Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora

CHAPTER 9 Richard Wright’s “Island of Hallucination” and the Gibson Affair

CHAPTER 9 Richard Wright’s “Island of Hallucination” and the Gibson Affair Richard Gibson The Gibson Affair was a scandal that rocked the African American community in the Paris of late 1957 and provoked tremors that continued long after. As the affair bears my name, I must accept or at least share responsibility; however, this is neither a confession nor an apology. This is an attempt to provide clarification of the mystery that still surrounds this incident, which some believe to have destroyed or diminished a certain cozy easiness of life in Paris for African Americans, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. But the Algerian War of Independence, which began in November 1954 and ended in 1962, effected profound changes in that seemingly innocent relationship. Les événements, as the ambushes and scattered attacks were euphemistically called at the onset, became a full-scale colonial war in Algeria, which revealed the complex realities of French racial attitudes growing out of colonial expansion and the steady increase of African and Asian immigrants in France since the First World War.1 Hundreds of African Americans today live permanently in the French capital without having to confront the vagaries of commonplace , everyday racism that they might still have to cope with in the United States. If of course they have sufficient financial means. Millions of North Africans and Africans from south of the Sahara and even those born in France are coping with French racism that 224 Richard Gibson differs greatly from the Anglo-Saxon variety of separation and segregation . Whereas the French Jacobin tradition proclaims “republican values” and the universality of humanity, it just as effectively excludes ethnic, cultural, and religious differences. My awareness of these French realities began only at the end of 1954 when I was being frequently stopped by French police and asked for my papers. Because of my light skin and frizzy hair, they would mistake me for an Algerian or some other North African but when I presented my U.S. passport or carte de séjour, I often received an apology. Nowadays, I add, I make, without any difficulty, visits to Paris and even to the Charente-Maritime, where an African American cousin rediscovered distant French cousins of ours, descendants of the African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, who had been unable to live with his white American wife and their son in the racist America of his day, but lived comfortably in France from 1898 to his death in Paris in 1937 (Alexander-Minter 23–33). But there was no visible Algerian problem in those years. In the 1950s there was. Michel Fabre produced what has become the standard account of the Gibson Affair. Although emphasizing the influence of the Cold War on those involved, Fabre has reluctantly admitted that the Affair was really about the question of Algeria. This is what he wrote in his biography of Richard Wright in 1973: In the spring of 1958, Wright was forced to go to the French police apropos of a curious matter which had actually started several years earlier and was then referred to in the American black colony as the “Gibson affair.” In 1956, Wright’s friend Ollie Harrington, a former NAACP public relations officer and a well-known cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Courier, rented his Paris studio while he was away on the Cote d’Azur to Richard Gibson, a young black novelist in Paris on a Whitney scholarship. Harrington was disagreeably surprised on his return to find that Gibson not only refused to vacate the apartment, but claimed to own the furniture, paintings and personal belongings that he had left behind. The argument continued for almost two years. Gibson made violent attacks which verged on the psychotic, while Harrington resigned himself to living elsewhere rather than call in the police , fearing that the American Embassy might intervene on account of his status as an expatriate with Communist sympathies . Meanwhile, the Afro-American novelist William Gardner Smith, who was working for Agence France-Presse, had helped get Gibson a job and would not disavow his friend, with the Richard Wright’s “Island of Hallucination” and the Gibson Affair 225 result that the black community had slowly taken sides in the struggle. Wright naturally supported Ollie Harrington, who had been his good friend since his arrival in 1955, although he did not share all his political opinions. In 1957, one of the...