"It Was Like Meeting an Old Friend": An Interview with John Edgar Wideman

In his review of John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing (1996), Philip Page declares, "Wideman has done it again. He has written another spellbinding, provocative—and difficult—novel" (African American Review Summer 1998: 32. 2). Page is right. Part of that difficulty arises from Wideman framing the narrative around ogbanje, an idea with which many of his readers may be unfamiliar. Ogbanje is the Igbo name for spirit children who undergo many life journeys through the same mother. Readers of Chinua Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart (1958), for instance, would have encountered an "ogbanje" character in Ekwefi's and Okonkwo's daughter Ezinma. Wideman introduces and elucidates the "ogbanje" concept on page 15 of The Cattle Killing, a story that enlists the 1856-1857 Xhosa cattle-killing incident in South Africa to explore, among other things, the costs and mutations of the initial Africa-Europe encounter, the question of love, interracial love, power, Anatomy and the black body, New World slavery, religion, Philadelphia fever plague, and faith.

In this interview, Wideman shares insight on Achebe's continued influence on his work and thought. He has also addressed that subject in Conversations with John Edgar Wideman (ed, Bonnie TuSmith 1998), the memoir Fatheralong (1994), other published statements, and at conferences on Achebe. In the present conversation, Wideman comments on his diffusion of aspects of the ogbanje principle in The Cattle Killing. For instance, Wideman infers in the novel that the enduring aftermath of the Africa-Europe encounter, which the Xhosa experience reifies, parallels the haunting by an ogbanje entity, itself the product of another kind of meeting: one between a man and a woman. Wideman adapts ogbanje as model for Kathryn, the novel's multiply reincarnated character, and also for the nameless, itinerant narrator-preacher. Furthermore, he finds in ogbanje a paradigm so pliable, yet familiar, it has racial, universal and subjectival implications beyond The Cattle Killing. The ogbanje mythic belief/trope helps him meditate on the potential of the human person to serve as a vessel for evil. Even more, it allows him to reflect on other dimensions of the black diaspora experience, including racial oppression, resistance, the tenacity of the (black/human) spirit and the need for "ritual" to rid black life of the ogbanje-like cycle of what Wideman sees as the "taint," the "poison[] that is part of the original contact between Europeans and Africans."

Generally, interviews zigzag through various works and issues in a writer's oeuvre and career. But when an author states, as does Wideman, that a whole work is built around a specific metaphor, focusing an interview on that premise offers readers information crucial for a deeper understanding of the work. The year 2008 will mark the golden anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart. Laced in Wideman's remarks about Achebe's monumental story is an appreciation of the nuanced though critically under-explored ways that Things Fall Apart, Achebe's storytelling, as well his theory of the novel and the novelist have helped shape not just African but African American writers and literary production since the sixties.

This interview, the transcript of which has been slightly edited for clarity and tightness, was conducted by telephone on Monday, July 5, 2004. Wideman spoke to me from France.

OKONKWO: The last time we spoke—a few weeks ago before you traveled to France—you mentioned that your novel The Cattle Killing is constructed around the ogbanje phenomenon.

WIDEMAN:Yes.

OKONKWO: So I want to start by asking if you did some reading on the phenomenon before you appropriated it for the novel.

WIDEMAN: Not really. Not any thing formal. What I know about ogbanje is actually derived from my reading of Achebe, and thinking about Things Fall Apart. Ogbanje occurs in his work and other places. But I don't know, I don't recall...