"Shifting Spirits": Ancestral Constructs in the Postmodern Writing of John Edgar Wideman.

We are difference....our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recoverable origin, is this dispersion that we are and make. (Michel Foucault)

One of the hallmarks of discourses often differentiated by the term minority is that they evoke some form of ancestor as a means of negotiating the presence of the past. In fact, Toni Morrison has argued that a fundamental aspect of black literature is the "presence or absence of an ancestor." According to Morrison, the ancestor functions as an elder who, rather than constituting a parental figure, is a kind of "timeless" entity that provides a certain "continuum in Black or African-American art." The presence of the ancestor can be seen in the work of writers such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Cade Bambara, but Morrison also notes that the absence of the ancestor in works by writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin results in an element of "destruction and disarray in the work itself" ("Rootedness" 343).

In another critical essay from the early 1980s, Morrison situates her idea of the ancestor in the African village, where the clan provided a collective experience of community and protection. The ancestor figure in black literature here functions as "the matrix of ... yearning" for village life and thus serves in the capacity of a sage who is the "advising, benevolent, protective, wise Black ancestor." The wise ancestor "values racial connection" and "racial memory over individual fulfillment," yet at the same time the "true" ancestor, according to Morrison, is "frequently a social or secret outlaw" in the hostile environment of the enemy--and in the case of black literature in America, the enemy is the continued presence of the past, oppressive white culture. Like the grandfather in Ellison's "Battle Royal," Morrison's ancestor strives to undermine the system, and offer alternative wisdom" in an effort to sustain succeeding generations ("City Limits" 39-40).

Morrison's genealogical configurations demonstrate that literary ties between present and past ancestors are constructs rather than givens, but such constructs nevertheless perpetuate significant suppositions. Analyzing postmodernism and minority literature, W. Lawrence Hogue argues that contemporary minority writers like Morrison finally reproduce themes of racial wholeness, community, and historical continuity that appeal to essentialist assumptions. Postmodern minority writers such as John Edgar Wideman and Richard Perry, on the other hand, are often ignored by cultural critics because their works do not exhibit a similar "nostalgia to reconstitute and sanction 'pre-modern values' about identity that no longer exist" (Hague 193). Of significance to Hogue is not only that postmodern narratives more accurately address the lived experiences of individuals negotiating a multitude of traditional, racial, sexual, political, economical, and psychological configurations, but that critical/cultural advocates discr edit these postmodern experiences as "abnormal" (194). bell hooks similarly cautions that "criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African-American experience" (28).

The portrayal offered by Hogue seems to me a legitimate assessment of a number of current critical perspectives dominating published scholarship on minority literature, yet these arguments create and maintain a polarity between authors of minority discourse rather than examining the way in which the postmodern writing of John Edgar Wideman, for instance, inscribes a sense of racial wholeness and historical continuity at one and the same time that it subverts and exposes the limits of its own desire. My study analyses two of Wideman's works, an early short story entitled "Damballah" (1981) and his recent novel The Cattle Killing (1996), to show how the inscription of what I term "ancestral constructs" in Wideman's writing both summons and undermines a nostalgic recuperation of the elder and racial continuity. As New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Hayden White remind us, we only know the past by means of texts, and any form of expression is considered a text constructed within the limitations of inte rpretative and language processes, whether it be a legal document, an anthropological study, or the recollections of a family member. Wideman's postmodernism [1] can best be understood along the lines of what Linda Hutcheon defines as "historiographic metafiction" because of its self-conscious or self-reflexive awareness of its own complicity in the act of re-presentation of events and personages into "fictional" discourse (Poetics 5)--further subverting that tendency through irony. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., argues in "The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey," what makes black texts different is exactly their transhistorical modes of "signifying" against the grain of dominance--whether it be that of a dominant white ethnocentrism or the lion of the jungle. "Signifying" functions primarily through irony, [2] or, as Gates explains, through the "ambiguities of language" in its capacity, whether in the Western or African tradition, for repetition and reversal/revision (286).

My comparative approach to Wideman's texts demonstrates the extent to which they are situated in the heart of controversy, or at the oftentimes ironic intersection of intertextual/historiographic revision. On the one hand, there is a desire to establish relations and strengthen cultural identity, and, on the other hand, there is a compelling resistance to essentialize that identity into a monolithic agenda that denies differences within cultures and even within individual identity. In Wideman's "Damballah," this intersection can be seen through intertextual relations with Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti, which is cited as a preface to the collection of short stories under the general title Damballah. The Cattle Killing acknowledges, among other historical texts named in the title-pages, Noel Mostert's Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People.

Although John Edgar Wideman, a prolific African American writer and former Rhodes Scholar, has published ten novels, two autobiographical works, several collections of short stories, and numerous essays in major journals, critical response to his work has been sparse when compared to that written on contemporary, especially black women's, fiction. And while two of his novels have been awarded the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Literary Award and two others have been nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards, the new Norton Anthology of African American Literature relies on a relatively brief book review for its introductory material on Wideman. [3] Critical reluctance may stem from the poststructuralist style that makes reading his work difficult, but that also, I would argue, makes it comparably rewarding. Two scholars who do offer important and careful readings of Wideman's postmodern technique are Klaus Schmidt, in his study of Reuben, and Robert A. Morace, in his comparison of Wideman's Philadelphia Fi re and Cheever's Falconer. Although each of these scholars rightly situates Wideman at the intersection between black and white traditions, neither attempts a sustained analysis of intertextual constructs that provides significant insight into his recontextualizing strategies.

