Jes Grew and the Wallflower Order, and the Harlem Renaissance, and where we can find Jes Grew and Wallflower Order dynamics today

 

   

Okay, so to preface my thoughts on this book

 I thought that Ragtime was quite the fever dream, and we had already been made quite aware that Mumbo Jumbo would be on a crazier level, so I braced myself throughout reading the book to see if it could top things like Houdini's random appearances throughout the story,  J.P Morgan's delusions about being an Egyptian pharaoh, or MYB going from comedic relief celebrity simp to revolutionary explosives maniac...and, well, let's just say Mumbo Jumbo blew those out the water. Black Herman essentially dispels a ghost with his pure, unadultered rizz, satire and irony is taken to the next level with a lot of the white character names being goofy stuff like: 

"Biff Musclewhite," a name that you would come up with if you were trying to guess the name of Guile from Street Fighter, OR he's the creation of a 3rd grade boy attempting to make an interesting action-genre lead for a superhero comic.

"Hinckle Von Vampton," like a silly little goblin shopkeep NPC who sells common gear in a fantasy-RPG

 and "Safecracker Gould," who sounds like he was ranked #1 most likely to rob a bank. 

Oh. And pages 180-82...certainly happened.

...

Jism can't even compare. 

    Moving on, despite the absolute insanity that has been Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, there are some very intriguing threads to pursue, especially relating to the symbolistic, metaphoric nature of Jes Grew and the Wallflower Order. Evidence of this can be seen with how Jes Grew seems to spread in a lot of the towns and cities which black people moved to during The Great Migration, which preceded and acted as a catalyst for the Harlem Renaissance. Jes Grew begins in the Southern city of New Orleans, which has a sizeable population of Black people, namely of Black Creoles who came from Haiti, where Jes Grew begins (not the Harlem Renaissance though). Both Jes Grew and the Harlem Renaissance began in the South, and continued moving further North, like Chicago on Page 17,  then people begin showing symptoms of it in New York in Page 64. Then the effects of Jes Grew begin having an impact on Europe too, starting with 65.

    Jes Grew is also distinctively described by LaBas that it's an "anti-plague" on page 6, enlivening any hosts, spurring them to dance. This also becomes the era of jazz, and specific types of poetry and spoken word created and/or greatly propagated by black people. In the pages before that, a side-character named Clem describes how they feel after being afflicted, where they say "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."

I think the way I interpreted this is this, and it's connection with the Harlem Renaissance is probably the most general interpretation. The "infected" people are growing a closer connection with black culture and identity, and rejecting the aspects of white culture and identity, destroying the dominance that it carried in society. Additionally, when Clem said that he felt like "deserting his master," that definitely seemed to me like a callout to how The Great Migration was the direct effect of people wishing to escape Southern racism and the many loopholes which essentially kept slavery, such as sharecropping (Might be a bit of a reach though.) The destruction of white dominance, and the satirically capitalized "Western Civilization" is why the Wallflower Order fear Jes Grew, which parallels why the white populace feared the Harlem Renaissance. As Black culture and identity begins to spread up in the North, white people grew increasingly fearful that after years of suppressing and oppressing them, the uprising of what they deemed "inferior" culture would topple their own. And when we see Jes Grew spread to Europe and other parts of the world, then that would obviously parallel the effects that actual Black culture and the has had across the world. What the Wallflowers and Atonists in general have attempted to do to Jes Grew is to:

 restrict, 

demonize 

and bastardize it as a way of undercutting and delegitimizing it to the public. They use negative language to pass it off as a "pandemic" "plague" or "crisis" even when it's clearly the opposite because that's what they want it to be seen as. In the case of Safecracker Gould in Chapter 51, he puts on black face and reads an offensive poem, where Hinckle Von Hampton purposefully depicts him as this revolutionary, influential, greatest-of-all-tine writer. This is something that would get the elites in the room to scoff at, and brush off as some kind of low brow, crass, primitive culture compared to others.

It's not hard to recognize this Jes Grew - Wallflower Order dynamic in real life too. Think of anything that a black person has done that warranted a bunch of unwarranted backlash from white people.

Remember in class how Beyoncé performed at the Super Bowl and it was somehow incendiary enough for people to attempt protesting against her song 'Formation,' and how it got the folks at Fox News all in a tizzy for no good reason.

Black hairstyles have long been under scrutiny and discretion of white people. No braids, locs, twists, or afros in school or workplace. Only straightened hair, sometimes having to be a certain length. There are stories of black kids in schools having to be sent home for having braids or locs that happened to be too long. Black hairstyles have long been labeled too "unkempt" or too "ghetto." In fact, the name dreadlocks comes from "...how the British, who were fighting the Mau Mau rebellion during colonialism in the 1950s, encountered the warriors' locs and found them "dreadful" Dreadlocks - WikipediaWikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Dreadlocks

These fit under the "restriction" and "demonize" elements. The way that black hairstyles have been bastardized is that non-black people have culturally appropriated these hairstyles, such as specific braid types and locs, despite them being incompatible with their hair type to the point it causes their hair to be in an unhealthy state or even fall out (karma). Then what some non-black people have done is attempt to rewrite the history and make it seem as if they're the originators even though they aren't and just want the cultural cred to seem superior.

Another element is African American Vernacular English (AAVE),  People have also restricted and demonized the usage of AAVE, especially older people, for being to inappropriate, improper, and rude, but that's just how black people talk casually to one another, in a process called code-switching (how underrepresented people consciously or subconsciously change their behavior depending on their environment). AAVE has also time and time again been bastardized by having people completely misinterpret their meanings but co-opt and generalize/commodift 90% of that slang anyways.

Exhibit A: "Gyat." (gēē-yâht)

People think that it means someone's... rear

When really it's supposed to be an exaggerated shorthand for "God damn" (example: Gyaaat dayum)

That brings up further discussions of non-black people talking extensively in AAVE even though they haven't grown up in or around black people and communities, and whether or not its co-opting some kind of false persona but that's honestly a different discussion for a different time. I said what I said

Well, what are your thoughts and ideas of real life Jes Grew and Wallflower Order dynamics? I'd love to hear some of your ideas n the comments :)