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

Jake continues to build "dreams of a black empire" and imagines an "epic where black troops were about to conquer the whole world" (144). His imperialistic fantasy is clearly informed by news of Hitler's war against Jews and the start of his European conquest. The "Exalted Commander" is cast as a sort of Hitler who will unify people.

Later in the text the nameless black voices that compose Part Two, Chapter IV confirm the importance of German and Italian nationalism to Wright's characters' thinking when we read, "'. . . it'd take a strong guy to make all these [multi-ethnic American] folks come under one command.' 'You telling me?' 'Like old Hitler . . .' '. . . and Mussellinni'" (183-84). The key point here is that Jake's "vague" cultural nationalism - forced blackness and hatred of whites - is transformed into black nationalism by the urban mass culture dominated by the ideologies of post-war nationalism at that time. In the above scenes, the various inter-war nationalisms - American nationalism, German nationalism, Italian nationalism, and black nationalism - bombard Jake and his friends, and, in their minds, all nationalisms are the same, since all nationalists appeal to their desires for power and control over their lives. On reading the Garveyites' Preamble that speaks of "One God! One Aim! One Destiny!" one of the characters says," 'Boy, that sounds like the Constitootion!'" (109). From his xenophobia, to his Republicanism, to the military metaphors he uses to describe the subduing of his hair, Jake proves himself to be a fine product of the nationalistic fascisization of the world.

In Native Son as well there are numerous passages that exemplify Wright's understanding of the psychological and cultural underpinnings of black nationalism. As suggested above, Bigger is a man who rejects his mother's black folk culture and is dazzled by American popular culture (Native Son 278) and, like Jake, identifies with the rabid nationalist projects of the 1930s:

Dimly, he felt that there should be one direction in which he and all other black people could go wholeheartedly. . . . He liked to hear of how Japan was conquering China; of how Hitler was running the Jew to the ground; of how Mussolini was invading Spain. . . . He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear and shame. (130)

Bigger identifies with these supposedly nationalist leaders because they are father figures or fuhrers who "whip" the imagined helpless black masses into shape for their own good. Both Jake and Bigger identify with nationalists precisely because they are authoritarian, supposedly omnipotent, and historically have been patriarchal to the core.

A supreme irony resides here, because Wright's male urban protagonists' displacement from the South (and its white father-black boy dialectic that narrowly defines place) results in the reemergence of the super-white ego in blackface. That is, displacement to a contradictory urban environment that promises all but grants little - and the desires, anxieties, and tensions which accompany it - has produced a counter-desire for placement structurally akin to that from which the characters originally fled. The discourse of American racism has worked so effectively that the original desired usurpation of the (Southern) master and desire for freedom have produced (within the racist wage-slavery of the urban society) a desire for a black master, motivated by the characters' infantile "reflex urge towards ecstasy, complete submission, and trust" ("How 'Bigger' "528). Wright's texts suggest that the frustrations of the No Man's Land and the appeal of nationalism are symptomatic of the failure of American capitalism to provide political, economic, and psychological stability conducive to his characters' desires for happiness and an enduring fulfillment.