Silence And Silence-breaking In Philadelphia Fire

Despite the fact that John Edgar Wideman has received many literary awards and has been recognized as one of the most important male African American writers in recent decades,there is a lack of the recognition given to many of his better known and more widely studied contemporaries.Thus this thesis purposely chooses Philadelphia Fire,the representation of the most mature work of his writing career,which wins Wideman the International PEN/Faulkner Award and shows a "new found Africanness"(Mbalia,1995:108)to push forward the recognition and the studies of Wideman which are urgently needed at home and abroad.The thesis mainly focuses on silence,a significant and recurring theme that is closely associated with the African Americans’ culture and literary works,and is frequently discussed and insinuated in Wideman’s works.In Philadelphia Fire,Wideman creatively explores the oppressive silence on the individual and the collective scale.He scrutinizes the causes of silence that are imposed on the individual African Americans,especially the silence between father and son,and the methods of breaking the silence,to speak out.Wideman also visits the silent ground of the holocaust of the MOVE(short for The Movement),a radical African American back-to-nature communal group that took place in Philadelphia in 1985.The truth of the MOVE,the reasons that underlie the bombing of the MOVE and its being erased from the mainstream history and memory are further exposed by Wideman through the technique of polyvocality.Wideman undertakes the mission of uncovering the horrible outcomes of oppressive silences and transforming the individual,the community and the dominant cultures’ silence into resistant voices.