Wright As a Writer
July 27th, 2011 | Author: admin
http://www.seniorcareatlakepointe.info/centennial-salutes-to-the-birth-growth-and-improvement-of-richard-wright-as-a-writer/
I have for long been touched by the literary excellence of Black Boy
of all Richard Wright's work which I have had a reading, teaching
contact spanning roughly thirty years, a duration in which I have kept
wondering as to what makes it such a breathtaking representation of a
writer and at the same time remain a lively, gripping, intriguing, and
illuminating read roughly throughout the pages. That this year is the
Centennial of his birth which is being marked deservedly well with
many literary events I belief that it could be the most needed
catalyst to drive me into putting my thoughts, reflections and
recollections of this ever-present Black Boy in print.
A celebration of the life and works of Richard Wright is requisite and
justified for me in Sierra Leone as his works both Black Boy and
Native Son are taught and studied at all levels of our educational
theory from secondary school level upwards and have left an indelible
impression on all who have read them. I have taught Black Boy for
roughly ten years from the teacher training college Milton Margai, to
librarians in training at Fourah Bay College and I and my students
have agreed it is an irreplaceable gem – his style as much as his
stoicism and his unswerving pursuance of self-improvement in spite of
all the military pitted against him, being a model for all .
One of America's greatest African-American writers, Richard Wright was
among the first Black writers to achieve literary fame and fortune.
But this was due mostly to the superb quality of his work: his vivid
descriptions of scenes, the sense of gradation in portrayal,
psychological penetration of his characters at various stages of their
growing up, especially so Black Boy, his capturing the traumas, pain
and anxieties of growing up black in the southern states of America in
the early twentieth century, and his commitment to championing the
cause of blacks whereever they live, Africa or the Diaspora.
Richard Nathaniel Wright, the grandson of a slave was born and spent
the first years of his life on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi
in September 4 1908.. His father, Nathaniel, was an illiterate
sharecropper and his mother, Ella Wilson, was a well-educated school
teacher. The family's ultimate poverty forced them to move to Memphis,
Tennessee, in 1913 when Richard was six years old. Although he spent
only a few years of his life in Mississippi, those years would play a
key role in two of his most recognized works: Native Son, a novel, and
his autobiography, Black Boy.
Soon after moving, his father abandoned the family, leaving his mother
to reserve them alone. His family moved to Jackson, Mississippi to
live with relatives. Wright's whole life was fraught with such
continual inviting from one town to another, some sudden and
traumatic, staying with relatives, at orphanages, enduring cleavages
with family members and teachers, fighting incessantly with bullies,
white street gangs,as much as his constant fight against hunger,
hypocrisy, parental neglect and the trauma of living in an household
of manifold sick members and coping with the drudgery of Christian
fundamentalism
So when in the spring of 1925 at the age of 15, Wright wrote his first
story "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre", and it was published in
Southern Register, a local black newspaper, he had minute reserve and
encouragement from his family. For his grandmother had already
conscripted every one on her side against Richard's independent and
creative spirit.
He had to invent a high level of motivation and daring , to go ahead.
He forged notes with the signatures of whites in order to borrow books
from the library for him to satisfy his unquenchable thirst for great
literature
He graduated as valedictorian of his 9th grade class in May 1925, and
enacted someone else daring defiance against authority by reading his
own speech instead of the principal's..He left school a few weeks
after entering High School, worked at any menial jobs in Jackson and
Memphis while persisting writing and discovering the works of the
masters. In 1927 he moved northwards to Chicago where he joined the
communist party and wrote articles and stories for many leftist
publications. He later became the leader of the John Reed club which
was dominated by the Communist Party. While this time, he edited Left
Front and contributed to New Masses Magazines.
In 1937, he moved to New-York and began work on a Writers task guide
book to the city entitled New York Panorama, and subsequently became
the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker. He gained national
attentiveness for his four short stories in Uncle Tom's Children,
which earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship Award; which allowed him to
complete his first novel Native Son in 1940. Native Son subsequently
became the first Book of the Month Club selection by an African
American author.
He married Ellen Poplar in 1941, and together they had two daughters,
Julia and Rachel.
In 1944 he broke away from the Communist Party. After inviting to
Paris in 1946,and becoming a French population in 1947, he wrote The
Outsider, Savage Holiday and Black Power. His travels throughout
Europe, Asia and Africa became the subject for numerous non-fictional
works that he wrote. In 1949 he contributed to the anti-communist
anthology The God That Failed, and his essay was published in the
Atlantic Monthly three years earlier.
In 1955, he visited Indonesia for the Bandung Conference. His recorded
observations of it were published in his book The Color Curtain: A
article on the Bandung Conference.
His other works comprise White Man, Listen!, The Long Dream, and Eight
Men; and a host of other publications.
He died in Paris in November, 1960, leaving an unfinished book A
Father's Law which was published by his daughter, Julia., in January
2008.
Richard Wright's most requisite contribution is in accurately and
vividly portraying blacks to white as well as black readers thus
becoming requisite reading to what it means to be a Black American and
equally an American of whatever ethnic background.