Several postmodern readings of Wideman's recent texts have lately appeared, most notably those on The Cattle Killing by Fritz Gysin and Kathie Birat in a special issue of Callaloo. It is noteworthy that this special issue is devoted to "The European Response" to Wideman's writing, and that these readings offer significant postmodern theoretical and structural insights on the texts. Nevertheless, it is precisely the African "spirits" that continue to intervene and often thwart such readings. My analysis further investigates these "spirits" by juxtaposing Wideman's texts to specific historical and ethnographic "pretexts" cited by Wideman himself in prefatory pages to his works.

In all of his texts, Wideman creates a lineage of ancestor figures in an effort to invigorate and recuperate characters in racial memory that have been excluded from mainstream literary! historical narratives. Clearly, as Wideman himself has said in interviews, his material is derived from family stories as well as literary and historical texts, although there is certainly a scandalous absence of sufficient historical documentation of African American experience. The absence, a deliberate consequence of white oppression, renders the project fundamental as well as arduous. Wideman's reconfigurations, or rememorations, of that which has been erased, ignored, or misrepresented in the traditional historical realm are manifest as a result of "spirits" constantly shifting [4] through and in figures of the text. These complicated demands of Wideman's hybrid textuality and historiographic metafiction are, in turn, often ignored, misread, or explained away by otherwise well-meaning African American scholars. The rich tapestry of "Damballah," for instance, is reduced by James W. Coleman to simply a story of "how the black American tradition is tied to African tradition" and is transmitted through "ghosts" because the "tradition is supernatural." Coleman further neglects the story's complications by deciding that, although the "Americanized blacks" regard the messenger/ghost character Orion as "crazy and want nothing to do with him," he remains "connected to them" since he has passed on his knowledge to a young boy, and by the mere fact that they share this "common tradition" (81-82). The differences, the irony, the multiple voices, and intertextual signification, or "sampling," in Wideman's writing deserve more careful analysis. What follows is my attempt to demonstrate the extent to which Wideman's writing both inscribes and subverts the desire for a common black tradition by means of the ancestral constructs in "Damballah" and The Cattle Killing.

Wideman's literary conjuration of the ancient African divinity Damballah opens his collection of short stories under a title by the same name. As a preface to the stories, Wideman sites an excerpt from Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti which describes Damballah as the "good serpent of the sky" and "the venerable father. . . of a world before the troubles began." [5] Damballah's presence, interestingly, is distinguished by the absence of any "precise communication"--in fact he is so wise, innocent, and strong that he seems unable even to "perceive the minor anxieties of his human progeny," or to communicate by means of the "petty precision of human speech." According to the citation from Deren, Damballah renders "a sense of historical extension" toward "the ancient origin of the race" (n.p.). Wideman's story of Damballah, the first in the collection, transcribes the ancestral deity of Deren's ethnographic description into the metafictional/historiographic milieu of African American slave prede cessors. The story opens with the figure of Orion, abbreviated to the name Ryan by the slave community, immersing himself in a river on an American plantation in an effort to connect, through the medium of water, across the sea of memory to the distant past. He hears the voices of his fathers speaking a mysterious language capable of deceiving fish into the fisherman's net, but since this language of the father has been denied him by the enslavers, he retaliates by refusing "ever again" to speak the words of the other. Orion strives to convey his-story to a young slave boy who observes him from "behind the trees" (18). Without speaking directly, but purely by means of the power of his eyes, Orion bores a hole into the young boy's chest and thrusts one word into that space--"Damballah" (20). The spirit of the ancient ancestor in that manner enters the life of the next generation. For the writer, however, the task is to make (the other's) language somehow perform in the black or ancestral spirit. The text offer s the following passage:

Orion wasn't speaking but sounds came from inside him the boy had never heard before, strange words, clicks, whistles and grunts. A singsong moan that rose and fell and floated like the old man's busy hand above the cross [drawn in the dust per the Haitian ritual, as described by Deren]. Damballah like a drum beat in the chant. Damballah a place the boy could enter, a familiar sound he began to anticipate, a sound outside of him which slowly forced its way inside, a sound measuring his heartbeat, then one with the pumping surge of his blood. (21)

Although the spirit of Damballah speaks outside of speech as we know it, Wideman's ritualistic story depends, ironically, upon written language and cites an ethnographic text as a preface for interpreting the significance of racial memory and of the strength to be found in the names and spirits of the ancestors, whether they are ancient or more immediate.

