* (restored)

 

‘In his 1971 novel Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed writes the story of an ‘epidemic’ of black culture—song, dance, slang and other elements—spreading into mainstream America. He calls his plague ‘Jes Grew’ and it is spread by ‘Jes Grew Carriers’ (or J.G.C.s) who are responsible for outbreaks throughout the US, and in some locations overseas.

‘Reed sets most of his story in New York during the Jazz Age. An earlier outbreak of ‘Jes Grew’—associated with the rise of ragtime in the 1890s—had been effectively contained. But now a new, stronger bug is sweeping northward from New Orleans, and threatens to subdue most of the population. There are “18,000 cases in Arkansas, 60,000 in Tennessee, 98,000 in Mississippi and cases showing up even in Wyoming.” Workers are dancing the Turkey Trot during their lunch break, and singing in the streets. The authorities are alarmed. People want to catch this new disease. Those who are still healthy gather around those already bitten by the bug, and chant “give me fever, give me fever.”

‘But if everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon of the new black plague, who is left to stop it. Here Reed outdoes himself, offering the grandest of conspiracy theories. The Knights Templar, apparently disbanded in the year 1312, are actually still hanging around, and waiting for a chance to stop the Jes Grew epidemic. But they need to get in line. The Teutonic Knights, founded in the twelfth century, also want to block the disease. And some Masons, a former cop, yellow journalists, Wall Street, politicians the folks at the Plutocrat Club, and a mysterious group known as the Wallflower Order, dedicated to implementing the world- view of an even bigger conspiracy group, known as the Atonists, all have skin in the game (literally and metaphorically).

‘Three years after Reed published Mumbo Jumbo, E.L. Doctorow released his novel Ragtime to great acclaim, with particular praise lavished on that book’s mixture of fictional characters and real personages from early 20th century America. But Reed set the tone for this mashup up truth and fiction in his colorful predecessor, and even anticipated Doctorow’s reliance on black music as an emblem for the flux and flow of the era.

‘If anything, Reed is more ambitious. He even includes footnotes and a lengthy bibliography at the end of his novel—with citations of everyone from Edward Gibbon to Madame Blavatsky. Photos and artwork are also inserted into the text, which often seems intent on breaking free of the constraints of the novel, and turning into a radical reinterpretation of the last several thousand years of human society.

‘Reed has delivered a classic work in the literature of paranoia. He joins an illustrious company, offering us a book that can stand alongside—at least in terms of the breadth of its conspiracy theories—Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus Trilogy, Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and other powerful literary evocations of our zeal to find hidden enemies everywhere we look. Writers nowadays may do some things better than their predecessors, but the generation that lived through McCarthyism, the Cold War, Alger Hiss and Kim Philby had a much better skill at capturing the exotic flavor of the paranoid mindset in narrative form.’ — Ted Gloria

 

__________
Facsimile pages

 

____
Further

Ishmael Reed Website
‘Mumbo Jumbo’ @ Wikipedia
‘Ishmael Reed and the Psychic Epidemic’
‘Mumbo Umbo: Wormholes through History’
Ishmael Reed @ Biblio
Ishmael Reed’s KONCH MAGAZINE
‘Ishmael Reed on the Life and Death of Amiri Baraka’
Ishmael Reed @ goodreads
‘Fade to White’, an Op Ed by Ishmael Reed @ NYT
‘Bad Apples in Ferguson’ by Ishmael Reed
‘All the Demons Of American Racism Are Rising From the Sewer’
Ishmael Reed on ‘Juice!’
‘Self-reflexivity and Historical Revisionism in Ishmael Reed’s Neo-hoodoo Aesthetics’
‘The Black Pathology Biz’ by Ishmael Reed
‘ISHMAEL REED: JABS, LOW BLOWS, AND KNOCKOUT PUNCHES’
‘Mumbo Jumbo’ reviewed @ Autodidact Project
Ishmael Reed’s Top Ten Books List
‘A Progressive Rebuttal to Ishmael Reed’
‘Ishmael Reed on the Language of Huck Finn’
‘Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo: Afrocentricism, Philosophy, and Haiti’
‘Ishmael Reed: The Idol Smasher’
Buy ‘Mumbo Jumbo’

 

____
Extras


Ishmael Reed reads two poems and discusses his novel “Mumbo Jumbo.”


