Black Power

by Richard Wright

  Four

  Wright understood the historic importance of Bandung and wanted his report to make up for its general neglect or misrepresentation in the Western media; for example, even the frequent dispatches and editorials in The New York Times in April 1955 appear to have swerved somewhat abruptly to match the official U. S. attitudes toward Bandung, from suspicion at its beginning to a final measure of satisfaction in the anti-Communist stances by nations such as Ceylon and Iraq. Wright notes early on how there was “something extra-political, extra-social” about the meeting—“it smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces.” Wright bemoaned the Western media’s capacity to distort the truth and noticed how poorly equipped Western journalists were to understand this event “initiated by someone else.” For example, in pursuing their “tirade” against the exclusion of the U.S. and Europe from the conference, these journalists “seemed to have forgotten that for centuries Asian and African nations had watched in helpless silence while white powers” had “disposed of” their “destinies.” Wright was not surprised at the “brooding, bitter, apprehensive” atmosphere surrounding the conference, fuelled by a “frenzied speculation” about the rising influence of Red China over Nehru and a prediction by the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations that the Chinese Communists were about to attack Quemoy and Matsu in mid-April.

  Throughout The Color Curtain, Wright shows great skill at staying away from topics—for example, Asian politics—that he was not well-equipped to deal with. He focused instead on issues such as the lures of racial and Communist ideologies where his insights were especially valuable in the 1950s and would still matter in any historical understanding of what is known today as Cultural Studies. Although not particularly well-informed about the intricacies of Asian politics and religions, Wright shows a sharp new understanding of the Asian personality, going well beyond the thoughts he expressed, say, after his meeting in New York with Vijaylakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, in 1945. Following his conversation with Mrs. Pandit about the effectiveness of non-violent means in seeking India’s freedom, he had noted in his diary that the Asians lacked a “sense of personal worth” in their passivity and that he missed in them the “tension” he admired so much in the American and African-American personality. In 1955, Wright found the Asians he interviewed for The Color Curtain ready to “gush, erupt, and spill out” their racial feelings; he acknowledged that he had misjudged Asian feelings and found that “many Asians hated the West with an absoluteness that no American Negro could ever muster.” The “racial tensions” that gripped Asia and Africa, observed Wright at Bandung, made “the Negro Problem” in the U. S. appear like “a child’s play.”

  Like Black Power, The Color Curtain appears to have been deeply affected by Wright’s subjective responses to Indonesia and the Bandung Conference, but he allows the reader once again to have access to other approaches or concepts which he might not fully endorse. For example, he concludes the long opening section, “Bandung: Beyond Left and Right,” by recording an extended interview with Mohammed Nastir, a former Prime Minister who was a leading spokesperson for the idea of a Muslim state. Nastir projects “Pan-Islam” as “a world force, socialistic in nature, keeping a middle ground between Communism and Capitalism.” Based on this interview, Wright felt that “the Indonesian Moslem had a personality that was intact, poised, healthy, and largely free from neurotic conflict. There was none of that uneasy shifting…between two worlds of values and two spheres of psychological being.” One has only to recall Wright’s lifelong exploration of “tension” and “twoness” as essential elements of a modern consciousness to know that he was not endorsing Nastir’s views on either religion or the theocratic state. And yet, his treatment of Nastir’s world view illustrates how on several occasions in The Color Curtain, he finds a way of locating himself outside the Western epistemologies with which he is generally associated in his travel books. His later nonfiction thus represents an early use of travel as knowledge and also anticipates the importance of positioning in current discourse on issues of culture and identity.

  In the practiced method of layered texts such as Black Power, Pagan Spain, and The Color Curtain, Wright’s own views thus get placed within a suggestive frame of other possible perspectives, achieving a measure of balance and the only kind of objectivity he thought possible. Objectivity, he tells us in White Man, Listen!, is a “fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction,” aimed at persuading others to apprehend “the same general aspects and tones of reality that comprise my world. By revealing the assumptions behind my statements, I’m striving to convert you to my outlook, to its essential humaneness, to the generality and reasonableness of my arguments.”

  His vision in The Color Curtain is ultimately fashioned by this kind of modified objectivity and his factual observations of Indonesian life and people are framed by his persuasive plea for full economic and political freedom for all. In his commentary on the conference itself, Wright stressed the potential unity among the participant nations based on their shared distrust of the West. Although he recognized the importance of religion in Asian and African lives, Wright dealt instead with what he grasped intuitively—the hostility of Asia and Africa to the West based on how they had been constructed by the West as the racial Other. As someone who had experienced the limits of ideology in his own checkered career with the Communist Party, Wright understood well why ideology mattered so little at the conference.