If "Damballah" functions as a kind of spiritual allegory, however, it is an allegory dependent upon the signification system under assault. The passage cited above articulates that which cannot be articulated, namely Orion's inaccessible language as the spirit of Damballah. The writing's self-awareness of its own complicity arises out of the shifts between that which is being represented in the narrative as unrepresentable and the act of representation itself. We are not sure, first of all, who is speaking from where. I quote again: "Orion wasn't speaking but sounds came from inside him the boy had never heard before, strange words, clicks, whistles and grunts." Even the words inside him have no clear referent, for the sounds may be coming from Orion or the boy himself as they are perceived. If an exchange is taking place, we are not sure how it happens, nor are we sure what to make of the fundamental sounds in the transmission: "strange words, clicks, whistles and grunts," along with a "singsong moan" and " drum beat." The text repeats that which neither the boy nor the reader can decipher, yet the word Damballah acts as a transcendental signifier of the yearned for Origin which will give meaning and continuity to a Diasporic condition.

At this point, it is interesting to look at several sentences in Deren's description of Damballah's serpentlike, primordial behavior that are omitted from Wideman's citation:

He comes as a snake, plunging at once into the basin of water that is built for him, and then writhes, dripping and inarticulate, upon the ground, or mounts a tree, where he lies in the high branches, the primordial source of all life wisdom. He makes his signs, his gestures of benediction; when he speaks, it is a barely intelligible hissing. (Deren 115)

Wideman then takes up Deren's text again where it states that "there is almost no precise communication with him ...." Damballah comes to mean what he literally signs, so to speak: His inarticulate gestures refer to "the primordial source" in spite of themselves and in spite of the fact that there is "almost" no intercourse with him. Still, the one word that is apparently articulated to the young boy--the proper name Damballah--inevitably results in competing interpretations. When the boy repeats the name of this venerable father, his Aunt Lissy strikes him "harder than she had ever slapped him" and warns him not to invoke that "heathen" word again: "'Don't you ever, you hear me, ever let me hear that heathen talk no more. You hear me, boy? You talk Merican, boy'" (20-21). Damballah, for Aunt Lissy, represents what is heathen, presumably in the sense that the word embodies Haitian Voodoo beliefs, which are juxtaposed in the story with the Christian sayings of Preacher Jim "talking bout Sweet Jesus the Son of God" (21). In another case involving utterance, Orion screams the word Damballah in a radical and deliberate act to disrupt Preacher Jim's sermon. Damballah here seems to signify pure resistance to all aspects of white Christian culture in the name of another father.

While Aunt Lissy and Preacher Jim respond reciprocally to Damballah's resistance with their own forms of opposition, the boy seems to interpret the word as a sign of his personal identity and as a feeling of hostility to what he perceives to be unmanly, house-related work:

Damballah. Be strong as he needed to be. Nothing touch him if he don't want. Before long they'd cut him from the herd of pickaninnies. No more chasing flies from the table, no more silver spoons to get shiny, no fat, old woman telling him what to do. He'd go to the fields each morning with the men. (20; my emphasis)

The word is thus empty enough to shift its meaning among members of the same oppressed culture. For the boy, the word is far more gendered and promises to empower him to be a (black)man and do what (black)men do, including working in the fields along with the other men in slavery. For Orion, the spirit of Damballah functions in the parameter of active political intervention against Christian beliefs and mastery. For black Christians, in contrast, the same spirit threatens spirituality itself. The text thus deliberately inscribes Damballah at the same time that it challenges any mastery of the word, or mastery of the paradox of a "spirit" within the spirit.

The signifying difference in/of spirit is not the only challenge to the notion of continuity and tradition in Wideman's text. The narrative, in choosing among various distinguishing attributes of Damballah's "history" as it is recorded in Deren's ethnography, reconstructs yet another archetype of the father/serpent, an archetype notably the reverse of the serpent in Christian tradition. Wideman's narrative depicts Damballah as a water spirit, seemingly taking possession of, or "mounting," as Deren phrases it, the human being (i.e., Orion), according to Haitian tradition. Orion draws the ritualistic "cross in the dust" ("Damballah" 21) signifying the "crossroads where the spirits passed between worlds" (18). Yet the presence of Damballah's spirit does not bring Orion "peace," like the "absent-minded caress of a father's hand," or the kind of detached, anxiety-free primal vigor and innocence of a god who is beyond the petty concerns of his "human progeny," described in the quotation from Deren in Wideman's pre face. Orion's spirit is, instead, driven to a radical and violent refusal of enslavement in the language and land of the other.

