'Cattle Killings' tackles spirituality, love and racism

John Edgar Wideman, two-time PEN/Faulkner Award winner and National Book Award nominee, has published a new novel tackling spirituality, racism and love - heavy topics for most writers, but well-mapped ground for this talented Pennsylvania native.

"Cattle Killing," Wideman's newest book, is centered on the historical annihilation of the Xhosa tribe's herd of cattle in an attempt to ward off European domination.

Directed by a prophecy, the Xhosas murder their cows, hoping to end the plague and destruction visited on them by their new European colonizers. In doing so, however, the Xhosa people destroy their food supply and, unaided by the Europeans, are enslaved or starve to death.

This actual event, however, plays a very small role in the novel's chronicle of black life. Wideman explores inter-racial relationships, religious conviction forced on African cultures by European colonizers, loss of faith, blindness (both literal and metaphorical) and the emotional wreckage left by slavery.

Spanning more than 200 pages, "The Cattle Killing" attempts no explanations, no judgments, none of the bravada some victims hide behind when detailing their experiences. Instead, Wideman approches his subjects with a bare lyrical approach, touching his prose with a tangled series of metaphors and leaving the reader to experience his story, not just read it.

Wideman's various narrators (who shift both sexes and races seamlessly, forcing the reader to abandon preconceptions about either to follow the thread of the story) face frightening truths about themselves.

Lamenting his own enslavement, one of Wideman's characters admits his desire for an effortless relief: "In the darkness, the quiet of the room (pumpkin breath wheezing, part of the quiet, the figure against which the ground of quiet defines itself), he wishes to be a white man. Holds the wish long enough for it to become a wet intimacy his tongue traces inside his pursed mouth, inside his lower lip, against his teeth, the sour, vacant spaces where teeth once rooted. A wish he could whisper aloud - wouldn't you be one of them if you could ... "

Wideman allows another of his enslaved characters to vent his fierce hatred with a horrifying and brilliant internal explosion. He writes, "They forget the flesh and blood beneath their airs and their finery, forget they are women just as surely as I'll be a man someday whether dressed in rags or king's robes, a man the day I rip the clothes off their bodies and stuff my truth between their legs."

Shifting from narrator to narrator, Wideman also tells stories through the voices of black women, white women, free and enslaved people, rich and poor.

The white slave owner is given the need he has to justify his actions to his slaves, presenting them with gifts and assuming their forgiveness.

The brave and lonely voice of a poor white maid who has run away with a rich black man grows stronger and stronger, only to turn into ashes on the page when angry villagers burn down the home she and her lover share. Blind women and men litter the pages, encouraging Wideman's wordplay with sensuality as well as accusing his readers with their own metaphorical blindness.

In the same instance, Wideman lifts away notions of guilt, asking for a reckoning and a redemption, a request for one's blindness to hide the color of one's skin rather than the humanity beneath it.

After obliterating barriers between time, races, languages, nationalities, sexes and classes with his dazzling onslaught of metaphors, Wideman explains the reasons for his ambiguity and his view of the ultimate harmony he sees in the notes of every human being. He writes, "Tell me, finally, what is a man. What is a woman. Aren't we lovers first, spirits sharing an uncharted space, a space our stories tell, a space chanted, written upon again and again, yet one story never quite erased by the next, each story saving the space, saving itself, saving us. If someone is listening."

All prose should be this good.

- Amy D. Hayes

04-20-98