So... I haven't blogged in a while. To be perfectly honest, Mumbo Jumbo leaves me exhausted after each reading that I haven't had the energy to blog about it. But tonight's reading was short, and I'm ready. Awhile ago in class we were asked the question, does Mumbo Jumbo offer a fair depiction of Western Society? At the time I said yes, but for different reasons than I do now.
At first I said yes because history shows us that, as a general rule, Western Society has been pretty horrible to all groups of people that try to disagree with its ideals, and that Ishmael Reed was simply offering another example. That was kind of a basic assumption on my part -- it was probably a Monday and Iprobably wasn't actually thinking that hard. Regardless, after today's discussion about Thor Wintergreen, I kind of think differently.
Someone wanted to discuss Thor Wintergreen's betrayal of the Mu'tafikah, and that discussion led us to a new one on the topic of Reed's treatment of white characters in general. Thor Wintergreen is kind of flat -- all the white characters are flat. They don't have any dimension, they're just straight up evil or easily manipulated into being evil -- which is how most western pop culture has depicted members of other races for the past who knows how many years. (Well, they aren't necessarily depicted as evil, but they certainly are fairly flat and one dimensional.)
In short, Reed makes his white characters caricatures. As evidenced by the art Abdul keeps on his desk, which were "cartoons" of people with chalk white faces. LaBas remarks that the white people "did not realize that the joke was on them" ( 97) in those carvings because they had no sense of humor. Reed goes on to describe different races and tribes that punished people for lacking a sense of humor, and then says that Christ was always "stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard" (97), which is pretty much how all of Reed's white characters act.
Essentially, Reed strips his white characters of all their other qualities, and leaves them with weakness, greed, stupidity, and the ability to sit drunk on a barrel. The evil, despicable-ness of Reed's white characters knocks you on the head with a club -- it's impossible to miss. So do I think that in this way Reed is fairly depicting Western culture? Sure, I think it's pretty fair considering the number of times ethnic groups of have been cartooned in Western media. And the way Reed makes it so obvious almost suggests that he's daring someone to disagree with him, but you can't, because he has so many years of evidence to back him up. Does that annoy me? No, not really, I think we pretty much deserve it.
1 comment:
I definitely see Reed's "caricatures" of white characters as one more way that this is a novel that's partly about other novels, literature, and art. Indeed, Reed is fully aware that it's pretty close to impossible to find a *single* multidimensional African American character in Hollywood film, radio and television, nor in fiction--popular or "literary"--by white authors. It's akin to what he says in the epilogue, about the illustrations from Western books (as in cowboys and Indians Western, but the term works two ways) that always feature a black character holding a platter, off to the side and in the background, not a part of the actual action. Reed makes all of his characters "cartoonish" to some degree, but there's a humorous, satirical quality to his white folks--even their names are an inversion of mocking and demeaning characters like Buckwheat or Little Black Sambo (Musclewhite? Wintergreen? Safe-cracker?).
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