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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works
/
Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices /
Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan
Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd
Today!
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Blueprint for Negro Literature
By
Richard Wright 1. The Minority Outlook
Somewhere in his writings Lenin makes the
observation that oppressed minorities often reflect the
techniques of the bourgeoisie more brilliantly than some
sections of the bourgeoisie themselves. The psychological
importance of this becomes evident when one recalls that
oppressed minorities, and especially petty bourgeois sections of
oppressed minorities, strive to assimilate the virtues of the
bourgeoisie in the assumption that by doing so, they can lift
themselves into a higher social sphere. But not only among the
oppressed petty bourgeoisie does this occur.
The workers of a minority people also strive
to forge organizational forms of struggle to better their lot
and they manifest the same restlessness. Lacking the handicaps
of false ambition and property, they have access to a wide
social vision and a deep social consciousness. They display a
greater freedom and initiative in pushing their claims upon
civilization than even the petty bourgeoisie. Their
organizations show greater strength, adaptability, and
efficiency than any other group in society.
That Negro workers have demonstrated this
consciousness and mobility for political and economic action
there can be no doubt. But has this consciousness been reflected
in the work of Negro writers? Has it been manifested in Negro
writing in the same degree as it has been in the Negro
workers’ struggle to free the Scottsboro boys, in the struggle
to free Herndon in the fight against lynching? Have they as
creative writers taken advantage of their unique minority
position? The answer decidedly is no. Negro writers have lagged
sadly, and the gap between the militant Negro workers and the
Negro writers widens relentlessly.
How can the hiatus between Negro workers and Negro
writers be bridged? How can the enervating influence of this
long-standing split be eliminated? In presenting a problem of
this sort, the old accepted attitude of following precedent can
lead nowhere. A slavish respect for past standards hinders
rather than helps. An attitude of self-consciousness and
self-criticism is far more likely to be a fruitful point of
departure than a mere recounting of past achievements.
Since there is a big task to be done, an emphasis upon
tendency and experiment, a view of the world as something
becoming rather than as something fixed and admired, is the one
which points the way for Negro writers to stand shoulder to
shoulder with Negro workers in mood and outlook.
2. The Role of Negro Writing: Two
Definitions
Generally speaking, Negro writing in the past
has been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, decorous
ambassadors who go a-begging to white America. They entered the
Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of
servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior,
that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of
other people. These were received as poodle dogs who have
learned clever tricks.
White America never offered them any serious
criticism. The mere fact that a Negro could write was
astonishing. Nor was there any deep concern on the part of white
America with what role Negro writing should play in American
culture; and if there was any role, it was through accident
rather than intent or design. It crept in through the kitchen in
the form of jazz and jokes.
On the other hand, these often technically
brilliant performances by Negro writers were looked upon by the
majority of literate Negroes as something to be proud of. At
best, Negro writing has been external to the lives of educated
Negroes themselves. That the productions of their writers should
have been something of a guide in their daily living is a matter
which seems never to have been raised seriously. Negro writing
became a sort of conspicuous ornamentation.
In short, Negro writing on the whole has been
the voice of the educated Negro pleading with white America.
Rarely has the best of this writing been addressed to the Negro
himself, his needs, his sufferings, and aspirations. Through
misdirection Negro writers have been far better to others that
they have been to themselves. And the mere recognition of this
places the whole question of Negro writing in a new light and
raises a doubt as to the validity of its present direction.
There is, however, a culture of the Negro
which has been addressed to him and him alone, a culture which
has, for good or ill, helped to clarify his consciousness and
create emotional attitudes which are conducive to action. This
culture has stemmed mainly from two sources: (1) the Negro
church; and (2) the fluid folklore of the Negro people.
It was through the portals of the church that
the American Negro first entered the shrine of Western culture.
Living under slave conditions of life, bereft of his African
heritage, the Negro found that his struggle for religion on the
plantation between 1820–60 was nothing short of a struggle for
human rights. It remained a relatively progressive struggle
until religion began to ameliorate and assuage suffering and
denial.
