The Counter-Archives of John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire and Armand Hammer’s Shrines
Wideman’s unresolved novel and Armand Hammer’s album are masterworks of this practice. They do not offer the official, definitive story of the MOVE bombing or of Black life under systemic pressure.
The return is a pilgrimage to a wound. In John Edgar Wideman’s 1990 novel Philadelphia Fire, the writer-in-exile Cudjoe comes home not to a place of nostalgia but to the smoldering aftermath of a city that has devoured its own. The year is 1985, and the Philadelphia police have dropped a military-grade bomb on the row house of the Black liberation group MOVE, killing eleven people, five of them children, and allowing the subsequent fire to incinerate 61 homes on Osage Avenue. Cudjoe returns to this scene of state-sanctioned ruin, obsessively searching for a ghost—a young boy named Simba Muntu, rumored to have been seen running naked from the flames. His journey through the city’s blighted landscape is a descent into a labyrinth of memory and violence, where the smoke never truly clears.
Thirty years later, the New York hip-hop duo Armand Hammer—composed of rappers billy woods and ELUCID—released their 2020 album Shrines, an artifact that begins in a state of sonic ruin. The opening track, “Bitter Cassava,” does not welcome the listener; it disorients them. An arrhythmic, non-quantized drum pattern stumbles beneath a cut-up sample of chromatic strings, creating a loop that is intentionally “jarring” and refuses to lock into a stable groove. It is the sound of something broken, a foundation that cannot hold. This auditory rubble serves as the entry point into the album’s world, a landscape littered with the debris of surveillance, colonial theft, and historical trauma.
Approached together, Wideman’s return to the burned cityscape and Armand Hammer’s cryptic soundscape of ruin announce a shared artistic and political project. Both Philadelphia Fire and Shrines are fractured meditations on Black life under perpetual siege. For these artists, a clean, linear narrative is not only aesthetically inadequate but ethically bankrupt. To tell a coherent story of the MOVE bombing or the ongoing catastrophe of systemic racism would be to impose a false order on the irrationality of state violence, offering the cheap comfort of a beginning, middle, and end to a trauma that has none. Instead, they refuse narrative closure, staging fragmentation as the most honest, and perhaps the only, form for articulating historical trauma without pretending it can be overcome. Their work insists that the shards are the story.
This commitment to fragmentation situates both John Edgar Wideman and Armand Hammer within distinct yet parallel lineages of Black experimental art, defined by a refusal of convention. Wideman emerged as a major voice in the late 20th century, a period when Black writers began moving beyond the more direct forms of social protest literature. His work, which blends memoir, fiction, and reportage, aligns with the formal innovations of contemporaries who recognized that representing the complexities of Black life required breaking the bounds of traditional realism. Like them, Wideman engages in the “appropriation and hybridization” that marks so much of Black art, creating a “quasi-cubist approach to storytelling” full of “angular sentence shards.” This is not art for art’s sake; it is a necessary formal response to a reality that defies simple explanation. His two PEN/Faulkner Awards, including one for Philadelphia Fire, signal his stature as a master of this challenging, convention-breaking tradition.
Armand Hammer operates within a similar avant-garde space in contemporary underground hip-hop. Their lineage extends back to the politically conscious origins of the genre, when artists like Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy positioned rap as “black America’s CNN,” a vital medium for social commentary. Yet, their more direct artistic precedents are found in the sonically adventurous and lyrically dense work of groups like Cannibal Ox, artists who prioritize formal complexity over mainstream accessibility. The duo’s work is famously challenging, rewarding “time and analysis” rather than passive consumption. Their backgrounds inform this; billy woods, born in the U.S. to a Jamaican intellectual and a Zimbabwean revolutionary, spent his childhood between Washington D.C., Africa, and the West Indies, giving his work a diasporic, anti-colonial scope that resists easy categorization.
The shared stake for Wideman and Armand Hammer is their mutual investment in forcing the reader or listener to inhabit a state of disorientation. Wideman’s novel drops its audience into a “nightmarish reality” with few narrative signposts. Armand Hammer’s music is so lyrically coded that ELUCID has advised listeners, “Don’t try to keep up. Let it take you.” This approach marks a crucial evolution in Black political art. It moves beyond the delivery of a clear, didactic message toward a formal embodiment of a political condition. The politics are not merely in what is said, but in the disorienting, fragmented, and opaque manner of its telling. In a world where direct protest can be easily co-opted or ignored, this formal complexity becomes a more sophisticated mode of resistance, creating a space of meaning that cannot be neatly consumed or neutralized.
The mirroring of fractured lives in fractured form is the central aesthetic principle of both Philadelphia Fire and Shrines. Wideman constructs his novel not as a linear investigation but as a recursive, polyphonic collapse. The book’s three-part structure is intentionally disjointed, with “little plot as such and even less linear development.” The narrative voice is unstable, shifting abruptly from the fictional protagonist Cudjoe to the author himself in the second part. Wideman breaks the fourth wall to ask, “Why am I him when I tell certain parts?” a move that shatters the illusion of objective storytelling and implicates the author’s own body and memory in the public trauma of the bombing. This technique is compounded by his use of what one critic calls a “multiplicity of ventriloquized voices.” The novel becomes a collage, incorporating disparate textual forms: biblical echoes, nursery rhymes, and, most significantly, a protracted meditation on a failed attempt to stage Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a West Philadelphia park. This play-within-a-novel functions as a powerful allegory, reframing the fire as the play’s storm and the city’s Black population as Caliban, forever subject to the whims of a colonial Prospero.
