Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo: Afrocentricism, Philosophy, and Haiti

Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo is an example of African-American postmodern metafiction. Reed uses multiple methods of expressing language through the written prose which abandons the accepted rules of grammar and English writing in favor of a universal hodgepodge approach of pictures, encyclopedia and dictionary entries, transcripts, multiple changes in narrator, and an author who inserts himself into the text occasionally and interweaves footnoted references and citations into the text. Reed also successfully fuses detective fiction, conspiracy and alternate history theories, and a surprisingly linear narrative that includes an Afrocentric perspective on Western history, philosophy, and race relations within the United States. Historical characters, both fictional and factual (James Weldon Johnson, Abdul Hamid, Warren Harding, Cab Calloway, and many others) are successfully mixed to form a complex narrative that exposes the problems of Western civilization and the origins of White and Black American identities.

I shall give a brief summary of the novel in order for the rest of my analysis to be understandable. Furthermore, this novel may be very difficult to understand for those with little knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance, history, Haitian Vodoun, and Afrocentric theory and epistemology. The novel is essentially about the spread of Black American culture during the Jazz Age (1920s) and the Harlem Renaissance, spreading to the point of becoming a pandemic that revolutionized and defined White American and European identities as well as being a product of the New Negro movement described by Alain Locke and other Harlem Renaissance thinkers. Referred to as “Jes Grew” (a reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a famous novel from 1852 in favor of abolition), Black culture and the Black Aesthetic grows from New Orleans to include nearly all of the Western world with new forms of dance, music (jazz and blues), literature, and painting (Pablo Picasso and many other European artists). Jes Grew, seen as a plague by the Atonists, the secret society of Teutonic Knights, Masons, and Knights Templar (yes, the Knights Templar miraculously survived the purging of the Middle Ages), try to stop its spread to preserve the glory of Western civilization and end the “immorality” encouraged by jazz, African-American dance, and art that begin to influence White youths. The Black Aesthetic and African-derived cultural uniqueness of Black Americans, defined as a counterculture of modernity by Paul Gilroy in his Black Atlantic, challenges Western cultural hegemony whilst simultaneously being a product of it and being appropriated by Western Whites in the United States. Indeed, when Freud and Jung visit America in the early 20^th century, both describe White Americans as “going Black” (209). In order to prevent the Atonists from destroying Jes Grew, Papa LaBas, a Harlem-based houngan (Haitian Vodou priest with a name that is a thinly-veiled reference to the loa Papa Legba, god of communication and intermediary between human world and the gods), his friend Black Herman, a legendary and real-life Black magician who also believes in Vodoun, and other Blacks (fictional and factual) work against the Atonists and their secret society, the Wallflower Order that seeks to co-opt and eventually end Jes Grew. The novel twists and turns at multiple points to reveal the story from the perspective of each party as it progresses, culminating in a final showdown between the forces of Atonism and Papa LaBas who reveals the truth like Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s novels: before a large audience, who listen attentively as the detective lays out the case.

Reed’s experimental novel that explores the falsehoods and problems of the Western tradition is profoundly Afrocentric. Premised on the notion of a common African-derived culture for the African diaspora, Reed uses Papa LaBas’s Vodou, Haiti as a cultural propagator of Jes Grew, Ancient Egyptian religion, mythology and history, Western science, the Crusades, the American occupation of Haiti as an extension of the Atonist war against Jes Grew, and conspiracy theories from an Afrocentist perspective to highlight the importance of African cultures in the formation of Western identity and as a countercultural, independent aesthetic that is always changing. Indeed, as Jes Grew changes over time, some of its past formations become appropriated by whites but still remain integral to the development of later forms of Jes Grew. For example, the popularity of blues and jazz music among White Americans decades after African-Americans moved on to more contemporary music forms is just one example of the process. Likewise, Reed’s novel critiques Carl Van Vechten and other whites who attempted to slum it up and take advantage of the genius and autonomy of the Harlem Renaissance to enrich themselves and co-opt it, as Hinkle Von Vampton is modeled on him. Jes Grew survives these Whites’ attempts to manipulate and destroy it, but is forced to reform itself in response as countercultural in order to continue to create another Black aesthetic and culture based on the life experiences of Black Americans.