Even today there are millions of Negroes
whose only sense of a whole universe, whose only relation to
society and man, and whose only guide to personal dignity comes
through the archaic morphology of Christian salvation.
It was, however, in a folklore moulded out of
rigorous and inhuman conditions of life that the Negro achieved
his most indigenous expression. Blues, spirituals, and folk
tales recounted from mouth to mouth, the whispered words of a
black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, the
confidential wisdom of a black father and to his black son, the
swapping of sex experiences on street corners from boy to boy in
the deepest vernacular, work songs sung under blazing suns, all
these formed the channels through which the racial wisdom
flowed.
One would have thought that Negro writers, in
their last century of striving at expression, would have
continued and deepened this last effort, would have tried to
create a more intimate and yet more social system of artistic
communication between them and their people. But the illusion
that they could escape, through individual achievement, the
harsh lot of their race swung Negro writers away from any suck
path. Two separate cultures sprang up: one for the Negro masses,
crude, instinctive, unwritten, and unrecognized; and the other
the sons and daughters of a rising Negro bourgeoisie, bloodless,
petulant, mannered, and neurotic.
Today the question is, Shall Negro writing be for the
lives and consciousness of the Negro masses, moulding those
lives and consciousness toward new goals, or shall it continue
begging the question of the Negroes’ humanity?
3. The Problem of Nationalism in Negro
Writing
In stressing the difference between the role
Negro writing failed to play in lives of the Negro people, and
the role it should play in the future if it is to serve its
historic function; in pointing out the fact that Negro writing
has been addressed in the main to a small white audience rather
than to a Negro one, it should be known that no attempt is made
to propagate a specious and blatant nationalism. Yet, the
nationalist character of the Negro people is unmistakable.
Psychologically this nationalism is reflected in the whole of
Negro culture, and especially in folklore.
In absence of fixed and nourishing forms of
culture, the Negro has a folklore which embodies the memories
and hopes of his struggles. Not yet caught in paint or stone and
as yet but feebly depicted in the poem and novel, the Negroes’
most powerful images of hope and longing for freedom still
remain in the fluid state of living speech. How many John Henrys
have lived and died on the lips of these black people? How many
mythical heroes in embryo have been allowed to perish for lack
of husbanding by alert intelligence?
Negro folklore contains, in a measure that
puts to shame more deliberate forms of expression, the
collective sense of the Negroes’ life in America. Let those
who shy at the nationalist implications of Negro life look at
the body of folklore, living and powerful, which rose out of a
unified sense of a common life and a common fate. Here are those
vital beginnings of that recognition of value in life as it is
lived that marks the emergence of a new culture in the shell of
the old.
And at the moment that starts, at the moment
a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the
civilization which engenders that suffering is doomed. Negro
folklore remains the Negro writer’s most powerful weapon, a
weapon which he must sharpen for the hard battles looming ahead,
battles which will test a people’s faith in themselves.
The nationalist aspects of Negro life are as
sharply manifest in the social institutions of the Negro people
as in folklore. There is a Negro church, a Negro press, a Negro
social world, a Negro sporting world, a Negro business world, a
Negro school system, Negro professions, in short, a Negro way of
life in America.
The Negro people did not ask for this, and if
they express themselves through their institutions and adhere to
this special way of life, this special existence was forced upon
them from without by lunch rope, bayonet, and mob legislation.
And what few crumbs of American civilization the Negro has
gotten from the tables of capitalism have been through these
special, separate institutions. No attempt is made here to
glorify these institutions.
Many of them are cowardly and incompetent;
but they are all that the Negro has. And any move, whether for
progress or reaction, must come through them and them alone for
the simple reason that all other channels are closed. Negro
writers who seek to mould or influence the consciousness of the
Negro people must address their messages to them through the
ideologies and ideals fostered in such a cramping and warping
way of life.
