The bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia is something I remember in a very inarticulate way. It happened in 1985, and formed part of the backdrop of my reading things like Bobby Seale‘s Seize the Time and Samuel Yette‘s The Choice in High School in DC. I remember the general tone of the media coverage was … suspicious, a sense that these nutty radicals must have been doing SOMETHING to warrant this kind of violent, deadly response.
In the intervening decades that we’ve become more public in our questioning of the motives of the brutal force of urban power structures. But of course that discourse has always existed, and the treatment of MOVE is certainly foreshadowed in the work of Seales and Yette, and hundreds, if not thousands, of other individuals.
John Edgar Wideman, whose Hoop Dreams I read and enjoyed, published Philadelphia Fire in 1990, essentially rapidly after the bombing. The book is … a lot of things. It mixes reflections on MOVE; on the bombing; on the travails of aging; on (as often in Wideman’s work) basketball, especially the pickup variety; and on a somewhat aborted attempt to produce Shakespeare in the park with kids from round the way.
Wideman is haunted by the child survivors of the bombing, by what they experienced and what happened to them. They are elusive, ghostly, and ubiquitous. The connecting thread through the book is grief, the grief of the violence against his community, the grief of his own passing youth, the grief of a lost relationship.
Widcman’s style isn’t for everyone: there is a lyricism, a playfulness with language, a freedom in form that may, for some, drift into being overwrought. But I enjoy it, and the overall structure of Philadelphia Fire, which wanders freely between memoir, fiction, and a blurry combination of the two, worked for me.
To the degree the subject matter appeals, recommended highly.