Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections

The Color Curtain: Richard Wright’s Journey into Asia

Partly because of America’s independence and isolation from the other continents , and perhaps, because of its development and evolution from the older cultures, the mode of writing in America has historically been noted for its time lag. Howellsian realism and the turn-of-the-century naturalism, for example, were in vogue two or three decades later than their counterparts in Europe. Poundian imagism, a modernistic literary movement under the influence of Asian poetics, originated in London in the early 1910s, but its full impact on American poetry came at least a decade later. What we today call postmodernity in American literature is no exception. Understandably, none of Richard Wright’s travelogues, which appeared in the mid-twentieth century, was favorably reviewed. What the literary public failed to see in these travel narratives was not only that they represented postmodernity, but also that America after World War II had a hegemonic “superiority complex” over the other cultures. The uniqueness of The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), one of several travelogues which Richard Wright published in the 1950s, can also be gauged in its subject matter. While Wright was primarily concerned with European colonialism in Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954/1956), his account of travel to the Gold Coast/Ghana, he deeply dealt with Eastern and African religions and Catholicism in a later travel book entitled Pagan Spain (1957). The Color Curtain Richard Wright’s Journey into Asia Yoshinobu Hakutani 63 The Color Curtain brought together all the issues which Wright had investigated differently in his other two works. By traveling by ship and airplane across the oceans and, more importantly, across the boundaries of race, culture, religion, and philosophy, Wright went to great pains to write an unprecedented postmodern, postcolonial travelogue. I On the surface, The Color Curtain seems an autonomous, independent travelogue , but its epiphany originates in its predecessor Black Power. It was among the Ashanti peoples of West Africa with whom Wright visited that he came upon what he called “[the African’s] primal outlook upon life, his basically poetic apprehension of existence,” a Zen-like revelation. With this primal outlook on human life, Wright traveled to Asia and specifically Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1954. “What the social scientist should seek for,” Wright argues, “are not ‘African survivals’ at all, but the persistence and vitality of primal attitudes and the social causes thereof. And he would discover that the same primal attitudes exist among other people; after all, what are the basic promptings of artists, poets, and actors but primal attitudes consciously held?” (BP 266–67). After Wright’s travel to Asia, his interest in Asian culture and Zen philosophy in particular intensified. In 1959, a young South African who loved haiku described the form to Wright, who, in turn, borrowed from him the four volumes of Haiku by R. H. Blyth (Fabre, UQ 505), a well-detailed study of the genre and Zen philosophy . Indeed, the primal, poetic vision of human existence in nature Wright seized upon in his African journey was reinforced by his view of Asian culture, religion, and philosophy. As a political discourse, The Color Curtain brings home a prophetic argument that Asians and Africans must acquire the basic ideas of democracy and freedom from the West. As an epiphany, it gives the admonition that they must uphold the African and Asian primal philosophy of life and reject its antithesis of Western materialism. This primacy of the spirit of nature over the materialistic pursuit of Western culture finds its genesis in Wright’s earlier essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” In this postmodern manifesto, one of his theoretical principles calls for an African American writer’s exploration of universal humanism, an examination which is common among all cultures. Says Wright,“Every iota of gain in human thought and sensibility should be ready grist for his mill, no matter how far-fetched they may seem in their immediate implications” (“Blueprint” 45). After a journey into 64 Yoshinobu Hakutani the Ashanti kingdom in 1953 when he was forty-five years old, Wright wrote in Black Power: The truth is that the question of how much of Africa has survived in the New World is misnamed when termed “African survivals.” The African attitude toward life springs from a natural and poetic grasp of existence and all the emotional implications that such an attitude...