Ownership of The Word

In African-American Lit last year I remember there being a discussion on the use of the n-word by African-American writers.  There has been a debate going on over it being used in the same sort of context by non African-Americans (namely Whites) and the appropriateness of it.  Essentially those in favor of its use being "decriminalized" believe that if they can say it why cant we?  I must admit I never agreed with this argument but I never really exerted much energy thinking about the issue.  Then as I was reading Mumbo Jumbo I ran across something that I interpreted as a similar thing to me.  Reed is telling the story of the Atonist rise to power in Ancient Egypt with a large section focusing on Moses.  He relates Moses saying to the Osirian Egyptians that, "I will unleash the Holocaust upon you this time if you persist in this action" (Reed 185).  Now I know that holocausts have happened to people all over the world throughout history up to the present, and that the Holocaust (which I grant you I am inferring to mean the one done by the Nazis under Hitler) happened to many more groups of people than just Jews, but this one short sentence out of the entire book offended me.

Earlier, Mr. Mitchell asked our feelings on the portrayal of Whites in Mumbo Jumbo, I didn't have any issue with it.  But because it is Moses saying this, it was just too far for me.  I shouldn't have been offended, and even when I first read this I realized that, yet I still was.  Even nearly seventy five years after it happened, the Holocaust is still such an open wound for Jews worldwide.  Perhaps because it is often misremembered in history as being something that only happened to Jews, or maybe for some reason that I can't think of but the Holocaust is something Jews seem to own now.  My first reaction was along the lines of "What right has Ishamel Reed have to make any kind of ironic joke out of the Holocaust?"  And to some extent I still feel that way, but I'm coming to see it now as less about it being Moses as a Jew and the Holocaust as something that happened in part to Jews, and more about history itself.  Reed is totally rewriting the common understanding of Ancient Egyptian history, so why can't he also make Moses into a Hitleresque figure?  Whose really to say that if you flip their lives that those two men would have been any different?  I think that is the point Reed is trying to get across, though I am still disconcerted by his choice of topic and the language he uses to accomplish it.      

Epigraphical Rebel?

Ishmael Reed is really breaking convention by starting his novel Mumbo Jumbo on the literal first page in the book.  This is so much of a convention, to start it later in the physical book, that when I heard where he put the first chapter, I wondered to myself if that was even legal (perhaps legal is the wrong word, but a violation of some agreement in the publishing world). This sets the tone for the book, as one that will not follow standard literary conventions. What this also does, is make those interim pages between the first and second chapter be seen.  The copyright pages really aren't important to authors I presume, that's in the realm of the publishers.  But the epigraphs really are.  Just like every word in the narrative is chosen by the author, so too are the epigraphs. Why would anyone spend time finding the perfect quotations to put in the epigraph if they didn't want their readers to read them.  

There are three quotes in the epigraph, though it is my understanding that the second and third are both James Weldon Johnson from his work The Book of American Negro Poetry.  Looking at the first one, attributed to Zora Neale Hurston, I couldn't help but feel that this is akin to how Ernest Hemingway put the Gertrude Stein quote "You are all a lost generation" as his first in The Sun Also Rises.  In it, Hemingway is not only describing one theme for his novel, dealing with the generation born out of war, but he is also paying tribute to Stein for being his mentor and helping get him to the place where his modernist novel could make it through publishing.  While I have no biographical knowledge of Reed and Hurston's relationship, if any, I do know that Hurston is one of the most well respected writers to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, helping to pave the way for African-American authors to be accepted by main stream (White) America. Perhaps Reed is not being as rebellious as the location of his first chapter may suggest.

The final two quotes from Johnson are integral, even more so than Hurston's.  Without them, the whole meaning of the first few chapters is unclear.  "jes' grew" doesn't mean much out of context, at least it didn't for me. After the first chapter I started suspecting it was the early forms of Jazz, but as "jes' grew" is a focus for the beginning of the novel, a suspicion of its meaning is hardly something to base your understanding of a novel on.  In the epigraph though, Johnson is telling us, if not explicitly, just what "jes' grew" is.  Reed put that in there so that readers of the epigraph would have a better understanding of his novel.  It would be out of rhythm for him to define it somewhere in the narrative itself, so the logical place is then in the epigraph.  How do you get a reader to read the epigraph?  Put it in the middle of the novel, not before it.  It doesn't look like Reed was being as much of a rebel after all, now does it?