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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On Richard Wright and Our Contemporary Situation

By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

“Are you still,” someone asked my young colleague Howard Rambsy II, “interested in Richard Wright?”  Imagine substituting another writer’s name in the question.  “Are you still interested in William Shakespeare?”  Anyone who asked that question might be considered odd.  So too do I regard the unnamed person who posed the question to Rambsy.  I have discovered no justifiable reason for not being still interested in Wright’s challenging works of fiction or in his provocative non-fiction. 

Indeed, our contemporary situation, which is constituted by a welter of immediate and long-term anxieties and denials, invites me to have a more profound investment in Wright and in how the body of his published and unpublished works might assist us in dealing with the chaos of the twenty-first century.  Our contemporary situation invites our dwelling with writers ancient and modern, especially those who raised disturbing questions about the designs human beings have upon other human beings. 

Focusing on Wright is both a professional and personal choice; it is , for me,  an existential choice, a choice to confront rather than be lobotomized by the absurd..

II. Wright orients us to points of reference

It is not a single work by Richard Wright that assists us to deal with the lack of metaphysical absolutes to secure our sense that life has meaning; it is the whole body of his work that serves as a question-generating machine. The short fiction in Uncle Tom’s Children forces me to deal with the idea of regional differences in the United States, with social and labor relations, with the permanence of race, racialism, and racism in America and with the fact that terrorism threatened certain Americans at least a century prior to 9/11.

Native Son forces me to ponder possession or absence of free will among my fellow citizens, to think about the nature of our vernacular political economy,  and to view the drama enacted in the spider web of the urban. Consider that Bigger Thomas has been rescued from the electric chair, displaced from Chicago to New Orleans, and refashioned as a dedicated looter rather than as an environmentally determined adolescent.

12 Million Black Voices, which Wright proclaimed in 1941was a folk history, exposes the unstable grounds upon which human histories are constructed and revised.  Moreover, given that some photographs used in the book came from the Farm Security Administration, my interest in the uses of visual evidence to broadcast state propaganda is quickened.

Black Boy, Wright’s autobiography, forces me to consider that life writing is an inscription of the self within a tradition and a quest for understanding, that book titles are often gendered.  Wright’s 1953 novel The Outsider obligates me to consider that philosophical meditations and common sense thinking about life can result in abject alienation. Eight Men bids me to examine stereotypes and Savage Holiday provides a glimpse of non-black pathologies. The Long Dream begets questions about fathers and sons, economics and amoral corruption, and death. The posthumously published Lawd Today takes me into the realm of folklore and generic imitation of James Joyce’s Ulysses; Wright’s 817 haiku (Haiku: This Other World) lead to questions about American uses of Oriental aesthetics.

Wright’s travel writing—Pagan Spain, Black Power, The Color Curtain, and White Man, Listen!—provides yet another frame wherein I can pose my unanswerable questions about world order and disorder; about human responses to natural disasters and recovery; about imperialism and its relationship with terrorism.

III. Wright promotes deeper inquiry about the aftermath of recent disasters

Richard Wright’s works did not suddenly cease on August 28, 2005 to be the objects of my research, but they did become, in a rather new sense, instruments or catalysts for thinking about the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. 

Wright hinted in his writing at the end of his life that the history of Western imperialism might be usefully examined as surreal, irrational, and effective immoral acts in the service of power.  One of the key phrases in our current situation is “homeland security,” a phrase that served as a warrant for the passage of the USA Patriot Act, a legal entity that authorizes suspension of constitutional guarantees. 

This Act has done much to create a climate for “legitimate” transgression of human rights.  To the extent that American citizens can be persuaded to be patriotic without question and to survive on a diet of misinformation, the immense power unleashed by the Act can oil that path that leads from American democracy as we knew it to American fascism that we imagined would never come into existence on our soil.  What has slouched into our lives is a horror that not even Wright’s most prophetic vision could prepare us to deal with.

Wright’s fictive treatment of the Mississippi River flood of 1927 in the short stories “Silt” (later retitled “The Man Who Saw the Flood”) and “Down by the Riverside” does prepare us partially for the national tragedy that is unfolding as the national gaze on the plight of New Orleans segues into macrodiscourses about government preparedness for responding to natural disasters, about poverty (which is being treated as an amazing new discovery); about the long-term effects of various toxins on ecosystems and on public health in the southeastern United States;  about race as an inevitable American dilemma;  about probable government appropriation of private property in New Orleans by using a fairly obscure concept—USUFRUCT –– as one recovery strategy. 

Wright’s story “Down by the Riverside” makes us aware that natural disaster and its subsequent traumas do not necessarily lead to any transcending of racial differentiation and skin privilege. As can be seen in the way our mass media used various kinds of print and visual narratives to report on New Orleans, a regressive process of demonizing one portion of the city’s population and of erasing the existence of other portions. The classic binary of black and white was showcased with a vengeance.  It is now very easy to believe that no Latinas/Latinos, no Haitians, no Vietnamese, no Japanese, no Chinese, no people of Asian descent inhabited the city.  They are a significant absence in the ongoing discourse.

So, what is the fallout that might be anticipated?  Listen to this small excerpt from the screenplay of Hotel Rwanda.

Paul [Rusesabagina]: I am glad that you have shot this footage—and that the world will see it.  It is the only way we have a chance that people might intervene.

A more scholarly forecast comes from Slavoj Zizek, a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany:  He concluded his article “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape: Reality and Fantasy in New Orleans” with a chilling paragraph:

The best that Richard Wright’s works can do to alleviate our pessimism and near despair is to remind us that human beings do survive enormous tragedies.  I grant that may be very true, but I still ask if in the absence of ruthless conversations about what it means to be an American it is possible for Americans to survive one another. 

It is quite conceivable that benign, highly selective genocide can occur here under the guise of homeland security or whatever the buzzword of choice might be. Wright’s example of engaging dangerous issues by way of his actively reading contemporary situations and writing about them is one we might wish to follow.

When I sum up my investment in Richard Wright and our contemporary situation, my attitudes are expressed concisely in the third stanza of my poem “After the Hurricanes.” –

Permit me to leave you with an unarticulated but certainly intended warning in the final line “Send them on middle passages into the blues.”  Remember, of course, that you will be on the same awe-filled journey.  Richard Wright and I are very unlike Ralph Ellison’s invisible narrator who spoke for you perhaps at the lower frequencies.  Our current situation demands that we speak to you of anguished efforts to uncover a truth.

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Address delivered at Grinnell College (October 27, 2005) /Jerry W. Ward, Jr. / 4311 Commons Circle / Vicksburg, MS 39180 / (601) 883-9926

posted 30 October 2005