ISHMAEL REED MUMBO JUMBO
“Why, when the seasons change on Mars, I sympathize with them.”
“According to the astrologer Evangeline Adams, America is born at 3:03 on the 4th of July, Gemini Rising. It is to be mercurial, restless, violent. It looks to the Philippines and calls gluttony the New Frontier. It looks to South America and intervenes in the internal affairs of its nations; piracy is termed “bringing about stability.” If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.”
*
“The people didn’t go for it and sarcastically called them The First Poets because in Egypt at the time of Osiris every man was an artist and every artist a priest; it wasn’t until later that Art became attached to the State to do with it what it pleased.”
“Osiris at this time was in Teotihuacán in South America where people of all races and from all over the world had arrived to watch the space ships their astronomers predicted would land. They landed after Osiris made a side trip to Olmeca where he remained long enough to pose for a portrait which was done in terracotta”
*
“The Jes Grew crisis was becoming acute. Compounding it, Black Yellow and Red Mu’tafikah were looting the museums shipping the plunder back to where it came from. America, Europe’s last hope, the protector of the archives of “mankind’s” achievements had come down with a bad case of Jes Grew and Mu’tafikah too. Europe can no longer guard the “fetishes” of civilizations which were placed in the various Centers of Art Detention, located in New York City. Bootlegging Houses financed by Robber Barons, Copper Kings, Oil Magnets, Tycoons and Gentlemen Planters. Dungeons for the treasures from Africa, South America and Asia.”
“The army devoted to guarding this booty is larger than those of most countries. Justifiably so, because if these treasures got into the “wrong hands” (the countries from which they were stolen) there would be renewed enthusiasms for the Ikons of the aesthetically victimized civilizations.”
“They repeat the names of the items aloud, the sound resembling subdued chanting.”
“Before museum heads could warn their continental colleagues of his presence in Europe, he and his aides, posing as innocuous exchange students, had repatriated masks and figures—carried to Europe as booty from Nigeria, Gold Coast, Upper Volta and the Ivory Coast—from where they were exhibited in the pirate dens called museums located in Zurich, Florence, England and in a private collection in Milan.”
“Man, it’s religion they make it into. We decided that we would be their desecraters, that we would send their loot back to where it was stolen and await the rise of Shango, Shiva, and Quetzalcoatl, no longer a label on a cheap bottle of wine but strutting across the sacred cities near the mysterious lakes of huge snakes like a cock. A proud cock.”
*
“No man. This is a psychic epidemic, not a lesser germ like typhoid yellow fever or syphilis. We can handle those. This belongs under some ancient Demonic Theory of Disease.”
ART: SUN RA
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