Ishmail Reed

One of America’s most significant literary figures, Ishmael Reed has published over thirty books
of poetry, prose, essays, and plays, as well as penned hundreds of lyrics for musicians ranging
from Taj Mahal to Macy Gray. His work is known for its satirical, ironic take on race and literary
tradition, as well as its innovative, post-modern technique.

Reed’s books of poetry include Conjure (1972), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and National
Book Award, Chattanooga (1973), A Secretary to the Spirits (1978), New and Collected
Poems (1988), and New and Collected Poems 1964-2007 (2007), which was named one of the best
books of poetry of the year by the New York Times, and won the California Gold Medal in Poetry,
awarded by the Commonwealth Club. Reed’s poems have been published in other forms as well.
His work has been featured as part of poetry walks in Berkeley, California and Richmond, New
York; it also appears as an installation in a BART station in Richmond, California.

Reed’s many novels include the critically acclaimed Mumbo Jumbo (1972), The Terrible
Twos (1982), Japanese by Spring (1993) and Juice! (2011). Recent essay collections include The
Complete Muhammad Ali (2015), Going Too Far: Essays About America’s Nervous
Breakdown (2012), Barack Obama and The Jim Crow Media, Or The Return of the ‘Nigger
Breakers’ (2010) and Mixing It Up: Taking On The Media Bullies & Other
Reflections (2008). Ishmael Reed: The Plays collected Reed’s six plays and was published in 2003.
Reed has also edited numerous anthologies, most recently among them Black Hollywood
Unchained: Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood (2015) Powwow, Charting the Fault
Lines in the American Experience: Short Fiction From Then to Now (2008), which he co-edited
with Carla Blank. He edits the online literary magazine Konch and blogs for the San Francisco
Chronicle.

Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1938, but grew up in the working-class
neighborhoods of Buffalo, New York. He attended the University of New York-Buffalo, but never
matriculated; he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University in 1995. He
also received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte,
North Carolina in 1998.
 Mumbo Jumbo

Reed's third novel Mumbo Jumbo. Nominated for a National Book Award is
his largest work to date and is one of his most important
contributions to the reinterpretation of African-American experience
and culture. It is a critique of black and Western literary forms and
conventions and of the complex relations between the two. It is a
thematic allegory of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s rendered
through casual connections with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
Mumbo Jumbo is about constructing of future black aesthetic. It uses
nineteenth century American Pantheism.
Reed appropriates American Renaissance tropes to comment on the
modernist co-optation of the Harlem Renaissance Egypt, the rituals of
West Indian magic and the conjuring power of the darkness.
Moving from ancient Egypt to the Crusades to the twentieth century
America, Reed in Mumbo Jumbo shows a consistent pattern of suppression
of non-Western cultures by Judeo-Christian culture. He portrays the
eternal conflict between the forces of life represented in the novel
by the powers of HooDoo and the forces of death represented by
Atonists and Wallflower Order in its broadest possible historical,
cultural and mythical contexts.
Mumbo Jumbo dramatizes the confrontation between Euro-eentric and
Afro-centric thought and culture. Reed wrote this novel in partial
response to white literary critics^ remarks that black Americans
lacked a literary tradition. It marks Reed’s shift from Egyptian
symbols and myths to those of African-American aesthetics or what he
calls Neo-HooDooism. It is both a satire on Western culture's concern
with rationality and an example of the reorientation of older
traditions possible under Reed's aesthetics of Neo-HooDooism.
In one of the interviews Reed expresses his intention to write about
American civilization in general instead of on a particular period.

“I want to write about ^Hixon administration but later I want to

transcend some particular political event and make a statement about
American civilization as a whole”.1

In another interview he traces the inspiration for his work to a

fetish he wrote.
"Mumbo Jumbo was derived from a fetish that I wrote. It was modelled
after a sculpture I had seen in museum".
Mumbo Jumbo is a detective novel, a historical narrative. Its central
purpose is to expand a wildly paranoid theory thereby explaining all
history from ancient Egypt to the present day.