Abstract
In a disjointed narrative drunkenness that straddles oneiric language, apocalyptic vaticinations, and alcoholic delirium, the narrative of the young itinerant preacher in John Edgar Wideman’s Cattle Killing unfurls. The narrative purports to be clear in launching the young lover into an asymptotic search for his soul mate who is nothing but a spirit akin to ogbanji, successively incarnated in deified women who experience an elusive existence and a tragic death. However, it fails to dispel, in readers, a deep doubt as to the intrinsic symbolism of this soul mate, and, finally, dissuades them that it is an ordinary love story. The Cattle Killing quilts the story of the deadly prophecy of Nongqawuse, decisive in the colonial conquest of the Xhosas in Southern Africa, into that of the epidemic yellow fever in Philadephia, and plunges the protagonist into a melancholic quest on which African people’s awakening is premised. Voudoun esthetics, Lacan’s theory of desire, and Genettian narratology constitute the major paradigm on which the textual analysis of this paper proceeds. Its aim is to highlight the narrative devices by which the poetics of affliction, melancholy and regret is activated in the work, with the aim of echoing its call for the improvement of the black people’s condition in the United States and all over the world.
Highlights
One of the human psychological drives which fuels the entrenchment of spirituality and religious expression in social life is certainly the dream of perfection, the attraction felt to the absolute Power, Truth, Beauty, and Righteousness
The narrative purports to be clear in launching the young lover into an asymptotic search for his soul mate who is nothing but a spirit akin to ogbanji, successively incarnated in deified women who experience an elusive existence and a tragic death
The bewitched protagonist, sharing stories with the elusive and revolving feminine figure possessed by the spirit, tries to fasten his bond to her and give a sense to his own life. It is these back and forth motions of the narrative between the holocausts of African people, prophecies, ancestral divinities and faith in the anguish of extinction, that enable and voice the metonymic slippage from the Xhosa cattle killing to the herdspeople own slaughter, the lack of evolution between the 17h-century Philadelphia where African children were slaughtered, and today’s Philadelphia
Summary
One of the human psychological drives which fuels the entrenchment of spirituality and religious expression in social life is certainly the dream of perfection, the attraction felt to the absolute Power, Truth, Beauty, and Righteousness. The bewitched protagonist, sharing stories with the elusive and revolving feminine figure possessed by the spirit, tries to fasten his bond to her and give a sense to his own life It is these back and forth motions of the narrative between the holocausts of African people, prophecies, ancestral divinities and faith in the anguish of extinction, that enable and voice the metonymic slippage from the Xhosa cattle killing to the herdspeople own slaughter, the lack of evolution between the 17h-century Philadelphia where African children were slaughtered, and today’s Philadelphia. The aim of this research work is to piece together into a single message the various stories woven in The Cattle Killing, using the narrative poetics, and to demonstrate that through the weeping of the female beloved who has fallen under the sway of death, the narrative mainly mourns Africa and its slow death
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