More Mumbo Jumbo

And here (and possibly even more confusing), is question number 2 on the end of Mumbo Jumbo:

This final part of the book provides a very detailed (and typically anachronistic) mythology of JG's roots.

So, what interests you in this account? Do you see any connections to earlier parts of the novel? Are any of the underlying issues clarified by this section? Who is the ostensible narrator of the history told here?

Beginning in Chapter 52 of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo there is an odd yet detailed account of the origins of Jes Grew and its destroyers. This story begins with a tale of Egyptian gods Osiris and Set. Osiris is the god of the underworld, but also a giver of life. Set, his brother, is appropriately known as the god of the desert – a dry, barren place. Osiris is, to one degree or another, patient zero in the Jes Grew epidemic. His brother is the initial destroyer of the “disease”. This all makes perfect sense until Reed inserts into the story facts about World War II, the Korean War, and the Indochina War. To complicate matters more, he adds Moses to the story of the Egyptian Gods.

This meshing of entirely different worlds indicates that Reed thinks religious texts are ultimately made up anyway. Moses, who the Atonists and other Christians would believe to have been real, is seen here as only as physically real as figures from Egyptian myth. They co-exist in Reed’s world. If religious texts are simply created from myth and then recorded in a text, they are no different than a fictitious novel. This tears religion down to the level it needs to be before Reed can insinuate that art is religion, or as he alludes on page 168, Rock’n’Roll is religion.

One thread that remains common in the history Papa LaBas is relating throughout these pages is the idea of the more conservative citizens trying to keep the more open-minded down. Set takes such drastic measures to remove this perceived threat that he kills his brother. We then see Moses as a parallel to Hinckle Von Vampton. First, like Von Vampton, Moses secretly sneaks into the places where Jes Grew is thriving. Later, he is recruited by Set to try and bring down the movement and he results to lying and working within Jes Grew to try and stop Jes Grew. It is all very cyclical like the time and plot in the novel, but ultimately, it demonstrates the traditionalists will stop at nothing to protect their power and their “right way”.

The beauty in the idea of Jes Grew is that it “has no end and no beginning… it will come back, and when it returns we will see that it never left… there is really no end to life, if anything goes it will be death” (204). Jes Grew is life. It is real living – emotion, art, sex, entertainment – something other than just going through the motions every day. This line insinuates that the joy and spark in the people will never die. The political and social hegemony will always have to continue the fight if they want to prevent outbreaks, but in the end, it cannot be stopped. If anything finally disappears, it will be the idea of boring traditional life.

A Little Mumbo Jumbo

Dear reader, a warning: This may seem grossly out of context even if you have read the novel on which I am writing. If you haven't, gods help you. It is brilliant, but challenging to comprehend on even my best day. I will post the question I am responding to, so it is not completely out of left field.

Thinking about the other works we've read so far, detective fiction seems to follow this pattern: a crime is committed, the detective (amateur or professional) investigates, the guilty party is discovered, punishment is (more or less) meted out to the guilty, the story is brought to closure or, at least, conclusion (with variations such as "The Purloined Letter").

How does Mumbo Jumbo adhere to and deviate from this pattern?

It goes without saying that every piece of detective fiction making an appearance this semester has a mystery to be solved. Mumbo Jumbo is no different in that aspect, but the type of mystery, the idea of morals and justice are a bit different. Rather than trying to track down a murderer of men, Mumbo Jumbo focuses on preventing the murder of Jes Grew. Ishmael Reed tells the reader that Jes Grew has fluctuated over time. Beginning in chapter 52, a narrative appears which indicates Jes Grew has been around in some form since the time of Moses. Even then, people like Set and the Atonists were on a mission to destroy it. The traditionalists couldn’t stand to see something bringing the “lower” people together that may allow them to find any power as a group. PaPa LaBas is the predominant figure in the novel trying to prevent the death of the Jes Grew movement by investigating the location of its sacred text and those trying to conceal it. Throughout the text, there are things that appear to be following the tradition of detective fiction, but then there is a departure from the traditional methods.

As is shown in detective fiction ranging from Edgar Allen Poe to Thomas Harris, there is a tendency for those with more power to discount or abuse the marginalized. Reed’s novel shows that more blatantly than any other we have read this semester. At every turn, we see Hinckle Von Vampton and the Wallflower Order trying to shut down Jew Grew. Every time there is the possibility of an “outbreak”, they scurry to shut it down. This “religion” is a threat to them because they are afraid of losing their social and political power. It is this fear that causes them to try to kill Jes Grew. If the Blacks, the Asians, the Latinos, the non-Christian traditionalists, etc have some exciting phenomenon to rally around, they may become a force to be reckoned with. The conspiracy the reader is left trying to solve is “who is trying to silence Jes Grew?” which points to another difference – the reader of Mumbo Jumbo is just as much (if not more so) the detective as any character Reed has written into the text.

Similarly to the other novels we have read, we have to follow clues, but the clues Reed gives leave us with more questions than answers. His twisted combination of fact and fiction ensures the reader can never trace actual events without running into a dead end or an aporia. It becomes a challenge to tell which side many of the characters are on by following the clues we are given. Often it seems as if in an ever to destroy “The Work”, one must do “The Work”. Moses seducing Isis in an effort to procure her sacred text is just one example of this, but even then, he tries to learn the secrets of the book rather than rid the world of it the way we believe he plans to (182-183).

One tradition of detective fiction that clearly holds up in Reed’s novel is the danger of being a detective or getting involved in a mystery. Due to their involvement in the Jes Grew mystery, Abdul is killed, Earline is possessed, and Charlotte vanishes. There is less deviation in this typical facet of detective fiction than the above, but there is still a key difference. The danger here is not always from tangible things or people. The novel’s supernatural aspects are just as much a threat to those tangled in the conspiracy and the investigation as any of the physical threats we have seen in other novels.

