Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo is one of the most difficult novels I've read in a long time. I suppose you can label it post-modern or avant-garde by virtue of his use of different typestyles to offset certain passages of text, the use of cardinal numbers instead of words (e.g. – "1" instead of "one"), footnotes, quotes from other texts, and even asides signed by the author himself. In addition to the mish-mash of stylistic elements, the book pulls in a lot of history and mythology making it a dense read despite being only about 220 pages long.

The story starts in New Orleans in the 1920s with the mayor enjoying a glass of bootleg gin along with the company of a floozy when he gets a call giving him some bad news. The city is ground zero for the Jes Grew plague in America. With this prelude over, the book then acts a bit like a movie with the copyright and title pages following.

What is "Jes Grew"? Well, it's black culture and cultural identity, generally. It manifests itself in jazz, blues, ragtime, &c. A page of quotes just before the dedication page explains the origin in a quote by James Weldon Johnson: "The earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, 'jes grew.'" People struck with Jes Grew dance, sing, speak in tongues, &c. They act like they're possessed. The most proximate patient zero of this plague is basically the collective population of Haiti and it spread to New Orleans, made its way to Chicago, and is now threatening to take over New York.

Directly at odds with Jes Grew are the Atonists, white folk who act as guardians of mores and propriety in the name of preserving their staid, puritan hegemony. Their "aesthetic is thin flat turgid dull grey bland like a yawn." (Reed doesn't go for serial commas.) And they are pissed. The higher ups enlist the Wallflower Order to stamp out Jes Grew. Leading the Wallflowers is Hierophant 1, i.e. – the Pope. Opposing them is PaPa LaBas. He is a Houngan Voodoo Priest who keeps the old ways alive from his Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral.

During the 1920s the United States occupied Haiti and this not only forms certain plot elements, but also stands as a good high-level summary of the conflict, of whites lording over blacks. Reed has a long digression late in the book in which he utilizes mythology to explain the background of Jes Grew. Back in ancient Egypt you had Osiris and Isis in conflict with Set. At this time Osiris demonstrated his dances which helped preserve the fecundity of the land and ensure healthy harvests to Thoth who captured them in The Book of Thoth. Osiris, Thoth, and their ilk were eventually banished leaving Set in charge. He established his own religion based around Aton, "the sun's flaming disc". The old ways of linking people to nature as set out in The Book of Thoth went underground and Christianity arose. Jes Grew needed the book lest it "be mistaken for entertainment". As Reed asks, what good is a liturgy without a text? (He references Helena Blavatsky in this section whom I read about recently.)

One Hinkle Von Vampton brought the book to the United States in the 1890s. Von Vampton is immortal and a Knights Templar. Although he and the KT were turned away and persecuted by the Church back in the dim and distant past, he fought Jes Grew then and continues his battle. He sets up the Benign Monster, a magazine, although populated by the writings of black authors, is actually a set-up. It's real purpose to devalue the Harlem Renaissance and halt the spread of Jes Grew into New York.

And so you have two sides, the pro-Jes Grew and the anti-Jes Grew, out looking for The Book of Thoth for their own purposes.

As a satire, I thoroughly enjoyed Mumbo Jumbo. You've got some Dashiell Hammett thrown together with a mythological backstory which would make the writers of LOST proud, and some great, funny elements such as a group of men liberating non-European art from the Center of Art Detention, i.e. – art museums, and returning them to their native countries. As satire, it was fantastic stuff and ranks up there with similar works that I love such as Dr. Strangelove.

But I finished the book not quite knowing what Reed was saying. Did he really think that black culture was predicated on emotion and entwined with Nature while white culture was staid and artificial? In terms of his critique of how the white majority deals with blacks and black culture, I think I get it. White attitudes perceive black culture as lewd and unrestrained. It's "primitive". The book was written in the late 1960s and/or early 70s so is Reed promoting a kind of Black Nationalism? Is he trying to get all Marcus Garvey/Stokely Carmichael on our asses here?

My guess is that he is. Reed's critique doesn't seem to simply be one of America. He describes a prelapsarian paradise in ancient Egypt which permeated the globe. And then came along Set and Christianity. Humanity distanced itself from nature and thought itself above it. Slavery saw the white man not only subjugate the black man but also grind the culture of the slaves into the ground; white men assumed the burden of divorcing blacks from their native culture and traditions. The book talks about how Jes Grew's gleeful aspects were transmogrified into defects by Freud. Ecstasy became hysteria, for instance. Reed takes some swipes and capitalism such as when LaBas dismisses the Atonists as being another species - Home economicus - which lays down another critique: whites are individual while blacks are communal. There's just too much history involved for this to be a narrow attack. Reed's not lobbing guided missiles, he's dropping an atom bomb.