Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature: West Meets East

Cro s s - Cu lt u r a l Vi sions i n A f r ic a n A m e r ic a n Li t e r at u r e

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Cro s s - Cu lt u r a l Vi sions i n A f r ic a n A m e r ic a n Li t e r at u r e We st M e e t s Ea st

Edited by

Yo sh i nobu H a k u ta n i

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CROSS-CULTURAL VISIONS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Copyright © Yoshinobu Hakutani, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11341–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cross-cultural visions in African American literature : West meets East / edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–11341–1 1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. Cultural fusion in literature. 3. East and West in literature. 4. African Americans—Intellectual life. I. Hakutani, Yoshinobu, 1935– PS153.N5C79 2011 810.9⬘896073—dc22

2010045302

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Con t e n t s

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

Summaries of Essays

xxi

Part I One

Two

Essays on Poetry

Richard Wright’s Haiku, Zen, and the African “Primal Outlook upon Life” Yoshinobu Hakutani

3

Richard Wright’s Haiku, Japanese Poetics, and Classical Chinese Poetry Jianqing Zheng

23

Three Wordsworthian Nature Poetry, Ashanti Culture, and Richard Wright’s Haiku: This Other World Peter Landino Four

Five

Cross-Cultural Poetics: Sonia Sanchez’s Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums Yoshinobu Hakutani

65

Jean Toomer Revisited in James Emanuel’s Postmodernist Jazz Haiku Virginia Whatley Smith

81

Part II Six

Seven

45

Essays on Ideology

The Western and Eastern Thoughts of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man Yoshinobu Hakutani

111

West, East, Africa: Richard Wright’s Native Son and Classic Movie Monsters Mera Moore

129

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Eight

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo through Confucianism Yupei Zhou

Nine

“A Beautiful Black Butterfly”: Eastern Aesthetics and Postmodernism in Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring Preston Park Cooper

Ten

“All Narratives Are Lies, Man, an Illusion”: Buddhism and Postmodernism Versus Racism in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and Dreamer Preston Park Cooper

157

177

191

Contributors

205

Index

207

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Ac k now l ed gm e n t s

I would like to acknowledge the journal and publisher for permission to republish the following essays in this collection. Yoshinobu Hakutani. “Richard Wright’s Haiku, Zen, and the African ‘Primal Outlook upon Life.’ ” Modern Philology 104 (May 2007): 510–28. Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Cross-Cultural Poetics: Sonia Sanchez’s Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums.” In Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. 180–94, 231–32.

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I n t roduc t ion

The development of African American Modernism initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright’s literary manifesto “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in 1937. In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and others acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology was shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats’s symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theater and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel’s jazz haiku energized by the crosscultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music. Among the African American modernists, Ellison and Baldwin wrote their fiction under the influence of Western modernism. In particular, emulating Henry James, Baldwin adapted the modernist principles and techniques of writing as opposed to those of realism and naturalism; Baldwin was fascinated by Jamesian impressionism. In the early decades of the twentieth century in the West, modernism was characterized by a synchronic and non-narrative mode of thought and underscored a reaction against and a release from Victorian literature. Modernist writing often created a microcosmic world that thrives on self-referentiality and moral relativism. William Faulkner, himself an influential modernist, called such artists and writers as Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf modernists. While Western modernists stressed impersonality to suppress human subjectivity—a vestige of romanticism—they developed the autonomous mode of expression as an aesthetic commitment to disrupt the mimetic and descriptive method characteristic of realism and naturalism. Such modernists believed that their art offers a privileged insight into reality and that art is an independent activity.

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Like Wright, Ellison was deeply involved with the issues of race, but, as his masterpiece Invisible Man (1952) exhibits, Ellison succeeded, with his skill and imagination, in making what is racial and regional into what is humanistic and universal. At the outset of his career, following Wright’s lead in Marxism, as stated in “Blueprint,” Ellison also argued that the rhetorical and political devices of proletarian fiction were the means by which to advance a radical black literature. His first publication, a review of Waters Edward Turpin’s These Low Grounds, appeared with “Blueprint” in New Challenge in 1937, closely reflecting Wright’s view that the African American racial or nationalist expression by a Marxist writer entails an inherent class consciousness. A series of book reviews Ellison published in New Masses in 1940 still reflected a Marxist perspective as defined in “Blueprint.” In “Stormy Weather,” a review of Langston Hughes’s autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), Ellison tried to make Hughes the chief spokesperson of the literary movement that distanced itself from the integrationist aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance and leaned toward a revolutionary black literature. Ellison assailed New Negro writers as proponents of a black middle class that had become self-conscious through the economic alliances it had made in supporting World War I. The work of New Negro writers was politically influenced by the black middle class interests and failed to express the painful experiences of the black masses. Ellison realized that “white faddists” were perpetuating the image of the black American as “primitive and exotic,” a deceptively racist perception that signifies the spiritual and moral decay of the postwar period. It looked as though the same white men were paying these African American writers and championing the passive black middle class to contain the working-class militancy prompted by the riots and lynchings during World War I. Wright and Ellison were trying to lure Hughes, the leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, to their camp under the banner of Marxist and proletarian writing. During the 1930s, as his well-known poems such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921), “The Weary Blues” (1926), and “I, Too” (1932) powerfully expressed the deep-seated feelings of the African American masses, Hughes’s voice resounded with those of Wright and Ellison. Of the three, Wright was the only one who was formally and actively involved in the activities of the Communist Party, attending the John Reed Club meetings, but they were all not only comrades in action but also united in the cause of African American modernism. In the development of modern African American fiction, the early 1950s marks an important turning point. Ellison’s Invisible Man thrives on a set of symbols with conscious allusions to American history and ideology. Ellison’s vision, like Wright’s, is not that of Invisible Man, the subject, but

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is representative of others. Like Wright’s Black Boy (1945), Invisible Man is deeply concerned with the development of an African American youth into maturity. Evoking the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests Ellison’s serious concern with W. E. B. Du Bois’s sense of double-consciousness, what Ellison himself calls “a Negro and an American, a member of the family and yet an outsider.” In search of identity in American society, however, Ellison focuses his vision not only on the broader culture and history but also on a deeper self-realization, reflecting the modernist principles of self-referentiality and moral relativism. Invisible Man also reflects the crossroad of Eastern and Western cultures. To envision the latent consciousness of the invisible man, Ellison relies on the techniques of French writers such as André Malraux and Paul Valéry. Among European existential works, Malraux’s Man’s Fate had an influence on Ellison’s characterization of the invisible man. In commenting on the psychological makeup of Wright’s Black Boy, Ellison points out in Shadow and Act that “all men possess the tendency to dream and the compulsion to make their dreams reality . . . and that all men are the victims and the beneficiaries of the goading, tormenting, commanding and informing activity of that imperious process known as the Mind—the Mind, as Valéry describes it, ‘armed with its inexhaustible questions.’ ” Ellison considers Black Boy and Invisible Man not merely accurate representations of African American life but typical twentieth-century works that poignantly reflect humanity’s quest for the meaning of its existence. Invisible Man is also a representation of Eastern ideology and point of view. Ellison expresses Eastern thought through Trueblood and the invisible man himself. Like Wright’s refection through his haiku “It Is September,” Trueblood’s observation of human life is not based on thought but upon his spontaneous response to natural spirituality. In Zen-inspired art, nature is the mirror of humanity. Zen practice calls for self-effacement; one should not allow oneself to control action. Lao Zse said, “Man takes his law from the earth; the Earth its law from Heaven; Heaven its law from Tao; but the law of Tao in its own spontaneity.” The twin deeds naturalness and spontaneity are in Zen the means by which human beings can be connected with the absolute, the achievement of satori. At the end of the novel the invisible man calls the Zen-like state of mind “the mind.” Later in the epilogue Ellison again intensifies his fascination with this state of mind. The invisible man’s definition of “the mind ” is neither his mind in the past nor the Emersonian conception of self. It is remindful of the Zen conception of the “here and now,” as well as of Lacan’s notion of the real. Dismissing from his mind his past endeavors, he wonders, “But what do I really want, I’ve asked myself. Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart or the power of a Jack, nor simply the freedom

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not to run. No, but the next step I couldn’t make, so I’ve remained in the hole.” What the invisible man means by “the next step” is the real step, which is neither imaginary nor guided by anyone. In Zen Buddhism, life is endowed with spontaneity and natural spirituality. “Life is to be lived,” he says, “not controlled.” In the tradition of Zen instruction the attainment of satori is as practical as is actual human life. When the young Bassui, who later became a celebrated Zen priest in Japan in the fourteenth century, asked his master, “What’s the highway to self elevation?” The master replied, “It’s never stop.” Failing to understand, Bassui persisted: “Is there some higher place to go on to?” The master finally answered, “It’s just underneath your standpoint.” In midcentury, Richard Wright’s fiction served as an exemplar of the East West crossroads as well. One of the existential works of fiction to which Invisible Man bears a striking resemblance is Wright’s novella “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1945). In both stories the protagonist’s identity is withheld throughout: the invisible man is anonymous just as is Wright’s protagonist, whose name is neither mentioned nor referred to. Wright’s underground man once spells his name on a typewriter in lower keys as “freddaniels.” Alienation from society, a dominant theme in existential writing, is also characteristic of both works: initially the invisible man is convinced, as is Daniels, that being an African American is responsible for his alienation from society. The two men, who try to be good, law-abiding citizens, both suffer from the oppression that stems from what they consider a lawless, amoral, corrupt, and chaotic world with little human value and little hope for renewal. Fred Daniels’s underground life has shown that he is liberated from desire, greed, and hatred and, more significantly, that he is free even of thoughts. His state of mind at the end of his life has an affinity with Zen enlightenment; his state of mind is reminiscent of that of Wright, who composed this haiku shortly before his death: It is September The month in which I was born And I have no thoughts.

It is difficult to conjecture whether Wright had Zen philosophy in mind when he wrote “The Man Who Lived Underground.” But in the late 1950s he borrowed R. H. Blyth’s four-volume history and study of haiku from Sinclair Beiles, a poet from South Africa living in Paris and associating with other poets of the Beat generation, such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Gary Snyder. Like these Beat poets, Wright studied not only the techniques and aesthetics of haiku composition but

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also Eastern philosophies and religions, such as Taoism, Confucianism, Mahayana Buddhism, and Zen, by reading, in particular, the first volume of Blyth’s book, subtitled Eastern Culture. Wright’s The Outsider (1953), on the other hand, is considered an existential novel, one that was popular in Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Portraying the highly educated, mature intellectuals Cross Damon and Invisible Man, both novels express the goal of modern African American novelists whose efforts have been to make their characters representative of people in society and universalize their cultural visions. The visions of these characters were influenced by those of early existentialists such as Kierkegaard and French existential novelists such as Sartre and Camus. Critics have noted distinct parallels between Wright and European existentialist novelists in their treatment of the metaphysical rebel, calling Cross Damon’s philosophy nihilistic. Wright lived and wrote The Outsider in France, where he maintained a close contact with Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir. Moreover, these French existentialists can conveniently be placed side by side with Wright’s protagonist, who contemplates human existence through his exhaustive reading of Nietzsche, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky. Despite differences in ideology and action between the two protagonhists, Wright’s The Outsider has an affinity with Camus’s The Stranger. Damon and Meursault are both rebels and existentialists. It is hardly coincidental that both novels were eloquent social criticisms in the twentieth century. The Outsider is an indictment of American society, for not only does Wright maintain Damon’s innocence but also shows most convincingly that men in America “hate themselves and it makes them hate others.” The Stranger, on the other hand, is an indictment of French society, for Camus proves that while the criminal is innocent, his judges are guilty. More significantly, though, comparison of the two novels of differing characters and traditions reveals that both Wright and Camus were writing ultimately about a universal human condition in modern times. There is, however, a remarkable difference between the two characters. While Damon is active all his life, Meursalt remains a passive observer. For Damon, life is all that matters. If his earlier life is not worth living, a new one must be created. A freak subway accident, in which he is assumed dead, offers him another life and another identity. All his life he plans his action with hope for the future and with denial of the past. Such attitude is emblematic of the African American tradition, the deep-seated black experience, as expressed in the spirituals. However violent and destructive Damon may appear, he eventually emerges from this tradition. Meursault, though, is the very product of the nihilistic spirit that lingered over Europe, particularly France, after World War II. He is an antihero who finds no

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meaning in life. Using crime as a thematic device, Camus focuses on the psychological effect of Meursault’s crime on his vision of existence. The conclusion of The Stranger serves as another example of the EastWest crossroads. After Meursault is sentenced to death, he realizes for the first time that his life has been enveloped in the elusive beauty of the world. Feeling compassion for his mother for the first time in his life, he says, “With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again.” This is an expression of karma instead of nirvana. Only at the very end of his life is he conscious of an epiphany: “To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.” Despite his death sentence, he remains calm, and happy, for he has cleansed his mind of materialistic desire and fear. The prisoner, though alone and trapped by a society without human values, is freed from within. Meursault’s state of mind at the end of his life is akin to Zen enlightenment. In subject matter and form, African American modernism, represented by Hughes, Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, has an affinity with AngloAmerican modernism. In fact, both groups of writers sought traditions, myths, and legends. In The Waste Land (1922) T. S. Eliot adopts the symbolic framework of the medieval Grail legend and other older fertility rites instead of the sordidness and sterility of Western modern life. In creating the Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner ponders the rise and fall of the genteel culture of the old Civil War South. Hughes and Wright enlightened their subjects’ heritages respectively in an ancient river such as the Congo and an ancient kingdom such as the Ashanti and in their religiosity and cosmology. For their techniques and styles, Hughes and Ellison both emulated the spirit, lyricism, and individualism that characterize the evolution of African American music from spirituals and gospel through the blues to jazz. Modern jazz is a cross-cultural hybrid of African American and Western music. One of the striking differences between Anglo-American and African American modernists has much to do with their attitudes toward their crafts. Hughes, for instance, advocated an aesthetic of simplicity and, like Whitman, voices of democracy. All in all, African American modernists shunned an elitist attitude Western modernists at times betrayed. George Orwell deplored Western modernists’ indifference to content and their preoccupation with form. “Our eyes,” he wrote, “are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to the Etruscans, to the subconscious, to the solar plexus—to everywhere except the places where things are actually happening.” This formalism in the 1920s was regarded by many as the logical aesthetic for modernist writing. Western modernists

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believed that their art offers a privileged insight into reality and at the same time, because art creates its own reality, it is not at all concerned with commonplace reality: art is an autonomous activity. While Anglo-American modernists such as Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, and Faulkner conveyed their personal, subjective visions with privileged sensibility, their African American counterparts such as Hughes, Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, as well as later African American writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, were intent on conveying their universal visions, their worldviews informed of other cultures. Despite the sentiments of fragmentation and alienation both groups of American writers generated, they tried to redeem themselves through the creation of art. Man acts, as Heidegger observed, “as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact, language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is above all else man’s subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation.” To overcome alienation, postmodernists have attempted to integrate themselves with the worlds of others, the phenomena taking place in other fields of knowledge and in other cultures and traditions. If modernism is characterized by the shifting of the burden of knowledge from the rational to the aesthetic, postmodernism is viewed as refining the rational in terms of the phenomenal. While modernism, especially Western modernism, smacks of elitism, postmodernism, as shown by the later Wright, Walker, and Morrison, is widely concerned not only with the mundane but also with other kinds of knowledge and other cultures. The postmodern characteristics attributable to late Wright, Walker, and Morrison, however, are radically different from those of the postmodern texts by such writers as Amiri Baraka , Ishmael Reed, and Charles Johnson. As most postmodernists try to situate themselves in the contemporary world, some modernists gauge their world in relation to past culture. To Eliot, present culture is an embodied experience of the present arising from the contiguous transformation of the past. Most modernists are opposed to absolute polarities in human experience. Victorians and some early modernists such as Henry James and W. B. Yeats, by contrast, had a penchant for the dichotomy of masculine and feminine, object and subject, the higher and the lower, the earlier and the later, present and past, time and place. On the contrary, late modernists such as James Joyce and postmodernists, in particular, explore the notion of integrating opposites. They view opposites as convenient ways of discussing present phenomena, which, upon closer observation, reveal themselves to be related to one another or to be functions of one another. Postmodernists, moreover, tend to parody past art, refrain from all absolutes, and deconstruct established images and ideas. Unlike Pound,

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who in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” laments over a culture filled with “mendacities” and “the classics in paraphrase,” a postmodernist is inclined to deal with copies more seriously than with originals. As a deconstructor, a postmodernist is fascinated not by the signified but by their “free signifiers.” Postmodern writers, as in contemporary visual arts, refuse to acknowledge any limits to the world of imaginary representation, whether it is a psychologically autonomous entity or a physically constructed realm fully integrated with the world of historical experience. The predominant modes of postmodernism are not as controlled and disciplined as those of modernism: the postmodern modes of expression tend to be ironic, parodic, digressive, and complex. The hermeneutic reading of the text, however, eventually manifests the fundamental difference between the two modes of writing. As most critics have noted, postmodernism is characterized by the decentered text. The postmodern text deals with oppositions, what Jacques Derrida calls différance. In each signifying text, internal conflicts develop independently of the author, the supposedly central informant. Consequently the text deconstructs itself because of the oppositional and conflictual nature of language. Because the différance is at work in the text, the author, let alone the reader, can scarcely claim absolute authority over a given text; there arises a structural impossibility of imposing a central idea, a summary, or a conclusion on the text. This is the reason why many postmodern texts incorporate segments of mass culture and late capitalism and draw on parodic forms in order to minimize autonomy, self-referentiality, and centralized vision. Postmodern texts, then, are said to denote a fundamental loss of rational and ontological certainty. The lack of center and the recognition of gaps and oppositions that characterize the postmodern text suggest that postmodernists are bent upon abolishing marginality and extending referentiality in their text. As postmodern texts, such as Wright’s The Color Curtain (1956) and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989), reveal, their visions and dialogues have come to include relations not only between East and West, Old and New, but also between the First, Second, and Third Worlds within as well as across national cultures. The conflict between Rushdie’s postmodern satirism and the ancient Muslim dogma, as fictionalized in The Satanic Verses, and the clash between left and right, race and religion, as depicted in The Color Curtain, are both dramatic examples of postmodern cross-culturalism, just as are the recent international challenges to the apartheid in South Africa and the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. This cross-culturalism, however, finds its origin in a much earlier period. One of the idiosyncrasies of Victorian thought was Western chauvinism. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, as Wright argued in Black Power: A

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Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954), the West was perceived as an advanced culture while Africans were regarded as primitive. Victorian intellectuals respected Chinese and Indian societies, which represented ancient cultures, but they considered these societies decadent and backward. Rudyard Kipling deemed it the moral duty of the West to help the nonwhite races of the world. More recently, postmodernist critics in the West, such as Roland Barthes and Derrida, have viewed Japanese culture as decentered. Because they define modernist writing as structural, systematic, and rational, they theorize that Japanese culture is essentially postmodern. Barthes argues and illustrates that Japan is a decentered culture in which the Buddhist state of mu, nothingness, represents the lack of a privileged Signified behind what he calls the “empire of signs.” Modernism, as well as romanticism, suppressed a decentered culture and the very margins in a culture that have come to gain power in postmodernist writing. Such margins are converted to signs of power and these signs are used to reshape the ostensibly fixed material world of history and produce new and more humane identities for human beings. As a result, the power of language in postmodernism operates in contrast to the function of language in realism. Realistic language, which functions as a mirror, conveys a common view by suppressing contradictory voices; it reflects the commonly experienced world outside the text. That is, experience is prior to language. In postmodern writing, language, though often derived from experience, has its own power and development independent of experience. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), for example, shows that Celie’s voice realistically echoes racist experience but simultaneously reflects what Wright calls in Black Power “a primal African attitude.” Celie laments that cutting a young tree is like cutting her own arm. Walker’s text is reminiscent of Wright’s: Wright was fascinated by the African reverence for nonhuman beings, a primal African philosophy that corresponds to the Buddhist belief. Both The Color Purple and Black Power as postmodern texts poignantly express the cross-cultural vision that humankind is not at the center of the universe. Another postmodern text conducive to a cross-cultural reading is Wright’s Pagan Spain (1957). Anomalies appear on the surface of this text: Spain looks like a society that is both Christian and Pagan. Wright’s discourse conveys such a message on the surface, but on the same surface it contains anomalies, or “gaps,” that, when taken into account, are found to conflict with and put into question what is signified. These gaps exist on the virtual margins of the text, but as the reader focuses on the gaps the text begins to deconstruct itself. The gaps spread and immerse themselves throughout the text. For example, the Black Virgin at Montserrat,

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an established symbol of Catholicism, becomes a powerful signifier, a text that systematically deconstructs itself before the reader’s expectant eyes. In sharp contrast to the male principle of life, for which Christianity stands, Spanish religiosity underscores the female principle of life that the Virgin signifies. Such a reading leads to the basic assumption of a feminist criticism that there are innate differences between men and women, and further that women are inherently superior, as Pagan Spain reveals that Spanish women are the pillar of Spanish culture. Julia Kristeva, a contemporary champion of feminist writing and a follower of Lacanian psychoanalysis, was fascinated by medieval Chinese womanhood when she visited northern Chinese villages in the late 1980s just as Wright admired Spanish womanhood when he traveled to Spain in the mid-1950s. A postmodern reading of Pagan Spain, then, restores the matriarchal power to an earlier culture, which merely existed in the margins of premodern text. Not only has postmodern writing subverted premodern text by shifting the margins to the center of the text, but the decentric mode of writing has also produced the effect of collapsing and destroying the time-honored oppositions: male and female, fact and fiction, civilized and indigenous, colonial and postcolonial, East and West, America and Europe. The most influential East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchange that has taken place in modern and postmodern times was the reading and writing of haiku. Among others, Richard Wright distinguished himself as a haiku poet by writing over 4,000 haiku in the last eighteen months of his life while in exile in Paris. Between Wright’s death in 1960 and the publication of Haiku: This Other World (1998), a collection of the 817 selected by Wright, only twenty-three of them had appeared in journals and books, but the entire manuscript of Wright’s haiku has been available for study since 1990. Since 1998, in particular, Wright’s haiku have made an impact on some of the contemporary American poets, most notably Robert Haas, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel. Robert Haas, U.S. Poet Laureate 1995–97, wrote in the Washington Post, “Here’s a surprise, a book of haiku written in his last years by the fierce and original American novelist Richard Wright. . . . What an outpouring!” Back in 1955 Wright attended the Bandung Conference of the Third World; two years later he was a member of the First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers, which met in Paris in September. During that same period he enjoyed gardening in his Normandy farm, an activity that supplied many themes for his haiku. Of his various experiences in this period, Wright’s travel to the newly independent Ghana in West Africa had a great impact on the haiku he wrote. The African philosophy of life he witnessed

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among the Ashanti—“the African primal outlook upon life,” as he called it—served as an inspiration for his poetic sensibility. Wright’s analysis of the African concept of life is also suggestive of Zen’s emphasis on transcending the dualism of life and death. Zen master Dogen (1200–1254), whose treatise Shobogenzo is known in Japan for his practical application rather than his theory of Zen doctrine, observed that since life and death are beyond human control, there is no need to avoid them. Dogen’s teaching is a refutation of the assumption that life and death are entirely separate entities as are seasons or day and night. To Freud, the unconscious includes a death instinct—an instinct in opposition to libido—an instinct to turn into elements in opposition to reproduction of organisms. To Lacan, the death instinct is not “an admission of impotence, it isn’t coming to a halt before an irreducible, an ineffable last thing, it is a concept.” Lacan takes issue with Freud, for Freud defines death as the opposite of life: the pleasure principle underlying life is opposed to the death wish, which “tends to reduce all animate things to the inanimate.” Lacan, however, defines this change from life to death as “human experience, human interchanges, intersubjectivity.” Lacan’s concept of death, then, has a strong resemblance to Dogen’s. Wright was, moreover, fascinated by the African reverence for the nonhuman living, a primal African attitude that corresponds to the Buddhist belief. He observed in Black Power that the pre-Christian African, like the Buddhist, was impressed with the littleness of a human being. The concept of unity, continuity, and infinity underlying that of life and death is what the Akan religion and Buddhism share. Wright’s reading of the African mind conforms to both religions in their common belief that not only are human beings unable to occupy the center of the universe, they are merely an infinitesimal fraction of time and space. The Akan religion and Buddhism both deemphasize human subjectivity. It is this revelatory and emulating relationship held by nature for human beings that makes the African primal outlook upon life akin to Zen Buddhism. With the advent of postmodern writing, American culture—with its economic and political influences across the shores—is bent upon Americanizing the world but at the same time is trying to globalize it. The East-West cultural exchanges, as seen in African American literature, give an admonition that seeing human existence can be achieved in ways that do not necessarily assert the self by excluding the other: truth is often a revelation from the other. However historically different their ideas and representations may have been, African American modernists and postmodernists have both contemplated upon the possibility of multiple worlds for human subjectivity.

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Su m m a r i e s of Es says

Chapter One Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Richard Wright’s Haiku, Zen, and the African ‘Primal Outlook upon Life.’ ” Richard Wright wrote over 4,000 haiku in the last eighteen moths of his life (1958–60). Before that period he had traveled to West Africa, Indonesia, and Spain to write the three travelogues Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954), The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957) respectively. In particular, the African philosophy of life he witnessed among the Ashanti—the “primal outlook upon life,” as he called it—served as an inspiration for his poetic sensibility as working in the garden on his Normandy farm made up many themes for his haiku. Initially he borrowed R. H. Blyth’s four-volume book on classic haiku from Sinclair Beiles, a South African Beat poet living in Paris and associating with American Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac. Studying Blyth’s volumes of haiku in earnest as did Kerouac, Wright was inspired by Blyth’s emphasis on Zen, the concept and practice that underlies much of the Japanese classic haiku. One of the salient characteristics of traditional haiku is for the poet to suppress human subjectivity, selflessness, meaning that the poet identifies with nature. The loss of the poet’s individuality involves a generalized melancholy or loneliness as an underlying rhythm. The absence of subjectivity represents the state of Zen, of what Blyth calls “absolute spiritual poverty in which, having nothing, we possess all.” Some of Wright’s haiku, however, express his personal, subjective feelings and thoughts just as do Ezra Pound’s imagistic and haiku-like short verses, such as “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals, on a wet, black bough” and “As cool as the pale wet leaves / of lily-of-the valley / She lay beside me in the dawn.” Wright’s subjective haiku, then, can be read as modernist rather than traditional.

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Chapter Two Jianqing Zheng, “Richard Wright’s Haiku, Japanese Poetics, and Classical Chinese Poetry.” This chapter focuses on Richard Wright’s haiku that show resemblances to classical Chinese poetry and the influence of Japanese haiku and Zen Buddhism. In the first part of the chapter, the author assumes that Wright may have read Ezra Pound in his early writing career in Chicago and had a momentary contact with haiku, Imagist poems, or Pound’s translations of Chinese poetry; such exposure could have been the seed that sprouted when he wrote haiku in his dying years, but to say that Wright must have been influenced by Pound and classical Chinese poetry would be arbitrary. However, the haiku moments recorded by Wright do reverberate with classical Chinese poems. The author is inclined to think that the influence of classical Chinese poetry on Basho may have gone in a subtle way to Wright even without his awareness. Since Wright read Blyth’s four volumes of Haiku with great enthusiasm and wrote more than 4,000 haiku of his own, the influence of Japanese poetry and philosophy in his work is apparent and significant. The second part of the chapter analyzes such impact and how Wright’s haiku incorporate many of Basho’s expressions, especially those that show evidences of the influence of haiku in terms of sabi, one of Basho’s major haiku characteristics. Wright’s haiku also suggest a sense of lonelilessness in the state of nothingness. They show that Wright, being free of personal emotion, expresses an aesthetic sensibility of lonelilessness and selflessness of a human being with nature and reaches the spiritual height of sabi. To sum up, then, Wright’s mass production of haiku can serve as an example of the influence of world literature and the resultant cross-cultural pollination. Though deviating from classical haiku in the use of certain techniques, Wright’s haiku demonstrate a state of mind of nothingness and reestablish his positive attitude toward life. Chapter Three Peter Landino, “Wordsworthian Nature Poetry, Ashanti Culture, and Richard Wright’s Haiku: This Other World.” R. H. Blyth underscores similarities between English nature poetry and Japanese haiku in his two-volume book, A History of Haiku. Blyth illustrates several of William Wordsworth’s poems and makes several references to his work while explaining the art of haiku. While Blyth wrote this and other haiku texts from the 1940s through the 1960s, it is interesting to note that few critics since have made reference to Wordsworth and the writing of haiku by American poets. As Blyth’s analysis is considered

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a standard description of haiku and its properties, Wordsworth’s poetry might be used to measure successful haiku. Furthermore, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s initial disillusionment resulting from the failure of the French Revolution led to their subsequent vision to revolutionize and transform the individual human spirit by using nature as a means to understand human existence. The Romantic notion of the totality of nature and humanity reflects the tenements of Zen philosophy epitomized in Gautama Buddha’s statement “Seek within, you are the Buddha,” as well as in the structural elements of haiku. Richard Wright explained this philosophy in regards to his experiences with the Ashanti culture of Africa in Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. The Ashanti culture’s affiliation with nature, instead of attending to social and political issues, correlates to the Romantic’s attempt at revolutionizing political and social systems, an attempt that failed for the French, and transforms the human spirit through nature. Wright sought a similar transformation through his haiku. He moves from the political and social discourse regarding race in Black Power to the nature poetry of haiku, preserving the notion of regeneration and revolution through a new medium: humanity’s affinity with nature. Chapter Four Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Cross-Cultural Poetics: Sonia Sanchez’s Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums.” Whereas Sanchez is considered an activist poet, a great majority of the poems in her latest collection, entitled haiku, tanka (short song), or sonku (haiku song), reveal that, turning away from the moral, intellectual, social, and political problems dealt with in her other work, she found in nature her latent poetic sensibility. Much of her poetic impulse reflects, as does that of the classic Japanese haiku and tanka, the unity and harmony of all things, the sensibility that nature and humanity are one and inseparable. She follows the Japanese poetic tradition, in which human action emulates nature and the poet suppresses human subjectivity. In portraying nature, she is at times puzzled by its spontaneous imagery. In such poems, she is reluctant to draw a distinction between human beings and animals, animate and inanimate objects. Many of her haiku and tanka not only follow Zen doctrine but also share the aesthetic principles that underlie classic haiku, such as yugen, through which the sense of loss is expressed. From time to time, her blues haiku figure a brightened sense of yugen. As aesthetic principles, yugen and the blues share the sentiments derived from private and intensely personal feelings. Unlike yugen, the blues in her haiku and other short poems confines its attention solely to the immediate and celebrates the bodily expression. She tries to link the blues message with sexually charged language so as to

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liberate black bodies from the distorted images slavery inflicted. In this collection, many of her poems poignantly express a desire to transcend social and racial differences and a need to find union and harmony with nature. Chapter Five Virginia Whatley Smith, “Jean Toomer Revisited in James Emanuel’s Postmodernist Jazz Haiku.” In the title JAZZ from the Haiku King (1999), the Nebraska-born African American Parisian exilic poet takes on Japanese culture, announcing that he is the “Jazz King of Haiku.” This declaration challenges the haiku tradition, its forms dating back to the thirteenth century and perfected by Basho in the seventeeth century. Emanuel, however, is a postmodernist poet seeking to destabilize meanings: his text is a syncretism of African American, bluejazz-gospel musics integrated with a Japanese poetic form. He is also writing out of an African American literary tradition that tends to parody its own expressions. This collection revives intertextual repetitioning by upgrading Jean Toomer’s modernist, 1920s seminal experimental novel Cane to contemporary times in order, like Toomer, to stave off the social death of a dying, musical artistic form and its cultural creators. For Emanuel, Jazz music is the Death-Life inspiriting force: he is its “electromyographic,” regenerative poetic voice consciously giving it life. His technique is complex, for he weds the Japanese, seventeen-syllable haiku form to an already musically driven, racialized cultural trope of “admixture” that defines African American jazz music. It had arisen during slavery and was revitalized by artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer was its leader, and now Emanuel has carried the Toomeresque novelistic cultural tropes forward into contemporary times. By synthesizing these cultural-historical paradigms, Emanuel creates a Bhabhaian-type “hybridized” text of words and musics and voices and sounds that at once reconnect Afro-Asian cultures that are seemingly separatist. Emanuel’s postmodernist jazz haiku thus magnifies the global presence of African American culture and engages diverse people the world over in a common dialogue, the ideal of which contemporary Afrocentric cultural critics define as “universal humanism.” Chapter Six Yoshinobu Hakutani, “The Western and Eastern Thoughts of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” The novel Invisible Man reflects the crossroad of Eastern and Western cultures. Modeling after Western modernists, its protagonist expresses their

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ideology and point of view. While Ellison shows that African American freedom and identity can be achieved through genuinely autonomous cultural voices such as jazz and the blues, he also evokes Yeats, Joyce, and O’Casey because the contribution of these writers to British culture is similar to the influences of African American music on American culture. Invisible Man is also a representation of Eastern ideology and point of view. Ellison expresses Eastern thought through Trueblood and the invisible man himself. Trueblood’s observation of human life is based not on thought but upon his spontaneous response to natural spirituality. This tenet of Zen, which teaches its followers to emulate nature, was one of the Taoist influences on Zen. From a Zen point of view, such a vision of life as Trueblood attains is devoid of much thought and emotion. Trueblood thus enlightens himself by looking up and seeing stars and expresses his satori by singing the blues. For him, natural spirituality and the blues are the means by which he achieves his enlightenment. At the end of the novel, while meditating underground, Invisible Man annihilates all except what he calls “the mind.” Finding this state of mind capable of giving pattern to the chaos of life, he finally emerges. While his view of life looks like Melville’s symbolization of the whiteness of the whale, in which the universe appears indefinite, void, and invisible, his outlook upon his own life also has an affinity with the Zen principle of the “here and now.” Chapter Seven Mera Moore, “West, East, Africa: Richard Wright’s Native Son and Classic Movie Monsters.” West meets East in the racialized U.S. cinema of the 1930s. Richard Wright could find no Hollywood producer to film his 1940 novel Native Son. Just as Wright adopted techniques of gothic literature such as those of Edgar Allan Poe, through allusions to Frankenstein, Dracula, and King Kong, his novel deploys literary and cinematic horror references to tell the story of Bigger Thomas. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Bigger is a lynchmob target who also commits monstrous acts. The monster represents non-whites colonized by the British, including slaves, as well as U.S. blacks living under Jim Crow. When a lynch mob burns a cross, Bigger can no longer bear to wear a cross given to him by a minister and thus tosses it away. The Dracula figure recalls the Inquisition, during which Christians enslaved and killed Muslims, who in turn did the same to Christians. When whites call for Bigger’s lynching—screaming, “Kill that black ape!” and “Burn that black ape!”—parallels arise to the 1933 film King Kong, which like Native Son has an interracial sexual theme. Wright repeats the technology-versus-primitive trope from Bigger’s perspective as the justice

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system chases, captures, tries, and convicts him. The King Kong films portray non-white characters as subhuman, including Charlie the cook and the inhabitants of Kong’s home island near Sumatra. In 1940, the publishers demanded that Wright revise Native Son, removing scenes they deemed offensive. The revision substitutes an imaginary film called The Gay Woman. Nevertheless, both versions of the novel allude to King Kong. To sum up, a final crucial connection between Native Son and gothic horror concerns scientific and technological symbolism. Bigger is surrounded by advanced technology that is out of his reach or, in the case of forensic science, deployed against him. The novel exhibits themes of contagion. Howling mobs, whether in horror cinema or Native Son, assume their own monstrous qualities. Wright accents contradictions of human behavior. Chapter Eight Yupei Zhou, “Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo through Confucianism.” This chapter uses Confucianism as a hermeneutic aid to read Ishmael Reed’s postmodern novel Mumbo Jumbo. Both Confucianism and African American culture spell out, in their own ways, the fundamental postmodern conceptions of heterogeneity and multiplicity. Based on this observation, the chapter, by examining approaches to heterogeneity, associates Mumbo Jumbo, a typical postmodern African American novel, with Confucianism and makes the latter relevant to the reading of the former. While a discourse of deconstruction and opposition marks Mumbo Jumbo as typically postmodern, the Confucian conceptualizations of harmony allow Confucianism to stand in opposition to the Western modernist logic of separation and binary oppositions. Seen through Mumbo Jumbo, Confucianism is inadequate by prioritizing the function of morality at the expense of that of subversion and revolt. Yet, seen through Confucian conceptions of heterogeneity, Reed’s novel is inadequate by equating the deconstruction of binary oppositions with the construction of heterogeneity and, at the same time, reiterates the logic of separation and binary oppositions by restricting the seeking and the possibility of heterogeneity to people of a uniform ethnic background. This reading demonstrates the necessity for the West and the East to communicate with each other. Chapter Nine Preston Park Cooper, “ ‘A Beautiful Black Butterfly’: Eastern Aesthetics and Postmodernism in Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring.” Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring uses an invasion of Eastern thought and philosophy on a California college campus to explore issues of racial politics

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and national identity. Vital to understanding Reed’s purposes are the ways in which Reed inserts Zen philosophy and aesthetics into the book and the roles of certain characters. This novel does not pose questions directly relating to reality—“is this real/unreal?” “is this what is real and what matters?”—and instead suggests that “we must question and determine what is solvable or impossible to solve.” Such statements do not emphasize progress, but there is still a desire for progress, given birth by the righteousness of frustration with all the American metanarratives suggesting that equality is a natural state for all citizens. If reality cannot deliver the equality that certain American metanarratives promise the masses, then individuals must create individual realities that fulfill promises or relieve frustration. A local narrative uprooting a metanarrative is not something that happens automatically. The local narrative must both reach readers on a widespread scale and also meet with widespread approval. Reed’s use of a hypothetical American college bought by a hypothetical cultural splinter group of Japanese who embody American fears of projected Eastern desires for cultural mastery shows the ridiculous logic that would have to be met for racist fears to ever be realized. The heroes of his local narratives both reveal the limitations of oppressive thinking and offer metanarrativedisarming solutions, partially based on the idea that Eastern philosophy can be flexible enough to embrace what is needed to circumvent cultural obstacles, provided expectations are based on stereotypical standards. Chapter Ten Preston Park Cooper, “ ‘All Narratives Are Lies, Man, an Illusion’: Buddhism and Postmodernism Versus Racism in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and Dreamer.” In his 1990 novel Middle Passage, Charles Johnson creates a narrative of slavery and of a slave ship that in both stories (Middle Passage and Dreamer) differs from and follows the norms of more traditional adventures set at sea in some unusual ways. The narrator and main character, Rutherford Calhoun, a black ex-slave from Southern Illinois, talks and thinks in a manner that seems very unlike any reader’s expectations for such a character. The story is set specifically in the year 1830, allowing the reader to prove that there are various anachronisms in Middle Passage. Johnson’s style and methods in this novel, as well as his later novel Dreamer, raise many questions. Johnson uses elements of postmodernism with a specific purpose: to allow Johnson to successfully fight, in a nonviolent way, to change the culture into that of which his work is a part. In the two novels, which each represent years of literary effort on his part, Johnson is often using the techniques of postmodernism to construct the novels. The

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postmodern approach, rather than simply taking a given stance on intertextuality and the relation of previous authors and writings to the new work, uses these techniques in an oppositional way. Although Johnson does not seek to commit himself to an ongoing relationship to and association with postmodernism, he shares with it key purposes, such as exploring not only how a new work may evolve from and play with the existence and influence of older works, but also how narrative techniques can highlight a desire to resist oppressive cultural metanarratives. Because of an emphasis on nonviolent cultural opposition, Johnson’s Buddhist beliefs also go hand in hand with the single goal shared by him and postmodernism in general, and all of these elements merge in his work.

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Pa rt I Es says on Poe t ry

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Ch a p t e r O n e R ic h a r d Wr ig h t ’s H a i k u, Z e n, a n d t h e A f r ic a n “P r i m a l O u t l o ok u pon Li f e” Yoshinobu Hakutani

Richard Wright is acclaimed for his powerful prose in Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), books that he wrote early in his career. But later in his life he became interested in poetry, especially the haiku. In the 1950s he enjoyed gardening in his Normandy farm, an activity that supplied many themes for his haiku.1 Of his other experiences in this period, Wright’s travels to the newly independent Ghana in West Africa are also reflected in his haiku. The African philosophy of life that Wright witnessed among the Ashanti—the “primal outlook upon life,” as he called it—served as an inspiration for his poetic sensibility.2 By the spring of 1960, Wright informed his friend and Dutch translator Margrit de Sablonière that he had returned to poetry and added, “During my illness I experimented with the Japanese form of poetry called haiku; I wrote some 4,000 of them and am now sifting them out to see if they are any good.”3 In his discussion of this development, Michel Fabre notes that Wright’s interest in haiku involved research into the great Japanese masters Basho, Buson, and Issa; he ignored the European and American forms that were then becoming popular. Fabre states further that “Wright made an effort to respect the exact form of the poem” but adds that it was curious for Wright to become interested in haiku at a time when he was fighting his illness. As Fabre reasons, “logically he should have been tempted to turn away from ‘pure’ literature and to use his pen instead as a weapon.”4 Constance Webb says that Wright had lost his physical energy and that “while lying against the pillows one afternoon he picked up the small book of Japanese poetry and began to read it again.”5 Apparently, Wright had borrowed it from a friend, a South African poet.6 Wright read and reread the classic haiku collected in the book. Webb comments that Wright “had to

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study it and study to find out why it struck his ear with such a modern note.”7 The haiku “seemed to answer the rawness he felt, which had, in turn, created a sensitivity that ached. Never had he been so sensitive, as if his nervous system had been exposed to rough air.”8 In a letter to Paul Reynolds, his friend and literary agent, Wright explained that he had sent to William Targ of the World Publishing Company an eighty-two page manuscript of haiku entitled This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner. After a few comments about Targ, Wright went on to say, “These poems are the results of my being in bed a great deal and it is likely that they are bad. I don’t know.”9 That manuscript had not been published in its entirety until 1998.10 We will never fully know the reasons why Wright turned to haiku during the last years of his life, but a reading of his haiku in This Other World indicates that Wright turned away from the moral, intellectual, social, and political problems dealt with in his prose work and found in nature his latent poetic sensibility. Gwendolyn Brooks called Wright’s haiku collected in This Other World “a clutch of strong flowers.”11 “These haiku,” Wright’s daughter remarks in her introduction, “not only helped him place the volcanic experience of mourning under the self-control of closely counted syllables, but also enabled him to come to terms with the difficult beauty of the earth in which his mother would be laid to rest.”12 Wright’s discovery of haiku, as Fabre says, “brings to light an often neglected aspect of the writer’s personality: his intimate sense of the universal harmony, his wonder before life, his thirst for a natural existence, all these tendencies which nourished, as much as did any ideology or faith, his courageous and incessant battle against all that prevents an individual from fully belonging to the world.”13 The genesis of Wright’s poetic sensibility can be glimpsed in his “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” even though its theory is Marxist. An African American writer’s perspective, Wright states, “is that part of a poem, novel, or play which a writer never puts directly upon paper. It is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people.”14 Wright establishes this vantage point in the autobiographical prose of Black Boy, yet he also consciously creates there a poetic vision of nature through and against which racial conflict is depicted. The poetic passages in Black Boy demonstrate Wright’s incipient interest in the exaltation of nature and point to his sensibility toward the congeniality of images from nature. J. B. Danquah’s The Akan Doctrine of God15 persuaded Wright of the African belief that spirits reside in inanimate objects such as trees, stones, and rivers. Wright also adopted an African belief in ghosts and the spirits of the dead, which to him meant that life and death are not diametrically opposed. “Life in the ghost world,” he remarks, “is an exact duplicate of life

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in this world. A farmer in this world is a farmer there; a chief here is a chief there. It is, therefore, of decisive importance when one enters that world of ghostly shades to enter it in the right manner. For you can be snubbed there just as effectively and humiliatingly as you were snubbed here.”16 This African religion, furthermore, does not recognize the existence of hell and sin, nor does it distinguish in the abstract between good and evil. “When the family is the chief idea,” Wright quotes Danquah as saying, “things that are dishonorable and undignified, actions that in disgracing you disgrace the family, are held to be vices, and the highest virtue is found in honor and dignity. Tradition is the determinant of what is right and just, what is good and done.” Whereas the Akan religion and Christianity share the concept of life after death, the Akan religion also resembles other religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism in its belief in reincarnation. Unlike Christianity, the Akan religion believes, as do Buddhism and Hinduism, in the existence of soul in nonhuman beings. “Death,” Wright observes, “does not round off life; it is not the end; it complements life.” To him the African religion looks “terrifying” but not “primitive.”17 One of the theoretical principles in “Blueprint” calls for African American writers to explore universal humanism, what is common among all cultures. “Every iota of gain in human thought and sensibility,” Wright argues, “should be ready grist for his mill, no matter how far-fetched they may seem in their immediate implications.”18 After a journey into the Ashanti kingdom in West Africa in 1953, when he was forty-five, Wright asserted in Black Power, “The truth is that the question of how much of Africa has survived in the New World is misnamed when termed ‘African survivals.’ The African attitude toward life springs from a natural and poetic grasp of existence and all the emotional implications that such an attitude carries; it is clear, then, that what the anthropologists have been trying to explain are not ‘African survivals’ at all—they are but the retention of basic and primal attitudes toward life.”19 Wright’s exploration of the Ashanti convinced him that the defense of African culture meant renewal of Africans’ faith in themselves. He came to see African culture buttressed by traditional human values—awe of nature, family kinship and love, a sense of honor—that had made the African survivals possible. When an African was transplanted to Europe or America, as Wright observed, that person identified himself or herself with the rational, urban, and economic way of life in the West but retained the traditional values. In particular, the transplanted African kept intact the awe of nature. That person, Wright argued, “remains black and becomes American, English, or French” but “to the degree that he fails to adjust, to absorb the new environment (and this will be mainly for racial and economic reasons!), he, to that degree, and of necessity, will retain much of his primal outlook upon

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life, his basically poetic apprehension of existence.” The way in which the African sees nature, as Wright realized, is humanistic and not materialistic. “The tribal African’s culture,” Wright argued, “is primally human; that which all men once had as their warm, indigenous way of living, is his. . . . There is nothing mystical or biological about it. When one realizes that one is dealing with two distinct and separate worlds of psychological being, two conceptions of time even, the problem becomes clear; it is a clash between two systems of culture.”20 If an African American, such as Wright himself, retained, in time or for a time, this “primal” outlook on life, it was because that person was unable to “see or feel or trust (at that moment in history) any other system of value or belief”: “What the social scientist should seek for are not ‘African survivals’ at all, but the persistence and vitality of primal attitudes and the social causes thereof. And he would discover that the same primal attitudes exist among other people; after all, what are the basic promptings of artists, poets, and actors but primal attitudes consciously held?”21 When Wright studied R. H. Blyth’s four volumes on the art and history of haiku,22 he was struck by the strong affinity between the worldview that underlies haiku and the African “primal outlook upon life” that buttresses Ashanti culture, one of the oldest in Africa. Unlike Western romantic poetry and even the earlier Japanese poetry called waka, haiku, as Blyth observes, “is as near to life and nature as possible, as far from literature and fine writing as may be, so that the asceticism is art and the art is asceticism.”23 Blyth’s definition of haiku as an ascetic art means that classic haiku by such masters as Basho, Buson, and Issa, which Wright emulated, strictly concern objects and phenomena in nature. In composing a haiku the poet must, at first, observe an object or phenomenon in nature from a perspective devoid of thoughts and feelings. Only after attaining that stance and vision will the poet be able to achieve a harmonious union with nature. The haiku poet’s perspective without egotism bears a strong resemblance to the African’s view of nature and self. In African life, Wright saw a closer relationship between human beings and nature than that between human beings and their social and political environment: “Africa, with its high rain forest, with its stifling heat and lush vegetation, might well be mankind’s queerest laboratory. Here instinct ruled and flowered without being concerned with the nature of the physical structure of the world; man lived without too much effort; there was nothing to distract him from concentrating upon the currents and countercurrents of his heart. He was thus free to project out of himself what he thought he was. Man has lived here in a waking dream, and, to some extent, he still lives here in that dream.” Africa evokes in one “a total attitude toward life, calling into question the basic assumptions of existence.”24 Wright was, moreover,

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fascinated by the African reverence for the nonhuman living, a primal attitude that corresponds to the haiku poet’s awe of nature. He thus observed, “The pre-Christian African was impressed with the littleness of himself and he walked the earth warily, lest he disturb the presence of invisible gods. When he wanted to disrupt the terrible majesty of the ocean in order to fish, he first made sacrifices to its crashing and rolling waves; he dared not cut down a tree without first propitiating its spirit so that it would not haunt him; he loved his fragile life and he was convinced that the tree loved its life also.”25 For Wright, the African and the haiku poet share not only an intuitive, selfless worldview but also the belief that humankind does not occupy the central place in the world. In studying Blyth’s analysis and reading of classic haiku, Wright learned that Haiku masters were able to present in direct statement the paradox of union with nature, expressing the desire to be a part of nature while simultaneously maintaining their separate identity. Born and trained in Western culture and tradition, Wright as an artist must have struggled to develop such a characteristic in his haiku. Classic haiku call for simplicity of language, thought, and image, an absence of complication that is often revealed in the spontaneous joy of union with nature. The joy, Blyth points out, comes from “the (apparent) re-union of ourselves with things,” our being among others.26 Austerity on the part of the poet is not only a lack of intellectualization, it is almost a wordlessness, a condition in which words are used not to externalize the poet’s state of feeling, but to “clear away something that seems to stand between” the poet and things in the world. Because things in the world are not actually separate from the poet, they “are then perceived by self-knowledge.”27 Classic haiku, as Wright learned, remove as many words as possible, stressing nonintellectuality, for thought must depend upon and not substitute for intuition. Another major characteristic of haiku Wright learned is a love of nature that is inseparable from the ordinary. For Blyth this characteristic is explained in terms of selflessness, meaning that the poet has identified with nature. The loss of the poet’s individuality involves a generalized melancholy or loneliness as an underlying rhythm. It represents the state of Zen, of “absolute spiritual poverty in which, having nothing, we possess all.”28 In Zen-inspired haiku, the material or the concrete is emphasized without the expression of any general principles of abstract reasoning. Animate and inanimate lose their differences, so that one might say haiku are not about human beings but about things. Zen teaches, as Blyth observes, that the ordinary thing and the love of nature are reduced to a detached love of life as it is, without idealistic, moralistic, or ethical attachments. Things are equal to human beings; both exist through and because of each other.

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“The Old Pond,” the most famous haiku by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho, has served in haiku criticism as a model of the Zeninspired haiku. To explain the poetics of nature, Yone Noguchi, as noted earlier, quoted “The Old Pond” in his criticism: Furu ike ya Kawazu tobikomu Mizu no oto.

The old pond! A frog leapt into— List, the water sound! (Noguchi’s translation)

One may think a frog an absurd poetic subject, but Basho focused his vision on a scene of autumnal desolation, an image of nature. As Noguchi conceived the experience, Basho was “supposed to awaken into enlightenment now when he heard the voice bursting out of voicelessness, and the conception that life and death were mere change of condition was deepened into faith.”29 Basho was not suggesting in the haiku that the tranquility of the pond meant death or that the frog symbolized life. He had the sensation of hearing the sound bursting out of soundlessness. In Zen one is taught to annihilate one’s thoughts and feelings before satori is attained: satori is the achievement of a state of mu, nothingness, as pointed out earlier. The state of nothingness is free of subjectivity; it is so completely free of any thought or emotion that such a consciousness corresponds to the state of nature. Directly concerned with objects and phenomena in nature, Basho completely suppresses subjectivity. Wright attempts to do so as much as possible in many of his haiku. Wright’s interest in this doctrine of Zen, the effacement of subjectivity, is reflected in his haiku numbered 508: 508.

It is September, The month in which I was born; And I have no thoughts.

In the first haiku in Haiku: This Other World, Wright, one who is the subject as well as the narrator describes himself as deprived of his name and subjectivity: 1.

I am nobody: A red sinking autumn sun Took my name away.

The state of nothingness, however, is not synonymous with a state of void but is functional, and its function is perceived by the senses. A tree is no

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longer an ordinary tree; it now exists with a different meaning, as shown in haiku 809: 809.

Why did this spring wood Grow so silent when I came? What was happening?

In the following haiku, Wright tries to suppress egotism and attain a state of nothingness: 721.

As my anger ebbs, The spring stars grow bright again And the wind returns.

As he relieves himself of anger, he begins to see the stars “grow bright again” and “the wind” return. Only when he reaches a state of nothingness is he able to perceive nature with his enlightened senses. In some of his haiku, as the following examples show, Wright offers simple scenes in which human beings and nature exist in harmony, in contrast to complex, intriguing scenes in society where people are at strife. 42.

Seen from a hilltop, Shadowy in winter rain, A man and his mule.

377.

In the winter dusk, A thin girl leads a black cow By a dragging rope.

541.

After the sermon, The preacher’s voice is still heard In the caws of crows.

“Seen from a Hilltop” (42) finds unity in humankind and nature: a man, a mule, a rain, a meadow, and a hill. “In the Winter Dusk” (377), like “Seen from a Hilltop” (42), is a direct description of a scene where a girl lives in harmony with an animal. It is not clear whether a girl leads a cow or a cow her. Since the rope is dragging, neither the girl nor the cow is forcing the other to move. Creating such an ambiguous image intensifies the unity and harmony between the living. In “After the Sermon” (541), the seasonal reference is ambiguous, but Wright finds a continuity between humanity and nature, “the preacher’s voice” and “the caws of crows.”30 Whether perceiving nature for its own sake or in its relation to humankind, Wright’s haiku thrive on the subtle interactions among the senses

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captured in seventeen syllables. For instance, in number 47, the poet seems to detach himself from a natural scene: 47.

