he could help her, that she might be in pain; he never wondered even if she were
dead ” (205). At worst, the perspective of distance makes it impossible for people to
react humanely to each other across the color line.
Rational communication, and particularly its failures, concerns Wright also in his
later work, where he becomes increasingly interested in describing the look of the
world in the context of global anticolonial struggles. His emphasis on the historical
and political functioning of vision in diasporic politics aligns his thinking with con-
temporary postcolonial theory. In its concern with the dialectics of seeing, his work
intersects with, for example, that of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming and the
Martiniquan theorist Frantz Fanon. In “ A Way of Seeing ” (1960 ), Lamming proclaims
that “ what a person thinks is very much determined by the way that person sees ”
(56). Throughout his oeuvre, Fanon similarly casts (post)coloniality in terms of a
radical contestation between worldviews. As exemplifi ed in his famous depiction, in
“ Algeria Unveiled ” ( 1959) , of the struggle against the French occupiers, colonialism
seeks to monopolize the means of describing the world, but in the very process elicits
Richard
Wright
323
unexpected counterstrategies whereby the colonized begin to manipulate the fi eld of
vision to their advantage. As Wright notes in his essay collection, White Man, Listen!
(1957 ), “ oppression helps to forge in the oppressed the very qualities that eventually
bring about the downfall of the oppressor ” (21).
One of Wright ’ s depictions of the unmanageable complexities, and the unforeseen
consequences, of colonialism is “ Man, God Ain ’ t Like That. … ” Describing the fatal
misunderstandings brought about by incompatible worldviews, the story follows the
trip to Africa by a Western artist – in search of his “ black period ” (171) – and his
wife, who upon returning to Europe bring with them Babu, their loyal African
servant. The Westerners gaze at the life of the “ natives ” from the exoticizing and
patronizing perspective of colonialism. They consider natives “ baboons ” and “ monkeys ”
(165) and, like Hegel and other Western thinkers whose writings legitimated pater-
nalistic views of slavery, regard them as mere children (172). From the Eurocentric
perspective, Babu seems an ideal native. He eagerly adopts Western ideals and acqui-
esces in his own humble place in the scheme of things, seeking to understand the
white man ’ s slant: “ Babu wonder how black folks look to Massa ” (169). Calling John
“ Massa ” and enjoying the pathos of Christian hymns (166 – 7), he becomes an example
of how, as Fanon writes in “ Racism and Culture, ” colonialism “ manages to impose on
the native new ways of seeing ” (38).
Babu ’ s is what Wright elsewhere calls “ the frog perspective, ” a term that conjoins
Nietzschean perspectivism and psychoanalytic theories of ambivalence. The colonized
subject, he argues, gazes at the colonizer ’ s world “ from below upward ” ; the frog per-
spective “ describe[s] … a sense of someone who feels himself lower than others. …
A certain degree of hate combined with love (ambivalence) is always involved in this
looking from below upward. … He loves the object because he would like to resemble
it; he hates the object because his chances of resembling it are remote, slight ” ( White
6). While this perspective often results in the pathologies that Fanon catalogues in
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) , “ Man, God Ain ’ t Like That … ” renders the drama a
tragicomedy. Despite the successful conversion of the African pagan into a worshiper
of Western culture, the Europeans don ’ t quite understand what they have done in
imposing their worldview on Babu. Adopting Christian mythology, he becomes con-
vinced that his master is the Son of God and, to fulfi ll Biblical prophecy, ends up
killing his Savior.
If contemporary critics have explored the similarities and differences between the
position of the black American and that of the colonized subject, Wright argues
that they share a peculiar angle on the world. As he writes in his foreword to
George Padmore ’ s Pan - Africanism or Communism ( 1956 ), “ The black man ’ s is a
strange situation; it is a perspective, an angle of vision held by oppressed people;
it is an outlook of people looking upward from below ” (xxii). This odd slant, and
its tragicomic ramifi cations, drives Bigger, Babu, and many of Wright
’
s other
protagonists.
Were we to identify one motivation behind Wright ’ s search for a productive per-
spective, it is his hope of accomplishing a rational description of the world, one that
324
Mikko Tuhkanen
could be embraced by the white and the black of the United States, the ex - colonizer
and the ex - colonized of the postcolonial world. This commonly accepted point of view
would end the convoluted performances that have distorted communications across
the color line. Wright shares this ambition with such postcolonial thinkers as Aim é
C é saire, who seeks to “ sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges,
the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook
”
(34). As he notes in
an interview,
“
a society is not very strong when it rests upon a large basis of
secret, hidden things, like quicksand. In my opinion, things must be in the open ”
( Conversations 237).
