Wright’s interest in matters racial and American was still intense, and he wondered if, “armed with these gloomy insights from an exiled life, I could aid my country in its clumsy grappling with alien realities.” These realities included the “naked and shivering world” of Asian and African nations just awakening to freedom. He saw the struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S. as inextricably linked to the full freedom for peoples of color throughout the world. So, while others participated in the boycotts and marches at home, he was convinced that he was fighting the same battles in global contexts by participating in debates on Negritude and Pan-Africanism and supporting movements for freedom in Africa and Asia. These new interests of Wright’s had been shaped by his friendship with George Padmore, a West Indian exile who lived in London, and through his involvements in the journal, Présence Africaine. In an unpublished essay, “I Choose Exile,” Wright had defended passionately his choice of living outside the U.S. by claiming his exile perspectives to represent the essence of Americanness, and he wondered in his correspondence why the exile of many white writers never received the kind of negative attention that his own did. While Wright was fully cognizant of racist and colonialist elements in the European psyche and conduct, his doubts about the American ability to completely overcome institutional racism were perhaps exacerbated by his own paranoia about the lingering specters of McCarthyism.
But the new role Wright was shaping for himself as a global intellectual was not unrelated to his earlier perspectives. By the late forties, it is clear that he had been thinking for some time about the relationship racism at home bore to the global realities of colonialism and capitalism, and had begun to view the American Negro as more than “America’s metaphor.” In 1946, he described the problem of 15 million black Americans as “symbolic” of the situation faced by over 1.5 billion people of color throughout the world. In a 1947 interview, he boldly declared the African-American to be “intrinsically a colonial subject, but one who lives not in China, India, or Africa but next door to his conquerors, attending their schools, fighting their wars, and laboring in their factories. The American Negro problem, therefore, is but a facet of the global problem that splits the world in two: Handicraft vs. Mass Production; Family vs. the Individual; Tradition vs. Progress; Personality vs. Collectivity; the East (the colonial peoples) vs. the West (exploiters of the world).”
In contrast to Hugh Kenner’s view of Robert Frost and William Faulkner as “homemade” artists, Wright emerged in the early 1950s as a literary descendant of the American expatriate writers of the 1920s whose craft and vision were shaped by European experience and influence. But he was also a descendant of slaves who made it his business to shape crosscultural perspectives on issues of identity, race, and colonialism—subjects neglected for the most part by the white Anglo-American modernists. In The Outsider (1953), Wright’s critique of fascism, Marxism, and existentialism is achieved through the career of its protagonist, Cross Damon, who filters these Western philosophies through his African-American experience as a “man gifted with a double vision,” as a center of “knowing,” being “both inside and outside of our culture at the same time.” At one level, Wright’s later nonfiction represents an autobiographical movement toward connection and renewal that is implicit in Damon’s final conversation with Ely Houston, the hunchbacked District Attorney who is both Damon’s foil and his “double.” It is not surprising that such a renewal in Wright’s case would spring from his lifelong curiosity about far-off places and other peoples of color. In the late 1950s, since there is no evidence that Wright had abandoned the novel and the short story as his primary forms of expression and since there is a convergence of motifs—e.g. (ab)uses of power by and for the individual and the community—in his writings of all genres, his later nonfiction must be seen as a crucial part of his intellectual and artistic growth.
Wright’s precocious fascination with distant social realities is evident in Black Boy: in Arkansas, the young Richard had pestered his mother with never-ending questions about “rifles” and “Germans” in World War I after a unit of black American soldiers marched past their home, causing him more terror than a chain-gang of men dressed in zebra stripes that he saw another day. In Black Power (1954), he views his Gold Coast trip as the fulfillment of his intense but unsatisfied curiosity as a boy about Africa. In the late 1930s, living in Chicago, as a member of the Communist Party, Wright had developed a serious interest in cultures and societies very different from the American life he had known. As early as 1941, he had considered going to the Soviet Union and China. In 1948–49, he had proposed a trip to Africa to report for the Associated Negro Press. Although neither of these trips materialized, Wright claimed that he was “temperamentally suited” to make such trips and report on their significance to fellow Americans.
