O’Brien, John, and Raman K. Singh. “Interview with
Robert Deane Pharr.” Negro American Literature
Forum 8 (Fall 1974): 244–246.
Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest. De Land,
Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973.
Whitlow, Roger. Black American Literature. Chicago:
Nelson-Hall, 1973.
Australia Tarver
Philadelphia Fire
John Edgar Wideman (1990)
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN’s novel about the bombing
of the house of the political group MOVE by the
Philadelphia police department in 1987 garnered
him his second PEN/Faulkner award. At the center
of the novel are the writer, Cudjoe, and his search
for a survivor—a little boy named Simba. The
postmodern work is structured by three voices and
identities, including that of Wideman. Wideman’s
metafictional narrative mirrors that of Cudjoe in
many ways, and in the text, Cudjoe’s search for
Simba becomes Wideman’s metaphorical quest to
understand the tragic life of his own son. The nov-
el’s nonlinear presentation, as well as its weaving
of multiple rhetorics (rap, Greek tragedy, journal-
ism, etc.), question the nature of “true” stories, of
realistic narrative, memory, and history.
The novel not only alludes to Shakespeare’s The
Tempest but signifies on it, implying that it is the
play in Western culture that Cudjoe believes needs
to be rewritten in order for African-Americans
to control perceptions of their collective identity.
The play takes place at “the birth of the nation’s
blues,” where Caliban is forced to see himself
only through Prospero’s eyes, to tell his story only
through Prospero’s tongue. Wideman uses silence
as a controlling image not only to reflect Caliban’s
inability to construct his own tale but also to sug-
gest that African-American history and culture is
still relegated to stereotypes (“de tail within the
tale”) within the American consciousness.
Cudjoe’s investigation of the MOVE bombing
and the search for Simba are ultimately fruitless
efforts, and Wideman, in the novel, is unable to aid
his son. The loss of children, and thus of the fu-
ture, permeates the work. Standing at a memorial
service for the victims of the bombing, Cudjoe is
reminded of a mob that attacked African-Ameri-
cans in 1850 in Philadelphia. The conflation of the
past and the future in the novel’s closing sections
motivates its readers to consider the still-unre-
solved and still-violent impact of slavery and rac-
ism in America. Wideman returns to this theme
in Two Cities (1998), using the MOVE incident
to explore the black-on-black violence within the
urban community.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mbalia, Dorothea. John Edgar Wideman: Reclaim-
ing the African Personality. London: Susquehanna
Press, 1995.
Tracie Church GuzzioPhillips, Carl (1959– )
Carl Phillips was born in 1959 in Boston, Massa-
chusetts. He was born into an air force family and
moved almost every year of his life until he was 10
years old. His father was stationed as a master ser-
geant in Germany, where Phillips studied German.
Phillips wrote poems in high school but went on
to study Greek and Latin at Harvard, graduating
with a bachelor of arts degree in 1981. He earned
a master of arts degree in Latin and classical hu-
manities in 1983 from the University of Massachu-
setts–Amherst. He also earned a master’s degree in
creative writing in 1993 from Boston University.
Phillips taught Greek and Latin to high school stu-
dents for eight years. After that, he entered a doc-
torate program in philology at Harvard. He took
time off to write and left the doctorate program
after the publication of In the Blood, his first col-
lection of poetry, in 1992. He went on to publish
Cortege (1995), From the Devotions (1998), Pasto-
ral (2000), The Tether (2001), Rock Harbor (2002),
and The Rest of Love: Poems (2004).
About passion, homoerotics, relationships, and
dreams, Phillips’s poetry is characterized as in-
novative, bold, and explosive. Critics warmly re-
ceived Phillips’s homoerotic poetry, which harks
back to classical Greek and Roman texts, providingPhillips, Carl 415