Blog2.24.2020


Black Boy at 75/ Native Son at 80

Richard Wright's gifts to world literature, to borrow verbs made famous by another native son of Mississippi, endure and prevail.  They do so because at each stage of his career, from his  proletarian verse and prose of the 1930's to his enormous outpouring of haiku and his final novel A Father's Law at the time of his death in 1960,  Wright raised essential questions. Such questions defy conclusive answers.  They invite responses.  They engender new questions which beget a new generation of responses.  Wright's legacy is marked by secular immortality and the infinite gestures of the human mind.

For me, the publication of the 75th anniversary edition of Black Boy is a reminder of how important  are the closing words of his autobiography ----"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human."  These sentiments  echo loudly in the special videos Wright's eldest daughter Julia Wright and her son Malcolm for the February 21 event to launch the new edition of Black Boy and to show the third film version of Native Son. [[ These videos are designed for limited, educational circulation/permission to be requested/Copyright; Julia Wright, Malcolm Wright/Videograph: Malcolm Wright/ Supplied to the Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Experience (MAXX) for their 21-2-2020 launchings of the 75th Anniversary Edition of "Black Boy" and the Southern Premiere of HBO's film of "Native Son"/source ---email from Julia Wright, dated February 22, 2020. ]]

 The videos moved me. I was moved to say to Julia and Malcolm-----"The videos you prepared for the MAXX event are poignant, and in the depth of my imagination they are soul-touching and much akin to how Richard Wright has touched my life. Both will help me greatly as I write about Wright's penetrating intelligence and creativity."/source -  my-email to Julia and Malcolm Wright, dated 2/23/2020 ]].

The video prepared me for the experience of holding the new edition in my hands, of being jolted by John Edgar Wideman's suggestion in his foreword that "[t]o read  Black Boy…is to stare into the heart of darkness.  Not the dark heart Joseph Conrad searched for in Congo jungles, but the beating heart I bear."  Wideman also reminds us our nation "can't abide, can't acknowledge, can't accept the fact a heart more or less identical to mind throbs relentlessly, hungrily, passionately, selfishly, an incorrigible mix of good and evil in every American breast" (xv).

It is an uncanny accident that I wrote









THEM/THOSE SAVAGES



"When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages --hate them  to the death."

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness



Look, and say can you see

what you must see

in the darkness of the heart.

Does hating them, those savages

dispensing venom, divisions, vices,

perpetual discord, constitutional pains,

ever suffice, ever resolve

the tyranny of misery?



Can terror be brought or bought

to civilize a savage mind?

No doubt, in the lurid murdering

of democracy, terror has purpose.---

judicious battle of hell balm

with the holy water of heaven,

the telos of the floral rainbow.

Make correct entries in the vortex of eternal violence.



a day before Wideman's foreword created, for me, the need to  examine once again in what sense literature is equipment for living.



 Essential questions from Malcolm's afterword ---"What would my grandfather make of our times? What choices would he make today?"( 389). ---obligate me to be disciplined as I write Richard Wright: An Unending Hunger for Life.  The book investigates his grandfather's robust creativity and challenging ideas from various disciplinary angles; it explores discrepant academic and on-academic uses of Wright's legacy.  One warrant for my engagement is anchored in the ending of Wright's autobiography.  Another warrant is the necessity to comment on how distortion of Wright's agenda in  the HBO version of Native Son does not encourage readers to deal with books and articles Wright published between 1953 and 1960, works that tell us much about the Cold War, democracy, fascism, continuing liberation struggles throughout the world, neo-colonial enterprises (especially in Africa), power contests among Asian nations, and the always evolving forms of terrorism.

Black Boy at 75 and Native Son at 80  instruct us to avoid enslavement to ignorance and the bliss of being stupid and hurl forth an imperative to read all of Richard Wright's works.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            2/24/2020 7:22:55 PM


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