The social institutions of the Negro are
imprisoned in the Jim Crow political system of the South, and
this Jim Crow political system in turn is built upon a
plantation feudal economy. Hence, it can be seen that the
emotional expression of group-feeling which puzzles so many
people and leads them to deplore what they call “black
chauvinism” is not a morbidly inherent trail of the Negro, but
instead is the reflex expression of a life whose roots are
imbedded deeply in Southern soil.
Negro writers must accept the nationalist
implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but
in order to change and transcend them. They must accept the
concept of nationalism because in order to transcend it they
must possess and understand it. And a nationalist spirit in
Negro writing means a nationalism carrying the highest possible
pitch of social consciousness.
It means a nationalism that knows its
limitations, that is aware of the dangers of its position, that
knows its aims are unrealizable within the framework of
capitalist America; a nationalism whose reason for being lies in
the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of
the interdependence of people in modern society.
For Negro writers, even more so than for Negro
politicians, nationalism is a bewildering and vexing question,
the full ramifications of which cannot be touched upon in a
paper of this sort. But among the Negro workers and the Negro
middle class the spirit of nationalism is rife in a hundred
devious forms; and a simple literary realism, which seeks to
depict the lives of these people, devoid of wider social
connotations, devoid of nationalist tendencies, devoid of the
revolutionary significance of even its nationalist tendencies,
must of necessity do a rank injustice to the Negro people and
alienate their possible allies in the struggle for
liberation.
If there are writers, white or black, whose social
consciousness is so barren that they cannot see the significance
of the lives of the Negro people even though those lives are
couched in national forms, then the meaning of the lives of the
Negro people will remain obscure even to themselves. One of the
great tasks of Negro writers of the future will be to show the
Negro to himself; it will be, paraphrasing the language of James
Joyce, to forge in the smithy of our souls the uncreated
conscience of our race.
4. Social Consciousness and the New
Responsibility
Naturally, all of this places upon Negro
writers, who seek to function within their race as purposeful
agents, a new and fearful responsibility. In order to do justice
to their subject matter, in order to depict Negro life in all of
its manifold and intricate relationships, a deep, informed and
complex consciousness is necessary, a consciousness which draws
for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and
moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the
forces of history today.
Every short story, novel, poem, and play should
carry within its lines, implied or explicit, a sense of the
oppression of the Negro people, the danger of war, of fascism,
of the threatened destruction of culture and civilization; and,
too, the faith and necessity to build a new world.
With the gradual decline of the moral
authority of the Negro church, and the increasing irresolution
which is paralyzing Negro middle-class leadership, there is
devolving upon Negro writers this new role. They are being
called upon to do no less than create values by which their race
is to struggle, live and die. They are being called upon to
furnish moral sanctions for action, to give a meaning to
blighted lives, and to supply motives for mass movements of
millions of people.
By their ability to fuse and make articulate
the experience of men, because their art possesses the cunning
to steal into the inmost recesses of the human heart, because
they can create the myths and symbols that inspire a faith in
life, they may expect to either to be consigned to oblivion by
the silent judgment of workers who ignore their writing, or to
be recognized for the valued agents that they are.
For the creation of a vigorous and forthright
literature, the historical tide is running with Negro writers
today. Electric and basic changes in social and economic
conditions foreshadow commensurate changes in the arts. Since
the World War a great many disturbances have broken the slumber
of the Negro people. The period of migration, the boom, the
Depression, the struggle for unionism, all these have created
conditions which should complement the rise of a school of
expression. The millions whose lives have been touched or
moulded by these forces constitute an audience. The question no
longer is will they respond, but can the need be filled. They
are hungry for food of more than one kind.
This mandate, and it is nothing than that, raises the
inescapable question of the personality of the writer. It means
that in the lives of Negro writers must be found those materials
and experiences which will create in them a meaningful and
significant picture of the world today. Many young writers have
grown to believe that a Marxist analysis of society presents
such a picture. It creates a picture which, when placed squarely
before the eyes of the writer, should unify his personality,
organize his emotions, and buttress him with a tense and
obdurate will to change the world.