Wright’s vision in the 1950s is thus a fuller development of these early global interests. In his later nonfiction, he was particularly interested in exploring the paradoxical situation of blacks in the West, developing compelling parallels between their condition and those of Westernized Asians and Africans. He regarded The Color Curtain as a “companion volume” to Black Power, where he had subjected a slice of African reality to the same kind of serious analysis that Europe had received for centuries. In White Man, Listen! (1957), as he examined colonialism and its psychological effects upon ordinary people throughout the world, Wright had expressed the hope that the Westernized leadership of new African and Asian nations would help their masses to disengage from “the irrational ties of religion and custom and tradition” to empower themselves through the same processes of modernization and industrialization that provided the foundations of democracy and individual freedom in the West.
This Westernized leadership was now meeting at Bandung, Indonesia, on April 18–25, 1955, to consider how they could help one another in achieving the social and economic well-being of their large and impoverished populations. Wright notes several times in The Color Curtain how this first-ever gathering of twenty-nine African and Asian nations was generally ignored by the Western media and viewed with hostility and suspicion by government agencies in Europe and the U.S. For Wright, this meeting of leaders who represented well over a billion people, the “underdogs of the human race,” was “a kind of judgement upon the Western world.” Their agenda at Bandung included advancing shared social, economic, and political interests; finding solutions to problems of “national sovereignty and of racialism and colonialism” and making joint contributions to “the promotion of world peace and co-operation.”
Wright felt that his background as a black person from the American South and his experience with the Communist Party qualified him well as a reporter for the West on this unprecedented conference of nations that represented diverse races, religions, and ideologies but were brought together by their past experience of colonialism and continuing distrust of the West. Wright received financial support for his trip from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but since he had an inkling of the Congress’s links with the Department of State and the CIA, he made sure by prior agreement that this assistance would not in any way impair his freedom of speech as a writer and journalist.
Two
The Color Curtain is as much Wright’s Asian book as Black Power had been his African book. The Bandung Conference included representatives from both African and Asian nations, but none of the major black African leaders were actually present there and, as Wright noted, “Negro Africa” was the weakest part of the conference even in terms of awareness. The conference was dominated by Asian nationalist leadership from countries such as Indonesia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Burma (now Myanmar), and the Philippines, but especially by the towering figures of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Prime Minister Chou En Lai of People’s Republic of China. As if to match the Asian dominance at the conference held in an Asian location, Wright’s book is suffused with Asia, especially Indonesia, as seen through the filter of what Wright called the “Asi
an personality.”
Wright showed his resourcefulness in briskly developing unorthodox techniques in approaching his new assignment in Asia. For his earlier trips to the Gold Coast and Spain, which formed the bases of Black Power and Pagan Spain (1957) respectively, Wright had done extensive library research. To prepare himself for his trip to Indonesia, he took the unusual step of developing a questionnaire with the help of sociologist Otto Klineberg. Between January and April 1955, he used this questionnaire to develop a comparative view of issues affecting individuals in modern life. He interviewed five individuals in Europe—four Asians and Eurasians and one Indonesian-born Dutch man—in order to gain some understanding of Asian attitudes and politics. While his quest for “the Asian personality” (like his concept of “the African personality” in Black Power) might appear to collapse significant differences that make up Asia, his methodological framework in The Color Curtain allows him to achieve a balanced perspective and avoid the worst pitfalls of homogenization. The extended interviews with diasporic Asians of diverse backgrounds residing in Europe are followed by interviews with Indonesian professionals, politicians, and journalists interspersed with detailed descriptions of Indonesian life and landscape. The effect of this creative mingling of detail is to evoke the reality of one particular nation, Indonesia (although he did not travel here as extensively as he had done in the Gold Coast), mediated through the strong sense of raw emotion and traces of self-hatred in “the Asian personality” that his interviews cumulatively convey.
