Laughter and Identity in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Abstract

Fortunately Tutankhamen came power and people were allowed do their stuff, working out this way on wall in hall every which-a-way. Maybe truest thing be said about racism is that it represents a profound failure of imagination. In his article Theories of Ethnic Humor: How Enter, Laughing, John Lowe states what is obvious but often overlooked condition of humor: To be funny indicates a lack of (439). It is an apt description of how Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo uses humor critique Western concepts of self and identity. By on sign of seriousness, Reed chips away conventions of unity and coherence from sphere of identity formulation, thus making possible conditions of instability and flexibility which can nurture a more fluid and expressive sense of self. But Reed's humor is never content with simply undermining seriousness of Anglocentric notions of self and identity. Mumbo Jumbo's narrative also lampoons various dimensions of black essentialism, what Henry Louis Gates describes as the Afro-American idealism of a transcendent black subject, integral and whole ... 'always already' black signified (251). Mumbo Jumbo is a which refuses all ethnocentric identities, even as it celebrates traces of a web of cultural energy that stretches between North Africa and North America. Indeed, Jes Grew phenomenon, Reed's metaphor for this fluid energy in Mumbo Jumbo, lives within his recasting of thousands of years of black cultural history, from Egyptology Jazz Age, into a protean form of personal energy that authorizes self and identity. And primary condition for maintaining that desired personal energy is laughter. Jes Grew, that psychic of 1920s which wends its way from New Orleans Chicago and on New York where it senses its text awaits, is an X factor, as neo-hoodoo detective Papa LaBas calls it. It is an attitude, rather than a substance; a form, rather than a content; a characteristic which plays a part in Ishmael Reed's vision of individual and collective identities. Gates identifies Reed's novel as a work of critical signification not simply because it makes liberal use of signifying trope of black verbal arts, but because For Reed, it is signifier that both shapes and defines any discrete signified. And it is signifiers of Afro-American tradition with whom Reed is concerned (251). In early pages of novel, omniscient narrator disparages those who seek to interpret world by using a single loa [spiritual guide] and implies that fixed, rigid definitions of a black essence would be Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean (24). Gates notes anti-essentialism in Reed's vision of African American experience with a similar image: Put simply, Reed's fictions concern themselves with arguing that so-called black experience cannot be thought of as a fluid content be poured into received and static containers (251). Nevertheless, through dazzling and outrageous pages of Mumbo Jumbo (ma-ma-gyo-mbo,' magician who makes troubled spirits of ancestors go away') (9), it is black culture which has historically been primary carrier of this fluid energy, this epidemic that has enlivened host ever since Osiris danced in Egypt. Dancing in novel is, in fact, a parallel metaphor reinforcing Jes Grew; and Reed likens specific forms of dance body laughter. The dances of Roaring Twenties, like dances for Osiris and Isis in ancient Egypt, are free, vibrant, and, most significantly, not serious. As with Jes Grew metaphor, Reed's critique of seriousness through dance metaphors rests largely on his reversals of high and low culture throughout novel; and so it is shaking and hully-gullying which make their ways into pages of text, not classical ballet or ballroom dance. …