Mumbo Jumbo Quotes

“I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Fear stalks the land. (As usual; so what else is new?)”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“He said he felt like the gut heart and lungs of Africa’s interior. He said he felt like the Kongo: “Land of the Panther.” He said he felt like “deserting his master,” as the Kongo is “prone to do.” He said he felt he could dance on a dime.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow’s Doxy.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“But what have Cortes and Pizarro or the others to do with me?

You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezume; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your mind carries their supply trains. You've changed your helmet for a frontier hat while I have changed my robes for overalls and a black leather jacket. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can't even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity. And the extent of their knowledge concerning Van Gogh is that he "cut off his ear." Man, it's religion they make it into.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“America is the smart-aleck adolescent who’s “been around” and has his own hot rod.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“Yes. You see, it’s not 1 of those germs that break bleed suck gnaw or devour. It’s nothing we can bring into focus or categorize; once we call it 1 thing it forms into something else.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“When I returned from Paris, I dropped out of high school and went to work in Grosvenor Library, where I read work by James Baldwin. But it took years for me to discard the myths imposed upon me by an Anglocentric education and popular culture.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Americans will not tolerate wars that can’t be explained in simple terms of economics or the White man’s destiny.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“I'm just 1 man. Not Faust nor the Kaiser nor the Ku Klux Klan. I am an individual, not a whole tribe or nation.

That's what I'm counting on. But if there is such a thing as a racial soul, a piece of Faust the mountebank residing in a corner of the White man' mind, then we are doomed. It always seems that we talk to the many and then the few and the we are down to 1 man and just as the war between the races is about to begin that 1 man becomes a few and then the many until the next time around and we turn our back on 1 another before the whole procedure begins again. Perhaps 1 day it will be the many and stay there.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“61 lynchings occurred in 1920 alone. In 1921, 62, some of the victims, soldiers returning from the Great War who after fighting and winning significant victories - just as they had fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the wars again the Indians - thought that America would repay them for the generosity of putting their lives on the line, for aiding in salvaging their hides from the Kaiser who had been tagged "enemy" this time. Instead, a Protestant country ignorant even of Western mysteries executes soldiers after a manner of punishments dealt to witches in the "Middle Ages." Europe and the Catholic Church are horrified but not surprised at this "tough guy" across the waters whose horrendous murders in Salem led Europe to reform its "witch laws.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“I think that when people like you , Mr. Von Vampton, say "The Negro Experience" you are saying that all Negroes experience the world the same way. In that way you can isolate the misfits who would propel them into penetrating the ceiling of this bind you and your assistants have established in this country. The ceiling above which no slave would be allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“the Thing has stirred in its moorings. The Thing that my Grandfather Harry and his generation of Harrys had thought was nothing but a false alarm.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“off the Evil Eye.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sickout when you possessed and Antagonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“So don't ask me how to catch Jes Grew. Ask Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, your poets, your painters, your musicians, ask them how to catch it. Ask those people who be shaking their tambourines impervious of the ridicule they receive from Black and White Atonists, Europe the ghost rattling its chains down the deserted halls of their brains.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“THE WALLFLOWER ORDER ATTEMPTS to meet the psychic plague by installing an anti-Jes Grew President, Warren Harding. He wins on the platform “Let’s be done with Wiggle and Wobble,”* indicating that he will not tolerate this spreading infection. All sympathizers will be dealt with; all carriers isolated and disinfected, Immumo-Therapy will begin once he takes office.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“The spirit hits them and they follow (My italics) Louis Armstrong Mumbo Jumbo [Mandingo mā-mā-gyo-mbō, “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away”: mā-mā, grandmother+gyo, trouble+ mbō, to leave.] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“This morning. We got reports from down here that people were doing “stupid sensual things,” were in a state of “uncontrollable frenzy,” were wriggling like fish, doing something called the “Eagle Rock” and the “Sassy Bump”; were cutting a mean “Mooche,” and “lusting after relevance.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“I gots to git down to the infirmary, Zuzu, something awful is happening, the Thing has stirred in its moorings. The Thing that my Grandfather Harry and his generation of Harrys had thought was nothing but a false alarm. The Mayor, dragging the woman by the fox skins hanging from her neck, leaves city hall and jumps into his Stutz Bearcat parked at the curb. They drive until they reach St. Louis Cathedral where 19th-century HooDoo Queen Marie Laveau was a frequent worshiper; its location was about 10 blocks from Place Congo. They walk up the steps and the door’s Judas Eye swings open.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“Whenever sophistry and rhetoric fail they send in their poor White goons. They don't have the guts of real gangsters. The letters after their names are their tommy guns and those universities where they pour over syllables in the many cubicles, their Big House.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“He is summoned and asked to swear upon the only book the judge will allow in "his court." PaPa LaBas won't dare touch the accursed thing. He demands the right to his own idols and books. It reminds PaPa LaBas of the familiar epigram: "Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow's Doxy.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“The Jes Grew crisis was becoming acute. Compounding it, Black Yellow and Red Mu'tafikah were looting the museums shipping the plunder back to where it came from. America, Europe's last hope, the protector of the archives of "mankind's" achievements had come down with a bad case of Jes Grew and Mu'tafikah too. Europe can no longer guard the "fetishes" of civilizations which were placed in the various Centers of Art Detention, located in New York City. Bootlegging Houses financed by Robber Barons, Copper Kings, Oil Magnets, Tycoons and Gentlemen Planters. Dungeons for the treasures from Africa, South America and Asia.

The army devoted to guarding this booty is larger than those of most countries. Justifiably so, because if these treasures got into the "wrong hands" (the countries from which they were stolen) there would be renewed enthusiasms for the Ikons of the aesthetically victimized civilizations.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo