I Feel Big Dumb



Before I get into how I feel dumb, is it just me or are there a lot of references to Ragtime in Mumbo Jumbo? Maybe we talked about this in class and I missed it for some reason, but I keep reading something in MJ that reminds me of Ragtime. There was the old guy at the end who said he was actually 29, similar to Tateh, and the foreshadowing of a guy drowning aboard the titanic, like Father with the Lusitania, and at some point I saw something about a Ford car. There were a couple others but I didn’t write them down. If these references are on purpose, which I think they are, then it’s funny because Ragtime was published after Mumbo Jumbo. So…either Ishmael Reed is clairvoyant, which I wouldn’t rule out, or Ragtime is referencing Mumbo Jumbo but only in obscure ways that make it seem like Mumbo Jumbo is actually referencing it……………….
Anyway, please tell me I’m not the only one who finished Mumbo Jumbo feeling like I only absorbed about 10% of the words. I got the gist of the storyline, but beyond that, it’s a shrug. Okay, not to toot my own horn, but I always do the English readings. I’m not a schmoop kind of girl. Before you call me a goody goody just know it’s because I don’t have the balls. However, around the fourth reading, I woke up one morning and searched for an online summary. The first few readings had been really frustrating. I wasn’t sure I would get anything more from the reading than from an online summary. I couldn’t find one though, so I just did the reading, and it was slightly more readable than the ones before so that was nice. I thought it would be a turning point, but I continued to struggle through later readings. It’s like, I start reading a paragraph with great intention to focus, and then by like the third sentence, my eyes glaze over. It’s kind of like with meditating where you’re like “ok, I’m going to clear my mind and think about nothing” and then two seconds later your mind’s like “wow I’m getting better at not thinking thoughts,” but, of course, that’s a thought in itself.
Reading Mumbo Jumbo, I found myself staring at a paragraph for minutes at a time, my mind constantly drifting off making me have to start back over or reread the last three sentences, again and again, trying to slap my mind into actually paying attention and make some semblance of sense out of the words, progressing at a snail’s pace. Reading Mumbo Jumbo, I found myself staring at a paragraph for minutes at a time, my mind constantly drifting off making me have to start back over or reread the last three sentences, again and again, trying to slap my mind into actually paying attention and make some semblance of sense out of the words, progressing at a snail’s pace. At some point in the book, I gave up for the sake of time and just tried to follow the plot and recall enough events to pass the reading quizzes, but beyond that, all the intricate details and deeper meaning didn’t make the cut.  I wish I had enough focus to thoroughly read MJ because I know Reed’s writing is genius. Theoretically. But hell Man, why did you make your book so unreadable? I know it’s a cool conspiracy-like thing where the atonists got to MJ first, or it’s meant to challenge our westernized perception of African culture, or some other smart purpose, and that’s great, but I can’t even read the book, so without Mitchell, it would be lost on me. Maybe MJ is designed to weed out the incompetent. Only the worthy may read this book, just like only the worthy may obtain the book of Osiris. I don’t even know if that reference was on point. Just….look….isn’t the point of writing supposed to be to make it as clear as possible for the reader? I know some writing has to be very technical and requires studying, but they aren’t deliberately convoluted like MJ was. It’s almost as though Reed was like, how confusing can I possibly make this book? I was reading my statistics textbook after a MJ reading one night, and that was easier to understand. That can’t be right. I have every hope that one day I will reread Mumbo Jumbo with a more intellectually competent mind and deeply appreciate it, but for now, I just want a book that has two consecutive sentences that actually relate to each other.

Comments

  1. Elizabeth TFebruary 29, 2020 at 10:35 AM

    Smooth Emi. I certainly get where you’re coming from. Reed purposefully breaks many conventions of novel writing – or at least, Western novel writing – and while I understand the deeper meaning, that our conceptions of “proper” formatting and plot structure come from our cultural, Atonist conditioning, and Reed is forcing us to grapple with our notions of “proper” and “improper” – none of that is very helpful when it comes down to trying to get a class reading done on a school night.
    Maybe even more troublesome for me to grasp than the strange formatting and complex sentences was the fact that the plot itself didn’t follow many of my expectations. Papa Labas is the “protagonist” only in the loosest sense – half of the chapters followed peripheral characters, plotlines were picked up and then dropped again with abandon, and historical accuracy was treated like suggestion. It’s an impressive book, but one that’s very hard to grasp on a page-by-page basis.