It is interesting to note at this point that Divine Horsemen offers more than one configuration of Damballah, arguably the result of a fusion of diverse African and indigenous native American [i.e., Aztecan, Mayan, and Incan] traditions in the West Indies. Deren charts the names of Haitian divinities according to their African and American/Indian counterparts. The name Damballah occurs in several but not all African tribal cultures, namely Dahomey, Ibo, and Kanga, as well as in the American/Indian Petro cultures (82-83). While Deren admits that origins can be obscure and classifications subject to debate among scholars, the chart does serve "to illuminate the manner in which the various [African] tribes, family lines and American/Indian divinities have been organized together into a single, compatible system" for ceremonial purposes (84). Deren speaks further of a difference between certain ancestral divinities associated with principles of education and initiation in comparison to those having powers of mag ic: "When divine power is to be put into action by human beings it becomes magic. Whereas the divine principle in itself is primarily natural and moral, and acts 'in general,' the magical principle which brings it to focus and directs it to a desired end is deliberate, amoral and specific" (66-67). What happens ultimately in the fusion of African and American/Indian cultures is that "divinities ... [are] transfigured" (69) as needed in response to circumstances. For example, "Damballah, the serpent, is sometimes conceived as the Plumed Serpent of Indian myth." In another example, the "gentle feminine Erzulie, became in the Petro [i.e., a ritual derived primarily from American/Indian tradition] context the corn goddess whose propitiatory service in the Indian culture had been extremely violent and bloody" (69). [6]

The transfiguration of divinities over time delineates not only a fusion of similar belief systems, but the fracturing of continuity in traditions--particularly as the need arises. Perhaps this is one possible explanation for the transfiguration that occurs in Wideman's portrayal of the spirit of Damballah/Orion. On the one hand, the spirit exhibits the inarticulate attributes of the ancestral entity as benevolent father from the African tradition. On the other hand, the spirit moves Orion toward, again according to the paradigm in Deren, American/Indian aggressive behavior and his own execution. The scene of Orion's execution, which only the boy has the courage to investigate, suggests that element of divine power turned into human action, namely the magical. We learn of apparent panic on the part of the executioners when they come face to face with some mysterious force while they are in the act of attempting to execute Orion: "One man's hat and another's shirt, a letter that must have come from someone's pocket lay about in a helter-skelter way as if the men had suddenly bolted before they had finished with Orion" (24-25). Despite the execution, Orion's spirit carries on for a time in the narrative--as narrative itself, story-spirit:

The boy wiped his wet hands on his knees and drew the cross and said the word and settled down and listened to Orion tell the stories again. Orion talked and he listened and couldn't stop listening till he saw Orion's eyes rise up through the back of the severed skull and lips rise up through the skull and the wings of the ghost measure out the rhythm of one last word. (25)

The literal execution merely displaces the figure of Orion into another realm and another kind of execution in words.

Ironically, the black preacher's "last rites" for Orion appeal to the name of the Christian father to restore this lost soul and to restore the "Word":

Forgive him, Father. I tried to the end of my patience to restore his lost soul. I made a mighty effort to bring him to the Ark of Salvation but he had walked in darkness too long. He mocked Your Grace. He denied Your Word. Have mercy on him and forgive his heathen ways as you forgive the soulless beasts of the fields and birds of the air. (25)

The juxtaposition of divinities allows for an ironic reading of the passage, for it is precisely the restoration of the figurative lost African soul that has taken place in Orion's transformation. Further verbal irony is implied with the suggestion that Orion has been walking "in darkness too long." And, of course, Orion certainly denied the "Word" of the one god in favor of the other. Yet we cannot forget that the irony comes at the expense of another African soul and ancestral tradition-- that of the black preacher.

What is important to emphasize concerning ancestral constructs in Wideman's rich and constantly shifting text is that there is no single original African ancestor father figure that can be appropriated or invoked.

Damballah's attributes shift according to time, place, and character--that is, according to contextual demands. The spirit that moves Orion does not translate identically to the spirit that moves the boy, or to the spirit in Deren's analysis. And, of course, the boy invokes the spirit of one ancestor at the expense of his more immediate relatives and their ancestors. The narrative leaves us yet another ironic conflation of discordant ancestral voices as the boy listens to Orion's disembodied talking head, which now, apparently, is capable of articulating clearly as the source of story upon story. Still, the words of Damballah, now "ghost stories," are expressed in terms fused in free indirect discourse with the terms of a Christian spiritual: "Damballah said it be a long way a ghost be going and Jordan chilly and wide and a new ghost take his time getting his wings together" (25; my emphasis). Damballah advises the boy to wait and listen to the stories of Orion until they are all gone. From what we know of Da mballah/Orion up to this point, the boy's "reading" of the ancestral voice as an adaptation of the Christian tradition seems a tremendous misappropriation or radical revision of what has been described in Wideman's story as nearly the exact opposite in Orion's behavior and the spirit of Damballah. Historical and narrative continuity is once again subverted, and readings of the past are shown to be always provisionally governed by the present, perhaps naively and with good intentions, but in some sense illusory nonetheless. [7]

For Wideman's writing, that seems to be where the spirit ultimately lies-- not in the ancestral divinity as such, but in the telling of stories. As Lynn Hunt aptly reminds us, "History is better defined as an ongoing tension between stories that have been told and stories that might be told" (103). Nevertheless, these stories matter as "a field of moral and political struggle in which we learn to define ourselves in the present. The struggle will continue because power is control over the storytelling function..." (104).

I would argue, further, that it is by means of Wideman's story of stories, or "historiographic metafiction," that notions of continuity, originality, authenticity, and the impulse to master representation are challenged. In Wideman's texts, we see similarities to what Linda Hutcheon in The Politics of Postmodernism describes from Foucault as the "interplay of different, heterogeneous discourses that acknowledge the undecidable in both the past and our knowledge of the past" (66). Furthermore, no alternative to storytelling seems possible.

