The Perfect Ending

Was anyone else initially unsatisfied with the ending of Mumbo Jumbo? After the initial triumph of Chapter(s) 52 and the end of the Talking Android, the fizzling-out of Jes Grew and the burning of the Book of Thoth came across as very anticlimactic to me. Not only had Jes Grew been eradicated, but the Text -- centuries old, expressed as crucial to the movement -- had been burnt with no hope of recovery. This ending was supposed to be one of victory, the moment when PaPa LaBas would discover the Text and stabilize it, and we would see Grew’s growth increase exponentially. (Of course, it would be foolish to expect something so traditional of Ishmael Reed.) Even with Jes Grew’s return in the 1960s, as documented by PaPa LaBas’ epilogue, we’ve only managed to make it back to square one -- small stirrings of true Jes Grew and no Text. For a moment, it felt like Jes Grew would never win. 
But perhaps Jes Grew’s success is not the best ending for this book. What is “success” (in the Atonist context) but all-encompassing conquest? And what is conquest but the halting of growth? Jes Grew’s nature, as evidenced even by its name, is to grow, to evolve with the birth of new loas like jazz and slang. It repeats itself “like a pendulum...more akin to what goes around comes around” (pg. 218). As PaPas LaBas states at the end of the novel, “Jes Grew has no end and no beginning...we will miss it for a while but it will come back, and when it returns we will see that it never left (pg. 204). Is it not the nature of Jes Grew, then, to “fail”, to die in a sense, then only afterward be renewed? Let’s say the 1920s version of Jes Grew had succeeded. Would that mean that the Harlem Renaissance would have been the final and only form of Jes Grew? Would we have had modern black forms of art like rap or slang? No, Jes Grew’s destiny is to grow with the birth of new “Black Loas”, for its life to “comfortably share a single horse like 2 knights” with its death -- at least, for the time being (“if anything goes, it will be death”) (pg. 204). 
And, besides, it wouldn't make any sense for Jes Grew to have “succeeded” in a time that Ishmael Reed could write about. Atonism, as a specific micro-aggressive form of white supremacy, hadn’t subsided by Reed’s 1970s (or even now, in the 2020s). To have defeated Atonism in his 1920s narrative is to have defeated appropriative racism in the 1920s. In this respect, Reed’s ending is not “anticlimactic” or melancholy so much as realistically hopeful. Besides, one of Reed’s ultimate goals is to go against traditional literary expectations (looking at you, commas), so it makes sense that his conclusion wouldn’t conform to all the drama of a “happy ending”. Maybe Jes Grew won’t “win” anytime in the near future, but the surety of its return is leaps and bounds more reassuring (not to mention significant) than a more fantastical final defeat of Atonism.

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