Reed also makes some huge assumptions often associated with the Afrocentric schools of thought. For example, some of the theories devised by J.A. Rogers and other Afrocentric historians such as John Henrik Clarke are presented as truths, including Rogers’s theory that President Warren Harding was Black. Moreover, when Papa LaBas traces the history of Jes Grew and the Atonists back to ancient Egyptian religion and history during the novel’s climax, there is an assumption of an Ancient Egyptian origin for the West African-derived faiths of Vodou (Yoruba, Fon, and related peoples of Nigeria and Benin) that connects the African diaspora to Egypt and Nubia in addition to a common racial identity. If Papa LaBas’s history of African-American culture is premised on the notion of a monolithic African culture, which it appears to be, then the novel overlooks the immense cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity of the African continent. In fact, Papa LaBas asserts that the origin of the Haitian loa Erzulie, loa of love and female fertility, can be traced to Isis (161-164). A better approach would be to recognize the archetypal maternal and female love deities that can be found in cultures all over the world. Reed ultimately traces Jes Grew’s origins to the Book of Thoth, which initiated as Thoth’s illustrations of the Black god Osiris’s dances associated with spring, fertility, and life along the Nile. The Book of Thoth is sought by the Atonists to prevent Jes Grew from overthrowing Western civilization, but the book itself is based on Afrocentric assumptions of Osiris traveling around the world from Egypt (including South America and Mesoamerica, thus referring to theories regularly associated with They Came Before Columbus and Black Athena). According to Papa LaBas’s history of the world, the teachings of Osiris were brought to Greece and southern Europe by Dionysus, whose name also refers to the University of Nysa, where Osiris learned his teachings from Black men (168).  These teachings of Osiris also moved south, to Nubia, the Sudan, and ultimately West Africa, where disciples of Osiris congregated at Ife, the Yoruba cultural and religious capital for centuries. This Egypt-centric view of African history, however, is very problematic for ignoring the huge cultural and religious differences between West Africa and the Nile Valley, but does conform to longstanding beliefs in Haiti and Black America about the relationship between the Nile Valley civilizations and the African diaspora. Indeed, 19^th century Haitian and African-American writers such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and many others, some influenced by the Masons and French Egyptologists, saw Ancient Egypt as a “Black” African culture that proves the glory and capabilities of the Negro race and part of the African American legacy. Strains of black cultural nationalism have always embraced Egypt, and the fact that some Europeans also recognized this (Count Volney of France, for instance) demonstrate the importance of changing the West’s perception of Africa and the African diaspora as static, uncivilized “tribes” wandering the African jungles. Reed challenges these racist assumptions of the West about African savagery by focusing on the origin of Christianity and the Atonists in Black Egypt, where the Virgin Mary of Christianity was modeled on Isis, which is reflected in the widespread Black Madonnas in Christian Europe. According to Reed, the worship of the Virgin Mary was a compromise between the Atonists and “pagans of southern Europe who still believed in the Osiris and Isis fertility cults (170), which coincidentally, were still practiced in “Nubia” during the early Christian period (the fallacy of the Nubian concept will have to be addressed in a separate paper, dear reader).

The Atonists’ attempts to purge the world of the Egyptian-derived mystery cults of Osiris and Isis obviously do not succeed. In the West, the Atonists use Jesus Christ, a man who was only a lowly bokor (similar to a Haitian houngan but can use magic for evil or good) to distract the masses and convince them to turn away from Osiris and the “pagan” traditions based on worship of the loas (Egyptian deities are so entwined into West African/Haitian religion that they become loas in Egypt, Nubia, and southern Europe). However, the Atonists were only able to do this in Europe because West Africa was outside the influence of the Atonist-controlled Church, and the slave trade only revived the Osiris tradition/Black African origins of Greece into Western consciousness again, manifesting as Jes Grew in the 1890s and 1920s (ragtime and jazz, Harlem Renaissance, etc.). Regardless of the problem of assuming an Egypto-centric Afrocentric foundation of history, as mentioned previously, the importance of identifying Egypt’s common cultural substratum with the Sudan and Ethiopia is essential for challenging the West’s long history of racism and “Othering” of Africa, which uses colonial and slavery-era stereoptyes of the African continent to define the antithesis of European glory, civilization, and triumph.  The fact that the origins of Ancient Egypt lie in the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley and northern Sudan is often overlooked by whites who perceive Afrocentric theories of Black Egypt as attempts at self-therapy for elevating black self-esteem, thereby ignoring how the construction of Western history is an even greater attempt at self-therapy in order to justify European aggression, imperialism, and racism against the majority of the world. Thus, Afrocentrism, though problematized by the Egypto-centrism assumed by Reed’s characters, is required for understanding the West’s contradictory relationship to cultures originating in Black Africa. The Atonist movement, rooted in Set’s jealousy of Osiris and attempt to replace him as the god of Egypt, becomes the West’s raison d’etre: vying to control and eradicate expressions of life and the celebratory nature of Osiris’s teachings, thereby creating the closed-minded perception of sexuality and the human body that became pandemic to the Christian world and opposed to the liberating power of dance, emotion, and the praise of life that define African-derived music and religious expression. Hence Set’s attempt to replace worship of the other loas with Aton, the Sun disc, that destroys life and is the antithetical Osiris (174).