His eldest daughter Julia Wright a journalist and the literary
executrix of Richard Wright's estate has edited the last of his books
to be published: Haiku, A Father's Law, and Black Power. On the
occasion of Richard Wright Centennial she sets the background showing
when her mother, Ellen Poplar married her father, Richard Wright, on
March 12 1941 and their life together until his death. Whilst he died
in 1960 she died on April 6 2004, at the ripe age of 92. Forty four
years after Richard. They are both buried in exile in Paris. Ellen was
the Executrix of the Richard Wright Estate for long decades before her
death, and was as well a literary agent in her own right . In the late
seventies, Celia returned to Paris from her freelance journalism work
in Africa to help her aging mother to cope the management of Richard
Wright's papers and books. As from 2004, Celia took over fully and
wholely representing the Estate in her late mother's place.
She convinced Harper Collins to publish his last unpublished draft,
uncorrected and unsubmitted. Death truly prevented him from giving it
the ending he would have wanted for it. It is called "A Father's Law"
and was published by Harper Collins on January 8th with a short
introduction by Celia, describing how she found it and related to the
conflict between the generations it depicts.
Remembering Richard Wright's readership, deprived for so long from his
political non fiction written in exile at the height of the Cold War,
she has tried to bring out these three books, essentially as a
trilogy, Black Power, White man, listen!, The Color Curtain. They,
according to her had been allowed to fall out of print for reasons of
poor sales – as some claimed; or for reasons of black listing as
others claimed.
Once again, Harper Collins has worked in trade with her to fulfill her
wish to give these later writings back to the collective by issuing an
omnibus containing all three works, which hit the bookshops in
February 2008.
Meanwhile, the idea of a initial series of Pre-Centennial Lectures and
gatherings to plan Richard Wright events was born. The idea was to
give autobiographical talks based on her own work in progress wherever
interest in Richard Wright was strong and leave her hosts free to
brainstorm and plan their own creative tributes to Richard Wright from
Centennial Committees to Festivals to art and the creation of
landmarks and encouragement of his ideas, from literacy to the
unrelenting struggle against racism.
During 2006, she followed the trail of Pre-Centennial interest in him
from Seattle to the University of Columbia, Missouri….. In New
Orleans, she spoke on the uncanny resemblance with Katrina, of the
floods portrayed in "Uncle Tom's Children" and "Eight Men"" only to
speak the following week in arid Arizona on campus but also in the
community. She spoke at the University of Massachusetts and a few days
later at the University of Temple and at the University of
Pennsylvania, she was the guest of Professor Joyce Anne Joyce, one of
the first superior Richard Wright scholars. … Meanwhile, Professor
Jerry Ward was stimulating the creation of Richard Wright Reading
Circles throughout the South whilst women like Professor Maryemma
Graham and Dr. Colia Clark traced a network of revival throughout the
land.
In 2008 there was much action from February 20 to 24 in Natchez, The
Natchez Literary and Film Festival totally dedicated to Richard
Wright, took place from March 28-March 30. She spoke on the theme of
Transmission and Resistance at the conference of Black Writers at
Medgar Evers College.. On March 29 at the Schomburg town in Harlem,
Howard Dodson and Professor Maryemma Graham wwere on a panel of
historians discussing : Richard Wright at 100 : looking backward and
forward hosted by the assosication of American Historians. April 13th
2008 was Richard Wright day at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill. With a day long commemoration where Celia shared the
keynote with her longstanding friend, Pr. Jerry Ward.
April 20th to 27th was Richard Wright Week in Philadelphia. June 19
and 20: American University of Paris, hosted an international
conference on Richard Wright. June 28th : a conference on Richard
Wright was held in Hiroshima, Japan, sponsored by the Japanese Black
Studies Association.
September 4 to 12 2008 at Jackson Mississippi will be observed as
Richard Wright week at various venues . Then in October 1st 2008 Celia
Wright will be giving the first DuBois invent lecture in Harvard .
Activities celebrating the centennial of Richard Wright's birth will
spill over into 2010 to merge with the commemoration of his premature
death in 1960.
"Everybody has internalized his or her Richard Wright. … If, as his
elder daughter, I had a personal emphasis to put I would say that
though the elites of Academia have claimed him and truly deconstructed
and post-deconstructed him, he belongs in the end to the community.
Bigger was electrocuted by the State, x-rayed by showpiece Academia,
given care and attentiveness where academics can be most generous –
and yet, elusive still he is alive and kicking out there seeking
answers to questions that are being asked manifold."
- Julia Wright, Paris Dec 18th 2007
Through his writing Richard Wright not only captured his experiences
as well as those of other blacks in the written word, but through him
the written word became a weapon used to destroy ignorance, racism,
economic violence and classicism. He challenged ordinarily held
stereotypes and notions of inferiority, defining black population as
full characters who were free to act upon the stage of human history
as commonplace human beings. The subjects and issues that his
characters struggled with represented the worst of human experience:
poverty, illiteracy, violence, race, abandonment, the fatherless
child, hunger, capitalism, racism, colonialism and war. Wright's
thoughts are derived from the political and collective fabric of his
time reflecting contributions of great men before him like W.E.B.
Dubois and Paul Robeson and in turn passed a patrimony of collective
consciousness in literature and influenced the civil proprietary and
liberation struggles of the second half of the twentieth century,
together with population like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm
X .
Centennial Salutes to the Birth, growth and improvement of Richard
Wright As a Writer
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