898 Reed, Ishmael
oppreSSIon in Mumbo Jumbo
Several art history students in Mumbo Jumbo begin
“to see that the Art instructor was speaking as
if he didn’t know we were in the room.” These
students are a racially diverse group who suddenly
recognize that their instructor is speaking of art
from a sense of cultural superiority that privileges
white, European art over the art of other cultures.
The students channel their righteous indignation
into stealing art from museums and returning
it to the people who produced it, liberating and
repatriating the collections of “primitive” artifacts
with the help of “sympathetic White students and
intellectuals” who are “unaffected by 1 of America’s
deadlier and more ravaging germs: racism.” The
thieves call themselves Mu’taf ikah; author Ishmael
Reed explains in a footnote that Mu’taf ikah is the
Quran’s word for the inhabitants of Sodom and
Gomorrah who “were the bohemians of their day”
just like these “art-nappers” are the “bohemians of
the 1920s Manhattan,” where the action of Mumbo
Jumbo takes place.
Museums, or “Centers of Art Detention” as they
are called in the novel, practice a form of cultural
oppression by removing artifacts from their original
cultural context—in which they might serve as art
pieces or as everyday tools or as necessary elements
of significant rituals—and putting them on display
for people who will treat them, even if respectfully,
as curios. The novel’s argument is that artifacts
that are integral to the cultural, spiritual, and even
day-to-day life of a people should remain with
those people. Removing those artifacts from their
context, taking them from the people who would
use them, and treating them as relics simply high-
lights how powerless the creators were to keep their
creations. Moreover, the museum seems to suggest
that the original culture does not deserve to keep
its artifacts, that their use for their creations is less
important than the museum’s use. Museums thus
implicitly argue that cultures whose material objects
are on display are inferior cultures, which in turn
subtly reinforces the feelings of superiority held by
museum visitors.
This argument is stated directly by Biff Muscle-
white, the curator of the Center of Art Detention:
“They’re the 1s who must change, not us, they . . .
they must adopt our ways, producing Elizabethan
poets; they should have Stravinskys and Mozarts in
the wings, they must become Civilized!!!!” Muscle-
white’s rage-filled rant depends on an assumption
that nonwhite, non-European cultures are under-
developed, underrefined, and not only inferior but
in need of improvement. Musclewhite defines the
core of oppression, speaking for those who think
they know what a culture needs better than that
culture itself.
A more insidious form of cultural oppression
is enacted by Hinckle Von Vampton, publisher
of the journal The Benign Monster. Von Vampton
manipulates an idealistic but unsophisticated black
writer to argue against black culture and for the
superiority of European culture; this is presented
as the “Negro Viewpoint,” but behind the writer’s
back, Von Vampton refers to him as the “Talking
Android.” Von Vampton is loosely modeled on
Carl Van Vechten, a champion of black artists and
writers during the Harlem Renaissance (writers
including Langston Hughes and Richard Wright).
Ishmael Reed is thus able to use Von Vampton to
expose the oppression inherent in a culture that
needs champions for minority voices in the first
place.
Reed is careful to demonstrate that oppression
is not limited to white-on-black, nor is it limited
to the arts; Abdul Sufi Hamid is a militant black
Muslim who practices both. Hamid’s response to
the emerging phenomenon of jazz is to see it as the
same kind of culturally backward curiosity that fills
Musclewhite’s museum, only Hamid also sees it as
representative of the ways black culture refuses to
advance itself: “O that’s just a lot of people twist-
ing they butts and getting happy. Old, primitive,
superstitious jungle ways. Allah is the way. Allah be
praised.” Hamid even destroys the ancient Book of
Thoth—without which jazz cannot become more
than a sidelight in the culture at large—because he
refuses to believe that the sensual, expressive indi-
vidualism it supports is dangerous to his vision for
civilized black culture.
Oppression is often thought of as any direct
action to keep a group from voting, or from work-
ing, or from equitable pay. Reed concentrates on
cultural oppression, arguing that culture is how we