The spring lingers on In the scent of a damp log Rotting in the sun.

The warmth of the sun, the scent of a damp log, the sight and silence of an outdoor scene, all coalesce into an image of spring. In the process the overall image has evolved from the separate images of the sun, the log, and the atmosphere. The images of sight, moreover, are intertwined with the images of the sun’s warmth and the rotting log as well as with the image of smell from the log, all these images interacting with one another. In trying his hand at haiku, Wright initially modeled his on those of the classic Japanese poets such as Moritake (1472–1549), Basho (1644–94), Kikaku (1661–1707), Buson (1715–83), and Issa (1762–1826). Two of the haiku in This Other World have a thematic resemblance to a famous haiku by Moritake: 626.

Off the cherry tree, One twig and its red blossom Flies into the sun.

669.

A leaf chases wind Across an autumn river And shakes a pine tree.

Here is Moritake’s poem, quoted in Blyth’s book of haiku:31 Rakka eda ni Kaeru to mireba Kocho kana 32

Fallen petals Seemed to return to the branch,— A butterfly!

Both of Wright’s haiku “Off the Cherry Tree” (626) and “A Leaf Chases Wind” (669) create an illusion similar to that in Moritake’s haiku. In “Off the Cherry Tree” a twig with its red blossom flies into the sun as if a bird had flown off the cherry tree. Likewise “A Leaf Chases Wind” captures a scene as though a leaf were chasing wind and shaking a pine tree rather than the other way around. It is this haiku by Moritake that influenced Ezra Pound’s famous twoline poem, “In a Station of the Metro.” Thus Pound, as discussed earlier, acknowledged for the first time in his career his indebtedness to the spirit of Japanese poetry in general and the art of haiku in particular. In the “Vorticism” essay, he quoted Moritake’s haiku “The fallen blossom flies

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back to its branch: A butterfly,” just before discussing his “In a Station of the Metro,” often regarded as the first haiku imitation written in English.33 Gwendolyn Brooks’ calling Wright’s haiku “a clutch of strong flowers” suggests that the images in Wright’s haiku are charged with energy. To demonstrate his poetic theory, Pound thought of an image not as a decorative emblem or symbol but as a seed capable of germinating and developing into another organism. As mentioned earlier, he presented what he called “a hokku-like sentence” he had written: The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough.

“In a poem of this sort,” he explained, “one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”34 The image of faces in the crowd is based in immediate experience at a metro station in Paris; it was “a thing outward and objective.” In Wright’s haiku, as in Pound’s imagistic poems, the description of nature is an imagistic one that directly derives from the perception of a natural object or event itself without thought, emotion, or point of view. A year after his Metro poem appeared, Pound stated that a poetic image “may be a sketch, a vignette, a criticism, an epigram or anything else you like. It may be impressionism, it may even be very good prose.” For Pound, the image, as discussed earlier, does not constitute simply a picture of something. As a vortex, the image must be “endowed with energy.”35 Imagism, in turn, is likened to the painter’s use of pigment. “The painter,” Pound remarked, “should use his colour because he sees it or feels it. I don’t much care whether he is representative or non-representative. . . . It is the same in writing poems, the author must use his image . . . not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics.”36 According to Margaret Walker, Wright was fascinated with American modernist poets, including Pound. “In the last years of his life,” she notes, “Wright discovered the Japanese form of poetry known as Haiku and became more than a little interested in what was not just a strange and foreign stanza but an exercise in conciseness—getting so much meaning or philosophy in so few words”37 Pound’s theory that the poet’s use of an image is not to support “some system of ethics or economics” coincides with the theory that haiku express the poet’s intuitive worldview. Wright, then, found the intuitive worldview of the haiku poet akin to that of the African. Because both views have little to do directly with politics or economics, Wright’s haiku remain a radical departure from his earlier work in prose. Whether Wright was influenced by Pound’s imagism is difficult to determine, but many of Wright’s haiku bear a close resemblance to classic

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Japanese haiku. In both style and content, a pair of his haiku in This Other World are reminiscent of two of Basho’s most celebrated haiku. Wright’s “In the Silent Forest” echoes Basho’s “It’s Deadly Quiet”: 316.

In the silent forest A woodpecker hammers at The sound of silence. It’s deadly quiet Piercing into the rocks Shrills of cicada.38

As Basho expresses awe at quietness, Wright juxtaposes silence in the forest to the sound of a woodpecker. Similarly, Wright’s “A Thin Waterfall” is akin to Basho’s “A Crow”: 569.

A thin waterfall Dribbles the whole autumn night,— How lonely it is. A crow Perched on a withered tree In the autumn evening.39

Basho focuses upon a single crow perching on a branch of an old tree, as does Wright upon a thin waterfall. In both haiku, the scene is drawn with little detail and the mood is provided by a simple, reserved description of fact, a phenomenon in nature. In both haiku, parts of the scene are painted in dark colors, as is the background. Both haiku create the kind of beauty associated with the aesthetic sensibility of sabi that suggests loneliness and quietude, the salient characteristics of nature, as opposed to overexcitement and loudness, those of society.40 As Basho expresses sabi with the image of autumn evening, so does Wright with the line “How lonely it is,” a subjective perception. The two haiku, however, are different: while Basho describes nature for its own sake, Wright interjects his own feelings in his description. Whether Wright and Basho actually felt lonely when writing the haiku is moot. Legend has it that Basho inspired more disciples than did any other haiku poet; Kikaku is regarded as Basho’s most innovative disciple. Two of Wright’s haiku bear some resemblance to Kikaku’s “The Bright Harvest Moon,” since both poets emphasize an interaction between humanity and nature in the creation of beauty: 106.

Beads of quicksilver On a black umbrella: Moonlit April rain.

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A pale winter moon, Pitying a lonely doll, Lent it a shadow. The bright harvest moon Upon the tatami mats Shadows of the pines. (Kikaku)41

In Kikaku’s haiku, the beauty of the moonlight is not only humanized by the light shining on the man-made objects but also intensified by the shadows of pine trees that fall upon the mats. The intricate pattern of the shadow of trees intensifies the beauty of the moonlight. Not only does such a scene unify an image of humanity and an image of nature, it also shows that humanity and nature can interact positively. In Wright’s first poem, an element of nature, “beads of quicksilver,” is reinforced with a man-made object, “a black umbrella.” In “A Pale Winter Moon,” while the second line projects loneliness onto a doll, the beauty of the winter moon is intensified by the presence of a manmade object. In contrast to the four haiku quoted above (Wright’s “In the Silent Forest” and “A Thin Waterfall,” Basho’s “It’s Deadly Quiet” and “A Crow”), these three haiku by Wright and Kikaku, although focused on nature, do lightly include human subjectivity in appreciating natural beauty. Wright’s “I Would Like a Bell” is comparable to Buson’s well-known “On the Hanging Bell” in depicting a spring scene, but Wright’s poem focuses on a human subjectivity, a desiring self: 13.

I would like a bell Tolling in this soft twilight Over willow trees. On the hanging bell Has perched and is fast asleep, It’s a butterfly.42

Buson was well known in his time as an accomplished painter and many of his haiku reflect his singular attention to color and its intensification. Wright’s “A Butterfly Makes,” for example, is reminiscent of Buson’s “Also Stepping On”; both imply a subjective perception: 82.

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A butterfly makes The sunshine even brighter With fluttering wings.

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14 / yoshinobu hakutani Also stepping on The mountain pheasant’s tail is The spring setting sun.43

In another fine haiku, Wright portrays humanity’s relationship with nature in terms of art: 571.

From across the lake, Past the black winter trees, Faint sounds of a flute.

Unlike “The Spring Lingers On” (47), discussed earlier, this haiku admits a human involvement in the scene: someone is playing the flute as the poet is listening from the other side of the lake. Through transference of the senses between the faint sounds of a flute and the black winter trees, a positive interaction between humanity and nature takes place. “From across the Lake” has an affinity with Kikaku’s “The Bright Harvest Moon,” noted earlier, for both haiku are expressions of beauty perceived by subjects in an interaction between natural and human objects. Wright’s haiku in their portrayal of humankind’s association with nature often convey a kind of enlightenment, a new way of looking at human beings and nature, as in the following examples: 720.

A wilting jonquil Journeys to its destiny In a shut bedroom.

722.

Lines of winter rain Gleam only as they flash past My lighted window.

“A Wilting Jonquil” (720) teaches the poet the lesson that natural things out of context cannot exhibit their beauty. In “Lines of Winter Rain” (722), the poet learns that sometimes only when an interaction between human beings and nature occurs can natural beauty be savored. While haiku poets often tried to suppress subjectivity in depicting nature, some of Wright’s haiku bring the poet to the fore. While haiku 720, “A Wilting Jonquil,” focuses on an object, haiku 722, “Lines of Winter Rain,” insists on the importance of “my lighted window.” None of the classic haiku Wright emulates express the poet’s thoughts or feelings. The first haiku in Wright’s Haiku: This Other World (“I am nobody: / A red sinking autumn sun / Took my name away”), as noted earlier, suppresses subjectivity by depicting the red sun that erases his name. And yet the poet is strongly present, even by negation. The same is true of some of

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his other haiku discussed earlier, such as haiku 809, “Why did this spring wood / Grow so silent when I came? / What was happening?” and haiku 721, “As my anger ebbs, / The spring stars grow bright again / And the wind returns.” Writing a haiku to depict a spring scene, quoted earlier, Wright and Buson take different approaches in terms of subjectivity: “I would like a bell / Tolling in this soft twilight / Over willow trees” (Wright); “On the hanging bell / Has perched and is fast asleep, / It’s a butterfly” (Buson). Wright’s focus is on a bell ringing softly over willow trees while Buson’s is on a butterfly actually fast asleep on a hanging bell. The two haiku are quite different: subjectivity is present in Wright’s haiku while it is absent in Buson’s. Another pair of haiku by Wright and Basho portray autumn scene: “A thin waterfall / Dribbles the whole autumn night,—/ How lonely it is” (Wright); “A crow / Perched on a withered tree / In the autumn evening” (Basho). Subjectivity is absent in Basho’s haiku while it is directly expressed by Wright’s third line, “How lonely it is.” In depicting the moon, for example, Wright and Kikaku write remarkably different haiku: “A pale winter moon, / Pitying a lonely doll, / Lent it a shadow” (Wright); “The bright harvest moon / Upon the tatami mats / Shadows of the pines” (Kikaku). Subjectivity is entirely absent in Kikaku’s haiku while it is strongly expressed in Wright’s with the middle line, “Pitying a lonely doll.” Absent subjectivity in composing haiku is akin to Lacan’s concept of the subject. Lacan, as a postmodern psychoanalyst, challenges the traditional concept of subjectivity. On the basis of his analytic experience, he sees subjectivity as a concept that concerns neither the autonomy of the self nor the subject’s ability to influence the other. Subjectivity is deficient because of the deficiencies inherent in language: “The effects of language are always mixed with the fact, which is the basis of the analytic experience, that the subject is subject only from being subjected to the field of the Other, the subject proceeds from his synchronic subjection in the field of the Other. That is why he must get out, get himself out, and in the getting-himself-out, in the end, he will know that the real Other has, just as much as himself, to get himself out, to pull himself free.”44 Because the subject, an infinitesimal fraction in time and space, is isolated from the world, the subject is capable of imagining only the other: society, nature, and life. Only when the subject is conscious of the deficiencies of language, as Lacan theorizes, does the subject of the unconscious emerge. Only then is the subject able to approach and encounter the truth of life—what Lacan calls “the real” and “the unsymbolizable.” To Lacan, the motive for subjectivity aims at the symbolic—what constitutes tradition, religion, law, and so on—whereas the motive for absence

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of subjectivity aims at the unconscious, a state largely derived from the other and partly derived from the imaginary on the part of the subject. The unconscious, then, is closer to the real than it is to the symbolic; the imaginary is closer to the real than it is to the symbolic. Lacan posits, however, that “there exists a world of truth entirely deprived of subjectivity,” universal truth, “and that . . . there has been a historical development of subjectivity manifestly directed towards the rediscovery of truth,” historically subjective truth, “which lies in the order of symbols.”45 Lacan sees the door as language; the door is open either to the real or to the imaginary. He says that “we don’t know quite which, but it is either one or the other. There is an asymmetry between the opening and the closing—if the opening of the door controls access, when closed, it closes the circuit.”46 He considers language either objective or subjective; the real is objective whereas the imaginary is subjective. In traditional haiku composition, language aims at the real through the imaginary rather than at the symbolic through the historically subjective. The Lacanian distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic has an affinity with one of the disagreements between Pound and Yeats in reading Japanese poetry and drama. Pound regarded symbolism as “a sort of allusion, almost of allegory.” The symbolists, Pound thought, “degraded the symbol to the status of a word. . . . Moreover, one does not want to be called a symbolist, because symbolism has usually been associated with mushy technique.”47 For Pound, symbolism is inferior to imagism, the imaginary in Lacan’s theory, because in symbolism one image is used to suggest another or to represent another whereby both images would be weakened. As noted earlier, Pound’s theory of imagism was derived from haiku, which shuns metaphor and symbolism, rather than from the Noh play, which Yeats considered “indirect and symbolic.” If Yeats’s ideal language has the suggestiveness and allusiveness of symbolism as opposed to the directness and clearness of imagism, then his sources certainly did not include Pound. Even though Yeats dedicated At the Hawk’s Well (1917) to Pound, Yeats was not enthusiastic about Pound’s theory. “My own theory of poetical or legendary drama,” Yeats wrote to Fiona Macleod, “is that it should have no realistic, or elaborate, but only a symbolic and decorative setting. A forest, for instance, should be represented by a forest pattern and not by a forest painting.”48 Yeats, a symbolist and spiritualist poet, was fascinated by the Noh play while Pound, an imagist, was influenced by Japanese poetry, particularly haiku. In any event, Lacan envisions a domain of the real beyond “the navel of the dream, this abyssal relation to that which is most unknown, which is the hallmark of an exceptional, privileged experience, in which the real is apprehended beyond all mediation, be it imaginary or symbolic.”

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Lacan equates this domain with “an absolute other . . . an other beyond all intersubjectivity.”49 In Lacanian terms, the haiku poet is motivated to depict the real directly without using symbols. In this process the poet relies on the imaginary, a domain that is closer to nature, where subjectivity is suppressed as much as possible. In an attempt to be objective and yet creative, the poets avoid symbols in writing haiku. “If the symbolic function functions,” Lacan laments, “we are inside it. And I would even say—we are so far into it that we can’t get out of it.”50 That symbolism is an obstacle in writing haiku can be explained in terms of Lacan’s definition of the symbolic order. Lacan observes that language symbolizes even things that do not exist, non-being: “The fundamental relation of man to this symbolic order is very precisely what founds the symbolic order itself—the relation of non-being to being. . . . What insists on being satisfied can only be satisfied in recognition. The end of the symbolic process is that non-being come to be, because it has spoken.”51 To Lacan, then, language makes non-being become being. Because haiku aim to represent being rather than nonbeing, what Lacan calls “language” or what is “spoken” does not apply to the language of haiku. Not only is Lacan’s theory of language applicable to the unsymbolic characteristic of haiku, it also clearly accounts for the absence of subjectivity in traditional haiku. Those haiku by Wright that express subjectivity directly or indirectly might be considered modern rather than traditional. The first line in Wright’s haiku 13 (“I would like a bell / Tolling in this soft twilight / Over willow trees.”), quoted earlier, constitutes an expression of subjectivity, but the second line, “Tolling in this soft twilight,” is an image created by the imaginary. Pound’s haiku-like poem “In a Station of the Metro,” noted earlier, has been regarded as imagistic and modernistic: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals, on a wet, black bough.” Since the image of the apparition as well as that of petals, as Pound explains in his “Vorticism” essay, are derived from the subject’s experience at the metro station, this poem indirectly expresses subjectivity. Pound also expresses subjectivity directly in another haiku-like poem, entitled “Alba”: As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley She lay beside me in the dawn.52

As the image of “the pale wet leaves,” a creation by the imaginary in Lacanian terms, indirectly expresses the subject’s desire, the last line explicitly brings in the desiring subject. One of the disciplines in classic haiku composition calls for restraining the expression of desire. “Desire” as Lacan observes,

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“always becomes manifest at the joint of speech, where it makes its appearance, its sudden emergence, its surge forwards. Desire emerges just as it becomes embodied in speech, it emerges with symbolism.”53 As Wright’s and Pound’s modernist haiku demonstrate, subjectivity in such haiku is expressed through the use of a personal pronoun, and the subject’s desire is evoked in an image that reflects subjectivity. Subjectivity and desire, its dominant construct, are both expressed through pronominal language rather than through an image in nature that embodies the real or the unconscious. Because Wright wrote haiku under the influence of classic Japanese haiku poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a great majority of his haiku, perhaps eight out of ten, can be categorized as traditional haiku, in which an image of nature is the focus of the poem and subjectivity is absent. Wright saw the images of nature he created in his haiku as expressing the “primal outlook upon life” he acquired in Africa. As he traveled to Ghana in 1953 to write Black Power, a postmodern and postcolonial nonfiction, he was deeply impressed with the African worldview that human beings are not at the center of the universe, a worldview that corresponds with that of Zen. Ashanti culture and belief, in particular, convinced Wright that the world of nature is preeminent over the subjective vision of that world. In writing traditionalist haiku, Wright adopted a poetic form in which subjectivity, egotism, and desire stand in the way of seeking truth. Not only do most of his haiku thrive on poignant images of nature, they also admonish the reader that only by paying nature the utmost attention can human beings truly see themselves. Notes 1. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York: Morrow, 1973), 447. 2. Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper, 1954), 266. 3. Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 505. 4. Ibid., 505–6. 5. Constance Webb, Richard Wright (New York: Putnam, 1968), 393. 6. According to Toru Kiuchi, this South African poet, identified as Sinclair Beiles in Michel Fabre’s Richard Wright: Books and Writers (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990), 14, was “one of the Beat poets and . . . his and their interest in Zen led Wright to the knowledge of haiku.” Kiuchi further notes that “because the Beat Hotel was in the Latin Quarter and Wright lived very close to the hotel, he must have haunted the hotel bar. I assume that Wright took an interest in Zen, which some of the Beat poets brought up as one of the important topics, and that Wright then must have known haiku through his conversations with Beiles” (Kiuchi’s letter to Hakutani, Aug. 7, 2005).

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wright, zen, the african “primal outlook upon life” / 19 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

Webb, Richard Wright, 387. Ibid., 393. Ibid., 394. This manuscript consists of a title page and eighty-two pages, page 1 containing the first seven haiku and each of the other pages ten, altogether 817 haiku. The manuscript, dated 1960, is deposited among the Wright collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. The manuscript was published as Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener (New York: Arcade, 1998; repr. New York: Random House, 2000). References to Wright’s haiku, including numbers, are to this edition. See the cover of the Random House edition of Haiku: This Other World. Julia Wright, introduction to Haiku: This Other World, xi. Michel Fabre, “The Poetry of Richard Wright,” in Critical Essays on Richard Wright, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 271. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in the Richard Wright Reader, ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre (New York: Harper, 1978), 45. See J. B. Danquah, The Akan Doctrine of God: A Fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion (London: Frank Cass, 1944). Wright, Black Power, 214. Ibid., 215–17. Wright, “Blueprint,” 45. Wright, Black Power, 266. Ibid. Ibid., 267. See R. H. Blyth, Haiku: Eastern Culture (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1981). This is a paperback edition of vol. 1 of R. H. Blyth, Haiku, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1949). Page references to this book are to the 1981 paperback edition. R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1963), 1: 1. Wright, Black Power, 159. Ibid., 261–62. Blyth, Haiku, 1: 9. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 162. Yone Noguchi, Selected English Writings of Yone Noguchi: An East-West Literary Assimilation, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani, 2 vols. (London: Associated UP, 1990, 1992), 2: 73–74. “After the Sermon” can be read as a senryu, a subgenre of haiku that expresses humor. Wright might have likened “the preacher’s voice” to “the caws of crows,” which sound least mellifluous. Senryu originated from Karai Senryu, an eighteenth-century Japanese haiku poet. The original and the translation are quoted from Blyth, History of Haiku, 2: 56. Moritake. A literal translation of the first two lines, “Rakka eda ni / Kaeru to mireba,” reads “A fallen flower appears to come back to its branch.” See Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., no. 573 (Sept. 1, 1914), 461–71. For the influence of haiku on Pound’s imagism, see Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism,” Modern Philology 90 (Aug. 1992): 46–69.

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20 / yoshinobu hakutani 34. Pound, “Vorticism,” 467. Hokku is an older term for haiku. Basho and other haiku poets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called haiku hokku. 35. Ezra Pound, “As for Imagisme,” New Age 14 (1915): 349. 36. Pound, “Vorticism,” 464. 37. Margaret Walker, Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (New York: Warner Books, 1988), 313–14. 38. The original of the haiku is in Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 40. The translation is by Hakutani. 39. For the original of the haiku, see ibid., 18. The translation is from Blyth, History of Haiku, 2: xxix. 40. The word sabi, a noun, derives from the verb sabiru, to rust, implying that what is described is aged. Sabi is traditionally associated with loneliness. Aesthetically, however, this mode of sensibility intimates of grace rather than splendor; it suggests quiet beauty as opposed to robust beauty. Many of Wright’s haiku thrive on the use of the word “lonely.” For further discussion of sabi and of other aesthetic principles, see Yoshinobu Hakutani, Richard Wright and Racial Discourse (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1996), 275–82. 41. The original of Kikaku’s haiku is in Henderson, Introduction to Haiku, 58. The translation is by Hakutani. 42. For the original of Buson’s haiku, see ibid., 104. The translation is by Hakutani. 43. For the original of Buson’s haiku, see ibid., 102. The translation is by Hakutani. 44. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1881), 188. 45. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 2, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Techniques of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 285. 46. Ibid., 302. 47. Pound, “Vorticism,” 463. 48. Yeats, letter to Mcleod, quoted in E. A. Sharpe, William Sharp: A Memoir (London: Heinemann, 1910), 280–81. 49. Lacan, Seminar, 176–77. 50. Ibid., 31. 51. Ibid., 308. 52. Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound: Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1957), 36. 53. Lacan, Seminar, 234.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Blyth, R. H. Haiku: Eastern Culture. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1981. ———. A History of Haiku. 2 vols. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1963, 1964. Carpenter, Frederic Ives. Emerson and Asia. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1930. Danquah, J. B. The Akan Doctrine of God: A Fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion. London: Frank Cass, 1944.

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wright, zen, the african “primal outlook upon life” / 21 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: Modern Library, 1940. ———. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820–1872. Ed. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. ———. The Works of Emerson. 4 vols. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1900. Fabre, Michel. “The Poetry of Richard Wright.” Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. ———. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: Morrow, 1973. Freneau, Philip. The Poems of Philip Freneau. 2 vols. Ed. Fred Lewis Pattee. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism.” Modern Philology 90 (Aug. 1992): 46–69. Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Kiuchi, Toru. Letter to Yoshinobu Hakutani on Sinclair Beiles. Aug. 7, 2005. Kurebayashi, Kodo. Introduction to Dogen Zen. Tokyo: Taiho Rinkaku, 1984. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: Norton, 1988. Pound, Ezra. “As for Imagisme.” New Age 14 (1915): 349. ———. “Vorticism.” Fortnightly Review 573, n. s. (Sept. 1914): 461–71. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner Books, 1988. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. Wright, Julia. “Introduction.” Haiku: This Other World. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade, 1998. Rpt. New York: Random House, 2000, vii–xii. Wright, Richard. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper, 1954. ———. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” Richard Wright Reader. Ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre. New York: Harper, 1978. 36–49. ———. Haiku: This Other World. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade, 1998. Rpt. New York: Random House, 2000. ———. “This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner.” Ms. New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1960.

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Ch a p t e r Two R ic h a r d Wr ig h t ’s H a i k u, Ja pa n e se Poe t ic s, a n d Cl a s sic a l Ch i n e se Poe t ry Jianqing Zheng

Introduction Around two years before his death, Richard Wright, one of the most wellknown African American writers in the twentieth century, became fascinated with haiku through his introduction to Sinclair Beiles, a young South African writer in Paris. Wright wrote more than four thousand haiku, of which 817 were collected in Haiku: This Other World, published posthumously in 1998. This collection is doubtlessly a significant addition to the Wright Studies. Though impressed with haiku writing, Wright had to take up additional work to meet his expenses after the summer of 1959, struggle against constant bouts of amebic dysentery, and live alone after his wife and daughters left for Britain. He never gave up writing haiku “born of a tormented soul confronted with hardship” (Fabre, Quest 488) because, like a consolation or a healing power, it gave him a feeling of sensitiveness and a temporary peace of mind during his illness and loneliness. In his letter of April 8, 1960 to Margrit de Sablonière, Wright talked about his sensitiveness to haiku: “These haikus, as you know, were written out of my illness. I was and am, so damnably sensitive. Never was I so sensitive as when my intestines were raw. So along came that Japanese poetry and harnessed this nervous energy” (Fabre, Quest 508). Once he found haiku, Wright could not stop digging into it, as he admitted in his letter of September 1960 to Margrit de Sablonière: “I’ve finished nothing this year but those damned haikus. . . . I’ll sit down one of these days and go over them, that is, reread them and see how they sound.”1 That Wright wrote four thousand haiku during his illness also shows that his anger, which prevails in Native Son and Black Boy, was gradually

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replaced with a tender feeling of sensibility to both nature and human nature, as he confesses in haiku 721: As my anger ebbs, The spring stars grow bright again And the wind returns.

The sentiment expressed above indicates at once that haiku, as a poetic form that focuses on human relationship with nature, rekindles Wright’s sensibility and tenderness to both nature and human nature, and his obsessive haiku writing makes him sensitive to the rediscovery of such a relationship. During this writing process, Wright has a chance to be imbued with Japanese poetry and Zen Buddhism. A Zen teaching says, “Seek within, you are the Buddha.” Haiku 721 reflects Wright’s search for selfenlightenment. When he is enlightened, he sees nature with a new vision, as suggested in the following haiku: An empty sickbed: An indented white pillow In weak winter sun. (425)

In this haiku the empty sickbed is juxtaposed with the weak winter sun to create a world where Wright attains satori, which means in Zen “as the state of mu, nothingness, which is absolutely free of any thought or emotion” (Hakutani and Tener 250). This juxtaposition reflects the mu or the forgetting of personal emotion. Haiku 1 is another good example that shows how Japanese aesthetics and Zen philosophy influence Wright in the process of awakening to the human relationship with nature: I am nobody: A red sinking autumn sun Took my name away.

The first line reveals the speaker’s feeling of loss, but his sensibility to the human affinity with nature may heal that loss. In the human world, his name may be forgotten, but in the other world—the eternal world—his name will be eternal for it becomes part of the sun. This haiku speaks of Wright’s rediscovery of his true self and poetic spirit for perfect integration with nature, that is, the state of mu or nothingness. This essay focuses on Wright’s haiku that reveal their resemblances to classical Chinese poetry and the Japanese influence, mainly through Basho, on his haiku. The translations of the Chinese poems discussed are mine.

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Resemblances of Wright’s Haiku to Classical Chinese Poetry Chester Himes has said in an interview that Wright’s work belongs to “a literature for the world” (Fabre and Skinner 7), and I think this work should include his haiku. The four thousand haiku he wrote indicate that Wright surely has a close literary kinship with Japanese poetry; however, some of his haiku may exhibit a distant kinship with classical Chinese poetry. To analyze Wright’s poetic resemblances, it is, therefore, necessary to discuss some typical characteristics of classical Chinese poetry. First of all, it is juxtaposition. In classical Chinese poetry, the desired juxtaposition requires a strict symmetrical contrast of images in a couplet. Take, for instance, the following couplet from the Tang Dynasty poet Lu Lun’s quatrain “Lament for Autumn with Li Yi” (同李益伤秋): 岁去人头白，秋来树叶黄。(Liu 63) Time passes: the hair turns white, Autumn arrives: the leaves turn yellow.

The first line has a reference to the human world, and the second to the natural world. The juxtaposition not only cuts the couplet into two parts but also engages in a comparison between the two images it separates, implying that the second represents the poetic essence of the first and sets up an internal comparison for the reader. Here, autumn indicates loneliness and sadness about old age, and the transference of the white hair to the yellow leaves intensifies the solitude of a man in decrepitude. Similarly, in Japanese haiku, autumn is a season word that also indicates loneliness, and a kireji or a cutting word is used to juxtapose the two parts. Terseness is another characteristic of classical Chinese poetry that challenges a poet to use only laconic phrases or incomplete sentences in juxtaposition so as to produce a perfect symmetrical contrast for a strikingly visual effect. Consider, for example, the following couplet from the Tang Dynasty poet Sikong Shu’s poem “Enjoying the Stay of My Cousin Lu Lun” (喜外弟卢纶见宿): 雨中黄叶树，灯下白头人。(Xu, Lu, and Wu 230) The yellow-leaf tree in the rain, The white-haired man by the lamp.

For effective contrast, the neat juxtaposition of the first phrase to the second presents a visual feeling of loneliness. The first line records the poet’s observation, and the second suggests an effect of that observation through an imaginative association it creates. This kind of juxtaposition produces an internal comparison in which the similar characteristics are equated in

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two different images, but each exists in its own right. Here, the natural scene offers an evocative setting for an implicit human situation in an empathetic way. It is easy to see how the use of this technique helps underscore the dynamic interrelationship between nature and human nature in classical Chinese poetry. An obvious example of juxtaposition in Ezra Pound’s imagist couplet “In a Station of the Metro” clearly shows its similarity to Sikong Shu’s couplet. When he hears a story about the haiku “The footsteps of the cat upon the snow: / Plum-blossoms” and recollects Takeari Arakida’s “The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: / A butterfly,”2 Pound finds the best way to superpose and revises his thirty-line poem into the present version: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound credits his “theory of superposition” to Japanese haiku: “The ‘one-image poem’ is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion” (Gaudier-Brzeska 89). What is Pound’s one-image? It can be the underlying meaning brought to the fore through juxtaposition of the two major images (apparition of faces and petals). When the “faces” act as the tenor and “petals” as the vehicle, the force of internal comparison creates an imaginative effect on the reader to complete the incomplete. Furthermore, Pound’s juxtaposition of faces to petals is not unfamiliar to Chinese readers. It suggests an echo of the Tang Dynasty poet Cui Hu’s quatrain “The Village South of the Capital” (题都城南庄): 去年今日此门中，人面桃花相映红。 人面不知何处去，桃花依旧笑春风。(Ge and Cang 58) On this day last year behind this gate, Your face blushed among peach petals. Now your face is nowhere to be seen While peach petals smile like before in spring breeze.

The poem juxtaposes the girl’s likeness to the peach petals to produce a feeling of love in the first couplet, but the second expresses sadness at the sight of peach petals without the presence of the girl whom the speaker misses. The source of this poem is as follows: One spring day, the poet goes to a village south of the capital to enjoy the view of sprouting grass. Because he is thirsty, he knocks on a villager’s door for a cup of water. A girl comes to offer him water and then stands by a blossoming peach tree. The next year, the poet, who can never forget the sight of the girl by the

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peach tree, goes there again, but he cannot find the girl anymore. Thus disappointed, he writes a poem on the closed door to express his feeling. Since then, in Chinese literature, the comparison of the face to the peach petal has been used as a phrase—人面桃花 (the peach blossom face)—to suggest feminine beauty or the impermanence of beauty like that of a peach petal. Of Wright’s haiku, two deserve a discussion. Haiku 626, like Pound’s “Metro” poem, seems an echo or an imitation of Takeari Arakida’s haiku: Off the cherry tree, One twig and its red blossom Flies into the sun.

The difference between Arakida’s and Wright’s haiku is that the former imagines the fallen petal as a butterfly returning to the branch while the latter imagines the blossoming twig as a bird flying into the sun. By borrowing Arakida’s mode of expression, Wright creates an interaction of things for a harmony or yin yang of heaven and earth. Similar to Pound’s “Metro” poem, haiku 362 is an appropriate example of juxtaposition with the use of a semicolon in the first line: The drone of spring rain; A lonely old woman strokes The fur of her cat. (362)

The transference of the senses from the droning rain to the woman’s stroking the cat’s fur makes her loneliness stronger. It is not difficult, however, to trace Wright’s haiku to classical Chinese poems. For example, the following haiku by Wright may be an echo of a couplet by Meng Haoran, a Tang Dynasty poet: There is where I am:— Summer sunset loneliness, Purple meeting red. (302)

Wright juxtaposes the speaker’s loneliness upon the summer sunset, yet the cheerful colors of purple and red show that he has overcome his lonely feelings with some insight into his coexistence with nature. The speaker is lonely, and so in his eyes, the summer sunset is lonely too, but this empathy of loneliness, when meeting nature, becomes colorful and brilliant. Moreover, Wright’s haiku 302 implies that he gains new understanding of loneliness for he attains the state of mu or nothingness, that is, lonelilessness in loneliness.

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Now, let’s see a couplet from Meng Haoran’s quatrain “Mooring on the Jiande River” (宿建德江): 移舟泊烟渚，日暮客愁新。(Ge and Cang 2) While I moor my boat by a mist-veiled island, My loneliness arrives at sunset.

The couplet describes the grief of a solitary traveler who moors by a misty island with loneliness rising to take hold of him. It suggests two kinds of loneliness: loneliness of the traveler and that of nature embodied in sunset. The speaker’s loneliness becomes intense through the setting of the sun. Loneliness is always a favorite theme in classical Chinese poetry, especially when it is associated with the season of autumn. The following couplet from “Night Moor by the Maple Bridge” (枫桥夜泊), a quatrain by Zhang Ji, a Tang Dynasty poet, is an example: 月落乌啼霜满天，江枫渔火对愁眠。(Ge and Cang 39) The moon goes down, crows caw, frost takes the sky, River maples and fishing lanterns weave in sleepy loneliness.

However, lonelilessness obtained from loneliness is also presented to suggest the state of mu in classical Chinese poetry, as in “Poem on Autumn” (秋词), a quatrain by Liu Yuxi, a Tang Dynasty poet: 自古逢秋悲寂寥，我言秋日胜春朝。 晴空一鹤排云上，便引诗情到碧霄。(Ge and Cang 63) Since ancient times loneliness has been autumn lament, But I say autumn is far better than spring. In the fine sky a crane soars high above the clouds, Taking my poetic feeling up to the blue space.

This poem doubtlessly offers a new vision of autumn that loneliness transforms into a positive attitude toward the world. Similarly, Wright expresses his attitude toward autumn in a positive tone: Golden afternoon: Tree leaves are visiting me In their yellow clothes. (666)

Li Po, one of the most famous poets in the Tang Dynasty, presents his idea of lonelilessness in a quatrain, “Sitting Alone toward the Jingting Hill” (独坐敬亭山): 众鸟高飞尽，孤云独去闲。 相看两不厌，只有敬亭山。(Ge and Cang 23)

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wright, japanese poetics, classical chinese poetry / 29 All the birds have flown high and away, A lonely cloud is wandering off free. We look at each other without boredom, It’s you, the Jingting Hill.

In Li Po’s poem the lonely speaker finds comfort in the Jingting Hill and transforms his loneliness into a state of lonelilessness or unity with nature. This unity reflects the Chinese poetic notion of integration of emotion and scene, as Wang Fuzhi (1619–92) remarks: Whatever thing there is outside, there can be a counterpart in man’s inner being; whatever emotion there is in man’s inner being, there must be the thing outside [to match it]. . . . If we go through the things of the world, we will see that, whatever our emotion is, it cannot be without a suitable correlative outside. (Sun 660)

Here is another haiku by Wright that refers to lonelilessness in loneliness: Summer mountains move To let a sinking sun pass To the other side. (550)

As an expression of pure sensibility to nature, this haiku resembles Li Po’s poem on watching the Jingting Hill. In the act of watching, the speaker forgets his loneliness by imagining that the mountains move to make way for the passing of the sinking sun. In the following haiku, Wright transfers loneliness to nature in exchange for a feeling of forgetfulness: And also tonight, The same evening star above The same apple tree. (639)

However, Wright’s kinship with classical Chinese poetry through Basho is revealed in the following example, a couplet from an untitled quatrain by Du Fu, a poet of the Tang Dynasty as famous as Li Po: 江碧鸟逾白，山青花欲燃。(Ge and Cang 37) Blue river, the birds look white, Green mountains, the flowers seem fiery.

Du Fu uses the visual images of four colors to create a contrast that presents beauty of nature. Through this delightful observation, he

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harmonizes into nature his loneliness expressed in the second couplet of the quatrain: 今春看又过，何日是归年？ I’ve seen these again this spring, But which year will I go home?

Now, read Basho’s haiku that resembles the first line of Du Fu’s quatrain: Darkening waves— cry of wild ducks, faintly white. (Basho 38)

This presents the speaker’s observation in which the transference of the senses helps create an atmosphere of loneliness. During his early years of haiku writing, Basho’s style of composition inclined toward Du Fu’s poetry. He was encouraged to use Chinese expressions and incorporated many of them in his haiku (Fujikawa 375). Wright’s haiku 584 is a close imitation of one of Basho’s compositions: From the rainy dark Comes faint white cries of wild geese,— How lonely it is.

In Wright’s haiku, loneliness becomes visible and audible through the color of white cries of wild geese against the background of the rainy darkness that further makes the speaker’s lonely feeling heavier. In fact, Wright’s haiku is identical to Basho’s. In an indirect way, it is also an echo of Du Fu’s couplet. Now, let us read a few more classical Chinese poems to which Wright’s haiku may bear resemblances. First, “The West Creek at Chuzhou” (滁州 西涧), a quatrain by Wei Yingwu, also a Tang Dynasty poet: 独怜幽草涧边生, 上有黄鹂深树鸣。 春潮带雨晚来急, 野渡无人舟自横。(Ge and Cang 41) I love the grass growing unnoticed along the creek And the orioles chirping in deep trees. The flash flood is rapid with spring rain at dusk, And a sampan turns itself by the deserted pier.

Wright’s haiku 505 shares a similar expression with the second couplet of Wei Yingwu’s poem: An empty canoe Turning slowly on a river In the autumn rain.

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The difference between the two poems is in the tone. While Wei Yingwu’s poem describes a delightful scene of spring, Wright’s haiku presents a different situation that connotes a feeling of loneliness through the season of autumn and the image of an empty canoe. Nevertheless, Wight shares a similarity with Wei Yingwu in describing the movement of a boat. The next resemblance we consider is that of Wright’s haiku 80 to “The Garden That Doesn’t Welcome a Visitor” (游园不值), a poem by Ye Shaoweng, a Song Dynasty poet: 应怜屐齿印苍苔， 小扣柴扉久不开。 春色满园关不住， 一枝红杏出墙来。(Ge and Cang 171) In fear that the clogs may tread the green moss, The wooden door keeps shut against my gentle knocks. But the color of spring cannot be closed within the garden— A sprig of red apricot peeps over the wall.

Wright’s haiku for comparison: The sprinting spring rain Knocks upon a wooden door That has just been shut. (210) After the rainstorm, A tendril of Wisteria Peeps over the wall. (80)

Haiku 210 and 80 are a perfect pair for comparison to the Chinese poem. The former shares a similar expression with the second line of Ye Shaoweng’s quatrain, and the latter resembles the last line of the quatrain in describing the flower peeping over the wall in springtime. Both poets use the symbolism of a single sprig or a tendril to suggest the coming of spring and to express their joy when spotting the flower. The only difference between the poems is that while Ye Shaoweng implies that the visitor is not welcomed by the garden owner, Wright means that the storm cannot destroy the life of a wisteria. The following poetic line from a classical Chinese poem (author unknown) is echoed by both Basho’s and Wright’s haiku: 踏花归来马蹄香 Back from flower-viewing, the horseshoe is scented.

There is a story about using this poetic line in a painting competition initiated by an emperor of the Song Dynasty. The painters feel it easy to

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draw flowers and a horse, but the abstract idea of “scent,” which is hard to draw, challenges them. Some draw a man holding a flower on horseback, some draw a few petals under horseshoes, but one painter shows his unique imagination. He draws a couple of butterflies following a shoe of a trotting horse to make the intangible scent tangible, thus winning the competition and the favor of the emperor. This story tells that the importance of painting lies in creative thinking, suggestive ways of expression and a unique imagination, and that a painter should be able to draw out the meaning beyond words. As for poetic creation, a poet should have the ability to use images to present ideas in a fresh way. Here is one of Basho’s haiku that shows a strong echo of the Chinese poem “Back from Flower-viewing,” mentioned above: In the garden a sweaty shoe—scent of chrysanthemum. (Basho 74)

The next two haiku by Wright can be explained by referring to both the classical Chinese poetic line of “back from flower-viewing, the horseshoe is scented” and Basho’s “In the garden” haiku: In a misty rain A butterfly is riding The tail of a cow. (17) Coming from the woods, A bull has a lilac sprig Dangling from a horn. (175)

Wright may not know the classical Chinese poetic line, but Basho, who studied classical Chinese poetry during his early writing career, should certainly know. It may be safe to assume that since Basho’s haiku bears a direct resemblance to classical Chinese poetry, Wright’s haiku too, through Basho’s influence, may bear this resemblance. While it is evident that Wright becomes fascinated with haiku through the introduction of Sinclair Beiles to R. H. Blyth’s four volumes of Haiku, he may have read Ezra Pound in his early writing career in Chicago and had a momentary contact with haiku or Imagist poems. An interview by Roy Wilder with Wright, published in New York Herald Tribute on August 17, 1941, notes that while working at the post office in Chicago, Wright gets into a habit of reading “T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joseph Wood Krutch and Aldous Huxley” (Kinnamon and Fabre 38). His reading, which may have included Pound’s haiku-like poems and translations of Chinese poetry,

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could have been the seed that sprouted when he began writing the most beautiful poems in his dying years. Moreover, Margaret Walker also notes that Wright “felt a close affinity to all modern poets and their poetry and read poetry with a passion—Shakespeare, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and Walt Whitman. He read all the poetry he could put his hands on. Because he never learned a foreign language he had to read most foreign poets in translation, but he read them” (313). Walker’s assertion may also offer a clue that Wright may have read haiku through Pound before he was introduced to reading Blyth’s Haiku, but to say that Wright must have been influenced by Pound and classical Chinese poetry would be arbitrary. However, the haiku moments recorded by Wright, together with Basho’s, do reverberate with classical Chinese poetry discussed earlier. Maybe poets in different times think alike, but I am inclined to think that the influence of classical Chinese poetry on Basho may have been passed on in a subtle way to Wright even without his awareness. The Japanese Influence on Wright’s Haiku Since Wright has read Blyth’s four volumes of Haiku with great enthusiasm and written more than four thousand haiku of his own, the influence of Japanese poetry and philosophy on Wright’s work is apparent. Among the Japanese poets, Matsuo Basho (1644–1694) is probably the most important influence. Basho, as a sensitive observer of nature, records impressions of his sensibility in his haiku and, more significantly, in his famous travelogue, Narrow Road to the Deep North. Imbued with his observation of nature, he uses colors to produce the visual effect. For instance, Irises blooming from my feet— sandals laced in blue. (Basho 75)

The color blue becomes a background that expresses a genuinely human joy with nature. This haiku is evocative of his other haiku “In the garden” and the classical Chinese poetic line “Back from flower-viewing, the horseshoe is scented,” discussed previously. In a similar way, Wright, as a haiku practitioner, records his observation that echoes Basho’s: I laid down my book: A tendril of Wisteria Encircling my leg. (110)

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34 / jianqing zheng

Wright’s haiku shows a trace of imitation of Basho’s in its description of delightful surprise. This description also shows that the poet’s careful observation is the much necessary process of awareness that nature is the stimulation of human nature. Through this process, Wright gives concrete, symbolic meaning to his sensibility. Obviously, Wright’s haiku incorporate many of Basho’s expressions. Haiku 316 is an interesting one that refers to Basho’s influence on him in the use of contrast: In the silent forest A woodpecker hammers at The sound of silence.

The poet sets up a contrast between the silence of the forest and the knocking of a woodpecker. Silence, which is commonly felt, transforms into a sound through the hammering of the bird. The contrast is effective; however, the weakness of this haiku is in the use of an adjective, “silent,” in the first line, awkward with six syllables and wordy because the noun “silence” appears in the third line. If the first line reads as “In the morning woods,” it can avoid wordiness and thus follow the 5-7-5 haiku pattern. This haiku is reminiscent of Basho’s most famous frogpond haiku in a similar mode of expression: Old pond, leap-splash— a frog. (Basho 58)

In comparison to Wright’s haiku, Basho’s is strong in suggesting silence through “leap-splash.” Wright’s haiku is also reminiscent of Basho’s famous cicada haiku: How quiet— locust-shrill pierces rock. (Basho 40)

In Narrow Road to the Deep North, the passage preceding the cicada haiku records Basho’s momentary impression of stillness during his visit to a mountain temple: In Yamagata there was a mountain temple, the Ryushakuji, founded by the high priest Jikaku, an especially pure and tranquil place. People had urged us to see this place at least once, so we backtracked from Obanazawa, a distance of about seven leagues. It was still light when we arrived. We

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wright, japanese poetics, classical chinese poetry / 35 borrowed a room at a temple at the mountain foot and climbed to the Buddha hall at the top. Boulders were piled on boulders; the pines and cypress had grown old; the soil and rocks were aged, covered with smooth moss. The doors to the temple buildings at the top were closed, not a sound to be heard. I followed the edge of the cliff, crawling over the boulders, and then prayed at the Buddhist hall. It was a stunning scene wrapped in quiet—I felt my spirit being purified. (translation by Haruo Shirane)3

In addition, Basho’s cicada haiku may have a reference to a poetic line from cicadas of Wang Ji, a Chinese poet of the Nan Dynasty: “蝉噪林愈静” (Cicadas’ shrill: silence of the woods is deeper). Both Basho and Wang Ji emphasize the tranquility of nature, but their focal points are different. While Wang Ji uses the shrill of cicadas to expand the quiet of the woods, Basho uses the stillness of the rock to set up a contrast to the sound of cicadas. Now let’s read another haiku by Basho Autumn moon, tide foams to the very gate. (Basho 58)

and one of Wright’s haiku that bears a resemblance: The spring flood waters Lap slowly at the doorsteps, — A radiant moon. (469)

While Basho’s haiku suggests a slight feeling of loneliness with the use of autumn, it creates an effective interplay of visual and auditory senses through the watching and listening of the speaker. Similarly, Wright’s haiku 469 focuses on the essence of a moment when nature is related to the human world through the images that appeal to both visual and auditory senses. The spring flood seen by the speaker transfers to the sound of the lapping moon at the doorsteps, and this transference leaves a space for the sensible imagination that both the flood and the moon are lapping and radiant. Let’s consider another haiku by Basho Not one traveler braves this road— autumn night. (Basho 56)

and two by Wright that are evocative of Basho’s: That road is empty, The one leading into hills

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36 / jianqing zheng In autumn twilight. (136) Autumn moonlight is Deepening the emptiness Of a country road. (501)

In both Basho’s and Wright’s haiku, loneliness is intensified with an emphasis on emptiness of the road in autumn. Basho’s haiku suggests a traveler’s fear of being alone on the road while Wright’s two haiku, though catching the essence of Basho’s mode of expression of loneliness, center on loneliness only. According to Donald Keene, suggestion is one of the four Japanese aesthetics and a major element of a poem’s beauty (295). The inclusion of the empty road leading into hills in autumn twilight or emptiness deepening on the country road does reflect the Japanese poetic spirit and power of suggestion. Wright must have been quite impressed by the image of an empty road, which he uses in other haiku of his. For instance, Just one lonely road Stretching into the shadows Of a summer night. (499) A long empty road Under a lowering sky In a winter dawn. (503) This autumn evening Is full of an empty sky And one empty road. (787)

These haiku show evidences of the influence of the sabi haiku style, which is one of Basho’s major haiku characteristics. By using sabi and suggestion, the poet associates loneliness with his self-content of life, that is, lonelilessness in loneliness. “Sabi is traditionally associated with loneliness. Aesthetically, however, this mode of sensibility smacks of grace rather than splendor; it suggests quiet beauty as opposed to robust beauty” (Hakutani and Tener 259). A further evidence of Basho’s influence on Wright is significant. Read Basho’s famous crow haiku: On the dead limb squats a crow— autumn night. (Basho 35)

This poem focuses on a crow’s solitary moment, but in a deeper sense, it presents a posture of the poet’s contended loneliness with nature. The transcendent change from the crow’s loneliness to Basho’s suggests the poet’s

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enlightenment. Aesthetically speaking, it is his ideal of loneliness and his realization that all in nature exist in a state of sabi and relatedness. In haiku, relatedness means that “two entirely different things are joined in sameness: spirit and matter, present and future, doer and deed, word and thing, meaning and sensation” (Hakutani and Tener 253). Wright’s haiku 141 resembles Basho’s crow haiku: An autumn sunset: A buzzard sails slowly past, Not flapping its wings.

In contrast to Basho’s crow in a static posture of meditation, Wright’s buzzard presents a movement. Yet, both create a sense of relatedness from thing (crow / buzzard) to thing (autumn night / autumn sunset) in nature and, in a suggestive way, from nature to human nature. Wright’s haiku shows that he is an ardent imitator who is receptive to both the Japanese haiku technique and Zen philosophy. In haiku 141, a sense of loneliness obtained by the observer at autumn sunset suggests a sense of lonelilessness in the state of nothingness. In other words, it shows that Wright, being free of personal emotion, presents an aesthetic sensibility of human lonelilessness and selflessness with nature and thus reaches the spiritual height of sabi. Now let’s get back to Basho’s crow haiku. It has a thematic reference to ancient Chinese paintings of crows on old branches such as 枯木寒鸦图 [A Crow on an Old Branch (Winter)]. Haruo Shirane has noted that Basho first completed this haiku in the spring of 1681, during his late Chinese-style period . . . the poem was written on a seasonal topic closely associated with Fujiwara Shunzei (d. 1204) and his medieval aesthetics of quiet, meditative loneliness. Crows perched on a withered branch . . . was a popular subject in Chinese ink painting. In this context, Basho’s haiku juxtaposes a medieval poetic topic with a Chinese painting motif, causing the two to resonate in montage fashion.4

In other words, the adoption of the image of crow from the Chinese ink painting helps Basho create a resonance between the tangible landscape and the intangible atmosphere of loneliness. Basho’s haiku may also have an echo of Ma Zhyuan’s “Autumn Thoughts” (秋思): 枯藤老树昏鸦，小桥流水人家，古道西风瘦马。夕阳西下，断肠人在天涯。 (He 218) On an old tree thick with withered rattan: evening crows.

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38 / jianqing zheng A small bridge spans the stream and a house leans by a worn path. Against west wind a thin horse and a crushed traveler— the sinking sun at the skyline.

This translation is done by using the haiku format for comparison. The images in the original would read as “withered rattan, old tree, evening crows; small bridge, flowing stream, someone’s house, worn path, west wind, thin horse; sunset in the west, a crushed traveler at the skyline.” If we pick images from only the first and last stanzas, we see a picture of Basho’s crow haiku. Although metaphor is seldom used in haiku writing, some haiku can be read as extended metaphors that express human feelings. Basho expresses his loneliness through the image of a caged cricket for an internal comparison in the following haiku: Loneliness— caged cricket dangling from the wall. (Basho 62)

Images in lines 2 and 3 of this haiku accomplish the abstract feeling of loneliness. Wright, while suffering from loneliness after his wife and daughters moved to London, writes one similar to Basho’s in expressing the mood: One vanishing ship On an autumn horizon: How lonely it is.

