A Reaction to Mumbo Jumbo

I'd say many of my other classmates would agree with me when I say that Mumbo Jumbo was a new experience when it comes to novels, especially postmodernist historical fiction. Upon picking it up in the beginning, I was frustrated: I felt confused as I was thrown into the action, and frustrated that I didn't seem to gain a sense of clarity as a meandered my way through the first couple chapters. However, the beauty of Mumbo Jumbo is that Reed appears to intentionally not conform to normal "guidelines" of most novels like, for instance, starting the first chapter after the title page. In retrospect, there were a couple things I learned.
First of all, reading between the lines and understanding how certain concepts interact with each other in the text is incredibly important, even if you don't understand the concepts to begin with. This is where the "historical" aspect of the novel comes in--I'm not ashamed to admit that I didn't understand 90% of the references to certain events and texts in history, but it wasn't incredibly necessary for me to have that background knowledge. Sure, there are things to be gained from the text by researching facts of voudou and Googling uncertain terms here and there. It made me feel better having some sort of background on what a "loa" was, but Reed's general point--that there are cultural influences that tends to rise and fall in phases, like jazz, and that there are opposing forces contesting such cultural forces--was still graspable to me regardless of that knowledge.
Besides the fact that general knowledge of what Reed is trying to convey is important, it’s also important to note that Reed didn’t have to conform to conventional methods of novel-writing to create a successful and interesting postmodern novel. Oftentimes, when we’re thinking about how images relate to the text, there’s an easy, direct correlation when authors decide to include them amongst their chapters. However, sometimes that way Reed includes images seem to have little to no relation to the words that they’re near… if that makes sense. For example, there was a scene in which Berbelang and a cohort of the Mu’tafikah were discussing plans to rescues art from a Detention Center, and right after a character said that white people were “devils,” there was a pictures of a very ugly beaked creature. In many novels, there are usually cues, like captions, to help us figure out what we’re looking at. Besides signs that includes words, there aren’t signals or clues to tell us why Reed included a certain image or what the image is even supposed to be. I sort of figured that maybe it was a manifestation of how such “devils” are perceived, but for all I know, that could be a complete reach and not what Reed intended at all.
That’s how I felt most of the time while reading this book—wondering if I was picking up on things that weren’t actually important. When I’m reading, I’m always putting myself in the shoes of the author whose book I’m reading—why did Reed include this? Why didn’t he include this? What’s the significance of this historical figure? Doing this does make it incredibly difficult to actually explore the various meanings throughout Mumbo Jumbo, since the book is so unorthodox and there are endless interpretations of what Read has created.