Mumbo Jumbo 897Equality 7-2521, writing in a tunnel under the
earth, explains his life, the society around him, and his
eventual escape from this society. His exclusive use of
plural pronouns (we, our, they) to refer to himself and
others defers to the mandate of the World Council,
which seeks to eliminate all individualist ideas. The
council raises children away from their biological
parents, assigns to them suitable skills to learn, and
then allocates them their roles in society. Equality’s
ability to think and question is considered a curse. It is
taken to mean that he is unwilling to give up himself
for others. That violates the principles upon which
Anthem’s dystopian society is founded.
Equality’s discovery of the life and artifacts from
the Unmentionable Times is considered a threat to
the social structure. He flees into the Uncharted
Forest outside the City, and upon entering the forest,
he realizes that he is free. He no longer must wake
up every morning with others to sweep the streets.
Now that he sees this, he is not stricken with the
sense that he will die at the fangs of the beasts of the
forest as a result of his transgressions. He develops a
new understanding of the world and his place in it.
On his second day of living in the forest, Equal-
ity stumbles upon the Golden One, Liberty 5-3000,
who has followed him from the City. They embrace,
fumbling to articulate their feelings as they do not
know how to feel specific individual feelings and
relate them to others. They discover a house from the
Unmentionable Times in the mountains, completely
preserved for hundreds of years by thick overgrowth.
Equality and the Golden One make it their home.
There is an unmistakable note of overt grim
intensity in the narrative that goes back to the
authorial intention and the resultant authorial inter-
vention in the narrative. The firsthand experience
of oppression that motivated Ayn Rand to raise a
bulwark of creative and critical writing against it was
neither unique nor the most horrific. Oppression
has been part of the history of humankind from the
time of the plight of English Protestants under the
Catholic queen Mary to the oppression of African
Americans in the free America and the colonial
enterprise of the European powers. What appar-
ently stunned Rand was the total failure on the part
of the then-contemporary American intellectual
establishment to appreciate the extent of it in the
Russian Empire. In fact, the very existence of it was
misjudged. In the United States, Macmillan’s refusal
to publish Anthem was based on the belief that “the
author does not understand socialism.”
Gulshan TanejarEED, iSHmaEL Mumbo Jumbo
(1972)
Mumbo Jumbo was the first of Ishmael Reed’s novels
to garner widespread critical acclaim and remains
one of his most significant works. A complex assault
on monolithic culture and an argument for mul-
ticulturalism, the novel is specifically interested in
demonstrating that European culture has obscured
its dependence on a more vital, rich, and seminal
African culture.
At its core, Mumbo Jumbo is a critique of the
Harlem Renaissance, which was a short but vibrant
outpouring of black culture during the 1920s. In the
novel, this outpouring takes the form of Jes’ Grew,
an individualized creative expression through dance
and jazz that threatens the staid dominant culture.
Jes’ Grew needs its sacred and ancient text to sustain
itself, though, and the oppressive Christian Wall-
flower Order seeks the text in order to destroy it. At
the same time, the voodoo priest PaPa LaBas, the
central figure in the novel, is also seeking the text
in order to preserve it. All the while, the text is in
the hands of a black militant Muslim, Abdul Sufi
Hamid, who destroys it without ever recognizing the
full impact of what he has done, and Jes’ Grew fades.
The novel is difficult to characterize, explor-
ing such themes as the individual and society,
oppression, pride, race, spirituality, and tra-
dition. It is at once postmodern, satirical, parodic,
and polemical as it relies on narrative fragmentation;
footnotes; complex references to myth, religion,
and history; allusions to other literary works; and
lengthy diatribes on the ways Western culture and
religion have systematically worked to contain and
marginalize African and Eastern culture and reli-
gion. Moreover, Reed (b. 1938) argues that even
black artists have been so co-opted by European
culture that they have forgotten how rich are the
offerings of their own heritage.
Michael Little