In Wideman's more recent work The Cattle Killing, ancestral threads are interlaced in yet another rewriting of history, specifically as a corrective measure and com-memoration of those African Americans who are not only gone but forgotten in the dominant tradition of American history. Wideman's postmodernism in that manner is always political, as it revises the past in a gesture that simultaneously confirms and subverts the power of historical representations. As if this double bind were not enough, the structuring of the postmodern text once again complicates and undermines its own revisionary tendencies. There are some minority critics who see this kind of strategy as hedging, or as artistic eccentricity in the face of adverse lived situations and institutional agendas that decry taking a position. Hutcheon's The Politics of Postmodernism responds to such criticism by emphasizing that postmodernism's foregrounding of its own "complicitous critique," one that desires yet is suspicious of "narrative mastery- -and master narratives" (64), keeps the fundamental problem of representation and its power constantly before us.

The Cattle Killing is framed by autobiographical discourse that initially situates the text we are reading as one presently being read at a literary conference and also being read to the narrator's father, who resides in an inner-city senior citizens' home. The narrator announces that the text should serve as a warning not to be "seduced by false prophecy" (7), as happened to the Xhosa people of South Africa. The story of the Xhosa is imposed upon the present-day American landscape, where black people are living comparably devastated lives and young black men are shooting one another. The present American "story" is analogous to the African story of the past in that the Xhosa, as a result of the effects of European invasion, destroyed themselves by killing their singular source of survival--their own cattle. The narrator explains the parallels:

He wanted every word of his new book to be a warning, to be saturated with the image of a devastated landscape.... His book beginning and ending here. The Xhosa, seduced by false prophecy, false promises, turning away from themselves, trying to become something else, something they could never be. Killing their cattle, destroying themselves, dooming their ancient way of life. Deadly prophecy in the air again. The people desperate again, listening again. (7-8)

The historical reference for Wideman's knowledge of the Xhosa ancestors, cited in the title-pages of the novel, is Noel Mostert's recent and extensive chronicle entitled Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People. Wideman's version of The Cattle Killing, as the narrator points out, wants to be "saturated with the image of a devastated landscape" in present-day America, but the narrative landscape shifts to the Pennsylvanian landscape of the late 1700s. The narrative voice becomes another--that of a young, black, itinerant, epileptic preacher reciting his-story to an unidentified, at times female, listener. We know from the title-pages of the book that Wideman is "sampling" material from various eighteenth-century letters, diaries, and sermons. And while there is devastation occurring in the novel's landscape due to an outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, with the subsequent terrorism inflicted on the black community, who were blamed for the disease, that image of d evastation is superseded by the itinerant preacher's travels in the natural environment outside of the city. There he encounters the spirit of an ancestral figure in the guise of a woman who is supplemented by various other women who seem to blend and fuse together into one and the same throughout the text.

The Xhosa story comes to the preacher by means of a dream whispered in the night by the mysterious woman, or blend of women. As the narrative shifts to the preacher's dream work, a girl reiterates her own account of the false prophecy she heard from ancestral fathers. Before describing her-story, it is interesting to note at this point that the actual incident in Mostert's historical account occurred in 1856, while the preacher's dream in the novel's account occurs at the time of the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia. Thus the preacher's dreaming functions as a prophecy of the girl's false prophecy fifty years in the future, yet the dream speaks of the event in the past tense. In structure as well as content, the narrative subverts conventional representations of time and space, but nowhere quite so radically as in this instance. In his influential study Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale explains: "Apocryphal history, creative anachronism, historical fantasy--these are the typical strategies of th e postmodernist revisionist historical novel" (90). By defying not only the official historical record, but historical conventions, or "realemes" (86) as well, "history and fiction exchange places" in order to question assumptions about what constitutes the ontological "real" (96). Although Wideman is not mentioned in McHale's discussion, Wideman's writing is situated to some degree within the parameters of McHale's definition of postmodernist revisionist historical novels, but more needs to be examined about the implications of the temporal revisions. The historical/fictional anachronistic reconstructions suggest the significance in/for the future of any "real" constructs in the "present." These temporal concerns are significant to the spirit of The Cattle Killing.

Her name is Nongqawuse, both in the Wideman and Mostert accounts, and she recalls how war, famine, and disease devastated the land in South Africa as a result of the invasion of white people. Nongqawuse and her sister are bathing one day in ancestral waters when a voice from the past speaks. The voice identifies itself as her father's brother, announcing a return to the old ways and prophesying a new, or a recuperated, world if his instructions are followed:

Listen with all your ears, child. You must carry my message to our people. Tell them the plague [lung disease] destroying their herds is God's curse upon those who have forsaken His ways. Tell them we must return to the old ways. The sacred path the ancestors walked. But first the people must kill their cattle. (146)

While most of the Xhosa initially ignore the prophecy, conditions deteriorate until there seems no other remedy. [8] The cattle are killed, but no ancestral resurrection or renewal follows. In Wideman's narrative, the dream girl has the advantage of hindsight and thus speaks of the fallacy of her own prophecy. She now knows that the spirit "had deceived them" and was, in actuality, "a spirit of despair grown strong inside our breast.., who whispered lies of the invaders in our ears. . . tricked us into toiling for our foe. . . taught us to kill our cattle, murder ourselves." Echoing the book's preface, she warns, "Do not kill your cattle. Do not speak with your enemy's tongue. Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream" (147).