In the end, there is no single guilty party. There is no real crime. The catch is that much like in The Conjure Man Dies, Jes Grew is not really dead. Like Frimbo, Jes Grew will come back to life. It already has in the past, and it will again. After all, “time is a pendulum… what goes around comes around” (218).

November's Wall of Shame

I've decided rather than allow anyone to miss these little gems of wisdom from university students, I would begin a monthly wall of shame. Today, I begin November with this:

Oh, America, has it come to this?

"I myself grew up in a difficult household and led a fairly rough life. Not in the same manner as the people in the movie. I can still relate to the fact that fighting does may win the battle, only calm will win the war."

From an e-mail inquiry to my university:

"hi ,

i happen to be 32-over the age of your traditional undergrad,can you give me any suggestions on where i could go to further my training in acting, or to start like i would if i where attending there.what would be the next best place other than yourself that you suggest i go, unless you have a program for adults.
thank you... XXXXX"

My turn

Today, I go on my own wall of shame. It's not for something I wrote, but for something I failed to write. I managed to miss an entire week of discussion in class without realizing it until my professor sent me e-mail to make sure I was alive. My head was as in the clouds this week as those who you typically see quoted here!

Hi, I want to go to another school:
(This one is especially priceless, because it is an e-mail addressed to me at Pace University)

"I am a high school senior, and I am plan apply to CUNY Brooklyn College for the Fall 2010 semester. I just wanted to know if there are any Letter of Recommendation requirements in which the recommender has to follow?"

Can I have an apostrophe, please?

"In conclusion, I truly feel that your emotional reaction is always at the mercy of the director and writer's and whether one feels upset about that or not may depend on what that person believes the truth's are in the movie, excluding the tweaks and embellishments."

Behold, the power of PoMo!

The following is written about Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. It addressed the question: "One critic writing about Mumbo Jumbo calls it a "de-centered" text. One example of this is that it is often hard to figure out who is speaking. In what other ways is this quality reflected in the book? Why do you think Reed uses this method? Analysis and examples, please!"

Thanks to the lovely website http://www.glbtq.com I came across the following quote that seems to help address this issue perfectly.

Linda Hutcheon describes the intellectual goal of post-modernism as to erode our assumptions by examining them, "to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as 'natural' (they might even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism) are in fact 'cultural'; made by us, not given to us," so that post-modernism "provokes an investigation of how we make meaning in culture."

This pretty clearly describes what we are looking at when we read Mumbo Jumbo. Reed has turned the world upside down with this novel. He breaks enough literary conventions that we are forced to really examine his work in order to pull some meaning from it. Reed switches tense, voice, and even location without a moment's notice. There is none of Aristotle's precious unity of time, place, and action to be found among these pages.

Not only has Reed made the novel challenge the current standards of writing, but as Hutcheon states above, he has challenged the notions of everything we are conditioned to think of as natural. We see Reed refusing to tip-toe around difficult race relations. The interactions in chapter 23 demonstrate the people of all races can work together, but people of every color can still come to the consensus that whites cannot be trusted (82-89). Attention is drawn to the fact that members of this alleged elite hegemony will commit murder and cover it up rather than allow the marginalized one more step up the ladder (95). Reed even shows us a black woman with a white maid (103)!

On the surface perhaps, the book addresses religion and politics of the Western world, but it does so much more than that - it tears it apart so the reader has to try and rebuild it. That is the point of de-centering the text, after all - to prove that these things are ultimately just constructs. Reed even forces us to consider one of the lesser used definitions of politics. The last definition Merriam-Webster offers for politics is “the total complex of relations between people living in society”, and even better, the website www.die.net offers as a definition “social relations involving authority or power”. It is this last definition that Reed makes us focus on. The politics of the book are not confined to party lines – religion is politics, dancing is politics, love is politics, New York is politics, history is politics, but it is perhaps most important to note that ALL of this is being challenged because a group of marginalized people are showing some autonomy and shaking up the status quo. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how every action these people take becomes politics – it all involves which group will ultimately end up with the power and control.

Similarly, Reed challenges our notions of religion by creating Jes Grew as a “religion”. It is not Christianity or Judaism, but it is something the people can rally behind, have faith in, and use as a means of keeping their spirits up in hard times. Isn’t that what most other organized religions give us? The hegemonic beliefs on religion are challenged more than that though. Early on we see Abdul switching off and on his “religion” when people are watching: “Abdul sees that the doorway is empty. Deprived of an audience, he changes his demeanor” (36). Reed introduces the Hierophant who confuses matters by being a symbol of corrupt religion. We see what looks like a genuine case of possession (126 -129). And as if we needed more cause to question everything we believe to be true about religion, we meet “3 deacons accompanying Rev. Jefferson” (142) who seem to be some play on upstanding southern Christian men being told to “bust him up. It ain’t no use to planting potatoes when it’s hog-killing time” (142).

These twisted, unexpected, de-centered lines of politics, religion, race, power, and corruption cause us to see clearly how carefully constructed this world must be. People are meddling in the election, trying to put “their man” in to maintain the balance of things. Entire publications are created to spread false messages to people. The end result of it all is that the reader cannot possibly piece together what is really happening at any moment. We must try to tease apart whatever scraps we can and then stitch them together to form our own construct of the truth. In doing so, we hopefully examine our own world a little closer and discover that societal power, organized religion, pop culture, and racial stereotypes are all carefully built by the people who have the power to begin with.