Mumbo Jumbo: Voice and Description

Mumbo Jumbo is an interesting book to read for many reasons. One of the main reasons that the book is so different and jarring than most other novels is the way Ishmael Reed tells the story. There are parts of the book where the voice becomes so distant that you would think that the line was part of a summary rather than part of the actual novel while other lines are just as descriptive and detailed as any other novel. There seems to be an effort to give the audience only part of the picture and leave the rest to be interpreted by each reader for themselves. This ambiguity in certain sections of the book along with the pace at which the book whips from one storyline to the next without much warning makes for an extremely disorienting and confusing start to the novel. The entire book seems to embrace the idea of a narrative being confusing and disjointed. The idea that a historical narrative can be told through a coherent story from a fixed perspective is challenged throughout the book with the style that Reed uses.

Here is an example of a sentence that seems to be more at home in a synopsis of the chapter than actually in the chapter: “They see Berbelang and a well-dressed young blond White man whom they recognize from the society pages as Thor Wintergreen, the son of a famous tycoon.” (Reed 30). This sentence describes Papa LaBas and Earline seeing Berbelang and Thor Wintergreen. However, the distance in this sentence was striking to me since Reed just tells us they meet these two instead of describing the scene or how they met them. It goes directly from them meeting to then describing dialogue, eliminating details about the atmosphere or the manner in which the meeting took place in a way that seems more like summarizing events than writing a novel.

This scene is made even more interesting by the way Reed treats the interaction between Abdul, Black Herman, and Papa LaBas, where everyone’s reactions and their thoughts are seemingly much more apparent and the characters get their own description before the meeting with Papa LaBas. We get the picture of Papa LaBas entering the room and the reactions from both Black Herman and Abdul in a way that is strangely omitted in the interaction with Berbelang and Thor Wintergreen. Right away, we see the difference in the descriptions, as Papa Labas is seen standing in the doorway after we get a detailed description of both the room and the appearance of the characters inside the room that Papa Labas will be interacting with. As Papa LaBas walks into the room, Abdul is described as staring “sneeringly at his shoes. Then his face.”(Reed 33). This is one of many examples where Reed mixes and matches different elements that are often considered standard in a novel to create a chaotic narrative, and one that isn’t coherent and clean nor is it intended to be.