Ishmael Reed

IdleRich

IdleRich
I don't recall. I might have argued about him? You might be mixing it up with Jason Louv who attacked my mate Steve because of his interest in Vodou. That was a really nasty episode.
I definitely know Steve yeah, and I think it was him I was thinking of come to think of it so... apologies, carry on.
 

version

Well-known member
Fits the history of vodou very well actually though. White people scapegoating it due to their inability to handle their own fucking problems.
It's often used as an exotic evil in Western media too, e.g. Angel Heart and Live and Let Die. The "Voodoo doll" is apparently more or less fiction as well.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
It's often used as an exotic evil in Western media too, e.g. Angel Heart and Live and Let Die. The "Voodoo doll" is apparently more or less fiction as well.
Yeah, totally. Which just builds on black as evil racism. Any non-Christian black spirituality is going to get damned.
If you ever see any vodou ceremonies most practitioners will be dressed in white - there's definitely a purity/white light vibe going on with some of it - and they start with extensive Catholic prayers (pretty much all Haitian practitioners are Catholic) but that doesn't make it into the misrepresentations.
 

version

Well-known member
Reed's little quirks and idiosyncrasies are intriguing. He never seems to write the word 'one', always says "1". Also capitalises "Black," and "White," and doesn't always mark dialogue from whatever else is going on. The first chapter of Mumbo Jumbo also precedes the copyright, title and contents pages and some of the pages are black or grey. There's little pictures and textboxes and all sorts in the text too.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I really liked mumbo jumbo, especially the longish section at the end where he tells, or retells, Egyptian/Biblical Myth.

It got a little disjointed in places, but it really reminded me of the illuminatus trilogy.

I thought his newest book sounded good


My impression is that he's not played the game, has remained pretty out there on the edge
 

version

Well-known member
Some of it's really reminiscent of GR,
"The headquarters of the Wallflower Order. You have nothing real up here. Everything is polyurethane, Polystyrene, Lucite, Plexiglas, acrylate, Mylar, Teflon, phenolic, polycarbonate. A gallimaufry of synthetic materials. Wood you hate. Nothing to remind you of the Human Seed. The aesthetic is thin flat turgid dull grey bland like a yawn. Neat. Clean, accurate, and precise but 1 big Yawn they got up here. Everything as the law laid down in Heliopolis 1000s of years ago. (Heliopolis, the Greek name for the ancient city of Atu or Aton.) You eat rays and for snacks you munch on sound. Loading up on data is slumber and recreation is disassembling. Transplanting is real big here. Sometimes you play switch brains and hide the heart. Lots of marching. Soon as these Like-Men disappear walking single file down the hall here comes another row at you. The Atonists got rid of their spirit 1000s of years ago with Him. The flesh is next. Plastic will soon prevail over flesh and bones. Death will have taken over. Why is it Death you like? Because then no 1 will keep you up all night with that racket dancing and singing. The next morning you can get up and build, drill, progress putting up skyscrapers and ... and ... and ... working and stuff. You know? Keeping busy."
 

luka

Well-known member

Jes Grewn​



The VooDoo tradition instructs that Moses learned the secrets of VooDoo from Jethro and taught them to his followers. H.P. Blavatsky concurs: “The fraternity of Free Masons was founded in Egypt and Moses communicated the secret teaching to the Israelites, Jesus to the Apostles and thence it found its way to the Knights Templar.”

... We learned what we always suspected, that the Masonic mysteries were of a Blacker origin than we thought and that this man [a Knights Templar Grand Master in 1890] had in his possession a Black sacred Book and how they were worried that we would find out and wouldn’t learn that the reason they wanted us out of the mysteries was because they were our mysteries! --
Mumbo Jumbo

Ismael Reed reminds us of another dimension of the Everlasting Gospel and its mysteries, which he terms "Jes Grew" in his incredible novel. Not only does its roots extend further back than the triumph of patriarchy, but likewise it precedes by centuries the white monopolization of the secret rites; both patriarchy and whiteness being key elements of Evola's bogus "Northern Light." The true tradition has always been open to all.

As Uždavinys explains, the principal Neoplatonic sages -- Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, etc. -- were natives of Egypt, the Near East and Anatolia, and certainly not "European" in ancestry and or in the traditions they revered. And these traditions, in the estimation of the philosophers themselves, originated not in Greece or Rome but in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

https://musicrising.tulane.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/383/2018/05/Untitled-1-1341860262.png


The secrets of VooDoo passed from the black priesthood of Egypt -- who in turn, according to the accounts of Apollonius of Tyana and others, obtained their wisdom from even older lineages in Ethiopia and India -- to Moses and the Old Testament prophets, to the Essenes and to the earliest iterations of the Kabbalah. From here they went on to provide the backbone of the Western European esoteric tradition, transmitted through the Templars and others.

Yet in a parallel transmission, the inner teachings of VooDoo spread to the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Africa, where it was inadvertently transported by the European slave trade to the Caribbean and the Americas.

This esoteric transmission was fused and infused with the West African music of slaves and the former enslaved, and began to bubble up in ports of admixture and creative miscegenation like New Orleans. And with this subversive spread of Jes Grew through blues, jazz, calypso and other musical genres, arose the renewed rites of popular and ecstatic initiation of our era. The black mysteries reemerge to bring light to the masses.

 

version

Well-known member
I think one of the most interesting aspects of Mumbo Jumbo's the group retrieving stolen artifacts from the museums and galleries, particularly the back and forth on Thor, the white guy in the group whose father runs one of them. A couple of them are constantly roasting him and saying they can't ever really trust him because he has the blood of Cortés and Pizarro and it kicks off a big argument.

Reed makes it particularly interesting because the white guy seems relatively harmless at first, but later gets talked round by a racist white guy appealing to his love of Western literature and claiming it's under threat. You can see him buckling as the racist manages to worm his way in and tap into or redirect an undercurrent.

There's a bit in Vineland where one of the hippies is trying to convince a Black Panther-esque group they're on the same side that came to mind too,

“But we’re fighting the common enemy,” Rex protested. “They’d just as soon kill us as you.”

The BAAD contingent liked that one, and laughed merrily. “The Man’s gun don’t have no blond option on it, just automatic, semi-automatic, and black,” replied BAAD chief of staff Elliot X.

“No! When the barricades are in the streets, we’ll be on the same side of them as you!”

“Except that we don’t have the fuckin’ choice, we got to be there.”

“That’s it, that’s just it! We’re choosing to stand with you!”

“Uh, huh.”
 

version

Well-known member
There's a Chinese guy in the group Reed's writing about who's really intriguing. He's by far the most aggressive and turns out to be right about not being able to trust the white guy, but Reed also slips in that this guy's from money and has him make insinuations about black people not having repelled their colonisers the way the Chinese did, so he comes off as a racist himself.

I haven't finished the book yet, so I dunno whether he pursues this stuff any further, but the amount of crisscrossing tensions within the group really stands out. One of the members more sympathetic to the white guy takes him out for coffee and gets into this big monologue centered on Faust as some sort of avatar of whiteness and connecting him to science and the war machine and so on then says he has to hope there's no such thing as a racial soul because if there's a piece of Faust in the corner of the white man's mind then they're doomed.
 

version

Well-known member
I keep meaning to look stuff up and forgetting to, specific dates and events he talks about.
 
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