Each of the references to the cattle killing prophecy in Wideman's narrative (e.g., in the preface and in the dream) seems a modulation of the other, the narrator in each instance conjuring up the past to remedy the present. Yet there are disquieting possibilities generated by the resonance between these two not quite congruent passages. Both warnings are based on a (e.g., the girl's) misreading which renders the foretelling of an outcome false. The misreading arises because the reader (e.g., the girl) fails to identify the thoughts of the "other" (e.g., the oppressor) disguised as the reader's (e.g., the girl's) own. There seems to be no procedure offered, however, to distinguish accurately the other's false words from one's own, except perhaps through revision or rereading. The Xhosa story presents the challenge of competing interpretations, but implicates the whole question of agency, as well. Although the dream spirit speaks with the authority of a wise ancestor, it is precisely the trickery of enemy wor ds that has resulted in misappropriation.

There are a number of differing interpretive responses possible for reading the dream work section of the text. A Lacanian reading would argue that what has been described is the very relation of any subject to language as a signifying system that is always "other" and which the subject depends on for its self-definition. Therein lies its power, and only by means of the unconscious realm can representation be disrupted and undermined as arbitrary. We recall at this juncture that what Wideman writes is arguably a literary work--a work of the imagination--and its relation to the world is a fictional construct, yet one that specifically in this instance highlights the literariness of texts of all sorts. Even establishing the context is problematic--the preacher's (unconscious?) dream spirit comes to him at a point in the story where his own spiritual identity is in question, in part due to his intimate association with an interracial couple, Liam and his red-haired, white Irish wife, but also, in part, due to his role as a spiritual leader in a plagueridden, racially divided land. He dreams himself back to Africa, into "the Africa of Liam's stories," and then further dreams within the dream a conflation of Liam's wife with other women of his life: "Old woman, girl, black, white. Bald, fiery-haired" (144). The shifting of spirits disperses identities beyond distinction. We are no longer certain who or what is speaking; that is, how to situate agency. [9]

A poststructural reading would perhaps comment that, ironically, the fictionality of the text already presupposes disguising the thoughts of the "other" as one's own, whether from the position of author or reader. Further, the ironic nature of "signifying" structures has always been recognized in the black tradition. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., argues, the black tradition differs essentially because of its tradition of signifying by means of trickery (e.g., the ancestry of the African Trickster figure and African American Signifying Monkey). The one who signifies thus "dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language" in order to wreck "havoc upon the Signified" ("Blackness" 236-38). Gates's analysis situates agency primarily in the hands of the individual black author and his relation to precursor texts--black and white. With regard to one's relation to the other's language, Gates refers to Wole Soyinka's conviction of the necessity for the black writer deliberately to coopt the" 'entire properties of that [alien] language as correspondences to properties in our matrix of thought and expression' "("Canon-Formation" 24). [10] Under this formulation, Wideman's text might be viewed more as a performance of co-opting language in an attempt to deflect or redirect its oppressive signification.

A New Historical/Cultural analysis might address the issue of agency by asking whether Wideman's text locates responsibility for events in the subject's unique, diverse entity or within the historical/cultural production of the subject. In Wideman's dream spirit segment we are seemingly given Nongqawuse's own revision or correction to her devastating misappropriation of the enemy's lies as the ancestor's prophecy. If we take the text at its word, it has itself appropriated the spirit of the African girl and bestowed upon her the unique and responsible agency to reread her-story after the fact, although it is certainly too late to undo the tragic cattle killing. By foregrounding the girl's exegesis to the neglect of the complicated historical context offered in Mostert's analysis, this reading privileges difference within the individual. By emphasizing the extent to which the girl locates the source of the problem in the words of the "invaders" and the "enemy's tongue," agency is situated in the social/politi cal realm. Jonathan Culler describes the warring potential at risk in these differing interpretations: "Some of the fiercest conflicts in contemporary theory arise when claims about individuals as agents and claims about the power of social and discursive structures are seen as competing causal explanations" (120). Anthony Appiah elucidates the dynamic more specifically in what he calls the "structural determinism" in critical "modes of historicism" found in the work of Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Greenblatt, for example, which assume that, "once an agent's socio-cultural location is fixed, his or her capacities for and in agency are fixed also; and, more particularly, that we will understand the outcome of social process structure and not 'merely' as the result of individual acts" (66-67). If Nongqawuse is thought of in terms of a self as process within a system of discursive possibilities, along the lines of Judith Butler's argument concerning agency in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, then her acts are not fixed within the either/or opposition of subject vs. culture.

