On Thursday night, the California Book Club convened to discuss Oakland author Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo with Reed, special guest Justin Desmangles, and host John Freeman. The conversation was rich and wide-ranging, touching on genre, literary influences like the Celtic Revival, hoodoo, music, Black cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, and appropriation.
Freeman asked about when Reed’s spiritual quest, which Mumbo Jumbo was part of, kicked off. Reed responded, “We grew up in households where there were whispers about a religion that didn’t sound like Christianity. It led me to exploring what this was all about, and I found that there was nobody in my education or in my family who could inform me that African religions survived the slave trade. This began as a journey to find a different model than those that were exhibited to us in Anglo studies.” He was influenced by discovering the folklore that became important to the Celtic Revival, particularly the Irish gods that weren’t Roman or Greek. He asked himself, “How do I apply that to my situation?” That led him to folklore he calls Neo-Hoodooism. His search began as “merely a tourist excursion into...voodoo and New Orleans.” He discovered that there was a whole pantheon that others like Zora Neale Hurston had explored before him.
Reed explained that he learned to write and how to study Black history while in a circle of Black cultural nationalists in New York. Various forms like comics and pulp books and movies had been dismissed as vulgar, but when he arrived in New York, painters and writers were starting to be inspired by those popular forms and were inverting them. Reed, in turn, became inspired by Imamu Amiri Baraka’s play Jello. His first series of novels, Free-Lance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and Mumbo Jumbo, were inversions, respectively, of gothic, Westerns, and whodunits. He noted that he’s “still on that” with his novel series that starts with The Terrible Twos. When Reed met his wife, Carla Blank, she was in touch with Indian and Japanese communities, and this changed his world and led to him founding the Before Columbus Foundation, which is dedicated to the promotion of contemporary American multicultural literature.
Freeman asked Reed what the protagonist in Mumbo Jumbo, the detective PaPa LaBas, means to him. Reed noted that there’s a character from early music in New Orleans who is identified as a trickster figure, who may be a figure of the devil, and the translation of his name was “Papa down here.” PaPa LaBas, as Reed describes him, is a detective who runs the loas, “who calls down the spirits.” Reed discovered the things that inspired LaBas while visiting the studio of the painter Joe Overstreet, which had geometric designs that Overstreet explained were there to call down the spirits during a ceremony. What Reed learned about this shifted him from taking a tourist survey to understanding hoodoo as more sophisticated than he’d been led to believe.
When Desmangles, the chair of the Before Columbus Foundation, joined the conversation, he commented that one of the key features that runs throughout the entire body of Reed’s work is the recovery and excavation of Black historical consciousness. “We understand that the period of enslavement is really just a fraction of the history coming out of Africa, of Black history, but we also understand that...during the development of the New World, literacy for Blacks was punishable by death, which gives a lot of insight into the contemporary controversies in education in the United States.” He noted that many of the ways of understanding the world coming through the culture of Black America were sublimated into the music, which later found its way into text.
Reed said that in Mumbo Jumbo, the fictional Jes Grew virus, which causes people to dance and becomes something that a number of white antagonists want to eradicate, is based on the concept of a loa. He explained, “The point I was making in Mumbo Jumbo was, there’s something about Black culture like this eruption of the spirit. Like rock and roll can be called a loa. Like ragtime can be called a loa—they emerge.” He went on, “There’s something about Black culture that drives our country into mass hysteria, and this is what’s happening now with this woke business.” He criticized the tendency to use “critical race theory,” “DEI,” and “woke” interchangeably and argued that “people who get worked up about wokeness know it has something to do with Black folks.”
Later, after an audience member asked, “Did you hear the novel before you wrote it?” Reed said that when he uses a word processor, he is using it to write down things that have been going on in his head for a long time. He mentioned that he has a poem to be published in the New Yorker called “Fugue.” It has language that’s been rolling around in his head for a long time and is based on a poem that W.B. Yeats wrote about the heart of an aged man being tied to a dying animal while sailing to Byzantium. “I’ve been thinking about those lines since I was 18, and I talk about how when you’re 18, given the mortality rates of people of your kind, people who are like me, you never think you’ll reach that point. But, you know, there it is.”•
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