Some of the questions Wright asked each of the five individuals he interviewed in Europe called for some very specific personal responses regarding their religious, educational, and family backgrounds, while others were aimed at gauging their general sense of the world in relation to “race,” class, and colonialism. It is interesting, for example, to note how the Asian respondents almost invariably rejected the notion that specific geographical regions are intended only for specific peoples or “races,” showing an early awareness of the dialogic, hybrid nature of national and ethnic identity in contemporary life.
Wright’s poring over his interview notes during his journey by night train from Paris to Madrid conveys a sense of urgency about his project of travelling from West to East, underscoring the openness and spirit of inquiry that marked his desire to discover and connect to the “Asian personality.” The five sections of the book together represent three clear movements. The excitement and exuberance of the new learner in the opening section gives way to more sober observations of Indonesian life and politics in the middle sections, building up our interest in the conference and preparing us for the controlled pessimism of his final thoughts. Each movement is shaped by a combination of rhetorical and literary strategies, including interviews with individuals, descriptions of personality and landscape, journalistic re-capturing of ideas and analysis—livened up occasionally by a novelistic treatment of event and character as in the “Sterno” episode in the chapter entitled “Racial Shame at Bandung” which returns to the motif of Asian self-hatred in the opening section.
Once again, as he had done in Black Power, Wright allows his readers a sense of participation in his own heuristic project, opening up the possibility of learning from travel in unknown surroundings. Thus Wright’s later nonfiction marks a very different approach to travel literature, for example, from that represented in recent decades by V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant trajectories of raw nerves and preconceived theories of whole and “half-made” societies. Wright’s own ambivalences and resistances, which provided some of the drama in Black Power, seem closer to resolution now—there is in The Color Curtain a stronger sense of connection and empathy, of understanding and commitment. Also, the Richard Wright we encounter here is a more experienced explorer, who shows an ability to observe and absorb more quickly and a deeper faith in his own perspectives. His method in both The Color Curtain and Black Power is also illumined in some ways by the theory of writing he had outlined as early as 1935 in his unpublished essay, “Personalism.” As a literary expression of “personal protest” which emphasizes “tendency rather than form or content,” personalism is in a sense “anti-aesthetic” as it seeks “to make those who come into contact with it take sides for or against certain moral issues” (cited in Fabre, op. cit.). By placing himself as an explorer in a domain of “self-consciousness, of nervousness, of questioning, of seeking, of trial and of wandering,” Wright draws the reader into a set of choices regarding the moral issues embedded in his narrative.
For Wright, some of these moral issues were defined by his interaction with the Indonesian people and landscape. Arriving in Jakarta on April 12, Wright was saddened by the harsh evidence of the 350-year colonial rule in the metropolis of 3 million people and the impoverished lives of its residents. The Dutch seemed to have exploited the rich resources of this island nation stretched over 3,000 miles of land and sea even more systematically than other colonial powers elsewhere in their Asian colonies. In the nineteenth-century, Netherlands Indies (the name the Dutch used for Indonesia) had for all practical purposes supported the industrialization of the Netherlands through its stupendous contributions of revenue. Through the introduction of extensive forced cultivation known as “Culture System,” Holland had organized by 1830 an intensive exploitation of land and labor in Java, the most densely populated of the 15,000 islands, where the peasants were obliged to grow commercial crops for the colonizers on more than two-fifths of their land. In 1940, a couple of years before the ruthless Japanese occupation, the Dutch nationals—some 200,000 of whom resided in Indonesia—had investments worth $1,300 million in the colony. Sutan Sjahir, a respected Socialist leader and thinker, told Wright how the Japanese occupation had paradoxically strengthened the nationalist movement against Dutch colonial rule. The Dutch “caved in” to the Japanese, they “bowed” and “begged” “Dutch fear of the Japanese was a powerful psychological element in our resolve to fight the Dutch for our freedom,” Sjahir explains.
