Allegory in Zulus

What a terrible title for a blog entry. Zulus is a novel so full of allusions and literary maneuvers that Percival Everett had to start stuffing them into the chapter titles. Which specific example of allegory could I possibly mean? Or do I intend to dissect ALL examples of allegory in Zulus, if there are any? The former. Definitely the former. Just ignore the title — that would probably be best. Consider it a bad joke that I’m sharing with myself.

What I want to talk about specifically is the potential allegory in the rapes that we’ve talked about in the novel so far, those being the rape of Alice Achitophel on page 11 and the rape of Leda referenced on page 75. Alice Achitophel’s rape needs no explanation to anyone reading this entry (I hope). She was tricked and impregnated by a man who wanted “to watch the snow from  [her] porch”. Leda, too, was tricked by the god Zeus, who appeared before her in the guise of a swan and (depending on the account you consult) seduced or raped her. Already there are similarities between the two events in how the act occurred. There are also similarities in the results that the acts produced. For Leda, it was four children: Castor, Pollux, Clytemenstra and Helen, who are also mentioned, though not by name, on page 75. One of those children in particular, Helen, bears a reputation as a startling beautiful woman. So beautiful that the origins of the Trojan War, according to Greek mythology, are found in her beauty and the want of it. Alice, too, yields a startlingly beautiful creature, though in her case the creature is (more or less) her own self. So there are similarities in the acts as well as the outcomes.

Back to my terrible title. How are these acts of violence allegorical? Only in theory, I guess. A theory. My theory. My theory that Percival Everett may be using these specific acts as a larger allegory for violence, and the beauty that sometimes is resultant in spite of it. This isn’t necessarily a view that I agree or disagree with, but this is clearly a novel of intensely violent events and themes. Violences committed against the planet. Against women. Against each other. The perpetrators are indiscriminately divided between the oppressive government and the rebels, between men and women. Since this is only a blog post and not a research paper my conclusion will have to be tentative and very much un-ground-breaking, but I wonder — now that two of Everett’s referenced acts of violence (specifically rape) have had similar outcomes — if he’s setting up a statement about violence as an all-encompassing act. I wonder if he’s setting up an allegory.

If this is what he intends to do, I think that this is a HUGE link between Zulus and both Cane and Meridian. In both novels, violence is everpresent and almost entirely committed against black Americans. Often, acts or objects of beauty were the result as well. In Meridian, Meridian herself is an example of human beauty and kindness in spite of the violences that she endures. The theme of beauty from violence also sounds similar to the story of Meridian’s great-great-grandmother, a slave, who created physical beauty in the form of paintings on the sides of barns. Cane too contains beauty from violence. The entire novel was inspired, if one interprets “Song of the Son” as a sort of thesis, by the unconscious beauty that Jean Toomer saw in black Americans, which was a result of the hardships and VIOLENCES that they had endured.

I’m excited to see where Everett goes in the last ten chapters or so, and, no matter what he does at this point, I think I can smell a research paper.

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