Haiku: This Other World (review)

Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright. Edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade Publishers, 1998. 320 pages, cloth $23.50.

Richard Wright, author of Black Boy and Native Son, was living in exile in Paris and facing death when he began to write haiku. So deep was his connection and so strong his commitment to the form that he composed over four thousand verses during the final eighteen months of his life. In the "mathematical" syllable count of haiku he found an emotional net, and in the deep connection with nature a mirror for the seasons of the soul. According to his daughter Julia, who introduces Haiku: This Other World, his haiku were "self-developed antidotes against illness" and his "breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath." She says she read the following haiku at his funeral:

Burning out its time,
And timing its own burning,
One lonely candle.

Having written so searingly about the displacement of the African-American male in his nation's culture and about his own bitter youth in the American South, Wright found himself alienated from his country at the end of his life. He became increasingly political in his writing and thinking, in part as a result of the belief that counterintelligence agents were tracking his movements--a belief that critics ascribed to paranoia, but that was proven later to be correct. At the same time, he was mourning the death of two of his closest friends and of his mother, whom he had written about searchingly in Black Boy. In addition, he felt exiled from his own body as his health began to deteriorate.

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

Like other Western writers of his day, Wright was introduced to haiku through the translations of R. H. Blyth and others. Unlike such poets as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, who experimented freely with haiku's structure while keeping the form's imagistic components, Wright seems to have stuck tenaciously to a strict syllable count and often used conventional seasonal references. And unlike such poets of the Beat Generation as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, who wrote a handful of haiku, Wright wrote thousands. He then arranged 817 of them as they appear in this book. Wright often pays homage to the great forebears of the form, such as Basho and Issa--sometimes directly, other times more obliquely. The following might have been inspired by Issa:

Make up your mind, Snail!
You are halfway inside your house,
And halfway out.

Here, the homage to Basho is obvious:

A horse is pissing
In the snow-covered courtyard
In the morning sun.

Living in France, Wright felt a peace and connection with nature that had been inaccessible to him during his boyhood in rural Mississippi: in that fertile but inhospitable American landscape, the young writer had equated nature with hunger and suffering, partly as a result of his being poor and black. In self-imposed exile, Wright lived from 1947 to 1960 on a farm in Ailly, Normandy, and spent his afternoons working in his garden. His daughter recalls that he would hang up the haiku on a clothesline "as if to dry."

Oh, Mr. Scarecrow,
Stop waving your arms about
Like a foreigner.

As his illness worsened, Wright reflected on a world without race or politics, which lay just beneath the surface of everyday perception, and magnified humor, joy, dignity, and imagistic delicacy. Always capable of being forceful and direct, here Wright is gentle and suggestive:

In the falling snow
A laughing boy holds out his palms
Until they are white.

We should be grateful that this outstanding volume has, after thirty-nine years, found a home in print. At first rejected by the World Publishing Company and then held for many years in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the manuscript has had a long journey to publication. Its arrival is indeed a major literary event...