And yet, for the writer, Marxism is but the starting
point. No theory of life can take the place of life. After
Marxism has laid bare the skeleton of society, there remains the
task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones out of the
plenitude of his will to live. He may, with disgust and
revulsion, say no and depict the horrors of capitalism
encroaching upon the human being. Or he may, with hope and
passion, say yes and depict the faint stirrings of a new and
emerging life.
But in whatever social voice he chooses to speak,
whether positive or negative, there should always be heard or
overheard his faith his necessity. And this faith and necessity
should not be simple or rendered in primer-like terms; for the
life of the Negro people is not simple as some dyspeptic
intellectuals contend. The presentation of their lives, should
be simple, yes; but all the complexity, the strangeness, the
magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over even
the most sordid existence, should be there.
To borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a
complex simplicity. Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Hemingway, and
Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London no less than
the folklore of the Negro himself form the heritage of Negro
writers. Every iota of gain in human sensibility and thought
should be ready grist for their mill, no matter how far-fetched
they may seem in their immediate implications. It would be a sad
brigade of Negro writers who would be afraid of this; and it
would be a limited consciousness that could not assimilate these
influences.
5. The Problem of Perspective
What vision must Negro writers have before
their eyes in order to feel the impelling necessity for an
about-face? What angle of sight can show them all the forces of
modern society in process, all the lines of economic and
political development converging toward a distant point of hope?
Must they believe in some “ism”?
They may feel that only dupes believe in
“ism”; they may feel with some measure of justification that
another commitment means only disillusionment; but any one
destitute of a theory about the structure, direction, and
meaning of modern society is a lost victim in a world he cannot
understand or control.
But even if Negro writers found themselves
through some “ism,” how would that influence their writing?
Are they being called upon to “preach”? To be
“salesmen”? To “prostitute” their art? What is the
relationship between “something to believe in” and artistic
expression? Must they “sully” themselves? Must they write
“propaganda”? No. It is a question of awareness of
consciousness; it is, above all, a question of perspective.
Perspective is that part of a poem, novel, or
play which writers never put directly upon paper, but which is
sensed in every line of the work. It is that fixed point in
intellectual space where writers stand to view the struggles,
hopes, and sufferings of their people. There are times when they
may stand too close and the result is a neglect of important
things. Of all the problems faced by writers who as a whole have
never allied themselves in act or thought with world movements,
perspective is the most difficult of solution. At its best
perspective is a pre-conscious assumption, something which
writers take for granted, something which they win through their
living.
A Spanish writer recently spoke of living in
the heights of one’s time. Surely, perspective means just
that.
It means that Negro writers must learn to
view the life of a Negro living in New York’s Harlem or
Chicago’s South Side with the consciousness that one sixth of
the earth’s surface belongs to the working class. It means
that Negro writers must create in their readers’ minds a
relationship between a Negro woman hoeing cotton in the South
and the men who loll in swivel chairs in Wall Street and take
the fruits of her toil.
Perspective is the frame in which the
picture is hung; it is the invisible brake or accelerator
upon the tempo of a poem; it is that part of a novel that is
remembered long after the story is forgotten.
Perspective for Negro writers will come when they have
looked and brooded so hard and long upon the harsh lot of their
race and compared it with the hopes and struggles of minority
peoples everywhere that the cold facts have begun to tell them
something.
6. Subject Matter and Theme
Once perspective has been gained, Negro
writers face a new landscape of subject matter. Negro
politicians and the social forces that shape their characters;
Negro leaders and the tactics they employ in satisfying both the
masses of their race who long for freedom and the whites who
place them in positions of authority; the thousands of juvenile
delinquents upon the streets of Chicago’s South Side and New
York’s Harlem; the role of sluggish reaction Negro teachers
play in moulding the minds of the young; Negro women who carry
the triple burden of their sex, of their race, and of their
class; the maneuverings of that vulture breed called the Negro
lawyer; the strange doings of that sainted devil, the Negro
preacher; the two million black John Does who trekked North in
1917; the battled thoughts of that Negro woman social worker who
works in the slum areas of her race; and that sixteen-year-old
Negro girl reading the True Story Magazine; all
constitute a landscaping teeming with questions and meaning.
