Performance: Richard Wright in 2015
Despite my having “performed” Richard Wright with a modicum
of success some years ago in a Chautauqua series sponsored by the Mississippi
Humanities Council, I know virtually nothing about performance theory as an “interdisciplinary
area of study and critical method” as it is discussed in the recent book Black Performance Theory (Duke University
Press 2014) edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. For me, performing Wright was a matter of
absorbing what I could of his personality and changing states of mind from his
writings, listening to his recorded voice, and praying that at some spiritual
level Wright would channel my imagination.
I am not an actor, so I just gathered courage and, one magical night, I
did become Richard Wright. Or so that
was what several people in the audience told me.
Tonight I had the opportunity to witness the performance of
a project conceptualized by Dr. Ross Louis, a professor in Xavier University of
Louisiana’s Department of Communication Studies, that used “haiku as a
performance aesthetic to prompt questions about Richard Wright, his haiku, Native Son and Black Boy. Borrowing the title “This Other World” from
the collection of 817 haiku selected from the approximate 4,000 haiku Wright
wrote in the last two years of his life, Louis did substantial research in the
Richard Wright Papers at Yale University and then wove a small number of haiku
and Julia Wright’s introduction to Haiku:
This Other World (1989) together with excerpts from Native Son, Black Boy
(especially the young Richard’s inquiries about race, his catalog of very
poetic discovery images, and the moment of verbal paralysis in a school room), “Blueprint
for Negro Writing,” and “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.” It is
important the Wright’s collection has been most recently published as Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon,
because the change of title is itself a publishing “performance” that has
consequences for our reception of Wright’s work. Louis directed two Xavier students, Thomas
James Nash II and Mia Selena Ruffin, in using their voices and bodies to
perform a quite challenging sketch of Wright’s creativity at the end of his
life. Presented in the outdoor sculpture
garden of Xavier’s Art Village, the experiment succeeded in dealing with two
questions: 1) How does Wright represent place within his haiku, especially
rural Southern places? And 2) How do the values of the haiku genre guide
decisions about space, time and movement in a performance of Wright’s work?
Nevertheless, the experiment raises enormous questions about our motives in
transforming Wright’s poetry into sound and motion and spectacle in 2015.
As the sun set over New Orleans and Xavier on a breezy
spring evening with the background musicality of construction noises, I was at
once pleased with the originality of the experiment and disturbed that the
performance was not followed by some dialogue among the audience, the director,
and the performers. The originality
consisted in putting Wright’s haiku or projections in the haiku manner into
Nature (the site specificity of New Orleans) and saluting the Japanese spirit
of creating a certain kind of poetic experience. This was far more satisfying than flawed
adaptations of Wright’s works for the stage, the movies, and the television
screen. Without clarifying dialogue about what was absent ----especially a
clear connection between Wright’s early proletarian poetry and his late, very
American projections of haiku---I think the quality of aesthetic experience for
the audience depended overmuch on how little or how much people knew about
Richard Wright, how little or how much people knew about a kind of Japanese
poetry that is internationally very popular and only lately getting critical notice
in Wright studies by way of such books as The
Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (2011), edited by
Jianqing Zheng and Yoshinobu Hakutani’s Richard
Wright and Haiku (2014). Already
Zheng and Hakutani have been challenged in Dean Anthony Brink’s article on
Wright’s search for a counter-hegemonic genre in Textual Practice 28.6 (2014) for giving insufficient attention to
Wright’s use of anamorphic possibilities in writing haiku. The performance at Xavier was a very rich
exposition of the problems of anamorphism, but the audience did not have an opportunity
to begin exploring that topic.
I applaud Dr.Ross Louis and the student performers for their
genuine effort to pay tribute to a portion of Richard Wright’s legacy to world
literature. I had a great experience
because I know Wright’s works well. I do
know that one other spectator had a less felicitous experience in following the
spaced arrangement of the project’s content. I must insist, in light of that
fact , that the Xavier Performance Studies Laboratory have a public discussion
of exactly what it performed in it “This Other World” presentation. It is not
perverse to ask, borrowing language from DeFrantz and Gonzalez, whether Xavier’s
quite specific “experimentation with form and ingenuity” is “part of what has
been called ‘the black aesthetic’ (10). It is likely that Richard Wright would
urge us to have just that discussion in order to grasp the ineluctable
complexity of everyday multicultural phenomena in New Orleans and to determine
why his works, haiku and all, are such powerful tools for shaping critical
consciousness of everyday life.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. March 27, 2015
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