)</span> Phrase for confusing or meaningless language

Mumbo jumbo, or mumbo-jumbo, is confusing or meaningless language. The phrase is often used to express humorous criticism of middle-management, and specialty jargon, such as legalese, that non-specialists have difficulty in understanding. For example, "I don't understand all that legal mumbo jumbo in the fine print."

The Last Angel of History is a 45-minute documentary, directed in 1996 by John Akomfrah and written and researched by Edward George of the Black Audio Film Collective, that deals with concepts of Afrofuturism as a metaphor for the displacement of black culture and roots. The film is a hybrid documentary and fictional narrative. Documentary segments include traditional talking-head clips from musicians, writers, and social critics, as well as archival video footage and photographs. Described as "A truly masterful film essay about Black aesthetics that traces the deployments of science fiction within pan-African culture", it has also been called "one of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s, influencing filmmakers and inspiring conferences, novels and exhibitions".

<i>The Last Days of Louisiana Red</i> 1974 novel by Ishmael Reed

The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) is a novel written by Ishmael Reed. It is considered a model novel of the Black Arts Movement and contains many elements of postmodernism. It continues the story of the character Papa LaBas introduced in Reed's previous novel, 1972's Mumbo Jumbo. The book emphasises voodoo. According to Kirkus Reviews, "Reed's hoodoo/mojo/gris gris/Mumbo Jumbo has a wickedly funny vitality that undermines white European ideology."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black Herman</span> American stage magician

Benjamin Rucker was an American stage magician, better known by his stage name Black Herman. He was the most prominent African-American magician of his time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kodwo Eshun</span> British-Ghanaian writer, theorist and filmmaker

Kodwo Eshun is a British-Ghanaian writer, theorist and filmmaker. He is perhaps best known for his 1998 book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction and his association with the art collective The Otolith Group. He currently teaches on the MA in Contemporary Art Theory in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at CCC Research Master Program of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gris-gris (talisman)</span> West African voodoo amulet

Gris-gris is a Voodoo amulet originating in West Africa which is believed to protect the wearer from evil or bring luck, and in some West African countries is used as a purported method of birth control. It consists of a small cloth bag, usually inscribed with verses from an ancestor and a ritual number of small objects, worn on the person.

James/Jim Haskins was an American author; he wrote more than 100 books for both adults and children. Many of his books are about the achievements of African Americans; they cover the history and culture of Africa and the African American experience. The biographical subjects include Lena Horne, Hank Aaron, Scatman Crothers, and Malcolm X. Most of his writings were for young people. He wrote on a great variety of subjects which introduced them to the language and cultures of other continents, especially Africa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louisiana Voodoo</span> African diasporic religion in Louisiana

Louisiana Voodoo, also known as New Orleans Voodoo, is an African diasporic religion that originated in Louisiana. It arose through a process of syncretism between the traditional religions of West Africa, the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, and Haitian Vodou. No central authority is in control of Louisiana Voodoo, which is organized through autonomous groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black science fiction</span> Science fiction involving black people

Black science fiction or black speculative fiction is an umbrella term that covers a variety of activities within the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres where people of the African diaspora take part or are depicted. Some of its defining characteristics include a critique of the social structures leading to black oppression paired with an investment in social change. Black science fiction is "fed by technology but not led by it." This means that black science fiction often explores with human engagement with technology instead of technology as an innate good.

Dark Matter is an anthology series of science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories and essays produced by people of African descent. The editor of the series is Sheree Thomas. The first book in the series, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000), won the 2001 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. The second book in the Dark Matter series, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004), won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 2005. A forthcoming third book in the series is tentatively named Dark Matter: Africa Rising. This was finally published at the end of 2022 under the title Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, from Tor Books.