Rooted in his Afrocentric alternate history of the world, the philosophical and theological views favored by Papa LaBas, Black Herman, and the Haitians in the novel pose a challenge to the Western traditions of epistemology and religion. As an ever-changing counterculture of resistance dating back to slavery, Papa LaBas, for instance, rejects the restricting and exclusivity of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which only worship a single God rather than accept the Atonist control of human lives. Western individualism is exposed to be a lie; individualism in the Western context can only be properly expressed under the narrow confines of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which does not allow one to worship as one sees fit and express it in their preferred way (35). This is why Papa LaBas is ridiculed by elitist Blacks and Whites opposed to his Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral store in Harlem where he sells cures and performs “The Work,” the tradition of the loa Osiris and loas of Haiti. Moreover, Papa LaBas rejects Jesus Christ, who cannot be true since according to the Bible and various depictions of him, he never laughs, unlike humans (97). Western religion proclaims Christ as both God and human, a product of Western binary oppositional thought, but fails to see the false assumptions of humanity the Atonists place on Christ in the first place. As Patricia Hill Collins explains, Western rationalism is based on binary oppositional thinking that requires objectification by the subject one endeavors to understand, which inevitably leads to thinking in opposites when the objectified becomes defined solely based on differences. This objectification process requires the creation of an Other to explain differences between Western cultures and the non-West, which is also predicated on the objectification of African and Black American cultures that are defined as inherently oppositional to Western rationalism and science. In addition, Western rationalism as presented by the Atonists overlooks the role of personal, lived experience in verifying claims about the world, which ultimately supports the poststructuralist message of postmodern literature generally. Characters in the novel express similar views, though the belief in the fusion of cultures to form newer manifestations of Jes Grew becomes clear near the novel’s conclusion. Abdul Hamid, a real-life Harlem streetcorner preacher of the 1920s, for example, is a self-taught intellectual because the institutionalization of education only removes rebels, controls intellectuals and tries to limit the New Negro writers of the Harlem Renaissance to copying White styles (37). The very structure of Western education restricts access to true knowledge by perpetuating ignorance and weakening autonomous intellectual and cultural expression, unlike the African-based Jes Grew culture of resistance to the limiting Atonist path. 

Furthermore, an independent Black philosophy cannot merely mimic Western philosophy, meaning Black Marxists and other Blacks aping Western thought ultimately cannot transcend the limiting structures of Western thought (51), which are built on objectification of the world rather than cooperation and wonder at the miracles of life and nature. Matter of fact, Papa LaBas criticizes Freud’s theory of indissoluable bond, or being one with the external world as a whole like Papa LaBas is with nature. Because the Western worldview requires objectification, conquest of the natural world ensues, which leads to technological advancement solely for the sake of growth rather than a focus on developing individual freedom and contentment collectively as one can see in the living Jes Grew tradition of Black Americans. The Westerner’s aggression and obsession with conquest (both natural and human) becomes clearly derivable to the focus on the pursuit of an epistemology that omits lived experience and the full effort to create individual happiness as a prerequisite for societal change rather than “progressing” technologically but retaining the inequalities of previous eras. This is not to suggest that the African-derived worldview and epistemology of Black America is opposed to technology. One of the devotees of Jes Grew, Nathan Brown, pursues a pragmatic approach of taking the best of Jes Grew and the West to improve one’s life, thereby worshipping a Black Christ with all the expressive and personal liberation that comes from individual happiness (116). Abdul Hamid, the Islamic radical, also recognized the need for technology to assuage poverty and uplift the increasingly poor people of Harlem (34). A dual approach to the living tradition of Jes Grew, which provides room for personal expression and comprehension of the external world without conquest and manipulation, must remain an independent movement but not totally reject Western rationalism to avoid declines in living conditions. It’s universality (no one is excluded from individual and creative freedom during religious Vodou experiences or told how to worship) and support for lived experience as essential for building foundations of knowledge is self-evident in Jes Grew’s origins back to Ancient Egyptian Osirian cult, which emphasized the celebration of spring and fertility, or life, as the basis for freedom. However, one cannot assume this means hedonism or devotion to carnal pleasure, as Abdul Hamid states about the Book of Thoth and Jes Grew in general. The purpose of Jes Grew is not mere hedonistic and selfish desire, but to reorient philosophy to focus on humanity rather placing reason on a pedestal when the very processes used in the Western rationalist tradition rely on dehumanizing and destructive relationships between the natural world and human society. Instead of hedonism, Jes Grew should be equated with universal emancipatory humanism with respect for all traditions, religious and secular. The unique experiences of the African diaspora exemplify the possibility of such a pursuit because of the constant battle against dehumanization and the heterogeneous origins of Blacks in various West and Central African ethnic groups and the legacy of syncretism within the diaspora.

