Fever

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racist violence.

Rather than a traditional linear narrative, “Fever” uses a collage structure to include fragments of actual historical documents, fictionalized versions of significant historical figures, and an array of anonymous and communal voices that share their perspective on the devastating impact of the yellow fever on the Black community in Philadelphia. These narrative segments range back in time to the American Revolution and forward to the 1980s when Black Philadelphians were again subject to state-sponsored violence. There is no omniscient narrator and are no signposts that alert readers to these changes in narrative perspective; rather, the shifts are detectable only in the changes in language and form. It is up to readers to determine whose perspective they’re encountering and do the interpretive work to figure out the narrator’s role in telling the story, their relationship to this history, and how reliable they might be as a narrator. By creating this level of readerly responsibility and the potential for many different misreadings or miscommunications, Wideman reveals the practical difficulty that people face in their attempts to get to the truth of a matter.