Meet Ishmael Reed


To Become A Writer, Ishmael Reed


Huey P. Newton, Ishmael Reed & Jawanza Kunjufu On Racism Again Black Men (1988)


Ishmael Reed at Litquake 2007

 

______
Interview

 

Let’s talk about writing. You’ve said before, “Writing is Fighting.” As you know, Miles Davis compared his musical exercise to the discipline of boxing. In fact, he said he respects good boxers so much, because they require and possess an intelligence; that, there’s a “higher sense of theory” going on in their heads. He compared it to his solitary exercise of performing.

ISHMAEL REED: Miles was also a boxer.

Right. So, we have this whole concept of boxing, writing, fighting. Why this philosophy of “boxing” as writing?

IR: I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don’t use words like “amber” or “opaque.” (Laughs.)

Or Chrysanthemums? (Laughs.)

IR: (Laughs.) Yeah, yeah. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali’s style. Others have compared my style to that of Roy Jones Jr. and Mike Tyson.

As a writer, you explore all kinds of different emotions. My latest poem is about a tree in my backyard, which is from the Tropics. I’m trying to explain how it got there. I had a meditative poem about watching out over the Golden Gate Bridge from a mountain.

It was published in The New Yorker. I think when I write essays I’m out to do on the page what we can’t do in the media. We don’t have billions of dollars that are available to these people who do what amounts to a propaganda attack on us. We’re being out propagandized. When I look at the newspapers, I’m furious. Because I can see where the interpretation of whom we are and how people from the outside define us.

My friend Cecil Brown is very upset because the SF Chronicle is doing a Black History Month series and it’s all White male writers! I mean they assign Black History Month to all White writers with all these African American writers in the Bay Area and in California? I mean I’m here and I’ve written for them. And of course, they wrote about the kind of Black image that appeals to them: Athletes and Entertainers. Not a single scientist, or inventor. I was down at Lockheed Martin, addressing the Black employees: Engineers and Scientists last week. I told them that a lot of the space equipment used by NASA was invented by Black scientists, yet when Mailer wrote that ignorant book about the moonshot, Fire On The Moon, he said that Blacks were jealous of this White achievement.The formula for sending a shuttle into space and bringing it back was devised by a Black woman scientist.

Cecil also said he was pleased that there was a Hollywood writer’s strike so all these demeaning images of blacks would at least disappear for a while, for at least 3 weeks. Because, I mean the Writer’s Guild is only like 2% African American. I think there’s probably, what, no Pakistani American writers?

I think there is 1.

IR: Well, probably, he’s the one saying, “We all ought to assimilate.”

Or, he might try to hide it.

IR: Yeah, hides it. Right. So, that’s all we have. All we have is writing. Sometimes it’s very effective. I mean I’m organizing my neighborhood block with emails, because we have criminal activity on our block. Instead of the old days, where we had to confront these people, now we can do it through emails and cyberspace.

I did a book called Another Day at the Front which was my first critical book about the media, and I got on Nightline. I was able to challenge some of these assumptions of African Americans and their culture.

Is writing a solitary experience? Is it shadowboxing in a sense?

IR: Not for me. I have T.V. on all the time when I’m writing. I have music on. I’m engaged with the world. If the phone rings, I answer it. I’m not the kind of writer who sits around 8 hours a day writing. I’ll write in the morning, and sometimes I’ll get up 4 in the morning sometimes and do this Anthology I’m working on. (PowWow, releasing this summer by De Capo Press). I’m learning a lot. I wasn’t really a short story person, but now I’m reading about 140 short stories and there are a lot of good ones out there. I’m reading stories from different groups– like from the 19th century immigrant perspective which is really overlooked. In this country, it’s not good to be “ethnic.” Although, T.S. Eliot said, “Not all ethnic writers are great, but all great writers are ethnic.” I mean Eliot was the head of the modernist movement!

