Oh, how the historiographical tables turn
We’ve just barely gotten into Mumbo Jumbo in class, and one thing I’m enjoying is the sheer…
postmodernism of it all. “Facts” and “history” are so confusingly melded into
the book that I feel like I’m seeing traditional US history with this hazy,
double-vision conspiracy behind it. I guess that’s the point. But there’s a
separate and more interesting type of “double vision” that Reed also employs to
great success. He highlights cases of historical double meanings, where a word
or concept which is important and meaningful in an African culture is made evil
and/or irrelevant in white American culture. Since, in Reed’s world, loas and
magical people exist, the white establishment that disregards these ideas is
wrong.
For example, take two words whose meaning Reed explicates in
the beginning of the novel: Voodoo and
Mumbo Jumbo. Voodoo, in American popular
culture use, is a broad, vaguely evil type of superstition that involves zombies
and/or dolls that can be used to torture people. Voodoo in Mumbo Jumbo is the religion or culture of the Haitian generals who
surround US Marines in the New York Sun headline.
Their true military power or influence has been kept secret from the American
public, but now they’ve thrown our army into chaos. Far from being a trope or a
joke, Voodoo religion and culture is secretly a powerful force in Mumbo Jumbo.
The phrase “Mumbo Jumbo” itself has been similarly diluted
and devalued since it entered white American parlance. The book defines Mumbo
Jumbo as a spiritual position, a “magician who makes the troubled spirits go
away,” which, from what we’ve seen so far, accurately describes PaPa LaBas.
From Reed’s definition, a Mumbo Jumbo is the religious equivalent of a priest,
perhaps, or a well-respected doctor. But translation to US English has changed Mumbo
Jumbo’s meaning. In mainstream culture, mumbo jumbo simply means “nonsense,”
and boring nonsense at that. Nonsense that you’ve completely devalued and given
up trying to understand. By titling his book Mumbo Jumbo, Reed anticipates the criticism he might receive: that
the book itself is too nonsensical, too confusing. That it’s mumbo jumbo. If
you can only see it for mumbo jumbo and not Mumbo Jumbo, then perhaps the Order
has gotten to you, too.
Taking historical doubling and perspective-change to another
level, Reed uses common white-historian-describing-black-people tropes to
describe white people from a black perspective. For example, it’s mentioned
that PaPa LaBas’s grandfather “…was brought to America on a slave ship mixed in
with other workers who were responsible
for bringing African religion to the Americas where it survives to this
day.” (Emphasis mine.) Here, African religion is treated as an important religion, not just superstition. Moreover,
it’s a religion that can spread and influence people. Instead of dying out or
being absorbed by Christianity, African religion is persisting, and white
people’s efforts to blot it out only spread it. Christian missionaries use
phrases like “bringing the word of God to the (insert minority-Christian area
here).” Reed is using that same language to indicate that maybe LaBas’s
grandfather was being generous, kind, helpful, or missionary in some way when
he continued to practice religion in America. That wording also lowers the
status of white people: they become the uneducated, godless folk in need of
exposure to the truth. By flipping the script of traditional historiography, LaBas
underscores its unfair manipulation of the facts while simultaneously creating
something fresh and new.
The correlation of Mumbo Jumbo's title and its content is certainly interesting. At first glance, Reed's writing is entirely what we might call mumbo jumbo, but you're entirely correct in the double meanings of cultural words. Mumbo Jumbo itself is a massive allegory for white Western culture: it's already full of things that aren't easy for white people to understand (in fact, white people may never understand them), and almost encourages them to dismiss it as culturally irrelevant. Reed respects African culture for what it is and what it brings to the world: I don't think I've ever actually seen someone refer to "African religion" before. That's probably for many reasons, one of them being Africa as a continent does not have one singular religion. But another reason is most likely just that the Western world doesn't respect African religions to consider them religions. Reed flips the script here by making the white people the godless ones in need of help, as you've pointed out. I'm interested to see what else he will do.
ReplyDeleteI agree- this book just completely transports you into a new way of reading altogether. And I think a lot of our confusion really reveals the extent to which we live in a whitewashed society; it'd be easier if we understood the references, Voodoo culture, etc. but we don't and thus we are really being challenged by Reed to think differently about all of culture.
ReplyDeleteThe way that Reed uses the language of historians to give credit to things that historians of the 1920s would have discredited is certainly interesting. I think that his use of newspaper excerpts and quotes to give legitimacy some of the events of the novel is in a similar vein. Reed made up some of those things, yet they still make us think about whatever they are referring to as more real. A very post modernist view of history.
ReplyDeleteThis book is just crazy amazing. Doctorow sort of re-introduced us to warps in history that we already knew about (for example, Harry Houdini being a fake name), but Reed goes another level to expose us to twists that even we, with all our supposed progressivism and postmodernist learning, aren't even aware of. He has to literally redefine voodoo and mumbo jumbo before starting the book -- otherwise, we would have probably read it with the same American conventions that he was trying to dissuade.
ReplyDeleteI think it is rally interesting how our current culture treats religions and cultures of groups in the minority, or ones that have died out entirely, and Mumbo Jumbo brings this critique into focus. Nobody (mostly) in our modern world belives in the gods or religions of the ancient Greeks or Romans, and so we just treat their views as preposterous, labeling them as superstition, or 'paganism'. However, our culture doesn't do the same to majority religions like Christianity, simply because there are more people following it. Their is no intrinsic difference between Voodoo, Christianity, or the 'pagan' beliefs of the Greeks, it's entirely socially constructed.
ReplyDelete"For example, it’s mentioned that PaPa LaBas’s grandfather “…was brought to America on a slave ship mixed in with other workers who were responsible for bringing African religion to the Americas where it survives to this day.” " I feel like this last is a really great example of what you're talking about here. We don't notice that something unusual is going on, that a different narrative is being constructed just by way the words are phrased until our attention is brought to it, but it fundamentally changes the way we see African religion in the New World. It reminds me of the very end of The Handmaid's Tale, which we read last year in Utopias and Dystopias. At the end of that novel, we see an academic conference, seemingly of a standard Western type, until we notice that none of the presenters are white. Instead, we get to see a Hindi scholar present an article on the influence of a particular manifestation of a Hindu god on American understandings of Christianity. It's jarring, and brutally effective. You say "hey, what are you talking about? What influence? Christianity is a different thing!" and then you realize that for one thing, there probably has been influence on understandings of Christianity from Hinduism, and for another, that this is what Western narratives can look like in a fairly benign form, not even a form which dismisses a culture or history entirely as being unworthy of study.
ReplyDeleteCould you see the statuettes on Abdul’s desk as another example of that historical doubling in Mumbo Jumbo? The statuettes are specifically by African artists, mocking white explorers in Africa – a reversal of racist depictions of African Americans by white artists and minstrel shows. We (being mostly white readers) might pause slightly reading this description of “chalk-faced, ridiculous, monkey-like” white people, not only the statues but in characters like Biff and Thor too - but Reed is doing this intentionally to show this racial portrayal “on the other foot.”
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