The symbolic meaning is clear in this haiku. The nature we perceive is a concrete form that conveys feelings. The contrast between a ship and the horizon expands the feeling of loneliness. Empathetically, this is a seascape of loneliness visualized in autumn. Below are two more haiku for comparison. Basho’s haiku Come, let’s go snow-viewing till we’re buried. (Basho 55)

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and Wright’s In the falling snow A laughing boy holds out his palms Until they are white. (31)

Basho’s haiku focuses on a happy moment of snow-viewing, a moment of eager involvement of the viewers. In the same way, Wright’s haiku presents a moment of joy with snow through the boy’s laughter, and its pattern of expression shows his imitation of Basho. However, according to Michel Fabre’s thoughtful analysis, Wright’s haiku 31 probably expresses a different view of snow through the connotation of “white” and with consideration of his cultural background: It is clear that the snow represents winter, but as a joyous season. Yet a hidden clue may reserve the symbolism. If the boy is black, his joy in touching the immaculately white flakes is perhaps accompanied by a desire to be like them, like his palms which are lighter than the rest of his body. Hence the somewhat pathetic quality of the poem read as an attempt by the boy to forget his blackness. The effect is entirely different if the snow is seen as a symbol of fundamental human quality, in that everyone, covered with snow, is the same color. (Fabre, Quest 506)

If it is “the same color,” can we assume that white is colorless? Technically, white, like black, is an achromatic color. If so, the combination of black and white with snow covering the palms may suggest the desire for racial harmony or the poet’s wish to have a harmonious moment with nature to forget his skin color even though such integration faces challenge in reality. Although Wright is indebted to Basho, it is not quite difficult to trace in his haiku the influence of other Japanese poets such as Issa. For comparison, read this haiku by Issa: For you fleas too, The night must be long, It must be lonely. (Blyth 318)

and this one by Wright: For you, O gulls, I order slaty waters And this leaden sky! (2)

Wright’s haiku bears a close resemblance to Issa’s. Issa uses the image of flea to express the human loneliness. Similarly, Wright uses the images of gulls, slaty waters, and leaden sky to create a visual effect of

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40 / jianqing zheng

loneliness. The exclamation mark gives a tone that makes this lonely feeling heavier. Read another haiku by Issa: Do not ever strike! The fly moves as if to pray With his hands and feet. (Hakutani and Tener 225)

and Wright’s two haiku that echo Issa’s: A fly crawls slowly Over a sticky paper,— How chilly the dawn! (295) Two flies locked in love Were hit by a newspaper And died together. (486)

According to Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener, Wright expresses in haiku 295 his sympathy with a fly that is reminiscent of Issa’s famous fly haiku: “In Issa’s haiku, the negative particle attached to the verb ‘strike’ functions as a cutting word. In Wright’s haiku, the final line with ‘how’ and an exclamation mark accomplishes the same effect” (225). Ironically, in haiku 486, the cruel speaker, instead of leaving the flies alone, hits them to death, and the tone shows that he enjoys doing so. This haiku is evocative of the rat killed by Bigger Thomas in Wright’s novel Native Son and the cat hanged by Wright in his autobiographical novel, Black Boy. In all, the above comparisons prove that the influence of Japanese haiku and Zen Buddhism on Wright is significant. “Influence,” as A. Owen Aldridge discusses, “is the reflection of the style or thought of one author in the work of a subsequent one. The reflected elements would not have existed in the second author had he or she not read his predecessor and been sufficiently impressed to follow the latter’s example” (43). As a matter of fact, Wright’s mass production of haiku can be considered a result of the influence of world literature and the cross-cultural pollination therein. Conclusion A few days before his death, Wright was interviewed by Frank Tenot, who said he saw the novelist in Wright, “but through the novelist, the jazz

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lover” (Kinnamon and Fabre 242). What would Wright say if he was told he was a haiku lover? There is no question that Wright devoted his life to haiku writing in the final stage of his life. Wright may have felt exhausted from his illness, his solitude, and his unyielding battle against racial injustice, but he gains a new understanding of himself and of the world through haiku writing, and thus he eases his mind and attains spiritual harmony with nature. His journey toward finding a haiku moment of enlightenment is best expressed in haiku 3: Keep straight down this block, Then turn right where you will find A peach tree blooming.

Basho died at the age of 50. In his deathbed, at the request of his disciples, he wrote his last haiku: Sick on a journey— over parched fields dreams wander on. (Basho 81)

Basho’s dreams should be his poetic spirit that has harmonized into nature and human nature. On November 28, 1960, Wright died at the age of 52. His life burned out like a candle, as predicted in haiku 647: Burning out its time, And timing its own burning, One lonely candle.

Wright burned out with his haiku spirit. However, his haiku, though departing from the use of certain haiku techniques, demonstrate a state of mind of nothingness and reestablish his positive attitude toward life. A treasure for scholarly research and common reading in modern American literature, Wright’s haiku still vibrate with his poetic spirit and human tenderness; his dreams of the other world wander on. Notes 1. Unpublished letter to Margrit de Sablonière, Sept. 23, 1960. Wright Archive, Yale University Library. Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985. p. 54. 2. According to Sanehide Kodama, “one of the haiku Pound had in mind was that of Takeari Arakida (not Moritake Arakida as erroneously known, especially

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42 / jianqing zheng abroad): ‘The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: A butterfly.’ ” American Poetry and Japanese Culture. Hamden: Archon, 1984. p. 218. 3. Haruo Shirane’s translation of the passage from Narrow Road to the Deep North is in Vol. D of The Longman Anthology of World Literature, ed. David Damrosch. p. 425. 4. Ibid., p. 412.

Works Cited Aldridge, A. Owen. The Reemergence of World Literature: Study of Asia and the West. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1986. Basho, Matsuo. On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho. Trans and intro, Lucien Stryk. New York: Penguin, 1985. Blyth, R. H. “Buddhism and Haiku.” Monumenta Nipponica 7.1/2 (1951): 311–18. Damrosch, David, ed. The Longman Anthology of World Literature. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. Trans. Isabel Barzum. 2nd ed. Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985. Fabre, Michel, and Robert E. Skinner. Conversations with Chester Himes. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. Fujikawa, Fumiko. “The Influence of Tu Fu on Basho.” Monumenta Nipponica 20, 3/4 (1965): 374–88. Ge, Jie, and Cang Yangqing, eds. Three Hundred Quatrains. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Book Publishing House, 1980. Hakutani, Yoshinobu, and Robert L. Tener. Notes of the Haiku. Haiku: This Other World. By Richard Wright. New York: Arcade, 1998. 207–44. ———. Afterword. Haiku: This Other World. By Richard Wright. New York: Arcade, 1998. 245–300. Harrington, Oliver W. Why I Left America and Other Essays. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. He, Xinhui, ed. Dictionary of Songs of the Yuan Dynasty. Beijing: China Women Publishing House, 1988. Keene, Donald. “Japanese Aesthetics.” Philosophy East and West 19, 3 (1969): 293–306. Kinnamon, Keneth, and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. Kodama, Sanehide. American Poetry and Japanese Culture. Hamden: Archon, 1984. Liu, Zuoying, ed. Ten Thousand Quatrains of the Tang Dynasty. Vol. 1. Beijing: Bibliography and Document Publishing House, 1983. Pound, Ezra. Gaudier-Brzeska. New York: New Directions, 1960. Sun, Cecile Chu- chin. “Ch’ing and Ching: Correlation between Inner Feeling and Outer Reality in Chinese and English Poetry.” Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association. Ed. Claudio Guillen. Vol. 2. New York: Garland, 1985. 658–64.

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wright, japanese poetics, classical chinese poetry / 43 Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Haiku: This Other World. New York: Arcade, 1998. Xu, Yuanchong, Lu Peixian, and Wu Jun, eds. 300 Tang Poems: A New Translation. Beijing: China Translation & Publishing Corporation / Hong Kong Commercial Press, 1988.

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Ch a p t e r Th r e e Wordswort h i a n Nat u r e Poe t ry, A sh a n t i Cu lt u r e, a n d R ic h a r d Wr ig h t ’s H a i k u: Th is O t h e r Wor ld Peter Landino

R. H. Blyth offers similarities between English nature poetry and Japanese haiku in his two-volume book, A History of Haiku. Blyth illustrates several of William Wordsworth’s poems and makes several references to his work while explaining the art of haiku.1 While Blyth wrote this and other haiku texts from the 1940s through the 1960s, it is interesting to note that few critics since have made reference to Wordsworth and the writing of haiku by American poets. I perceive Blyth’s analysis as a standard description of haiku and its properties; hence, I use Wordsworth’s poetry as a standard for measuring successful haiku. Furthermore, Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s initial disillusionment resulting from the failure of the French Revolution led to their subsequent vision to revolutionize and transform the individual human spirit by using nature as a means to understand human existence. The Romantic notion of the totality of nature and humanity reflects the tenements of Zen philosophy2 noted from Gautama Buddha’s statement “Seek within, you are the Buddha,” as well as in the structural elements of haiku. Richard Wright explained this philosophy in regards to his experiences with the Ashanti culture of Africa in Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, observing, “in the African primal outlook upon existence, a person’s consciousness . . . corresponds to the spirit of nature” (Other World 296). The Ashanti culture’s affiliation with nature, instead of attending to social and political issues, correlates to the Romantic’s retreat from revolutionizing political and social systems, an attempt that failed for the French. Instead, they attempt to transform the human spirit through nature. Wright sought a similar transformation through his haiku, as he discovered “that only with the utmost attention human beings pay nature can they truly see themselves” (Other World 300).

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46 / peter landino

He moves from the political and social discourse regarding race in Black Power to the nature poetry of haiku, preserving the notion of regeneration and revolution through a new medium: humanity’s affinity with nature. Blyth remarks, “Haiku is at its best when it is simply Wordsworthian, that is, Wordsworth at his most simple” (13). Wordsworthian simplicity revolves around the Romantic quest of “merging the individual self with the infinite; [the] attainment of the absolute” (Chai 204). To accomplish this seemingly “simple” quest, Wordsworth united the self with nature. By attaching the self to the infinite and absolute in nature, the poet attained the organic whole: that being the affinity of humankind and nature. This totality brings a higher, purer consciousness, enabling the poet to transcend to the highest state of spiritual reality, an essence revealed in the natural world. While the quest in and of itself sounds complicated, the method Wordsworth incorporated into his writing allows for an understanding of the idea. Just as the haiku form demonstrates simplicity in its structure of 5, 7, 5 syllables per line and in many cases even in its understanding, haiku exemplify the affinity of humanity and nature because of a “deeply significant common element” (Blyth 34). The quest for understanding becomes simple because of the common element that ties the two together. In a sense, seeking within oneself to find what is primal in humanity— Wright defined the primal in Ashanti culture as an individual’s “basically poetic apprehension of existence” (Black Power 296)—and to find it also in nature allows an individual to find it in himself or herself as well. The fascinating aspect of this simplicity is its relevance as a constantly evolving and continuously creative process, thus making it an infinite and absolute quest while reciprocally being a quest for the infinite and the absolute, with humanity and nature being the significant and common players in it. The infinite capacity of a pure or higher consciousness that continuously creates and evolves in the pursuit of the absolute corresponds with Wright’s observation that a person’s consciousness, as he understood it in terms of the Ashanti culture, corresponds to the “spirit of nature.” Human consciousness, then, matches or seeks affinity with the infinite and absolute realm of nature, without the attachments of human emotion. The idea Wright characterized through humanity’s affinity with nature and his understanding that through nature human beings gain a true awareness of themselves, both revolutionize him. For example, Wright’s “Dewdrop Joins Dewdrop” presents a tension-free look at nature, 77.

Dewdrop joins dewdrop Till a petal holds a pool Reflecting its rose. (Other World 20)

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A reflection appears as if the rose holds a mirror upon itself, while, in fact, nature holds a mirror to itself, and the poet sees this moment of sensation. The reflection, though, as the poet explains, shows simply “its rose.” The pool merely reflects an identical image without disparities. The haiku shows nature in a simple state and yet demonstrates by its actions that nature is vibrantly “alive.” According to Blyth, “alive” means “having a direction, a purpose, a will,” and nature presents this to human beings by “returning us to Nature, that is, to our own nature” (9–10). Humanity and nature, therefore, illustrate themselves as one and the same, with “our own nature” and “Nature” as identical. As Blyth explained, human beings get their direction, purpose, and will from nature; they return to the state of being “alive” through nature. Therefore, “returning” means that human beings come back to a place they know and have been before—a seemingly primal, innate, authentic state of being. In Book One of The Prelude,3 Wordsworth recollected how the nearby Derwent River sang lullabies to him and how, as he wrote his poetry, he sensed the animism of the river as Wright sensed that of the rose looking into the dewdrops. Likewise, haiku reflects “that state of mind in which we are not separated from other things, [but] are indeed identical with them” (Blyth 13). This statement truly represents haiku and the Zen philosophical doctrines they capture. In Black Power, Wright’s journey to Ghana to observe the political and social aspects of a nation seeking independence and “Freedooom” instead leads him to find the deeply significant element that is common to both humankind and nature: a universal, original, absolute, infinite, yet simple common element. So simple, in fact, that he dedicates his final writings during a debilitating illness to capturing this common element in its simplest form, the haiku poem—a form that, in its own right, strives for simplicity while accentuating the totality of humanity and nature. The form and essence of haiku pertains ideally to the “Romantic” quest of Richard Wright, as Michal Fabre states, “ ‘For Wright, it is in harmony with nature that man will most fully realize his humanity’ ” (Tener 275). This philosophy of human existence allows human beings to reconnect with the natural world simply because of human beings’ affinity with it. Nature represents part of the human self, and the ability to seek the absolute within the self becomes much more of a reality if nature is perceived as “primal” to human existence. Wright chose “primal” over “primitive,” a word many Western anthropologists used to define African culture, because of the Ashanti belief that the world of nature supercedes any scientific perspective of the world. Instead, Wright quotes from Edmund Husserl’s Ideas,4 solidifying for himself the Ashanti view that intuition and primal human instincts are what aid individuals on their quest for truth (265).

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48 / peter landino

The primal intuition that both Wright and the Romantics believed put people on the path to ultimate truth eventually led Wright, as it did for the Romantics, to revolutionize the human spirit in conjunction with the spirit of nature. For Wright, a “pastoral impulse” helped him sense his primal beginnings in the rural south—a beginning he not only had to confront but also could never escape. Kenneth Kinnamon’s article “The Pastoral Impulse in Richard Wright” provides unique insight into Wright’s use of the “pastoral impulse.” Although Kinnamon’s article does not discuss Wright’s haiku, I see this impulse present in them. Kinnamon uses pastoral “to indicate a retrospective rural nostalgia from the vantage point of [Wright’s] urban present,” but Kinnamon clearly avoids suggesting that Wright “consciously utilized conventions of the pastoral literary tradition” (42). Wright’s pastoral impulse originated intuitively from his Southern roots, roots his daughter Julia mentions he tried hard to resist. Kinnamon points out that Wright, while living in France from 1957 until his death, bought a farm in Normandy and grew vegetables. Wright also ate “down home cuisine” at LeRoy’s in Paris, a restaurant “owned and operated by an American Negro” specializing in black southern delicacies. Although an ex-patriot, Wright remained a “native son of the American South” (42). Wright’s haiku, started during August 1959 on the Normandy farm, also echo his Southern roots. Many critics note Wright’s extensive use of magnolias and other components of the Southern landscape as topics of his haiku—for example, “In a Summer Haze,” 28.

In a summer haze: Behind magnolias, Faint sheets of lightening. (Other World 7)

The summer haze, magnolias, and sheets of lightening ascertain fundamental parts of the Southern landscape. As much as Wright disliked the countryside because of the racial tensions associated with it, he returned to it, albeit in a different setting. Wright lived, ate, and associated with aspects of his Southern heritage. By writing haiku at this point in his life, when he was 52, Wright at times saw nature in its fundamental simplicity, as nurturing to the soul and humanity’s affinity with it. Wordsworth wrote about nature’s innate ability to nurture in Book One of The Prelude about the Derwent: . . . didst thou, O Derwent! Winding among grassy holms Where I was looking on, a babe in arms

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richard wright’s haiku: this other world / 49 Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts . . . giving . . . A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves. (I. 274–281)5

These verses represent the moment of sensation Blyth calls necessary for haiku, and one of the reasons Blyth referenced Wordsworth so often. Wordsworth returned to the totality of nature he once intuitively experienced as an infant. Nature’s “music . . . composed” his thoughts and helped him sense not only nature, but himself as well. Nature and Wordsworth think and “breathe” as one; they are whole. Correspondingly, Wright’s “deepest yearnings” (Tener 280) are to sense nature as one with his thoughts, his breath, and his life. Tener explains how the writer of haiku “in a brief moment . . . sees a pattern, a significance he has not seen before” (281). This idea is evident in Wordsworth’s Derwent passage and in Wright’s “In An Old Woodshed” and “A Wild Winter Wind”: 187.

In an old woodshed The long points of icicles Are sharpening the wind. (Other World 46)

708.

A wild winter wind Is tearing itself to shreds On barbed-wire fences. (Other World 177)

Typically, icicles sharpen in the wind, yet Wright observes the opposite as true. A wild wind typically tears objects in its path. In these haiku, Wright keenly understood the wind and the ice/barbed wire in a reciprocal way. Yet, it also indicates a pattern and significance not sensed before, just as Wordsworth saw significance in the Derwent at a later date. The wind, ice, and barbed wire demonstrate identical features to the observer. For several of Wright’s haiku this rings true, but not necessarily as a “harmonious union” (Tener 280), since this significance has been present all his life, as Kinnamon established for Wright and as Zen teaches for all human beings. “Union” means that separate parts join together, but Zen philosophy clearly explains nature and humanity’s totality from their origin. Wright’s ability to relate this moment in haiku carries Wordsworthian traits in both his use of nature and his poem’s

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simplicity. Wright sensed the wholeness of humanity while expressing it in poetry written for this sole purpose, that wholeness being haiku. As Blyth stated and Wordsworth demonstrated, the totality is a simple concept, but it is this very simplicity that makes it difficult to comprehend. Haiku and Wordsworth’s poetry present the means to express the sensation, but the sensation is present before the poetry is written. It is innate in the poet. The primacy of nature Wright perceived while amongst the Ashanti culture nurtured his philosophy, enabling him to compose haiku. Wright’s initial emotional attachments to nature formed during his upbringing in Mississippi. Wright’s daughter Julia, quoting her father’s journal, remarked how Wright “disliked the countryside because it reminded him of the physical hunger he had experienced as a poor black child in one of the world’s most fertile landscapes” (Other World xi). Haiku, however, helped Wright change his perspective so that he, at times, saw nature like Wordsworth and the Romantics did, as nurturing to the soul, not conflicting with it. Blyth’s descriptions of the Zen philosophical doctrines regarding the “wholeness” and “oneness” of humanity and nature, as demonstrated in Japanese haiku and parts of Wordsworth’s poetry, are traits adopted by and observed in several of Wright’s haiku. However, the lightning that struck Wright toward an organic understanding of the world apparently resided, at least in part, in what he discovered in the Ashanti culture. Being present in the culture led him to formulate the approach he found so intriguing in his reading of Blyth’s Haiku. His associations with the Ashanti culture in 1953, his subsequent reading of Blyth and his interest in haiku by 1959, and his eventual dedication to the poetry itself in 1960 (dedication in the strongest sense of the word since he composed over 4,000 of them), all aligned ideally for him to transform from a politically and socially charged writer into a nature poet. As a nature poet, like Wordsworth and Coleridge before him, he spurned trying to revolutionize social and political structures and returned to transforming the human spirit he saw reflected in nature. Once the human spirit is transformed, social and political unrest would follow suit. He realized that discovering the essence of the human soul and the human spirit through nature’s affinity with them will change human consciousness into a purer form, thus exposing unjust and prejudiced social and political systems to those who are enlightened. According to Blyth, haiku procure the pure consciousness of enlightenment in its simple form, since haiku “is the poetry of meaningful touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell, it is humanized nature, naturalized humanity” (28), making it the ideal vehicle for Wright to substantiate the affinity he saw between nature and human beings.

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If the Ashanti culture triggered in Wright a return to nature to sense humanity, he made note of it early in Black Power. He says, “The over-all impression was that the black human beings had so completely merged with the dirt that one could scarcely tell where humanity ended and the earth began; they lived in and of the dirt, the flesh of bodies seeming to fuse insensibly with the soil” (74). In this description, with the totality between these people and nature being so physically interwoven, Wright barely discerns a separation between them. This oneness with nature in a physical sense, one of Wright’s earliest impressions in the book, held such tremendous appeal for him that it explains the enormous influence this culture had on him. The wholeness is clear and obvious and seemingly displayed in a way not often referenced—physically. In this instance, if these people were so physically in tune with nature, then their spiritual affinity must be transcendent. These people constituted what Ralph Waldo Emerson likens to nature as that of a discipline and as serving humankind (Chai 67). Wright continued, “these people were old, old, maybe the oldest on earth . . . The delicate strands of that fragile culture, so organically dependent upon the soil and climate of West Africa, so purely woven out of the naked impulses of naked men, could never be reconstituted” (76). These remarks cite the problems the culture faced in adhering to its traditions in the midst of new world progress. Wright saw a transcendent, pure culture never to be duplicated, one that was physical and now spiritual. Wordsworth wrote The Prelude with many parallel characteristics. Wordsworth took a chronological approach to his autobiographical poem, starting in Book One from his days as a youth in the English countryside, and proceeding all the way to Book Fourteen where he states, Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified, By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved. Others will love, and we will teach them how. (XIV. 444–447)

Wordsworth sensed the wholeness of humanity and nature as “sanctified,” primarily through his ability to “speak” with her “Prophets” and presumably by teaching others through poetry to do the same. Furthermore, this wholeness may be as simple to teach as Wordsworth acknowledged. Blyth stated that the most ordinary people “are able, if they will, to understand” this wholeness, exemplified in haiku, because of a “deeply significant common element” in both (34), as exhibited in the “mirror” reflection of

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Wright’s haiku 77, “Dewdrop Joins Dewdrop,” quoted earlier. Wordsworth also does this in Book Fourteen: . . . the mind Learns from such timely exercise to keep In wholesome separation the two natures, The one that feels, the other that observes. (XIV. 344–347)

With Wright’s southern heritage intrinsically a part of him, he could not separate the overwrought feelings associated with it. In order to write haiku, he needed to simply observe with his senses and not add feelings to the sensation. To return to his own nature, he needed to “exercise” his mind to solely observe, and his travels in Africa allowed him to do this. Wordsworth’s verses reflect the wholeness displayed in haiku; “[haiku] does not add human emotions to poetical sensation, it does not add human will to the will of nature” (Blyth 26). Haiku present only the observed sensation, it is “just photography. One of the worst things in the world is mere sensation smeared all over with emotion and thought” (Blyth 25–26). The difficulty for Wright was to merely observe the sensation and revert his thinking to the primal stages of beauty without a human emotional tag attached to it. Kinnamon explains this difficulty further, “Wright’s prose . . . depicts the Southern pastoral scenes. Often, of course, he is merely heightening the contrast with the racial violence that occurs in these settings, but the rural attachment is real” (47). Many of Wright’s haiku, though, offer a new perspective on the landscape, not one depicting tension and conflict, but one sensing the affinity achieved in Wordsworth and classic haiku poetry. Wright’s ability to write without the tension is displayed in “Tossing All Day Long,” 196.

Tossing all day long, The cold sea now sleeps deeply On a bed of stars. (Other World 49)

He sensed only the natural, rural attachment essential for the haiku poet. He gives human characteristics to the sea, as Wordsworth does the Derwent, and writes what he observes, just like photography. Wright separates emotion from pure observation. He presents human beings’ totality with nature through personifications of “toss” and “sleep.” Wright taught himself as he came full circle back to nature’s sounds and sights, sensing them “now” as he did before the negative associations accompanied them.

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However, haiku has taught him as an adult to try and disassociate the tensions tied to these senses. Instead, he looked to understand the senses in regards to the totality of human beings and nature in the moment of sensation. He learned what Wordsworth called separating the two natures. “The Blue of This Sky” is another example of this idea: 265.

The blue of this sky Sounds so loud that it can be heard Only with our eyes. (Other World 67)

Wright saw significance in the color of the sky, the significance being that he can hear it with his eyes because the blue is so loud. He must use two of his senses to explain what he sees in the moment of sensation, thus causing a juxtaposition of the senses and their qualities. Wright’s observation of the sea illustrates another, equally pure observation; the personification does not offer emotion or thought but instead relays the aliveness significant in a moment of sensation. In these photographic moments of sensation, Wright freed himself from the tensions, possibly represented in the tossing sea of his past, and enjoyed in the “now” the totality of himself and nature “On a bed of stars.” He sees nature in an enlightened state. But these examples of Wright’s haiku embody pure sensation, not smeared with emotion and thought. As Kinnamon aptly suggests, “paradise could indeed be regained” (44). Indeed, Wright returned to the natural setting, both on the farm and in these haiku, displaying humanity’s affinity with nature while speaking through haiku as one of nature’s prophets, as Wordsworth did through his poetry. Wright further examines these natural settings, eventually understanding and interpreting them poetically without emotion, in Chapter 30 of Black Power, one of the most intriguing in relation to the Ashanti culture. Wright traveled to the jungle region and found “men and women . . . sitting and staring calmly into space” while the “Negroes themselves claim that they came out of holes in the ground” (269). He is told that African men worry little if at all about material concerns because “the system of native African communism saves him from want” (271). Wright observed this serenity when he noted how a native chief and his men whom Wright befriended live life in a dream “with their eyes open” (280), while “the African [in general] had projected an invisible world out of himself and he was living and reacting to that world” (272). Wright casts a shadow of disparity through his tone in this chapter, yet he reveals how this transformed him beyond recognition. He struggled with modes of progression and the way these people adhered to their origins and primal ways with

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contentment. In a way, the contentment of these people made it uncomfortable for outsiders to be around them, as the Englishman in this chapter tells Wright about an outsider’s inability to comprehend the Ashanti ways. The Ashanti in this area display such unadulterated and innate qualities in their habits that they cause nonnatives to feel uneasy. Communally, these Africans proceed unabashed by the changes around them, being so interwoven into the fabric of the African continent that change goes either unnoticed or is attended to with indifference. Yet these qualities that Wright offered with a tone of disfavor express the same qualities that enliven his haiku and characterize “Wordsworth at his most simple.” The Africans were simple people leading simple lives, as nature attests. They live in unity with their natural surroundings and take little if any recourse to material possessions. They claim, in a verse from a classic Ashanti poem, that “ ‘Earth, while I am yet alive, / It is upon you that I put my trust’ ” (Black Power 379). Wordsworth presents the same innate trust and faith in nature in his famous poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey:” . . . Nature never did betray The heart that loved her, ‘tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. (122–134)

The interwoven quality of nature and the Ashanti people Wright found on his visit epitomizes the unity of nature and humanity. Material needs and concerns never prevail over those who adhere to nature, as “joy,” “lofty thoughts,” and a “cheerful faith” prevail in this state of mind. However, the joy referenced is not an outward joy, but the joy Coleridge expressed: “ ‘Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, & that we are all one Life’ ” (Chai 300,306). The essential unity necessary for spiritual survival comes from those who “believe” and “feel” nature like Coleridge, “trust” nature like the Ashanti poem revealed, and “love” nature like Wordsworth, thus loving, trusting,

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feeling, and believing in humanity. The Ashanti culture and this feeling of oneness, alien to Wright during his youth in the South, ever so subtlety, as only nature can do, transformed his philosophical inclinations. It took only a few more years for him to discover haiku and realize through his own writing of haiku what had with “quietness and beauty” fed his soul in Africa. The wholeness that Wright eventually sensed in his soul and spirit comes to light in one of his earlier published haiku, “Standing in the Field:” 489.

Standing in the field I hear the whispering of Snowflake to snowflake. (Other World 123)

Considering the Wordsworthian foundations of simplicity and nature along with the influences of the Ashanti culture, Wright illustrated the poet-speaker as being one with nature. The poet is at once part of both the field and humanity, without separation or misinterpretation, but whole. The poet and the scene are one because they are coexistent and coeternal. The poet, the falling snow, and the field have intrinsic value. The speaker’s act of standing, and not moving as the snow does around him, allows him to feel the sensation, since his walking could create sounds muffling out the snow’s whispering. He must stand still to hear, just as the field is still. If the crops or grasses that comprise a field were to move, the whispers would be inaudible. The whispering of the snowflakes is always present, but it takes this “moment” of sensation for him to hear it; this pure consciousness allows the poet to communicate with nature as he listens to Nature speak in the simplicity of moving snowflakes. The snowflakes’ simple, audible whisper is the sensation. In this haiku, Nature and Wright are whole because the moment of sensation is heard; nature is understood because he can hear it. Wright sensed that significant common element— and in this haiku, the Wordsworthian communicable element—in nature and humanity. The snowflakes and the field contain satori, “the enlightenment that transcends time and space, and even the consciousness of the self” (Afterward Other World 296). They are alive. Haiku 489’s “ah-ness,”6 a trait attributed to successful haiku, is evident in the poet’s stillness. He senses to stand in order to hear and hears because he is standing. To overlook the simplicity of the haiku is to oversimplify the purpose of haiku. Human beings do not need to identify with nature or harmonize with her, as Wordsworth states, because “she can so inform the mind within us” through a scene such as Wright’s. Nature and humanity are one and the same. The poet is the snowflake because he can hear the whispering. He is also the field since he is still. The snowflakes are the poet

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because they have something to say. The field is the poet because it is still and listening. The poet, the snowflake, and the field are timeless, absolute, and infinite in this moment. The “ ‘ah-ness’ ” is that all are necessary, doing what they do at this moment, for the sensation and communication to occur. All are in a natural state. This haiku captures the instantaneous and spontaneous moment, which is the moment human beings sense the affinity between themselves and nature. The snowflakes are not symbolic because haiku, for that matter, is not symbolic (Blyth 13). The revelation in this selection of Wright’s haiku is free from any emotion he previously associated with nature, and he “simply” hears, sees, and observes nature, and himself, as Wordsworth did. The haiku displays the freedom, tranquility, and calmness that Wordsworth said Nature breathes. The intuitive breath humans share with nature instills the freedom, tranquility, and calm sought for in life. Wright explained, “There is no reason why an African or a person of African descent . . . should abandon his primal outlook on life” as reflected in the Ashanti culture; furthermore, “the tribal African’s culture is primally human; that which all men once had their warm, indigenous way of living, is his . . .” (296). This idea conveys the Zen belief that humans must return to nature and their intuitive ways. In Zen philosophy, the state of mu7 or nothingness means, “In this Nothing, all things are equal, because infinite. In this Silence, all things speak. We are not superior to nature, nor yet inferior to ‘it’, but of one substance with it” (Blyth 16). In the Afterword to Haiku: This Other World, editors Tener and Hakutani state how Wright “found his poetic sensibility” in haiku (294). He discovered that “man and nature are inseparable” as well as “an awareness of what human beings share with all living things” (294). “A Chill Autumn Wind,” “A Spring Sky So Clear,” and “In a Silent Forest” support these sentiments. 297.

A chill autumn wind Filling the valley With mountain voices. (Other World 75)

301.

A spring sky so clear That you feel you are seeing Into tomorrow. (Other World 76)

316.

In the silent forest A woodpecker hammers at The sound of silence. (Other World 79)

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The poet hears nature’s “mountain voice,” and because of the sky’s clarity, he can sense the future. The sky and the wind contain satori, like haiku 187 and 265 mentioned previously. The “silence” gives way to voices and a sense of tomorrow. Wright sensed the infinite along with humanity and nature as “one substance.” These haiku gave him the means to relate his poetic sensibility, the sensibility necessary for writing haiku. Hearing in silence represents the state of mu, revealed through the woodpecker since the “sound of silence” could not be heard without the bird’s hammering. The state of nothingness is achieved by seeing into tomorrow because the sky is clear. All things speak, even the “silent forest.” Equally, Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” achieves the same state of mu: A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears or sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. (115)

Wordsworth captures the state of mu with death as the main element. In one of his “Lucy” poems,8 she is of “one substance” entirely and, therefore, doesn’t need to hear or see. She is one with “earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees.” The poet experiences no human fears, no tensions; he senses wholly the Silence and humanity’s inseparable state with nature. I chose Wordsworth’s poems about death because of Wright’s battle with illness during his last eighteen months, and because of the influence J. B Danquah’s The Akan Doctrine of God had on Wright.9 Wright came to an appreciation of the African belief that natural elements like Wordsworth’s rocks, stones, and trees were alive with a spiritual essence. Furthermore, the Ashanti believe in a transcendental element of nature, as white missionary Lloyd Shirer, a Department of Welfare employee in the Northern Territories, explained to Wright. “ ‘The ground in which [an African’s] ancestors are buried is charged with spirits whose influence is both good and bad. Therefore, to leave a spot in which ancestors are buried creates terror in some African tribes . . . they feel they are leaving their very souls behind them’ ” (216). After a discussion with Mr. Shirer and Shirer’s African cook, whom Wright interviewed to get further insight into the transcendent soul, Wright concluded with

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a paragraph full of questions directed at the African belief system. He said these are “but dreams, daylight dreams, dreams dreamed with eyes wide open! Was it the jungle, so rich, so fertile, was it that life, so warm, so filled with ready food, so effortless, prompted men to dream dreams like this?” (217). Wright’s tone is less critical, as he not only learned more about the culture but also truly began to sense the African beliefs unawares. He surmised further in appreciation, “It may be that such beliefs fit the soul of man better than railroads, mass production, wars . . . And the African is not alone in holding that these dreams are true. All men, in some form or other, love dreams” (217). In this section of Black Power, Wright discovered truth in the natural world and a belief intricate in human understanding—the belief that dreams make the quest for absolute truth possible—although questions still persist, as he ends Chapter 24 with an ellipsis and a question. Yet his appreciation, along with his initial misgivings about the African belief doctrines, becomes essential in enlightening his past, since his ancestral roots are in the rural southeastern United States. Daughter Julia explains how her father wrote haiku as “self-developed antidotes against illness” (Other World viii). She later continues explaining haiku as “a form of poetry which links seasons of the soul with nature’s cycle of moods [that] enabled [Wright] to reach out to the black boy part of himself still stranded in a South that continued to live in his dreams” (xi). The rural attachment is real in his dreams. “So close to his death,” the haiku not only began a “self-nurturing” for Wright “but also enabled him to come to terms with the difficult beauty of the earth in which his mother would be laid to rest” (Other World xi). With a heightened awareness of his physical instability but highly sensitized mental state, nature helps him see into the future with assurance rather than reservation. He hears voices coming from the mountains, those of nature and human beings rolled round in the earth’s diurnal course. Some of his haiku help him ease “the black boy part of himself still stranded in the South,” sensing, as did his mother, that he too would be laid to rest in the earth. Wright’s concept of life and death is suggestive of Zen philosophy, as Hakutani and Tener note, according to Zen master Dogen, “since life and death are beyond human control, there is no need to avoid them. Dogen refutes the assumption that life and death are entirely separate entities, as are the seasons” (Other World 297). Wright sensed and pondered this belief while observing the Ashanti, and through his haiku he realized the truth in it. The following haiku reach for this truth. “A Soft Wind at Dawn” and “One Magnolia” display the characteristics of earth’s diurnal course and

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Julia Wright’s insight into the cycle of moods represented in haiku: 39.

A soft wind at dawn Lifts one leaf and lays it Upon another. (Other World 10)

50.

One Magnolia Landed upon another In the dew-wet grass. (Other World 13)

The beauty of nature seen in the decaying of leaves and petals illustrates nature’s affinity with human existence. The poet sensed human beings like the leaves and petals landing upon each other. Although they no longer attach to a tree, they are still alive and inseparable from nature. The wind still moves them, and the dew-wet grass still holds them. Whether decaying or living, they represent nature, since even decaying nature is alive. In earth’s diurnal course, human beings also live with the rocks, the trees, and the decaying leaves. Wordsworth explained how the “mellower years will bring a riper mind and clearer insight” (I. 236–37). Although Wright’s physical strength weakens, his mind is clear as reflected in the blue sky he observes. Wright is, in a Wordsworthian sense, “mellower” while writing haiku than while engaging as the protest writer because of his more observant, more sensitive state of mind, and he eventually discerns truth in the African beliefs he sought to understand. “The Spring Hill Grows Dim” explains this point further: 640.

The spring hill grows dim, Today joining other days, Days gone, days to come. (Other World 160)

The infinite and coeternal expression in this haiku illustrates Fabre’s discussion of Wright’s psychosomatic state at the time he wrote haiku. Wright’s illness helped him write “pure literature” because, as Wright stated, “I was so damnably sensitive. Never was I so sensitive as when my intestines were raw” (Fabre 508). He returns back to nature in writing this haiku; during this time in his life he nearly exclusively wrote haiku. I stress “So damnably sensitive” and “so sensitive” because the moment of sensation is vital for haiku, and these

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sensations bring truth through primal intuition. Fabre continued, “Never before had Wright . . . written anything so directly related to his psychosomatic state” (508). The haiku “The Spring Hill Grows Dim” looks to the past and to the future, while the poet observes the present. The past, present, and future are inseparable. As Blyth explains, “The thought is not mere thought, but the thought subsumed in sensation; the sensation is not mere sensation, but the sensation involved in real thinking, that is, poetical thinking . . . when the man and the thing are in any way separated or separable, no poetry, and especially that of haiku in any language is possible” (38). Since haiku helped Wright “live with illness” (Fabre 509), he sensed the totality of humanity and nature in not only his poetical thinking but also in living his everyday life by what Wordsworth calls the “timely exercise” of the mind. With his body ailing and frequently bedridden, Wright plainly exercised his mind while writing and arranging over 4,000 haiku. Wright says that he was sensitive not just in his poetry but damnably so in all aspects of his life. The simple “spring hills” helped him sense the past, present, and future as one; it helped him sense tomorrow. Living with his illness, he intuitively senses for the first time in his life that he is “alive,” as nature returns him to what Blyth calls “our own nature”—one similar to the primal state of the Ashanti culture, where once someone finds an essence in ancestral souls and spirits, “something strange will happen to you” (Black Power 215). When Wright persisted in questioning what the strange thing would be, the African cook replied, “It’s hard to tell, sar” (215). Inevitably, Wright soulfully discovers this strange feeling in haiku. In Book Five of The Prelude, Wordsworth spoke of nature’s ability to return humans back to her—our own nature—which I feel nature demonstrated to Wright as represented in the animism of his haiku mentioned so far. Wordsworth explained how Great and benign, indeed, must be the power Of living nature, which could thus so long Detain me from the best of other guides And dearest helpers, left unthanked, unpraised. Even in the time of lisping infancy, And later down, in prattling childhood, even While I was traveling back among those days, How could I ever play an ingrate’s part? Once more should I have made those bowers resound, By intermingling strains of thankfulness With their own thoughtless melodies; (V. 166–76)

Wordsworth chose his pen to thank nature by joining her melodies with his own. He returns back to nature to hear her alive again and experience

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the state of mu. Nature was present even when he was unaware of her, “and soothes me now” (V. 180). Nature’s “thoughtless” melodies free him from any negative associations or tensions, making him just as free they are. The thrust of living nature’s constant omnipresence, many times going unnoticed, returns human beings back to it time again and time again. This omnipresence and Wright’s realization of it is displayed in his “The Lake Gulps Spring Rain:” 661.

The lake gulps spring rain, Sucking the falling drops With a million mouths. (Other World 661)

In this commonly observed reoccurring scene, he noticed how the raindrops make an impression in the water on impact. Furthermore, the impressions appear as “a million mouths,” seemingly infinite in number yet all seen in an instant, representative of the state of mu. However, Wright’s realization of this state takes time, as Melvin Dixon notes from Wright’s White Men Listen! “I and my environment are one, but that oneness has in it, at its very core, an abiding schism” (93). In his haiku, though, Wright senses no detachment in his comprehension of nature’s affinity with the human race. But as Dixon remarks, Wright was also an individual human being and, like Wordsworth, observed that human interactions with the modernized world at times mute the mountain voices and the thoughtless melodies of nature or prevent human beings from seeing the million mouths. These characteristics distance Wright from the environment, but the great and benign power of “living” nature returns him back, just like it did for Wordsworth. Wright uses his “pen as a weapon” (Fabre 508) for much of his career, but in his haiku, he uses it to self-nurture his state of mind. He writes about nature, which in turn enables him to discover his true self. While many reviews examine the tensions and emotions associated with Wright’s haiku, this chapter notes some of the haiku that follow the Zen philosophy Blyth stresses as essential to haiku. The styles evident in the chosen haiku most closely resemble elements of haiku that illustrate simple observations of humanity’s oneness with nature, culminating in the state of mu. Wright’s haiku that follow the observation angle of Wordsworth’s “two natures” present only the moment of sensation that is crucial to haiku. There is little reason to assume that any of Wright’s haiku that stray from this awareness are inferior in any way, some are just not “Wordsworth at his most simple,” while some, the haiku chosen, are the best representations. Wright expounded on a Wordsworthian philosophy that “should the chosen guide / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, / I cannot miss

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my way” (Prelude, I, 16–18). Wright discovered a truth heard amongst the snowflakes and observed among the Ashanti, a simple yet organic base on which to live. Critics have written about Wright’s apprehension regarding the Ashanti culture and its chances of survival in the mode recorded in Black Power, but the physical and spiritual wholeness the tribes shared with nature transcends their place in modern society, just as the wholeness of Wright’s haiku will surpass him. Wright senses through his haiku that the affinity between humanity and nature necessitates human survival. Wright’s proclamation “In nature is where we find our humanity” and Wordsworth’s “Let Nature be your teacher” (Wordsworth 107)10 signify these intrinsic and intuitive qualities human beings share with nature, as well as the importance this state of mind has in human existence. Notes 1. R. H. Blyth’s extensive use of William Wordsworth, starting on page 1 of the Introduction, includes the poems “Evening Walk,” “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Stepping Westward,” “To A Butterfly,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “Tintern Abbey,” “Resolution and Independence,” “Personal Talk,” “The Glow Worm,” “To A Cuckoo,” and “To A Skylark.” Blyth explains how haiku poets believe poetry is “of meaningful touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell; it is humanized nature, naturalized humanity” (28). To demonstrate, Blyth uses six lines from “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” explaining, “This is haiku because the poet sees himself as a cloud, a kind of unsui” (26–27). He simultaneously used haiku and Wordsworth’s poems to explain the characteristics of haiku, most of which is noted throughout these pages. See Blyth, A History of Haiku. Vol. I. 2. Blyth explains Zen by quoting Bernard Phillips, who says Zen is to make the practice of giving oneself wholly to one’s actions so that the doer becomes one with the practice. The philosophy of Zen is the very seeking of wholeness, of which the seeking is part of this wholeness (Blyth, A History of Haiku, 4–6). Historically, Zen originated in China and was disseminated to Korea and Japan. In Japan, Zen flourished and influenced Japanese art and poetry. See William J. Higginson’s The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1985). 3. Wordsworth’s The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind: an Autobiographical Poem was begun in Germany in 1798 and completed in 1804–05; however, Wordsworth revised it throughout his life, and it was published after his death in 1850. The poem describes “a peculiarly favorable and fortunate development, a history of how the mind can preserve and foster its highest potentialities, and of what it then becomes. As such the poem is the central statement of the philosophy Wordsworth held during the years of his greatest achievement.” See English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 169–77, 212–13. 4. Edmund Husserl, Ideas (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962). 5. For all the cited selections of Wordsworth’s poetry, see Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965).

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richard wright’s haiku: this other world / 63 6. The often referred to “ah-ness” in haiku refers to a sensation that goes deeper than words can explain. It is a moment that “by recognizing the intimate things that touch us we come to know and appreciate ourselves and our world more.” See Higginson, Haiku Handbook, 4–6. 7. The state of mu in Zen is a state of human existence in which “human-centered though and emotion, human selfishness and egoism” are absent. This enlightenment “is so completely free that such a consciousness corresponds to that of nature.” Once this state of nothingness is attained, an individual can then perceive the world through enlightened senses. See Yoshinobu Hakutani’s Richard Wright and Racial Discourse (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1996) 290. See also Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) for a postmodern and post-structural theory on practicing the concept of mu. 8. Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems refer to a series of six poems where the identity of the character has yet to be solved. Her identity is not important, as the focus of the poems is “principally on the mental experiences of the poet-speaker.” The six poems are “Strange Fits of Passion I have Known,” “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways,” “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower,” “Lucy Gray,” “I Travelled Among Unknown Men,” and the one I mention, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” See Stillinger, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 518 and Perkins, English Romantic Writers, 263. 9. J. B. Danquah, The Akan Doctrine of God: A Fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion (London: Frank Cass, 1944). 10. “The Tables Turned,” Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 107.

Works Cited Blyth, R. H. History of Haiku. Vols. I–II. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1964. Chai, Leon. The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987. Dixon, Melvin. “Richard Wright: Native Father and His Long Dream.” Black World 1974, 23, 5 (91–95). Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1996. Kinnamon, Kenneth. “The Pastoral Impulse in Richard Wright.” Mid- Continent American States Journal. 1969, 10, 1 (41–47). Tener, Robert L. “The Where, The When, The What: A Study of Richard Wright’s Haiku.” Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. 273–98. Wordsworth, William. English Romantic Writers. Ed. David Perkins. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. 169–77, 212–13. ———. Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Wright, Richard. Black Power. New York: Harper-Collins, 1954. ———. Haiku: This Other World. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade, 1998.

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Ch a p t e r Fou r Cro s s - Cu lt u r a l Poe t ic s: S on i a Sa nc h e z’s Li k e t h e Si ngi ng Com i ng O f f t h e D ru ms Yoshinobu Hakutani

Some accomplished poets produced their work in isolation. Emily Dickinson is one of the world’s best-known and widely admired poets, though at the time of her death in 1886 only eight of her more than seventeen hundred poems had been published. Richard Wright wrote in exile over four thousand haiku in his last year and half. But only twenty-four of them had posthumously appeared in print before the publication of his Haiku: This Other World (1998), a collection of 817 haiku that Wright himself had selected. Time has changed not only for the poet but for the literary public as well. Readers of poetry over a century ago were not quite familiar with the style and vision of Dickinson, who wrote those terse verses with their bold, startling imagery, nor were they as interested in cross-cultural visions as are today’s readers. When Wright experimented with those massive haiku in the late 1950s, he did so in isolation, as Dickinson wrote her poems. Recovering from illness, Wright composed his haiku in bed at home as well as in the hospital, in cafés, in restaurants, in Paris as well as in the French countryside. Sonia Sanchez, by contrast, has appeared as a postmodern, postcolonial, and remarkably cross-cultural poet. Such an observation, however, does not suggest that Dickinson and Wright were less cross-cultural. Indeed, Dickinson’s readers have long recognized in her poetry the Calvinist tendency to look inwardly, as well as the transcendental view of nature and humanity. Many of her poems also exhibit the dialogue she had with contemporary industrial culture. And Wright’s later work, such as “The Man Who Lived Underground” and haiku, shows his interest in French existentialism as well as in Zen aesthetics.

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Although Sanchez is known as an activist poet, much of her poetic impulse in Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums (1998) derives from the tradition of Japanese haiku, in which the poet pays the utmost attention to the beauty inherent in nature. A great majority of Sanchez’s latest collection of poems are entitled haiku, tanka, or sonku. Reading such poems indicates that Sanchez, turning away from the moral, intellectual, social, and political problems dealt with in her other work, found in nature her latent poetic sensibility. Above all, her fine pieces of poetry show, as do classic Japanese haiku and tanka, the unity and harmony of all things, the sensibility that nature and human beings are one and inseparable. In this collection, much of her poetry poignantly expresses a desire to transcend social and racial differences and a need to find union and harmony with nature. 1 Many of the haiku and tanka presented in the first section of Sanchez’s collection, entitled “Naked in the Streets,” reflects the poetic tradition in which human action emulates nature. As the section title suggests, Sanchez creates an image of nature out of a scene of streets. Today the poet as well as most of her readers live in urban communities in close contact with the streets, just as classic haiku poets and their readers lived and worked closely with nature. The first haiku in Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums conveys the delightful sensation one feels when in contact with nature: you ask me to run naked in the streets with you i am holding your pulse. (4)

Much in the same spirit, Whitman writes in “Song of Myself,” I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me. (25)

While immersing herself in nature, Sanchez from time to time subtly expresses her aversion to artificiality and domesticity. The first song in “Naked in the Streets” reads, i cannot stay home on this sweet morning i must run singing laughing through the streets of Philadelphia.

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sonia sanchez / 67 i don’t need food or sleep or drink on this wild scented day i am bathing in the waves of your breath. (5)

The urge Sanchez feels to cleanse herself of the unnatural and the artificial also echoes in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. (25)

Both Sanchez and classic Japanese haiku poets are always inspired by the visual beauty in which nature presents itself. Buson was well known in his time as a professional painter, and many of his haiku reflect his singular attention to color and its intensification. “Shake Loose My Skin,” one of Sanchez’s haiku included in the middle section, and “A Poem for Ella Fitzgerald,” one of her longer poems, both thrive on colorful imagery. The haiku reads, i am you loving my own shadow watching this noontime butterfly. (61)

“A Poem for Ella Fitzgerald,” the longest poem in this collection, is focused on these lines: the moon turned red in the sky, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. nightingales in her throat ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... an apollo stage amid high-stepping yellow legs ... ... ... ... i remember it was april and the flowers ran yellow the sun downpoured yellow butterflies (104–7)

Both poems are reminiscent of Buson’s “Also Stepping On,” a haiku comparable to Wright’s haiku: Also stepping on The mountain pheasant’s tail is The spring setting sun.1

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For a seasonal reference to spring, Buson links the image of a bird with spring sunset, because both are highly colored. As a painter he is also fascinated with the ambiguous impression the scene he has drawn gives him; it is not clear whether the setting sun is treading on the pheasant’s tail or the tail on the setting sun. In any event, Buson has made both pictures beautiful to look at. In Sanchez’s haiku “I Am You Loving,” it is ambiguous whether the focus is on “my own shadow” or “this noontime butterfly”; both constitute beautiful images of nature. Likewise “A Poem for Ella Fitzgerald” juxtaposes the image of the red moon with that of nightingales. Sanchez in these poems creates, as does Buson in his, a pair of counter-images, each, in itself highly colorful and bright, intensifies the other. In portraying nature, Sanchez is at times puzzled by its spontaneous imagery. Two of the poems in the collection—“I Collect” (sonku) and “In This Wet Season” (haiku)—have a thematic affinity with the following famous haiku by Moritake (1472–1549): Rakka eda ni Kaeru to mireba Kocho kana

Fallen petals Seemed to return to the branch,— A butterfly! 2

Both “I Collect” and “In This Wet Season” create an illusion similar to that in Moritake’s poem. “I Collect” begins with a query: i collect wings what are you bird or animal? (15)

In the other poem, in this wet season of children raining hands we catch birds in flight. (103)

Sanchez is reluctant to draw a distinction between children and birds, hands and rain. As brought up in my reading of Wright’s haiku in chapter 1, it is this haiku by Moritake that influenced Ezra Pound’s composition of the famous metro poem, often regarded as the first published haiku written in English, as noted earlier: The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough (“Vorticism” 467)

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As pointed out earlier, Pound was influenced by Japanese poetry in general and by the art of haiku in particular. In the “Vorticism” essay, he quoted Moritake’s haiku, just before discussing his “In a Station of the Metro.”3 In emulating the spirit of nature, Japanese poets are often struck with awe and moved to respond with respect. Some American poets such as Emerson, Dickinson, Pound, and Wright viewed nature from a similar vantage point, and Sanchez too seems to have followed this tradition. In keeping with this tradition, the haiku poet may aim not only at expressing sensation but also at generalizing and hence depersonalizing it. This characteristic is present even in one of Basho’s lesser-known haiku: Hiya hiya to Kabe wo fumaete Hirune kana4

How cool it is, Putting the feet on the wall: An afternoon nap.

Basho was interested in expressing how his feet, anyone’s feet, would feel when placed on the wall in the house on a warm summer afternoon. His subject was none other than this direct sensation. In a similar vein Sanchez expresses, in two of the haiku included in “Naked in the Streets,” the pure sensation that nature offers for human perception: i count the morning stars the air so sweet i turn riverdark with sound. (8) i come from the same place i am going to my body speaks in tongues. (9)

The predilection to portray human life in close association with nature means that the poet is more interested in genuinely natural sentiments than in moral, ethical, or political problems. Looking at the wind as a primal signifier of nature, Sanchez composed two poems in “Naked in the Streets,” one entitled “Haiku” and other other “Blues Haiku”: Haiku how fast is the wind sailing? how fast did i go to become slow? (38) Blues Haiku let me be yo wil derness let me be yo wind blowing you all day. (39)

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Traditionally, another singular, awe-inspiring signifier of nature in haiku is silence. Besides “The Old Pond,” Basho is also known for another haiku that concerns nature’s silence, “It’s Deadly Quiet,” one that is comparable to Wright’s haiku: It’s deadly quiet Piercing into the rocks Is the shrill of cicada5

In the middle section, “Shake Loose My Skin,” Sanchez wrote this haiku: how still the morning sea how still this morning skin anointing the day. (50)

As Basho was awed by the silence pervading the backdrop of the scene in contrast to “the shrill of cicada,” Sanchez is struck by the equation between the stillness of “the morning sea” and that of “this morning skin.” Richard Wright, perhaps influenced by Basho, composed the following pair of haiku in which he focused on nature’s silence: In the silent forest A woodpecker hammers at The sound of silence. A thin waterfall Dribbles the whole autumn night,— How lonely it is.6

What is common to these haiku by the three poets is that the scene is drawn with little detail and the mood is provided by a simple, reserved description of fact. These haiku create the kind of beauty associated with the aesthetic sensibility of sabi that suggests loneliness and quietude as opposed to overexcitement and loudness.7 Traditionally as well, the haiku in its portrayal of human beings’ association with nature expresses the poet’s enlightenment, a new way of looking at humanity and nature. In some of her poems in Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums, Sanchez follows this tradition. The second stanza in “Love Poem [for Tupac],” the following lines, the old ones say we don’t die we are just passing

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sonia sanchez / 71 through into another space. (111)

suggests Sanchez’s fascination with the Buddhistic worldview of reincarnation. The Buddhist concept of reincarnation, as discussed in my reading of Wright’s Black Power, has a striking affinity to the Akan concept of life and death. Buddhism and the Akan religion share the belief, as does Lacan, that death is not the opposite but a continuation of life.8 The following haiku expresses not only the concept of reincarnation, but also that of enlightenment as in Zen philosophy: what is done is done what is not done is not done let it go . . . like the wind. (27)

The last line, “let it go . . . like the wind,” spontaneously expresses the truth about nature and humanity. Some of Sanchez’s haiku like this one have an affinity to the Zen concept of mu. This state of nothingness is devoid of all thoughts and emotions that are derived from human subjectivity and egotism and is contrary to the conscious or unconscious truth represented by nature. An enlightened person is liberated from the self-centered worldview, convention, or received opinion that lacks fairness and justice. Although in the first two lines of this haiku Sanchez describes facts in human life, in the last line she gives an admonition as a Zen master that one must emulate the principles of nature in molding one’s conduct and action. Another haiku by Sanchez, included at the end of “Naked in the Streets,” also concerns the Zen-like discipline of thought: let us be one with the earth expelling anger spirit unbroken. (44)

In the middle section, “Shake Loose My Skin,” Sanchez composed another Zen-inspired haiku: you are rock garden austere in your loving in exile from touch. (97)

In these haiku Sanchez tries to render the austerity of the human mind by viewing nature as a revelation. Not only do many of Sanchez’s haiku follow Zen doctrine, they also share the aesthetic principles that underlie classic haiku. One of the most

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delicate principles of Eastern art is called “yugen.” Originally yugen in Japanese art was an element of style pervasive in the language of noh. It was also a philosophical principle that originated in Zen metaphysics. In Zen, every individual possesses Buddhahood and must realize it. Yugen, as applied to art, designates the mysterious and dark, what underlies the surface. The mode of expression is subtle as opposed to obvious, suggestive rather than declarative.9 Yugen functions in art as a means by which human beings can comprehend the course of nature. Although yugen seems allied with a sense of resignation, it has a far different effect upon the human psyche. The style of yugen can express either happiness or sorrow. Cherry blossoms, however beautiful they may be, must fade away; love between man and woman is inevitably followed by sorrow. The sense of loss also underlies the principle of yugen. Sanchez’s first tanka in “Naked in the Street” expresses such a sentiment: i thought about you the pain of not having you cruising my bones. no morning saliva smiles this frantic fugue about no you. (18)

A pair of blues haiku, included in the same section, figure a brightened sense of yugen: when we say good-bye i want yo tongue inside my mouth dancing hello. (16) you too slippery for me. can’t hold you long or hard. not enough nites. (17)

As aesthetic principles, yugen and the blues share sentiments that are derived from private and personal feelings. As modes of expression, the two are different; the blues stylistically differs from yugen since, as Amiri Baraka has observed, the blues “issued directly out of the shout and of course the spiritual” (62). Whereas yugen is characterized by reservation and modesty, the blues tradition calls for worldly excitement and love. Unlike yugen, the blues focuses solely on the immediate and celebrates bodily expression: both “When We Say Good-Bye” and “You Too Slippery” convey direct, unreserved sexual manifestations. Most importantly, Sanchez tries to link the blues message with sexually charged language so as to liberate black bodies from the distorted images slavery inflicted.