 Another important theme in the novel is the image and historical/cultural dynamics of Haiti. After the Wallflower Order’s Holy War on Haiti is exposed, Haiti becomes a worldwide symbol of religious and aesthetic freedom (64). The Atonists caused the American occupation of Haiti to attack the source of Jes Grew, since Haiti is closer to Africa culturally than Black America and responsible for bringing Vodou to New Orleans. Haiti, elevated to international symbol of Jes Grew and freedom of religion and aesthetics, plays a significant role in the novel. Charlemagne Peralte, leader of the cacos resisting the Marine occupiers, is portrayed as a Voodooist betrayed by a mulatto and murdered by a white American dressed as a black Haitian woman after a valiant raid on Port-au-Prince. Haitian characters, such as Benoit Battraville, provide Papa LaBas and Black Herman with the necessary information to find Hinkle Von Vampton and Hubert “Safecracker” Gould and prevent the Knights Templar and Teutonic Knights in the Wallflower Order from destroying Jes Grew. Batrraville also acts as a mentor, informing Papa LaBas that African-American expressions of Jes Grew must be internally developed, and that the jazz, blues, and other unique Black American forms of art and music are Jes Grew (198). The history of Haiti as an intermediary between African America and Africa is also self-evident in the immense pride African-Americans take in Haitian religion, culture and history, since Haiti was the first black nation to challenge Western hegemony in the Americas. Haitians identification with Ancient Egypt undoubtedly influenced African-Americans, although the exact origins of Haitian studies of Egypt are unknown. The only thing we do know is that the Masons established lodges in Haiti during the colonial period where some free people of color were also present, and since the Masons traced their ceremonial rights to Ancient Egypt, people of color involved in the organization while still in Haiti saw this as an attempt to appropriate what is rightly the legacy of Black people. Papa LaBas’s very name, a reference to Haitian loa Papa Legba, the most popular and widely revered loa in Haiti, is the god of the crossroads whose permission is sought for any ritual possession or communication with other loas. Papa LaBas acts as an intermediary himself between Blacks and the loas when he performs ritual healings or demands his employees at the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral feed the loas, which is a Haitian custom. Haitian cosmology continues to provide the basis for Papa LaBas’s comprehension of the world, and it is ultimately at the crossroads between Western and African worldviews as well since it also carries some European influences from the creolization procress.

As previously stated, Mumbo Jumbo is a wonderful metafiction and exploration of the inherent problems in the West. Surprisingly, Harold Bloom includes the novel in his list of the 500 greatest books of the Western canon, even though Ishmael Reed is challenging the very notion of Western philosophy and civilization while promulgating an Afrocentric multicultural alternative to the limiting Western cultures. Although his Afrocentric philosophy is based on some poor assumptions of an Egyptian origin for many archetypal aspects in human religion and mythology, it is essential for highlighting the West’s unrecognized debt to Africa. Reed also promotes an alternative worldview that places human life and freedom above a system of gathering and verifying knowledge that divides humankind and objectifies nature, abhors ancient but evolving forms of religious expression, and places African diasporic thought in the center for a new model of understanding the world. Haiti plays a vital role in this by challenging the foundation of Western hegemony: white supremacy, intolerant Christianity, and imposed Western aesthetics.