Exploring Richard Wright’s Other World
Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard
Wright and Haiku. Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2014.
Zheng, Jianqing, ed. The
Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
During
the seventeen years since the publication of Haiku: This Other World (New York: Arcade, 1998), scholars and
critics have been at once fascinated and puzzled by the fact that Richard
Wright (1908-1960) composed slightly more than 4,000 haiku during the last two
years of his life. The magnitude of his
output is impressive, very impressive for a writer plagued by illness and
political surveillance. It is now commonplace
to claim that Wright’s experiments with a Japanese poetic genre were therapeutic,
but such a proposition is not sufficient.
One of the outstanding features of Wright’s prose fiction and
non-fiction was powerful, often jolting, imagery. Something beyond therapy that we may not yet
be able to name motivated his deep investment in the discipline of haiku.
Recent
books by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Jianqing Zheng seek to forge a critical
discourse that can benefit readers who have a special interest in haiku or
Richard Wright or both. Within the
limits that are perhaps innate in explanatory activity, these books do move us
forward in a quest to understand more about Wright’s exploration in that other
world of haiku. They help us to understand a little better the changing
tensions between ancient Japanese and modern American ideas regarding poetry,
poetics and aesthetics, and the cultural functions of haiku. Hakutani and Zheng invite us to participate
in crucial critical work.
Hakutani’s
Richard Wright and Haiku focuses
primarily on Wright’s creativity within a specific genre. One might expect that the study would
illuminate Wright’s innovations as well as dialogues among haiku scholars about
the consequences of innovation. Hakutani
is one of the leading experts on haiku in the United States and an esteemed
Richard Wright scholar. Along with
Robert L. Tener, he edited the first edition of Haiku: This Other World and provided invaluable notes and an
afterword. In Richard Wright and Racial
Discourse (1996), chapter 12 “Nature, Haiku, and ‘This Other World’,” he
provided a summary of points he has consistently made about haiku, Zen, an
African view of life, Wright’s retreat from moral, political, social, and
intellectual to find “in nature his latent poetic sensibility” (RWRD 261). It is noteworthy that Hakutani concluded this
chapter by assuring readers that “Just as [Wright’s] fiction and nonfiction
directly present” the conviction that materialism and greed are “twin culprits
of racial conflict,” Wright’s haiku “as racial discourse indirectly express the
same conviction” (291). That Richard
Wright and Haiku hesitates to engage implications of such a conviction is
one of its shortcomings.
Hakutani
chose to divide the book into Part I History and Criticism and Part II Selected
Haiku by Richard Wright. Five of the
chapters in Part I summarize the long history of Japanese haiku and the major
work Yone Noguchi did in bringing notice of the genre to the English-speaking
world of the early twentieth century; the remaining five chapters discuss
Wright’s haiku as English poems and senryu, the relationship of those poems to
classic haiku and modernist poetics, and Hakutani’s idée fixe about Wright’s discovering “a primal outlook on life”
which might reveal what Akan religion and Zen Buddhism share in common. Let it
suffice that Wright possessed a primal outlook independent of his visiting
Ghana and writing Black Power, and
more thorough investigation of Wright’s use of African American rather than
African lore is desirable. Hakutani’s
failure to use a skeptical, multi-dimensional perspective on what has been
called the cultural unity of African thought is a demerit. Part II reprints 145
of the 817 haiku published in Haiku: This
Other World along with the corresponding “Notes on the Haiku” from that
edition. The recycling does not escape notice.
For
readers who know very little about haiku or Richard Wright, Part I provides
enlightenment, and Part II may encourage them to read all of the published
haiku. More advanced readers may use
Part I to refresh their memories of the haiku presence in American poetry and
to ask questions about what such poets as Lenard D. Moore and Sonia Sanchez
have contributed to the genre. On the
other hand, some Wright scholars might dismiss the truncated repetition of Part
II and invest energy in comparing Wright’s early proletarian poetry with his
later haiku by way of a close reading of Eugene E. Miller’s Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of
Richard Wright (1990).
It
would have been politic for Hakutani to have acknowledged either continuity or
discontinuity between Miller’s study and his own work in poetics. He would have impressed his readers with
greater attention to incongruities in the study of Wright’s haiku and minimized
the sense that he is reaffirming overmuch the “official” perspective he and
Tener established. Hakutani’s choices in
recycling so much in Richard Wright and
Haiku are not fatal and certainly should not preclude a fair reading of the
book. On the other hand, he does not satisfy a reader’s hunger for insights
about Wright as much as does The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives
on His Haiku.
It is
exceptionally valuable to have complementary and contrasting views of Wright’s
haiku, because only a few scholars have read all of his 4,000 plus haiku in the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. A complete analysis of the haiku with the aid
of a remarkable database recently constructed by Toru Kiuchi will unsettle any
comfortable ideas about Wright’s poetics. Jianqing Zheng has an uncanny sense
of what is necessary; his anthology sets us on a journey toward future critical
assessments of Wright and, indeed, toward expansive interpretations of the
varying functions haiku can have in the contemporary world. Zheng made good choices in publishing
original essays in tandem with reprinted ones from such journals as MELUS, Valley Voices, Tamkang Review,
and Journal of College of Industrial
Technology (Nihon University). The ten essays in this anthology invite
readers to contemplate Wright’s daring and discipline, his flaws and triumphs,
his humor and use of the American South and racial histories in grounding his
haiku, and his fidelity to 5-7-5 syllable structures. Special notice should be given to Richard A.
Iadonisi’s challenging argument that Wright’s haiku are not quite the escape
hatches many believe they are and to Zheng’s belief “that nature, which
fulfilled Wright and made him an integrated part of it through his haiku, is a
fundamental element in his works” (TOWRW
xvii). One must entertain the
possibility that Wright’s signature skepticism precluded any ideal, aesthetic
integration with nature and exposed the mythopoetics of writers ancient and
modern who assert they have achieved sublime enlightenment. Even as Wright
submitted to the severe discipline of classical Japanese haiku, he was defiant
in creating a body of poems that ultimately are projections in the haiku
manner.
Richard Wright and Haiku and The Other World of Richard Wright are
commendable guides that point us toward a future in the study of Richard Wright’s
poetics. They strengthen us to measure the merits of groundbreaking claims in
Dean Anthony Brink’s article “Richard Wright’s Search for a Counter-hegemonic
Genre: the Anamorphic and Matrixial Potential of Haiku,” Textual Practice 28.6 (2014): 1077-1102. In many ways our exploring
of Wright’s other world is always a beginning, a fresh attempt to understand
mysteries, those red suns that take our names away.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