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That the blues tradition has a greater impact on Sanchez’s poetry than does the aesthetics of yugen can be seen in how Sanchez constructs her imagery. If imagery in classic haiku is regarded as indirect and suggestive, the imagery in Sanchez’s poetry has the directness and clarity of good prose as opposed to the suggestiveness and vagueness of symbolist poetry. The first poem in “Naked in the Streets” has an extremely sensuous image: dancing is described in terms of “corpuscles sliding in blood” (3). In the second poem of the same section, a haiku quoted earlier, the central image of running “naked in the streets” does not suggest anything other than what it describes: you ask me to run naked in the streets with you i am holding your pulse. (4)

In another poem, a blues haiku, in “Shake Loose My Skin,” a series of images consist of instantaneous actions: legs wrapped around you camera. action. tightshot. this is not a rerun. (68)

Both poems have an affinity to imagistic poems in the expression of love, such as Pound’s “Alba”: As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley She lay beside me in the dawn. (Personae 109)

In this haiku-like poem what Pound expressed was not his personal feeling for the woman lying beside him at dawn but the spontaneous sensation he felt of the coolness of “the pale wet leaves / of lily-of-the-valley.” Likewise, the actions themselves of running “naked in the streets” and “legs wrapped around you” were Sanchez’s subjects in the poems. Such poems as “You Ask Me to Run” and “Legs Wrapped Around You” bear a structural resemblance as well to “In a Station of the Metro,” Pound’s famous imagistic haiku. Unlike Sanchez’s haiku, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is constructed in two lines simply because Pound had in mind “a form of super-position” in which the poem was to be composed. “In a poem of this sort,” he explained, “one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (“Vorticism” 467). Compared

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to Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Sanchez’s “You Ask Me to Run” has a similar structure in imagery. Just as in “Legs Wrapped Around You,” Sanchez in this poem is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective, that is, running “naked in the streets,” transforms itself or darts into a thing inward and subjective, that is, the image of “i am holding your pulse.” The image of running “naked in the streets” is based in immediate experience, whether real or imagined, since Sanchez lived in Philadelphia. Not only did she see the “thing,” it must have generated such a sensation that she could not shake it out of her mind. Most discussions about the genesis of the imagist movement are speculative at best. Pound’s insistence that an image in poetry must be active rather than passive suggests that modernist poems such as Pound’s and Sanchez’s are not descriptions of objects, but, as Aristotle had said of tragedy, an action. Pound approaches Aristotelianism in his insistence that the image of the faces in the crowd in his metro poem was not simply a description of his sensation at the station, but an active entity capable of dynamic development. According to his experience, this particular image instantly transformed itself into another image, the image of the petals on a wet, black bough. In Pound’s view the success of this poem resulted from his instantaneous perception of the relatedness between the two entirely different objects. Although in Sanchez’s poems the two related objects are not entirely different as in Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Sanchez’s images, like Pound’s, are strikingly active and instantaneous rather than symbolic and suggestive. 2 Although most of the short poems collected in Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums are stylistically influenced by the poetics of haiku as well as the aesthetics of modernist poetry, much of Sanchez’s ideological concern is postmodern, postcolonial, and African American. Many of her poems aim at teaching African Americans to achieve individualism and to value their heritage. Even such a haiku as mixed with day and sun i crouched in the earth carry you like a dark river. (36)

succinctly expresses what Langston Hughes does in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

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sonia sanchez / 75 My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (Selected Poems 4)

Sanchez and Hughes are both portraying how the African American soul, a symbol of humanity, is deeply embedded in the earth. The soul, as Hughes sees, “has grown deep like the rivers”; anyone endowed with it, like Sanchez, carries anyone else “like a dark river.” Hughes’s signifying thrives on a chain of signs, signifiers, and signifieds. While “the Euphrates,” “the Congo,” “the Nile,” and “the Mississippi” are all signs of great rivers, they also signify different human histories. All the signifieds in turn signify yet other historical events. For African Americans, “the Mississippi” signifies its “singing . . . when Abe Lincoln / went down to New Orleans”; not only does it signify “its muddy bosom,” but its signified in turn signifies a beautiful image, the golden river under sunset. Sanchez’s haiku, however, is comprised of fewer but nonetheless equally powerful signs, signifiers, and signifieds: the words “mixed,” “day,” “sun,” “i,” “crouched,” “earth,” “carry,” “you,” “dark,” and “river.” These words express natural, spontaneous human sentiments, as do those in classic haiku, rather than emotional, personal feelings. In fact, an epiphany given in Sanchez’s haiku “Mixed with Day and Sun” bears a strong resemblance to the crosscultural vision captured in Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Sanchez’ most important thematic concern is love of humanity, an act of faith that must begin with self-love. The last poem in the collection, dedicated to Gwendolyn Brooks, is a response and rejoinder to such a poem as Brooks’s “The Mother.” Not only is Brooks portrayed as “a holy one,” she has also become a universal symbol of the mother with enduring love and humanity: for she is a holy one restringing her words from city to city so that we live and breathe and smile and breathe and love and breath her . . . this Gwensister called life. (133)

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The sign that Sanchez’s “For Sister Gwen Brooks” shares with Brooks’s “The Mother” signifies the universal vision that love emanates from mother. Sanchez’s refrain “for she is a holy one” further signifies the goddess worshiped among the Ashanti and the female king who owns her children, as described in Richard Wright’s Black Power. As Wright speculates in Pagan Spain, the universal motherhood has derived from the Virgin Mary, “Maya, the mother of Buddha,” and “Isis, mother of Horus.” As Wright remarks, “Egyptians worshiped Isis . . . and she was called Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven, Mother of God” (Pagan Spain 65). In “The Mother,” Brooks makes the issue of abortion, referring to it as a sign, signify the universal issue of love. The opening lines graphically describe the lifeless fetuses: Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

“The damp small pulps,” a signified, in turn signifies the “singers and workers,” the objects of motherly love, who would have flourished if their unborn bodies had not been aborted: The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

Brooks as a mother expresses her remorse over aborting her children as if she has committed a crime: I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,

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Toward the end of the poem, however, the issue of abortion signifies that of nurture. Millions of children the world over, born of poverty and neglect, are Brooks’ ultimate issue and concern. Although the poem, on the surface, depicts the abortion of fetus, Brooks appeals to the moral conscience of adults with her profound love and compassion for children. The poem is a social protest in allusion to the issue of nurturing children instead of a debate on the issue of abortion in itself: If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?— ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. (Selected Poems 4–5)

Brooks agonizes over the callousness of a society that stunted and killed children, who if nurtured would become “singers and workers.” “The Mother,” then, reads as an admonition that neglect of children is the fault of society, not that of mother. It is only natural and universal that a mother should love her child; it is unnatural and immoral that society should refuse to nurture children. The penultimate poem in Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums is dedicated to Cornel West. In contrast to the rest of the poems, it is a prose poem like Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Cornel West, a Harvard professor, is not presented as a spokesman of the academia but characterized as a cultural activist like Whitman, Hughes, and Brooks, each of whom in a unique way sought to apotheosize the humanity of the land. Sanchez sees West as the foremost individual at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a spokesperson always “questioning a country that denies the sanctity, the holiness of children, people, rivers, sky, trees, earth” (130). Sanchez urges the reader to “look at the father in him. The husband in him. The activist in him. The teacher in him. The lover in him. The truth seeker in him. The James Brown dancer in him. The reformer in him. The defender of people in him. The intellectual in him” (130–31). West is This man. Born into history. This humanist. This twenty-first-century traveler pulling us screaming against our will towards a future that will hold all of humankind in an embrace. He acknowledges us all. The poor. Blacks and whites. Asians and Native Americans. Jews and Muslims. Latinos and Africans. Gays and Lesbians. (131)10

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Rather than dwelling on the racial conflict and oppression the country has suffered, Sanchez admonishes the reader to see cross-pollination in the various cultures brought together to the land. Whether Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums is Sanchez’s best work remains to be seen, but her effort to use diverse principles of aesthetics in molding her poetry has few precedents in American literature. Thematically, nineteenth-century American poets such as Emerson, Poe, Dickinson, and Whitman were partly influenced by various cultural and religious thoughts, as twentieth-century American poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Richard Wright, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder at some points in their careers emulated Eastern poetics. Sanchez, though, remains one of the accomplished contemporary American poets writing from the perspective of cross-cultural visions to determine the form and content of her poetry. Notes 1. The original in Japanese reads “Yama-dori-no / o / wo / fumu / haru no / iri-hi / kana.” The English translation is by Hakutani. 2. The original and the translation are quoted from Blyth, History of Haiku 2: 56. A literal translation of Moritake’s first two lines would be “A fallen flower appears to come back to its branch.” 3. For the influence of haiku on Pound’s imagism, see Hakutani, “Ezra Pound.” 4. The original is quoted from Henderson. The translation of this haiku is by Hakutani. 5. The translation of this haiku is by Hakutani. 6. See Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright. The 817 haiku are numbered consecutively, as noted earlier: “In the Silent Forest” is 316 and “A Thin Waterfall” 569. 7. The word sabi in Japanese, a noun, derives from the verb sabiru, to rust, implying that what is described is aged. Buddha’s portrait hung in Zen temples, the old man with a thin body, is nearer to his soul as the old tree with its gnarled bark and fallen leaves is nearer to the very origin and essence of nature. For a further discussion of Buddha’s portrait, see Loehr 216. 8. While Freud defines death as the opposite of life, meaning that death reduces all animate things to the inanimate, Lacan defines death as “human experience, human interchanges, intersubjectivity,” suggesting that death is part of life (Seminar II 80). To Lacan, the death instinct is not “an admission of impotence, it isn’t a coming to a halt before an irreducible, an ineffable last thing, it is a concept” (Seminar II 70). 9. In reference to the works of Zeami, the author of many of the extant noh plays, Arthur Waley, perhaps one of the best-known scholars of Eastern literature, expounds this difficult term: It is applied to the natural graces of a boy’s movements, to the gentle restraint of a nobleman’s speech and bearing. “When notes fall sweetly and flutter delicately to the ear,” that is the yugen of music. The symbol

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sonia sanchez / 79 of yugen is “a white bird with a flower in its beak.” “To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest with no thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that goes hid [sic] by far-off islands, to ponder on the journey of wild-geese seen and lost among the clouds”—such are the gates to yugen. (Waley 21–22) 10. This stanza, filled with rather superficial racial and cultural labels, is reminiscent of the least inspiring stanza in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: Magnifying and applying come I, Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah, Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson, Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha, In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved, With Odin and the hedeous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image, (Whitman 58)

Works Cited Blyth, R. H. A History of Haiku. 2 vols. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1963, 1964. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Selected Poems. New York: Harper and Row, 1999. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism.” Modern Philology 90 (Aug. 1992): 46–69. Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki. New York: Doubleday / Anchor, 1958. Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1959. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 2, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Techniques of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: Norton, 1988. Loehr, Max. The Great Paintings of China. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Pound, Ezra. “Vorticism.” Fortnightly Review No. 573, n. s. (1914): 461–71. Sanchez, Sonia. Like the Singing Coming off the Drums. Boston: Beacon, 1998. Waley, Arthur. The No Plays of Japan. New York: Grove Press, 1920. Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Ed. James E. Miller, Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Wright, Richard. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper, 1954. ———. Haiku: This Other World. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade, 1998. Rpt. New York: Random House, 2000. ———. Pagan Spain. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957.

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Ch a p t e r Fi v e Je a n Toom e r R e v isi t ed i n Ja m e s Em a n u e l’s Po st mode r n ist Ja z z H a i k u Virginia Whatley Smith

In the title as well as in the introductory haiku poem of his 1999 volume JAZZ from the Haiku King, Nebraska-born poet and African American Parisian exilic James A. Emanuel takes on Japanese culture and announces that he is the “Jazz King of Haiku.” This is a statement challenging Japanese masters of the haiku tradition, its forms dating back to the thirteenth century and afterward perfected by Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century. But one has to recall that Emanuel is a postmodernist poet; his text, in essence, is a syncretism of African American, blue-jazz-gospel musics that have been integrated with a Japanese poetic form. Moreover, Emanuel is also writing out of African American literary traditions that parody its own expressions. In JAZZ from the Haiku King, he revives this literary cultural pattern by upgrading Jean Toomer’s modernist, 1920s experimental novel Cane to contemporary times in order to stave off the social death of a dying, musical artistic form and, therefore, of its African American creators (Toomer 14). Jazz music is that oxymoronic Death-Life inspiriting force, and James A. Emanuel is its “electromyographic,” regenerative poetic voice. He weds the Japanese, seventeen-syllable haiku form to an already musically driven, racialized cultural trope of “admixture” defining African American jazz music that had arisen during slavery and become revitalized during the Harlem Renaissance. And, by synthesizing these culturalhistorical paradigms, the poet creates a Bhabhaian “hybridized” text of words, musics, voices, and sounds that at once reconnect Afro-Asian cultures that are seemingly separatist (Bhabha 277). Most important is that Emanuel’s postmodernist, jazz haiku text intensifies the global staging of African American culture through the impulse of “jazz” music to engage diverse people all around the world in a common dialogue, the ideal state that contemporary Afrocentric cultural critics define as “universal humanism” (see Balogen 174).

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One significant observation that comes to mind when reading James Emanuel’s postmodernist, jazz haiku is that one does not have to travel to Japan to enjoy the medium; instead, he brings Japan to you, the readerauditor. In its simplistic definition, haiku poetry, perfected in the seventeenth century by Matsuo Basho, is markedly significant because of its traditional, rigid, three-line, 5-7-5, seventeen-syllabic code. However, as haiku poet Bruce Ross observes, Traditional Japanese poetry is based on combination of lines of five and seven onji, a syllable-like unit of a vowel or a consonant and vowel. Haiku uses a pattern of five-seven-five onji originally arranged in vertical columns. A haiku in Japanese is extremely short so that it is recited in one breath. Since an average syllable in English is much longer than an onji, modern haiku in English generally range from twelve to fourteen syllables, although many haiku poets try to maintain a five-seven-five syllable count. Some modern English haiku use the three-liner vertical column arrangement, but horizontal one-liners, two-liners, and fourliners occur, with the horizontal three-liner short-long-short construction the most common. (xiii)

Today, the horizontal three-line, 5-7-5 haiku pattern is very common, although its other syllabic forms too attract interest. Most importantly, haiku poetry is transnationally practiced and globally published, thereby rendering it a multinational medium. The author Richard Wright not only attended the Bandung conference in Indonesia in 1956 but afterward also renewed his interest in the craft that first defined his professional career as a successful poet, himself vigorously writing over 4,000 haiku in English toward the end of his life that were first published only in 1998 some thirty-eight years after Wright’s death. James A. Emanuel is another haiku disciple but illustrates how he, another African American Parisian expatriate, has not only “seized the haiku word”—a tradition of stealing the master’s word dating back to the slave Frederick Douglass—but now has also transformed it by “jazzing” its contours (Narrative 31–32). Another literary disciple besides Douglass has also influenced Emanuel’s structural modes and rhetorical styles in JAZZ from the Haiku King. Upon publication of his 1923 modernist novel Cane, Jean Toomer garnered a host of followers during the 1920s and beyond, inclusive of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright (Bontemps 187–99). And like other transnational writers in the 1960s still avowing allegiance to Toomer, James Emanuel was no exception in recovering an African cultural practice of “call” and “response” that occurs when one author indirectly repeats or intertextually “calls out” another’s work that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. today defines as

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“signifyin’ ” (103). In fact, Michel Fabre reports that, during a 1979 trip to France, Emanuel had spotted a “church nave” in Burgundy and had stared at “its Gothic interior” because the image had seemed “reminiscent of settings used by Jean Toomer near the end of the long ‘Kabnis’ chapter of Cane, . . . ” (qtd in Fabre, From Harlem 331). Emanuel’s echoing the literary stylistics of a modernist writer is not considered disadvantageous; in fact, it is considered “African,” for Toomer’s seminal novel is even today considered a model text for its capacity to inspire cultural pride in African roots. Yet, one cannot ignore its difficult, elusive narrative structure that escapes genre typecasting. Although clustered into three sections partitioned by arcs, one needs to start in reverse and at the third division (Part III) of Cane in order to comprehend the text’s convoluted narrative modes and main statement. This section is presented mostly in dramatic form and concerns the journey of the poet Kabnis to self-knowledge. Until he casts aside his mantle of shame and accepts his slave past, he suffers the plight not only of modern man, but also of most African Americans, who, like Kabnis, have inherited a “fractured” or warped psyche inclusive of cultural amnesia, assimilationist thinking, and racial self-loathing—the premodernist traits that Paul Gilroy attributes to the Black Atlantic Personality emerging from slavery (Gilroy 15–16). Western slavemasters succeeded skillfully in reinscribing captive Africans into nonhuman chattel during antebellum times by using legal mechanisms and violent methods that continued into the postbellum eras of Ku Klux Klan lynchings and Jim Crow lawmakings. Toomer’s Kabnis has returned to his southern birthplace of Sempter, Georgia, to teach but is daily riddled with fear because of white culture’s ongoing acts of lynchings now terrorizing the black community. Moreover, as he struggles to teach at a backwoods school, Kabnis himself is distraught over his own personal turmoil over feeling creatively impotent as a poet because he cannot word paint stories about the “pain and beauty” or the contradictory allure of the tempestuous South that both attracts and repels him (Toomer 83–84). Only when learning from an elderly African slave ship survivor, Father John, that “th white folks” “made th Bible lie,” is Kabnis able to emerge from his darkened basement hole into the dawn of light to sing the “Song of Son” in tribute to the “purple plums” or the dying race of black Americans that his poetic voice now proceeds to enliven and redeem (Toomer 117, 14; Krasny 228). Cane’s Part III, the synthesis, contains all the cultural knowledge that Toomer has represented in fragmented forms and/or reduced to microcosmic character portraits, symbols, settings, and themes. All these narrative tropes the author has additionally more expansively expressed in the two other parts. In Part I, the South or the thesis, Toomer presents a mixture of

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six vignettes or full short stories about black women, and a series of poems interjected between the prose works. In Part II, the North or the antithesis, Toomer shows the inhuman nature of Western industrialization and urbanization that have resulted in the southern Negro being dehumanized into losing his or her soul and capacity to sing. This grouping, too, consists of six short and long stories of which one is about a female among five male portraits; there also are interwoven poems and dramatic scenes. Each section also starts with a page inscribed with the part title (Part I, Part II, Part III) alongside a single arc engraving, in Part III though there are two, detached half arcs that never form an African circle of wholeness. But in their signature chapter positions, they integrate with the major theme of the entire novel about a dying race of people no longer imbued with a concept of African Wholistic Selfhood. It is the mission of Kabnis/Toomer to reconnect them with their Past, and this the poet sets out to accomplish once he emerges from the basement hole in his capacity as a New World Black Christ figure (117). That these contours of Toomer’s novel influence the manner in which Emanuel devises his rhetorical modes for JAZZ from the Haiku King is the point of argument. Emanuel’s jazz haiku, too, is a mission of cultural redemption by means of the African American musical expressions of blues, jazz, and gospel musics. Toomer’s musical representations are interspersed throughout all three sections of Cane; they also appear as epigraphs to stories, or within the narratives. As fragmented pieces, they are the kinds of microcosmic haiku that James Emanuel replicates in his piece JAZZ from the Haiku King as his own macrocosmic themes and subjects. This callresponse repetitioning is affirmed by another critic. In 1925, Gordon B. Munson had already noted that the “early sketches in Cane . . . depend fully as much upon a musical unity as upon a literary unity” because of Toomer’s earlier interest in becoming a composer. And he also noted how Toomer had followed trends of other modern writers in the 1920s who would, without qualm, eschew negative forms or traditions and cross over into new scientific fields in order to find a means of unifying the Self in a post–World War I era that they perceived as being chaotic. Observes Munson, So he [Toomer] turned to an intensive study of his own psychology. He sifted psycho-analysis for what minute grains of truth it might supply, he underwent the training for “conscious control of the body” prescribed by F. Matthias Alexander, he spent a summer at the Gurdjieff Institute, Fontain-bleau, France, where he obtained what he regards as the best method for his quest. We should note that his search is distinguished from that of many other American artists (Sherwood Anderson may be cited as typical) by its positive scientific character. These others

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jean toomer revisited / 85 work from a disgust or a negation. They cut loose from something they abhor and, unprovided with method, drift aimlessly in search of a leaven which somewhere, somehow, will heal. Toomer has a method and an aim, and he devotes his whole time and energy to them. In his own words, this is what he is doing: “I am. What I am and what I may become I am trying to find out.” (174)

It is these Toomeresque representations of different musical forms in Cane as well as the author’s interests in scientific theories for healing the Self—the body—that Emanuel proceeds to adopt and to adapt as hybridized forms or ideas for the characters, symbols, themes, poetic expressions, and fine art engravings in his work. In essence, Emanuel upgrades Toomer, and his volume JAZZ from the Haiku King is as eclectic as Toomer’s but now falls into the postmodernist category owing to its post–World War II production. And again similar to Toomer, Emanuel the poet looks toward Japan and utilizes not only the traditional horizontal, three-line, 5-7-5 syllabic haiku format, but also at times the one-, two-, four- and even ten-line models as well as the occasional twelve- or fourteen-syllabic representations. Different from Toomer’s three-part volume, however, Emanuel’s work is laid out in eight sections plus appendices. Also, the haiku poet’s settings are perceptively more transnationally “territorial” owing to dictates of jazz music that, by being cross-culturally admixtured, define Emanuel’s jazz haiku as a domestically grown, internationally enjoyed, musically driven, multidimensional medium. What is minimized as a musical trope in Toomer’s Cane is maximized as the structuring device in Emanuel’s work. And like an African griot, Emanuel upgrades Toomer’s musical forms by magnifying them as the means by which to unify into a Wholistic statement the text’s fragmented words, phrases, themes, definitions, adaptations, musical guises, performative stagings, multilingual representations, fine arts showcasings, and multiple artists being featured or providing assistance to himself, the jazz haiku poet. Seemingly different from Toomer, Emanuel starts off in Part I by defining Jazz, but we, the readers and listeners, need to undergo a postmodernist Time shift and time travel or fast forward according to “actual African Time” to Part V called “Jazz Mix” in order to locate Emanuel’s “recent Present” modifications to Jazz’s already Past, “improvisational” history (Mbiti 16–17). In structural layout, this position of Part V recapitulates the “Theater” vignette in Part II of Cane set in Washington, DC at an urban theater located near saloons. Jazz music spills from outside to inside the theater where a pianist rips the chords at a dance rehearsal. Emanuel changes the instruments and, in a comical and witty haiku entitled “Jazz

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as Chopsticks,” converts a two-piece Japanese eating utensil into an instrument in lieu of the usual bass fiddle and bow in order to replicate the dissonant, noisy sounds of jazz music in a theater or night club. And just like a bass fiddler who uses instruments that would be part of a duo, trio, or big band, Emanuel calls upon his converted chopsticks as tools of competition. His poem has seven stanzas, with each stanza consisting of three lines in the 5-7-5 syllabic construct. Differences occur because, point 1, Emanuel on line 1 includes an asterisk delineating a footnote in the style of 1920s modernist writers such as Toomer who would append footnote remarks or end-text glossaries to explain meanings. In fact, Emanuel has an end-text section entitled “About the Author” to update readers about his expatriate life and profuse publications beyond the 1970s (120–22), and another section entitled “Notes on the Translators,” which provides full identities of his six (German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French, and Irish) accompanists to his English language sets (118–19). In the case of the asterisk in “Jazz as Chopsticks,” Emanuel’s explanation for the first two lines that read “If Twin’s* the arrow/Chops is the bow” says, at the bottom of the page, “In this long series of haiku, excerpted here, it becomes quickly evident that Chops and Twin are names given to the chopsticks (Chops the slower, sturdier one, Twin the roaming, more imaginative one)” (82). As for point 2, the reader now proceeds to see some typed words in total capitals for emphasis—for example, the word “JAZZ,” also in line two. And for point 3, the person sees additional three-space gaps between words on a line, which in haiku poetry are called kireji, meaning “cutting words” or what Bruce Ross call “particles of language that indicate a pause or a stop.” However, jazz music imposes a pause as well; it is known as a “break” or “cut” that occurs during a set when a quartet or band is playing together and then suddenly halts simultaneously to allow one instrumentalist to “cut” in and solo. This poem as well as most of Emanuel’s jazz haiku have kireji “cuts” or “pauses” that condense haiku “image clusters” and subject matters throughout the volume, thereby elongating or shortening the line’s image or statement like an extended solo would do (Burton xiii). Furthermore, Emanuel’s punctuation is important to understand his compositions in terms of his version of jazz haiku, for these punctuation variables capture the “tone” of the jazz dialogue or bowing (arco) and plucking (pizzicato) being performed by Chops and Twin on the bass fiddle. There are ordinary quotation marks and exclamation marks for emphasis, but also inordinate, Toomeresque colon marks like those in Cane that signal internal thoughts or dialogue. Here in JAZZ, each of these colon marks is a feature of the kireji and functions as another “cut” announcing an ongoing dialogue between Chops and Twin and a third party: one colon appears at the end of a line, and another precedes

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one of Chops’s remarks (Hakutani 224). Emanuel also inserts hyphenated words and utilizes contractions to indicate the informal, colloquial nature of their speech acts. However, like the instance of “Theater,” Jazz music is a performance medium for listening or dancing; this the reader-auditor verbally and visually hears and sees, as Chops and Twin mime the instrumental pieces that compete in a jazz set: If Twin’s* the arrow, Chops plays bow. No JAZZ fallin’ if they both don’t go. Chops makes drum sounds SPIN. Twin coaxes them, herds them in, JAZZ their next of kin. Exuberant probes, clean-wood finger, lacquered bone: JAZZ dining alone. “One-legged music? No such thing.” Wouldn’t say that if they heard Chops sing. When stuck on his lick, Chops runs the scale. Twin slides loose, then harpoons the whale. “Chops, whatcha doin’?” “Waitin’ for Twin. It’s my bass his melody’s in.” Chops: “Hey! That a tree that fell?” “No. Just me dreamin’ of Mademoiselle.” (82)

The listener has not only experienced a set but, according to the lyrics, also been exposed to Jazz’s international appeal by a reference in the last line to the French word “Mademoiselle,” and then, secondarily, to Jazz’s sensual nature by a reference to a French woman who causes Twin to feel a sudden, sexual urge like a man “harpoon[ing] a whale.” This sexual response mimes John’s reaction to Dorris in “Theater,” but Twin’s extemporaneous reaction is also part of the rule governing haiku: to capture comic emotions or the reality of the “moment” and its spontaneity, as in, for instance, Twin’s reaction to “slide loose,” meaning to “cut” or to “break” into Chops’s “melody” (Burton xiv). As far as his feelings for Dorris in Cane, John does not act upon that capacity of Jazz to cause one to improvise or to act spontaneously. He

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suppresses them. On the other hand, Emanuel strives to emphasize Jazz’s magnetic effect upon the Self to act impulsively and/or to “harpoon” the moment, the minute, the hour, or the day of black culture or other cultures. In fact, it is at this historical juncture in the ambiance of the familiar or the foreign setting that new, artistic forms of vocal, instrumental, lyrical, or visual expressions are born. This is also another purview of Japanese haiku; it requires such a spontaneity in the crafting of poetry, but, according to James Emanuel, it is not just an accident in his craft. Emanuel has surpassed Toomer as far as devising a specific theory of “electromyography” to explain the body chemistry that Jazz ignites and, in turn, proceeds to electrify the words and musics, voices and sounds, and images and textual representations throughout JAZZ. It emanates from the artist’s body actions. Says Emanuel, Although the oral thrusts of jazz haiku could be raised to theatrical heights during their public presentations, by a repertoire of gestures, bodily movements, and vocal changes, they share with all other poems the basic purpose of aesthetically communicating, by use of generally accepted literary techniques, a disciplined awareness of a particular experience. That awareness, if we apply the findings of electromyography, shapes itself first in the poet’s body in the form of muscular reactions to sounds and situations around him—superficially exemplified, perhaps when he leans forward tautly to absorb his favorite passages of jazz. That awareness is progressively disciplined (that is, subjected to intellectual control and artistic method) as its oneness becomes identifiable in the subtle way that our altering consciousness transforms tones, into music, trees and grass into landscapes, handclaps into applause. (Emanuel MS “Sounds,” 8; emphasis mine)

Here, Emanuel fully develops and codifies as a theory what Toomer delved into only minutely. And, by means of his formal theory of “electromyography,” Emanuel fully expands, magnifies, and transcends Toomer’s seminal studies to merge the sciences and humanities that resulted in his experiential “training for ‘conscious control of the body’ ” at the Gurdjieff Institute in France (Munson 174). The Random House Dictionary defines “electromyography” to mean “a device for recording electric currents from an active muscle to produce an electromyogram.” And “electromyogram” means “a graphic record of the electric currents associated with muscular action” (431). Emanuel’s volume JAZZ from the Haiku King is that composite, “graphic record” of the results—jazzed haiku—produced by the artist’s electrifying muscular actions of scripting and/or reproducing history. This electrical charging to Emanuel’s body ascends from the inspiriting forces transcending from subjects in their storyworlds, and Jazz music syncretizes all of them.

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To be specific, as Twin becomes engrossed in his music, he has an “electromyographic,” bodily reaction to his music that simultaneously permeates his “conscious thought” that, in turn, alters the tone of his music and that of the set. This same electromyographic body-mind fusion between Twin and a phantasmagorical French mademoiselle is similar to the magnetically charged, male-female, nonsexual fusion occurring successfully between Kabnis and Carrie Kate in Part III of Cane that enables him to rise as a healed poet and Black Christ figure. She takes Kabnis’s “hot cheeks between her cool hands” and “Her palms draw the fever out” (117). Electromyography energizes Emanuel the poet’s body-mind creative spirit. The result is a hybridized version of jazz music that enables Emanuel so skillfully to replay, retool, or realign a rigid, 5-7-5, seventeen-syllable, Japanese poetic medium and its other syllabic and line variations into a new poetic jazz-haiku form. However, Emanuel is not just adding another link to Africanist culture and its already worldwide contact spaces owing to European colonialism, slavery, and bodily displacements. There has always been contact with Asiatic peoples dating back to Arab-Moorish trade relations with China during the “Golden Age of West Africa from the eleventh to mid-fifteenth centuries” (Clarke 51). Emanuel exceeds the limitations of domestic references and allusions to Eastern religion in Toomer’s Cane in order to enlarge Toomer’s subject matter of slavery. In fact, Emanuel, himself a worldwide traveler and ambassador of jazz haiku, expansively re-historicizes and globalizes these Afro-Orientalist connections in his 122-page poetry collection. African American Jazz music has a global slave history and a past, which account for the necessity of the reader of JAZZ from the Haiku King to go backward from Japan to the Pastness of the Present according to African Time to locate Jazz’s slave roots of origination. This African Past in the Present Toomer has connected in the Part III sequence in which Kabnis manages to communicate with Father John and learns the truth about his slave past. Emanuel broadens this topic of slavery by means of Jazz’s territorial link to Japan. Thomas J. Hennessey, in his text From Jazz to Swing: African American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890–1935, offers some cogent working statements defining jazz music. He notes that “Jazz is a uniquely American music that comes from a special period in American history” (15). He further states that in the 1890s, most black Americans lived in “small and medium-sized communities” that jazz musicians later called “territories,” and that it was “the musical and social life of these territories [that] produced many of the performers and the bulk of the audience for jazz” (16). Emanuel’s mastery of “haiku” makes “Japan” a new Jazz-haiku—not just jazz—“territory.”

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Class level and racial subject matter immediately become differentiating factors for Emanuel as to how, like Toomer, he will adapt the haiku form. This is why he skips the waka haiku of the thirteenth century affiliated with the courtly class in favor of the sixteenth-century renga haiku now more accessible to the general population. The renga consisted of a “continuous chain of fourteen (7-7) and seventeen (5-7-5) syllable verses, each independently composed, but connected as one poem.” It reversed the waka pattern by repositioning the three-line, 5-7-5 seventeen-syllable cluster at the bottom of the five lines, thereby suggesting a class shift. This innovation also forecasts how the three-line grouping eventually would stand alone, while still reflecting creative “ingenuity” and “humor” (Hakutani 247). And here is where James Emanuel enters the verbal sparring. In his opening poem entitled “The Haiku King,” he acknowledges that haiku has many international subjects who have for centuries vowed allegiance to the king of poetry’s highest art form. Says Emanuel, Haiku King subjects loyal: seventeen each meal serve Him. Food royal. (1)

In adding a tsukeku or verse linked to the “first verses of another poet,” Emanuel, quite differently, chooses by indirection to acknowledge Basho’s superior position in refining what has come to be recognized as the traditional three-line, 5-7-5 haiku construct (Ueda 3; Hakutani 247). This means that Emanuel, now a dinner guest, should place a seventeen-syllable haiku dish on the table for all to feast on. However, the reader must accept this opening salutation to royal Japanese haiku with an African, Present-Past contingency. Emanuel has entitled his volume JAZZ from the Haiku King and, therefore, has emphasized two points. First, that he is the new “king” and, therefore, his tsukeku has a higher temporal position of a hokku, which in the ancient past had been composed by the most “senior” member or members of the renga poets (Hakutani 247). This is Emanuels’ Present-time selfdeclaration, which links, more appropriately, to the second point that he, beyond Toomer, has “postmodernized” and upgraded haiku tradition. His volume title indicates that “JAZZ” the instrumental music is the noun subject, collection focus, and thematic controller, and that haiku is his latest meal for jazz’s consumption. Emanuel, in essence, is presenting a special kind of Afro-Asian “jazzed” haiku dish, thereby both acknowledging and departing from Basho. Says Makoto Ueda, “Those who wanted to write in a radically different style had to deny Basho’s poetry first and justify their denial in one way or another” (3). After

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Emanuel published Deadly James and Other Poems in 1987, he began to “depart from convention” in his first “breakaway” collection of 16 Haiku Poems published in 1992. He further refined his haiku innovation in his 1999 volume JAZZ from the Haiku King. His haiku poems have been “jazzed up,” “blackened,” and “adapted” as a kinship member of an already specialized and diversified form of African American jazz music. Says Emanuel, The sounds of saxophones, trumpets, pianos, the voices with which they harmonize provide background for a radically different kind of poem, my innovation in 1992: jazz haiku. Jazz haiku are meant, ideally, to approximate the sound and style of jazz and more feasibly to reflect some of its natural techniques, history, and star performers. These haiku conform to tradition only in their restriction to three and seventeen syllables in a 5-7-5 sequence. (“Sounds” MS, 8–9)

For instance, in the next three poems of “Jazzanatomy,” “Jazzroads,” and “Jazzactions,” Emanuel represents “Jazz” as a personification that is continually mobile and easily adaptable to old or new places. Musicians call these various spatial eruptions of jazz “territories.” And its malleability reflects Jazz’s fluid nature to resist boundaries and to adapt to any geographic site willing to hear it. In the first stanza of the three-line, fourstanza haiku “Jazzanatomy,” Emanuel tells us what topics constitute Jazz’s subject matter. He says that, “EVERYTHING is jazz:/”; in the next line following the colon, Emanuel cites that “snails, jails, rails, males, females/” are the themes to be broadly explicated in the volume. These are repetitive lines from the prologue to section I entitled “PAGE ONE” in all capitals. Here, they function as a two-liner haiku introduction to the section, as they do in Emanuel’s all other introductory sections in his varying styles of one-, two-, or four-liners. Inside, this two-liner expands into a full poem. And in the third line, which reads “snow white cotton bales,” Emanuel has inserted a kireji pause between the words “snow white” and “cotton bales” to emphasize Jazz’s southern birthing in the cotton kingdom (Ross xv). Here, specifically, is where Emanuel, again, departs from Basho in terms of subject matter and style because of Toomer’s influence. Bruce Ross indicates that “Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827) introduced an idiosyncratic element into haiku through his child-like identification with nature and human behavior, often depicting a lowly or subjugated person or thing in colloquial language” (xv). Emanuel thus exposes the horrors of slavery but humanizes the lowly victims by cloaking them in the mantle of royal haiku while talking about common events of black folk culture. This is the reason why, here, in “Jazzanatomy,” the poet also describes Jazz’s “electromyographic” nature in terms of body discourse—the music’s electrically

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charged impact upon the muscles of the musician-instrumentalist that precipitates the musician and the instrument to fuse together. This is especially clear in the second stanza, line 1 of “Jazzanatomy,” when Emanuel writes “Kneebone, thigh, hip-bone,” and in line 2, when he claims that “Jazz slips you percussion bone,” likening a human body part to an instrumental bone. In the third line, Emanuel clarifies his point about body-to-mind cohesiveness and concludes that this metal object that simulates human form is in a category “classified [as] ‘unknown.’ ” This particular haiku seems more akin to a senryu in which incongruous objects ironically function harmoniously. That is because Jazz enables Japanese haiku, through the process of electromyography, to adapt to the language and experiences of black culture. African American Jazz, thus, is a kinetic, fluid, and transcendent medium; what Emanuel has created with his “Jazzanatomy” haiku escapes exact description. It is not a senryu per se that rejects traditional haiku in order to focus on human nature because the real topic is an instrument. It is more akin to a “mock senryu haiku,” especially since Emanuel is continually defining and redefining its contours (Hakutani 255; Ross xxxiii). Nonetheless, Emanuel’s racial subject and lower class level do become clearer because of the setting revealed in the third stanza. His three lines of “Sleek lizard rhythms/ cigar-smoke tunes, straight-gin sky/laced with double moons” all create a verbal-visual image of an urban juke joint crowded with smoking and drinking patrons who become blindly “double mooned,” intoxicated (2). It captures the ambiance of the Washington, DC urban setting at or near the salons and theater in Toomer’s vignette “Theater.” And more explicitly, Emanuel’s poem is a tribute not to nature’s “moon,” but to human nature and the attempts of African Americans through alcohol and Jazz music to escape, albeit briefly, confronting their social problems. The last stanza explains that Emanuel extends Jazz’s requirements to include an instrumentalist who provides music with not only rhythm but also an “electromyographic” beat, a “riff” that keeps one reactively mesmerized: “Second-chance rhythms,/don’t-give-up riffs: jazz gets HIGH /off can’ts, buts and ifs” (2). This latter line of negative statements counters Basho’s ideals. They symbolize blockade verbs, connective adverbs, and subjunctive impossibilities that have traditionally hindered slaves, post-Emancipated and Jim-Crowed freepersons, and post-1960s African Americans from participating in America’s democratic ideals. It is also from these blockade ambiances of defeat, pain, and suffering that Toomer in Cane illustrates how a purist form of blues music arose out of slavery and laid the foundation for instrumental jazz. The senyru that seems to have been the favorite style of Richard Wright is not definitively Emanuel’s forte. Like Toomer, Emanuel is

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relaying cultural messages about the African American slave and postEmancipatory experiences, which Jazz takes as its subject, and Jazz haiku as its conveyance. The global, electromyographic responses to Emanuel’s vision of jazz music makes it impossible for him to focus always on the abstract, “harmonious beauty of nature” without qualifications (Hakutani 255). This is the reason why Jazz is Emanuel’s dominant voicing; it enables Emanuel to integrate the global ambiances inspiriting the fostering, transforming, transferring, and rediscovering of African American jazz music. For example, while Emanuel the poet’s oral recitations provide the steady lyrical “riff ” of Jazz spoken in the English language on the left page of the volume, his translators at the sites to which Emanuel himself has globally traveled speak simultaneously in French, Russian, Spanish, Irish, and other languages on the right page, and the foreign language representations change, multiply, or fade out. This multilingual format takes on the familiar, dual language Japanese-to-English, side-by-side layout owing to the medium’s attraction to a global, English-speaking readership from the seventeenth century onward (Hakutani 255). But there is also another explanation for Emanuel’s transnational linguistic presences and/or absences in the volume. They also recapitulate the same presences and/or absences of early Africans who fostered the roots of the blues in America after having been uprooted and rerouted from homeland Africa into the New World by EurAmerican slavemasters, represented singularly by Father John in Cane. Initially these captives were speaking Hausa or Fulani or Swahili but were forced to adopt the master’s foreign tongue without literacy training. What erupted from the mouths of these eartrained, phonetic speakers were mimetic sounds: vocables, as Toomer notes, such as field hollers or church moans and finally simple lyrics expressed colloquially (Cane 85, 88). This transplantation of Africans—with their varied languages and musics that has so greatly impacted the global world today and its current cries for “cosmopolitanism,” “shared humanity,” and “universal humanism”—Emanuel has graphically depicted in two, linking exposétribute poems on the Transatlantic holocaust (Appiah xx–xxi). In his recent 1993 long poem entitled “The Middle Passage Blues,” Emanuel has broken all of Basho’s tight rules and has resorted to a seven-line, nineteenline, seven-line, and ten-line cluster of four stanzas that makes the long poem appear like a truncated, thirteenth-century renga or series of linked verses (Ross xv; Hakutani 247). It is obviously not one hundred consecutive stanzas, multiauthored, or a five-line stanza split into three lines of 5-7-5 seventeen and two lines of 7-7 fourteen syllables. But, in terms of volume density, Emanuel has produced over one hundred individual haiku that have been clustered by section title and are sometimes multilingual

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in voicings. He, in essence, has created his version of a truncated “jazzed renga” in the poem “The Middle Passage Blues,” which, because of its fluid, adaptive nature and its central focus on Jazz, connects to all the haiku poems in the entire volume. In addition, says Bruce Ross, “Traditional Japanese haiku also includes either a kigo (‘season word’) or kidai (‘seasonal topic’)” in “one, two, or three images” that “provide the emotional focus in haiku” (xiii–xiv). But Basho himself broke tradition. He changed the hokku format, that is, the concept of the first 5-7-5 onji of the one-hundred stanza unit having to include “a reference to the seasons and a concluding kireji [pause].” Instead, Basho opted to allow a “less artistically decorous subject matter” that would highlight “the nature imagery represented at the moment of composition” (xv). Now here is where Emanuel’s variant “jazzed renga” integrates with Basho’s ideas of (1) capturing the emotional or “spiritual” quality in the imaging, and (2) allowing a “less artistically decorous subject.” There it stops, for Emanuel represents the “less artistically decorous subject” as captive African slaves. Moreover, Emanuel deviates from Basho, again, by appropriating the updated ideas of Basho’s successor Yuso Buson (1716–83), “the next great developer of haiku form,” who “emphasized the universal nature of the subject matter of haiku by focusing upon human as well as nature subjects” (Ross xv). And this Emanuel does, and again by means of the yugen haiku, which examines “the mysterious and dark, what lies under the surface” (Hakutani 256). Peeling back and probing the West’s narrative of slavery and its recasting of its African human subjects into denatured objects of chattel enables Emanuel to venture into the “dark” and the “mysterious.” As in the technique of haiku to provide micro-imagings, the poet, too, by means of simplistic impressions, magnifies the mental, verbalvisual, and emotional responses of a Present-day heir, a generationally distanced adolescent black male finally confronting his legacy of slavery similar to the Kabnis/Father John encounter in Cane. In the first two lines, Emanuel states, “Middle Passage”: “the WORD means blues to me./ Look at it front or backside, it still means BLUES to me.”/ (110). In between, the “I-centered” poet persona recalls his younger alter ego who had received the narrative of three generations of slave history from his grandma. And in the repeated telling of the story being passed down from grandma to grandson, he, the poet-persona, owns it, soul-migrates into it, and then “electromyographically” shapeshifts into the personage of great-grandpa the African slave and relives the Afro-realistic and/ or surrealistic, chained, Middle Passage horror. This Presentness of the Past leads the poet-persona to cry out “I got the Middle Passage blues, and I can hardly stan’,/ but Great-grandpas’s still there breathin’ and Grandma’s/ got my han’/.” He, Emanuel’s persona, transmigrates into

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the slave ship and becomes traumatized. Emanuel’s point, like Kabnis/ Toomer’s learning lesson in Cane, is that one cannot deny or run away from one’s slave past but must accept it (Toomer 116–17). Like Father John’s act of passing on knowledge to Kabnis/Toomer, this first-to-third generation, grandmother-to-grandson African rite of passage to selfknowledge is the affirmation impelling Emanuel the poet’s concluding remark that “I’m a Middle Passage man” (Emanuel 110–111). This is a blues, yugen haiku that enables the soul to utter its pain of enslavement without shame. In his companion, tightly knit yugen haiku in the 5-7-5 format of three, three-line stanzas entitled “The Middle Passage,” Emanuel illuminates instrumental Jazz’s tendency to repetition and, in this case, reveals another point of view of the travesty of slavery. In the “Esther” vignette, Part I of Cane, Barlo the itinerant preacher has a limited vision of the Middle Passage horror (Toomer 23). In his yugen haiku parody, Emanuel magnifies the crossing by focusing on the “seasonal” aspect of nature. His has an ironic meaning relational to the climate outside and inside the slave ship during the Middle Passage crossing. He illustrates how the discordant aspects of Jazz instrumental music were born out of the agonizing, dehumanizing, cacophony of sounds of a death crossing. Ross states that, “although American and non-Japanese poets cannot really produce classical Japanese haiku in the strictest sense because that haiku is determined by codifications of sentiment, ideology, symbol, and intertextual allusion as well as sound values specific to Japanese culture and Japanese haiku, successful versions of haiku in the classic mode have been composed in English and other languages” (xvi). These would be the Imagists such as Ezra Pound and the modernists such as William Carlos Williams, but Ross does not include modernist poet Jean Toomer’s name on his list (xvi–xvii). Emanuel does because he is “responding” to Toomer’s “call” and acknowledging a royal, haiku poet and black writer ancestor, but all by means of indirection. For example, like Toomer who has to his credit a three-line, sixteen-syllable onji haiku poem to “Blood-Burning Moon” entitled “Red Nigger Moon. Sinner!” that includes a kireji pause for emphasis (31), and the poem “Cotton Song” that includes his vocable utterance of “Eoho” (11), Emanuel has an African American male poet model to “signify upon” as far as recapitulating the haiku mandates requiring inclusions of sound, ideology, sentiment, symbol, and intertextual allusions in one poem (Gates 103). Thus, in this particular haiku yugen repetition of the previous middle passage poem, Emanuel “jazzes” up the six-to-ten-week holocaust voyage by taking his reader-auditors down into the pit of pain—the slave hold—to illustrate through imagery, allusion, and ideology how the instrumental

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sounds of Jazz music originated from the vocablic utterances erupting each moment of “The Middle Passage” journey: Tight-bellied ships, gorged to the core, JAZZ claiming berths where breath soured no more. Chains, whips, ship-to-shore. JAZZ don’t talk about these things it can’t do without? Chainmates, black, vomit for breath, sang LIFE into JAZZ while leaping to death. (74)

Lyrical words of the blues fail here; only the dissonant quality of instrumental jazz music can reproduce the sounds of this sorrowful, painful, wordless death-ride of afflicted chain-linked, sardine-packed bodies exhaling, suffocating, and/or expiring amidst the stenches of vomit, clanks of metal chains, or outcries of suiciders plummeting overboard into the shark-infested, paradoxically welcoming waters of “LIFE” (74). Here, this synchronous fusion of life and death the poet Emanuel captures as a form of Taoist philosophy that appreciates the “liveliness of the cosmic energy displayed in all things” as well as of Zen Buddhism that appreciates the immanence of nature and the human soul (Ross xxix). But the imagery and the mood or Jazz tone are elegiac, which ironically provides a simultaneous spiritual life after death for the escapee victims. Hence, the reader easily grasps the poet’s “sentiment” or messaging here about subjugated humans either living or dying in the Present-now moment being word painted in these two call-response, linking poems adhering to the tenets of hokku poetry, now in modern times simply called haiku. To observe the emotional impact of seasonal, natural, or human subject matter, Emanuel also ventures into scripting images of country or plantation life where slaves, Basho’s “less artistically decorous subjects,” were ultimately deposited. And Emanuel, like Toomer who wrote vignettes of farm life in Part I of Cane, word paints those fusings between nature and simple human folk that inspired the births of jazz and blues. In section IV entitled “Some Guises of Jazz,” the poet Emanuel resorts to wabi haiku that focus on the “human perception of beauty stemmed from poverty.” And, yes, the poet depicts how the slaves, under duress of pain, became “one with nature” by working hard to produce and harvest the “beauty” of nature’s wealth for their masters. At times, small events—haiku moments—would spark spontaneous, sensory reactions from these overworked farm laborers, events that Emanuel micro-images from different

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perspectives (Hakutani 262; Ross xxix). The one-stanza, three-line haiku poem “Corncob Pipe” illustrates how the discarded residue of a natural product could serve not only as mattress ticking, but also as a smoking implement: “Corncob pipe: Jazz smokes,/ its long stem puffing music/out of slave-time jokes” (68). Here, Jazz’s intangibility is defined as a visual image of rising smoke. Just a simple act of artistic modification to a corncob brings momentous pleasure. The act is historically slave-based, just like the next wabi haiku poem, “Greens.” It states, “Lid’s on, steam’s risin’:/ collard greens, Lord, bubblin’ JAZZ!/ That’s appetizin’ ” (68). Here the simple pleasure is slave food—the visual image this time being the steam escaping from the lid and the audible sound of a bubbling pot of greens. In another short poem, Emanuel says that the taste of country “Jam” is a jazz experience: “JAM from JA-A-AZberries,/ lush vines strummed, plucked, bursting juice:/ sweet music sprung loose” (68). One can sense the hard slave labor, as in Toomer’s poem “Reapers,” that made the land fertile in order to produce such luscious JA-A-AZberries (Toomer 5). For the counterpart wabi haiku that features the blues lyrical music and magnifies the human subjects, the food producers, one has to flash forward to Emanuel’s section VIII, entitled “Got the Blues (Haiku and More),” and read true, comic dialogues between humans and nature amidst the travesties of loss. Toomer’s short poem “Nullo” about loss amidst traces of the past plays a key role in this section of Emanuel’s jazz haiku. In number “IV,” Emanuel’s speaker says, “Here I am sittin’/ on this stump. There’s a rabbit!/ I bet he won’t jump” (100). The reader feels the spontaneity of the male speaker who has a knee-jerk “electromyographic” response of jumping up after spotting a rabbit, while the rabbit remains unmoved by his presence (100). Nature energizes, even if conversation is one-sided. However, in Emanuel’s complementary, blues poem, a long sixline, six-stanza sabi haiku entitled “Sittin’-Log Blues,” there is a definite witty exchange between another isolated male and the log upon which he is sitting. Again, nature moves the human spirit: the penniless log has no tolerance for a lovelorn male frozen into inaction and self-pity because of a lost love. All of the remaining blues poems in this section are about loss of a woman, a job, a home, or a land site and recall a similar theme of egregious loss in Jean Toomer’s poem “Nullo.” The six-line sabi haiku is about the hazards of deforestation and the human impulse to kill off nature: the forest is gone and so are the cows and rabbits who used to feed on or graze the land (Cane 20). Only the residue of a cow’s hoofprint remains as a trace of the Past, and the Present “noise” is that of falling pine needles. “Nullo” here means the death of life and the bizarre state of emptiness. For Basho, this absence of consciousness would be a Zen-like ascendancy; for Toomer, nothingness is raw spirituality at the expense of human and

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natural elements; and for Emanuel, it is a state of “no self” for the beleaguered lover who has descended to vagrant level. Nature, the log, is man’s prime mover and the log’s electrical charge inspires him to get on with his life (JAZZ 100; Ross xxviii). Jazz is the catalyst of change and is transmutable too. In two complementary poems under “Some Guises of Jazz” entitled “Jackhammer” and “Ammunition” (70), these haiku present loud, jarring, grating sounds associated more with urban, “civilized” society. In fact, as Toomer recalls in Part II of Cane, Emanuel portrays the impetus for change that drove both slaves and freeman from the country to the city. The sabi haiku can especially illuminate conditions of isolation or loneliness (Hakutani 259). In the poem “Farmer,” Emanuel illustrates how laborers, most often alone while plowing the fields, had inspired blue-jazz country music. He writes, “Good-grip Jazz, farmer: / ploughed music like fields, worked late,/ kept all furrows straight” (64). Although singing praises to the slave/neoslave laborer, the lonely farmer felt that the task itself was most often drudgery entailing working from sunup to sundown during a twelve-to-fifteen-hour day. For those seeking a better life, singing frequently would occur as a spontaneous action, according to Emanuel’s poem “Old Friend”: “Old friend Jazz: one day/got holta ma hand just so,/ and never let go” (64). Being struck suddenly by an “electromyographic” Jazz moment would spark muscle movement and inspire a desire to act immediately. But being illiterate, so Emanuel argues, has not been a handicap for the migrant laborer because being self-actuated is the most important trait. Emanuel’s four-stanza senyru haiku “Jazzroads” is a key poem that captures incongruous images and highlights the reasons impelling the formation of blue-jazz-gospel musics in particular “territories.” Reflecting the progression of narratives from the rural South in Part I leading to ascension to the urban North in Part II of Cane, Emanuel the poet shows how Jazz music produced on remote farms traveled as well to rural-urban sites and then cities because of its migrant composers, instrumentalists, or singers. The subject matter also changes; it no longer focuses on unremitting slave labor in nature, but on human nature and aspirations for a better life in towns and cities, and preferably in the North rather than in the South. In stanza 1, the poet captures the emotional tensions felt by runaway slaves who had to be soundless and “un-jazzed” in a “Nullo”-like silence during movement on the underground railroad: “North Star raised no soun?/ No JAZZ on the undergroun’?/ Whole RAILWAY down?” Again, Emanuel redefines Basho’s tribute to silence and “no self” unconsciousness as disbelief. Nature, here, must be silent. This escape plot to freedom involving life or death has generated an unspoken music of fear; Emanuel captures

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that stifled sound by punctuating the necessity of their dead silence in order to live in freedom. Those who over the years escaped and landed in New Orleans would in the 1890s find a cacophony of noise and banter owing to population density. Relates Emanuel, “Storyville gossip,/ washboard lye gather up JAZZ/ when all clothes dry.” Here the poet includes allusions to the urban poor—women at their daily work of washing clothes in New Orleans’ “Storyville” quarter, the origin of Dixieland jazz, and themselves inspiring kernel ideas for blue-jazz music that will make this territory famous. In fact, in stanza 3, Emanuel indicates how self-destructive city life has become and how Jazz has integrated into musical forms traits of the city’s ruthless personality: “Drank its own rhythms,/ sucked its rhymes, cannibalized/its ripe flesh sometimes.” In its birthing of new expressions, urban Jazz turns ruthless, self-consuming, and destructive by repeating the acts ongoing in human nature. Emanuel’s imagery here is reminiscent of Toomer’s personification of “Seventh Avenue” in Washington, DC, in Part II, the northern sequence of Cane (14). Emanuel too concludes that the archetypal, voracious city does not die; instead, in “Jazzroads” it continues to grow. In stanza 4, Emanuel captures Jazz’s modes of transportation from South to North, each time altering its image as more musical variants hitch themselves onto the Jazz vehicle: “JAZZMOBILE coughed, stopped./ Refueled with ragtime, blues, swing./Revved up and BEBOPPED” (4). In this stanza referring to ragtime, blues, swing, and bebop, Emanuel swallows up forty years of post-slavery musical history, 1890–1935, and beyond. Yet all of these musical forms born out of the horror of slavery and the musician’s various needs to utter its pain and beauty additionally reflect the syncretic nature of Jazz and its shapeshifting qualities. Ragtime, blues, swing, bebop, and the like are traveling mediums and, as Emanuel demonstrates, have geographical identities. All of their journeys on the Jazzmobile to break out into territories have not been easy. In his wabi haiku poem “Traveler,” for example, Emanuel illustrates how impoverished Jazzmen would dress “indecorously” for relocating suddenly: “JAZZ, loose overcoat,/ seven-league boots, cocked hip. Note:/wants mate for a trip” (64). Being sparsely attired in an overcoat and tall boots, the traveler plans to take a tall step, perhaps by railway. In section VIII, entitled “Got the Blues,” Emanuel articulates that the getaway experience is not necessarily one of comfort: “Been ridin’ the rails.*/Butt’s dusty. When I last ate?/My mem’ry’s rusty” (98). It has been a long, hungry ride. These are masculinist descriptions; most transient hobos riding the rails have been men since women have generally been encumbered with children and incapable of sudden flight. Nonetheless, the “Traveler” in the poem still pines for a female mate.