As such, Wright ’ s ethics is arguably guided by post - Enlightenment rationalism,
particularly by Husserlian phenomenology ’ s efforts to cut through inaccurate, ideo-
logical, or biased descriptions of phenomena. 6 Phenomenology seeks the “ bracketing ”
of misleading apprehensions and the consequent discovery of a shared, rational point
of view. For Husserl, the elimination of false beliefs and perceptions allows the pro-
duction of a global, shared worldview, one that would enable unhindered communica-
tion between self - possessed subjects.
Wright, too, wants to reorganize the tortured Weltanschauung of the twentieth
century, informed by the guilt, fear, and bad faith bred by history ’ s atrocities. 7 He
may have recognized an anti - racist methodology in Husserl ’ s work, given that “ phe-
nomenology wanted to be a radically new philosophical method that strives toward
freedom from prejudice ” (Held 33). If we accept the Husserlian bent of Wright ’ s
art of perspective, we must nevertheless note their differing estimations of the cost
of one ’ s efforts at rationality. According to Husserl, the “ phenomenological reduc-
tion ” – the suspension of one ’ s “ natural attitudes ” – is something “ we can quite
freely exercise ” ( § 31/59). He asserts that “ we are completely free to modify every
positing and every judging ” ( § 32/60). For the black Americans and colonized sub-
jects of Wright ’ s texts, however, the bracketing of belief – of false perspectives –
constitutes not a free act but a dangerous transgression inviting immediate punitive
mea
sures.
Wright for the most part wants the world organized according to a shared, rational
standpoint. Fatal miscalculations, such as Bigger ’ s murder of Mary and Babu ’ s killing
of his master, are the unforeseen consequences of incompossible worldviews, the blind
arrogance that, according to Wright and others, informs Western views of its others.
Yet, the non - communication between incongruent ways of looking at the world, and
perceiving the gaze of the other, simultaneously guarantees that “ imperialists of the
twentieth century are men who are always being constantly and unpleasantly sur-
prised ” (Wright, Black Power 132). Making an observation whose relevance contem-
porary readers may recognize, Wright continues elsewhere: “ rarely do things work
out … the way the white man had hoped and thought they would, in the countries
he colonized ” ( Conversations 161). An early theorist of the stupidity and arrogance of
the powerful, Wright also fi nds a bittersweet hope in the uneven exchanges carried
out on (what Mary Louise Pratt calls) “ contact zones, ” whether of the American scene
or the colonized world.
Richard
Wright
325
Notes
1
This term appears in Wright, Black Boy , 164,
4
“ Man of All Work ” similarly parodies the
238; The Outsider , 492, 497, 526, 675 ( “ the
blindness inherent in the white perspective. To
sight of the world ” ), 774; and Father ’ s , 34.
support his wife and child, the story ’ s protago-
2
Similarly, in its deployment of the prophetic
nist dresses in drag to land a job as a domestic
tradition of the Jeremiad (see Hubbard), David
in a white family. While the white father,
Walker ’ s proto – Black Nationalist manifesto of
blinded by race even to gender differences,
1829 is concerned with the revolutionary
attempts to come on to the new black maid, it
power of prophetic visions.
is only the young child of the family, still rela-
3
This tendency has been critiqued by numerous
tively unschooled in the gendered and racial-
commentators. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes
ized practices of vision, who sees through the
that, in his autobiography, Wright casts other
black man ’ s performance.
blacks as “ pitiable victims of the pathology of
5
For graphic descriptions, verbal and visual, of
slavery and racial segregation who surround and
the history of lynching, see Allen et al.
suffocate him. Indeed, Wright wills [the narra-
6
For a brief record of Wright ’ s engagement
tor ’ s] special self into being through the agency
with Husserl, see Fabre, Richard , 76 – 7. I have
of contrast: the sensitive, healthy part is fore-
elsewhere argued for the benefi t of reading
grounded against a determined, defeated black
Wright
’
s emphasis on perspective through
whole ” (182). Valerie Smith continues: “ Wright
what Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially in its
portrays with contempt the larger black com-
reading of Renaissance perspective, suggests to
munity, identifying it with what he sees as an
us about the negotiations of visibility and
extreme tendency toward accommodation.
power: see Tuhkanen, The American Optic , esp.
Wright is especially judgmental with regard to
introduction and chapter 1 .
black women. … [H]is protagonists routinely
7
For Wright ’ s discussion of the pathologies of
reject their connections to black women as a
Western modernity, see his introduction to
stage in their search for liberation ” (435).
Drake and Clayton.
References and Further Reading
Allen , James , Hilton Als , et al. Without Sanctuary:
Douglass , Frederick . Autobiographies
. Notes by
Lynching Photography in America . Santa Fe, NM :
Henry Louis Gates , Jr. 1994. New York :
Twin Palms , 2002 .
Penguin/Library of America , 1996 .
Baker , Houston A. , Jr. “ Belief, Theory, and Blues:
— — — . My Bondage and My Freedom . 1855 . Rpt.
