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'In his 1972 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
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Facsimile pages
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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'
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Extras
Meet Ishmael Reed
To Become A Writer, Ishmael Reed
Huey P. Newton, Ishmael Reed & Jawanza Kunjufu On Racism Again Black Men (1988)
Ishmael Reed on Bookworm
Ishmael Reed at Litquake 2007
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Interview
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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.
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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
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*
p.s. Hey. ** Scunnard, Hi, J. It happies me up to make you happy, naturally. So, ... even steven. You good? What's your latest? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Agree with you across the board about Ms. Posey. It is weird that Allen took so long with her, it's true. I've heard tell of Eric Zemmour, and I've seen his face around, but I didn't know squat about him until you linked me to that article, and I still don't, but only because I haven't read it yet, but I will read/know shortly. Thank you! ** James, Hi, James. I believe that grille gif is from 'Dazed & Confused', but don't quote me on that. I've forgotten already and am guessing based on a half-memory. Oh, like I said, they've let me live here 7 years when the rule is that you only live her 2 years, so I think the eviction is only fair, as sad and as much of a drag as it is. Thanks, though. ** Keaton, Hi. Oh, uh, lucky you, I think? Ah, you're a classicist or something about painting. That's hardcore. Yeah, I'm not. I like my painting, when I like painting, the way I like my fiction, which is forever searching for something impossible or something. Well, you're going to get as skinny as a rail when you're here. That seems contextually sound. ** Etc etc etc, Hey. Yeah, I met and talked with Parker Posey for a while once because she was in the dreadful film adaptation of my novel 'Frisk', and she was exactly like she is in the movies. I felt more like her co-star for an hour than a dude at her table. I've never seen 'Louie', strangely. I pretty much never watch TV, so I've missed almost everything on TV from the last five years or so. Interesting about your stand-up comedy exploration. Stand-up comedy is really hard for me. I can't take it. The form is too something-or-other for me, and I always wish I could be calm enough to study it, but I get irritated and flee the minute I see it. Strange. Seems fruitful, though. ** Kier, Hi, KierKier! Doesn't have the same ring. Yeah, she rules. Oh, I had some of those waffles when I was there. They're so cool: the interlocking hearts thing is a lot more charming than it seems like it should be. American waffles are kind of middle-ground. I like them, of course, but they don't really have any quality of note. They're just kind of a more conservative version of other countries' waffles. Oh, wow, the ram was only there to make baby sheep? Is that what you mean? That's kind of cool. I love Lukas Haas, as I'm sure you know. His speech at the end 'Mars Attacks' is one of my favorite cinema things ever. I did a long interview with him when he was making 'Johns' for Spin Magazine, but they never ran it. I've been wanting to get it transcribed forever, but it's so much work, and it's in LA. He was a totally, totally lovely guy. He was supposed to star in John Waters's 'Pecker', but he had health issues at the time and had to pull out. Amazing ears, yes! My day ... first Zac and I worked on editing the film. We're starting by putting together a rough cut of the third scene -- the one with fake snow and krampuses -- and we got a ways into that, and we'll continue pretty much as soon as I launch this post. That went well. Then we met up with Elias and hung out with him for a couple of hours before the Iceage gig. I had been really nervous to meet him, but he's such a totally great, sweet, warm, friendly, super smart guy, and it was very fun. He read us the beginning of a short story he's writing, and it was really good. Anyway, yeah, we liked him a whole lot, and I can definitely see us all being friends now, which would be really nice. Iceage were great, of course. Elias had a sore throat, but he didn't hold back. They played most of the new album and only a couple of the earlier songs, 'Morals' and one other I forget. Then after we hung out a little with Elias and Jacob, the guitarist, who was also super nice, after the gig. So it was great day and night. Your turn. Tuesday: what happened? ** Unknown, Hi, Unknown! That was quite a cool and action-packed and sparkly PP poem-shaped comment, and thanks a bunch. ** Steevee, Hi. Elias and Iceage were both really great. Thanks. I'm sure that prioritizing your health over 'Interstellar' was a very good call. I only like 'Memento'. I wasn't even all that impressed with 'The Prestige', although, yeah, I can that one being in the positive category. ** _Black_Acrylic, I was going to say that 6 CDs sounded like a lot of CDs for that period, but cool. I saw that Duncan Campbell won, and I know I know his stuff, but I can't remember it this morning. Google. ** Torn porter, Howdy. Work I'm getting done or hoping/trying to get done: film editing, my new novel, my other eBook novel, co-writing (with Zac) screenplay for the first feature film Gisele is going to direct, and this and that. Good luck on Saturday. Dickie Beau ... no, I don't think I know him or her, unless I'm spacing. Who is he/she? ** Hyemin kim, Hi. Here's the post you're looking for. On the 23rd, I'm talking about the artist Paul McCarthy in conjunction with a big show he has here, and also talking about the LA art scene from whence Paul and I both came. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Glad your cold is leaving you. I saw 'Nightcrawler'. Mm, I was kind of charmed by it at first, but when its obvious, poorly rendered 'message' started coming into the equation, I started disliking it. I don't like Jake Glyllenhaal, and I never have, but I think he maxed out the thing about him that's interesting in a way that was as impressive as I can possibly imagine he could ever be again. So, yeah, shrug. Thanks about meeting our deadlines. Too early to tell, but we're giving them a shot. Yury's fashion line is going okay, I think. There's yet another delay, I think because he needs to register the brand/company, and that's tricky, apparently, so he's trying to sort that out right now. But I think it's going well enough. ** Sypha, Hi, James. I'm sorry to hear about the post-Thanksgiving health lessening. I hope that gets righted right away, obviously. Curious how 'Les Miserables' sits with you because I am absolutely positive that's a book I will never read in my lifetime. ** Misanthrope, Hi. In writing fiction, editing is definitely my favorite part by far, and, yeah, if I could start with editing instead of writing a draft, I would pay whoever gave me that power a bunch of money. So far the film editing is a lot of fun, but we'll see once we've been doing it for a month or more straight. Really grim about your aunt. Oh, god, that's hell if she knows, and, ugh, she probably does in some way, no? Horror. Shit, about your nephew's school thing. I don't know. Obviously, he needs to go to school, period. Ugh. I love photos of people acting funny and looking like shit. When I'm not amongst them. ** Jebus, Yeah, a pleasure. I really, really like the 'Dust' tracks a lot! So true about Gluth's novel, yeah. Guy's a wizard. You take care too, and have a really swell day. ** Right. 'Mumbo Jumbo' is such an amazing novel. Ishmael Reed's first few novels in general are so great, and they're very strangely overlooked and underrated, I have no idea why. Anyway, if you don't know 'Mumbo Jumbo' already, I hope you'll look into it today, and I will see you tomorrow.