Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections - Reviews - Book Review

African American Review, Fall, 2002 by John M. Reilly

Virginia Whatley Smith, ed. Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. 2001. 248 pp. $40.00 cloth/$22.00 paper.

Travel has long been associated with wisdom. The well-traveled person "knows" distant places and, thus, has often gained new insight into his/her place of origin. While the body travels through spatial geography, the mind undertakes its own voyage of discovery, a journey of cognitive mapping. In the archaic world, Odysseus sailed through the known, and unknown, world, returning with knowledge that allowed him a new purchase on life in Ithaca. In the twentieth century the young Mississippian Richard Wright journeyed to Chicago, although later he wrote that he did not yet know his story when he arrived in the city. It took a second journey on Wright's part, this one into the realm of theory he discovered by reading the works of the Chicago School of Sociology, before he acquired the cognitive map by which he charted his experiences, so that they would yield the coordinates of fiction and autobiography. How significant it seems, then, that knowledge-giving travel is associated with literature either as a report on journeys of discovery or as virtual journeys that readers of the Iliad and the works of Richard Wright may undertake, just as Wright himself did, to learn some cartography of identity and reality.

Placed under the aspect of the "new reflections" embodied in this book edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, the travels undertaken by Wright later in his career reveal a complex dialectic. The three books he published relating his travels--Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain--and a fourth that would report on a trip into French West Africa that he was planning at the time of his death, embody an interchange between appropriation and application. As a writer with contracts and advances for the production of the accounts of his ventures into the Gold Coast on the cusp of independence, the milieu of a political conference in Bandung, and Fascist Spain, Wright was commissioned to return with the information and knowledge he would acquire about places and occurrences foreign to most American readers in the 1950s. The chief instrument Wright carried with him on these travels was the set of conceptual structures he had devised, under the tutelage of the Chicago School. This epistemological charting tool had given him the means to "know" his own story at home in African America. Now as an African American abroad, he could, using the same instrument, work with a feeling of confidence that his equipment had prepared him again to "know."

According to the essays compiled by Virginia Whatley Smith, the synthesis of this dialectic of interchange was the unique genre he forged upon the model of travel literature. In her own essay on The Color Curtain, Smith terms the genre an eclectic travel account, which she explains "integrates the fields of literature, journalism, history, sociology, psychology, and anthropology to construct a text delineating [Wright's] role as the travel writer/narrator and participant/ observer of the Bandung Conference." John Lowe, examining Pagan Spain through astute close reading of the narrative persona, builds a description of the text as a combination of the dual narratives of ethnography. Where ethnographers usually produce formal reports and personal narratives for separate publication, Richard Wright combines the two in pioneering a new hybrid out of investigative writing learned from the Chicago School and the observations of an ideal viewer. Dennis F. Evans, also writing on Pagan Spain, and attending to the book 's sympathetic presentation of women as part of its critique of the phallocentric Church and State, determines that the work ought to be placed in the canon of Wright's autobiographical work, where it will be seen to counter his more typical masculinist stances and, thus, expand our understanding of the man.

Other essays in the volume figure the template of Wright's travel writing to be more derivative. For instance, S. Shankar, writing about Black Power, first relates the book to other "typical Colonial" narratives and, second, explores Wright's "political geography"--his assertion of a diasporic link through a common heritage of suffering and a hunger for freedom. The result, by Shankar's reading, is a work that assimilates Africa into the discourse of alterity at the same time that it applauds the drive for national liberation. Noting the ambivalence toward Africa so often observed by critics of Black Power, Ngwarsungu Chiwengo elaborates the point to conclude, in agreement with Shankar, that the distanced narrator, whose discourse by the way is conditioned by literary sources (which is to say, affected by Wright's developed instrument for knowing), has created a neo-colonialist work.

While taking account of the evident relationships between Wright's travel books and other works of literature, none of the essayists derogates Wright on this account. On the contrary, there are rich discoveries to be made by intertextual analyses, such as those presented in the essays by Keneth Kinnamon, Yoshinobu Hakutani, and Jack B. Moore. Kinnamon addresses what might seem to be inevitable parallels between the treatment of bullfighting in Wright's Pagan Spain and Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon to uncover significant contrasts resulting from Wright's countering Hemingway's focus on the bullfighter with his own center of attention--the mythologized bull. Equally notable are Kinnamon's discussion of Wright's interest in sexuality and the equivalence he finds in the rendition of bullfighting as a secular version of Spanish Catholicism. Hakutani introduces a far less familiar comparison of Wright to the poet Basho in order to develop previously unnoted relationships in Wright's work to Zen Buddhism that would flower in the vast haiku project Wright undertook in his last illness. In his analysis of the dynamics of The Color Curtain, Hakutani concurs with formulations of his companion essayists in judging the travel book to be less about Bandung than about Wright. For Jack B. Moore, whose essay is the only reprint in the volume, Wright on Africa belongs in the long tradition of travel writing, dating back to John Smith and continuing into the publications of Paul Theroux and V. S. Naipaul, where fiction and fact are blurred. Moore has elsewhere proposed reading Black Power as a novel (Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines, 1987). Here, in elaborating on the proposal, Moore describes how Wright "constructed" Accra and an Africa that reflect the enervation and depression he felt in its midst.