Ishmael Reed

There are reports that a strange contagion is sweeping the country, playing hide and seek with the authorities, jumping from one neighborhood to another. Some people think it’s a hoax; others are convinced it is a conspiracy to destroy Western civilization. In Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed reimagined the past (all the way back) and predicted the future.

Reed drops some clues early as to what he’s getting at. The outbreak (after a fleeting episode in the 1890s) erupts in Congo Square in 1920—not coincidentally the year Charlie Parker was born. Infections spread from New Orleans to Chicago then threaten New York. Mumbo Jumbo. The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance ain’t what they seem.

The new plague is a kind of anti-plague, really, one that enlivens rather than kills its host, causing an outbreak of dancing and sensuousness, people wriggling like fish, ‘lusting after relevance,’ ebullient and ecstatic.

Even the sap in the maple trees moves nasty.

In Reed’s multifaceted presentation, black music & dance, poetry & painting—favoring spontaneity, creativity and free expression over the strictures that would shackle the human spirit—were a challenge to the aesthetic order, and a threat to Western civilization more generally. The battle between opposing aesthetics was an early-20th c. American manifestation of an ancient conflict with origins in Egypt (Sun Ra was right!), renewed in late antiquity when the Church drove the rites associated with the pagan gods underground, where they persisted. The only remedy that the Church and the forces of order thenceforward knew was to ‘beat the living shit out of them.’ The 1915 invasion of Haiti by US Marines was intended as a preemptive strike against a Vodoun invasion, and Warren Harding was pushed into the presidency by agents of a secret society determined to thwart the spread of the ass-shaking epidemic. The plan goes off the rails when Harding exposes the Holy War in Haiti and then is spotted at a rent party in Harlem, with music and dancing as cover for a ‘chitterling switch’ to raise money for an anti-lynching campaign. Harding is suspected of speaking in code to blacks (“The Negro should be the Negro and not an imitation White man”) and of hiding his Negro ancestry and thus must be eliminated as Garfield was. Meanwhile, Marcus Garvey and Black Herman are subverting the intentions of the New Negro to assume his place in the established order; the last remnants of the Knights Templar are in hot pursuit of a band of mu’tafikah that is looting museums (‘pirate dens’) in a campaign to return stolen art to its origins; and the ancient rites have resurfaced as samizdat. At their wits’ end, the agents of order are forced to fight fire with fire—publishing a literary magazine as an organ of disinformation, and concocting a plot to impoverish the country so that people cannot afford radios.

A houngan explains that outbreaks of the dancing plague occurred because the mysteries had no text to turn to. A lost liturgy was seeking its litany. The genius of black people in America, says the houngan, is that they were dumped here on their own without the Book to tell them where the spirits were or how to perform the rites to invoke them and so they made up their own. Blues. Ragtime. Jazz. Inadvertently, they preserved and advanced the Work. With Mumbo Jumbo, the Work once more finds its Word.

Remember to feed the loas.… (més)

"The Novel [...] organized systematically and formally to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation which it perpetually holds out and withdraws. [...] A realism that seeks History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach." — Fredric Jameson

There was a moment in the late 20th century in which the pre-eminent progressive author (Reed, Doctorow, perhaps also Coover, though I’m loath / to file him in that pigeonhole) was writing bad-on-purpose novels composed entirely of plot — all fat, in the sense that the adverb is excess fat in a sentence, I maintain 'plot' functions like this in the novel — the reading of which is providing a surplus value of pleasure derived from an extra-textual (i.e. romantic political) association in easy sympathy with a heaping of Catch-22 exclamation-mark humor. The difference between this kind of writing and my sympathy with that mantra (from Shelia Heti): "I should put a lot of shit in the play," perhaps comes down to (a different) "Argument From Degree."… (més)

An ad promises Benjamin "Chappie" Puttbutt III that he will learn the language of Japanese by spring. He had started taking lessons to learn Japanese in the Air Force Academy in the mid 1960s. Only the lessons ended after he had been expelled from the Academy. In the beginning the reader has no idea why Puttbutt has been expelled, but hang on! That story is coming and it's a doozy. In present day, Puttbutt teaches English at the Jack London College. His only ambition in life is to make tenure, but he is a miserable failure. [As an aside, I can tell you that tenure is not all that it is cracked up to be.] But anyway, Puttbutt is so desperate for this recognition that he jumps on the latest support bandwagon that will further his cause, even if it means derogatory talk about his own race and culture.
Reed's tongue in cheek commentary on institutional endowments was pretty funny. A student can get away with murder because his father practically funds the entire college. Where have we seen that before? Be prepared for other snarky commentary on political hotbed topics like the LA riots and the beating of Rodney King, nationalism, racism, any ism you can think of. Speaking of racism, here is a snarky scene to ponder: a professor is exclaiming that racism has never existed on the Jack London College campus while a fraternity is having its annual "Slave Day." I was tempted to play a drinking game with the words nationalism and Yoruba.… (més)