When I first encountered Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, shortly after its 1972 publication, I had no idea what to make of it. I was 12, and a precocious reader, but Mumbo Jumbo was unlike anything I had come across: a rollicking novel, written in almost pointillistic style, in which a virus called Jes Grew affects Black communities, although this may be less a matter of affliction than of release. Reed writes in the early pages, “People were doing ‘stupid sensual things,’ were in a state of ‘uncontrollable frenzy,’ were wriggling like fish…; were cutting a mean ‘Mooche,’ and ‘lusting after relevance.’… We knew that something was Jes Grewing just like the 1890s flair-up.”
That this plays both into and against racial and cultural stereotypes is precisely the point. Reed has always regarded the role of the writer as inherently political—an aesthetic of provocation, if you will. If that’s confrontational, it’s also necessary. For 60 years, he has been a passionate advocate for a wide array of other authors, espousing a communitarian sensibility. As he wrote in 1992, “American literature in the last decade of this century is more than a mainstream.… [It] is an ocean.”
A third of a century later, as the current administration seeks to erase DEI efforts, such an idea is more relevant than it has ever been.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Mumbo Jumbo, in that sense, feels like a key text in a tradition extending from the Harlem Renaissance writers (whom Reed has long cited as a central inspiration) up through the Beats and the Black Arts Movement. Such a lineage includes Robert Coover’s The Public Burning and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, William S. Burroughs’s Roosevelt After Inauguration and Darius James’s Negrophobia. Although many of these works are satirical, that seems too narrow a framework; rather, they are works of moral outrage. As Reed writes, “terrible plagues were due to the wrath of God; but Jes Grew is the delight of the gods.”
God, gods—the message emerges in the shift to lowercase, to pluralization, a syntax that rejects monotheistic orthodoxies. The move feels almost poetic, which makes sense: Reed, who began publishing poems in the 1960s, told the Utne Reader in 2007, “I’ve probably been more influenced by poets than by novelists.”
But there’s more at work here than stylistic revolution; indeed, to read Mumbo Jumbo now is to recognize its reach in another way. Since it appeared, we’ve experienced two real-world plagues—HIV and COVID—and cannot help but read it through that lens. Relevance again, which is to say that as time passes, the meaning of any book becomes contingent. That Mumbo Jumbo continues to speak to us on so many levels is a testament to Reed’s vision and acuity.•
Join us on April 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Reed will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Justin Desmangles to discuss Mumbo Jumbo. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
