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RESEARCH PRODUCT

La langue affrontée : voix intimes des domestiques dans The Cattle Killing de John Edgar Wideman

subject

description

The Cattle Killing traces the path a young Black itinerant preacher – a former slave reduced to vagrancy in plague-ridden 1793 Philadelphia. During his travels, he encounters Liam and Mrs. Stubbs, a Black man and a white woman, both former servants who have come from England where Liam was indentured to painter George Stubbs while his wife was Stubbs’ maid. They came to America in hope of a better life that would save them from ambiant racism. The preacher also meets Kathryn, a black woman serving the wife of a famous Abolitionnist, a Founding Father and enlightened humanist. Kathryn works as an amanuensis for her blind mistress and writes a diary the latter dictates. Yet the servant surreptitiously inserts clandestine words into her mistress’s diary, and this ventriloquism voices the history of the vanquished, whose memory the words of the victors haven’t managed to obliterate. The servants occupy an intermediary space in which language seems to rise up against itself, and the servants’s voices, because they sometimes overlap the masters’, or because they echo them, amount to a true offence against the language of Enlightenment and against the categories on which it is based. These intimate voices undermine language and the values it conveys, yet they do not reverse them. Located in the innermost recesses of the masters’ voices, the servants’ voices cleave language apart, causing signs to proliferate, thus blurring meaning and ideology. In this open rift of language, meaning anarchically accrues, proliferating stealthily.