Legba's Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic

5. Dis-ease, De-formity, and Diaspora: John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing

{ 141 } Dis-ease, De-formity, and Diaspora John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1996, noted African American author John Edgar Wideman identifies the “special subversive , radically democratic role” that fiction can play not only in terms of transforming readers’ ways of seeing the world, but, even more powerfully, in tangibly altering readers’ ways of being in the world. In Wideman’s own radically democratic, subversive works, narrators, voices, stories, histories, myths, fantasies, imaginations, and readers are always woven together, ebbing, flowing, and spilling out onto each other’s textual bodies and into the body of texts. The rich discursive texture of Wideman’s narratological endeavors reflects African Atlantic traditions of storytelling. Throughout Wideman’s oeuvre, storytelling always exists in Great Time, bridging past, present, and future and history, memory, and the imagination . “The past,” Wideman affirms, “presents itself fluidly, changeably, at least as much a work in progress as the present or future” (Hoop Roots 9). You can pick up in the playing if you listen hard, listen easy enough, the chorus saying, We are doing this together . . . —John Edgar Wideman, Hoop Roots Mark my word, it is the contagion of freedom they fear . . . Do not fall asleep in your enemy’s dream. —The Cattle Killing 5 { 142 } chapter five For Wideman, as for Earl Lovelace, Great Time operates as a powerful dimension for healing, salvation, and transformation. The confluence and convergence of spatial-temporality sustains the primacy, grants tenure, and inaugurates the transformational power of stories, whose efficacious articulation is contingent upon collective performance. Meaning—that which is gleaned from the hermeneutical process—is only substantively achieved via active writerly engagement in the conjuring, production, dissemination , and enacting of stories. Like quilting and jazz, the recounting of stories, stories that emerge from a fluid and elemental intersubjectivity, becomes the locus of survival. InWideman’s purview, the imagination is “the pathway to freedom”.1 The imagination is the place where alternatives to the paradigm of race—“the doctrine of immutable difference and inferiority, the eternal positioning of white over black”—posit new formulations of African Atlantic subjectivity (Fatheralong xxii). Thus, in Wideman’s estimation, the doctrine of racism “can be given the lie by our life stories” (Fatheralong xxxi). In other words, the exercise of imagination, engendered by the enactment of storytelling, becomes the mechanism by which the Discourse of race is consummately fissured and replaced with ethical, just, democratized, humanist, empowering discourses. The question implicit in such faith is this: how can the imagination function powerfully to give the lie to the paradigm of race? How might the imagination provide salvation in the face of Wideman’s viscerally disturbing proclamation that “we are in the midst of a second middle passage ” (Fatheralong xxii). Acknowledging that “race is an essentialist concept or an existential one, depending on the moment,” Wideman resists the propensity to relegate race solely to the symbolic realm. Fictional or not in its construction, race materializes in the forms of disenfranchisement and exclusion that have historically plagued African Atlantic subjects. The exercise of imagination is, in this context, literally a matter of life and death. What kinds of reconfigurations, reinventions, reconceptualizations of African Atlantic subjectivity might assure African Atlantic survival in the midst of the contemporary horrors that constitute Wideman’s “second middle passage”? In its twenty-first-century context (when there are no more slave ships and dungeons), what kinds of dexterous metamorphosing are adept to navigate the confines of the jail cell, the ghetto, and also the Dis-ease, De-formity, and Diaspora { 143 } coffin? What kinds of revisionary strategies are equipped to transliterate mere survival into surviving whole? Storytelling Wideman’s eruptive narrative constructions are designed to so discomfit readers that they have no choice but to self-reflexively attend to their desires for linearity, clarity, causality, and coherent meaning. In the final pages of Fatheralong is this assertion: “i’m remembering things in no order, with no plan” (184). The hegemony of Western linear, cause-andeffect discursive practice is exposed and critiqued. The frustrated reader becomes in this instant an imaginative agent, an anxious talisman toward new identities. Central to Wideman’s conceptualization of the power of the imagination in creating a freeing and freed discourse is deploying a narratological structure that produces synergistic, participatory engagement in coextensive acts of naming and renaming reality, claiming and reclaiming language . In order to...