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With the poem “Jazzroads,” Emanuel also captures a historical moment, the impetus of rural people to “rush to town,” starting in the 1880s according to W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903 (125). The lure of urbanization owing to turn-of-the-century industrialization, concomitantly, inspired the emergence and journey to prominence of African American jazz music at both national and international levels. In From Jazz to Swing, Thomas J. Hennessey identifies some significant points about the preconditions that brought together blues vocal and jazz instrumental musicians in the 1890s inaugural period of Jazz’s eruption, starting in the “territory” of New Orleans. Says Hennessey, The strongest musical traditions in the territories in 1890 were folk music, the spirituals of the black church, and the vocal tradition rooted in the work song that was developing into the blues. These African-American musical forms showed strong African folk roots, including: (1) the calland-response form; (2) bent, blues notes that went off the European scale; (3) emphasis on solos and collective improvisations; (4) a rough, personal vocal tone; (5) strong, complex rhythms, and (6) oral rather than written transmission. These forces were a strong part of the background of jazz, but they were vocal forms of music. (16)

In terms of lyrical blues singers melding with instrumental jazz players, Hennessey states that “the young musicians who would play jazz were more directly influenced by brass bands, pianists, and small groups playing for theaters and dances.” Even in this (1890) period, these traditions reflected the European musical norms of “(1) structured, composed pieces; (2) the European scale; (3) grouping instruments together in sections; (4) ‘legitimate’ tone and phrasing; and (5) written transmission, which required reading skills for performance” (16). Summing up these short characteristics of vocal and instrumental musical forms of 1890, Hennessey concludes, “The interaction of these two very different traditions [blues and jazz] shaped the history of jazz. That interaction came from choices made by African-American musicians in the social, economic, and cultural context of the 1890–1935 period” (16). Emanuel’s haiku “Jazzroads” also brings out another germane point about the now rural-urbanized, transient musicians. These earliest instrumentalists formed brass bands playing banjos, fiddles, and jugs; they appeared at carnivals, tent shows, wild west acts, circuses, and minstrel shows playing blues and ragtime music for blues singers and entertainers in touring companies throughout the South (19). Most were ear-playing artists who left farms in droves and were in possession of only rudimentary instrumental musical skills they had self-taught. They transformed small farm gatherings into urban acts for which they were well paid between

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1900 and 1914. And out of these urban saloons, nightclubs, and cabaret ambiances also emerged ragtime music or pre-jazz instrumental music also notated above in Emanuel’s poem “Jazzroads.” Hennessey describes ragtime as the “first black mass media entertainment music”: Ragtime is actually three different things: a syncopated on-the-beat style of playing music, a specific form of music composition based on the march structure, and a popular music craze that swept America in the 1890s. The playing style and repertoire influenced the brass bands, but ragtime was primarily piano music that could be reproduced by sheet music and piano rolls. Its key significance to the development of jazz was its pioneering of the mass media. Scott Joplin and other ragtime performers could distribute their music as sheet music or piano roles, . . . This model would be mirrored by the phonograph record’s impact on jazz. By 1900, ragtime pianists could be heard around the country in theaters, clubs, and sporting houses. (19)

In addition, says Hennessey, the former “ear-playing, blues-based rural blacks” in New Orleans (20) and then those migrants to the territories of Chicago and New York City, by 1914, had to adjust to demands for professional “reading musicians” as the shape of theater bands changed to orchestras with educated composers promoting sheet music as another form of revenue (25). Clearly by 1914, notes Hennessey, the seeds of jazz were sown as the ear-playing musicians of folk traditions began transforming into professional, reading-based musicians and composers (27). Emanuel in the remaining sections of JAZZ from the Haiku King captures all of these urban fluxes affecting musicians that forced them to change from ear-playing to reading-literate workers as well as to become vocal and instrumental performers. In addition, his rhetorical modes allude to Toomer’s style in terms of small cameos about people (“Fern”, “Robert”); places (“Seventh Avenue”); things (“November Cotton Flower”), or events (“Conversion”) appearing in Cane. For example, in section III, entitled “More Stars (Jazz, Blues, and Gospel),” Emanuel illustrates but enlarges Toomer’s vignettes on human subjects. However, he now differently focuses on more renowned subjects, but in terms of temporality, his cameo studies range from 1890 to 1990 and beyond. Most portraits seem to be in the form of wabi haiku that capture flashes of the subject’s grandeur within sparse settings of poverty or struggle. For example, in sync with his prefatory topic listed in section I, Emanuel celebrates male and female blues artists such as Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and Ma Rainey for their special stage attire or methods of performance at tent shows or in juke joints. Emanuel includes blue-jazz’s cousin gospel music featuring Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin in this section because of their fluent skills

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at melding blues and gospel musics. And, with the shift from jazz to swing music leading to the big band era of the 1930s, Emanuel uses forms of the wabi haiku to insinuate flashes of the urban club environments of New Orleans, Chicago, and New York where orchestra leader and singer Cab Calloway belted out his famous “ ‘Hi-dee-hi-dee-ho!’ ” (40; Hennessey 100), or the genius “stretched” soloist Louis Armstrong created a “Jazzrainbow: skywash/ [when] his trumpet blew/” (56; Hennessey 34; 78). He pays homage to Ella Fitzgerald’s fifty years of “scatting” vocables, 1938–1996, and then switches to the form of sabi haiku to illuminate the grandeur, tragedy, and/or isolations of jazz greats Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane so popular from the 1940s to the 1970s. Finally, Emanuel illustrates that Jazz knows no boundaries nor shirks any natural or unnatural medium to express itself. It assumes many guises, inclusive of varying visual textualities related to the fine arts. In Toomer’s modernist novel Cane, for instance, the author inserted half- and doublearc engravings imprinted onto blank pages so that they would function as divisions between the three sections of the experimental novel (2, 39, 81). Emanuel too utilizes the fine arts in his jazz haiku volume. For example, along with his five-stanza tribute to “Billie Holiday,” he includes a black and white engraving of “Lady Day” (49), and one of Mahalia Jackson (53). Both Lady Day’s and Mahalia Jackson’s sketches were crafted by acclaimed fine artist Godelieve Simons, “a well known Belgian engraver” whose photograph and brief biography appear on the back, inside cover of the volume. Simons is also the primary artist who has worked with Emanuel to produce texturized engravings that collude with the verbal texts of Emanuel’s jazz haiku, thereby melding image and text. In section VI, entitled “Jazz Meets the Abstract (Engravings),” the reader is presented with nine laser-photographic images of Simons’ etchings on wood or stone. Unlike Toomer’s, in some cases they are complemented by a haiku in Emanuel’s autograph that is germane to that art piece. This admixturing of the verbal and the visual arts has been done deliberately and skillfully and signifies a major shift from the cold font of typeset words, the format of the majority of poems in Emanuel’s collection. Here the poet imposes humanizing, cursory writing that is more personal and subjective onto the cold, dead engraving. The texturized change is as significant as in the 1890–1914 time period when the literacy demands for musicians changed from “earplaying” artists to “reading musicians” with the commercialization of the record industry in New York and sales of printed sheet music. Similarly, Emanuel’s shifting from cold typescript to personal autograph now humanizes his sabi haiku poetry and suggests to the reader that a real person, not an abstraction or personification like Jazz the music, has authored this published text. Nonetheless, there is a symbiotic relationship

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between images and words: the images too are haiku. Bruce Ross notes that traditional Japanese haiku is written in “vertical columns” (xiii). But Emanuel is writing in English and other languages that are non-Japanese and written horizontally. This spatial quandary is where Jazz can mediate Space and the fine arts can replicate language. Like Toomer’s blank divider pages with a single or double arc, Emanuel’s first panel is pure abstraction. It too is wordless and has a vertical black column that intercepts with overlapping black and white triangles that have been texturized to appear sponge-like and porous as well as oddly blurred, scored, etched, or purely white-spaced and unmarked. This stressing or scripting of blank space, nonetheless, is fine art, jazz haiku language. In his second panel, Emanuel overlays words in cursory writing onto the hard wood surface; it is a haiku poem in autograph, and is another method of texturing a hard surface. The cursory text provides the general theme for this section. On the other hand, the black and white images of lines, angles, triangles, dots, and white spaces illustrate various aspects of space being invaded like nature, and thusly being recomposed, marked, and scripted. However, Emanuel, the poet, in the stead of Roland Barthes, suggests that it takes the power of language to name a person, place, or thing (Barthes 32). Emanuel’s autograph language signifies power, on the one hand, but, on the other, exemplifies how language is arbitrary and unfixed in meanings because it can be “jazzed.” On each of the wood or stone engravings, the poems appear left, right, top, bottom, middle, sideways, and at every odd angle possible, thus illustrating the slipperiness of words and their meanings. They are not all vertical like haiku written in the Japanese language. But, similar to Emanuel’s representation of Ella Fitzgerald’s song “A Tis-ket, A Task-ket” as falling into a vertical disarray, the poet has illustrated how jazz is the ultimate consciousness and prime mover of both Time, considered to be kinetic and linear, and Space, considered to be dead, bounded, and static. Here is where Emanuel broaches the “cosmic nature” of haiku and Jazz’s own cosmic impulse to animate Space, which turns Western concepts upside down. Haiku, like Jazz, is Time conscious. Bruce Ross reminds haiku proponents of the “Buddhist idea that the world is made anew each moment.” He also quotes Robert Spiess who recognizes the “cosmic dimension” of haiku but rejects the vital notion of a past or future. “The whole of life is in each moment,” says Spiess (xiv). Such nullification of a triadic linkage between the Past, Present, and Future at first seems totally anti-African, anti-Toomer, and anti-Emanuel. Ross further observes that Westerners look at the cosmos in opposition to Easterners: “The long poetic traditions of both the East and the West [regarding] the exploration of man’s relation to nature” is a central facet of “Japanese culture,” having derived such beliefs from “Taoism, Buddhism, and

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Shintoism.” This man-nature symbiosis is obviously the dualism recognized by both Toomer and Emanuel; it is the perfect subject for exposing Western slavery and redeeming the black subject from oppression. Hence, where they also agree with Eastern concepts is expressed in Ross’s next statement: “Broadly speaking, the poetics of the East reflect an ontological union of man’s consciousness with nature in which nature is of equal valence to man while the poetics of the West reflects an allegorical subsuming of nature in which man dominates nature” (xii). Thus, the unnatural human nature of the West to enslave Africanist people from the South of the globe is why both Toomer and Emanuel have chosen to utilize the vehicles of blue-jazz-gospel musics to deconstruct and to expose the Western drive of humans to contain nature. This perverse drive to enslave has proven to be unhealthy and nihilistic for Africanist people. Jazz, by means of the Jazz artist, “electromyographically” upsurges, restabilizes, recodifies, and mediates the unnatural urges of Westerndefined nature to contain and allows for an Africanist epistemology and counterdiscourse language of liberation to enable the knowledge of truth to emerge. The model for such subversiveness is that of Frederick Douglass’s “theft” and a recodification of the master’s language cited earlier in this chapter. Similarly Emanuel, like Toomer, uses Jazz as the counterdiscourse medium to adopt, modify, and then blend some Eastern haiku rules with the Africanist concept of ontology that continually looks backward to the Past in order to go forward to the Present and potential Future. Most notable is that Asia and Africa converge on notions of ontology as being temporally based. Invariably African Time, as noted by John Mbiti, is indelibly grounded in the Present-now; for whatever futurity exists, it is always viewed as “potential Time.” The Future is probable, has not yet happened, and is generally anticipated as six months or, at its extreme, perhaps two years . However, African “actual Time” is grounded in the Present-now, inclusive of the momentous Past, and this Present-now moment is marked, scored, inscripted, or time-logged by a particular occasion (birthing), a season (harvesting), or an event (slavery) relative to that Present-now occasion (Mbiti 16–17; 78). This truncated Future, yet Time-conscious Present-Past, African concept of Time may sound Asian/Taoistic, but it is African based. Yet, the two cultures converge on this important concept of Time, for Time aligns Afro-Asian peoples into a jazz-harmonious, blended kinship because of their like values and beliefs in the Present-now moment. Thus, African and Asian peoples have a “shared history” in a spiritually based, belief system that is anti-Western in respect to the universal relationship of all human beings to nature and the cosmos. Unlike the West, Africans and Asians, rather than attempt to enslave human nature, speak the language of universal humanism that respects it.

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Clearly then, Emanuel’s purpose in JAZZ from the Haiku King is not only to redeem a “dying race” of Africanist people, like Toomer’s mission in Cane, but also to expose and to sanctify its cultural contours by means of the musics that African Americans authored. That harmonizing medium is JAZZ in the eyes of James Emanuel, the haiku poet, African American bard, cosmopolite (citizen of the world), and universal humanist. This is the reason that Emanuel’s engraved jazz haiku both rewrite and syncretize nature according to African (South) and Japanese (East) concepts of Time and Space while exposing the dissonant unnaturalness of Western epistemology. Emanuel’s jazzed haiku engravings about the slave experience enable this transcendent, cosmic, Afro-Asian redemptive experience to occur. For example, both cultures reject the Western concepts of Time and Space according to Emanuel’s representation in his first untitled haiku engraving. He proclaims, “Space moves, contours grow/ as wood, web, damp, dust. Points turn,/ corners follow. JAZZ!” (87). Jazz, therefore, is “EVERYTHING” that Emanuel had earlier declared on “Page One,” the section I introduction (xv). In his second stanza on the engraving that reads, “Secrets, nude (disguised /as lines, corners, blackness, white),/strip woods, hold them tight” (87), the poet indicates how Jazz is consciousness; it moves Space. It also holds the secrets of life, to humanity, and to the cosmos as do the natural elements of wood. In the next panel, Emanuel pays tribute to human life that is valued in African culture and its drive to regenerate. Says the poet, “No meaning at birth:/just screams, squirms, frowns, without sight,/ fists clenched against light.” Obviously, this is imagery of a child’s first moments after birth—the struggle for life is a cluster of noises, movements, and struggles against sudden lightness that had been darkness in the womb. And how does the child now-grown-up respond to representation of birth? In line 2, Emanuel writes, “Sean would like this art./ “It’s Scottish,” he’d say. “Like JAZZ./Sean’s stubborn that way” (88). Here the poet inscribes the abstract piece with a personality, a boy’s birthing, naming, and sense of Scottish heritage. Space has now been inscribed and a secret revealed by language. In the opposite panel, Emanuel adds a one-stanza tribute again to Louis Armstrong: “Louis SEES this art,/ SCATS tromp- boomp, BEEEbel, SO- O- Ohbel:/his tract on “Abstract” (89). Here, Emanuel inserts kireji pauses for emphasis to suggest that Louis, with his trumpet sounds, can solely communicate with jazz’s abstractness in the form of a fine arts piece. But it is a threefold process: Louis’s trumpet captures the rhythms and tones of sound, and scatting captures the language of a metal object. Thus, scatting becomes his “tract” or interpretation of the “abstract” known as Jazz.

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In the remaining five panels, Emanuel continually defines intangible Jazz music’s abstract quality as a concrete, visual representation inscribed in space that assembles the Present-now moment. Jazz is kinetic and moves spatial art, which in the other panels Emanuel depicts in forms of moving actions, images, or events of walking, sitting, meeting at “Big Red’s Cafe´,” or building a house to Jazz. Always the poet is ferreting out the truth through which Jazz is the vehicle, catalyst, and purveyor of knowledge. This accounts for the last panel of the series and the last statement of the volume: it is Simons’s engraving scored but not marked by Emanuel’s autograph language. That is because Emanuel concludes the volume on a kireji pause of pure “silence,” which Ross explains is “haiku’s capacity to elicit a deep universal insight into the meaning of reality.” He says that “Basho characterized the highest valuation in this capacity in the term sabi.” It is perceived by some to be a state of “detachment in a cosmic sense” or a state of “existential loneliness” that produces the “pathetic beauty that is found in all things” (Ross xxx). This is the state of pathos or sympathy that Kabnis/Toomer was attempting to achieve in “Nullo” and the entire novel Cane—to magnify the pain and beauty of a suffering, dying race of people. Emanuel has duplicated the pathos, magnified a still, dying form of African American jazz music, and raised its consciousness to cosmic level. With his last panel, Emanuel stops Time to emphasize silence and unconsciousness in a sabi haiku Death moment. However, that synchronicity is brief as LIFE elevates Jazz to its ultimate cosmic level of consciousness as a humanizing and syncretizing universal medium. In Jazz language, this stilling pause, “break,” or “cut” is preparatory to a Louis Armstrong– type performer who is about to break in and move dead Space with an extended solo. James Emanuel is that artist about to commence his next Jazz haiku set. To sum up, Emanuel’s volume JAZZ from the Haiku King is an eclectic, postmodernist Jazz haiku narrative of redemption, regeneration, and healing that, by means of the “electromyographic” nature of blue-jazz-gospel musics, elevates the subhuman slave experiences of African Americans to that of the template for universal humanism. He adapts rhetorical modes and messagings from Jean Toomer’s novel Cane and upgrades the struggle to redeem a dying musical form, and thus a race of people, to contemporary time. Its textual recovery comes from Jazz’s ability to recover and syncretize the Past with the Present-now. Out of Africa came the sounds, out of slavery came the lyrics of blues and gospel, and out of both becoming hybrid came instrumental Jazz. And Jazz, as Emanuel claims, is the sum total of “EVERYTHING!” It is the intelligence and the consciousness of black culture, and Japanese haiku is the newest appendage to the

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territorial domains where Jazz has reared its head and left its imprint. Emanuel’s section VII entitled “Jazz on the Rue Du Bac: Steve Lacy” illustrates the transnational reach at which an African American artistic craft has found its place at multicultural sites around the world; it has found a home in French culture while losing ground in American culture. As Toomer in Cane had been attempting to redeem a “dying race” (14), Emanuel has been attempting in JAZZ from the Haiku King to uplift and salvage a “dying” African American jazz musical form and signature of black America by infusing musical and cultural death with “LIFE” or Jazz’s electrical charge in every part of the world. In fact, Emanuel’s first stanza for “Jazz on Rue du Bac” demonstrates that universal, “electromyographic” response. Says Emanuel, Out of his looping shoulder, patient hip (who knows?) squirms the music, woooh! waaah! woooh! waaah! pieces of the audience breaking away from chairs, leaning, woooh! waaah! woooh! waaah!

The vocables are the “electromyographic” sounds of Jazz music speaking from the particular saxophone of Steve Lacy, and the breaking of chairs is the audience’s reactions to Jazz’s ability to suddenly energize the body and soul. That is the nature of James Emanuel’s Jazz haiku; it enlivens, humanizes, and universalizes. Like Jazz music itself and its universal appeal that, upon detection, opens up a “wormhole in the universe,” the poet’s artistry in this electrifying graphic Jazz haiku record has opened up a universal space of dialogue between and among disciples of African American culture, its Jazz musical traditions, and its poetical voicings born out of slavery calling for universal humanism. Fear not that one will forget, for Japanese haiku is the latest conveyance for immortalizing Jazz’s multilingual messages and James A. Emanuel is Jazz’s royal haiku bard. Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” Image, Text, Music. Ed. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 32. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.

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108 / virginia whatley smith Clarke, John Henrik. “Africa and World History in Perspective.” A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African American Studies . Ed. Floyd W. Hayes, III. San Diego: Collegiate Press, 1992. 43–59. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. 1845. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1989. “Electromyography.” Random House Webster’s College Dictionary. McGraw-Hill, 1991. 431. Emanuel, James A. Jazz from the Haiku King. Detroit: Broadside, 1999. ———. Biographical Sketch. January 1974. Author ownership. ———. “9 Illustrations of Jazz from the Haiku King.” Owned by Author James A. Emanuel. Undated. ———. “Literary Happenings.” Christmas 1991–2006 (16 TS sheets by author). ———. Middle Passage. CD. J. Emanuel & N. Howard. Recorded at Tervuren, Belgium: Altsax Studios, May 17–19, 2001. ———. Short letter to Virginia Whatley Smith, November 16, 2007. ———. Short Letter to Virginia Whatley Smith, November 20, 2007. ———. Short Letter to Virginia Whatley Smith, November 24, 2007. ———. “Silence, Sound, and Poetry.” On Jazz from the Haiku King. Essay typescript. Published in Belgian Journal Sources (in French). (February 1997): 8–11. Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1991. 324–336. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifyin’ Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Hakutani, Yoshinobu and Robert Tener. “Afterword.” Haiku by Richard Wright. New York: Anchor, 1998. 245–300. Hennessey, Thomas J. From Jazz to Swing: African American Jazz Musicians and their Music, 1890–1935. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994. Lamar, Jake. “A Tribute to James Emanuel. 7 Profiles of James Emanuel. Ed. Godelieva Simons. Brussels: Grav’iSim, 2006. 88–89. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. 1969. Second edition. New York: Heinemann, 1990. Ross, Bruce. Ed. Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1993. Simons, Godieleve. “Engravings of James A. Emanuel’s Jazz Haiku.” Undated. Author Owned. Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Ueda, Makoto. The Master Haiku Poet: Matsuo Basho. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983.

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Pa rt II Es says on Ideolo g y

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Ch a p t e r Si x Th e We st e r n a n d Ea st e r n Thoug h t s of R a l p h Ell i s on’s I n v isi bl e M a n Yoshinobu Hakutani

Among the well-known twentieth-century African American novels, Invisible Man (1952) has distinguished itself as unique racial discourse. As a novel of racial prejudice, Richard Wright’s Native Son had succeeded in awakening the conscience of the nation in a way that its predecessors had failed to do. Toni Morrison’s celebrated novel Beloved (1987) is perhaps one of the most poignant recreations of the legacy of slavery. For the expression of an African American woman’s love and suffering, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) excels in its use of a vernacular as does Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told by an innocent, uneducated youth. Such novelists as Wright, Morrison, and Walker have succeeded in recording the ineffable agonies and rages of racial victims only because their works are solidly based on fact and history. None of these novels, however, concerns the mindset of an individual more subtly than does Invisible Man. And this novel, unlike other African American novels, features the complexity of the protagonist’s mind thoroughly foregrounded with a cross-cultural heritage. Invisible Man, then, represents the confluence and hybridity of Western and Eastern thoughts. The different styles of writing notwithstanding, Invisible Man and Native Son both capture the plight of an African American trapped in a racist society at midcentury. While the social and economic backgrounds of the two novels remain similar, Ellison’s technique is more modernistic while Wright’s is more realistic. As a result, Ellison’s protagonist is by far more articulate and subtle than Wright’s. To defend the racial victim, Wright as a literary realist can rely on authentic court records such as those of the Robert Nixon murder trial and conviction in Chicago in the late 1930s. Ellison, on the other hand, as a psychological and highly imaginative realist, vividly recalls

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his personal experiences with an evocation of the social realities and cultural myths. When such experiences, facts, and memories are presented in the novel, they become metaphoric rather than realistic. Invisible Man reads like a cross-cultural rather than a social discourse. Little wonder, when Ellison’s protagonist-narrator revisits these historical and cultural sites and moments in the novel, he becomes invisible—particularly to those who have excluded the existence of African Americans from their lives. 1 In “The World and the Jug,” Ellison writes, “More important, perhaps, being a Negro American involves a willed (who wills to be a Negro? I do!) affirmation of self as against all outside pressures—an identification with the group as extended through the individual self which rejects all possibilities of escape that do not involve a basic resuscitation of the original American ideals of social and political justice” (Shadow 132). Throughout Invisible Man, as Ellison reminds white Americans of their blindness to the true identity of their fellow citizens, Ellison proves how invisible an African American is to white American society at midcentury. To help white Americans better understand black life, Ellison is urging black Americans to recreate themselves instead of accommodating white Americans’ superiority complex and allowing their condescension. To Ellison, then, making African Americans’ invisibility visible means “a willed affirmation of self,” the ultimate achievement of freedom and equality guaranteed in the Constitution. Ellison’s argument for the invisibility of the African American identity also suggests that black life in America constitutes not only the lives of African Americans but those of all Americans. Ellison’s observation bears a strong resemblance to Wright’s, as shown in 12 Million Black Voices, published in 1941.1 This well-documented work demonstrates that the principal motive African Americans had for their exodus from the rural South to the industrial North was their quest for freedom and equality. Wright himself, a victim of racial prejudice and hatred, fled to Chicago in search of the kind of freedom and dialogue he had never experienced in the South. “For the first time in our lives,” he wrote, “we feel human bodies, strangers whose lives and thoughts are unknown to us, pressing always close about us.” In stark contrast to the situation in the South, where African Americans were not allowed to communicate freely with white citizens, the crowded and noisy apartments in the northern cities became hubs of interracial mingling and communication, places where the migrant African Americans came in close contact with “the brisk, clipped

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men of the North, the Bosses of the Buildings.” Unlike the southern landlords, the city businessmen, Wright discovered, were not “at all indifferent. They are deeply concerned about us, but in a new way” (12 Million 100). In the industrial city, as Wright observed, an African American functioned as part of a “machine.” Unlike life in the rural South, which depended upon “the soil, the sun, the rain, or the wind,” life in the North was controlled by what Wright called “the grace of jobs and the brutal logic of jobs” (12 Million 100). By living and working ever so closely with the white bourgeoisie, the minority workers in the city strove to learn their techniques. Consequently, Wright noted, African American workers “display[ed] a greater freedom and initiative in pushing their claims upon civilization than even do the petty bourgeoisie” (“Blueprint” 38). Escaping the harsh conditions under which African American workers had to produce and compete with white workers became a reason to achieve a higher social and economic status. The interaction, dialogue, and competition involved in the activities led to their initial consciousness of self-reliance. In short, the African Americans of the industrial North were given a chance to shape their own lives. Economically an individual was a machine and individual productivity was measured not by race, but by merit. White citizens, who worked in close contact with African Americans, in turn, viewed them with respect and friendliness. When white workers realized that they shared with African Americans the same working conditions and worldview, they became curious about African Americans’ cultural legacy and, in particular, their musical heritage. In 12 Million Black Voices Wright traces the cross-racial and cross-cultural dialogue that took place in the industrial North: Alone together with our black folk in the towering tenements, we play our guitars, trumpets, and pianos, beating out rough and infectious rhythms that create an instant appeal among all classes of people. Why is our music so contagious? On the plantations our songs carried a strain of other-worldly yearning which people called “spiritual”; but now our blues, jazz, swing, and boogie-woogie are our “spirituals” of the city pavements, our longing for freedom and opportunity, an expression of our bewilderment and despair in a world whose meaning eludes us. (12 Million 127–28)

To Wright, and to Ellison as well, the contribution of African American music to American life and culture served as a catalyst to developing affinities between African and European Americans. To today’s Americans, jazz and the blues have become national music as much as they remain the African American legacy. More recently Toni Morrison has also observed

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that the presence of African Americans enriched American life and culture: what she calls “Africanism” was the yoke of American culture. “Black slavery,” she argues in Playing in the Dark, “enriched the country’s creative possibilities” (38). While Ellison shows in Invisible Man that African American freedom and identity can be achieved through genuinely autonomous cultural voices such as jazz and the blues, he also evokes Yeats, Joyce, and O’Casey because the contribution of these writers to British culture is similar to that of African American music to American culture.2 To envision the latent consciousness of the invisible man, Ellison relies on the techniques of French writers such as André Malraux and Paul Valéry. Among the European existential works, Malraux’s Man’s Fate had an influence on Ellison’s characterization of the invisible man.3 In commenting on the psychological makeup of Wright’s Black Boy, Ellison points out that “all men possess the tendency to dream and the compulsion to make their dreams reality . . . and that all men are the victims and the beneficiaries of the goading, tormenting, commanding and informing activity of that imperious process known as the Mind—the Mind, as Valéry describes it, ‘armed with its inexhaustible questions’ ” (Shadow 81). Ellison considers Black Boy and Invisible Man not merely accurate representations of African American life but typical twentieth- century works that poignantly reflect humanity’s quest for the meaning of its existence. As Ellison clearly acknowledges in his essays, collected in Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, he was also influenced by American writers, including Melville, Twain, Stephen Crane, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Although Ellison was hesitant to express his ties with his African American predecessors such as Hughes and Wright, ties that were closer than he was aware, he frequently discussed their works in the light of his own ideas and techniques underlying Invisible Man. All in all, what makes Invisible Man a unique modernist novel are the various cultural strands that have gone into its composition.4 2 Many of his essays indicate that Ellison underplayed the concept of selfcreation, a major ideology inherited from national character, whether the ideology was ingrained in the African American or the European American tradition. The treatment of this theme in Invisible Man, however, strongly suggests that Ellison was highly conscious of the theories and practices of self-creation advocated by his American predecessors such as Wright and Emerson, who both taught Ellison that it is essential for African

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Americans to create themselves rather than be given identity by society. Wright’s and Emerson’s writings alike provide Ellison with an admonition that if a writer does not find the theories, techniques, and representations needed to exist, the writer must invent them. Wright’s conception of self-creation is shown in Black Boy, the book Ellison admired the most among Wright’s works. In that autobiography Wright enabled the narrator to convey the truth about African American experience as did Ellison in Invisible Man. What distinguishes Black Boy from Wright’s other narratives was not an application of literary naturalism but a creation of perspective, as shown in Black Boy. This concept of perspective, which Wright finds most difficult to represent in a narrative, has an affinity with Ellison’s concept of invisibility in his novel. The intellectual space Wright theorizes comprises, on the one hand, an African American writer’s complex consciousness deeply involved in his or her experience and, on the other, a detachment from it. By “detachment” Wright means a reflection accomplished in isolation, in a space like the underground hideout in Invisible Man, where neither those afflicted, such as Trueblood, Wheatstraw, and Mary, nor those sympathetic to their plight, such as Jack, Ras, and Sybil, are allowed to enter. Writing, though foregrounded in the clashing dialogue between the protagonist and others in society, as Wright argued in American Hunger, “had to be done in loneliness” (123). Wright’s attempt to establish perspective and provide it with intellectual space, as noted earlier, accounts for his lifelong commitment to a narrative by which he is able to express his own vision of life. Wright’s determination to bring home such a narrative is similar to Ellison’s dedication to writing Invisible Man. Wright’s entire work has shown that Wright, like Ellison, was a remarkably resilient thinker and writer. At the outset of his career his writing was deeply influenced by Marxism, as was that of some other American writers, including Ellison. But later, as Wright became independent of the Marxist manifesto, he considered only the theory of class struggle valid and applicable to African American life and rejected, as did Ellison’s invisible man, much of the Marxist practice that suppressed freedom and individualism. Whether Ellison attempted to draw an analogy between his concept of self-creation and Emerson’s or wished to subvert Emerson’s political ideology,5 the reader is reminded of Ellison’s creation of a fictional character named Emerson in Invisible Man. In his essay “The Negro and the Second World War,” a 1943 editorial in Negro Quarterly, Ellison declared, “As long as Negroes fail to centralize their power they will always play the role of a sacrificial goat, they will always be ‘expendable.’ Freedom, after all, cannot be imported or acquired through an act of philanthropy, it must be won”

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(“The Negro” 238). Ellison’s advice on African Americans’ self-creation and autonomy in this editorial echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, stated in an 1844 journal entry: When at last in a race a new principle appears an idea, that conserves it. Ideas only save races. If the black man is feeble & not important to the existing races, not on a par with the best race, the black man must serve & be sold & exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization, for the sake of that element no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him, he will survive & play his part. . . . The intellect, that is miraculous, who has it has the talisman, his skin & bones are transparent, he is a statue of the living God, him I must love & serve & perpetually seek & desire & dream on: and who has it not is superfluous. . . . I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be that proud discovery that the black race can begin to contend with the white. . . . The negro has saved himself, and the white man very patronizingly says, I have saved you. If the negro is a fool all the white men in the world cannot save him though they should die. (Selected Writings 123–24)

Although Emerson’s statement on anti-slavery betrays his condescension to African Americans, his argument for self-help and self-creation concerns humanity as a whole. Emerson, moreover, bases his argument on transcendentalism, his own observation that intellect, or individualism, is a divine gift. “Days,” Emerson’s most favorite poem, written six years after the journal entry above, reads, Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. (Selected Writings 481)

This poem expresses Emerson’s condescension to himself as a mere human being just as does his earlier journal entry to African American slaves. Emerson, however, places greater emphasis on human beings’ tendency to be remiss in heeding God and rely on others than he does on the issues of race and gender.

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In Invisible Man, self-reliance and self-creation function as Ellison’s central theme. As Ellison’s protagonist begins to doubt the import of Marxism in achieving African American individualism and independence, he reminisces about his college professor, who once discussed James Joyce’s hero. “Stephen’s problem, like ours,” the invisible man heard his professor say, “was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals” (354). To Ellison, Stephen’s achievement is not the Irishman’s success in transcending the oppression of the Irish by the English but his creation of an individual capable of seeing himself not as a member of a race, class, or gender, but as a member of the human race. “[If] you have man,” Emerson asserts, “black or white is insignificance. . . . I say to you, you must save yourself, black or white, man or woman. Other help is none” (Selected Writings 123). Ellison and Emerson not only agree on the principles of self-help and individualism but also share the vision that the achievement of African American individualism leads to the creation of a culture worthy of universal respect and admiration. In the journal entry quoted earlier Emerson projected that “if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new & coming civilization . . . he will survive & play his part” (Selected Writings 123). In the same journal entry Emerson recognized that African Americans were on the verge of creating a culture worthy of his respect. In Invisible Man, on the other hand, Ellison draws an analogy between the creation of Irish culture conceived by Joyce’s hero Stephen and the creation of African American culture seen by the invisible man. For Ellison, creating a culture for African Americans means creating “something far more important” than a race. “For the first time, lying there in the dark,” the invisible man says, “I could glimpse the possibility of being more than a member of a race” (Invisible Man 354–55). Throughout the novel the Emersonian concept of self-reliance underlies the development of the invisible man’s character. Even at the outset of his search for identity, Ellison’s hero suspects that fighting a battle royal might lure him away from finding himself. “In those pre-invisible days,” he ponders, “I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington” (18). In his subsequent search and ordeal, various personages he encounters serve as a catalyst in making him less invisible to himself and others. Mr. Emerson’s secretary gives the invisible man an advice: “But I want to help you do what is best. . . . What’s best, mind you. Do you wish to do what’s best for yourself?” (188). “Oh, God!” the secretary finally utters, “Don’t you see that it’s best that you do not see him?” (189). Later in the novel, other figures likewise play the role of a catalyst for the invisible man’s self-realization. The vet the invisible man meets urges

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him to be self-reliant and independent.6 Wheatstraw serves as a model of the ideal African American—independent, self-reliant, and compassionate. As he comes in contact with his Marxist comrades such as Brother Jack and Extortionist Ras, he slowly realizes his own identity: “For one thing,” he says, “they seldom know where their personalities end and yours begins; they usually think in terms of ‘we’ while I have always tended to think in terms of ‘me’—and that has caused some friction, even with my own family” (316). It is this concept that Ellison finds lacking and hence invisible in American life. 3 Commenting on the essays collected in Shadow and Act, Ellison writes, The very least I can say about their value is that they performed the grateful function of making it unnecessary to clutter up my fiction with half-formed or outrageously wrong-headed ideas. At best they are an embodiment of a conscious attempt to confront, to peer into, the shadow of my past and to remind myself of the complex resources for imaginative creation which are my heritage. (xxii–xxiii)

Ellison sounds modest in calling some of his ideas “half-formed or outrageously wrong-headed.” But when he calls these essays “an attempt to transform some of the themes, the problems, the enigmas, the contradictions of character and culture native to my predicament, into what André Malraux has described as ‘conscious thought’ ” (xix), Ellison is acknowledging the import of existentialism, an ideology that underlies Invisible Man as equally do other philosophies of life. In the same introduction Ellison also remarks, When I began writing in earnest I was forced, thus, to relate myself consciously and imaginatively to my mixed background as American, as Negro American, and as a Negro from what in its own belated way was a pioneer background. More important and inseparable from this particular effort, was the necessity of determining my true relationship to that body of American literature to which I was most attracted and through which, aided my what I could learn from the literatures of Europe, I would find my own voice, and to which I was challenged, by way of achieving myself, to make some small contribution, and to whose composite picture of reality I was obligated to offer some necessary modifications. (xix)

Indeed, Invisible Man reverberates various voices heard in some of the wellknown existential works of fiction by Ellison’s contemporaries in America

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as well as in Europe. But what is interesting and significant to Ellison’s novel as a representation of modern African American culture is that the protagonist’s existential outlook is subtly tempered and modified by other related and yet different kinds of experience and thought Ellison cherished as an African American. One of the existential works of fiction to which Invisible Man bears a striking resemblance is Wright’s novella “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1945). In both stories the protagonist’s identity is withheld throughout: the invisible man is just as anonymous as Wright’s protagonist, whose name is neither mentioned nor referred to. Wright’s underground man once spells his name on a typewriter in lower keys as “freddaniels” (55). Alienation from society, a dominant theme in existential writing, is also characteristic of both works: initially the invisible man is convinced as is Daniels that being an African American is responsible for his alienation from society at large. The two men, who try to be good, law-abiding citizens, both suffer from the oppression that stems from what they consider a lawless, amoral, corrupt, and chaotic world with little human value and little hope for renewal. Despite their anonymity, both protagonists are portrayed as highly realistic characters. Throughout the story, Fred Daniels is not an African American man in name only. Not only is his plight real, but also all the major incidents and characters he is involved with, which at times appear to be clumsily constructed repsesentations, reflect the racial struggle and oppression that an African American like him experiences. Ellison’s novel, however, is replete with such realistic personages as Dr. Bledsoe, Norton, Wheatstraw, the vet, Mary, Sybil, Ras, and Jack. Once confined in the sewers Daniels is completely isolated from the white world, and the only group of people he encounters is an African American congregation in a basement church. Even though they are African Americans, he feels completely alienated from them. “After a long time,” the narrator says, “he grew numb and dropped to the dirt. Pain throbbed in his legs and a deeper pain, induced by the sight of those black people groveling and begging for something they could never get, churned in him” (Eight Men 33). Similarly, once the invisible man settles down in his Harlem underground he loses interest in returning to “Mary’s, or to the campus, or to the Brotherhood, or home” (Invisible Man 571). The invisible man, finding the members of the Brotherhood a group of deluded Marxists, becomes disenchanted with their activities just as Daniels, seeing the black congregation, a group of fanatic Christians, comes to despise them. Such scenes in both stories are not inserted as symbols but serve as graphic details of the futility and oppression of modern life. Such episodes not only make for depth but are subtle representations of existential ideology and protest.

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Despite such similarities, however, there remain considerable differences in outlook between the two works. Wright’s vision of society is far more deterministic than Ellison’s: unlike the invisible man (a typical antihero in a modernist novel), Daniels, a racial victim, has no choice but to flee to the underground world. Furthermore, he has no choice but to confess to a crime he did not commit. The narrator intimates that Daniels “was tired of running and dodging” (Eight Men 27), a case history of oppression and persecution. The reader learns later that Daniels has been falsely accused of the murder of one Mrs. Peabody. Her identity as a white woman is not suggested until the midpoint of the story. Immediately after the episode in the grocery, as Daniels steps into the world above, the narrator says, “A few shy stars trembled about him. The look of things was beautiful, yet he felt a lurking threat.” Walking toward a deserted newsstand, Daniels sees a headline: “HUNT NEGRO FOR MURDER” (49). At the end of the story the racial theme is once again intensified. Unable to comprehend Daniels’s vision of the underworld, Lawson, one of the policemen, shoots him down, insisting, “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things” (92). Unlike Daniels’s motive for living underground, the invisible man’s is to hibernate and recreate himself. “Here, at least,” the invisible man says, “I could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet. I would take up residence underground. The end was in the beginning” (Invisible Man 571). In contrast to Ellison’s existential view of African American life, Wright’s idea of the universal human condition is expressed in terms of a dialectic. Daniels, now settled in the underground cave, argues, “Maybe anything’s right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, any act a man took to satisfy himself, murder, theft, torture” (Eight Men 64). What Daniels calls “the world as men had made it” is precisely the fact of human history, not a utopia, philosophy, or religion. For him, of course, it constitutes a world of racism and oppression. If such a world were deemed right, then, it would follow that any one person’s offense—“murder, theft, torture”—would be right. What Daniels is saying rings true because one person’s offense, however serious it may be, can scarcely compare with even a fraction of the past, not to mention future, injustices in American society. The ambiguity in Daniels’s judgment of human behavior and the conflict between personal and societal judgments lead to a nihilistic spirit that Wright, unlike Ellison, attempted to express in this story. For Daniels, at least, a human action, whether it is well intended or not, has no meaning. For a person to find value in his or her act or in a society that has victimized the person is sheer futility. If such value should exist, Daniels asserts, it should be annihilated.

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On the contrary, the invisible man’s worldview is not nihilistic. A series of ephiphanies given underground provide the invisible man with an uplifting, congenial expression of human existence. He now realizes that he should be able to emulate an African American such as Trueblood, an existential hero who has created himself and now has his own life and destiny under control. Upon severing his lingering ties with the Brotherhood, the invisible man now begins to conceive a more compassionate worldview than before with a concept of brotherhood quite different from what Marxists and Communists believe in. He now wonders, If only I could turn around and drop my arms and say, “Look, men, give me a break, we’re all black folks together . . . Nobody cares.” Though now I knew we cared, they at last cared enough to act—so I thought. If only I could say, “Look, they’ve played a trick on us, the same old trick with new variations—let’s stop running and respect and love one another . . . ” (Invisible Man 560)

The attitude he now has toward his fellow African Americans is in singular contrast to the one he used to have at the beginning of the novel. Living under the tutelage of Dr. Bledsoe, he was pretentious and condescending to his peers just as was Norton to Dr. Bledsoe and to him. The invisible man’s having compassion upon others is reminiscent of the vision that Cross Damon in Wright’s existential novel has as he lies dying on a New York street. Wright presents Damon’s worldview with some contradiction. Early in the novel Damon considers himself a nihilist, but toward the end of his life he becomes a man of compassion. In The Outsider, Wright seems to have taken the risk of contradicting himself not only because of the realistic accumulation of detail but also because of his insistence that Damon judges life inherently meaningful as does Ellison’s invisible man. What is common between the two African American intellectuals is their constant compulsion to take action in search of the meaning of their lives. Unlike Daniels, they are endowed with what Emerson called the “intellect, that is miraculous” and god-given (Selected Writings 123), as well as with the spirit of freedom to create an essence. Their actions result in something, whether it is love or hatred, happiness or tragedy. In the end, they create their existence and achieve their identity. 4 Some of the modernist novelists in Europe and America who produced existential works were also interested in Eastern thoughts and religions, particularly in Zen Buddhism. Camus’s The Stranger, for example, presents Meursault as an antihero who finds no meaning in life. Using crime as a

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thematic device, Camus focuses on the psychological effect of Meursault’s crime on his vision of existence. After Meursault is sentenced to death, however, he realizes for the first time that his life has been enveloped in the elusive beauty of the world. “To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly,” he says, “made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still” (154). Despite his death sentence, he remains calm, and happy, for he has cleansed his mind of materialistic desire and fear. The prisoner, though alone and trapped by a society without human values, is freed from within. Meursault’s state of mind at the end of his life is akin to Zen enlightenment. Like Meursault, Daniels in Wright’s story is also liberated from desire, greed, and hatred. In fact, Daniels is free of self-centered thought. His state of mind at the end of his life recalls that of Wright himself who wrote numerous haiku shortly before his death, one of which reads, It is September, The month in which I was born; And I have no thoughts. (Haiku 127)

It is difficult to determine whether Wright had Zen philosophy in mind when he wrote “The Man Who Lived Underground.” But there is much evidence to indicate that at least toward the end of his life Wright was interested in Zen philosophy and aesthetics, especially in haiku, as noted in the introduction and discussed in chapter 1.7 The visions of human life Meursault and Daniels have at the end of their lives also resemble the outlook upon life Ellison’s invisible man gains underground. Early in the novel the invisible man, coming in contact with Trueblood, receives a revelation about African American life and identity. The invisible man learns that Trueblood, encountering the hardship of his life, “looks up and sees the stars and I starts singin’.” “I don’t mean to,” Trueblood says, “I didn’t think ‘bout it, just start singin’. I don’t know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I know is I ends up singin’ the blues” (Invisible Man 66). Like Wright’s haiku “It Is September,” Trueblood’s observation of human life is based not on thought but upon his spontaneous response to natural spirituality. In Zen-inspired art, nature is the mirror of humanity. Zen practice calls for self-effacement; one should not allow oneself to control action. “Drink tea when you are thirsty,” writes Yone Noguchi, “eat food in your hunger. Rise with dawn, and sleep when the sun sets. But your trouble will begin when you let desire act freely; you have to soar above all personal desire” (Noguchi, Story 242). This tenet of Zen, which

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teaches followers to emulate nature, was one of the Taoist influences on Zen. Lao Zse said, “Man takes his law from the earth; the Earth its law from Heaven; Heaven its law from Tao; but the law of Tao in its own spontaneity” (Noguchi, Spirit 43). The twin deeds naturalness and spontaneity are in Zen the means by which human beings can be connected with the absolute, toward the achievement of satori. From a Zen point of view, such a vision of life as Trueblood attains is devoid of much thought and emotion. Trueblood thus enlightens himself by looking up and seeing stars and expresses his satori by singing the blues. For him, natural spirituality and the blues are the means by which he attains his enlightenment. At the outset of the novel the invisible man is also aware of various means by which he may be able to achieve his enlightenment. “Perhaps,” he says, “I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible” (Invisible Man 8). To make his invisibility visible, Ellison’s protagonist literally and figuratively uses the electricity stolen from Monopolated Light & Power. “And I love light,” he says. “Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms any reality, gives birth to my form.” The invisible man’s form, then, is analogous to the state of nothingness in Zen. The hole in his Harlem underground has nothing in it and is dark, but now it is lit up like Broadway and the Empire State Building, New Yorks’s two brightest spots, which, he satirically remarks, “are among the darkest of our whole civilization—pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I’ve heard).” Ellison is treating this hole as a trope, for the invisible man says, “the point is now that I found a home—or a hole in the ground, as you will. Now don’t jump to the conclusion that because I call my home a ‘hole’ it is damp and cold like a grave; there are cold holes and warm holes. Mine is a warm hole.” (6). Trueblood is also conscious of this state of mind when he sings the blues: “I sings me some blues that night ain’t never been sang before, and while I’m singin’ them blues I makes up my mind that I ain’t nobody but myself and ain’t nothin’ I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen” (66, emphasis added). Not only is Trueblood’s state of mind devoid of desire, egotism, and untruth, it is also capable of destroying any false social or political convention, tradition, and belief. Like Trueblood, a Zen Buddhist must purge his or her mind and heart of any materialistic thoughts and feelings and appreciate the wonder of the world here and now. As does Trueblood, the invisible man gradually realizes that he has followed false conventions and beliefs. When the invisible man is handed over yams and called “one of these old-fashioned yam eaters,” he nonchalantly responds, “They’re my birthmark. . . . I yam what I am” (266). But at the same time it occurs to him that “what and how much had I lost by trying

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to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?. . . . I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seen simple” (266–67). Once he has settled down in his Harlem underground, however, he redeems himself. He finally realizes that, unlike Robert Frost as portrayed in his poem “The Road Not Taken,” the invisible man has been a conformist all his life. “So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others,” he declared, “I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. Thus I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired” (573). While the invisible man’s rebellion against convention leads to his embracement of Emersonian self-reliance and individualism, his resolution at the end of the novel suggests that he is not entirely satisfied with his view of himself. The difference in the concept of individualism between Emersonian transcendentalism and Zen philosophy lies in one’s view of self. Emerson defines enlightenment as the self’s consciousness of the oversoul, God, while Zen calls it the self’s achievement of relating to the spirit of nature, a state of nothingness, where neither the ego of an individual nor the over-soul of God exists. In contrast to Emerson, Zen, as suggested in the introduction, is strikingly similar to Lacan.8 In particular, the primacy of natural spirituality over human subjectivity that Zen stresses has a closer resemblance to Lacan’s critique of subjectivity, which posits the human subject’s inability to attain the real of natural experience. In The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Lacan as a Zen master challenges his students to undermine their subjectivity. For Lacan, because the emergence of the unconscious constitutes reaching “the real Other,” the conscious self—subjectivity—that is corrupted by male-oriented language and society must be undermined.9 For Emerson, on the other hand, the conscious self identifies its individuality with God, the over-soul; but this subjectivity is still emphasized in terms of the self. Ellison’s concept of individualism, represented by the invisible man, seems more closely allied with the concept of human subjectivity in Zen and Lacan than it is in Emerson. In fact, Invisible Man has few references in which the word of God or the over-soul is heeded. Earlier in the novel, the invisible man describes Dr. Bledsoe: “He stood before us relaxed, his white collar gleaming like a band between his black face and his dark garments, dividing his head from his body; his short arms crossed before his barrel, like a black little Buddha’s” (118). The invisible man, seeking an interview with Mr. Emerson, sees in his office, which looks like a museum, “an ugly ebony African god that seemed to sneer (presented to the school by some traveling millionaire)” (181). It looks as though, while Emerson wishes to rely on the self as much as on God, Ellison and Lacan refuse to

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rely on Him. Zen’s doctrine of self calls for the follower to annihilate self in reaching the state of nothingness so as to liberate the self from the habitual way of life. In Zen, one must destroy, just as must the invisible man and Lacan, not only the self contaminated by society, but also God, Buddha, Christ, any prophet, or any idol because it is only the true self, the self without the ego, that can deliver enlightenment. It is this state of mind, a state of nothingness, that Ellison’s protagonist is trying to achieve. At the end of the novel he calls the Zen-like state of mind “the mind ”: “So I took to the cellar; I hibernated. I got away from it all. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t be still even in hibernation. Because, damn it, there’s the mind, the mind ” (573). Later in the epilogue Ellison again intensifies his fascination with this state of mind (580). The invisible man’s definition of “the mind ” is neither his mind in the past nor the Emersonian conception of self. It is remindful of the Zen conception of the “here and now,” as well as of Lacan’s notion of the real. “It [the mind] wouldn’t let me rest,” the invisible man says. “Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough. Books were not enough. My belated appreciation of the crude joke that had kept me running, was not enough” (573). Dismissing from his mind his past endeavors, he wonders, “But what do I really want, I’ve asked myself. Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart or the power of a Jack, nor simply the freedom not to run. No, but the next step I couldn’t make, so I’ve remained in the hole” (575). What the invisible man means by “the next step” is the real step, which is neither imaginary nor guided by anyone. In Zen Buddhism, life is endowed with spontaneity and natural spirituality. “Life is to be lived,” he says, “not controlled” (577). In the tradition of Zen instruction the attainment of satori is as practical as is actual human life. When the young Bassui, who later became a celebrated Zen priest in Japan in the fourteenth century, asked his master, “What’s the highway to self elevation?” The master replied, “It’s never stop.” Failing to understand, Bassui persisted, “Is there some higher place to go on to?” The master finally answered, “It’s just underneath your standpoint” (Ando 164).10 At the end of the novel the invisible man, without a Zen master, meditates underground, awaiting the answer to his own question. Later in the epilogue, Ellison intensifies the invisible man’s preoccupation with seeking this answer: In going underground, I whipped it all except the mind, the mind. And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals. Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge. (580–81)

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This vision of life offers “infinite possibilities,” one of which he says he has now taken. “What a phrase—still it’s a good phrase,” he says, “and a good view of life, and a man shouldn’t accept any other; that much I’ve learned underground” (576). While his view of life looks like Melville’s symbolization of the whiteness of the whale, in which the universe appears indefinite, void, and invisible,11 his outlook upon his own life also has an affinity with the principle of the “here and now” in Zen philosophy. Notes 1. In his essay “Remembering Richard Wright,” included in Going to the Territory, Ellison expresses his indebtedness to the encouragement and advice Wright offered the young Ellison. Ellison, however, is somewhat critical of Native Son: “I feel that Native Son was one of the major literary events in the history of American literature. And I can say this even though at this point I have certain reservations concerning its view of reality” (Going 210–11). But, among Wright’s works, Ellison was most impressed by 12 Million Black Voices, which he thought is Wright’s “most lyrical work.” While Ellison thought that this compelling work of literature “could move [Wright’s] white readers to tears,” he also realized that Wright forged “such hard, mechanical images and actions that no white reading them could afford the luxury of tears” (Going 211). 2. Wright similarly refers to the Irish tradition in 12 Million Black Voices: “We lose ourselves in violent forms of dances in our ballrooms. The faces of the white world, looking on in wonder and curiosity, declare: ‘Only the negro can play!’ But they are wrong. They misread us. We are able to play in this fashion because we have been excluded, left behind; we play in this manner because all excluded folk play. The English say of the Irish, just as America says of us, that only the Irish can play, that they laugh through their tears. But every powerful nation says this of the folk whom it oppresses in justification of that oppression” (128). 3. For a study of Malraux’s influence on Ellison, see Savery. 4. Conversations with Richard Wright also is witness to Ellison’s alliance with modern European literatures and traditions. In an interview for American Weekend, published in Paris on Jan. 24, 1959, Wright said, “Negro literature . . . is a good barometer of Negro reaction. As fields open up to Negroes, it will be reflected in Negro literature. There is a large group of Negro writers in Europe—Demby and Ellison in Rome, for instance. All of them are broadening their experiences in a European context” (Conversations 185). 5. Kun Jong Lee demonstrates that while Ellison appropriates Emerson’s condescending attitude toward the black race, he redirects this negative aspect of Emersonian self-reliance. Ellison, Lee argues, “both accepts and rejects Emersonianism” (342). 6. Robert Butler reads as a trope the vet in Invisible Man, whose words admonish the protagonist to “learn to look beneath the surface” (Invisible Man 153) and subvert the materialistic values of the Horatio Alger myth (“City as Psychological Frontier” 127).

