2016 read #72: Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed.

Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
218 pages
Published 1972
Read from September 11 to September 21
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

For such a brief, determinedly postmodern book, Mumbo Jumbo is thick with things to unpack. First, and most obvious these days, is the fact that it's 2016 and our society seems to have made little, if any, progress on the issues of race and culture satirized here. We still have a corrupt good ol' boy police culture; we still carry forward a colonialist mentality; the supremacy of "Western civilization" is a never-questioned article of faith for a staggering percentage of the population (a belief which supports a substantial corner of the publishing market, and even shows up to this day in how college art history courses are demarcated); we still have irrational hatred, bigotry, and basket upon basket of deplorables. But these are obvious points.

This is the sort of book that makes me wish I were better at commentary and dissection, at analysis in general. One topic (out of many) that stuck with me during my read of this book was the role of the cultural critic in keeping anything counter to the accepted narrative from entering the public (i.e. White, middle class, self-appointed "real American") awareness. This is deftly lampooned with a selection of juicy blurb quotes on the back jacket ("Propaganda," "Cute," "...such gratuitous viciousness is not called for," "This is diarrhea of the typewriter," from the likes of The New York Times, Kirkus, and The Journal of Black Poetry), and used directly several times within the text, barbed with quotation marks: "so read the 'illiterate' 'contradictory' 'scrawls,' product of 'a tormented mind'...." And more pointedly: "1st they intimidate the intellectuals by condemning work arising out of their own experience as being 1-dimensional, enraged, non-objective, preoccupied with hate and not universal, universal being a word co-opted by the Catholic Church when the Atonists took over Rome, as a way of measuring every 1 by their ideals." You can hear a young author's personal axe against the grindstone while still recognizing the sad social truth within the satire. To this day, conservative types (generally White, cis, hetero, Christian men) enjoy wielding "Calm down, you're too emotional" to shut down any debates -- all while ranting, unprompted, about the social ills brought about by "political correctness" and "millennials" and "people who don't want to work."

On a textual (rather than metatextual) level, I was fascinated by Reed's depiction of history as a clash of rival secret societies going all the way back to Osiris, the original funky brother, and Set, the first wallflower, spiteful over his own inability to bust a move. It is, naturally, as 1970s as you could possibly imagine. There are ancient aliens and oneness with Nature, revisionist archaeology of the "everything goes back to Egypt" school, prehistoric Black universities in Arabia -- all things nowadays relegated to basic cable conspiracy shows (and, well, bestselling books too, I suppose), but in the hands of a writer as talented and vigorous as Reed, it becomes a heady mix.