Both Chapters 52

I have been honestly lost on why Ishmael Reed wrote Mumbo Jumbo with two chapters 52. Before we read it, my first assumption was that it would be an exploration of two alternate paths the plot could take. Instead, it ended up being a two chapter retelling of Egyptian mythology and the Book of Exodus with a similar contagious dance to Jes Grew. There is no real break in the story between the chapters besides the narration slightly shifting to Moses a few pages before chapter 52 #2 and shifting back to the 1920s a few pages before chapter 53 (Reed, 374, 398). I don’t see any clear interpretation behind this besides vague connections.

You can make the argument that there are some patterns showing each chapter as a separate arc of the overall story of Mumbo Jumbo. The first is of the contagious art and dance spreading and the second is of people trying, and failing, to imitate it (whether to devalue it or to get success). Reed might be splitting the two up to present the two as patterns that happen separately, as the stories of Osiris and Set first appear around 2400 BCE and Moses appears around 1500 BCE. Each chapter would follow the first and second wave of this spread of cultural tradition, following the same waves of Jes Grew. With this, he retells the story in the setting of the religion that the future atonists subscribe to. While Moses and the Old Testament is commonly looked up to by Christians and Jews (or Knights Templar and other 1920s subscribers of Christianity), Reed explains that it and Moses’s journey was inspired by Ancient Egypt and black spiritual traditions, those of which are then considered brash and animalistic to those characters. He makes the point that the cycle has occurred before, also going in those two waves. 

Though, a part of me believes the best chance is that this interpretation is unintended and that chapter 52 #2 is just a typo to represent the Talking Android method of devaluing art. With Reed’s use of the number 1 to mean “one” or the chapter before the title page, the whole book could be meant as an example of how the Jes Grew epidemic is portrayed (44). Chapters 52 is a parody of the mistakes that Atonists believed African Americans would make and it would make the content within the chapters irrelevant to the distinctions between them. 

As much as I dislike not having my own clear interpretation of the novel, I am torn between the explanation of it having to do with the Talking Android method or an example of the two separate waves. In the end though, Ishmael Reed wrote Mumbo Jumbo with much more ambiguity than Doctorow’s Ragtime and intended his telling of history to be interpreted in multiple different ways. 

Works Cited

Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. Scribner, 1972.