900 Reed, Ishmael
tradItIon in Mumbo Jumbo
PaPa LaBas, the voodoo priest at the center of
Mumbo Jumbo, traces the history of tension and strife
between Western and Eastern cultural traditions
back to the antagonistic Egyptian rulers (and broth-
ers) Set and Osiris. Osiris was an artist, a dancer
whose powerfully inventive dances earned him a
sizable following and considerable popularity among
his and his brother’s subjects. After days spent farm-
ing and tending crops, the Egyptians would spend
their evenings dancing, all to the increasing frustra-
tion of Set, who was jealous of Osiris’s popularity
and who considered the celebrations frivolous. In
time, though, people began dancing during the day,
as if they could not control themselves, and the crops
began to suffer. Uncertain what to do, Osiris asked
the artist Thoth to study the dances and write them
down in an attempt to make some sense of them
and gain some control over them. Thoth believed
that “the outbreaks occurred because the mysteries
had no text to turn to,” no litany to give the dances
structure and meaning. The Book of Thoth worked
to maintain balance until Set killed Osiris, and in
time the book was lost.
In Ishmael Reed’s mythology, the dances and the
spirits of those dances persist. Just as the Egyptians
would be suddenly overcome by the urge to dance,
almost as if possessed, moments in history see sud-
den outpourings of cultural invention. The action
in Mumbo Jumbo takes place during the Harlem
Renaissance, chronicling the Jes’ Grew movement,
which spreads explosively around the country. Jes’
Grew is an updated manifestation of Osiris’s danc-
ing: Reports come in that “people were doing ‘stupid
sensual things,’ were in a state of ‘uncontrollable
frenzy,’ were wriggling like fish, doing something
called the ‘Eagle Rock’ and the ‘Sassy Bump’; were
cutting a mean ‘Mooche,’ and ‘lusting after rel-
evance.’ ” The problem for Jes’ Grew is that it has
no text: Without the Book of Thoth to provide
some order, Jes’ Grew sweeps the country and then
evaporates.
The Osirian impulse is described in Mumbo
Jumbo as a natural part of human expression and
emotion, but one that is not able to grow and
flourish because it has no tradition of validation; it
remains always an individual urge. The paradox is
that the tradition’s vitality is rooted in its individual
expression, but the variety of individual expression
prevents the tradition from ever taking coherent
form. Traditions need a text in order to be trans-
mitted and preserved, but also to preserve cultural
knowledge, to help individuals understand how
they fit into a community, and to help them make
sense of their individual impulses. Yet traditions risk
becoming too conventional, adhering too strictly to
their texts and thus surrendering their meaning to
the sterile observance of sanctioned forms.
Reed is expansive in his critique of hidebound
traditions and the ways that established traditions
will react aggressively and fearfully to preserve
themselves and subjugate others. As Jes’ Grew is
seeking the Book of Thoth, opponents are actively
working to keep the book hidden and to suppress
any efforts to recreate its text. Just as the Osirian
traditions continue, albeit sporadically, Set’s jealousy
and lust for power persist in the Wallflower Order,
the secret guardians of Judeo-Christian traditions
and power. One of Reed’s more powerful cri-
tiques emerges from his depiction of the Wallflower
Order’s efforts to repress one tradition by creating a
lesser version that they could control. Their vehicle
is the literary journal The Benign Monster, which
presents the “Negro Viewpoint” through the writ-
ings of a naive young black man who is manipulated
by the journal’s white editor. The goal of the journal
is to hide its agenda behind an African-American
voice that writes to denounce Jes’ Grew, arguing
instead for the superiority of European culture and
traditions.
Equally at fault is Abdul Sufi Hamid, a militant
black Muslim who has the Book of Thoth but does
not realize its significance. After reading it and
deciding “that black people could never have been
involved in such a lewd, nasty, decadent thing as
is depicted here,” he burns the book, and shortly
thereafter Jes’ Grew dies out. In the end, PaPa
LaBas is reduced to a relic who is paraded through
university lectures where he is patronized as an
“eccentric old character from the 20s,” and Jes’ Grew
is reduced to a curiosity that flares up in various
cultural movements but never coalesces into a viable
tradition of its own. The critique Reed offers is to
excoriate those traditions that encourage moribund