I don’t know about this solitary stuff. I mean I do plays and they are collaborative. My last play was called “angry” by the New York Times. Even though every line could be footnoted. I got a great review in the Backstage which is a theatre trade magazine, but the Times guy said I was “angry” about a lot of things. But, I mean, what was I angry about? I took on 2 issues. One was the pharmaceutical industry using African Americans as guinea pigs and colluding with psychiatrists, who get $40,000 kickbacks, and how they use these drugs in Africa for testing. They are fully aware of the bad side effects when they produce these drugs. The other issue is how think-thanks front these people like McWhorter to push this line that “all of African American’s problems are self inflicted.”

This is what we’re up against. See, our intellectuals don’t know what we’re up against. They think this is all about getting on the Bill Maher show. There is an orchestrated campaign that is tied to the Eugenics campaign. I just had a dialogue with John Rockwell from the New York Times, because we’re in the same anthology together. I said, “Look, the Eugenics movement came out of the United States.” “Where? Where? Where?” he said. So, I had to send him a book on this.

Let’s talk about Mumbo Jumbo your most famous novel. Many say this novel was about the forces of “rationalism and militarism” versus the forces of “the magical and the spontaneous.” Today, we find extremist groups rooting themselves in piety, religion, spirituality and faith. In the 1972 version of the novel, Abdul Hamid, a Black Muslim fundamentalist, burns the “Book” which contains the “key” to these ancient traditions of magic, dance, and creativity. If Mumbo Jumbo took place in the 21st century, who would burn the “Book”?

IR: I think there are fundamentalists all over the world. I think all religions have fundamentalists who have different interpretations of scriptures that are very vague. These books are written in metaphor, they are written with symbolism. A lot of it is outdated and tied to the times in which the text was written. So, you can do anything you want to with religion. Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don’t think the two mix. But, we always believed in separation of church and state. But, I predicted there would be a theocracy in the 80’s in my book The Terrible Twos, where I had a preacher running the White House in 1982.

You see, I think when you’re an independent intellectual you’re going to get it from all sides. I get it from the Left, the Right, the Middle. When I proposed that people said it was silly, but now we have Huckabee and Bush, and others. I mean they’re all still players. But, when I said it, they thought it was silly.

 

___
Book

Ishmael Reed Mumbo Jumbo
Scribner

‘Mumbo Jumbo is Ishmael Reed’s brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.’ — Scribner

 

