The Cattle Killing by John Edgar Wideman
"The Cattle Killing" by John Edgar Wideman is a complex narrative that intertwines the historical experiences of the Xhosa people in South Africa with contemporary themes of urban violence and cultural miscommunication. The title references a tragic legend where the Xhosa, misled by false prophecies, sacrificed their cattle in hopes of expelling colonial oppressors, which ultimately undermined their own survival. This historical backdrop serves as an analogy for modern youth, who, in their search for redemption, may similarly sacrifice essential aspects of their lives by responding to harmful influences.
The narrative features a contemporary African American writer named Isaiah, who reflects on his own experiences and the stories of an unnamed eighteenth-century former slave and preacher. This preacher uses storytelling as a means to navigate the brutal realities of his time, particularly during the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, where racial scapegoating exacerbated the suffering of marginalized communities. Through polyphonic storytelling and postmodern techniques, Wideman explores the intricate connections between past and present, while expressing skepticism about art's ability to bridge the gap between the artist and the audience. Ultimately, "The Cattle Killing" emphasizes the enduring power of storytelling within African American culture as a source of hope amidst despair.
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The Cattle Killing by John Edgar Wideman
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1996
Type of work: Novel
The Work
Told in a complex intertexual layering that juxtaposes the Philadelphia of the late eighteenth century with that of the 1990’s, The Cattle Killing provides Wideman with an opportunity to reconfigure a common theme in his writing: the mythically resonant patterning of experience across history that can provide clues by which the past may explain—and potentially redeem—the present. The title derives from a legend detailing how the Xhosa people of South Africa allowed false prophecy to dupe them into killing their cattle herds to effect the departure of the white imperialists destroying their world. Tragically, their action furthered the white agenda by depriving the Xhosa of the staples upon which their way of life depended. For Wideman, the analogy to contemporary urban youth violence could not be clearer: Once again, a people desperate for rescue are sacrificing the lifeblood of their society in a pernicious receptivity to the wrong messages.
Wideman offers another example of such cultural miscalculation by dramatizing the racist consequences attending the l793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Having earlier published a short story entitled “Fever” (1989) on the same subject, this time Wideman adds to the picture of white scapegoating of black people with a study of how the contagion at the city’s core spins into outlying areas beyond the metropolis: No amount of segregation or withdrawal from the collectivity can counter the essentially organic nature of the social order, and disease infecting one group will inevitably damage others.
In working out these themes, Wideman tells a story within a story. The frame narrative belongs to Isaiah, a contemporary African American writer much like Wideman himself who has completed a new book that he sets out to share with his father and son. The book actually closes with the son’s analytic response via a letter, contributing a bit of information that Wideman then spins into one final collaborative twist. At the center of the manuscript is the storytelling activity of an unnamed eighteenth century former slave and itinerant preacher—storytelling to which he now resorts as an alternative to the religious faith that once sustained him but can no longer convincingly counter the brutal realities and waves of human misery that he has witnessed as a result of the plague. The love that he bears for a bedridden woman whom he intends to keep alive with his stories about his past provides a touchstone for him in the present. The woman herself is shrouded in mystery, with the narrative never explicitly naming her but associating her variously with the preacher’s earlier encounters with a ladies’ maid named Kathryn, as well as a slave who had delivered herself and a dead child into a lake, either drowning or “disappearing” in the process.
Long a practitioner of postmodern textual acrobatics—polyphonic narratives, unmediated disjunctions of time and place, elusive and elliptical voicings akin to jazz solos—Wideman also makes clear once again his doubts about the potential of art to relieve the artist’s egotism or conjure up the audience with which he wishes to communicate. Yet he avoids repudiating the claims of artistic “meaning” altogether by appealing to the countervailing influences upon him of African American culture, with its faith in storytelling as a conduit for hope. In her defense of the novel’s difficulty, reviewer Joyce Carol Oates called it “a work of operatic polyphony that strains to break free of linguistic constraints into theatrical spectacle.”
Sources for Further Study
Atlanta Constitution. October 24, 1996, p. D1.
Booklist. XCII, August, 1996, p. 1857.
Boston Globe. October 13, 1996, p. N16.
Chicago Tribune. December 8, 1996, XIV, p. 6.
Library Journal. CXXI, July, 1996, p. 164.
The Nation. CCLXIII, December 28, 1996, p. 58.
The New York Times Book Review. CI, November 3, 1996, p. 20.
Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, August 12, 1996, p. 63.
San Francisco Chronicle. October 13, 1996, p. REV5.