<i>Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down</i> 1969 novel by Ishmael Reed

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a novel by the African-American writer Ishmael Reed. It is a satirical take on the traditional Western. It is Ishmael Reed's second novel, following The Freelance Pallbearers (1967), and was first published in 1969. It tells the story of the Loop Garoo Kid, an African-American cowboy who practices the religion of Neohoodooism, and describes his struggle against established religion and cultural oppression.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alondra Nelson</span> American sociologist, policy advisor and author (born 1968)

Alondra Nelson is an American academic, policy advisor, non-profit administrator, and writer. She is the Harold F. Linder chair and professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, New Jersey. From 2021 to 2023, Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where she performed the duties of the director from February to October 2022. She was the first African American and first woman of color to lead OSTP. Prior to her role in the Biden Administration, she served for four years as president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council, an independent, nonpartisan international nonprofit organization. Nelson was previously professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science, as well as director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University.

Julia Jackson was a Louisiana Voodoo practitioner from New Orleans.

Arthur R. Flowers, Jr. is an American novelist, memoirist, and performance poet. His work is known for its focus on the African-American experience, particularly folklore, blues music, and hoodoo spiritualism.

Africanfuturism is a cultural aesthetic and philosophy of science that centers on the fusion of African culture, history, mythology, point of view, with technology based in Africa and not limiting to the diaspora. It was coined by Nigerian American writer Nnedi Okorafor in 2019 in a blog post as a single word. Nnedi Okorafor defines Africanfuturism as a sub-category of science fiction that is "directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view..and...does not privilege or center the West," is centered with optimistic "visions in the future," and is written by "people of African descent" while rooted in the African continent. As such its center is African, often does extend upon the continent of Africa, and includes the Black diaspora, including fantasy that is set in the future, making a narrative "more science fiction than fantasy" and typically has mystical elements. It is different from Afrofuturism, which focuses mainly on the African diaspora, particularly the United States. Works of Africanfuturism include science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, horror and magic realism.

References

  1. ↑ The Knights Templar order was in fact disbanded in 1312.
  2. ↑ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. New York: American Heritage Publishing. 1969. p. 862. mā-mā, grandmother + gyo, trouble + mbō, leave.
  3. ↑ Reed, Ishmael (1972). Mumbo Jumbo. p. 148. (In this way, he points his finger at his killers. Few historians have understood this clue.—I.R.)
  4. ↑ Reed, Ishmael (1972). Mumbo Jumbo. p. 21.
  5. ↑ Reed, Ishmael (2017). Mumbo Jumbo. Back Cover: Penguin Classics. Cover Photograph © Ishmael Reed
  6. ↑ Nelson, Alondra (June 2002). "Introduction Future Texts". Social Text. 20 (2): 1–15 [8]. doi: 10.1215/01642472-20-2_71-1 . Retrieved September 8, 2011.
  7. ↑ Nelson, Alondra; Ron Eglash; Anna Everett; Tana Hargest; Nalo Hopkinson; Tracie Morris; Kalí Tal; Fatimah Tuggar; Alexander G. Weheliye (2002). "Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text". Social Text (71): 8. Archived from the original on June 21, 2013. Retrieved March 25, 2013.
  8. ↑ Snead, James A. "On Repetition in Black Culture." Black American Literature Forum, No. 15, Vol. 4, Black Textual Strategies, Vol. 1: Theory (Winter 1984). 146–54.
  9. ↑ Schmitz, Neil (April 1974). "Neo-Hoodoo: The Experimental Fiction of Ishmael Reed". Twentieth Century Literature. 20 (2): 126–140 [127]. doi:10.2307/440731. JSTOR   440731.
  10. 1 2 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., "The 'Blackness of Blackness': A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 4 (June 1983), pp. 685–723.
  11. ↑ Nelson, Alondra. "Introduction Future Texts", Social Text, 71 (Vol. 20, Number 2), Summer 2002, pp. 1–15.
  12. ↑ Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 1972, p. 211.
  13. ↑ Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 1972, p. 218.
  14. ↑ Reed, Ishmael (December 12, 1976). "Remembering Josephine". The New York Times . Retrieved February 14, 2023.
  15. ↑ "Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo at Fifty | Covers". Online Exhibitions | University of Delaware. Retrieved February 14, 2023.
  16. ↑ Vincent, Rickey (1996), Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, p. 177.
  17. ↑ Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow, London: Penguin Books, 1995, p. 588.
  18. ↑ McAloon, Jonathan (August 1, 2017). "Mumbo Jumbo: a dazzling classic finally gets the recognition it deserves". The Guardian .
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.