Smooth Mumbo Jumbo
On
Thursday in class Kat and I presented the article "Crossing
Western Space, or the HooDoo Detective on the Boundary in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo
Jumbo" by Richard Swope. The group before us with Maggie, Sophia, and
Irina talked about some similar ideas that our article had brought up, so the
conversation connected well throughout the hour and I was hoping to continue
that discussion here.
Both groups talked about how Papa LaBas is like an
unconventional detective in the way that he uses spiritual guidance of loas and
his “knockings” to do detective work, whereas a typical Atonist detective would
use hard evidence and scientific research. Also, as several people pointed out
in class, he tended to accidentally find things/ have everything explained to
him, which is not how usual detective stories work. To expand on the
discussions in class, we talked about how Mumbo Jumbo is satirizing and almost
directly confronting the ways that Atonists (or Western civilization in
general) think about the world. Papa LaBas looks at the world a different way,
which can be seen through his smooth methods of detecting.
Swope writes that there are striated spaces in the book and
smooth spaces, the striated spaces being Atonist where science and creativity
can’t expand, grow, or develop. The smooth spaces are like Jes Grew, constantly
moving, expanding, and changing. Some good examples that we didn’t discuss in
class about interactions between smooth and striated spaces in the novel are
the museum (or a Center of Art Detention) and the art that is kept there. The
museum is a striated space as an Atonist construction that is built to restrain
artistic expression and separate the art from it’s true home. The art itself
wants to be smooth but can’t as it is not allowed to grow and breathe when
being kept in a Center of Art Detention.
Another overlapping of Atonist (striated) space and Jes
Grew (smooth) space is in the collision of the Atonist city and the Harlem Renaissance.
Harlem has jazz music that scares white people and “threatens” their children. The
city characters like Hinkle Von Vampton that go into Harlem are clearly out of
place and don’t understand the culture around them. This is clear when HVV
thinks that he can have one Talking Android that represents the whole race. HVV
believes that striating the essence of the Harlem Renaissance into white
stereotypes will contain the movement and stop the smooth space of jazz and
Harlem from flourishing.
Do you see any other direct conflicts in the book between
smooth and striated spaces?
Nice post. I thought about chapters 51 and 52's. The history that Papa Labas was telling the people was definitely smooth while the environment he was telling it was striated (I mean, you have Hinckle Von Vampton and Papa Labas in the same room.)
ReplyDeleteNewspapers, mostly run by the Wallflower Order, form a striated space where the only things you can write about are the things the Wallflower Order says you can. Ironically, HVV breaks the striation by publishing a story about the war in Haiti to get himself noticed.
ReplyDelete-Reed
This is really interesting. I thing jazz itself does this near the end when it stops growing and developing (as quickly) and is adopted by the fancy parties and such of Atonism. This is shown now in the way that jazz is now almost Atonist in character in use. I like this way of thinking about it though,
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