In the context of Wideman's text, however, although it problematizes the narrative context in terms of the complexity of the subject/preacher identity and his relation to the dream spirit, it nevertheless corroborates, by means of the spirit girl's socio-structural implications, a causal explanation of the cattle killing event in terms "sampled" from Mostert's rendering [11] as, "at bottom, a consequence of territorial confinement, the national despair of a people who saw no way out of their losses and defeats and the cultural onslaught of the past half[-]century, and who, confronted additionally by the havoc of the lung-sickness, had turned, as Christians themselves did in dire extremity, to the shades" (1195). Even the prophecy itself, according to Mostert, is a reconstruction, or co-opting, of Christian language into Xhosa structure: "Throughout this crisis the white men were forced to witness the infusion of their Christian 'word' into Xhosa logic and cosmology and have it given back to them in ways they did not much appreciate" (1197).

I do not wish to suggest that the relation of Wideman's "fictional" text to Mostert's "historical" text, or any other, for that matter, is any more or less complex than the relations within each. It is important that each is, in its own way, attempting to rewrite history--narrating the past through the tinted lens of the present. Nevertheless, in effect, Wideman's text presents Mostert's causal explanation in the guise of Nongqawuse's words, but that explanation is already in the language of the other that her words wish to refute--the "other" here encompassing "Western" culture, language, and dominance, and perhaps patriarchy, as well. Ironically, then, the emancipatory politics of both texts are never free of the realm of language and the (il)logic of its function.

Still, there is more to say about putting words into Nongqawuse's mouth. Perhaps it is only common sense that her spirit would speak of revelation, or the wisdom that comes from having seen the consequences of its false prophecy. Wideman's text resurrects her-story, in one sense, yet is silent on other details offered by Mostert. In Mostert, there is no mention that Nongqawuse, the 15- or 16-year-old niece of a tribal seer, ever came to an understanding of the tragedy. In fact, he states that she was exiled and shunned by the Xhosa thereafter, and that it is "impossible to know" how to interpret the girl's prophetic behavior. Perhaps she was "simply the medium for what Mhalakaza [her seer uncle] transferred to her from his own visionary imagination"; perhaps "she, like St Joan and St Bernadette, saw her own visions and heard voices"; or perhaps she constructed the vision herself based on her observation of the lung-sickness situation and having heard other women prophets suggest the same prophecy the precedi ng year (1191). In Wideman's representation of her spirit, she, ironically, still speaks with authority in the words of the "other." [12] A comparison of how both writers construct their respective narrative histories according to differing constitutive interests gives rise to no happy resolution of/in black and white. Rather, the emphasis implicates the need for a commitment to rereading, together with an unmistakable omen--beware of putting your faith into words? [13]

The end of the novel presents the preacher acting on the dream spirit's recommendation (e.g., "Do not speak with your enemy's tongue. Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream" [147]), in spite of the fact that her words have a history of disastrous results. Nonetheless, when a fire destroys the lives of young, black, plague-victim orphans who are housed at night in the cellar of a church-sponsored home, the preacher turns, as he says, "away from a god who authors an endless chain of horrors for African people" (204). The fire is started by one of the young male orphans, whose rage over the injustice he suffers cannot be contained. The preacher's response is not only loss of faith, but, simultaneously, literal loss of "facility" to speak the other's language. The preacher/text begins to "sta-stasta-sta-stutter" (205). The implication is significant, for it is not action speaking louder than words that matters, or some kind of plain speaking that can empower the black community. Rather, the signifying system i tself is undermined to expose its limitations and disrupt the master narrative-its own included in the equation. While the narrative of the (preacher's) past has been both reinscribed and disrupted, the voice of the work's present resumes, beginning once again to come to terms with the language of the other.

In reading The Cattle Killing alongside "Damballah," kindred spirits seem to inhabit the preacher and Orion as each renounces the language of the oppressor as his means of subverting Christian belief. The Cattle Killing, however, by extension and reversal, showcases a preacher figure which in "Damballah" is marginalized as Preacher Jim. It is worthwhile noting, as Houston A. Baker, Jr., explains, that the preacher in the African American tradition is the father of figuration: "The master of metaphor in the AfroAmerican community...has long since been acknowledged as the preacher..." (7). Yet in "Damballah," it is not Preacher Jim who "signifies" in the master's tongue, but Orion's utterance of the foreign word into the master's discourse that disrupts and redirects it. The Cattle Killing, in turn, redirects its own gaze onto a preacher in the past and in crisis over the inescapable complicity and shifting spirit of "the (W)ord." By comparing these ancestral textual constructs, it is obvious that Wideman's co mplex grafting of historical/fictional performance, unlike the master narrative, relentlessly rethinks its own occasion.

Sheri I. Hoem is Associate Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. Her articles on postmodern literature and theory have appeared in Diacritics and Paragraph, and she is presently working on a book which addresses comparative postmodernism.

Notes

(1.) My use of the term postmodem is based on what Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition admits is a simple-to-the-extreme definition--"incredulity toward metanarratives"; that is, writing that is skeptically inquisitive toward any grounds of authority, assumption, or convention. The metanarrative function, writes Lyotard, "is losing its functors .... It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements..." (xxiv). For Lyotard, "postmodern knowledge... refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable" (xxv). Certainly Wideman's "Black" postmodernism works to the same ends, although each time uniquely, of course.

