From No Man's Land to Mother-land: Emasculation and Nationalism in Richard Wright's Depression Era Urban Novels - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Anthony Dawahare

Not to plunge into the complex jungle of human relationships and analyze them is to leave the field to the fascists and I won't and can't do that. (Wright, qtd. in Fabre 185)

... anything that is felt to give out goodness and beauty, and that calls forth pleasure and satisfaction, in the physical or in the wider sense, can in the unconscious mind take the place of [the infant's perception of the mother's] ever-bountiful breast, and of the whole mother. Thus we speak of our own country as the "motherland" because in the unconscious mind our country may come to stand for our mother, and then it can be loved with feelings which borrow their nature from the relation to her. (Melanie Klein, "Love, Guilt and Reparation" 103)

While serving as Director of the Harlem Bureau of the Daily Worker between 1937 and 1938, Richard Wright wrote an article for the newspaper praising the launching of New Challenge, a black American literary quarterly that published first-rate black writers such as Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and Langston Hughes. Wright was particularly excited about the quarterly because "for the first time in Negro history problems such as nationalism in literature, perspective, the relation of the Negro to politics and social movements were formulated and discussed" ("Negro Writers" 7). For those familiar with Wright's "A Blueprint for Negro Writing," first published in New Challenge in 1937, it is obvious that he was applauding his own planned contribution to the quarterly, as "Blueprint" deals first and foremost with the problem of nationalism for black writers. Moreover, since the Daily Worker article and the New Challenge essay were written in the middle of 1937, it is safe to say that Wright, then twenty-eight years old, was beginning to formulate just what sort of contribution to black American writing he would make during the next few years. The literary works Wright wrote between 1937 and 1941 focus explicitly on issues related to nationalism, although scholars have yet to explore this fact in depth.

Remarkably, Wright's literary treatment of nationalism remains avant-garde since he reveals what many contemporary theorists have yet to disclose: a complex insight into the deep psychology of nationalism. Like many contemporary theorists, Wright viewed nationalism as an historical phenomenon that constructs what Benedict Anderson has termed "imagined communities" for people who in fact are anonymous to each other but wish for social communion. Wright also perceived nationalism as a divisive political ideology that must be supplanted with a Communist ideology he believed necessary for the emancipation of the working class. But Wright's most significant contribution is his synthesis of Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts in his effort to portray critically the insidious appeal of nationalistic ideas to the infantile desires of working-class men. For Wright, the danger posed by nationalism was its unconscious appeal to the psyches of male workers. His Depression Era works suggests that, since all male workers are raised in a patriarchal society, their feelings of powerlessness can evoke feelings of emasculation. Wright shows how these feelings of emasculation can be intensified for black men, since they are extra-oppressed by racism and are symbolically emasculated as "boys" in a racist discourse. In somewhat Oedipal terms, the black man is put in the position of having "to kill" the white man/father in order to cancel his "boy" status. Wright's concern is that black working-class men are apt to heed the call of black nationalists, precisely because they promise a reclamation of manhood and the goal of disposing of the white father - namely, the acquisition of the mother-land.

In Lawd Today! (completed in 1938 and posthumously published in 1963) and Native Son (1940), Wright represents urban black men in the grip of such a racialized Oedipal struggle. His urban protagonists internalize the racist dynamic of the black boy-white father dialectic and are thus psychologically caught between an impulse to act the black "boy" who submits (in various ways) to whites and a desire to be the "man," which involves behaviors associated with the powerful white father. In other words, his protagonists seek to compensate for their socially conditioned feelings of impotence through fantasies of omnipotence, which are fed and formed by the "logic" of American racism, as well as the nationalistic and fascistic ideologies that flourished internationally in the 1930s. Both social-psychological and political factors contribute to a complex ethnic/nationalistic psychology for his protagonists, who unconsciously associate the attainment of manhood with the possession of a black "motherland." However, while Wright represents the appeal of nationalism, he considers such an ideology incapable of self-reflexively addressing the very precondition for its being - i.e., a racist class society. As the above epigraph suggests, Wright believed it vital to disclose and, therefore, to lessen the subconscious appeal of nationalism in order to make possible progressive political action for working-class men that is not determined by the self-defeating logics of American racism and nationalism.