Fever

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

Literary collage “includes words, phrases, or sections of outside source material in juxtaposition” (“Collage.” Poetry Foundation). Wideman’s “Fever” uses collage by incorporating excerpts from historical documents and sections narrated by a wide range of perspectives. The opening passages, for instance, include excerpts from Richard Allen’s 1794 pamphlet about the fever, contemporary encyclopedia-like entries that describe yellow fever and a particular species of mosquito, and the anonymous perspective of an enslaved person being bitten by a mosquito in the hold of a ship. This allows Wideman to correct the historical record to include perspectives previously erased or excluded. The inclusion of materials from both 1793 and the 1980s also draws a comparison between the knowledge that we have of these events and the persistence of institutional forms of racist violence.

Wideman’s “Fever” includes a range of narrators and frequently shifts narrative perspectives over the course of 35 distinct sections of text. These shifts use third-person perspective to describe the events of the fever and first-person perspective when the narrative shifts to Richard