Armand Hammer constructs a parallel architecture of collapse through sonic disjuncture. Shrines is a masterclass in auditory fragmentation, with a varied production that moves between “spacey and claustrophobic soundscapes.” Beats rarely provide a stable foundation; they are active, often disruptive, participants in the narrative. On a track like “Dead Cars,” a “jazzy transition” abruptly interrupts the song’s momentum, while on other tracks, the music dissolves without warning into spoken-word samples, breaking the lyrical flow. The album is populated by haunting, “disembodied female voices” that weave through the mix “hauntologically,” creating an atmosphere of ghostly presence. The guest features function less as traditional collaborations and more as layered, sometimes competing, interruptions. Moor Mother’s appearance on “Ramesses II” is a prime example; her verse erases “Western notions of linear progression,” pulling us out of the song’s timeline and into a deeper, cyclical history.
In both Philadelphia Fire and Shrines, catastrophe is not a historical event to be remembered but an ambient condition to be endured. The MOVE bombing serves as the novel’s gravitational center, yet Wideman refuses to treat it as a closed chapter. It is a “personal rupture” that Cudjoe can neither fully comprehend nor atone for. His obsessive search for the child survivor, Simba, is ultimately futile; the boy is never found, a narrative void that symbolizes the impossibility of resolution or redemptive closure. The fire becomes a prism through which all other forms of loss are refracted—Cudjoe’s estrangement from his own children, and most poignantly, Wideman’s own grief over his incarcerated son. The catastrophe of 1985 is not past; it is a persistent, burning present. Armand Hammer enacts this same temporal collapse, treating history as a series of “looping cycles” rather than a linear progression.
Shrines is threaded with allusions to a litany of disasters that bleed into one another: the colonial theft of artifacts, the violence of the carceral state, the enduring specter of American white supremacy. On “War Stories,” billy woods finds a grim comfort in racism’s predictability: “Feel it in the air like a Confederate flag... Thought I was tripping out here, I’m glad.” The line suggests that the shock has worn off; the violence is expected. This sentiment is crystallized in one of the album’s most potent lines, delivered by ELUCID on “Slewfoot”: “Fumes noxious, we are bored of the apocalypse.” This is a radical reframing of disaster. The apocalypse is not a spectacular, future event but a tedious, ever-present reality. The most radical gesture of both works is this translation of catastrophe from a historical event into a lived atmosphere. They are less concerned with documenting the specifics of what happened than with rendering the toxic, paranoid, and claustrophobic feeling of living in its perpetual fallout. For the communities they depict, catastrophe is simply the weather.
The deliberate difficulty of these works—their resistance to easy interpretation—is a central component of their political power. Wideman’s narrative is built on a foundation of opacity. His characters are described as “mirrors and voids rather than stable subjects: shifting, shapeless, voiceless.” Cudjoe’s motivations for returning to Philadelphia are murky and suspect, even to himself, and the novel ends not with answers but by “compound[ing] the mystery.” This refusal to provide a clear, morally legible narrative denies the reader the comfort of easy judgment or catharsis. It forces an engagement with ambiguity and complicity.
This strategy is mirrored in the famously cryptic lyricism of Armand Hammer. The rhymes of billy woods and ELUCID are dense, allusive, and elliptical, a collage of surrealist imagery (“Grillin’ swordfish on the back of a black orca”), historical reference, and coded personal narrative. Their work has been described as a “musical puzzle” that must be “studied like poetry.” This is a conscious aesthetic. As ELUCID states, the work is “always in code,” a directive to the listener to surrender to the experience rather than attempting to decode it. This shared commitment to opacity is a profound political gesture. In a cultural marketplace that often demands Black artists perform their trauma in legible, consumable ways, obscurity becomes a form of self-defense. It is a refusal to make Black interiority transparent for an outside gaze, a method of reclaiming a private space of meaning that cannot be easily appropriated, simplified, or dismissed.
In these works, geography is never neutral; it is a text inscribed with layers of memory, violence, and power. For Wideman, Philadelphia is the novel’s central character, a haunted landscape that serves as a “map of... the nation and our collective condition.” His prose lavishes attention on the city’s surfaces—its parks, its basketball courts, its sweltering summer streets—but reveals them to be haunted by the deeper histories of white flight, industrial collapse, and racial betrayal. The city is a gothic space, where the true horror is not supernatural but social and political—the “national ideology” that allowed a Black mayor to authorize the bombing of a Black neighborhood.
Shrines maps a more diffuse but equally haunted geography, one suited to the 21st century. The album’s cover, a photograph of an NYPD officer tranquilizing a tiger named Ming that was being kept in a Harlem apartment, immediately frames the urban environment as a site of containment and state intrusion. The lyrics then pan out to a global landscape of siege, moving from the prison to the post-colony to the abstract, deterritorialized space of the surveillance state. The track title “Solarium” becomes a potent metaphor for this modern condition: a space that provides the illusion of openness and nature while remaining fully enclosed and controlled—a perfect description of life under digital surveillance. Reading Wideman and Armand Hammer together reveals a historical progression. Wideman’s haunted city is specific, material, and geographically bounded. Thirty years later, Armand Hammer depicts a world where the logic of the siege has become global and virtual. The haunted city has expanded to become the surveilled planet.
Wideman’s unresolved novel and Armand Hammer’s disjointed album are masterworks of this practice. They do not offer the official, definitive story of the MOVE bombing or of Black life under systemic pressure. Instead, they preserve the echoes, the shards of memory, the emotional textures, and the unanswered questions that official histories erase. They offer no solutions and no easy redemptions. They create, in their place, living shrines to the unrecordable aspects of trauma and survival. Reading these works in parallel illuminates a shared, insurgent project that flows through both Black experimental literature and underground hip-hop. It is the project of recording the unrecordable, of testifying to what has been burned away, and of keeping the fire of memory alive, not as a single, steady flame, but as a constellation of scattered, burning fragments.