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224 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1972
Deluxe Ice Cream, Coffee, 1 cent Pies, Cakes, Tobacco, Hot Dogs and Highways. Highways leading to nowhere. Highways leading to somewhere. Highways the Occupation used to speed upon in their automobiles, killing dog pigs and cattle belonging to the poor people. What is the American fetish about highways?Since I missed that entirely the first time until Rayroy pointed it out, it wasn't until like yesterday that I realized how that reminds me of a lot of what Henry Miller cracked on about in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. (Oh, look, a dead white dude.)
They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.
Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.
But what is after them?
They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress. We call it Haints. Haints of their victims rising from the soil of Africa, South America, Asia.
(p135)
I was in Harlem watching the little colored waifs play in the school yard. Some of them dropped their notes which I immediately swept into my briefcase and they would bawl but then I appeased the little chocolate dollops by awarding them peppermint candy.We also spent a good chunk of book club looking at the illustrations and photographs in each of our editions. Some of the ones I had in my book were replaced by different images in Rayroy's copy, and I can't imagine why that might be unless maybe copyrights or something. I have to say that most of the images in my copy were better than the one in his, not that that means anything. I'm just saying that if you read any copy of this book, you may have different images throughout.
(p141)
The Atonists got rid of their spirit 1000s of years ago with Him. The flesh is next. Plastic will soon prevail over flesh and bones. Death will have taken over. Why is it Death you like? Because then no 1 will keep you up all night with that racket dancing and singing. The next morning you can get up and build, drill, prowess putting up skyscrapers and…and….and…working and stuff. You know? Keeping busy. [Reed's ellipses.]The novel, though relatively short, tells the labyrinthine story of the agencies trying to advance or stop the spread of Jes Grew.
John Milton, Atonist apologist extraordinary himself, saw the coming of the minor geek and sorcerer Jesus Christ as a way of ending the cult of Osiris and Isis forever. […] Another Atonist; that’s why English professors like him, he’s like their amulet, keeping niggers out of their departments and stamping out Jes Grew before it invades their careers. It is interesting that he worked for Cromwell, a man who banned theater from England and was also a hero of Sigmund Freud. Well the mud-slingers kept up the attack on Osiris, a writer Bilious Styronicus even rewriting Osirian history in a book called the Confessions of the Black Bull God Osiris in which he justified Set’s murder of Osiris on the grounds that Osiris made “illicit” love to Isis who, he wrote, was Set’s wife. He was awarded the Atonists’ contemporary equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for this whopper.In fact, an overhasty reading of Mumbo Jumbo might lead one to expect that its ideological conflict is a matter of black vs. white—because in modern Europe and America, it is. But Reed's most ambitious joke is delivered in a climactic thirty-page summing-up that parodies detective-novel exposition resolutions, conspiracy theories, and religious revelations all at once. PaPa LaBas, attempting to arrest Hinckle von Hampton, explains to a Harlem society gathering that, "if you must know, it all began 1000s of years ago in Egypt."
LaBas could understand the certain North American Indian tribe reputed to have punished a man for lacking a sense of humor. For LaBas, anyone who couldn't titter a bit was not Afro but most likely a Christian connoting blood, death, and impaled emaciated Jew in excruciation. Nowhere is there an account of Christ laughing. Like the Marxists who secularized his doctrine, he is always stern, seriously and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does 1 see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised, or certain African loas, Orishas.So, if you are looking for a serious laugh, I highly recommend Mumbo Jumbo.
Americans will not tolerate wars that can't be explained in simple terms of economics or the White man's destiny.Once upon a time, I aspired to committing to a long and fruitful relationship with a little old, semi known author named Thomas Pynchon, one who happens to explicitly namedrop Reed in his most iconic composition. Later on, I fell down several Tumblr holes devoted to detailing the trials and tribulations of Black culture and learned about a certain sector of virulent machismo bred on certain conspiracies regarding Ancient Egypt and its modern incarnations whose members are sometimes derisively and pejoratively referred to as "Ankh Ni**as'. Here and now I find myself at an unexpected intersection between the two, an uneasy mix when I consider my customary efforts to rescue non-white source material from their overbearing white "adaptors" alongside my goal to not ignore the complexities of intersectional social justice. In the end, I let my more "objective" reaction to how Reed chose to weave his text determine where I fell on the scale, and while the beginning was rather glorious in its gallivantingly ribald pacing and irrepressible webs upon webs of historical fact and tenuous connection, the end had far too much world building walls of text to successfully undercut the ever increasing chauvinism in its creative choices. I may waffle more positively on the rating in the future, but for now, in light of all that I've read in nearly half of this current year, two stars accurately sums up my reception: great idea, far too self-absorbed an execution, and when a text is attempting to write out a millennia of alternate history, it really can't afford any sort of myopia in its bias.
[O]ur nation did not heed the prophecies of its artists and it paid dearly. We will never make that mistake again.