The Dismissal of Jes Grew and Similarities in Today's Society
To be completely honest, after reading Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, many parts of the book continue to be completely incomprehensible to me and I am still struggling to piece the various plotlines together. At the beginning, Jes Grew was one of these puzzling phenomena that made no sense. What really is Jes Grew? Is it an actual plague? Why are people so angry about it? However, I am pleased to say that I am now a changed woman. From our in-depth class discussions on the importance of Jes Grew, I can confidently say that I can not only provide a definition of Jes Grew, but my own depiction of it in today's culture. At the beginning of Mumbo Jumbo, we are introduced to Jes Grew as something that makes people dance provocatively. However, Reed only refers to Jes Grew using the vocabulary that one would normally use with infectious disease, which confused me for a bit. Words such as “pandemic”, “infection”, and “immune” had me wondering if we were talking about an actual disease. Ho...