“Something About the Silence”: John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire

Abstract

John Edgar Wideman’s 1990 novel Philadelphia Fire meditates upon the 1985 bombing of the MOVE group in Philadelphia, and draws a contrast between the ambivalence of MOVE’s use of “Africa” as a signifier in the aftermath of the Black Power movement, and the traditional communal experience of what is called “African Time”. For Wideman, Africa as a signifier is indicative both of a cultural amnesia attributed to trauma on a systemic scale and of the possibilities for a profound connection to meaning held within the African American community. Wideman’s novel shows how “Africa” as an idea in the context of urban protest has been all but detached from meaning, and how storytelling can retrieve the lost significance of tradition in settings of urban disenfranchisement.