  But while Wright warned the West against underestimating the enormity and depth of that feeling, he conveyed too his sense of the fragile nature of Asian-African unity based on “race” alone. A couple of years later, Wright was to declare in White Man, Listen! that the American Negro was “something not racial or biological, but something purely social, something made in the United States.” In Indonesia, he was disturbed by evidence of “reverse racism” by which a government official gave him preferential treatment over a white American journalist. He was saddened too by the purely “racial” motives of Mr. Jones, a black man from Los Angeles, who had used his life’s savings and his wife’s to come to Bandung, “to feel a fleeting sense of identity, of solidarity, a religious oneness with the others who shared his outcast state.” Wright notes how Carlos P. Romulo, the Philippines representative who had made the most race-conscious speech at the conference, reminds the delegates about “how easy it is to be a racist,” warning Asians and Africans against becoming “the kind of men whom they now condemn.”

  So, for Wright in The Color Curtain, the future of Asia was best defined not through some fixed idea of ethnic purity or national exclusiveness, but in terms of how culture and politics are shaped by global issues as they affect the life-chances of ordinary human beings. For him, Chou En-lai’s clever but effective moves at the conference (for example, in a speech aimed at gaining a Third World foothold, Chou stressed Asian-African unity instead of attacking the West or selling Communism to newly freed nations) symbolized both the understandable attraction and the risks that African and Asian nations faced in turning to Communism. Even though they desperately needed Western capital and technologies for development, these nations had genuine fears of being re-enslaved by the West through neocolonial methods. Wright reported on the Indonesian awareness of their uneasy relationship with the West; they would welcome Western technology and its advantages, but how could they fend off “the desire of the West to dominate”? While he warned the Western leadership about the possibility that Communism might spread in Asia and Africa unless they made the moral commitment needed to develop their former colonies, he refused to condemn Communism in any strong terms. In discussing the role of the West in Africa and Asia with a white American liberal, who considered himself a Jeffersonian Democrat, Wright favored constructive Western intervention—something he had shied away from in his advice to Kwame Nkrumah at the end of Black Power.

  Wright emerges in The Color Curtain and other works of travel and political reflection as an independent observer of race and co
lonialism in world affairs who reserves the right to choose his targets in the West or elsewhere in search of an inclusive and humane vision of individual freedom and community life. When read in conjunction with Black Power, White Man, Listen! and some passages not included in the published version of The Color Curtain, Wright’s view of the West appears far more complex than the Cold War clichés and abstractions at the end of The Color Curtain that some readers have complained about. For example, here is part of what Wright says in a passage which he appears to have been persuaded to leave out from the concluding sections of the published book:

  White Europe’s impact upon the colored East sets in motion two contradictory currents: one is a reflex gesture on the part of the Easterner to recover what he has lost by his contact with the West—his language, his art, his religion and his traditional ways of seeing and doing; the other is a state of chronic anxiety, bordering on hysteria, to embrace as quickly as possible the new Western techniques of science and industry in order to defend himself. (Copyright © Ellen Wright; quoted by permission)

  It is such blending of psychology and political insight in his analysis of global affairs that makes The Color Curtain valuable reading even today and opens the possibility of viewing Wright’s later nonfiction as a worthy precursor to the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Since Wright had constructed the worlds of his travel books from the 1950s with careful attention to artistic method and since he had poured into them his genuine passion and commitment as a black intellectual of the West, he was deeply disappointed by what he considered their often poor and hostile reception. Wright expressed his frustration at this in a letter to his Dutch friend, Margrit de Sablonière, when he wrote, “So far as the Americans are concerned, I’m worse than a communist, for my work falls like a shadow across their policy in Asia and Africa…. Truth-telling today is both unpopular and suspect” (30 March 1960).

  Truth-telling will perhaps always be unpopular and suspect, but in The Color Curtain, as in all his later nonfiction, Wright did not hesitate to tell the truth as he saw it. These books are thus a crucial part of Wright’s oeuvre, and one has to understand them in order to appreciate fully his deep concern and sensitive engagement with issues that continue to challenge us.

  AMRITJIT SINGH

  RHODE ISLAND COLLEGE

  White Man, Listen!

  WITH A FOREWORD BY JOHN A. WILLIAMS

  This book is dedicated to

  My friend,

  ERIC WILLIAMS,

  Chief Minister of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and Leader of the People’s National Movement;

  and to

  THE WESTERNIZED AND TRAGIC ELITE OF ASIA, AFRICA, AND THE WEST INDIES—

  the lonely outsiders who exist precariously

  on the clifflike margins of many cultures—men who are

  distrusted, misunderstood, maligned, criticized

  by Left and Right, Christian and pagan—

  men who carry on their frail but indefatigable shoulders

  the best of two worlds—and who,

  amidst confusion and stagnation,

  seek desperately for a home for their hearts:

  a home which, if found,

  could be a home for the hearts of all men.

  FOREWORD

  “It can be said that the white man is at bay. Never have so few hated and feared so many.”

