[Pictured: Richard Wright sitting on a sofa, Lido, Venice, 1950. (Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images)]
By Jerome Louison
What makes a Black novel (poem, play, or non-fiction work) truly great? Since the time of Phyllis Wheatley, Black writers in America, and their mostly white benefactors, have had to grapple with this question. The question also inspired the origins of this blog. As a lover of old books by Black writers, I’m constantly struck by how many incredible ideas and artistic works have been lost to time. This is due almost entirely to the nature of Black oppression in American society. Black writers and thinkers, regardless of their motivations, have historically conformed to standards imposed by external factors. This has left a legacy of Black writing that, for all its highlights and geniuses, never quite reached its full potential. It also never galvanized the masses of Black people long-term, nor maintained enough Black institutions to perpetuate it. But several thinkers saw this in real-time and warned against it. Richard Wright was one such thinker.
The Historical Role of the Black Writer
While immortalized for his fiction work, particularly his legendary novel “Native Son,” it is Wright’s non-fiction writings that we are concerned with. In particular, we’ll focus on his 1937 essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”1 While a member of the Communist Party, Wright contributed this piece to the leftist magazine New Challenge, which he also helped edit. The essay was meant to underscore the theoretical foundation of the magazine. Wright begins the piece by delineating the types of roles Black writers had historically played in American literature. For white audiences, Wright states:
“[Black writers] entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people.”
As such, these writers were not offered any serious critique for their works on artistic grounds. For Black readership, folks were just happy to see accomplished writers of the race. The result was that, for Wright, “…Negro writing has been something external to the lives of educated Negroes themselves. That the productions of their writers should have been something of a guide in their daily lives is a matter which seems to never have been raised seriously.” Black writers thus had two roles: pleaders for Black humanity to whites generally, and models of “achievement” for the Black petty bourgeoisie to showcase, like trophies. Meanwhile, the lives, and particularly the social and political activity, of working-class Black people went almost completely neglected. Black union organizing and political organizing against lynchings in the South (and North) were absent from Black literature at the time. This was especially egregious to Wright, given that “Lacking the handicaps of false ambition and property, [the Black working-class] have access to a wide social vision and a deep social consciousness.”
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In addition, working-class Black people (who make up the large majority of Black people in America) have a unique culture, developed and recorded mainly through the Black church and folklore. Wright recounts how, through the church, Black people “first entered the shrine of western culture.” For millions of Black people at the time, the church’s teachings were all they knew of the world. On the other hand, Black people retained their deep thought through an oral tradition that included “Blues, spirituals, and folk tales…” Wright explains further:
“…the whispered words of a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, to confidential wisdom of a black father to his black son; the swapping of sex experiences on street corners from boy to boy in the deepest vernacular; work songs sung under blazing suns – all these formed the channels through which the racial wisdom flowed.”
In the late 19th to early 20th centuries, Black writers, on the whole, captured none of this. Instead, they strove to use their art to escape their conditions and the people attached to it. Black literature did not have a Black audience in mind.
Nationalism – Endemic to Black Life in America
As a communist writing in a Marxist magazine, Richard Wright makes great pains not to promote a nationalist perspective. The inherent internationalist and integrationist politics of the Communist Party were at odds with Black nationalism, at the time typified by the likes of Marcus Garvey and his UNIA-ACL. However, as Wright remarks, “…the nationalist character of the Negro people is unmistakable.” This “nationalist character” is held in the Black oral tradition and folklore more than anywhere else. Says Wright,
“Here are those vital beginnings of a recognition of value in life as it is lived, a recognition that marks the emergence of a new culture in the shell of the old.”
The plethora of Black institutions, from the church to newspapers to sports leagues, total “a Negro way of life in America.” And it is through these institutions that any progress for Black people is to occur, because, according to Wright, “…all other channels are closed.” Any Black writers looking to make an impact on their people’s conditions must grapple with the nationalist character as it is first, before anything else. It is worth quoting Wright at length here, as this is the core thesis of the essay:
“Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them. They must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess and understand it. And a nationalist spirit in Negro writing means a nationalism carrying the highest possible pitch of social consciousness. It means a nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations; that is aware of the dangers of its position; that knows its ultimate aims are unrealizeable in capitalist America; a nationalism whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdependence of people in modern society.”
Collective Work and Responsibility
According to Wright, as the 20th century reached its midway point, Black writers had a new level of responsibility. They were uniquely qualified to fill the leadership void left by the “gradual decline of the moral authority of the Negro church, and the increasing irresolution which is paralyzing the Negro middle class leadership…” Through their art, Black writers could and should “create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die.”
Black writers thus need a framework to analyze society and Black people’s place in it. For Wright, a Marxist framework was necessary. Marxian dialectics, which Wright used throughout the essay, explained the dynamic nature of Black life and the various social and economic classes involved. It also imbues one with the will to change the world, not just describe it. True to his nature, however, Wright was not content with Marxist analysis alone. As he writes,
“Yet, for the Negro writer, Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life. After Marxism has laid bare the skeleton of society, there remains the task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones out of his will to live.” [emphasis mine]
Throughout the essay, Wright talks of writers having a consciousness. For him, this consciousness is not meant to compel Black writers to preach to their audiences, but to inform the writer’s perspective about the modern world and their place in it. Without that, the writer is “…a lost victim in a world he cannot understand or control.” It is through this consciousness, or “perspective” as Wright also calls it, that the Black writer can connect the daily lives of their people with the machinations of a global economic and political structure which defines the parameters of those lives.
This consciousness is also historical in scope. It involves some understanding of the African origins of Black Americans, and what was lost, as well as retained. With this perspective in place, the number of themes for Black writers is limitless. Dialectically, however, the limitless themes are themselves bound by the limit of the craft itself. Writing does not replace other forms of communication or artistic expression – it complements them.
That complementarity implicitly means that Black writers must work collectively, both among themselves and with other writers. Wright states,
“The ideological unity of Negro writers and the alliance of that unity with all the progressive ideas of our day is the primary prerequisite for collective work.”
Writing near the end of the Great Depression, on the eve of World War II, with the rise of Nazi Germany abroad, and the end of the Harlem Renaissance at home, Wright recognized the tumultuous moment he was in. His blueprint was meant to invigorate a new generation of Black writers to meet this moment. It feels fitting to leave Wright with the last word, which holds much resonance for our current time:
“These tasks are imperative in light of the fact that we live in a time when the majority of the basic assumptions of life can no longer be taken for granted. Tradition is no longer a guide. The world has grown huge and cold. Surely this is the moment to ask questions, to theorize, to speculate, to wonder what materials can a human world be built.”
Notes
[1] The essay can be found in “Richard Wright Reader”, edited by Ellen Wright and Michael Fabre.
This post has been syndicated from Read - Hampton Institute, where it was published under this address.