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ralph ellison’s invisible man / 127 7. For recent discussions of Zen philosophy and aesthetics, see Hakutani, “Emerson” and “Ezra Pound.” 8. For a discussion of the relationship between Zen and Lacan, see Samuels. 9. Most modern works on Zen stress the importance of genderlessness in their discussions of Zen. See, for example, Kurebayashi 142–49. 10. The Zen master’s pronouncement “never stop” recalls Whitman’s last passage in “Song of Myself ”: “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another” (68), or the last lines in “Passage to India”: “O my brave soul! / O farther farther sail! / O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? / O farther, farther, farther sail!” (294). Whitman’s final statement in “Song of Myself ”—“If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles” (68)—echoes the Zen master’s: “It’s just underneath your standpoint.” 11. In the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby-Dick, Melville writes: “Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” (169).

Works Cited Ando, Shoei. Zen and American Transcendentalism. Tokyo: Hokusei, 1970. Butler, Robert. “The City as Psychological Frontier in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Charles Johnson’s Faith and the Good Thing.” The City in AfricanAmerican Literature. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1995. 123–37. Camus, Albert. The Stranger. 1942. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1946. Ellison, Ralph. Going to the Territory. New York: Random House, 1986. ———. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1995. ———. “The Negro and the Second World War.” Negro Quarterly (1943). Rpt. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Boston: Bedford, 1995. 233–40. ———. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman. New York: New American Library, 1965. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “Emerson, Whitman, and Zen Buddhism.” Midwest Quarterly 31 (Summer 1990): 433–48. ———. “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism.” Modern Philology 90 (Aug. 1992): 46–69. Kurebayashi, Kodo. Introduction to Dogen Zen. Tokyo: Taiho Rinkaku, 1984. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954. Trans. John Forrester. New York: Norton, 1988.

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128 / yoshinobu hakutani Lee, Kun Jong. “Ellison’s Invisible Man: Emersonianism Revised.” PMLA 107 (March 1992): 331–44. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. ———. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993. Noguchi, Yone. The Spirit of Japanese Poetry. New York: Dutton, 1914. ———. The Story of Yone Noguchi. London: Chatto and Windus, 1914. Samuels, Robert. “Emerson, Lacan, and Zen: Transcendental and Postmodern Conceptions of the Eastern Subject.” Postmodernity in East-West CrossCulturalism. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. London and Toronto: Associated UP, 2002. 157–67. Savery, Pancho. “ ‘Not Like an Arrow, but a Boomerang’: Ellison’s Existential Blues.” Approaches to Teaching Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ed. Susan Resneck Parr and Pancho Savery. New York: MLA, 1986. 65–74. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, E. Hudson Long, and Thomas Cooley. New York: Norton, 1977. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. 1982. New York: Pocket Books, 1985. Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Ed. James E. Miller, Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. 1977. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. ———. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. 1945. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. ———. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” Richard Wright Reader. Ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. 36–49. ———. Eight Men. Cleveland: World, 1961. ———. Haiku: This Other World. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade, 1998. Rpt. New York: Random House, 2000. ———. “The Man Who Lived Underground.” Eight Men. Cleveland: World, 1961. ———. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. ———. The Outsider. 1953. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. ———. 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking, 1941.

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Ch a p t e r Se v e n We st, Ea st, A f r ic a: R ic h a r d Wr ig h t ’s Nat i v e Son a n d Cl a s sic Mov i e Monst e r s Mera Moore

Introduction West meets East in racialized depictions of 1930s classic movie monsters.1 These horror films exhibit racial associations in part due to casting of actors with Eastern physical features. The era’s most well-known monster actors include Bela Lugosi (1882–1956) and Boris Karloff (1887–1969).2 An Eastern European immigrant from Hungary who spoke accented English, Lugosi portrayed the classic Dracula character in the 1927 Broadway show Dracula, the 1931 movie Dracula, and other works, becoming so identified with this role that he was “buried in full Dracula regalia” (Jones 90–91). In a 1936 serial competing with the Fu Manchu cycle, Lugosi was cast as a Eurasian mad scientist, Victor Poten, in 15 episodes of Shadow of a Chinatown (Wong 59). He also played Igor in Son of Frankenstein (1939), the werewolf who bites Lon Chaney’s character in The Wolf Man (1941), and Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). Boris Karloff, from a British family having ancestors in both Britain and India, parlayed his Anglo-Indian looks into a series of exotic and horror roles. Karloff achieved fame with the film Frankenstein in 1931, reprising that role in 1935 with Bride of Frankenstein and in 1939 with Son of Frankenstein, among others. In 1932, he played Imhotep in The Mummy. In the Fu Manchu series, whereas every other actor to portray the title role was a white performer in yellowface, Karloff was the only actor of Asian ancestry cast as that character, in 1932 for The Mask of Fu Manchu (Wong 58). Karloff enjoyed a long and celebrated career performing in horror films.

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Beginning in 1911, an Irish novelist born in Britain, Sax Rohmer (Arthur Henry Ward, 1883–1959) created the Fu Manchu character through thirteen novels and a number of short stories. An avid Egyptologist by hobby, he spent time in Limehouse, London’s Chinatown (Wong 57; Ash and Rohmer 75). Wong states that Rohmer was “preoccupied with the more seamy aspects of Chinatown, both real and imagined” (57). In 1923, a British film company produced The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu and, in 1924, thirty 15-minute serials, The Further Mysteries of Dr. Fu. Various American studios extended the series: The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu in 1929, The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1930, Daughter of the Dragon in 1931, The Mask of Fu Manchu in 1932, and the serial The Drums of Fu Manchu in 1940 (compiled into a single film in 1942). Darrell Y. Hamamoto cites U.S.-China relations as the reason for the eight-year gap between MGM’s The Mask of Fu Manchu in 1932 and Republic Studios’ The Adventures of Fu Manchu in 1940. According to Rohmer’s biographers, Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, the MGM film drew protests from the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC (214). Notes Hamamoto, “Because China was needed as an East Asian ally against Japanese military expansionism, the official protest was taken seriously enough to stymie the production of subsequent Fu Manchu films” (112). Asian villains nevertheless continued to appear on screen, including Ming the Merciless in the 13-episode Flash Gordon serial (1936) starring white actor Charles Middleton as Ming (Wong 59). From the first, Hollywood films relegated African American actors to servant and laborer roles,3 but two Asian American actors achieved star status in early U.S. cinema, although their roles too were nearly always confined to certain types. Renee E. Tajima explores cinematic stereotypes of Asian women, such as the helpless Lotus Blossom and the monstrous Dragon Lady. Cynthia W. Liu examines limitations placed on the career of Hollywood actor Anna May Wong (1905–1961), who became a star through films such as The Thief of Baghdad (1924). Wong and her male counterpart, the only other Asian star in Hollywood during the silent and early sound eras, Sessue Hayakawa (1889–1973, who famously co-starred in Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957), faced similar problems when casting decisions were made. Both actors appeared in the 1931 Fu Manchu film Daughter of the Dragon (Hamamoto 250–53; Liu 28–29). Wong and Hayakawa worked regularly. Wong sometimes traveled to England to escape U.S. casting restrictions. The prolific Hayakawa, who acted for the studios while also making films with his own company, became a millionaire. However, in 1930, the studios agreed to abide by a production code based on anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited nonwhites from having physical contact with whites on screen. Accordingly,

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MGM refused to cast Wong in the film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (1937), since the role of O-Lan required a screen kiss. The other cast members would be whites performing in yellowface. Likewise, after 1930, Hayakawa, who had sometimes played romantic roles, saw his acting career further circumscribed. Richard Wright (1908–1960)4 had a great enthusiasm for films. Ross Pudaloff has written extensively on Wright’s interest in films. In 1946, Wright gave an interview to French journalist Lucienne Escoube, deploring the censorship in Hollywood. Wright discusses state censorship boards that “prohibit a film in which the sense or the tendency doesn’t suit them and which seems to them likely to stimulate changes of opinion, to cause trouble” (112).5 Works by and about blacks and other minorities are particularly affected by such censorship, asserts Wright. He states that Hollywood had produced only two major films focusing on black characters, Hallelujah! and The Green Pastures, emphasizing that even they “do not depict the life of blacks in the large cities” (112–13). In a 1949 interview with Argentine journalist Ramuncho Gomez, Wright explains why he is making the film version of Native Son in Argentina, remarking that he had previously “sold the rights” to a Hollywood company, “but I withdrew the script because they wanted to turn Bigger Thomas, a black boy marked by fatalistic destiny, into a white character” (135).6 1. Native Son Wright’s novel Native Son grapples with the milieu of monstrosity arising from U.S. horror cinema that depicts those of African, Asian, and Near Eastern heritage as bestial, barbaric, and uncivilized. Through allusions to the figures of Frankenstein, Dracula, and most of all King Kong, Native Son deploys cinematic monster references in a tale about a young black man trapped in, and by, a racially restrictive culture that wishes him dead.7 Raised in a Chicago slum, Bigger gets a job as a chauffeur for a white family. Bad luck places him in the bedroom of the family’s college-age daughter, Mary, whom he accidentally smothers to death. In trying to hide the incident and escape, he enlists the aid of his girlfriend Bessie; fearful she will turn him in, he then murders her. White officials chase, catch, try, and convict him, sentencing him to die, yet Bigger remains unremorseful. Michel Fabre, in a renowned 1971 article, emphasizes Native Son’s gothic imagery. He observes the novel’s “Poe-esque metaphors and scenes,” pointing out the language employed by Bigger’s defense attorney, Boris Max: “The corpse is not dead! It still lives! It has made itself a home in the wild forest of our great cities, amid the rank and choking vegetation of slums! It has forgotten our language! In order to live it has sharpened its

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claws” ([1940] 361–62; qtd. in Fabre 19, n. 6). The word “corpse” recalls the un-dead figures of Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. Max’s comments connect Bigger to these two classic monsters: “the corpse returns and raids out homes! We find our daughters murdered and burnt!” ([1940] 361–62). Like Bigger, the cinematic monsters symbolize whites’ fear of miscegenation, especially rape of white women by non-white men. Further, Max’s remarks summon up the King Kong monster: “By night it creeps from its lair and steals towards the settlements of civilization!” ([1940] 361–62). Max configures Bigger, like Kong, as a wild animal, saying, “at the sight of a kind face it does not lie down and kick up its heels playfully to be tickled and stroked. No; it leaps to kill!” ([1940] 362). Teresa Goddu’s work in gothic American culture and literature explores the gothic in slave narratives with the innovative term “haunting back”; Elizabeth Young applies Goddu’s conception of a “black gothic” to works by Frederick Douglass, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and Dick Gregory. James Smethurst connects Native Son to American horror films of the 1930s. He points out that, in 1938, while Wright drafted his novel, the 1931 versions of Frankenstein and Dracula reappeared together. Citing David J. Skal, Smethurst points out that a theater in Brooklyn, where Wright lived while at work on the book, screened the double-bill of Frankenstein and Dracula (39, n. 7). Smethurst emphasizes that, although 1930s horror films certainly influenced Native Son, particularly the first two sections, gothic romance was an even more significant source material for Wright because, whereas gothic horror foregrounds the supernatural, gothic romance often offers a “rational” explanation; says Smethurst, “in Wright’s novel the supernatural is rigorously exposed and rejected even as the language of the supernatural is employed” (31; 39, n. 7). Native Son is much more than gothic melodrama. Wright aimed for the novel to be less sentimental than his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children. With Native Son, he hoped, “No one would weep over it . . . they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” ([1940] xxvii). The novel’s monster allusions heighten readers’ awareness of Bigger’s circumstances, actions, and reactions.8 2. Frankenstein In 1931 and 1935, James Whale directed two works that are today classics of cinematic horror, Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. In Whale’s films, asserts Young, “the monster embodies a paradox, the sympathetic lynch-mob target who is also, possibly, a demonic rapist. Because the monster’s status

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as innocent victim is transformed if he seems to pose a sexual threat to white women, the force of this second persona—the black rapist—is so explosive that it overrides the first” (183–84). Young advances her theory of the “black Frankenstein” that various literary and cinematic incarnations of the monster invoke whites’ stereotypes about black men as dangerous monsters. Smethurst connects Frankenstein’s monster in Whale’s films to Bigger in Wright’s novel: “The thousands of police officers with flashlights and searchlights who pursue Bigger through an urban gothic landscape of abandoned tenements on the South Side at the end of the second section of Native Son closely resemble the villagers with torches who chase Frankenstein’s monster through an expressionist landscape” (31). Furthermore, notes Smethurst, in Frankenstein, the first Whale film, the scientist battles the monster on a windmill; in Native Son, Bigger wrestles with a police officer on a rooftop, knocking him unconscious. In Frankenstein, a villager looks up “and, seeing the monster with Frankenstein on the windmill, shouts, ‘There he is, the murderer’ ” (31). Just as the mob chasing Frankenstein’s monster calls for the monster’s destruction, likewise whites in Native Son demand Bigger’s lynching. Allusions to Whale’s sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, appear in Native Son through the characters of Mary and Bessie. The monster accosts Frankenstein’s fiancé Elizabeth in her bedroom on her wedding night. Young underscores the imagery of interracial rape as Elizabeth is discovered crying helplessly on the bed (183). The novel’s moments in Mary’s bedroom, with the sexualized encounter between her and Bigger, followed by his killing of her, recalls the bedroom scene in Bride of Frankenstein. Even more overtly, Bessie parallels the monster’s bride. As Smethurst observes, Bessie is essentially “passive” (33); although her role is much larger than the bride’s, the bride also merely reacts rather than initiating action. Moreover, Bigger and the monster both kill their partners, Bigger after concluding that he cannot trust Bessie not to inform on him, and the monster upon realizing that his bride has rejected him. After Bigger rapes her, Bessie utters the word “horror” ([1940] 219), accentuating the novel’s gothic theme. In the essay “The Ethics of Jim Crow” opening Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright reports his realization at a young age of the requirement to “live as a Negro” after his mother beats him for fighting with a group of white boys (6). Imparting “Jim Crow wisdom,” to keep them alive, she demands that her children behave subserviently around whites (6). The awakening of Frankenstein’s monster is into confinement by clamps and chains. In that moment, Victor Frankenstein transforms from mad scientist to father—and to slave owner. Victor treats his monster as a child in need of containment. Whereas Bigger’s mother is herself trapped in poverty and

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Jim Crow restrictions, raising her family in a rat-infested Chicago tenement, Victor is a titled European landowner with ample funds; by the time Victor creates his creature, circa 1818, Britain has passed the 1807 antislavery law, but not until 1833 was slavery abolished in the British colonies. Victor’s monster represents non-whites colonized by the British, particularly black slaves of the West Indies. Although Bigger is not enslaved, his life under white domination is intolerably oppressed. Although certainly rooted in the crucial problem of discrimination against blacks prevalent while Wright was working on his book, the allusions to classic movie monsters in Native Son extend beyond racism. Examining Frankenstein imagery in numerous works of literature and mass media, Young stresses that what she calls the “black/white axis of representation within U.S. culture” is not the only important topic of study for an interpretation of this monster figure, pointing, for example, to Orientalism. She mentions the short story “Moxon’s Master” (1909) by Ambrose Bierce, in which the Frankenstein figure is “a fez-wearing chess player with the torso of a gorilla—[which] connotes the putative savagery of both black men and the feminized East” (15). The fez associates Bierce’s monster with the Near East; the gorilla torso ties the monster to Africa. 3. Dracula The gothic period of British monster fiction began with an 1816 fragment of a vampire story by George Gordon (Lord Byron), the setting for which, a Turkish graveyard, suggests that vampires are Muslims and vice versa. Byron’s friend John Polidori expanded the piece into a novella, The Vampyre, which in turn became a source for Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. That book has led to many plays and films including the 1931 movie. When Bigger experiences his strongest emotions, Native Son introduces connections to Dracula. During Bigger’s trial, the judge moves jurors, prosecution, and defense to the scene of the crime: the Daltons’ home. Afterward, Bigger is brought outside, where a screaming white mob awaits. In a pivotal moment, witnessing a Ku Klux Klan cross burning on top of a nearby building, Bigger rejects Christianity. He has been skeptical of his mother’s Christian beliefs, but at a dispassionate distance. The black minister Reverend Hammond had previously visited him in his cell, insisting that Bigger accept and wear a chain with a cross. The boy takes the advice. Now, Bigger compares the cross around his neck to the burning cross: “He wanted to tear the cross from his throat and throw it away. . . . it was an evil and black charm which would surely bring him death” ([1993] 338; [1940] 313). Just as any cross is anathema to Dracula, so Bigger cannot endure its presence. Back in his cell, Bigger pulls off the chain

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and throws it to the floor. The jailers admonish him, “You’d better get your soul right,” and he replies, “I ain’t got no soul!” (314). When the black minister arrives, Bigger knocks him down. Left alone, Bigger retrieves the cross but, unable to bear holding it, tosses it away. The literary and cinematic Dracula monster exercises superhuman power, and white men seek to rescue white women from his non-white clutches; whereas the historical Romanian prince—called Vlad III, or Dracul, who ruled from 1456 to 1462—brutally killed Muslim Ottoman Turks, among others, in the name of Christianity. Hence the weapons used against him in the Hollywood versions of the Dracula story are Holy Water and the Crucifix, identifying vampires with the Devil and with non-Christians. Historically, in Europe, infidels included both Jews and Muslims with roots in the Near East and North Africa. David Stannard notes that, during the early Spanish Inquisition, Jews and Muslims could become Christians to escape torture and execution. By 1487, the converted fell under suspicion of performing witchcraft, many were burned at the stake (182–83). Stannard says, “In the fourteenth century Mediterranean . . . while Christian Europeans were buying shiploads of captured infidels, Muslims were doing the same thing—except that many of their purchased slaves were Christians” (207–08).9 Muslims, already known as fierce combatants for their Crusades in the Near East, aroused fear throughout Europe by enslaving Europeans. In 1934, in Chicago, Elijah Muhammad founded the second temple of the Nation of Islam, and Wright joined the Communist Party. Neither associating with the Muslims nor completely abandoning his Christian upbringing, Wright creates a character in Native Son who rejects the brand of African American Christianity that, conceived in slavery, underpinned Jim Crow. Analyzing the interweaving of Marxist and Christian imagery in Wright’s story collection Uncle Tom’s Children, Timothy P. Caron states, “Wright longed for a politically responsive church” (47). Bigger’s rebuff of the black preacher, according to Lale Demiturk, is not because the young man “is incapable of faith in God but because he was pushed outside of the Christian scheme of the universe” (89). In an interview with Peter Schmid in 1946, Wright asserts that African cultural traditions are incompatible with “Christian virtues of meekness and altruism”: “When he is struck, he does not turn the other cheek. When he can, he will strike back” (108). Wright rejects whites’ using Christianity to label blacks “as happy-go-lucky or lyrically sentimental,” asserting that blacks are intelligent and powerful (108). Both Dracula and Bigger represent conflicts with Christianity. In refusing the preacher’s overtures, Bigger expresses African American selfdetermination. Just as Dracula suffers physical revulsion when confronted

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with the Christian cross, so does Bigger; more significantly, both die unrepentant, refusing to beg for their lives. Reflecting upon the burning cross he sees while being transferred back to the jail in conjunction with the cross around his neck, Bigger undergoes a transformation: “The cross the preacher had told him about was bloody, not flaming; meek, not militant. It made him feel awe and wonder, not fear and panic. It had made him want to kneel and cry, but this cross made him want to curse and kill. Then he became conscious of the cross that the preacher had hung round his throat” ([1940] 313). The threatening white mob inspires hatred in Bigger, both for the mob and for his own and other blacks’ acceptance of racial bigotry and discrimination. Soon thereafter, in his cell, he orders the preacher to leave, shouting, “Take your Jesus and go!”—his response to the minister’s dropping the cross back into his cell is to fling it through the bars against a wall ([1940] 314–15). At the novel’s end, he further rejects the Christian ethos of forgiveness, “I ain’t trying to forgive nobody and I ain’t asking nobody to forgive me. I ain’t going to cry. They wouldn’t let me live and I killed” ([1940] 391). Bigger’s statements “But what I killed for, I am” and “What I killed for must’ve been good” ([1940] 391–92) link him to the Dracula monster. 4. King Kong The monster King Kong, in the 1933 movie King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, most directly corresponds to Bigger in Native Son. During Bigger’s capture, a white mob screams, “Kill that black ape!” ([1940] 253). After an all-white jury finds him guilty, someone in the courtroom yells, “Burn that black ape!” ([1940] 309). Fatimah Tobing Rony emphasizes the film’s interracial theme in its portrayal of King Kong and the character played by white heroine Ann Darrow: “The indigenous person who does not remain in his or her proper space is something abhorrent, and it is the implicitly monstrous character of this hybridity which King Kong takes literally” (155). Tying the film to anthropological warnings at that time about the dangers of white adventurers/scientists mixing with women of color, Rony connects King Kong to white Americans’ anxieties about black migration Northward after the Civil War. Young, citing D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation, comments, “the gorilla who dangles the blonde in his paw is at once an unreal creature of fantasy and the direct descendant of the black monsters of the Reconstruction South” (183). Novels such as H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and The Land That Time Forgot (1918) initiated a literary

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and then filmic tradition of white men in so-called primitive locales. Rony explains nineteenth-century racial color codes—white, red, black, and yellow—that formed the basis of anthropology and ethnography, later influencing cinematic monster images (10). Early ethnographic films, claims Rony, strip subjects of their history, omitting names and personal data, while racializing subjects’ bodies as examples of savage, primitive, and Third World cultures (71). Via what she calls ethnographic ventriloquism, white filmmakers’ speak in place of indigenous peoples, in films such as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Flaherty’s Moana (1926), and F. W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931). Rony describes such works as “time machines into a faraway present which represented a simpler, ‘savage,’ past” (133). Cooper and Schoedsack’s films Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), which epitomized the vogue for ethnographic romanticism, prefigure King Kong. Rony notes that, because audiences soon found racial movies predictable, films used increasingly spectacular and often contrived scenes. She points out that filmmakers found the excitement they sought in storylines contrasting the primitive with the modern. Rural locales in Africa and Asia make up the settings for such fiction films as W. S. Van Dyke’s Trader Horn (1929) and Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (1932), Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game (1932), and Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1933). Cooper and Schoedsack’s King Kong is set in New York City but takes the viewer also to the imaginary Skull Island, purportedly situated in the Indian Ocean.10 Rony cites the image of King Kong clinging to the Empire State Building under attack by fighter planes as an example of the clash between the primitive and the modern (155). Wright repeats the technology-versus-primitive trope from Bigger’s perspective. An industrial water hose slams him flat onto a roof; then the justice system, backed by the firepower of the National Guard, takes him into custody, convicts him, and sentences him to death. Arguing for his execution, the prosecutor states, “Every decent white man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the wooly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death” ([1940] 373). This remark is reminiscent of prehistoric creatures in the jungle on Skull Island. Emphasizing dinosaurs as museum spectacles and cinematic monsters, Rony quotes from Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, in which he describes dinosaur monsters as “vivid, combat-oriented metaphors” (Carroll 219–20; qtd. in Rony 182). Kong himself is killed by the airplanes’ gunfire, symbols of war technology. Says Rony, “For the myth of modernity to be maintained, order must reign again” (187). The final line

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of Native Son, “He heard the ring of steel against steel as a far door clanged shut” ([1940] 392), emphasizes the forces of modern technology deployed against Bigger, who is configured as a savage. Affiliated with the monstrosity of Kong are the residents of the imaginary Malayo-Polynesian Skull Island. Rony emphasizes that the island “is constructed as a feminized space with a wall which must be penetrated,” noting that the islanders are presented as “dark-skinned, fierce, lustful, and yet childlike, afraid of guns” (176). Because Skull Island is “situated off the coast of Sumatra,” she notes, “the use of African American extras to play the role of Indonesian islanders underlines how in the popular as well as scientific imagination dark skin was fully synonymous with Savagery” (177). Cast as the islanders’ chief is Noble Johnson (1881–1978). Rony points out that Johnson was “a light-skinned African American actor and a pioneer producer of black film . . . [who had] played Ivan, the Cossack servant in The Most Dangerous Game” (177). Similarly, the Native American Yaqui actor Steve Clemente (1885–1950), who portrays the Medicine Man in King Kong, has also played “an evil Mongolian servant” in The Most Dangerous Game (177). Rony observes that the display of Kong on a Vaudeville stage in New York City echoes how non-Western people alive and dead were exhibited in zoos, theaters, fairs, films, and museums. The film’s premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, notes Rony, “shared the bill with an act with a prophesying Chinese fortune-teller: Gin Chow, Chinese philosopher” (257, n. 49; “Gin”). The Chinese American actor Victor Wong (1906–1972) portrays a cook named Charlie in King Kong and Son of Kong (1933). In the first film, sitting and peeling potatoes, not making eye contact with Ann Darrow, “Charlie is feminized by his position as a cook and by his body language” (175). The ship’s captain Jack Driscoll enters, looking at Ann directly in the eye and lecturing her. When Ann jokingly tries to make Jack jealous, by saying “Iggy’s nice to me. Iggy likes me better than anyone else on board,” the camera reveals that Iggy is a monkey, tied by a leash beside Charlie. Rony describes a hierarchy in this screen image: Jack at the top, standing; Ann, below him, also standing; Charlie below them, sitting; and Iggy, bouncing on the ground (175; 257, n. 48). To Rony, Iggy is “a kind of miniature precursor to Kong” (175). Extending Rony’s interpretation of this tableau, we can divide the figures into two pairs: up high Jack and Ann, and down low Charlie and Iggy. This visual union of Charlie and Iggy associates Charlie with Kong. Thus, when Iggy is revealed to be the suitor to whom Ann refers, Charlie’s potential as a romantic rival to Jack is negated. By emphasizing Charlie’s affiliation with Kong, the film classifies Asians as monstrous aberrations.

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5. Trader Horn When first published in 1940, Wright’s Native Son contained several redacted and revised sections. At the insistence of the Book of the Month Club in conjunction with Harper and Row, Wright famously changed parts of the book. The restored, original novel came out in 1993. The dialectic between the two versions can provide a window into Wright’s vision of a nation in which legalized segregation was a crucial tool for whites to divide themselves physically and socially from blacks and other minorities. During the 1920s and 1930s, prejudice against blacks extended pervasively into every aspect of American life. A well-known modification in Native Son is in the part where Bigger and his friend Jack go to the movies. Both the 1940 and 1993 versions have Jack’s line, “Trader Horn’s running again at the Regal. They’re bringing a lot of old pictures back” ([1940] 31; [1993] 29). Both conclude with Bigger’s stream-of-consciousness while viewing Trader Horn. In between, across four pages, is the changed portion. In the censored 1940 version, Jack and Bigger watch a movie, an invention of Wright’s called The Gay Woman. It depicts intrigue among wealthy whites in which a young woman married to an older man has an affair with a younger man. After a Communist, a “wild man,” tries to explode a bomb in a nightclub ([1940] 34–35), the woman returns to her husband. The original 1993 version shows Bigger and Jack viewing a newsreel about socialite Mary, her Communist boyfriend Jan, and their friends frolicking on a beach in Florida. Excited by the sight of white women in bathing suits, they masturbate and then change their seats to escape the wet floor. Original 1993 Version He saw images of smiling, dark-haired white girls lolling on the gleaming sands of a beach. The background was a stretch of sparkling water. Palm trees stood near and far. The voice of the commentator ran with the movement of the film: Here are the daughters of the rich taking sunbaths in the sands of Florida! This little collection of debutantes represents over four billion dollars of America’s wealth and over fifty of America’s leading families. . . . “Some babies,” Jack said. “Yeah, man!” “I’d like to be there.” “You can,” Bigger said. “But you’d be hanging from a tree like a bunch of bananas. . . . ” They laughed softly and easily, listening to the commentator’s voice. ([1993] 31–32)

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Revised 1940 Version Bigger saw a night club floor thronged with whirling couples and heard a swing band playing music. The rich young woman was dancing and laughing with her lover. “I’d like to be invited to a place like that just to find out what it feels like,” Bigger mused. “Man, if them folks saw you they’d run,” Jack said. “They’d think a gorilla broke loose from the zoo and put on a tuxedo.” They bent over low in their seats and giggled without restraint. ([1940] 33–34)

It is important to recognize these changes in relation to the two characters’ desire to participate in the privileged activities that they see on the screen. The original’s line “You can . . . But you’d be hanging from a tree like a bunch of bananas” is much more radical than the revised version’s “Man, if them folks saw you they’d run . . . They’d think a gorilla broke loose from the zoo and put on a tuxedo.” Of the original, comments Jonathan Elmer, “The only way they could ever be in the scene is as a stain on the picture, as lynched and mutilated bodies, strange fruit” (137). The changed version deploys sideshow imagery, whereas the original underscores the everpresent threat of Jim Crow lynching. In the original, Jack wants to be on the newsreel’s beach to be near the white women, whom he perceives as sexually desirable, and Bigger makes the disparaging joke. In the revision, Bigger wants to be in the film’s night club to experience its ambiance, but not to dance with the white women. Thus, the modified version deemphasizes any attraction of black men toward white women. In addition, Jack offers the joking remark. This reversal of roles, together with the change in their laughter from confident assurance to childish giggling, makes Bigger a less threatening figure in the revision. Both the original and revised jokes express an association with the cinematic King Kong figure—“bunch of bananas” ([1993] 32) and “a gorilla broke loose” ([1940] 33). When Bigger wonders whether he is “going to work for rich white people like you saw in the movies,” readers get different impressions from the two versions. In the original, Bigger refers to the newsreel. In the revision, he means the melodramatic characters in The Gay Woman ([1993] 35; [1940] 33). Both versions then introduce the film Trader Horn: If he were, then he’d see a lot of things from the inside; he’d get the dope, the low-down. He looked at Trader Horn unfold and saw pictures of naked black men and women whirling in wild dances and heard drums beating and then gradually the African scene changed and was replaced by images in his own mind of white men and women dressed

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richard wright’s native son / 141 in black and white clothes, laughing, talking, drinking and dancing. ([1993] 33; [1940] 35–36)

Whereas the revision emphasizes the white woman and her lover in the night club, the original contains no prior reference to night clubs, suggesting that this image arises from Bigger’s own knowledge of the existence of whites-only night clubs, giving his character a greater intellectual depth than does the revision. Furthermore, when Bigger replaces his memory of the Africanesque scenes of Trader Horn with his awareness of the night clubs, Bigger assumes the role of an adventurer exploring what for him is exotic, the white world. Conclusion: Moving Forward Wright’s Introduction to Native Son emphasizes that, as he contemplated Bigger, he sought to present a character that “would loom as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within him the prophecy of our future” ([1940] xx). A crucial connection between Native Son and gothic horror concerns the function of scientific symbolism. Fabre’s seminal 1971 essay “Black Cat and White Cat: Richard Wright’s Debt to Edgar Allan Poe” points out that, as a child, Wright undertook to selfeducate despite his grandmother’s opposition to reading. Fabre emphasizes that Wright’s autobiographical work Black Boy specifies Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (re-titled as “The Cask of Amontillado”) as a noteworthy influence. Wright vividly recalls this story about a renowned scientist who had rigged up a mystery room made of metal in the basement of his palatial home. Prompted by some obscure motive, he would lure his victims into his room and then throw an electric switch. Slowly, with heart-racking agony, the air would be sucked from the metal room and his victims would die, turning red, blue, then black. (Wright [1940] 34; qtd. in Fabre 17)

Correspondingly, execution by the electric chair awaits Bigger at the end of Native Son. Wright states that he approached Native Son from a scientific perspective. Yoshinobu Hakutani dubs Wright’s first autobiographical book, Black Boy, “a convincing sociological study,” theorizing that Wright consciously intends “to use the young self as a mask” in representing not simply his own experiences but also those of a generation of young Southern black men (“Creation” 85). In Native Son’s Introduction, Wright states, Just as one sees when one walks into a medical research laboratory jars of alcohol containing abnormally large or distorted portions of the human

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142 / mera moore body, just so did I see and feel that the conditions of life under which Negroes are forced to live in America contain the embryonic emotional prefigurations of how a large part of the body politic would react under stress. . . . Why should I not, like a scientist in a laboratory, use my imagination and invent test-tube situations, place Bigger in them, and, following the guidance of my own hopes and fears, what I had learned and remembered, work out in fictional form an emotional statement and resolution of this problem? ([1940] xxi)

Hakutani asserts that Native Son employs a technique similar to that applied in Black Boy, adding that, according to Wright’s Introduction to Native Son, Bigger “is a conscious composite portrait of numerous individual blacks he has known” (85). “A spokesman for the voiceless black youths of the South,” says Hakutani about Black Boy, Wright “must be objective and scientific in his observations” (85). Wright’s technical, medical description of his writing process for Black Boy provides insights into the novel as the story of a monster, Bigger, created by a racist, mad-scientist culture that will never control him. References to technology abound in the book. While hanging out, Bigger and his friend Gus are surrounded by advanced technology far out of their reach. Streetcars could take them somewhere, but they barely have enough cash to see a movie. Driving by in an expensive automobile arouses their interest. They watch an airplane sky-write the words “USE SPEED GASOLINE” ([1940] 20). Relieving the misery of their deprivation, they joke around, pretending to be rich whites speaking on imaginary telephones about stock transactions. Later, chauffeuring Mary for the first time, Bigger is elated: “he had a keen sense of power when driving; the feel of a car added something to him. He loved to press his foot against a pedal and sail along, watching others stand still, seeing the asphalt road unwind under him” ([1940] 63). In the courtroom, the jury examines items of physical evidence obtained through forensic science: “All of the jurors examined the purse, the blood-stained knife, the blackened hatchet blade, the Communist pamphlets, the rum bottle, the trunk, and the signed confessions” ([1940] 305). Likewise, wheeled into the courtroom and presented as scientific evidence is “the raped and mutilated body of one Bessie Mears,” along with “testimony of police officers and doctors relating to the cause and manner of her death” ([1940] 306). The 1930s films Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, along with Island of Lost Souls, feature mad scientists.11 So does Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1896 novella, the 1931 film adaptation of which starred Fredric March, who won an academy award for his portrayal of the dual characters. As a “double” figure, says Heidi Strengell in her article “ ‘The Monster Never Dies,’ ” the werewolf archetype is an

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antecedent to Mr. Hyde. Strengell references Stephen King’s collection of nonfiction essays about gothic horror in the Frankenstein, Dracula, and Jekyll/Hyde tales called Danse Macabre.12 By 1940, several Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde films had been made, and the plot was well known. Native Son underscores contagion themes. When Mary and Jan want Bigger to come into the restaurant with them, at first he refuses but then agrees angrily. Mary becomes emotional, nearly crying, which makes him even more furious: “He stepped backward, as though she were contaminated with an invisible contagion” ([1940] 72). In his pre-sentencing summation, the district attorney compares Bigger’s crimes to “contagion” ([1940] 373). Despite his prior suggestion, when trying to obtain a confession, that the young man could get an evaluation in a mental hospital and perhaps obtain a recommendation of “not responsible” to avoid execution, the prosecutor now argues for the death penalty by referring to the “diseased mind” of “a bestial monstrosity” ([1940] 286, 373). Although The Wolf Man did not premiere until 1941, Native Son anticipates that film. Wright’s Introduction compares fascism in Nazi Germany to Jim Crow ([1940] xviii–xix). Racial contamination pervades The Wolf Man, which constructs Gypsies as the source of the main character’s transformation into a lycanthropic wild man monster. At this same time, in real life, Nazis were committing genocide against Roma and Sinti peoples, with 500,000 exterminated in the death camps.13 Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare notes that The Wolf Man’s screenwriter, Curt Siodmak, had fled Germany in 1933, spending several years elsewhere in Europe before coming to the United States. DeGiglio-Bellemare observes that the main character has had a pentagram tattooed on his chest to mark him as cursed, symbolic of the marking of prisoners in the concentration camps. The lead character’s paranoia is representative of the internalized self-hatred among those living under Nazi propaganda that constructed Jews, Roma/Sinti, and others as diseased and in need of extermination (1). Eugenics, a term coined by a cousin of Charles Darwin, Frances Galton, in 1883, was widely known by the 1930s. Used to justify sterilization in many nations including the United States, and employed in the United States to support anti-miscegenation and anti-immigration laws, eugenics declined in popularity after the Nazis used it to justify mass genocide. Using pseudo-scientific claims, proponents argued for the superiority of certain races and supported oppressive practices such as Jim Crow segregation. Bigger and his friends are well aware that they are not, in fact, inferior, that assertions by whites of blacks’ lack of intelligence is a cover story for racial discrimination. For instance, when Bigger expresses his wish to pilot a plane, Gus replies, “If you wasn’t black and if you had some money and if they’d let you go to that aviation school, you could fly a plane”

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([1940] 20). Bigger half-jokingly says that he would use the technology to get revenge on whites: “Cause if I took a plane up I’d take a couple of bombs along and drop ’em sure as hell” (20). Bigger—the offender and the offended—resembles both monsters and monster makers. Following her death, dismemberment, and incineration, his own monstrous creation, Mary’s ghost, haunts him for the remainder of the novel, as Fabre observes, in the figure of the white cat.14 His second monstrous creation, Bessie’s ghost, also pursues him, her corpse wheeled into the courtroom. In Native Son, the howling mob so familiar in classic horror cinema makes Bigger seem deserving of sympathy. Whites screaming “Burn that black ape!” and “Kill that black ape!” are the ones who appear monstrous. The novel inspires critical approaches to literature, cinema, and American culture. To paraphrase Shelley’s dedication to her book Frankenstein, Wright bids his hideous progeny to go forth and prosper.15 Notes 1. Scholars connect literary and cinematic monsters to racial imagery. Reel Bad Arabs by Jack Shaheen documents filmic associations of Egyptians “with the un-dead,” such as in The Mummy of 1932 and its remakes (24–25). In “Daywalkin’ Nightstalkin’ Bloodsuckas: Black Vampires in Contemporary Film,” Frances Gateward focuses on black vampires in films from the 1970s to 1990s. Anolik and Howard’s The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination includes “White Terror, Black Dreams: Gothic Constructions of Race in the Nineteenth Century” by Eugenia DeLamotte, “The Infamous Svengali: George Du Maurier’s Satanic Jew” by Ruth Bienstock Anolik, “Yellow Peril, Dark Hero: Fu Manchu and the ‘Gothic Bedevilment’ of Racist Intent” by Karen Kingsbury, and “Mixed Blood Couples: Monsters and Miscegenation in U.S. Horror Cinema” by Steven Jay Schneider. 2. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to address the many interpretations of images from classic horror cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. For more information on this topic, see the following: Classic Movie Monsters by Donald F. Glut; The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941 by Reynold Humphries; Universal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horror by Dan Jolley, Den Beauvais, Dan Vado, and Steve Moncuse; The Rough Guide to Horror Movies by Alan Jones; Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror by Mallory, Michael; Monsters: A Celebration of the Classics from Universal Studios by Roy Milano and Jennifer Osbourne; Songs of Love and Death by Michael Sevastakis; Of Gods and Monsters by John T. Soister; and Universal Horrors by Tom Weaver, John Brunas, and Michael Brunas. Rick Warland’s “OWI Meets the Monsters: Hollywood Horror Films and War Propaganda, 1942–1945” discusses B-horror movies during the war. 3. Exploring Hollywood’s casting of black actors is Donald Bogle’s influential 1973 book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. Bogle has also published

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richard wright’s native son / 145 Blacks in American Film and Television; An Illustrated Encyclopedia; Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television; and Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood. Other works include Ed Guerrero’s Framing Blackness, Mark Reid’s Redefining Black Film, and James Snead’s White Screens, Black Images. Following Bogle’s model, Renee Tajima, Charles Ramirez Berg, and others classify role types to which minority actors have been relegated. Ramirez Berg’s Latino Images in Film also analyzes Alien and Terminator science fiction films as exemplifying white Americans’ anxieties about Asian and Latino immigrants. Referencing Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, he discusses aliens as nightmare imagery resulting from stereotyping. He speculates, “the root cause of the cinematic distortion of the Hispanic goes far beyond concerns about loss of jobs or the drain on social services. . . . Something more fundamental is perceived to be at stake: national identity, the ideal of a unified, national ‘self ’ ” (164). Ramirez Berg exposes how stereotyping on a collective social basis produces xenophobia and isolationism. Regarding Latinos, “the current cinematic shape of that fear,” he asserts, “transforms the greaser bandit into a terminating cyborg, [and] the Hispanic harlot into a fertile, black, Alien mother, menacingly reproducing monsters down in her lair” (182). 4. There are a number of biographies about Wright’s life, along with an 88-minute biographical video with Facilitator Guide: Richard Wright—Black Boy (1994). Ann Rayson observes that the novel Native Son was an immediate hit, becoming a best-selling Book of the Month Club publication, with 215,000 copies sold in the first three weeks. A 1941 Broadway play version of Native Son appeared at the St. James Theatre, adapted by Richard Wright and Paul Green, produced by John Houseman, directed by Orson Welles, and starring Canada Lee. Two film versions were made of the novel. A 1951 film was made in Argentina starring Wright as Bigger, but at age 42 he was considerably older than the 20-year-old character, and the film, appreciated in Europe, did not get a positive reception in the United States. Oprah Winfrey produced the 1986 film that presented only part of Native Son and downplayed whites’ inhumane treatment of Bigger (whose mother’s character was played by Oprah). 5. The two special collections with Wright’s papers are The Richard Wright Collection at the University of Mississippi and the Richard Wright Papers at Yale University. The original manuscript of the play Native Son: The Biography of a Young American, Wright and Green’s 1941 adaptation, is held at the University of Pennsylvania. Wright published five novels: Native Son (1940), The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), The Long Dream (1958), and Lawd Today (1963). Published posthumously are a novella, Rite of Passage (1994), and an unfinished crime novel, A Father’s Law (2008). His two collections of short stories are Uncle Tom’s Children (1938, 1940) and Eight Men (1961). He was a prolific writer of nonfiction, with eight books: How “Bigger” Was Born; Notes of a Native Son (1940); 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941); Black Boy (1945); Black Power (1954); The Color Curtain (1956); Pagan Spain (1957); Letters to Joe C. (1968); and American Hunger (1975). There are four essay collections: The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch (1937); Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945); I Choose Exile (1951); and White Man, Listen! (1957).

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146 / mera moore In 1998, a posthumous poetry collection came out, Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. In 1993, Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre edited Conversations with Richard Wright. In 1991, Arnold Rampersad edited Wright’s complete works in two volumes. 6. James Baldwin famously criticized Native Son in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949). Others praised the book, such as Frantz Fanon in “The Fact of Blackness” (1952) and Irving Howe in “Black Boys and Native Sons” (1963). A 1993 unexpurgated version of the novel came out from Library of America, introduced by Arnold Rampersad; Rayson notes that the re-inserted lines about Bigger’s attraction to the white woman he later kills makes the character of Bigger even less deserving of the readers’ sympathy. Rayson mentions significant sources about Wright: “For primary materials, see Charles T. Davis and [Michel] Fabre, Richard Wright: A Primary Bibliography (1982); for secondary sources, see [Keneth] Kinnamon, A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933–1982.” Rayson cites the essay collection edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993). Other useful sources include Critical Essays on Richard Wright (1982) and Richard Wright and Racial Discourse (1996) by Yoshinobu Hakutani, Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays (1995) by Arnold Rampersad, and The Death-Bound- Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2005) by Abdul T. JanMohamed. 7. Noël Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart argues against classifying horror movies as supporting or opposing any particular sociopolitical status quo, yet he states that a single film or group of films can serve a dominant ideology (204–205). Works such as Vivian Sobchak’s Screening Space advance the theory that mid-twentieth-century American and British science-fiction films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still and Night of the Living Dead reflect cold war fears of communist takeover. Other sources are Tom Weaver’s Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes, Mark Jancovich’s Rational Fears and American Horror from 1951 to the Present, and Kevin Heffernan’s “Hypnosis in Media: The Hypnosis Horror Films of the 1950s.” Cyndy Hendershot’s works include her book I Was a Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism, and the Cold War Imagination and her articles “Domesticity and Horror in House of Usher and Village of the Damned,” “Monster at the Soda Shop: Teenagers and Fifties Horror Film,” and “The Cold War Horror Film: Taboo and Transgression in The Bad Seed, The Fly, and Psycho.” 8. Various schools of thought exist on the subject of why people appreciate horror in literature and cinema, including Freudian/Rankian, Darwinian, and Jungian, as well as interpretations centering on pleasure. Psychoanalytic interpretations include F. M. Michel Frann’s “Life and Death and Something in Between,” Michael E. Jones’ Monsters from the Id, and C. Urbano’s “Projections, Suspense, and Anxiety.” An author of much relevance here is Stephen Jay Schneider, with “Manifestations of the Literary Double in Modern Horror Cinema” and “Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film,” along with his edited collection Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare and, co-edited with Daniel Shaw, Dark Thoughts. Darryl Jones’ Horror: A Thematic History in

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9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Fiction and Film defines Darwinist interpretations. He notes, “Classic horror movies offered werewolves of both the Darwinist (external invasion) and Freudian (internal neurosis) types” (171). From the Jungian school are James F. Iaccino’s Psychological Reflections on Cinematic Terror and Randy Loren Rasmussen’s Children of the Night—and Will Rockett’s Devouring Whirlwind, which incorporates Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Beginning with Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, scholars have investigated pleasure as a spectatorial reaction to horror cinema. These include Gaut Berys’ “The Enjoyment Theory of Horror: A Response to Carroll,” Tania Modleski’s “The Terror of Pleasure,” Yvonne Leffler’s Horror as Pleasure, and Matt Hills’ The Pleasures of Horror. Stannard explores roots of “wild man” mythologies, extending this construct to explain justifications for enslavement and mass murders of Muslims and Jews in Europe from 1096 through the Inquisition in the fifteenth century. Most Europeans associated non-whites and non-Christians with wildness and barbarity, labeling them infidels (169–83). The wild man notion justified not only slavery but also Europeans’ suppression of indios in the Americas and of other peoples throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—a notion adapted by white Americans to support constructs such as manifest destiny and Jim Crow laws. In her short film of 1994 titled On Cannibalism, Rony, who grew up in an Indonesian family that had immigrated to the United States, explains that one day during her childhood she was watching King Kong on television, when she realized that the islanders were speaking her mother’s dialect. In her book The Third Eye, Rony identifies the dialect as that spoken by the indigenous people of Nias island in Northwest Sumatra (177). For more information about mad scientists in film, see Jason Colavito’s Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Other works connecting the Wolf Man character to the notion of doubles and doppelgangers include Stephen Jay Schneider’s “Manifestations of the Literary Double in Modern Horror Cinema,” which employs ideas of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank to explore monster images, and Karl Miller’s influential Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Widely believed to have originated in South Asia, specifically central India, persons known in the West as Gypsies immigrated to Europe in the eleventh century. The term “gypsy” is a misnomer, resulting from the erroneous belief that they came from Egypt. As non-sedentary peoples, Roma and Sinti face ongoing marginalization. For more information about the Roma and Sinti, see Nicolae Gheorghe and Andrzej Mirga’s The Roma in the Twenty-First Century: A Policy Paper. Fabre’s “Black Cat and White Cat: Richard Wright’s Debt to Edgar Allen Poe” analyzes the images of the white cat, white flowing material, and fire in Native Son. Young points to the double meaning of both book and monster when Shelley dedicates her novel Frankenstein with these words: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (Young 3).

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Works Cited Anolik, Ruth Bienstock, and Douglas L. Howard, eds. The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. ———. “The Infamous Svengali: George Du Maurier’s Satanic Jew.” The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. 163–95. Ash, Cay Van, and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1972. Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. Des Moines, IA: Library of America, 1998. Berys, Gaut. “The Enjoyment Theory of Horror: A Response to Carroll.” British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (Jan. 1995): 284–90. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bierce, Ambrose. “Moxon’s Master.” 1909. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in Films. New York: Viking, 1973. ———. Blacks in American Film and Television: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1988. ———. Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television. New York: Straus and Giroux, 2001. ———. Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood. New York: Ballantine, 2005. Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. New York: John Day, 1931. Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes. 1912. ———. The Land That Time Forgot. 1918. Caron, Timothy P. “ ‘The Reds Are in the Bible Room’: Political Activism and the Bible in Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children.” Studies in American Fiction 24 (1996): 45–64. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990. Colavito, Jason. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Davis, Charles T., and Michel Fabre, eds. Richard Wright: A Primary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. DeGiglio-Bellemare, Mario. “ ‘Even a Man Who Is Pure in Heart’: Filmic Horror, Popular Religion and the Spectral Underside of History.” Journal of Religion & Popular Culture 17, 2 (Fall 2007): 2. July 31, 2009 . DeLamotte, Eugenia. “White Terror, Black Dreams: Gothic Constructions of Race in the Nineteenth Century.” The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. 17–31. Demiturk, Lale. “Mastering the Master’s Tongue: Bigger as Oppressor in Richard Wright’s Native Son.” Mississippi Quarterly 50, 2 (Spring 1997): 267–76). Rpt. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Richard Wright’s Native Son. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2009. 85–93.