If this is the Negro writers’ subject
matter, then it must be marshaled toward some goal, some
critique; it must be linked with the imaginative representations
of the rest of mankind. Negro writing must be placed somewhere
in historical space and time; in short, it must have a theme.
This does not mean that Negro writers’ sole
concern must be with rendering the social scene; but if their
conception of the life of their people is broad and deep enough,
if the sense of the whole life they are seeking is vivid and
strong in them, then their writing will embrace all these social
forms under which the life of their people is manifest.
And in speaking of theme, one must
necessarily be general and abstract; the temperament of each
writer moulds and colors the world he sees. Any one theme may be
approached from a thousand angles, with no limit to technical
and stylistic freedom. But at the core of the life of a people
is one theme, one historic sense of life, one prismatic
consciousness refracting aesthetic effort in a whirlwind of
color.
Negro writers spring from a family, a clan, a
class, and a nation; and the social units in which they are
bound have a story, a record. Sense of theme will emerge in
Negro writing when Negro writers try to fix this story about
some pole of meaning, remembering as they do so that in the
creative process meaning proceeds equally as much from the
contemplation of the subject matter as from the hopes and
apprehensions that rage in the heart of the writer.
Reduced to its simplest and most general terms, theme
for Negro writers will rise from their understanding of their
being transplanted from a “savage” to a “civilized”
culture in all of its social, political, economic, and emotional
aspects. It means that Negro writers must have in their
consciousness the foreshortened picture of the whole nourishing
culture from which they were torn in Africa, and the long,
complex (and for the most part unconscious) struggle to regain
in some form and under alien conditions of life a whole culture
again.
And not only does this mean that they must have this
picture, but also a knowledge of the social and emotional milieu
that give it tone and solidity of detail. Theme for Negro
writers will emerge when they have begun to feel the meaning of
the history of their race as though they in one lifetime had
lived it themselves throughout all the long centuries.
7. The Problem of Judgment and Criticism
As can be seen from the Negro writer’s
subject matter and theme, his rebellion will be not only against
the exploiting whites, but against all of that within his own
race that retards decisive action and obscures clarity of
vision. And his loyalties will be toward all those forces which
help to shape the consciousness of his race toward a more heroic
cast. His will be the task to arrange into significant artistic
patterns all the experiences of his people, those experiences
which converge toward death as well as those that converge
toward life, and stamp them with his judgment of hate or love.
Hitherto, a cowardly sentimentality has
deterred Negro writers from launching crusades against the evils
which Negro ignorance and stupidity have spawned. Negro writers
should not hesitate to tell the truth about their people for
fear of harming them, or for fear that these truths may be used
by belligerent whites against them. The problem of judgment for
Negro writers is bound up with the problem of their becoming
whole men, human beings.
There is but one searchlight that can help
Negro writers to walk along this rocky ledge, and that is the
pitiless glare of a criticism whose frame of reference is
historical, political, and economic as well as aesthetic. Over
and above all their achievements, Negro writers should never
feel that their goal has been reached; always ahead should be
the sense of areas of experience to be conquered; problems to be
framed, pondered and solved; always in them should reside the
sense of becoming. And out of this sense will, should, grow the
need for criticism.
Only when Negro writing is bathed in the white light
of a constant and responsible criticism and only when that
criticism has become the conscience of Negro writing, can it be
said that Negro writing has come of age.
8. Autonomy of Craft
To depict this new reality, to address this
new audience, requires a great discipline and consciousness than
was necessary for the so-called Harlem School* of expression.
Not only is the subject matter dealt with far more complex and
meaningful, but the new role of the writer is qualitatively
different. The Negro writers’ new position calls for a sharper
definition of the status of craft, and a sharper emphasis upon
its functional autonomy.