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Steeqhen, I feel pretty confident that the lack of citation will fly by them. Or else they’re sadists. But it’s true that’s a world I can only speculate vaguely about. Never seen a second of ‘Doctor Who’, as I’m sure I’ve said. But I believe you and almost everybody else. The museum was open and the show — a Rammelzee retrospective — is so fantastic that it’s one of those shows you wish everyone everywhere could see. Dublin, nice. I hope you had a carefree weekend that was only the beginning. ** _Black_Acrylic, I kind of figured the Moroder years would be your favorites. I didn’t even need a little bird to tell me that. The link worked, and, yes, that some very beautiful jubilance right there. Congratulations, believer! I did not know Gang of Four are from Leeds. The second time I went to see them, they had cancelled at the last second because they’d found out the owner of the club had horrible politics, but they stood in front of the club for hours talking with every disappointed fan who showed up. Swell lads. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Sparks are a vast wealth. And how was the intriguing sounding ‘Bad Boy’? Please pass my question along to love if you don’t mind. Love trying to figure out the best way to use the word ‘curdled’ in something he’s writing, G. ** Carsten, I would guess the Iggy crowd will be rather gray haired and creaky, but second guessing Germans as a whole is always a fool’s game. That whole Los Feliz-Silverlake-Echo Park area is the dream area, I think, but pricier by the minute because of that. I smoke Camel Blue. They’re uneventful but do the trick without abnormal hassle for the chest. My weekend was pretty okay. We had the most intense hail storm I’ve ever seen in my life during which I was luckily indoors but glued to the windows of course. Your weekend panned out? ** Steve, I’m so sorry, Steve. I lost both my parents in a short period of time. It was very shocking, but somehow having the dreaded occasion of losing them and that lifelong buffer happen kind of all at once helped numb me at the time. Strength, man. Great, your new show! Everyone, The 4th episode of Steve’s exciting podcast “Radio Not Radio” is out now, and you can hear it here. Looking forward to that. ** Sarah, Hi, Sarah! Cool to see you! No, this blog has some kind of bug that makes it hard for some people to comment, and the hosts can’t fix it, and I’m helpless to do anything, and it seems to come and go, and I’m sorry for the hassle but very glad you persevered. You sound good. And the short stories being published! If you don’t mind braving whatever evil forces are haunting this place, I’d love to know where I can read them if that’s possible online and if you don’t mind sharing the links. I’m good, mostly trying to create a good life for Zac’s and my new film and writing the next one and probably going up to Holland to visit my favorite amusement park, Efteling, in the next couple of weeks. So my coast is clear. Take care, pal. ** catachrestic, Yes, the technical issue is unfortunately well known to me, and, as I explained to Sarah, I’ve tried and tried to get it fixed or get my hosts to fix it to no avail. Some people go to the posts on my Facebook or Instagram and use the links to get straight to the current day, which is a hassle. Anyway, sorry. That’s ultra-good news that you feel unprecedentedly close to devising a creative practice for yourself. What are you imagining/scheming towards, if you can say? ** Lucas, Lucas!! As you can imagine, I’ve been wondering how you are and where and what’s going on with you. It’s so good to see you! LA was good, and things with the film are good, and the film is kind of the center of my life at the moment. You sound really great. I’m happy you’re enjoying friends and stuff and even school. And that you’re writing. Collobert, yes, I should spotlight a book by her, shouldn’t I? I will. I’m A-okay, I’m writing the new film. It’s going well and being tough to get right, of course. Anyway, there you are, yay! ** Roo, Right back at ‘ya. ** Diesel Clementine, What makes feet the best? I actually wonder that because of all the foot fetishists on the escort and slave and other fetish sites these days. Feet are such a huge thing. And other than clean nails and length and I don’t what else, I don’t really understand how feet-obsessed people rank feet. These guys post photos of their feet and proclaim how amazing they are, and they just look like every pair feet I’ve ever seen more or less. Anyway, sorry for saddling you with that question. I would most certainly indulge whatever it is that you would like to make a blog post about, so fire away at that with my blessing and gratitude should that mood continue to strike. ** HaRpEr, Thank you! It was great. It got major traffic! I only have ‘Woofer’ on vinyl, but now I have to check its stream. I want to hear Jane Remover. Have you heard Um, Jennifer? I’m going to track them down today. Everyone (I know) is talking about them. Todd Rundgren: I was obsessed with his stuff in the early 70s. I have insanely large collection of extremely rare stuff by him that I collected that might be worth a small fortune, I should check. ‘Wizard’ is probably his best, or at least it’s from his peak period, I think: ‘Something/Anything’ -> ‘Todd’. My weekend was good. I’m headlong into revising the new film script, and I’m pretty into it, and that was most of my Saturday and Sunday. Hoping the carthasis is still in operation. And thank you ever so much again for the amazing Sparks fest! ** jay, Sparks are great live and playing in London this fall if you feel like testing them out to that degree. Unnecessary luck on the grades, and, yeah, no worries, I’m sure. I hope your week is dawning in the classic sense. ** Okay. I decided to relight the spotlight I aimed some years ago at this really great novel in case you might not know it. See you tomorrow.