John Edgar Wideman: Two Cities

By TINA SHAW*

Ine one year Kassima lost her imprisoned husband to Aids and both her sons to gang wars. The last thing she needs now is Robert Jones, a 50-year-old black man, who has fallen in love with her after a long night and day in bed.

Two Cities, Wideman's 14th novel, follows Kassima through a love that can't be new or easy, but in the end may offer an antidote to the killing streets.

The novel opens with Kassima's boarder, old Mr Mallory, amateur photographer and chronicler of his times, in Pittsburgh, and thinking back to Philadelphia of 1985, when he walked the streets with his friend, dreadlocked John Africa.

John Africa, also known as Dogman because of his job walking dogs, has a community in Philadelphia. A recurring riff throughout the novel, based on fact, is what happened to John Africa, black leader of the Move, an activist organisation in 1970s Philadelphia, dedicated to helping victims of the system. In 1985 police launched a full-scale military operation against the Move headquarters, killing 11 men, women and children.

Wideman doesn't focus entirely on the Move, but uses this material almost as background. His broader focus is the plight of urban black people.

Maybe Wideman is pushing a cause, in his fairly one-sided portrayal of the Move, but it's a cause that can handle a lot of pushing, if you see this story from the perspective of a black man's holocaust. "They die for the colour of their skin, the colour that is his colour," thinks Robert.

As Kassima says of the Bible's Book of Lamentations, "This story about people beat down so low they got to pray for a reason to pray."

How do you survive an urban killing field? Mr Mallory copes by writing to the dead artist Giacometti, and by documenting with his camera - the scene, for example, in a post office when two gangstas queue-jump. Tension is thick in the air. Mallory frightens everybody by stopping the boys for a photograph.

Most moving of all is the tender relationship between two people who have been through hell. This ain't The Cosby Show. Loosely based around a love story, Two Cities is like a long, elegiac conversation, with voices mingling in sorrow and anger. A book full of sad, black, beaten characters who nevertheless can still remember what it is to love.

Picador

$24.95

* Tina Shaw is an Auckland writer.