Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo isn't just a load of Mumbo Jumbo
In 1972, Ishmael Reed published Mumbo Jumbo as an "epidemic" of black culture across 1920s New Orleans. He highlights Western culture and its disregard for African culture and society as a whole. Reed uses satirical and historical ideas to challenge the topics of race, religion, and culture. Through the spread of Jes Grew (a mysterious anti-plague symbolizing Black culture). Reed exposes how Western institutions attempted to suppress non-Western ideas and practices. The novel aims to embrace the roots and practices of African culture while criticizing those who seek to erase it.
The term Mumbo Jumbo is used to describe nonsense or confusion. Gibberish or Hocus - Pocus also being used in the same context. When Reed introduces Papa LaBas (a popular hoodoo priest), he mentions how figures like himself are misunderstood by the white establishment. With this he provides the definition of Mumbo Jumbo from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language "magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away" (Reed 7). This line setting up the title of the novel makes the insult ironic. The “Mumbo Jumbo” feared by Westerners is just the living force of Black expression and creativity represented by the spread of Jes Grew. To Atonists, Jes Grew looks like a sickly disease. An infectious dangerous disorder. Though, to Reed, it seems to represent life, joy, and freedom amongst the black community. What westerners viewed as a danger or meaningless superstition, was seen by many as a rich spiritual tradition that has survived centuries of suppression.
In the end, Mumbo Jumbo is not just a story about an epidemic of culture, it serves as a challenge to the reader to understand what society sees as “nonsense”. Through Jes Grew and figures like Papa LaBas, Reed highlights how African traditions such as spirituality and music continue to thrive even with those aiming to erase cultural aspects. By reclaiming or redesigning the term “Mumbo Jumbo”, Reed turns the term into a form of pride and resistance. He reminds the readers that Black art and spirituality aren’t a form of chaos, rather a form of expression and the active pieces to culture itself.
It's true that the derisive term "mumbo jumbo" doesn't just connote nonsense or incoherence but specifically a kind of "hocus-pocus" fake "magic," as you note, which is even MORE relevant to the novel's context, since it reflects the ways in which African religion specifically has been treated as "hocus-pocus" within the Western context (Hollywood has a long tradition of treating voodoo practices as "hocus-pocus".) And within the novel, PaPa LaBas "repurposes" the insult to allude to the original meaning, as his Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral itself functions to "heal" troubled spirits and to cultivate loas. "The 'Mumbo Jumbo' feared by Westerners is just the living force of Black expression and creativity represented by the spread of Jes Grew" is an excellent summation of the novel's key conflict, and it could easily be the thesis statement for an essay on the subject.
ReplyDeleteHey Brianna, I loved your blog and the way it added on to your points in class! I think it's definitely true and super interesting that Jes Grew and even this book are kind of based on the bias of the reader, and that the reader makes an inherent decision to look at the book as either "mumbo jumbo" or an in depth commentary on the structure of our world. It kind of adds to how ironic and postmodernist Reed can be, and I really like how you highlight that.
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