-
Gazing Through the Screen: Richard Wright’s Africa
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
James Campbell states in Exiled in Paris that Richard Wright once claimed in his journal that he would write the best book on Africa during his time (185). Wright eventually wrote on Africa, but his travelogue entitled Black Power (1954) is one of his most criticized books, especially by Africans who feel betrayed and misrepresented . Concurring, John Gruesser contends in “Afro-American Travel Literature and African Discourse” that the disillusioned and alienated Wright, like William Gardner Smith, Maya Angelou, and Gwendolyn Brooks, fails to represent Africans accurately. Despite his self-declared hybridity, Wright neither identifies nor upholds African tradition, nor does he give Africans a voice or presence in Black Power. His only intimate African friend, Peter Abrahams, claims that “Wright wanted to understand the African, but . . . [he] found the African oblique, a hard-to-know man” (“Blacks” 23). Abrahams describes Wright as a bewildered and disconnected man who did not understand that race does not entail acceptance in tribal Africa. Abrahams claims to love Africa unconditionally. According to him, only outsiders (white people or the Richard Wright types) like or dislike Africa. Tellingly, Wright declares his admiration for the followers of Marcus Garvey in Black Boy (1945), but declines to follow them because of their unrealistic aspirations . Wright contends that he pities them because their dream of returning to Africa could never materialize since “Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Gazing Through the Screen Richard Wright’s Africa Ngwarsungu Chiwengo 20 Europe, [that] their lives were alien to the mores of the natives of Africa, [that] they were people of the West and would forever be so until they either merged with the West or perished” (337). While Wright shares the Garveyites’ passionate emotions, a result of their exclusion from American life, he accepts his alienation and sees no utopian return to Africa. After all, home is, according to Wright in White Man, Listen!, anywhere the mind establishes it. His uprootedness does not distract or perplex him; he welcomes the feeling of aloneness because it is “the natural, inevitable condition of man” (xvii). Although Wright presumes he is a universal man and revels in his deracination, he, nonetheless, claims to be psychologically distant from Western culture as a marginal American hybrid subject who has not been “allowed,” as he writes in White Man, Listen!, “to blend, in a natural and healthy manner, with the culture and civilization of the West” (47). Wright’s Black Power is a travel narrative which, contrary to most accounts economizing on travel, does not have a fixed site of reference, or, as in Georges Van den Abbeele’s own words, an oikos, a home, “in relation to which wandering can be apprehended ” (xviii). Wright, who is both subject and object in his insecure and cold native American oikos, has already undergone a journey of dislocation in 1946 when he leaves America for Paris in his search for home. While Wright’s British journey in 1953 from Liverpool is the initial point of his departure in Black Power and serves theoretically also as the physical point of reference defining and limiting the movement of his travel, Wright lacks an emotional oikos since Europe, his exile site of (dis)placement, is a space of both sameness and difference. Wright’s home in exile, even as it grants him freedom, preserves his marginality, for, as he writes in the dedication to White Man, Listen!, the Westernized and tragic elite of Asia, Africa, and the West Indies are lonely outsiders. As an outsider, Wright seeks “desperately for a home for [his] heart: a home which, if found, could be a home for the hearts of all men” (v). Wright’s initial European departure point is, hence, already a problematized space—epistemologically, socially, and historically constructed as the land of exile while Africa is his point of origin. The years spent in Paris separate him from his black constituency and his native home, America, so defined by time. Indeed, Jan Vladislav claims in “Exile, Responsibility, Destiny” that one’s history, the history of those who surround one, and language make a place home (15). Yet, Wright’s position in America, according to Paul Gilroy, is an uncomfortable one, for he is “inside but not organically of the West” (151). Although Wright considers his European departure site as home, for him, unlike for his fellow Western travelers, the West is the socially-constructed point of destination since it is solely his physical oikos and not...