Notes for a Post
-
Structuralist Criticism of
in Autobiographies , 103 – 452 .
Afro - American Literature . ” 1986 . Rpt. in
— — — . Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
Napier , ed., African American Literary Theory ,
an American Slave . 1845 . Rpt. in Autobiographies ,
224 – 41 .
1 – 102 .
C é saire , Aim é . Discourse on Colonialism . 1955.
Du Bois , W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay
Trans. Joan Pinkham . New York : Monthly
toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept .
Review Press , 1972 .
1940.
New
Brunswick,
NJ :
Transaction ,
Derrida , Jacques . Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money .
1991 .
1991. Trans. Peggy Kamuf . Chicago : Univer-
— — — . The Souls of Black Folk . 1903. Ed. Henry
sity of Chicago Press , 1992 .
Louis Gates , Jr. , and Terri Hume Oliver . New
Dixon , Melvin . Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography
York : W. W. Norton , 1999 .
and Identity in Afro - American Literature . Urbana :
Ellison , Ralph . Invisible Man
. 1952.
New York
:
University of Illinois Press , 1987 .
Modern Library , 1994 .
326
Mikko Tuhkanen
Fabre , Michel . Richard Wright: Books and Writers .
Napier , Winston , ed. African American Literary
Jackson : University Press of Mississippi , 1990 .
Theory: A Reorder . New York : New York Uni-
— — — . The Unfi nished Quest of Richard Wright .
versity Press , 2000 .
2nd edn. Trans. Isabel Barzun . Urbana : Univer-
Pratt , Mary Louise . “ Arts of the Contact Zone . ”
sity of Illinois Press , 1993 .
Profession 91 ( 1991 ): 33 – 40 .
Fanon , Frantz . Black Skin, White Masks . 1952 .
Smith , Valerie . “ Alienation and Creativity in the
Trans. Charles Lam Markmann . 1967. New
Fiction of Richard Wright . ” 1987 . Rpt. in
York : Grove Press , 1982.
Gates and Appiah, eds.,
Richard Wright ,
— — — . “ Algeria Unveiled . ” A Dying Colonialism .
433 – 47 .
1959 . Trans. Haakon Chevalier . 1965. New
Tuhkanen , Mikko . The American Optic: Psychoanaly-
York : Grove Press , 1990. 35 – 67 .
sis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright .
— — — . “ Racism and Culture . ” Toward the African
Albany
:
State University of New York Press
,
Revolution: Political Essays . 1964. Trans. Haakon
2009 .
&nbs
p; Chevalier . 1967. New York : Grove Press , 1988 .
Walker , David . David Walker
’
s Appeal to the
29 – 44 .
Coloured Citizens of the World . 1829. Ed. Peter P.
Foner , Philip S. , and Herbert Shapiro , eds. Ameri-
Hinks . 2000. University Park : Pennsylvania
can Communism and Black Americans: A Documen-
State University Press , 2006 .
tary History, 1930 – 1934 . Philadelphia : Temple
Wright , Richard . American Hunger
. 1977.
New
University Press , 1991 .
York : Harper & Row , 1979 .
Gates , Henry Louis , Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A
— — — . Black Boy (American Hunger) . 1945 . Rpt.
Theory of African
-
American Literary Criticism .
in Later Works , 1 – 365, 875 – 84 .
New York : Oxford University Press , 1989 .
— — — . Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land
Gates , Henry Louis , Jr. , and K. A. Appiah , eds.
of Pathos . 1954. New York : HarperPerennial ,
Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and
1995 .
Present . New York : Amistad , 1993 .
— — — . “ Blueprint for Negro Writing . ” 1937.
Held , Klaus . “ Husserl ’ s Phenomenology of the
Rpt. in Richard Wright Reader . Ed. Ellen Wright
Life - World . ” Trans. Lanei Rodemeyer . The
and Michel Fabre . New York : Harper & Row ,
New Husserl . Ed. Donn Welton. Bloomington :
1978 . 36 – 49 .
Indiana University Press , 2003 . 32 – 62 .
— — — . Later Works . New York : Library of
Hubbard , Dolan . “ David Walker ’ s Appeal and
America , 1991 .
the American Puritan Jeremiadic Tradition
.
”
— — — . “ Bright and Morning Star . ” Uncle Tom ’ s
Centennial Review 30.3 (Summer 1986 ): 331 – 46 .
Children . 1940. New York : HarperPerennial ,
Husserl , Edmund . Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phe-
1993 . 221 – 63 .
nomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy,
— — — .
Conversations with Richard Wright .
First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenom-
Eds. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre .
enology . 1913. Trans. F. Kersten . The Hague :
Jackson
:
University Press of Mississippi
,
Martinus Nijhoff , 1982 .
1993 .
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 71
