Ismael Reed—Full of Mumbo Jumbo or Literary Genius?

One of the unique ways that sets Mumbo Jumbo aside from other historical fiction novels is Ishmael Reed’s positioning of photos, artwork, diagrams, signs, and texts that at first glance have little to no significance to the actual chapter. Many of these insertions often have no captions or any further explanation past the media itself. Sometimes, they even seem nonsensical in nature. They do provide context—but even context to the images remains uncertain and dependent on the reader. A “classical” (modernist) historical fiction author might argue that Reed’s inclusion of non-textual devices is ridiculous and demeans the genre, claiming the novel’s title aptly describes its essence. I say this annoyance around Mumbo Jumbo is because critics hate what they don’t understand, and Reed revels in the postmodernist narrative of nonsense and disorder.

To embrace literary postmodernism means to embrace the spirit of deconstructing the meaning of literature as a rational concept of “correct” aspects and “wrong” aspects. Furthermore, to understand postmodernism texts from modernist texts, one must perceive the written work as not only a total fictional narrative but a subjective portrayal able to recognize its existence past the constraints of a single perceived analytical interpretation by readers. Postmodernist works acknowledge their status as fiction and their actuality in the external world. Traditional literary conventions are discarded, subverted and parodied, and objectivity of the world portrayed within the narrative is manipulated by the author. 

Ishmael Reed reconstructs the entire literary genre of historical fiction through Mumbo Jumbo. Modernist historical fiction typically depicts a fictional plot based on historical events, often implementing this method through taking people from actual history and actual events. The reader is aware that the novel is a modified version of an imagined history—something based on fact but remains fictional. Mumbo Jumbo strays from the carefully construed guidelines between fantasy and reality by turning not just history into fiction, but fiction into history. Let me explain. Unlike the “classical” writers of the genre, Reed structures his book similar to a history textbook or a documentary, following the path of a disease (Jes Grew) to its origins and resolution. He includes visual evidence, whether text or imagery, to support a fabricated tale of epidemics and murder within an early 20th century New York. The images and text, while often left to interpretations, are cited by sources (many of plausible credibility) which exist in a bibliography. All of these elements of Mumbo Jumbo speak to a revolutionary shift from historical fiction into fictionalized history—one self-aware of its fictional and historical nature. It leads to a couple of questions: What is history but a fabricated explanation of facts? Who's to say the Jes Grew movement in Mumbo jumbo never happened, when Reed delineates the epidemic through “real” events in the historical timeline of reality? If so, how objective is historical “truth” if its very essence can be manipulated? Perhaps there isn’t an answer to any of these questions, and there never will be. Maybe Jes Grew did happen, maybe it didn’t. Who knows? I certainly don’t.