In 1955, however, Wright is struck more by the post-independence realities of poor housing and inadequate schooling, complicated by signs of neocolonial control. He notes how Jakarta, like Accra in the Gold Coast, “presents to Western eyes a commercial aspect, naked and immediate, that seems to swallow up the entire population in petty trade—men, women, and children…. [O]ne must sell to buy products shipped by Europe.” He views the canals built by the Dutch in Jakarta as an imperial project inappropriate to Indonesian climate and landscape, observing how the poor urban residents use them for washing, bathing and defecation. He learns from journalist Mochtar Lubis about the nightmarish Chinese ghettoes, about bandits who pose a threat to safety and political stability, and about how the Indonesian rickshaws called betjas are shameful reminders of colonial rule.
Three
Early in the book, Wright’s conversations with his wife make it clear how new and exciting the idea of Bandung was for him. But for many of its major participants, the project that Bandung represented had had a respectable history. While Wright might not have had a detailed knowledge of the backstage maneuverings before and during the conference, he proves himself a shrewd observer of the dynamic of idea and personality at Bandung in recognizing Jawaharlal Nehru as a pivotal presence. In fact, it was Nehru who served as a link between Bandung and its precursors and otherwise provided the foundational framework for the conference. At Bandung, Nehru made a case once again for non-alignment and neutrality as a way for African and Asian nations to stay clear of the Cold War tensions between the two super powers or otherwise mediate between their conflicting claims.
Nehru had been deeply influenced in his political thinking by his participation in February 1927 at the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels, undoubtedly a major precursor to Bandung. It was at this conference that he, as a representative of Indian National Congress, met for the first time a wide array of representatives of colonial peoples and their European and Latin American supporters—radical nationalis
ts along with left-wing socialists and orthodox Communists. And it was at Brussels that the idea of forming a group of African and Asian nations for mutual cooperation was first conceived. Again, in March 1947, Nehru made his debut on the international scene by hosting in New Delhi the first Asian Relations Conference, an impressive gathering of scores of Asian nations. Echoing Emerson’s “American Scholar” plea against European hegemony, Nehru caught the mood of the conference in his inaugural speech by asserting the place of Asia and Asians in the world political community, stressed Asia’s “special responsibility” for Africa, and concluded with a plea for faith in the human spirit.
Many readers have noted how Wright’s persona is a central presence in travel books such as Pagan Spain, Black Power, and The Color Curtain. When Wright writes about Africa and Asia, his emotional and political impulses are implicated at one level through his strong empathy with the Westernized leaders, the “tragic elite” to whom he dedicated White Man, Listen!, “men who are distrusted, misunderstood, maligned, criticized by Left and Right, Christian and pagan…and who…seek desperately for a home for their hearts: a home which, if found, could be a home for the hearts of all men.” From Wright’s portrait of Nehru in The Color Curtain and from their brief correspondence, it would appear that Wright felt a special affinity with Nehru. The two men shared an attraction to Marxism and socialism, but Wright, the independent artist, would have agreed with Nehru, the patrician aristocrat, who declared in his autobiography, Toward Freedom, that “communists often irritated me by their dictatorial ways, their aggressive and rather vulgar methods, their habit of denouncing everybody who did not agree with them.” Based on his conversations at the conference, Wright found Nehru to be “logical, quick, observant, and knowing,” someone who, like India, was “part East, part West.” However, Wright hints that at Bandung Nehru was being used by the “coy” and smooth Communist, Chou En-lai, who made masterful moves to gain legitimacy for the People’s Republic of China among resistant Third World nations, approaching the conference participants with “utmost friendliness and reserve…turning the other cheek when receiving ideological slaps.”
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