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  2. Elizabeth RienstraMarch 2, 2020 at 4:57 PM

    You are not alone here, because I definitely feel like I have little to no grasp on Mumbo Jumbo. I also got a general grasp of the plot, but most everything else disappeared into the nether. You described reading Mumbo Jumbo exactly how I experienced it. I had every intention of understanding Reed's writing and catching all the little details, but by the end of the reading I was still wondering what was happening. I'm usually the kid who picks up on the subtler stuff and remembers tiny details from the readings, but by the last reading of Mumbo Jumbo I still didn't know who some of the characters were. And that was an incredibly frustrating experience. I didn't expect to understand the entirety of Mumbo Jumbo. I figured some things would be a mystery by the end. But when those things are fairly central ideas of the plot, that's just infuriating. And it wasn't like I wasn't trying to understand the book: I spent what felt like forever and a year on each reading, but I still retained basically nothing. I had enough of an idea to pass the reading quizzes, but at the cost of what? My sanity?
    Mumbo Jumbo drove me crazy. Its almost complete lack of coherency annoyed me, as did its new phenomenons that I'm sure I would have been able to keep track of had I not been struggling to wade through everything else (I still don't know what a J.G.C. is). I'm not saying that Reed's style should be totally abolished and condemned. I'm sure there's merit in Reed's writing, which I can tell is genius. But I certainly can't understand it, and if I can't understand it, then what's the point? As the readings went on, I only found myself getting more frustrated. I thought that once we got deeper into the book I'd understand it more, but I just maintained the same barely-competent level of comprehension. It felt like a waste of time. And just to add insult to injury, the majority of my friends loved Mumbo Jumbo, breezed through the readings, and sung nothing but praises.
    I'm sorry Mr. Mitchell, but this book was a lost cause on me. Maybe everyone else got it, but Mumbo Jumbo went over my head. And to be completely honest, I'm not planning to revisit it until I'm older and have a fighting chance of knowing what's happening and what everything means.

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  3. Grace JuhnMarch 8, 2020 at 3:39 PM

    I definitely struggled with that not gonna lie. It was particularly hard to read when the character plot and flow of the book seemed like all over the place at times. It was particularly hard to comprehend the narratives where all these new words were thrown at me and I had to try my best to even understand half of the logistics behind these two words and the phrases in which they were used.

    I also found may connections between ragtime and mumbo jumbo and I pointed out in class one time. But I had no idea that Ragtime was written after mumbo jumbo (oops) so I thought that Reed was referencing to different aspects of Ragtime. I remember that Reed talked about houdini and then later in ragtime, Doctorow literally uses houdini's escape tricks for the flow of the book.

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  4. Anya Kaplan-HartnettMarch 12, 2020 at 5:44 PM

    I loved reading Mumbo Jumbo! I definitely see what you mean about how the plotting can be confusing (especially at the beginning) but ultimately every aspect of the text is meant to defamiliarize Western culture and expand our horizons to consider alternate perspectives. Literature doesn't need to be totally "readable" to be accessible, and maybe Reed wants readers to work a little harder to connect the dots and follow his incredibly intricate text. Mumbo Jumbo takes extra conceptual work to read but that doesn't mean we can't understand his greater argument. Also, reading doesn't mean that you need to understand every sentence the same way. Sometimes it's better to let passages kind of move through your brain without the kind of immediate verbal comprehension we expect. But the amazing thing about reading literature is that not everyone has to like the same things -- there's no accounting for taste. You can be challenged by a novel and really learn a lot from it without enjoying every page (me @ Mrs. Dalloway last year, sorry Mr. Mitchell)

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