Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

This is one of those rare books that I both enjoyed a lot but also felt like I wasn’t entirely 100% getting.

Ishmael Reed is a very important and significant writer, and tho I haven’t read a huge amount of his work before – the only one I definitely have read is his eviscerating late-career critique of that terrible musical Hamilton – I have finally arrived at this book, Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a key entry in his acclaimed oeuvre.

The way I would  describe it – and I did while reading it – is that this book is essentially what both Kurt Vonnegut and William S Burroughs wish they had been able to achieve…

By this I mean, there is:

• a clear and consistent disjointedness to sections of text and to narrative;
• a clear and yet complex (and perhaps  indefinable in its specifics to me (because I’m ignorant not because the text is lacking)) satirical purpose;
• humour; 
• action;
• classic literary sleaze (or sleaze-adjacent sex);
• engagement with previous bodies of work and complex historical texts, which figures as an intellectualism, as an in-depth knowledge of literary history; and
• a purposeful and intentional vagueness and lack of clarity that never feels anything other than totally deliberate.

What’s it about?

Mumbo Jumbo is about an epidemic, a dance craze, a culture craze, a re-evaluation of the state of the nation craze that’s taking place in the United States of America in the 1920s.

It’s ragtime, it’s jazz, it’s swing, it is burgeoning mass media, it is magazines and newspapers, it is cinema and it is sin and it is dancing and it is fucking and it is fun and it is looking towards the future…

It’s a novel about the restoration of pre-colonial religious practices, about rituals and religions that were lost (i.e. intentionally destroyed by colonisers) during the centuries of enslavement inflicted upon peoples of African descent in the North American continent…

It’s a novel about Haitian independence and freedom, it’s about the Knights Templar, it’s about newspapers, it’s about railroads, it’s about migrations to cities, it’s about urban renewal and it’s about politics and it’s about class and it’s about education and it’s about race and racism and sex and sexism…

There are references to numerous works of art and literature, some of which may have not quite been within the time limit of the narrative flow of the text, but also may have been… I don’t know quite how early some of the big names of the ’40s and ’50s started their careers and it may well be that they did exist in the public eye 20 years before that…

(One example – and there were others – is Cab Calloway, who I mainly associate with the 1980s comedy (I think it was a comedy?) The Blues Brothers, but maybe Calloway was a young man in the roaring twenties??? I could find the answer to this by googling, yes, but I shan’t be doing that, thank you very much.)

Mumbo Jumbo is about intellectuals and preachers, about activists and assassins, about cruelty and about trying to manipulate the forces that are growing and internationalising this dance pandemic and trying to subvert and control the raging power and potential of this conversion of energy into something new, something fresh, something very very American.

Alas, though, jazz didn’t save the world…

We still live – a hundred years after the setting of this novel and fifty years after Reed wrote it – in a constant and unvarying horrorshow of a nightmare ruled by people who love order and commerce and extraction and exploitation. We are still – most of us, though maybe you, reader, are not – stuck in networks and systems designed to keep us down and desperate and sapped of energy and power and joy.

Christ.

There’s no happy ending, really, is there?

Re: Mumbo Jumbo: did I understand everything that was happening? No, I didn’t. Did I feel like Ishmael Reed understood everything that was happening? Yes, and that is why I think this novel is a success and one that would probably reward far more attention than I paid to it, reading it while tubing (riding the London Underground) around the city, otherwise bored out of my sad, little, empty, loser mind…

–///–

Mumbo Jumbo is funny, it’s exciting, it’s full of narrative twists and turns, and engaging and playful subversions of standard narrative and structural expectations…

It plays with histories of literature and religion and culture, without ever becoming stuffy – as I said, I didn’t understand all of it, but I never felt like not understanding every paragraph meant  there was a contempt felt towards me by the writer, which is something I’ve found with bad yet also intellectual novels.

(I’m not going to list any examples, but you know the kind of crap I mean – where there’s no pleasure to be taken unless you’re taking 100% of the pleasure… A good counterexample, similar to this, is Proust – which is often highly confusing and highly intellectualised, yet even a reader as dumb as be can be confused and bored through The Guermantes Way yet still enjoy the pleasures of Sodom and Gomorrah…)

So, yeah, what I’m saying basically is that Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed is a powerhouse of a playful, experimental, political novel from a particular time and place. It’s evocative, explorative, confrontational, engaging, highly researched, highly intellectualised, but also incredibly fucking fun.

Highly recommended, and I am v v keen to dip into some more Reed at some point soon…