(2.) Wideman discusses the "playful and artistic dimensions" of the "signifying" tradition for black speech communities in "Charles Chesnutt and the WPA Narratives: The Oral and Literate Roots of Afro-American Literature." As an example, Wideman states that "in the street a skillful signifier can talk behind a victim's back while looking him in the face" (66). However, Wideman does not address the difficulty of interpretation that always enters this kind of scenario in terms of who does or does not have the ability to read the differences in meaning and how that is or is not accomplished--not only during the street incident of signifying, but also in the act of reading a signifying text.

(3.) The book review, although not mentioned as such by Norton editor Barbara Christian, is the work of fiction writer Randall Kenan, whose review appears in The Nation Jan. 1990: 25-27 (see Christian 2327).

(4.) My use of the term shifting follows Barbara Johnson's explanation in her response to Gates's "Canon-Formation and the Afro-American Tradition." According to Johnson, Roman Jakobson uses shifter to describe "an expression that takes on different meanings (referents) in different contexts, an expression that refers to the instance of its own enunciation" (42). Wideman, himself, uses the term shifting spirit in an interview with James W. Coleman, with regard to his characters and the impossibility of assigning one-to-one correspondence with real individuals (see Coleman 158).

(5.) It is of some interest to note that Maya Deren, as she fully discloses in her text, is an artist--a New York-based filmmaker--who has no training in the field of anthropology. Nevertheless, Divine Horseman is replete with the appropriate footnotes to published scholarship in the field relevant to her findings, and she has the endorsement of Joseph Campbell, who provides the forward to the work. For a discussion of the extent to which Deren's work can be said to lean toward the scientific description of a culture or toward an artistic interpretation--one that may well be a projection of her own personal fantasies more than an accurate interpretation--see Jacqueline R. Smutch's 'Continuum or Break?: Divine Horsemen and the Films of Maya Deren," New Orleans Review 17 (Winter 1990): 89-97.

(6.) Damballah has a female counterpart, described in Deren's text as "Abide," the rainbow: "Damballah and Abide, who together represent the sexual totality, encompass the cosmos as a serpent coiled about the world. The egg, the world egg, is the special symbol for them; and an egg is the particular offering to Damballah" (116). Wideman's text offers no comparable counterpart to this feminine principle. This aspect of Wideman's work deserves careful scrutiny but is beyond the scope of the present study. For an insightful treatment of ancestral figures in the works of African American women, see Holloway.

(7.) The impulse to totalize the narrative is symptomatic of critics, as well. Doreatha Drummon Mbalia essentializes the text by summing up its 'meaning": " 'Damballah' celebrates African history by reclaiming the African in African-American literature. The main character is Orion who, in finding his Africanness [just as Wideman does, according to this critic], accepts the responsibility of passing on the precious history of African people so that neither the people, nor the culture is ever destroyed" (52). The quotation Mbalia uses to demonstrate her reading is the one I cite above: "Damballah said it be a long way a ghost be going and Jordan chilly and wide..." (25).

(8.) Mostert's chronicle states that not all of the Xhosa were "beguiled" by the vision, especially those whose cattle were not affected by the disease. Yet a "mass" of the people were finally caught up in the excitement" (1193).

(9.) Wideman speaks of shifting of identities in his interview with James W. Coleman: "My own sense of identity, or the sense of identity which I am evolving as I write books, has a lot to do with ... what is fragmentary, what is discontinuous, more and more so. So that my whole way of looking at human beings and lives is changing all the time. I probably believe... more than most people that the notion of a stable, underpinning personality is itself a fiction. That people have different stages and go through different personas and they are really drastically, drastically different in the sense that you could talk about one person's life as many lives" (158-59).

(10.) For an excellent discussion of minority literature as that which "deterritorializes" the mother tongue, see Deleuze and Guattari.

(11.) Of course, one could interrogate Mostert's sources to demonstrate further the constructed nature of all historical narratives. An exhaustive study would also examine the 'various eighteenth-century diaries and sermons" Wideman admits having "`sampled'" in the title-pages of The Cattle Killing.

(12.) It may also be of significance that the preacher is an epileptic, whose fits are described in the text as resulting in moments of seeing with a clarity impossible under normal circumstances.

(13.) Wideman refuses to reduce the lines of his writing to demarcated borders of typical racial rhetoric and linear history because, as he says: "Any place you cut into American history, you get all kinds of situations--you had black people and white people living together, families making babies during slavery days; you had black businessmen who were very successful at the turn of the 19th century in Philadelphia; you also had awful things going on at all times.... The scary thing about race relations is that no, they haven't changed very much at all.... We still think we need the concept of race to understand ourselves, and it's with the concept of race that we try to make sense of ourselves and our world, and it's a bogus concept; it's a concept that doesn't get us a very deep understanding of who we are, or what our country is now, or what it has been" (Olander 1-8).

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