mumbo jumbo (ishmael reed)

Well now… this is perhaps the ur-text of 2020. Pandemic/ BLM/ Conspiracy theories. Mumbo Jumbo’s got it all. The Jes Grew pandemic is sweeping the States, making everyone dance to its crazy rhythms. The Knight’s Templar are desperate to repress it. They set out to discover the secret blockchain code which will reveal its Egyptian mysteries. A race war plays out on the streets of New York. In the midst of which Reed gives an erudite and definitive guide to the history of Osiris and Isis and Moses and the origins of just about everything. Mumbo Jumbo is as the title suggests a rip-roaring nonsensical blast of glorious imagination, strident enough to blow down the walls of Jericho. Ishmael Reed’s novel is Pynchonesque in its scope and refusal to take itself too seriously. Its brash, prophetic prose suggests that not much has changed in a hundred years of the USA. Perhaps because it refuses to pander to a conventional downbeat minority narrative, or perhaps because it’s just so out there, Mumbo Jumbo would not appear to be part of the canon, either of US literature or US Afro-American literature. But as 2020 has blessed us with all the ingredients which seemed so outlandish in Reed’s imagination, perhaps people might start to recognise Mumbo Jumbo for what it is: one of then most astute portrayals of the USA ever written. Egyptian founding myths and all.