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richard wright’s native son / 149 Dirks, Tim. “The Greatest Films: Horror Films.” Filmsite. 1996–2009. Aug. 2, 2009. . Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Lost World. 1912. Elmer, Jonathan. “Spectacle and Event in Native Son.” American Literature 70, 4 (Dec. 1998): 767–98. Rpt. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Richard Wright’s Native Son. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2009. 127–53. Escoube, Lucienne. “No Film Has Ever Depicted the Life of Blacks in American Cities.” L’Ecran Française (Nov. 19, 1946): 12. Trans. Keneth Kinnamon. Rpt. Conversations with Richard Wright. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 111–14. Fabre, Michel. “Black Cat and White Cat: Richard Wright’s Debt to Edgar Allen Poe.” Poe Studies IV, 1, 4 (June 1971): 17–19. Aug. 8, 2009 . Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness.” Partisan Review (1952). Rpt. Chicken Bones: A Journal. Jan. 4, 2005. Aug. 2, 2009 . Frann, F. M. Michel. “Life and Death and Something in Between: Reviewing Recent Horror Cinema.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 12, 4 (Dec. 2007): 390–97. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad/Penguin, 1993. Gateward, Frances. “Daywalkin’ Nightstalkin’ Bloodsuckas: Black Vampires in Contemporary Film.” Genders 40 (2004). . Gheorghe, Nicolae, and Andrzej Mirga. The Roma in the Twenty-First Century: A Policy Paper. Project on Ethnic Relations, May 1997. Sept. 23, 2008. Aug. 9, 2009 . “Gin Chow at Chinese.” The Los Angeles Times. Apr. 1, 1933. Glut, Donald F. Classic Movie Monsters. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978. Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Gomez, Ramuncho. “Richard Wright, the Black Dostoevsky.” Trans. Keneth Kinnamon. Rpt. Conversations with Richard Wright. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 133–38. Gordon, George (Lord Byron). “Fragment of a Novel.” 1816. Guerrero, (ed.), Framing Blackness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 1993. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. ———. “Creation of the Self in Richard Wright’s Black Boy.” Black American Literature Forum 19, 2 (Summer 1985). Rpt. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2006. 83–96. ———. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1996. Hamamoto, Darrell Y. Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Hanson, John Stag. “The Man Who Killed King Kong.” Movies International 1, 3 (1966): 23.

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150 / mera moore Heffernan, Kevin. “Hypnosis in Media: The Hypnosis Horror Films of the 1950s: Genre Texts and Industrial Context.” Journal of Film and Video (Summer 2003). Rpt. Hypnosis. 2009. Aug. 2, 2009 . Hendershot, Cyndy. “Domesticity and Horror in House of Usher and Village of the Damned.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17, 3 (Oct. 2000): 221–28. ———. “Monster at the Soda Shop: Teenagers and Fifties Horror Films.” Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture 10 (March 2001). . ———. “The Cold War Horror Film: Taboo and Transgression in The Bad Seed, The Fly, and Psycho.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 29, 1 (Spring 2001): 21. ———. I Was a Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism, and the Cold War Imagination. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 2001. ———. Anti- Communism and Popular Culture in Mid- Century America. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003. Hills, Matt. The Pleasures of Horror. New York: Continuum, 2005. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992. Howe, Irving. “Black Boys and Native Sons.” Dissent (1963): 353–68. Rpt. Peter Losin. Aug. 9, 2009 . Humphries, Reynold. The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social Landscape. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006. Iaccino, James F. Psychological Reflections on Cinematic Terror: Jungian Archetypes in Horror Films. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994. Jancovich, Mark. American Horror from 1951 to the Present. Staffordshire, England: Keele UP, 1994. ———. Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester, NY: Manchester UP/St. Martin’s Press, 1996. JanMohamed, Abdul T. The Death-Bound- Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Jolley, Dan, Den Beauvais, Dan Vado, and Steve Moncuse. Universal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horror. Portland, OR: Dark Horse, 2006. Jones, Alan. The Rough Guide to Horror Movies. London, England: Rough Guides, 2005. Jones, Darryl. Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Jones, E. Michael. Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film. Dallas, TX: Spence, 2000. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley Books, [1981] 1983. Kingsbury, Karen. “Yellow Peril, Dark Hero: Fu Manchu and the ‘Gothic Bedevilment’ of Racist Intent.” The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. 104–99. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933–1982. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. Kinnamon, Keneth, and Michel Fabre, eds. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993.

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richard wright’s native son / 151 Leffler, Yvonne. Horror as Pleasure: The Aesthetics of Horror Fiction. Trans. Sara Death. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2000. Leroux, Gaston. The Phantom of the Opera. 1911. Liu, Cynthia W. “When Dragon Ladies Die, Do They Come Back as Butterflies? Re-Imagining Anna May Wong.” Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism. Ed. Darrel Y. Hamamoto and Sandra Liu. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2000. 23–39. Mallory, Michael. Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror. Universal City, CA: Universe, 2009. Mank, Gregory W. Karloff and Lugosi: The Story of a Haunting Collaboration, with a Complete Filmography of their Films Together. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990. Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Modleski, Tania. “The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 691–700. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Boston: Harvard UP, 1992. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. . Polidori, John. The Vampyre. 1819. Ramirez Berg, Charles. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. Austin: U of Texas P, 2002. Rampersad, Arnold, ed. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice/Longman, 1994. Rasmussen, Randy Loren. Children of the Night: The Six Archetypal Characters of Classic Horror Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998. Rayson, Ann. “Richard Wright’s Life.” American National Biography Online. Feb. 2000. . Rpt. Modern American Poetry. Mar. 18, 2001. Aug. 2, 2009 . Regester, Charlene. “African American Extras in Hollywood during the 1920’s and 1930’s.” Film History 9, 1 (1997): 95–115. Reid, Mark. Redefining Black Film. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1983. Richard Wright—Black Boy: Facilitator Guide for the DVD. California Newsreel, 1994. . The Richard Wright Collection. Special collection. University of Mississippi Libraries. . Richard Wright Papers. Special collection. Yale University, Beinecke Library.. Rockett, Will H. Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Rohmer, Sax. Sax Rohmer’s Collected Novels: The Hand of Fu Manchu, the Return of Dr. Fu Manchu, The Yellow Claw, Dope. Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1983.

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152 / mera moore Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996. Ruby, Jay. “A Re-Examination of the Early Career of Robert J. Flaherty.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Fall 1980): 431–56. Rpt. Jay Ruby Home Page. Aug. 2, 2009 . Schmid, Peter. “Die Stimme der Entrechten.” Die Weltwoche (Zurich, Nov. 15, 1946): 5. Rpt. in English as “An Interview with Richard Wright.” Pan-Africa (Aug. 1947): 37–38, (Sept. 1947): 29–31. Rpt. Conversations with Richard Wright. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 106–10. Schneider, Stephen Jay. “Manifestations of the Literary Double in Modern Horror Cinema.” Film and Philosophy (2001): 51–62. ———. “Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film.” Senses of Cinema 15 (July–Aug. 2001). ———. “Mixed Blood Couples: Monsters and Miscegenation in U.S. Horror Cinema.” The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. 72–89. ———, ed. Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Schneider, Stephen Jay, and Daniel Shaw, eds. Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003. Seed, David. American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999. Sevastakis, Michael. Songs of Love and Death: The Classical American Horror Film of the 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. Shaheen, Jack G. Reel Bad Arabs. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. 1818. Smethurst, James. “Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son.” African American Review (Spring 2001): 29–40. Snead, James. White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. Ed. Colin MacCabe and Cornel West. New York: Routledge, 1994. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New York: Ungar, 1987. Soister, John T. Of Gods and Monsters: A Critical Guide to Universal Studios’ Science Fiction, Horror, and Mystery Films, 1929–1939. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1896. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Strengell, Heidi. “ ‘The Monster Never Dies’: An Analysis of the Gothic Double in Stephen King’s Oeuvre.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture. 2, 1 (Spring 2003). . Tajima, Renee E. “Lotus Blossoms Don’t Bleed: Images of Asian Women.” Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women. Ed. Asian Women United. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. 308–17. Urbano, C. “Projections, Suspense, and Anxiety: The Modern Horror Film and Its Effects.” Psychoanalytic Review 85, 6 (1998): 909–30.

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richard wright’s native son / 153 Weaver, Tom. Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes: Interviews with Actors, Directors, Producers, and Writers of the 1940s through 1960s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991. Weaver, Tom, John Brunas, and Michael Brunas. Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946. 2nd ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. 1895. ———. The Island of Dr. Moreau. 1896. Winfrey, Yayoi Lena. “Yellowface: Asians on White Screens.” IM Diversity. Exhibition book for Yellowface: Asians on White Screens, Hollywood Entertainment Museum, Los Angeles. 2009. Aug. 2, 2009 . Wong, Eugene Franklin. “The Early Years: Asians in the American Films Prior to World War II.” Screening Asian Americans. Ed. Peter X Feng. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002. 53–70. Worland, Rick. “OWI Meets the Monsters: Hollywood Horror Films and War Propaganda, 1942–1945.” Cinema Journal 37, 1 (Fall 1997): 47–65. Wright, Richard. The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch. New York: Viking, 1937. ———. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Harper, 1938, 1940. ———. Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940. ———. Native Son. Ed. and intro. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Harper, 1993. ———. How “Bigger” Was Born; Notes of a Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940. ———. 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking, 1941. ———. Black Boy. New York: Harper, 1945. ———. Introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. [1945.] Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. ———. I Choose Exile. In The Writer’s Presence. Ed. Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1951. ———. The Outsider. New York: Harper, 1953. ———. Savage Holiday. New York: Avon, 1954. ———. Black Power. New York: Harper, 1954. ———. The Color Curtain. New York: World, 1956. ———. Pagan Spain. New York: Harper, 1957. ———. White Man, Listen! Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957. ———. The Long Dream. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958. ———. Eight Men. New York: World, 1961. ———. Lawd Today. New York: Walker, 1963. ———. Letters to Joe C. New York: Harper, 1968. ———. American Hunger. New York: Harper, 1975. ———. Richard Wright: Early Works and Richard Wright: Later Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. De Moines, IA: Library of America, 1991. ———. Rite of Passage. New York: Harper, 1994. ———. Haiku: This Other World. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade, 1998. ———. A Father’s Law. London: Harper Perennial, 2008.

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154 / mera moore Wright, Richard, and Paul Green. Native Son: The Biography of a Young American. Original ms. 1941. University of Pennsylvania, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, Rare Book and Manuscript Library. . ———. Native Son: The Biography of a Young American. New York: Harper, 1941. Young, Elizabeth. Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor. New York: New York UP, 2008.

Filmography Birth of a Nation. Dir. D. W. Griffith. DWGC/Epoch, 1915. Blonde Venus. Dir. Josef von Sternberg. Paramount, 1932. Bride of Frankenstein. Dir. James Whale. Universal, 1935. Bridge on the River Kwai. Dir. David Lean. Horizon/Columbia, 1957. Chang. Dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack. FP-L/Paramount, 1927. Daughter of the Dragon. Dir. Lloyd Corrigan. Paramount, 1931. Dracula. Dir. Tod Browning. Universal, 1931. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dir. John S. Robertson. FP-L, 1920. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dir. Rouben Mamoulian. Paramount, 1931. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dir. Victor Fleming. MGM, 1941. Drums of Fu Manchu. Dir. John English and William Witney. Republic, 1940, 1942. Flash Gordon. Dir. Frederick Stephani and Ray Taylor. Universal, 1936. Frankenstein. Dir. James Whale. Universal, 1931. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Roy William Neill. Universal, 1943. The Further Mysteries of Dr. Fu. Dir. Fred Paul. Stoll (UK), 1924. The Good Earth. 1937. Dir. Sidney Franklin. MGM, 1937. Grass. Dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack. FP-L/Paramount, 1925. The Green Pastures. Dir. Marc Connelly and William Keighley. Warner Brothers, 1936. Hallelujah! Dir. King Vidor. MGM, 1929. Island of Lost Souls. Dir. Erle C. Kenton. Paramount, 1932. The Mask of Fu Manchu. Dir. Charles Brabin and Charles Vidor. MGM, 1932. Moana: A Story of the South Seas. Dir. Robert J. Flaherty. FP-L, 1926. The Most Dangerous Game. Dir. Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Shoedsack. RKO, 1932. The Mummy. Dir. Karl Freund. Universal, 1932. The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu. Dir. Rowland V. Lee. Paramount, 1929. The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu. Dir. A. E. Coleby. Stoll (UK), 1923. Native Son. Dir. Pierre Chenal. Sono Film (Argentina), 1951. Native Son. Dir. Jerrold Freedman. American Playhouse/Cinecom, 1986. King Kong. Dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack. RKO, 1933. Nanook of the North. Dir. Robert J. Flaherty. Revillon, 1922. On Cannibalism. Dir. Fatimah Tobing Rony. Women Make Movies, 1994. The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu. Dir. Rowland V. Lee. Paramount, 1930. Richard Wright: Black Boy. Prod. Madison D. Lacey. BBC, 1994.

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richard wright’s native son / 155 Shadow of a Chinatown. Dir. Robert F. Hill. Victory Pictures, 1936. Son of Frankenstein. Dir. Rowland V. Lee. Universal, 1939. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas. Dir. F. W. Murnau. Murnau-Flaherty Productions, 1931. Tarzan the Ape Man. Dir. W. S. Van Dyke. MGM, 1932. Thief of Baghdad. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, 1924. Trader Horn. 1931. Dir. W. S. Van Dyke. MGM, 1929. The Wolf Man. Dir. George Waggner. Universal, 1941.

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Ch a p t e r Eig h t Ish m a e l R e ed’s Mu m b o Ju m bo t h roug h Con f uc i a n ism Yupei Zhou

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo has been widely accepted as a postmodern novel. Most critics define the novel as postmodern on the basis that it is, both formally and thematically, a postmodern deconstruction of modern epistemology and politics and that it offers and experiments with artistic forms and epistemological paradigms alternative to the modern categorization of African American art and African Americans as the other. For most critics, the formal implies, explicates, expresses, or mediates the epistemological. The formal and the epistemological constitute a multicultural as well as oppositional discourse. As W. Lawrence Hogue states, “deconstructing the novel becomes a metaphor for deconstructing metaphysics” for Reed (“Postmodernism” 182). Hogue’s discussion of Mumbo Jumbo’s paradigm of postmodern epistemology takes the formal as his analytic framework. Likewise, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. points out that Mumbo Jumbo, by way of such formal strategies as pastiche, parody, doubling, and signifying, not only revises the Western idea of writing and reading but also critiques “the notions of closure” that are both obvious in Western metaphysics and “implicit in the key texts of the Afro-American canon” (226–27). What Gates also does, typical of later African American critics, specifically Reed critics, is tie the formal with a political end and locate the formal within an African vernacular tradition, thus connecting Africa, African America, and the United States under the rubric of postmodernism. Such critical visions and approaches, though intensely formalist and geographically specific, manage to cross spaces and, in Madhu Dubey’s words, “to secure not only a unique cultural lineage for black literary postmodernism, but also its political difference from other brands” (153–54). Yet, Dubey points out, formal and generic approaches to African American literary

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postmodernism has the danger of being too tenuous (151), since the nature of postmodernism is contradictory, as shown within the field of African American literary studies, which discusses and defines postmodernism in a way suggestive of the “continuing implication of postmodernism in the modern values and formations” such as nation or utopia (158). Like Dubey, Michael George Hanchard also positively maintains that African American literary studies is not parochial and has already demonstrated a global dimension by emphasizing the African-derived and -descended as well as the U.S. perspectives of the African American (141). However, this global dimension, Hanchard indicates, is limited and it has become obvious that African American studies must probe further into “the relationship between African American studies, African studies, and other discipline-, area-, and population-specific epistemes” (150). This call is timely. Current situation with African American literature is that it is widely read and taught both within and outside the United States, by such diverse people as Americans, non-African-descended Americans, Chinese, and Japanese. That the PMLA Forum on “who shall teach what?” (McKay) opens up a heated discussion on “who shall teach African American literature” has proved that to address the phenomenon of a worldwide interest in African American literature has been imperative for African American studies. Opening up the field of African American literary studies and pedagogy also becomes essential. In fact, Reed, as a writer, expressed this opening-up endeavor as early as the 1990s. In a 1991 interview, Reed asserts that his goal is “to become more of a global writer.” For this purpose, he was studying “Japanese as well as Yoruba.” The result of this endeavor is his 1993 “trilingual” novel Japanese by Spring (Bezner and Reed 115). Although, as Crystal S. Anderson has commented, when using “the Japanese as a metaphor for white supremacy and allies them with American Blacks,” Reed “simultaneously privileges a multiethnic perspective and undermines that perspective by reinforcing the black-white racial paradigm” (379), and the novel gestures toward a possibility for African American literature to meet Asian culture. From the postmodernist point of view, it is preposterous to think that Asian culture in general, Confucianism in particular, is neither associated with nor relevant to African America and Africa. Like African culture, Chinese culture has been a globally influential force and yet, has been, also like African culture, defined by the West as the other. Western philosophers such as Hegel oppose the progressive to the backward—namely, Western Enlightenment to Eastern barbarism/primitivism. Judged by the terminology of Western philosophies, Chinese philosophies have been defined as non-philosophical, even anti-philosophical. Max Weber, for example, thinks that Confucianism is marked by “naïvetè,” “indolence,”

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“the retention of magic” (233), and “the barbaric lack of education” (228), all of which constitute obstacles to “rational, objective ‘progress’ ” and capitalism (241). Like African American intellectual history, to which generations of African American thinkers and artists have contributed, Confucian intellectual history, though named after Confucius, according to David Hall and Roger Ames, includes interpretations of Confucius in all subsequent generations that “both maintain and add to the original teachings of Confucius.” Confucius, Hall and Ames state, is a “corporate” person, “a community, a society, a living tradition,” “who is continually being seen in the ongoing transmissions of cultural values” (24). Because of all these sharable experiences and of the project-in-progress nature of both Confucianism and African American culture, it is not accidental that under the influence of postmodernism, there appeared in the United States in the 1980s an intense effort among scholars of African American studies to rediscover and reconstruct their own cultural traditions and critical theories and, in China, a resurged interest among scholars of Chinese studies in rejuvenating and renewing Confucianism. And it is less accidental that traditional Chinese and African American cultures have both been discovered as standing “in an anticipatory relation to postmodernism, understood as a critical stance toward modernity,” since they are “at once inside and outside the discourses and formations of modernity, and have therefore been uniquely predisposed to reflect critically on the grand narratives of the modern West” (Dubey 151–52). Chinese scholars Chen Zhi-liang and Yu Nai-zhong have maintained that in crucial ways postmodern philosophies reiterate Chinese philosophies, which constitute critiques of modernity. As their research shows, Heidegger’s theory of truth as unconcealment is inspired by Lao-tzu, whereas Derrida’s idea of decentralization is a repetition of China’s Buddhist philosophies. Postmodernist deconstruction of language and Lèvinas’s philosophies of the other both find parallel ideas in Confucianism. Cheng Zhi-hua has also confirmed that although postmodern approaches are fundamentally different from Confucianism, crucial postmodern conceptions correspond to Confucian philosophies, for example, postmodern reconceptualizations of rationalism and binary metaphysics, postmodern propositions of heterogeneity, and postmodern philosophical reconstructions of moral principles. Confucianism and other traditional Chinese philosophies, though chronologically premodern and far from being a discourse of opposition, form a critical stance on modernity. Lionel M. Jensen, commenting on the book Thinking through Confucianism by Hall and Ames, remarks, “their result in thinking through Confucius is” “the application of his ‘take’ ” on his principal issues “to a reshaping of the philosophical premises that ground our way of thinking in the West” (17), and, in Hall’s and Ames’s own

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words, to an “unthinking” of Eurocentric assumptions and interpretative categories (8). Both cultures’ breakdown of linear periodization manifests itself as symbolic of the postmodern as well. If postmodern is more an epistemological stance and a hermeneutic aid than a chronological period, postmodernism and the postmodern conditions create and constitute a space or a channel in or through which African American culture, Confucianism, and Mumbo Jumbo may encounter, cross, communicate with, and benefit from one another. As Liang Yan-cheng argues, postmodernism launches an attack upon hegemony and meta-narrative and creates paralogy by way of deconstruction. However, the breakdown of the subject-object opposition and the condition of paralogy make communication difficult in the postmodern era and lead to negativism. However, when postmodernism promotes itself as a better theory, it, in fact, negates its own negativism. Liang suggests that to avoid falling into the contradictions of postmodern negativism after deconstructing the humanist subjectivity and demolishing the subjectobject opposition, postmodernism has to turn to Matrim Buber’s I-Thou model of communication, one based on interpenetrative relationships. Reed, in Hogue’s view, accomplishes what Liang describes as a postmodern action of deconstruction and construction. He “is a critic of ontology and modernity from the periphery,” “reacts against the universality of instrumental reason,” “overturns binaries, undermines hierarchies, and suggests a dispersal-plural way of defining history and reality” (Hogue, Postmodern 143). Helen Lock accurately describes Reed’s novel as an “art of subversion” (67). For both Hogue and Lock, Reed demonstrates his postmodern epistemology by adopting a satirical narrative mode, a deoppositional and deconstructive discourse, and an indicting and militating undertone. Deeply embedded in the novel is a subversive and deconstructive philosophy of change. In accompaniment to these, he reconstructs a Voodoo-centered paradigm of heterogeneity through his stylistic deconstruction and re-accommodation. Richard Swope positively describes this “New Hoodoo as a multi-cultural amalgamation” (619). However, in these postmodern attempts, Liang suggests, broadly, a paradigm and a process of construction based upon both interpersonal and interpenetrative relationships is absent. Following this absence, the process of establishing a heterogeneous yet non-confrontational relationship is inadequately explored. Although Reed and Confucianism agree upon the idea of heterogeneity, they diverge on the way heterogeneity is achieved and the way the nature and condition of heterogeneity are defined. Confucian philosophy takes as its core inner cultivation and interpersonal relationships based upon inner cultivation. By way of moral cultivation, a society is able to accomplish harmony and unity—the harmony among and the unity of

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differences—both of which are goals beyond heterogeneity itself. Giving all priority to moral cultivation rather than subversion, and to unity rather than separation, Confucians would consider the demise of social evil as a result of natural exhaustion or deterioration and that of benevolence as a consequence of working on and transforming malevolence. Since a discourse of subversion and opposition is not encouraged, in situations pressing for a revolution, Confucianism becomes inadequate. However, since Reed and Confucianism share the fundamental idea of heterogeneity and multiplicity, one would complement, constitute, and construe the other where the other fails or becomes inadequate. This communication itself would model an interpenetrative relationship. The postmodern idea of heterogeneity is a consistent theme in Mumbo Jumbo that Reed explores. Reed validates this idea by calling into question the Western monolithic and linear order founded upon binary oppositions. For this purpose, Reed creates an order in the novel, the Atonist Path, as a meticulous copy of the Western paradigms of politics, institutionalizations, ways of thinking, history making, and linguistic control. Reed uses the traditional Western genre of the detective story as a structuring device. Reed, however, deconstructs the genre as if breaking down the Western order it represents by allowing texts and genres of diverse nature to cut in from time to time to disrupt the detective story line—texts such as newspaper clippings, book quotations, annals of histories, photographs, poems, graphics, dictionary definitions, and genres such as romance, fantasy, science fiction, mythology, jazz, and movie. Reed’s postmodern techniques of pastiche, parody, mimicry, satire, and exaggeration serve the same purpose well. The collage of these different types of texts, genres, and techniques embodies a decentered and nonlinear condition of heterogeneity, fluidity, and openness. This condition of dynamism is accompanied by a collage of such distinct orders of belief and ideological systems as Voodooism, Egyptology, and the American political system. Through these strategies, Reed is able to present different ways of defining and describing the world, and to problematize the boundaries between the real and the fictional, the actual and the imagined, myth and reality, and finally to reduce to mere fraudulence linear and binary oppositional logics. The major conflict in the novel is between the Atonist Path and Jes Grew, namely, between the West and the non-West. The single most important action on the part of the Atonist Path that—with the help of “its backbone” (47) and military wing, the Wallflower Order of the Knights Templar—controls the United States is to invalidate, suppress, and eliminate Jes Grew. Since the novel spans literally thousands of years, Reed shows this action of suppression as long as the West and the non-West have lasted, and hence the whole Western history as one of suppression and the entire

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non-Western history as one of being suppressed. Naming Atonists people such as emperor Constantine, the medieval papacy, Milton, Cromwell, Freud, Charlemagne, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, the Mellons, and Hitler, Reed indicts the West for being consistently brutal, arbitrary, and conspiratorial under the cover of civilization. The novel opens with another round of brutal and arbitrary actions of the Atonists to suppress the Voodoo-inspired Jes Grew, which newly breaks out in New Orleans. Satirically, the Atonists’ reason for suppression is that Jes Grew is different and indefinable. Jes Grew has nothing they can “bring into focus or categorize” (4), not even by “the most distinguished bacteriologists, epidemiologists, and chemists from the University” (5). And as soon as “we call it 1 thing it forms into something else” (4). To the Atonists, Jes Grew brings people into a state of “uncontrollable frenzy” (4) and makes them do “stupid sensual things” such as “wriggling like fish,” “lusting for relevance” (4), and “deserting his master” (5). Representative of the “forces of oppressed freedom, mystery, wonderment, flexibility, diversity, and spontaneity” (Hogue, Postmodern 152), Jes Grew collides in every way with the Western terminologies of linearity and instrumental reason. To inhibit it, the Atonists define Jes Grew as nothing but “a psychic epidemic” (5), a crippling force to “the cherished traditions of the West” (15), “the boll weevil eating away at the fabric of our forms our technique our aesthetic integrity” (17). And “if Jes Grew becomes pandemic it will mean the end of Civilization As We Know It” (4). By doing so, the Atonists determine what is universal as “a way of measuring every 1 by their ideals” (133). What is defined as parochial and incompetent is, in fact, what is non-Western. The Atonists evaluate Haitian intellectuals negatively by “condemning work arising out of their own experience as being 1-dimensional, enraged, non-objective, preoccupied with hate and not universal” (133). They describe Africa and China as lagging behind and having the necessity to change, to “become Civilized !!!!,” to adopt their ways, and to produce “Elizabethan poets” and “Stravinskys and Mozarts in the wings” (114). Their epistemology allows no space for contradiction, diversity, heterogeneity, and multiplicity. Reed’s stylistic renovation and diversification, together with his satirical characterizations and descriptions of the Atonists, will accomplish his goal of deconstructing and critiquing the order of linearity and binary oppositions, on the one hand, and the goal of endorsing and modeling an order of heterogeneity, on the other. These two goals are mutually defined and constitutive in Mumbo Jumbo. Both Sharon Jessee and Swope describe Reed’s model of heterogeneity as “amalgamation”—in Jessee’s words, “an amalgamation of perspectives, art forms, and lifestyles from different cultures, past and present” (5). According to Swope, Reed lets these

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different entities “communicate, mix, clash” with or “disrupt each other” (613). The result of such amalgamation is the New Hoodoo. Swope and Helen Lock think that this cultural mixture of Reed’s does not overturn the binary hierarchies but brings African and African American cultures into a dialectical relationship of mutual absorption—in Swope’s words, of “double-crossing” (618). However, Swope’s meticulous analysis shows that each one of Reed’s strategies of double-crossings and reconstructions completes in one way his attack upon Western culture. In both Swope’s criticism and Reed’s text, constructing heterogeneity and interrogating Western metaphysics are reasonably and effectively identified. As a result, constructing heterogeneity and deconstructing monism are identified with each other and tend to be the teleology of each other. Since Reed’s ways of crossing spaces turns out to be ways of interrogation and deconstruction, Swope’s analysis of Reed’s ways of crossing spaces turns out to be a series of verifications of Reed’s ways of interrogation and deconstruction. Examined through the Confucian point of view, Mumbo Jumbo’s postmodern project would reveal an absence within itself. In Reed’s paralleling of his action of critiquing with his action of endorsing, a destination transcending these two parallel goals is missing. In other words, a transcendent yet non-Utopian ideal is unavailable. In consequence, a process beyond and other than critiquing and subverting through which a heterogeneous society can be built is missing. In contrast to what is conceived as heterogeneity by Reed, heterogeneity as defined in Confucianism is not the goal of human society; it is the nature of the universe as well as of being. The ideal yet pragmatic goal of human society is harmony, which spells out the state in which differences should relate to one another. For Confucians, harmony refers to an ideal relationship among differences. Harmony is ostensibly different from uniformity, on the one hand, and from chaos, on the other. So the ideal relationship among differences can be explained as unity without uniformity, agreement upon disagreement. Only in harmony can a society grow and thrive. Shi Bo, a thinker from the West Zhou Dynasty, says, “harmony allows and guarantees the thriving of all things whereas sameness/uniformity inhibits growth and development. Balancing one thing and another is called harmony. So things will thrive and people will obey. If one same thing is added to another, it will have to be thrown away when the job is done” (Guo Yu 477). Shi Bo’s words, though brief, accurately identify the problem of the West and offer the reason why Western epistemology is under the attack of non-Western peoples. Yan Ying, a thinker from the State of Qi of the Zhou Dynasty, also asserts, “uniformity is sameness and the repeated accumulation of same things” and “harmony is dialectics whereas uniformity is metaphysics”(Zuo

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Zhuan 1182). Yan Ying describes this dialectic relationship by comparing harmony and unity to soup and music. The relationship among the different kinds of ingredients used to make a soup and among the various musical instruments played to create a piece of music, he observes, is dialectic—that is, mutually restrictive—yet, at the same time, cooperative, interdependent, and mutually supportive, coordinating, and promoting. Yan Ying rhetorically asks, “if a soup is made of water only, who would have it? If music is played only with one instrument, who would listen to it?” (Zuo Zhuan 1182). Yan Ying’s harmonious unity of differences is not arbitrary amalgamation. Whereas the realization of harmony is preceded by allowing and admitting heterogeneity, coordinating differences into a dialectic relationship occurs between the admission of heterogeneity and the accomplishment of harmony. In short, Yan Ying’s concept of unity of differences leads to harmony. Aligning the achievement of social harmony with the individual achievement of integrity, Confucius considers cultivating one’s moral integrity as a way to achieve the coordination of differences. The major responsibility of coordinating differences lies with the individual and his/ her inner cultivation. For Confucius, harmony is also a norm of value. Confucius says, “A person of integrity seeks unity without uniformity, harmony upon differences whereas a disrespectable person seeks uniformity without unity, sameness without harmony” (The Analects 166). This explanation of harmony and heterogeneity in ethical terms spells out an inclusive and tolerant state of being, which in turn forms an explanation for the problems of an exclusive and intolerant state of being, such as those of uniformity, separation, and immorality. At the same time, it implies a dynamic process that is initiated and gains impetus from within an individual, a process through which the inclusive and tolerant relationships of dialectics are shaped, developed, and sustained. Civilization, as defined in Confucianism, is realized exactly in this dynamic process. This definition of civilization based on ethics conflicts with the Western notion of civilization, which is founded on instrumental reason. Western civilization is exactly what Reed interrogates in his novel. As Reed would describe, this civilization represented by the Atonist order adheres to the logic of binary oppositions, which is the same as the monolithic logic of uniformity. The Atonist mind interprets the world “by using a single loa” just “like filling a milk bottle with an ocean” (24). The Atonists do what Derrida negatively describes as the “calculated effacement” of differences (142) and “a violent hierarchy” (Hogue, Postmodern 15). Questioning this mindset, black poet Major Young asks Vampton, “Is it necessary for us to write in the same way?” (102). Major Young then states outspokenly, “I am not Wallace Thurman, Thurman

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is not Fauset and Fauset is not Claude McKay, McKay isn’t Horne. We all have our unique styles” (102). Western civilization, as is depicted by Reed, has violated the heterogeneous nature of the universe. This violation determines that this monolithic order can survive only by way of deception, conspiracy, and violence, that is, through the liquidation of moral integrity, and through disastrous intercultural, intergroup, and interpersonal relationships. The connection among Vampton, “Safecracker,” Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, Musclewhite, and Harding is founded on profitability. Attempting to suppress Jes Grew, the Wallflower order installs “an anti-Jes Grew President, Warren Harding,” and puts Hincle Von Vampton, a Knights Templar, in charge of seeking and destroying the Text and creating a Talking Android “who will work within the Negre . . . to drive it out, categorize it analyze it expel it slay it, blot Jes Grew” (17). Doing Jes Grew is made “a federal crime” (94). False research report is issued in newspapers saying that it “ ‘SCIENTIFICALLY’ PROVES THAT JES GREW IS HARD ON THE APPENDIX” (115). A “Holy War” (140) is launched in Haiti, which is thought to be “responsible for the Jes Grew crisis” (13). Vampton hires Woodrow Wilson Jefferson to write a column for his newly initiated magazine, the Benign Monster, in order to “confuse the state of Black letters” so that “they would be isolated ” and to pit “1 writer against the other” (78–79). In Mumbo Jumbo, literally everything under the control of the Atonist Path is constructed for the benefit of its monolithic goals: elections, laws, institutions, news media, police, and artists. These strategies of deception, conspiracy, and violence are only repetitions of many others throughout the Atonist history. About 3,000 years ago, Moses seized upon the Book of Troth by using all of these strategies on Jethro and Isis. America’s war against Haiti is only an “upsurgence of a Holy War” (133) against people such as Haitians for thousands of years. Reed aptly describes the Atonist history as resembling a three-story building, on that has “a store which deals in religious article” on the first floor, “a gun store” on the second, and “an advertising firm” on the third (82). Locating the building above the Mu’tafikah basement, Reed uses it to symbolize the oppression the Atonists have imposed on people of color. Reed’s criticism of Western civilization is trenchant; even when viewed from a Confucian vision, a vision that is silent about subversion and supportive of moral pursuit, his criticism of this civilization reveals many of its problems. The Atonist order acts against the heterogeneous nature of the universe. The order opposes one thing to another and violates the dialectic nature of relationships. On top of this, the Atonists abandon moral restrictions. In their system of thoughts, no notion close to that of harmony ever exists. In spite of the fact that the problems Reed exposes go in every way

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against the Confucian conceptions of harmony and heterogeneity, Reed’s ingeniously built critical stance also constitutes a problem, if viewed from a Confucian standpoint. Since his goal is to critique, the process of working toward a goal after and beyond the critical stance is absent. The question of how differences can ever coexist with, cross, and influence each other to form a condition of heterogeneity remains unanswered and mystified. Following this, the state of heterogeneity represented in the novel becomes the static absolute that eventually turns into its opposite, that is, uniformity. At the same time, Reed’s discourse is somewhat unable to free itself from the logic of separation and opposition. Reed does, however, successfully demonstrate an effort to build and validate an alternative self-other relationship beyond separation and opposition, though not so much between cultures as within the black community or rather within a group of people whose ethnic backgrounds and experiences are similar. Swope argues that the alternative self-other relationship built by Reed in Mumbo Jumbo is a mode of double-crossing. New Hoodoo is the result of a combination of African and American cultures. LaBas acts not only intuitively but also rationally. On the one hand, however, the double-crossing occurs less effectively on the level of individual behaviors than it does on the level of cultural or stylistic interactions. On the other, no white people are seen double-crossing in the novel. The only white individual who crosses over, Thor Wintergreen, ends up turning back and betraying his black, yellow, and red Mu’tafikah and causes the death of Berbelang. Double-crossing, or a dialectic relationship, breaks down at these links. But, among African Americans and Haitians, individuals are mutually supportive for non-material or profitable purposes. At this point, the novel plays out the Confucian ideas of harmony and heterogeneity exceptionally well. No murdering, betraying, and deceiving occur among them. Their apparent moral superiority is not imposed on them by laws, education, or institutions of any sort, an absence of imposition that, however, allows them little chance to remain morally good. Their non-hostile and beneficial interpersonal relationship derives from their freedom from the drive for hegemony and for conquering and defeating others. Jes Grew also keeps them in good shape both spiritually and physically. Jes Grew “is an anti-plague” that when “enlivened [in] the host” makes its victims feel “that the air was as clear as they had ever seen it and that there was the aroma of roses and perfumes which had never before enticed their nostrils.” It is electric as “life” and “characterized by ebullience and ecstasy” (6). As “the delight of the gods” (6), it enables its people to be one with nature and to see “Nkulu Kulu of the Zulu,” to feel “the gut heart and lungs of Africa’s interior” (5). Although not all Jes Grew carriers know its nature, those

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who do understand have the potential to possess a supernatural power and admit and accept differences. LaBas, for example, accepts many different loas instead of just one. He can sense a conspiracy and other phenomena by dreaming about it, feeling it, using “2 heads” and his “Knockings” (25). He can “knock a glass from a table by staring in its direction; and fill a room with the sound of forest animals” (24). As Hogue describes, “he has an expansive consciousness” (Postmodern 159). Being one with or even close to nature leads to this expansiveness of consciousness and supernatural power. Whereas Jes Grew followers such as LaBas, like their ancestor Osiris, have “developed such a fondness and attachment for Nature that people couldn’t tell them apart,” the Atonists, in contrast, like their ancestor Set, form a conflicting relationship with nature. Set “hated agriculture and nature which he saw as soiled dirty grimy etc.” As “the 1st man to shut nature out of himself,” Set calls it discipline” (162). As a result, Set and his descendent Atonists, like the reconstructed Faust in the novel, have no “conscience” and hence no sense of guilt (91). Laws and institutions instigate and cover crimes instead of inhibiting them. The Atonist history starts and is inundated with murdering. Set mutilates Osiris. Vampton murders Abdul. Musclewhite kills Berbelong and Charlotte. “Safecracker” tries to kill Buddy Jackson. The Wallflower Order not only kills Jes Smith, Warren Harding’s Friend, who tries to warn Harding of their conspiracy, but also poisons Harding, who they find has black blood in him. And the Atonist Church “killed millions of people” by “throwing those possessed by demons into dungeons, burning it out of them” (172). Stealing is as common as killing. Moses learns to do the Work and seizes hold of the Text through tricks and lies. American and European museums are “pirate dens” (83) that amass items stolen from countries other than Europe and America under claims that art works are better protected there. American soldiers on arrival in Haiti remove all the money, amounting to $60,000,000, from Haitian banks under the “justifiable” reason that Haitians have to pay “debts” they owed to Americans (133). “Safecracker” steals jazz choreography and wants to turn it into his own Broadway musical one day, even though the dance is, he complains, “Eccentric and individual” (103). Not only are killing and stealing justified but also their condemning of those they kill and steal from is legitimated. Just as Major Biff Musclewhite avidly states before shooting Berbelang, “Judeo-Christian culture, Christianity, Atonism whatever you want to call it” is “the most noteworthy achievements of anybody anywhere in the . . . the . . . whole universe” (114). Jes Grew carriers’ and the Atonits’ attitudes toward nature and diversity and, consequently, their disparate moral aptitudes imply, on the one

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hand, an effective exposure of Westerners’ means of establishing a monolithic order and eliminating differences, and, on the other, an illuminating means of attaining a better state of being. Reed uplifts this latter state of being, represented by LaBas, to a level very close to that of harmony and unity, harmony between human beings and the unity of nature and human beings. Yet Reed’s description of the harmonious interpersonal relationship tends to be limited by Confucian standards of harmony and unity. Reed makes the unity of nature and human beings function as a thriving power for individual subjectivity, which extends itself into the supernatural. Although this supernatural power obtained by people such as LaBas is used to cure people of their diseases and to kill evil-doing people, as LaBas’s father once did, its function is limited to extending the self to the other for the satisfaction of the individual will. The ultimate mystique of New HooDoo, then, lies in the expansion and recreation of the subjectivity into a supernaturally powerful selfhood. Through Confucian eyes, this illuminating self-other relationship is still typically Western, because the unity serves an individualistic purpose and expresses only individual will, and although the self and nature as the other are united and mutually reflected and constituted, the self and other human beings are not. What is endorsed is still the idea of separation and opposition as far as human relationships are concerned. For Confucians, on the contrary, all levels of harmony culminate in the unity of heaven, earth, and human beings, briefly, in the oneness of heaven and human beings, or in the oneness of the Dao (rules) of Heaven and the Dao of Human Beings. As Tang Yi-jie demonstrates, the oneness of heaven and human beings is also expressed as the oneness of the self and the other, and as the oneness of the body and the mind (185). In Tang’s view, passages of “Xi Ci” in the book The Zhou Book of Change offer a philosophical interpretation of these levels of oneness by way of interpreting The Book of Changes, stating that the latter covers the Dao of Heaven, the Dao of Earth, and the Dao of Human Beings. The Dao of Heaven expresses itself as the relationship between Yin and Yang, between the Dao of Earth Gang (hardness) and Rou (suppleness), and between the Dao of Human Beings Ren (benevolence) and Yi (righteousness). However, all the three relationships belong to the universe or the Dao of the Universe (198). The Confucian thinker Zhang Zai from the Song Dynasty says, “The Dao of Heaven as Yin and Yang is the Dao through which all things in the universe come into being and grow. The Dao of Earth as Gang and Rou is the Dao all natural laws follow. The Dao of Human Beings as Ren and Yi is the Dao on which human nature relies” (Collections of Zhang Zai 235). This idea of unity or oneness points out that the relationship between contradictory elements is dialectically interdependent rather than oppositional. The unity of heaven, earth, and

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human beings into the Dao of the Universe expresses itself within the same dialectic relationship between elements within heaven, earth, or human beings and between elements from one entity and those from another. So the unified relationship between heaven and human beings exists and is expressed not only in the material and visible exterior but also within the invisible human interior. The Dao of Human Beings (that is, of the relationship between Ren and Yi) and the Dao of Heaven reflect, express, and contain each other. As Mo Ming-ren and Li Jian-qun observe, eventually, the oneness of heaven and human beings is nothing but the complementariness of the natural being and human behavior, of material necessity and freewill. The ultimate goal of the growth of the universe is realized within this process of complementariness (38–39). Since human behavior and natural necessity are complementary and since the Dao of Heaven is reflected through the Dao of Human Beings both in human nature and in human behavior, the Chinese expression for morality consists of two Chinese characters Dao and De (benevolence, righteousness, virtuousness). As is said in The Doctrine of the Mean, “righteousness is the rule of the Dao of Heaven. Being righteous is the rule of the Dao of Human Beings. A righteous person gets Dao” (The Doctrine of the Mean 148). The Dao of all stays with and within human beings and human affairs and hence is also the Dao of Human Beings obtainable by and carried out through human beings in terms of De. Liu Yu-li thus posits that De means both virtue and internal strength whereas Dao means both the real existence of the rules of heaven and earth and a transcending force that endows us with order and harmony. On the basis of this concept, a human being’s heart is understood as a reflection of heaven, an internal state of Dao, and embodies at the same time internal transcendence; as the Confucian thinker Xu Shen-xi from Han Dynasty puts it, “De is obtainable by being virtuous to others so that others benefit from De, and is obtainable from within so that the person’s own body and mind benefit from it” (Shuo Wen Jie Zi 73). Confucius hence believes, “Dao is with human beings. When human beings want to follow the Dao by staying away from other human beings, they would not make Dao” (The Doctrine of the Mean 113). De in this sense mediates the ultimate transcending Dao, human interior, and the other. Human interior through De both transcends into heaven and extends into the other, mediating the Dao and human reality of existence. De, obtainable only through self-cultivation and self-reflection, leads to positive—that is, harmonious—self-other and heaven-human relationships. Confucius says twice in The Analects, “never treat others the way you don’t treat yourself and never impose on others what you yourself don’t want” (The Analects 143, 197). In Confucius’s eyes, a person

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who is able to take the other into consideration when taking an action is a civilized person, because “a person of integrity judges himself more demandingly than he does others whereas a disrespectable person judges others more demandingly than he does himself” (The Analects 197). Tang Kai-lin and Cao Gang observe that the behavioral subject acting out this idea of the moral movement from the self to the other takes him/herself as the starting point and core and understands the other’s interest and needs by matching the other’s and his/her own. Tang and Cao define this behavioral pattern as one founded on the self as an object of perfection and moral satisfaction, and hence self-cultivation is core to Confucian norms of behavior. This notion of the self is distinct from the individualistic self. While individualism takes the self and the expression and satisfaction of personal will and desire as the goal, the Confucian idea of self-originated behavior takes the self as the starting point—the criterion—and selflessness as the goal (89–90). Just as Joseph Chan has noted, “self-legislation and the radical free expression of the individual’s will, are incompatible with” Confucianism (286). Hogue reads the Atonists’ self-justified actions as a violation of the philosophical principles of such philosophies as those of Thomas M. Scanlon and Emmanuel Lèvinas. Lèvinas’s account of an ethical obligation to the call of the other and Scanlon’s theory of justifiability to others share with Confucianism its conceptions of harmony and positive self-other relationships. In his interview with Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Scanlon says, “friendship, family relations, and the pursuit of intellectual and other forms of human excellence, presuppose relations with others as subjects to whom justification is owed” (76). A wrong action is “one that I could not justify to others on grounds I could expect them to accept” (Scanlon 4) whereas a judgment of right and wrong “is, at the most basic level, thinking about what could be justified to others on grounds that they, if appropriately motivated, could not reasonably reject” (5). To see this justifiability to others is to recognize “human life as valuable, because this principle “connects the sphere of value, or ‘the good,’ with ‘what we owe each other’ in a way that reduces the apparent conflict between them” (8) and “accounts for the distinctive normative force of moral wrongness” (5). This goal of reducing conflicts reiterates the Confucian goal of harmony and unity. Scanlon intends his idea of justifiability to others to account for duties to others “such as the duties not to kill and harm, duties to aid, duties not to manipulate others, and obligations to keep the assurances we have given them” (Herlinde Pauer-Studer 80). Although Confucian philosophy of moral nobility is much less analytical and concrete, what Scanlon aims to achieve is exactly what Confucius undertakes to realize— resolution of conflicts through morally based self-other relationships. Yet

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Scanlon’s and Confucian approaches to a positive self-other relationship are different. Scanlon’s is still based on the separation of the self and the other, while, for Confucian thinkers, morality or virtue is obtainable not as a result of justifiability to other fellow human beings only. What leads to a virtuous state of being is the internal’s comprehension and containment of the external by way of the internal because the external is communicable to and exists within the internal through the internal’s intuition and De. This external, however, means much more than other fellow human beings. It is, in fact, part of what Confucians call Dao, which includes other human beings. Because of this crucial difference, Jes Grew carriers’ supernatural power, as depicted by Reed, is different in nature from the limitless power as conceptualized in Confucian thoughts. Liu Yu-li argues that since the Confucian notion of morality is not imposed on the individual by heaven but is internal to the individual, this internal is limitless. On the one hand, this internal is the ethical foundation that opens a way to the field of moral knowledge. On the other, it is a metaphysical basis that opens a way to the intelligible world. According to Liu, for ancient Confucians, every person possesses not only a perceptually intuitive ability but also an intellectually perceptive ability. That is why every person has the potential to comprehend Dao and become a sage. The goal for the limitless internal to achieve is to be a realistic person of Dao, who acts Dao to others so that social harmony can be realized, not to be an avenger or an exerciser of supernatural physical power. Seen this way, Reed’s alternative paradigm tends in nature to be Western. Despite this crucial distinction, Reed’s Jes Grew seems, in many ways, the Confucian Dao Africanized. Just as Dao is understood as existent both inside and outside a human being and as endless being itself, so is Jes Grew seen as an endless and limitless life force. Helen Lock reads, “Jes Grew is not only a phenomenon, a state of being—it is also a living state of organism, becoming” (72), just as LaBas says, “Jes Grew has no end and no beginning” and “Jes Grew is life” (204). Everybody may carry Jes Grew, which “knows no class no race no consciousness” and “is self-propagating” and might hit anybody (5). Like Dao, Jes Grew exists within a human being and can be expressed and defined only through human behavior. And like Dao, Jes Grew unites nature and human beings into oneness; while it gives its carriers internal power, its carriers also reflect nature’s force. Also like Dao, Jes Grew is not to be learned but intuitively perceived, felt, experienced, and identified. In Confucianism, only those who are righteous would be able to seize upon Dao within their own hearts and express it by acting Dao and achieving De, whereas those who are not won’t be able to touch and act Dao even though it is available to and within them. Osiris and Moses exemplify this contrast. Osiris “had developed such a fondness

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and attachment for Nature that people couldn’t tell them apart” (166) and “taught people to permit nature to speak and dance through them” (165). The Osirian orchestras “play a music that was influenced by the stars” (175). In contrast to Osiris, Set, “the 1st man to shut nature out of himself” (162) and to hate agriculture and nature, is self-centered, egoistic, and murderous. Like Set, Moses obtains the Text and learns to do the Work but is never able to feel it inside himself and the Work has never become part of himself. The Text, therefore, does not make his music or dance any better: “Moses began to play Jethro’s songs but they weren’t coming across like the way they had at the old man’s fireplace,” sounding “flat, weak, deprived of the lowdown rhythms that Jethro had brought to them” (183); “Moses then played the songs of Jethro with the words but his voice sounded feigned, his mimic of Jethro’s dialect phony” (182). As Donald L. Hoffman comments, “opposed to the healing houngan, Moses becomes the first bokor, the first deceitful sorcerer, the first priest to combine his ability to channel the power of the gods with a lack of respect for either the divinities or the worshippers he pretends to serve” (1246). Moses would not know what is wrong. And he wouldn’t, because he wouldn’t do what the Haitian houngan Benoit Battraville tells Nathan Brown to do in order to catch Jes Grew: “I am saying Open-Up-ToRight-Here and then you will have something coming from your experience that the whole world will admire and need” (152). Knowing by opening up and experiencing is central to Confucian philosophies for the construction of a society into harmony. When asked by a student why as a teacher he doesn’t want to say anything at that very moment of lecturing, Confucius answers, “Doesn’t heaven say anything? The four seasons go as usual and all things grow as usual. Does heaven say anything?” (The Analects 222). Dao is not known through any linguistic medium. As is stated in The Zhou Book of Change, “writing cannot express all ideas and language cannot express all feelings. Even so, can’t the ideas of a sage be unseen and unknown?” (222). In Mumbo Jumbo, Jes Grew does have a text. But Abdul burns the text. It is reasonable to understand, as does Gates, that the destruction of the text derives from Abdul’s ignorance of the nature of Jes Grew (226). However, it is also possible to say that Reed destroys the Text, because he maintains the idea that truth may not be delivered through language. For Lock, the absence of the Text reversely symbolizes Reed’s idea that written words are fixed, closed, and “petrified” (71). As Black Herman says to LaBas, even if “we were dumped here on our own without the Book to tell us who the loas are, what we call spirits were,” “what it boils down to, LaBas, is intent.” He continues, “if your heart’s there, man, that 1/2 the thing about The Work” (130). Indeed, Dao is not manifested through language and yet it is not totally transcendent. It exists within human beings and yet is obtainable

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and expressed through human beings’ direct experiences with nature in which Dao exists. When obtained, the internal Dao will then be manifested and exteriorized through human characters and behaviors. That is why, Confucius says, “intelligent people love and are close to natural waters and people of Ren (benevolence) love and are close to mountains” (The Analects 70). Only when human beings and nature become one do human beings aquire qualities of waters and mountains such as the adaptability and flexibility of waters, and the permanency and immutability of mountains. Only when they possess these qualities can Dao manifest itself to them and through them and only then do they know. Such conceptualizations of knowing are the other side of the idea of the oneness of heaven and humanity, of nature and humanity. Zhu Xi brings together this idea of knowing, the idea of the oneness of heaven and human beings, and the idea of harmony and heterogeneity, when he says, “between heaven and earth, things and beings are many and different. But there is only one li (principle). Everything may have a li but all li’s are manifestations of that one li.” “Know the One li (law) so that one can be Ren (benevolent) and let others share it with oneself. Know the differences so that one can be Yi (righteous) and love others by starting to love the ones related to oneself” (Mengzi Huo Wen Zhuan Yao 1: 7). Hogue says, “although Reed makes the African American Jes Grew’s host in the United States, he makes it quite clear that Jes Grew is not essentially African American. It exists everywhere; it is a part of everyone’s history” (156). In this sense, Jes Grew is a material part of the history of Confucianism whereas Confucianism is also a philosophical part of Jes Grew. Creating this life force, Reed, by taking a postmodern critical stance toward the Western paradigm of modernity, encounters the core of the Confucian concept of heterogeneity. However, to the extent that Reed’s novel repeats Western logics of separation and opposition, he departs from Confucianism. To the extent that a discourse of subversion is not available in Confucianism, and that, as Joseph Chan has said, Confucian conceptions of harmony and unity do not “provide a secure justification for civil liberties” (Chan 293), Confucianism departs from Reed. But Confucianism, in Fred Dallmayr’s evaluation, is neither “an ethics of abstract-universal rules nor a form of relativism” nor “conventionalism.” Because of this, its potential as an ongoing project will always translate it into a constructive epistemological and hermeneutic tool or solution to contemporary problems. Chan is not alone when he claims that, correctly interpreted, “Confucianism can provide a corrective, in the political domain, to the tendency of Western liberalism to accentuate the pursuit of self-interest (of individuals and groups) at the expense of a shared concern with the common good” (209). At the same time, since Reed’s Mumbo

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Jumbo also shows African American literature as open and flexible, it will also fill in the absences in Confucianism. Works Cited Anderson, Crystal S. “Racial Discourse and Black-Japanese Dynamics in Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring.” MELUS 29, 3/4 (2004): 379–96. Bezner, Kevin, and Ishmael Reed. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed.” Mississippi Review 20, 1/2 (1991): 110–19. Chan, Joseph. “Moral Autonomy, Civil Liberties, and Confucianism.” Philosophy East and West 52, 3 (2002): 281–310. Dallmayr, Fred. “Tradition, Modernity, and Confucianism.” Human Studies 16, 1/2 (1993): 203–11. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Dubey, Madhu. “Contemporary African American Fiction and the Politics of Postmodernism.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 35, 2/3 (2002): 151–68. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. Thinking Through Confucius. Albany: State U of New York P, 1987. Hanchard, Michael George. “Black Transnationalism, Africana Studies, and the 21st Century.” Journal of Black Studies 35, 2 (2004): 139–53. Hoffman, Donald L. “A Darker Shade of Grail: Questing at the Crossroads in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.” Callaloo 17, 4 (1994): 1245–56. Hogue, W. Lawrence. “Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and the African American Narrative: Major’s Reflex, Morrison’s Jazz, and Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35, 2/3 (2002): 169–92. ———. Postmodern American Literature and Its Other. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. Jensen, Lionel M. Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. Jessee, Sharon. “Ishmael Reed’s Multi-Culture: The Production of Cultural Perspective.” MELUS 13, 3/4 (1986): 5–14. Lock, Helen. “ ‘A Man’s Story Is His Gris-gris’: Ishmael Reed’s Neo-Voodoo Aesthetic and African-American Tradition.” South Central Review 10, 1 (1993: 67–77). McKay, Nellie Y. “Guest Column: Naming the Problem That Led to the Question ‘Who Shall Teach African American Literature?’; Or, Are We Ready to Disband the Wheatley Court?” PMLA 113, 3 (1998): 359–69. Pauer-Studer, Herlinde. “Contractualism and What We Owe to Each Other.” Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 70–89 Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Atheneum, 1972. Scanlon, Thomas M. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Swope, Richard. “Crossing Western Space, or the HooDoo Detective on the Boundary in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.” African American Review 36, 4 (2002): 611–28.

