존 에드가 와이드맨의 『소떼 죽이기』: 아프리카 전통가치의 회복과 대항서사

Abstract

This paper attempts to reread The Cattle Killing, focusing on how Wideman constructs the counter-narrative through reclaiming the African traditional values. Unlike most of critical essays on The Cattle Killing which have considered it as ‘historiographic metafiction’, in this paper much attention is given to the African traditional values. By employing ‘the Great Time’ in which past, present and future are floating, with being inextricably linked to one another, Wideman shows how three narratives of different times and places are interconnected, which suggests that the crisis of the contemporary African American community should be grasped in the transatlantic Africans’ history of racial oppression. Furthermore, on the basis of the African Ibo’s belief that ‘All stories are true’ Wideman reconstructs the forcibly forgotten and excluded narratives of a black male indentured servant and a black female slave as well as a black itinerant preacher, whose diverse stories vividly reveal the harsh realities caused by the racial oppression. In particular, the emphasis is given on the necessity of maintaining the ‘storytelling’ tradition through the mutually beneficial relationships of a nameless itinerant preacher with Liam and Kathryn. The storytelling is stressed not only as the affirmative power to help them overcome their traumas by sharing their stories, but as the crucial means of conveying from generation to generation how the African American community has survived a dreadful racial oppression. Thus, Wideman constructs the counter-narrative which makes it possible for the African American community to resist the master narrative and to gain ‘the whole survival’ by reclaiming the African traditional values.