  These words, written by Richard Wright three years before his untimely death on November 28, 1960, in Paris, have more meaning today than when they were first set down. The white man, Wright meant, has been brought to bay by his own conscience, by the juggernaut, economics, and by the ceaseless pressure brought to bear upon his grim penchant for insisting that the world was his and his alone; the pressure has come from all over the world: China, Africa, Latin America, the rest of Asia, and in America itself. Nonwhite pressure.

  It is good that WHITE MAN, LISTEN! is being reissued in this edition. The book tells us that the problems (and advantages) of race are not confined to the United States. There are facts here, not thin emotion; there are here the thoughts of a man exposed to as much of life as his energies would permit. WHITE MAN, LISTEN! may sound imperative; it is. But it is also a plea: LISTEN! please, LISTEN! No man may correct himself unless he knows an error has been made. Wright gives Caucasians around the world the chance to understand what their fathers and they have done not only to black and brown men, but to themselves. Wright cries to men to listen to a way to survive.

  A man named James Meredith brought honor at last to the sullen, alien state of Mississippi, but Richard Wright also hailed from there. Self-educated and instinctively opposed to the way Negroes had to live in Mississippi and everywhere else in America, he left and made his way north to live in Chicago, New York, and, for a time, other cities. Intellectually he came to know that what was bad for the Negro was bad also for America: that what was a horror for an individual was a horror for the society.

  Although Richard Wright had more than a dozen books published, he never in life (or death, as a matter of fact) gained his rightful place in American letters, except during brief, grudgingly illuminated moments. A most unusual phenomenon of the American literary society is that American Negro artists pass to success in single file and, more often than not, over one another’s dead bodies. Richard Wright understood this very well, but even so he took a secret pride in venturing over the trail.

  He deserved acclaim, not so much as a spokesman for the Negro people, and I don’t know whether he thought himself one or not (I’m inclined to think that such a title would have disgusted him), but as an artist. He was a novelist who ranged from realism to surrealism; he was an essayist in the classic sense, posing a question and by logic answering it. He was a poet well versed in Haiku. He was a political analyst, a political writer as well. If he had to, he could write a good, tight news column, and then retreat to a corner and set down a poem in pyrrhic meter.

  In Native Son Richard Wright jolted the American literary scene with Bigger Thomas, a hapless, bitter, damned, ignorant, brutal, ghetto-Condemned black Negro, who would have whipped half to death any one of Hemingway’s soldiers and he-men on a southside Chicago street corner. Bigger was not romantic like Quee Queg in Moby Dick, nor was he legendary like John Henry. He was no Stepin Fetchit or Mantan Moreland. He was none of the shadow, soft and unobtrusive, mysterious, that we find in our literature. He was a Negro that few white people ever believed they would meet face to face, and yet, they faced him every day. He was real.

  If Theodore Dreiser took his place in American literature by telling us of the damned relationship between American love and the American dollar in An American Tragedy; if Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris achieved their positions by giving us the first full-blown stink of the bottomside of capitalism in The Jungle and The Pit; if Sinclair Lewis could name the emptiness of America Babbit; then Richard Wright deserves a place beside them because he gave us a stunning view of the economic and spiritual poverty of millions of people. He deserves to be included among the American authors college students find in their literature books because he brought an entirely new dimension to American letters—a dimension that we have come to accept, after so long a time, as real.

  Many black writers were influenced by Richard Wright, and this, too, I believe, is the sign of an artist, that he is in many ways emulated; the power of his words or the colors on his canvas impel others toward their own palettes or pens. There are still many writers, especially young Negroes, who reread Wright and find, in a vein of words which have been thought to be completely used up and digested, undiscovered diamonds. There were writers closer to Wright’s own generation who were also influenced by him. One notices that while Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground is a short story, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is much like it in surrealistic tone, but brought to full fruition in the novel form. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time has very strong similarities to WHITE MAN, LISTEN! The difference here is that, while Baldwin attacks
the white world only, Wright is just as quick to flay the black. It is Baldwin, of course, who has inherited what critics would consider Richard Wright’s mantle.

  One thought pervaded all of Wright’s work: that the perennial human failing—man’s gross inhumanity to man—had to be abolished. He explored this condition with foresight and explained it so accurately that, in many subtle ways, he was asked to keep his mouth shut. He went to Paris; he became an expatriate, although, because he was black, he was not considered in the same light as the white expatriates of twenty years earlier. This book, written as Africa came into independence, as the Montgomery boycott of 1955 was successfully concluded, will bear out his fantastic sense of perception. Because he could perceive by the acts of the past what the future would bring, many Asians and Africans violently disliked WHITE MAN, LISTEN! Wright was too honest to be altogether pro-African or pro-Asian.

  For example, he could write with immense candor that he agreed “that some of the missionary work [in Africa] was good: I agree that his boiling down four hundred gods and six hundred devils into one God and one Devil was an advance.” But Wright remained “numbed and appalled” to know that “millions of men in Asia and Africa assign more reality to their dead fathers than to the crying claims of their daily lives: poverty, political degradation, illness, ignorance.”