Writers should seek through the medium of
their craft to play as meaningful a role in the affairs of men
as do other professionals. The limitations of the craft
constitute some of its greatest virtues. And if the sensory
vehicle of imaginative writing is made to carry too great a load
of didactic material, the artistic sense is lost. And if
imaginative writing is required to perform the social office of
other professionals, then the autonomy of craft is submerged and
writing fused detrimentally with other interests.
The relationship between reality and the artistic image
is not always direct and simple. The imaginative conception of a
historical period will not be a carbon copy of reality. Image
and emotion possess a logic of their own. A too literal
translation of experience into images is a defeat for
imaginative expression. And a vulgarized simplicity constitutes
the greatest danger in tracing the reciprocal interplay between
the writer and his environment. Like medicine and engineering,
writing has its professional autonomy (not absolute
independence). Writing should complement other professions, but
not supplant them.
9. The Necessity for Collective Work
It goes without saying that these things
cannot be gained by Negro writers if their present mode of
isolated writing continues. This isolation exists among Negro
writers as well as between Negro and white writers. The Negro
writers’ lack of thorough integration with the American scene,
their lack of a clear realization among themselves of their
role, have bred a whole generation of embittered and defeated
literati.
This isolation is not a voluntary thing as
would appear at first sight, and it is not something which Negro
writers ultimately wish. Barred for decades from the theater and
publishing houses, they have been made to feel a sense of
difference. Their unspoken wish for isolated working and
living—though they verbally deny this!—is but the reflex of
the whole special way of life that has been forced upon them.
The problem by its very nature, is one which
must be approached contemporaneously from two points of view.
The ideological unity of Negro writers and the alliance of that
unity with all the progressive ideas of their day is the primary
prerequisite for collective work. On the shoulders of white
writers and Negro writers rests the responsibility for ending
this mistrust and isolation.
By placing cultural health above narrow
sectional prejudices, liberal white writers can help to
break the stony soil of aggrandizement out of which the stunted
plants of Negro nationalism grow. And the Negro writer can help
to weed out these choking growths of reactionary nationalism and
replace them with hardier and sturdier types of vegetation.
These things are imperative in light of the
fact that we live in an age when the majority of the most basic
assumptions of life can no longer be taken for granted.
Tradition is no longer a guide. The world has grown huge and
cold. And time has come to ask questions, to theorize, to
speculate, to wonder out what materials can a human world be
built.
Each step along this unknown path should be
taken with thought, care, self-consciousness, and deliberation.
And when Negro writers think that they have arrived at something
which smacks of truth, humanity, they should test with others,
feel it with others. They should want to feel it with a degree
of passion and strength that will enable them to communicate it
to millions who are groping like themselves.
To recapitulate: We are writers of a
minority people whose working class is pushing militantly
forward. We have the choice of writing for Negro and white
“Society” or for our working class and the cause of social
justice it represents. If we choose to stand on the side of
social progress, then our artistic expression must shape the
(folk-national) aspirations of our people. This necessitates a
basic realignment, ideologically and aesthetically, on our
part.
It calls for a new consciousness and a new
responsibility. Negro writers must live on the heights of
their time and weave their subject matter into artistic patterns
and suffuse these patterns with their will to live. Their
resurgence against the bulwarks that stand in from of them might
necessitate a resurgence against those obstacles within their
own group which retard them.
Writers faced with such tremendous tasks can
have no possible time for malice and jealousy. The conditions
for the growth of each writer depend too much upon the good work
of other writers. Every first-rate novel, poem, or plays lifts
the level of consciousness higher. When we start, we start from
the beginning, but from the height reached by the last aspirant.
Every contribution fertilizes the soil out of which we as
writers grow. We need one another.
Richard Wright 1937
* Harlem Renaissance
A shorter version of this essay appeared in the
fall issue of a magazine called New
Challenge in 1937. This version is a much longer development
of the original one and it is being published for the first time.
Source: Edited by John A. Williams and Charles
F. Harris •
Amistad 2:
Writings on Black History and Culture • Copyright © 1971 by
John A. Williams, et al. • Vintage Books Edition, February 1971
• New York, NY posted 24 February 2006 updated 4 October 2007 |