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ishmael reed’s mumbo jumbo / 175 Weber, Max. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Trans. and Ed. Hans H. Gerth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951.

Works in Chinese published in China Chen, Zhi-liang, and Yu Nai-zhong. “A Return of the Postmodern Philosophies to Traditional Chinese Philosophies.” Journal of Humanities 3(2008): 14–18. Cheng, Zhi-hua. “A Dialogue between Postmodernism and Confucianism.” Academic Monthly: 3(2005): 74–79. Liang Yan-cheng. “Western Postmodernism and China’s Confucian Philosophy.” Social Science Front Monthly 2 (1994): 82–93. Liu Yu-li. “The Unity of Rule and Virtue: A Critique of a Supposed Parallel between Confucian Ethics and Virtue Ethics.” Qilu Journal 186. 3 (2005): 27–33. Mo Ming-ren, and Li Jian-qun. “Exterior Transcendence and Interior Transcendence: Differences and Convergences between Chinese and Western Views of Beliefs Seen From Rosenzweig’s Religious Philosophy.” World Philosophy 4 (2002): 27–41. Tang Kai-lin, and Cao Gang. Re-interpretations of Tradition: Evaluations of the Contemporary Values of Confucian Thoughts. Shanghai, P. R. China: East China Normal UP, 2000. Tang Yi-jie. The New Axial Age and China’s Cultural Construction. Nanchang, P. R. China: Jiangxi People’s Press, 2007.

Confucian Classics in Chinese The Analects. Modern Chinese Translation and Notes. Cheng Chang-ming. Tai Yuan, P. R. China: Shuhai Press, 2001. Collections of Zhang Zai. By Zhang Zai. Beijing, P. R. China: Zhonghua Book Company, 1978. The Doctrine of the Mean; The Great Learning. Modern Chinese Translation and Notes. Liang Hai-ming. Taiyuan: Shuhai Press, 2001. Guo Yu. Modern Chinese Translation and Notes. Huang Yong-tang. Guizhou, P. R. China: Guizhou People’s Press, 2009. Mengzi Huo Wen Zhuan Yao. By Zhu Xi. Ed. Tang Song. 3 vols. Beijing, P. R. China: Beijing Library Press, 2004. Shuo Wen Jie Zi. Notes. Su Bao-rong. Xi’an, P. R. China: Shaanxi People’s Press, 2000. Zuo Zhuan. Modern Chinese Translation and Notes. Ye Nong. Guang Zhou, P. R. China: Yangcheng Press, 2007. The Zhou Book of Change. Chief ed. Tang Ming-bang. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1995.

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Ch a p t e r Ni n e “A Be au t i f u l Bl ac k Bu t t e r f ly”: Ea st e r n A e st h e t ic s a n d Po st mode r n ism i n Ish m a e l R e ed’s Ja pa n e se by Spr i ng Preston Park Cooper

Zen concepts and Eastern aesthetics are certainly not strangers to postmodern African American fiction. One may consider Rutherford Calhoun’s encounter with the god in the hold of the ship in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, or Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, in which the main character is an elevator operator/detective who ascribes to the belief that the best way to do her job is by using pure intuition. Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring uses an invasion of Eastern thought and philosophy onto a California college campus to explore issues of racial politics and national identity. Vital to understanding Reed’s purposes are the ways in which Reed inserts Zen philosophy and aesthetics into the book and the roles of certain characters. A definition of Zen involves certain basic characteristics of spiritual perspective. Enlightenment is something that Zen Buddhism teaches can be attained by the individual on his or her own, through contemplation of the needlessness of the mental and cultural strictures of the world. Enlightenment is a state that is natural to all, if only one can overcome the limits that the world naturally imposes on one’s perception. In Zen, material concerns and worries about the present or future are thought to be pointless. Achieving this state of enlightenment requires strong selfdiscipline and self-reliance. In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard rejects what he terms “metanarratives” (“grand” or “super” narratives), such as Christianity, Marxism, and the myth of scientific progress, because they purport to explain the world in ways that are, in fact, not “true” but arbitrary,

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intolerant of difference, and always in the service of one or another vested interest seeking to gain or retain power. Lyotard suggests that we live in a time when such narratives are no longer even tenable, if only because it is no longer possible to represent the majority in any given time or place as subscribing to a single set of beliefs. This being the case, argues Lyotard, the contemporary or “postmodern” world is left to pledge allegiance to what he calls “mininarratives” or “micro narratives”: provisional, temporary, contingent “explanations of things.” Lyotard argues that the postmodern seeks to present the unpresentable, and that its writers are working without the normal rules in order to determine the rules of “what will have been done” (Lyotard 81). The way that certain African American novelists such as Reed use postmodern narrative techniques to create local narratives and to tear away racist metanarratives shares much in common with the Zen Buddhist concept of seeking the state of mu, or nothingness, thus enabling one to see things, and in this case people and/or institutions, in the state of satori, that is, with a new meaning that was not apparent before due to the limitations of the viewer. Zen teaches that such great truths of the world, located within the soul, cannot be spoken or written. For this purpose, Zen teachers such as Bodhidharma have used koans, which are questions, stories, or sayings designed to shock one’s awareness into the state of enlightened perception. In contemporary U.S. society, perhaps no group has had as much reason to be suspicious of national grand narratives—of, for instance, the American Dream, our myths of the self-made man, our conviction that everyone possesses inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—as have African Americans. It is perhaps no accident that several critically acclaimed and often quite popular African American novelists have written books that take dismissive aim at the grand narratives that American culture has subscribed to and believed in (or has pretended to), novels that replace such myths with provisional, temporary, contingent explanations of things. In some of Reed’s work there is an important boundary that is weakened: the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. A statement in nonfiction is suspect. Facts and other bits of supporting evidence can be changed, warped, interpreted, obscured. However, a story that does not demand that it be taken seriously is also less likely to activate natural resistance to such a demand. As long as a reader accepts that a story is fiction, he or she is more likely to accept any parts of it that happen to be true, or not true, on equal terms. The difficulty comes after one has finished the story and must, like waking from a dream, sort out which parts of it had connection to and meaning in reality and which had none.

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In Japanese by Spring, Reed makes himself into a character in the novel. His part in the novel is large enough to make him an important character, but certainly not the main character; this role falls unquestionably upon Chappie Puttbutt. Reed-as-character has a little interaction with Puttbutt, but he is not obsessed with Puttbutt or Puttbutt’s activities or Puttbutt’s world. He does not narrate the story in order to give us insight into Puttbutt’s character, or into that of any other major character. Reedas-character has a life and interests of his own. He is a third-person character like any other in the novel, and like any other, we see him through the filtration of the omniscient narrator. The goal of this narrative strategy is to persuade the reader to accept Reed’s point of view, his argument that the racial and especially cultural status quo of the United States is not only flawed but not even as strong as it appears. By making himself into a character in the novel, Reed is treating reality itself—the reader’s own reality, which contains author Ishmael Reed—as just another text to be drawn upon and used as it pleases him in postmodern fashion. In Reed’s work, all politics and indeed economics are almost always about race and— especially—culture. The world of the exotic—the concept of the exotic—is played with in Japanese by Spring to become a sort of occult, mysterious, otherworldly signifier in itself. Often, for example, Reed dismisses the idea that African Americans would be content and treated as equals if only they would accept American metanarratives such as Christianity, and/or the hegemonically approved version of American history. In his book Masters of the Drum: Black Lit/Oratures Across the Continuum, Robert Elliot Fox enforces the link between the importance of works such as Reed’s and narrative choices: some critics have accused Alice Walker’s The Color Purple of being historically inaccurate, when “some self-appointed guardians of black reality seem to misunderstand that a novel, a work of fiction, has its own particular truth” (26). Thus Fox enforces and encourages the split between nonfiction and fiction and approves of the power of fiction. Fiction can be valid even if it plays postmodernly with reality. Certainly Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian argue that Japan sees itself as quite postmodern when they write that the description of postmodernism . . . began to fit the Japanese conditions remarkably well, as if the term were coined specifically for Japanese society. The dispersal and demise of modern subjectivity, as talked about by Barthes, Foucault, and many others, have long been evident in Japan, where intellectuals have chronically complained in fact about the absence of selfhood. The postmodern erasure of historicity—as Jean-François Lyotard reflects–is the stuff of Japanese nativist religion (shintoism) in which ritual bathing is intended to cleanse the whole past alongside the evil residues from the past . . . Logocentricity appears to be

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180 / preston park cooper one crime Japan is scarcely guilty of: so much so that Karatani Ko¯jin and Asada Akira could boast to Derrida that there is no need for deconstruction as there has never been a construct in Japan. (148)

It seems quite natural that Reed would use Japanese culture as a tool, particularly when he shows that it should not be stereotyped any more than should American culture. Japanese by Spring is, for the most part, a very American book in its analytical scope. America is the specific milieu of the novel. In the book, the sinister world that invades is all of the American fears about the power of Japan, if not the cultural power and alien “otherness” of Asia in general, made manifest in the community of a small college in California, Jack London College. It is this Eastern world that is the alien invading culture in Japanese by Spring. Belief systems concerning reality clash and collide in Japanese by Spring. The reader comes to the novel with certain expectations about modern American social reality. The world of Charlie Puttbutt is initially presented as a world in which an individual can work his or her way up the ladder of American life by going along, not causing trouble, repressing outrage, and doing whatever is needed to work with others and to get along and toe the line of the most powerful. This perception of the rules of social reality is not enough for Puttbutt to get what he wants because there is a clash between who he is, a minority, and who is in power, namely the old traditionalists, often referred to by the novel as the Miltonians, for their worship of the work of John Milton as well as the symbolic nature of Milton as an apologist for powerful men. Puttbutt is unsuccessful in getting along with those in power because of his race, and also partially because he has outraged those on the side of the oppressed, who do have a little power. Puttbutt wants to win but cannot see victory against the oppressed or for the oppressors. It is interesting to note that Reed’s works seldom if ever represent African Americans as having no power and Caucasians or anyone else having total, unchallenged power. Reed not only tends to represent the oppressed groups in his novels as having a somewhat powerful minority but also sometimes shows that they can be misguided or confused as well, just not as misguided or confused as the hegemonic majority. He certainly does so with Japanese by Spring. Into this struggle comes an equalizing force: the menace of the alien culture and economic power of the Japanese, who appreciate, to a far greater degree than at least the Miltonians, anyone who follows them as loyally as does Puttbutt. The Japanese buyout of the college turns the tables against both the American oppressed and the American oppressors. All factions are seen as secondary next to the wider-reaching global perspective of

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the buyers. The European-based culture, formerly the majority, has been forced into equal status with African studies and gender studies. As someone open to new cultures, Puttbutt is seen as the perfect figurehead representative of the college’s new Japanese masters. Thus, the novel offers many opportunities for Puttbutt to humble the faculty, staff, and students who did indeed wrong him. Puttbutt takes advantage of a number of these opportunities, and this has a certain amusement value for the reader for sometime, as it certainly does, for quite a while, for Puttbutt himself. Reed, however, does not encourage the reader in taking pleasure in this reversal of fortunes. The narration often, very subtly, reminds the reader that the reader should really be as uncomfortable with Puttbutt’s revenge as the reader was with Puttbutt’s initial frustration and humiliation. The reader is allowed to be comfortable rooting for almost no one in the novel, not even, fully, Reed-as-character. Reed-as-character does not really fight or strive or rail against anything in the novel, he simply disapproves of some events and advises others against certain spiritually negative courses of action. For an important character, he never has, unlike Puttbutt, enough power to change anything by himself to make the reader root for him. He is simply an oracle who is not specifically assigned to anyone, a Chorus who is not involved enough in what the reader thinks of as the novel’s main event—that is, a Chorus. Reed is also sometimes surprisingly honest in his self-portrayal and goes so far as to engage a sense of ironic, humorous play, as in this parodic self-deprecation: “He sometimes went around with a tacky beard in order to appear to be a man of the people” (191). In any event, the political status quo of the American college is disrupted and, through the metonymic person of Puttbutt, reversed. Many of the racist metanarratives about the power of the Miltonians or about the role and/or power of the American college in general are proven not so much to be wrong as to be simply no longer applicable to the reality of Puttbutt’s institution, to his short-lived delight. However, just as Reed does not allow comforting single-minded simplicity in the revenge fantasy of Puttbutt, he also does not keep his own status quo. The reader’s most natural expectation is that the novel will end as all of the Americans at the college unite against their common alien foe and rebel, and that afterward things will return to normal, but with people having better understanding of one another and a new willingness to compromise on all sides. The college, of course, may be easily seen as a microcosm of the country. Reed again defies reader expectations. The reader may accept the Yellow Peril stereotype of the evil, crafty, inscrutable Japanese who just want revenge upon the world for their defeat during World War II as an over-the-top allegory required for the sort of simple unification expected.

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Japanese by Spring, however, is not an allegory. It is revealed that the buyers of the college should not be seen as representing Japan as a whole in any way, that they are a strange fanatical splinter cult that has survived all these years quite out of accordance with actual Japanese culture. When this is understood, the reader feels quite clear about the plot, but the cultural and even moral expectations become murkier. Suddenly it is no longer a matter of fish uniting to drive a larger fish out of their section of pond. The level of metaphor is forced to recede in the mind of the reader. In the end, the buyers of the college do not represent Japan, they do not represent cosmic evil, they do not represent American fear of Japanese economic power. At that point, it is difficult to see them as representing much more than what they are, which is yet another cultural fragment that, in its rage and social conditioning, lashes out amongst others and wastes its energy on fighting those that have, statistically, only a very small amount of power to affect it even on a cultural level. A group of believers in certain metanarratives that are so dated that they have been abandoned by their own cultural majority have tried to undermine American metanarratives by allying with the sort of repressed power that Puttbutt wishes to represent. This, Reed is suggesting, is what happens when one believes one’s own metanarratives. However, Puttbutt’s beliefs are as confused as those of the splinter cult. Mostly because of a speech that Puttbutt’s fleeing Japanese superior gives him, and partially from the way Puttbutt’s military parents discuss the cult, the reader is actually instilled with a little pity for the warlike cult and its members, being just another example of a sick offshoot of a national culture such as we have in America. When put into perspective by the twin complexes of the military and the business world, the cult seems pathetic rather than frightening in its lust for regaining glories lost five decades ago. The world has, in great part, moved on, as shown by Puttbutt’s grandfather’s connection to the cult. One can understand and feel sorry for the grandfather, who desires success and freedom via merit rather than the family’s preference for endless political missions. These missions are geopolitical in the case of Puttbutt’s parents. Although the reader is fairly convinced by the novel that in America the race of one’s parents can hold one back, Puttbutt’s parents nonetheless seem to have the greatest mastery over the truest interpretation of their world’s reality. Reed thus plays with American interpretations of political realities and fears of otherness and exoticness. Japanese by Spring demonstrates how Americans’ hatreds and fears generate stereotypes and enforce oppressive metanarratives and limit their reactions and behaviors. The reader may ask himself or herself at the novel’s close, What did I expect? Was I supposed to have been fooled by the Japanese stereotypes? Did I expect that the faculty’s rebellion would simply frighten the buyers into reversing all

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their changes and handing the school back for free? After all, the Japanese buyers made a legitimate purchase. A college is a business like any other. Did I expect that there would be a simple ending? The novel is full of such questions and details that seem unsatisfying if one holds to predictable expectations of a satisfying conclusion. It is the way Reed prefers to create, but it also underscores the fact that our political reality is not given to easy solutions. The above examinations of Japanese by Spring were necessary in order to understand the nature of the metanarratives it challenges. This is arguably Reed’s most openly political novel. The metanarratives that this novel challenges are often in conflict with one another, for example, the assertion “While African Americans are America’s friends, Japanese culture is the enemy” clashes with the belief that “Japanese culture is purely peaceful and meditative.” It is apparently important to Reed to set up Japan as a country that is very conflicted and sometimes confused in regard to race and prejudice, just like the United States. Japanese by Spring has quite a few metanarratives on the list of those it challenges, such as “Asian and African American cultures have nothing in common, and should have nothing to do with one another”; “The racial and especially cultural status quo of the United States is not flawed but is in fact quite strong”; “One can work one’s way up the ladder of American life by going along, not causing trouble, repressing outrage, and doing whatever is needed to work with others and get along and follow the lead of the most powerful”; “Morally, might does and should make right.” By combining some of the reality of his own identity and persona with that of his fiction, Reed strengthens and anchors the power of this local narrative. If the author is real within and without the bounds of the fictional world, the politics of the real world must be real in the fiction–but in the fiction, Reed can play with them as he likes. It is a typically magical-logic, Neo-HooDoo solution to a real-world political problem: using the law of similars, which says that like affects like, Reed applies his literary HooDoo on a problem in a microcosm in order to affect the similar problems of the macrocosm. At about the same time as Japanese by Spring was published, Reed made a link, on the basis of usefulness, between Zen Buddhism and Voodoo in his essay “American Poetry: Is There a Center?” While discussing the importance of Boulder, Colorado to American Poetry, Reed writes of an encounter, reported in the 1972 book Our Time, between Rinpoche and an old Zen master who met and talked about the shape an American Buddhism would take. They opened a mental hospital in upstate New York. Millions of Americans

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184 / preston park cooper are “depressed,” that unmysterious word they created to describe what the old folks used to describe as a “haunt ridin’ you” or “death on your back” or “bad load in your head.” TM [transcendental meditation] may be one way of dealing with the increasing madness occurring in highly technological societies. It was almost as if the devil had become immune to the dominant psychiatric techniques of the last century. Buddhism, Voodoo, and other religions might provide some answers. (Reed 264–65)

Reed immediately goes on to approve of Rinpoche’s idea of shedding the stereotypical trappings of “the beards and long hair” so as to “recruit some of the power elite” (265). Clearly, the concept of adapting ways of thinking “foreign” to the brain patterns American culture normally uses is interesting to Reed, and it shows that he wishes to heal what he sees as diseases of the American culture just as religious ceremonies and rituals throughout the world seek to put right that which is out of balance. Reed names Puttbutt’s college “Jack London College,” making it, initially, a college that idolizes a man who hated and feared both the races of Asia, particularly the Chinese, and the African races, grouping them all into the category of “Third World People” (9). This is one of the central tenets of Japanese by Spring: many Americans have a similar hate and fear that started out of similar reasons, so Reed chooses—since Japan and China were, in 1992 when the novel was published, quite the fearsome economic powers—to reverse the typical situation and enforce Eastern ideals, philosophies, and aesthetics. On one level, at one point in the book, this produces quite an improvement. By chapter 35, “the Jack London campus is now peaceful. The student lounge, which had been a rowdy playpen for the most privileged youth in the world, was now an additional reading room” (135). The bars and restaurants are closed down, and alcoholism decreases. Everywhere on the campus “there was silence and decorum. Sororities and fraternities were closed. In their place were friendship clubs where students would meet under the supervision of chaperons and discuss Nihon-no art and culture” (135). Reed knows that there is much to admire about Japanese culture, but he increases the connection between the new culture of the college and America’s more openly racist past. The college is hardly a multicultural paradise. Puttbutt’s superior makes various racist statements about laziness, stupidity, and even the brain size of Americans. Americans are increasingly threatened with job loss, and even those of Asian American decent are not trusted by the new cultural leaders. The new culture wants to replace entirely, and not embrace or accept. But Reed does not allow expectations to stand. Consider, for example, the student who first is the greatest torturer of Puttbutt but then changes and becomes his slave: servile, meek, and

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thoughtful. Puttbutt never has a huge change of heart and “sets free” this student. Nor does the student, once the Japanese cult loses control of the college, return to his cruel ways, in any sort of Clockwork Orange celebration of individuality. Nor does Puttbutt become, in his revenge, increasingly cruel, inhuman, and heartless. The delight he takes in the humiliations of faculty members who still desire their jobs is merely very human, not really inhuman. As in real life, there are many inconsistencies. Some faculty members who stay on do hate Puttbutt. One man whom Puttbutt assigns to learn the African language of Yoruba finds it spiritually liberating and throws himself into it. Although he is not so stupid as to be exactly grateful to Puttbutt, this teacher takes his experience and gets something truly worthwhile out of it and improves as a person. He is not, of course, a major character. Near the end he serves as a far better oracular Chorus of wisdom than Reed-as-character does, but no one really listens to him, and so his wisdom is around for only one scene. Reed strives, in all possible ways, for realism of characterization. Very little is done by wholes in the novel; there are extremely few absolutes. The novel defies expectation by being, within the conventions of a nonexperimental novel, extremely un-novel-like. The reader would be more than ready to forgive stereotypes and formulae. A stereotype is, after all, a gross generalization of uninformed expectation. Reed gives only a few, and then he deflates them as well. The true antagonist of the novel is closedmindedness, and even that is not an absolute; the oppression of Puttbutt or of his parents or his grandfather is not an illusion. It is a reality. However, that does not mean that Puttbutt and his parents do not feel that they should work in spite of it and rise above it for the greatest good. There is a famous story about the great Taoist master Chuang Tzu who once dreamed that he was a butterfly. The dream was so real, Chuang Tzu questioned, on awakening, his assurance of which reality was the true reality, butterfly or man. Reed, however, with his magical literary philosophy of Neo-Hoodooism, is a man and writes a fiction of himself as seemingly the same man. He uses the power of the unreal to affect reality. A very strong hint that Reed is both aware of the butterfly story and using its concept actively comes with the last line of the book: “Just then a beautiful black butterfly with yellow spots collided with his chin and flew away” (225). Reed suggests, playfully as ever, that now it is time for the reader to awaken and wonder at what is real and valid and at what is unreal and false. Reed’s style has slowly evolved over the years from a love of offering many characters to be followed and a certain wild experimentalism in form to a playfulness and fascination with global, instead of just American, mythology and satire, to, finally, a tighter focus on a number of important

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cast members and a desire to communicate the importance of the big picture, of spiritual growth on the individual and national levels rather than the opposition of good versus bad. Reed’s work is postmodern, but as an established author comfortable in his style and his narrative skill and/or power, he strives in this novel for more subtle effects than in the past, and his philosophy has evolved as well. The mystery revealed at the end of Japanese by Spring shows the key moment to the understanding of Puttbutt’s character, and one might have very well missed its importance had Reed not so clearly meant it to be what occupies our thoughts at the end of the novel, albeit minus Reed’s epilogue. It is revealed that, during his years attending college, Puttbutt had an affair with the Japanese wife of his teacher, an affair that ended in the samurai-like murder/suicide of the teacher and his wife. The young Puttbutt changes his nature from that moment on, overcome by the knowledge that the combative natures of himself and the other man robbed Puttbutt and the world of the beauty and pleasure of the wife’s existence. Part of what made Puttbutt special was his open-mindedness in being able to so appreciate the importance of the wife’s exterior and interior beauty. His flaw in the rest of his life after this event is that he destroys himself in his quest to change himself into a non-combative being. His quest fails, but even then, Puttbutt remains out of balance whenever faced with a conflict. Unlike his parents, Puttbutt does not know when or whom to fight nor when or with whom to make peace. Puttbutt’s mother demonstrates this ability in herself when, after being captured during a mission to assassinate a despotic leader, she spends several years with her captors, using the power of her personality to wear them down into new, changed people. Reed-as-character demonstrates this knowledge or wisdom regarding when to confront and when to make peace when he is rude to the white captain of industry who visits him. Reed-as-character does this in order to make the businessman understand that in the long run it will be more beneficial commercially to create greater opportunity and to play fair with his American workers, to build up the oppressed persons of America, instead of wasting money trying to keep them in check. When potential students resist new ways of thinking, Zen teachers (again, such as Bodhidharma) often exhibit an immovable, long-lasting determination to force the students to see that there can be no compromise regarding the perceptual way forward. Japanese by Spring is a novel about political power, but underlying the examinations of political power is the idea that the wielding of such power can come only when one is in balance in regard to one’s own power. The novel’s title is very intentionally humorous and yet telling as well. Puttbutt hopes to be Japanese by spring, a sort of pun of meaning

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created by dropping an actual stated verb as in, for example, “to learn Japanese by spring.” So from one perspective, this is ridiculous— Puttbutt is not Japanese and cannot become so. However, the desire could also be said to be about mastering the ability of seeing the world from the Japanese perspective, or, rather, from the perspective that comes with a Zen-like proper understanding of personal power and the balance this perspective provides. Puttbutt wants the power outright, but his unresolved grief is an obstacle. His parents and Reed-as- character are better examples. An important factor in understanding the postmodern African American novel is that now, in the postmodern era, the European American system has grown so out of control that it has had an unfortunate result: in the postmodern world of politically correct equalization, most African Americans and most Anglo-Americans often feel quite powerless in the face of the out-of-control system. To borrow one of the most powerful metaphors from Deleuze and Guattari’s work A Thousand Plateaus, the cities have grown so large and so structured that they have left very little wilderness in which the rhizomal resistance might thrive. Any rhizomal fringe resistance is generally forced to leech power away from the system within the system: there is very little periphery remaining save for spots where the system has already happened to have crumbled and corrupted from the inside. Thusly is the protagonist of Reed’s Japanese by Spring trapped in the global-yet-unique system of Reed’s own California, in which racial as well as personal prejudices, like the complex systems of power, are indeed so complex that the main character is never sure for long whether he has attained or lost power. Japanese by Spring’s emphasis upon Eastern aesthetics, particularly those involving religion, are tied to power—to coping with it, to coping with the lack of it, to coping with life, to seeing things from new perspectives. Reed seeks to destroy all aspects of American culture that exist as a result of cultural perspectives created by racist metanarratives. He wishes to replace the old racial viewpoints with new nonracial ones, hoping to bring spiritual inspiration from his groundbreaking examples of effort. Unfortunately, replacing one cultural referent with another comes neither quickly nor en masse. Still, one can see that Reed’s philosophy of Neo-HooDoo art is well titled. The New HooDoo involves hexing oppressive metanarratives so that their power is drained away. It uses a new way, indeed the very power of newness, of the unexpected, to undermine all that tries to maintain an oppressive status quo in American culture and literature. Through literary example, through satire and mockery, but also, often, by juxtaposing one system with another, Reed’s works weaken and steal, in the cultural tradition of the trickster, the power from a system that he finds racist and in

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need of treatment. However, in another way—a way that Reed very clearly hints he has in mind—Reed can be seen to offer, in Japanese by Spring, local narratives as koans that seek to shock the reader out of his or her complacent acceptance of the limiting metanarratives that obscure a more enlightened viewpoint. Having said all of this, I consider one important question: What dream is Reed talking about when he refers, through his koan of the beautiful black and yellow butterfly, to a dream and a reality? Is it the fictional world or the real world? It seems an over-obvious interpretation that Reed, as author or as character or as both, is suggesting that the reader “wake up” out of the fictional “dream” and pursue the opportunities for fighting metanarratives in the real world just as Reed uses the fictional world of the novel to do so (why else, in such an interpretation, would it be suggested that one awake?). It also seems preachy, which Reed (as author and as character) goes to great pains to avoid. I suggest two other dreams to which Reed may be referring. One might be the metanarrative of the American Dream, but this, like other aspects of the aforementioned interpretation, seems downbeat, when the symbolism of the butterfly seems to carry the opposite connotation. There is, however, another Dream, which is fully fledged in the world of African American literature: Langston Hughes’ dream that, when deferred, is really a dream that is denied. Hughes’ concept as stated provided Lorraine Hansberry with direct inspiration for her play A Raisin in the Sun, but it is also implicit in the speech of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech—whereas Richard Wright turned the concept on its head in his novel The Long Dream. The Dream in question is the dream of African American equality, which Wright darkly reverses in commenting on the nightmarish quality of the world of racist Mississippi in which a man of color is not treated as a human being. The coin simply has two sides: the unreality of past (and usually present) inequality, and the beautiful-but-asyet-missing reality of the future world in which one imagines that equality may be attained. Japanese by Spring does not pose the question of “is this real/unreal” nor “is this solvable/unsolvable,” but of “we must determine and question what is real and what matters” and “we must question and determine what is solvable or impossible to solve.” It is true that this question does not emphasize progress. But there is still a desire for progress, given birth by the righteousness of frustration with all the American metanarratives that suggest that equality is a natural state for all citizens. If reality cannot deliver the equality that certain American metanarratives promise the masses, then individuals must create individual realities that fulfill promises or relieve frustration.

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In his essay “Multiculturalism and the Media,” poet and critic Jack Foley uniquely puts into words an emphasis not simply on cultural trends but also on mythologies. He begins by arguing that whiteness as a concept does not represent an ethnic group, but a way of thinking that allows one to engage in dominance-based behavior. “To speak of multiculturalism, therefore, is to speak of a way of seeing the world without whiteness—though one has to admit that whiteness (power, dominance) is much in evidence. We create it daily in our interplay with others” (369). Foley’s observation is an admission of the existence of racial metanarratives. To be Irish, or Italian, Foley argues, is to create a deep and intricate fabric of mythologies rooted in the historical character of a people. . . . But what if we need to change something about our mythologies? Only a mythology can counter a mythology, and if the mythologies we have are racist, sexist or in some deep sense immoral, then it is necessary to create new mythologies. But mythologies are not created out of nothing. They are the deep expressions of the historical self-consciousness of a particular people who live in a particular place. It is in fact impossible to think without mythologizing, and mythologies abound in American culture . . . it is the work of the living artist to create mythologies we can live in, fictions which spring, not from stereotypes . . . but from the truth of the living heart . . . And of course it is possible, but it requires an effort not only of construction but of deconstruction. Only a mythology can counter a mythology, and it is only from the point of view of a new fiction that the inadequacies of the old can be exposed. (369–70)

Foley is speaking primarily of poetry, but there is no reason that his words cannot apply to fiction as well. It can also be argued that the medium of the novel, as a narrative, is a more appropriate method than poetry for fighting racist metanarratives. This is not simply because of the equality of fighting one type of narrative with another; at this time, the novel form also has a higher cultural value than does poetry. A local narrative uprooting a metanarrative is not something that happens automatically; the local narrative must both reach readers on a widespread scale and meet with widespread approval. Works Cited Foley, Jack. “Multiculturalism and the Media.” MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace. Ed. Ishmael Reed. New York: Penguin, 1997. 366–70. Fox, Robert Elliot. Masters of the Drum: Black Lit/Oratures across the Continuum. New York: Greenwood, 1995. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Tran. from the French by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

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190 / preston park cooper Miyoshi, Masao. “Against the Native Grain: The Japanese Novel and the “Postmodern” West.” Postmodernism and Japan. Ed. Massao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1989. 143–65. Questia. Mar. 13, 2006 . Reed, Ishmael. Airing Dirty Laundry. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993. Questia. Mar. 13, 2006 . ———. Japanese by Spring. New York: Penguin, 1996.

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Ch a p t e r Te n “All Na r r at i v e s A r e Li e s, M a n, a n Illusion”: Bu ddh ism a n d Po st mode r n ism Ve r sus R ac ism i n Ch a r l e s Joh nson’s M i ddl e Pa ssag e a n d D r e a m e r Preston Park Cooper

In his 1990 novel Middle Passage, Charles Johnson creates a narrative of slavery and of a slave ship that in both stories (Middle Passage and Dreamer) differs from and follows the norms of more traditional adventures set at sea in some unusual ways. The narrator and main character, Rutherford Calhoun, a black ex-slave from southern Illinois, talks and thinks in a manner that seems very unlike any reader’s expectations for such a character. Further, the story is set very specifically in the year 1830, allowing the observant reader to prove that there are various anachronisms in Middle Passage. While some may be unintentional or at least not directly intentional, others seem wholly intentional. Johnson’s style and methods in the novel, as well as in his later novel Dreamer, raise many questions. Johnson uses elements of postmodernism with a very specific purpose: to allow Johnson to successfully fight, in a nonviolent way, to change the culture of which his work is a part. In the two novels, which each represent years of literary effort on his part, Johnson is often using the tools of postmodernism to construct the novels. The postmodern approach, rather than simply taking a given stance on intertextuality and the relation of previous authors and writings to the new work of art, uses these techniques in an oppositional way. Although Johnson does not seek to commit himself to an ongoing relationship to and association with postmodernism, he and it share key common purposes, such as exploring not only how a new work may evolve from and play with the existence and influence of older works, but also

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how narrative techniques can highlight a desire to resist oppressive cultural metanarratives. Because of an emphasis on nonviolent cultural opposition, Johnson’s Buddhist beliefs also go hand in hand with the single goal shared by him and postmodernism in general, and all of these elements merge in his work. In his book Turning the Wheel, which primarily focuses on Buddhism, Johnson speaks of living in the right way or ways in accordance with Buddhist thought and includes discussion of harmful or incorrect livelihoods, quoting page 123 of Alex Kennedy’s 1987 book The Buddhist Vision: “evil must be combated by nonviolent means. We must battle against everything which drags men down, using criticism, exhortation, influence, and whatever means are ethically sound and cause no harm to others” (26). In his book Understanding Charles Johnson, author Gary Storhoff says that Johnson’s “Christian background enriches and expands his Buddhist themes, with imagery and allusion, while the liberating aspects of his Buddhist convictions give his Judeo-Christian sensibility a provocative intensity that spiritually challenges his reader” (1). The phrase “provocative intensity” is vague—but the point is clearly in the spiritual challenge. Storhoff adds that Johnson writes fiction to express a fundamentally philosophical vision. . . . Philosophical discourse tends to be formidable, even forbidding, reaching conclusions as finished products and often offered with clenched minds. Yet Johnson’s fiction is wonderfully accessible to lay readers interested in philosophical reflection. (1–2)

The latter statement may be a matter of opinion, but Storhoff has a point— fiction has an advantage of accessibility over nonfiction, however it is written. Storhoff is much more interested in Johnson’s Buddhism than in his postmodernism as such, but he does hint that “Johnson also rejects the contemporary axiom that meaning is a mere chimera, that it is impossible to demonstrate any truth whatsoever” (6–7). This is not really a contemporary axiom in general, but one specifically of deconstruction—and a metanarrative often needlessly associated with postmodernism. However, it makes slightly more sense to mention it in light of a similar (false) association with Buddhism: “If life is an illusion and nothing matters, then why bother?” Such thinking confuses nothingness with emptiness, as will be discussed later in connection with Johnson’s novel Dreamer. Suffice to say, as Storhoff puts it, “Johnson’s work revolves around Buddhism’s central doctrine: All things are in constant flux” (Storhoff 17), Storhoff strikes closer to the truth—a novel, once having entered a culture, can work in a flexible way, a flexibility that does not date it in quite the same way as nonfiction can grow dated. Storhoff also, however, states that all of Johnson’s

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work, in general, revolves around Buddhism’s core doctrine—a much stronger statement than Storhoff’s initial observation about the integration of Johnson’s Judeo-Christian sensibility and Buddhist themes—and serves as solid evidence that Johnson’s goals, Buddhism, and postmodernism all overlap and complement one another. In his article “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction,” written for an issue of Callaloo (which he guest-edited) and reprinted in his book I Call Myself an Artist, Johnson states that the new audience that has been opened up for African American fiction by recent female African American authors has brought to light “a level of social discrimination the nation needs to deal with” (Artist 85–86). He goes on to say that he feels these works represent a new “stage in black literature if the . . . final goal . . . of art is, as John Fowles wrote in Daniel Martin, ‘whole sight.’ ” (86). With this mention of “whole sight” Johnson makes a statement of logic that could benefit with a little rearranging: the creation of the then-recent works of fiction by female African Americans brought to light social discrimination with which the nation needs to deal. It is not only the creation of these works of fiction but also their success in sales that has opened up an audience. But the works themselves matter too; they have opened the minds of the readers to the social discrimination that the works address. Of course, since he is speaking of the African American milieu, one is dealing not only with social discrimination but also with racial discrimination that has blended with the former. The nation, as a whole, must deal with this issue. It was not dealing with it until the works opened up the audience. This opening of a new audience, one that was not there before, at least not for African American literature, is important and will help achieve art’s final goal, if the final goal of art is “whole sight.” Johnson’s phrasing implies an America that is able to look through the metanarratives that blind it and to see its citizens equally. The work brings the new audience, and the new, receptive audience begins to represent the beliefs of the works that are local narratives that undermine the metanarratives that keep things from changing and from becoming more equal. It is also important, however, to note that, instead of simply making something new, what Johnson feels is needed is a new, or complete, perspective. This imagined perspective that can lead to freedom from prejudice is one that shares many tenets with the enlightened perspective sought by followers of Buddhist beliefs. In his book Turning the Wheel, Johnson deals with the history behind Buddhism, philosophies that are parallel to it, and the history of the African American search for equality. One of these, posited by W. E. B. Du Bois, is the issue of how, once African Americans are free and equal, should they live. Should they live as other free Americans have, considering the disgust felt for the ways in

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which Caucasian Americans had once lived? Johnson equates this with Buddhism’s tenets of the “right life” or “right lifestyle.” This is typical of the sorts of parallels that Johnson draws in his works. Middle Passage is a local narrative that offers direct counter-examples to all of the following hypothetically stated metanarratives, and more: “The black culture is one that is inarticulate and poorly educated and not suited to thinking.” Rutherford’s very existence defies this statement. The Allmuseri oppose this metanarrative: “The black race is savage and violent.” This last example is somewhat dated in its phrasing, but this book is set in the past. Johnson is dealing with metanarratives of the era as well. Other metanarratives are opposed: “The modern is white and in opposition to nature, and this is the path to the future.” “There is no relationship, be it spiritual, emotional, or psychological, between African Americans and their African roots.” The entire book serves to oppose this metanarrative. “There is and should be a separate black and white aesthetic.” “To be civilized is to be desired; to be civilized is to conform to white values.” “Whites are free men, unlike slaves.” Middle Passage is, in short, a counternarrative to all of these. These metanarratives deal with more than racism. Each of them deals with a perspective that is divisive, violent, hateful, or oppressive to the human spirit on general terms. Johnson is determined to use literature to defy expectations about racial issues. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Johnson wrote short stories of different genres and forms, as if simply to show that he could do so. In fact, one story, “China,” is about an African American who, like Johnson, has a fascination with the martial arts; the character is upset when accused of wanting to be Asian. To an even greater degree, Middle Passage uses its characters to defy such expectations. Steven Connor, in his book Postmodernist Culture, writes that the purpose of certain postmodern works is an analysis that, instead of obediently adopting a marginal place itself, brings the margins into the center by applying deconstructive critique to the dominant selfhistories of the West. Thus, Homi Bhabha characterizes racial stereotyping as a fetishistic projection of those things that are avowed by the colonial self. To objectify the frightening forms and forces of irrationality, perversity, femininity, and evil in the shapes of subjugated races is reassuringly to distance those forces, but it is by the same token to give them a positive existence and thus to risk contamination or “reversion” toward them (Connor 265). Of course, racial stereotyping is, in many ways, an issue of identity, and an exploration of whether there is even such a thing as a group identity. Buddhism suggests that such concepts are merely fictions and indeed are obstacles to the clear perspective that leads to enlightenment. Johnson can easily be demonstrated to be intensely interested in the issue of African

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American identity, but in what ways is this interest in Middle Passage Buddhist in nature? Ngonyama refers to Rutherford as Brother (119). This has interesting psychological ramifications if we consider how Rutherford feels about brothers. Does Ngonyama’s referring to Rutherford in this way confirm Rutherford’s theory that the Allmuseri choose him as a person to trust because of his skin color, or is it that Rutherford, of all the crew, is least alien to them in their philosophical worldview? It is even more interesting, however, when Rutherford metaphorically turns to the reader and addresses the reader in the same way. “Do I sound like a patriot? Brother, I put it to you: What Negro, in his heart (if he’s not a hypocrite), is not?” (179). Rutherford treats the reader as if he knows that the reader is actively listening. The use of the term “Brother” for the reader may be purely symbolic, as Rutherford uses it, in its implication that he thinks the reader is another black male—or is this his way of talking to himself? However, it must certainly be seen as a definite sign that Rutherford feels that the reader is friendly toward him, and in a very intimate way. Indeed, how can the readers of a character’s tale not be intimate confidants? This simple statement by Rutherford makes him seem so much more of a reliable narrator; that is, it decreases doubts one may have about his sincerity. If, however, Rutherford’s use of the term “Brother” is philosophical and not racial, it is like the Brother that Buddhist monks striving together toward enlightenment might use. Later in the novel, Rutherford goes on to note that he “occasionally caught myself incapable of seeing things in general terms. In other words . . . I felt I could assume nothing about anyone or anything” (194). Johnson consistently places a higher value on the Allmuseri ways than on those that one can learn from America. Rutherford has learned many things on his Middle Passage, one of them is thinking in a fashion free from stereotyping, free from prejudice. His thoughts are colorblind; while he is in this mindset, each person is an individual, and nothing more. Another obstacle to Rutherford’s enlightenment is his feelings on the nature of his birth, or rather his fate. Early in the novel, Rutherford broods on his fate: “The Reverend’s prophecy that I would grow up to be a picklock was wiser than I knew, for was I not, as a Negro in the New World, born to be a thief? Or, put less harshly, inheritor of two millennia of things I had not myself made? But enough of this” (47). One circumstance that disturbs Rutherford is not that he is a Negro, but a Negro in the New World, as opposed to Africa, where black skin is the norm, or Europe, where it is a rarity. In the New World, however, Rutherford has inherited nothing but the traditions of a culture from which he feels alienated, just as his elder brother, apparently on a wiser path, has relinquished any claim to the inheritance of Peleg Chandler. This feeling of alienation helps make sense

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of Rutherford’s deep bitterness toward his brother; Rutherford feels that he is owed something valuable from somewhere in the past, and he cannot find it. Perhaps this sense of lack in his past is why he has such reverence toward the European philosophy he has learned from Chandler, and such awe for the treasures of antiquity that Falcon has plundered. It should be noted, however, that Rutherford/Johnson, with his “But enough of this,” also weakens the formulaic pompousness of the prose style in which these profound statements are made. With that, Rutherford and Johnson seek to dismiss this type of thinking, although such issues are felt so bitterly that Rutherford is far from done with them; it will require Rutherford’s meeting with the Allmuseri god to overcome all spiritual obstacles. Still, the obstacles of identity and the pointlessness of having faith in their reality are clear to others besides Rutherford by the end of his journey. With so many people, even the seemingly powerful, lacking freedom, it seems as if the identities of master and servant hardly matter; in the final log entry, Papa Zeringue himself says that once he had “got in that was it . . . Sometimes the biggest curse in the world kin be getting exactly what you want, or think you want, ‘cause there’s no way to see all the sides when you sign your name . . . ” (202). The reader feels little sympathy for Papa Zeringue, but his statement further adds to the concept that he too is a slave to those who offer such Faustian bargains, that indeed such identities as master or servant, wealthy or poor are meaningless. In the end, Rutherford, during his encounter with the Allmuseri god, asserts, “I had to listen harder to isolate him from the We what swelled each particle and pore of him, as if the (black) self was the greatest of all fictions” (Middle Passage 171). Johnson’s Middle Passage, postmodern fiction-withina-fiction in which the black self is represented by Rutherford, shows a gentle self-consciousness on Johnson’s part. He knows that one of the things upon which he is signifyin(g), in the sense of H. L. Gates’ The Signifying Monkey, is the nature of black identity itself. Rutherford speaks of his desire, in his younger days, to “steal things others were ‘experiencing.’ Believe me, I was a parasite to the core. I poached watches from Chandler’s bureau and biscuits from his kitchen; I pirated from Jackson’s trousers the change he made selling vegetables from his own garden; I listened to everyone and took notes” (Middle Passage 162). Reflecting on this while on The Republic, Rutherford realizes that “in myself I found nothing I could rightly call Rutherford Calhoun, only pieces and fragments of all the people who had touched me, all the places I had seen . . . The ‘I’ that I was, was a mosaic of many countries, a patchwork of others” (162–163). Here, Rutherford himself is a postmodern text of literary appropriation, feeling the dismay of being made up entirely, as far as he can tell, of earlier experiences, identities, and words— again, his identity is shown to be a fiction. Johnson, in Turning the Wheel,

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quotes the Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, whom Dr. Martin Luther King nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize: “ ‘When you are able to get out of the shell of your small self . . . You will see that you are interrelated to everyone and everything, that your every act is linked with the whole of humankind and the whole cosmos.’ ” (12). In other words, whatever the universe is, it is oneself. This is well-represented by parts of the passage in Middle Passage in which Rutherford confronts the Allmuseri god. He has to feed it, and it appears to him as his father. “That is mostly what I saw, and for the life of me I could no more separate the two, deserting father and divine monster, than I could sort wave from sea” (Middle Passage 168–69) First, it is fascinating to suggest that the Allmuseri god is consuming, or eating, Rutherford’s obstacles of perception that force him to see the world as disunified. Truly, it is a powerful thing that can remove these spiritual obstacles with which Rutherford has labored his entire life. The Allmuseri god seems to function much like the old concept of a sin-eater, which takes on one’s sins and removes them when it goes—much like divine forgiveness of sins in the Christian religion—but the Allmuseri god does not remove Rutherford’s sins, but the sources of his spiritual suffering. Of course, the price of this experience is the toll it takes on Rutherford’s body, for the experience of being exposed to the entire universe is overwhelming: “the god, like a griot asked one item of tribal history, which he could only recite by reeling forth the entire story of his people, could not bring forth this one man’s life without delivering as well the complete content of the antecedent universe to which my father, as a single thread, belonged” (169). Rutherford sees what happened to his father—the death, and the interconnectedness. —his breathing blurred in a dissolution of sounds and I could only feel that identity was imagined; I had to listen harder to isolate him from the We that swelled each particle and pore of him, as if the (black) self was the greatest of all fictions; and then I could not find him at all. He seemed everywhere, his presence, and that of countless others, in me as well as the chamber, which had subtly changed. Suddenly I knew the god’s name: Rutherford. (171)

Similarly, Peter Cringle sacrifices himself to feed the others on board the ship, understanding that all life is equally valuable as well as interconnected. Storhoff reminds the reader, also, that the Allmuseri have no fingerprints. The symbolism is clear: setting aside for the moment the issue of having an identity as a people, the Allmuseri certainly defy the need for individual identity.

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Johnson himself seeks to avoid being “typed” as a writer of African American fiction, as a writer of a particular genre, or as a part of a given movement, and so his work is purposefully and carefully crafted to draw on what has gone before and yet be entirely unlike what has gone before. He uses the techniques of postmodernism without wishing to become a postmodernist, and even if he does happen to write as a postmodernist, he does not want to be typed as a postmodernist forever: I would like to believe that I could write book after book and someone could believe that they had been written by different people. In this book over here, Faith and the Good Thing, black folklore has this particular function. But over there, there’s none of that in Middle Passage . . . Things could absolutely change in terms of the overall experimental effect, from book to book. That’s the kind of freedom I would like to see from novel to novel, from story to story. (Diedrich 173)

Johnson describes his ideal self as he does his ideal character in a novel: “Every major character for me is a character of evolution and change. They are not the same at the end of the book as when we first saw them. The ideal novel would be one in which there are no minor characters, where there are no flat characters . . . That would be the ideal novel” (Diedrich 172). It becomes clear that freedom for Rutherford Calhoun, as a creation of Johnson, means freedom to change, to evolve as a person. His attempts at mastering this type of freedom are what allow him to cope successfully with the physicality of Santos, the machinations of Papa Zeringue, and the desires of Isadora, in ways in which he was incapable at the start of the novel. When one understands Johnson’s views and goals, one can understand the goals of Middle Passage, and why it is successful in achieving them. This brings us to Johnson’s more recent novel, Dreamer. Although a portion of the novel is entirely devoted to directly exploring the life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, the other chapters are more revealing of Johnson’s goals, as amateur look-alike Chaym Smith devotes himself, with full method-acting technique, to the process of becoming King in every way. It is a process that is quite easy on the outside, but somewhat difficult insofar as Smith more or less must master King’s speaking patterns, speechmaking inflections, and mannerisms, but hardest when it comes to qualities that Smith most wishes to copy—King’s inner strength, peace, and faith. Smith desires these because he knows that it is mostly these that provide King with his power and thus serve as key to King’s eventual immortality. At this level of copying, however, Smith is ultimately a failure, although it must be said that he never gets his chance.

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Chaym wishes to understand King because he sees that King is so entwined with King’s message that King will become as immortal as his message, as the new way of being that he espouses, as his new narrative. Clearly, this is a novel of someone who, like Buddha, has achieved a level of enlightenment so profound that he is sometimes able to communicate something of it in his sermons and speeches, and like Buddhists, Chaym wishes to reproduce the enlightenment by copying the perspective. If the perspective, and therefore the enlightenment, and therefore the immortality in men’s hearts, is a product of understanding the way King sees the world, then Chaym will become King and therefore get the rest of what he seeks as well. Of course, the fact that Chaym wants the immortality more than the enlightenment clouds his motives and makes things more complicated. Dreamer is a very fitting work for discussing racial and social local narratives and metanarratives. Chaym chooses the power of method acting because it is the power of specificity, of knowing all the details of another character’s narrative, both external and internal. He seeks the power to truly become King when he wishes, to be able to fake another identity so well that it becomes true, that it transforms him into a different, less tormented, better person. King is the powerful leader who leads by example, who embodies his own message. Indeed, Chaym has actually been to the East and was exposed to certain philosophies there: “I stayed in the East, sorta like being in exile,” (Dreamer 35) says Smith of his time in Asia. Of course, Cain left Eden and went East, into the land of Nod, and Bishop later refers to how racist treatment “consigned us to a more benign phantom realm east of Eden” (73), but Johnson specifically makes Chaym’s East the Far East. In any event, if Johnson seems caught up in the issue of Christian narrative power versus a more subtle Buddhist narrative, it is important to remember that combating racism is Johnson’s larger goal, rather than, say, disseminating a secretly Buddhist text. The above, though, is not the only flexibility involved in Johnson’s exploration of the Cain and Abel symbolism; he also uses it to set up more opposition. There is a contrast between a preacher that Bishop and Smith hear speak on the subject of Cain’s damnation and a harsh speaker Bishop hears who incites violence between the races. The preacher suggests that Cain has a clue to salvation that is “wrapped in the perennial mystery of what . . . doing well, possibly means. Is there a single answer? I think not. As a question, it is open-ended, admitting of only provisional answers, a riddle that yields an inexhaustible reply, which is cast best not as a clever sentence but rather in the quality of sacrifice and sentience itself” (Dreamer 157). The question that seems to have no answer is, surely, “Since Cain was jealous of his brother because of God’s favor, even though

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Cain offered the fruits of his farming and Abel the flesh of his livestock, why did God favor Abel over Cain?” It cannot be answered because we cannot know the mind of God. By pointing this out, Johnson brings back the issue of the role of perspective in racial prejudice. The preacher in the passage calls into question the accepted definition of “doing well” because if one cannot understand the answer to the question, perhaps one should redefine the question, or at least the goals for which a race is striving. Even though the question cannot be answered with certainty without knowing the unknowable mind of God, Johnson sets up Dreamer with characters that make it clear that the important difference between them is the intention, the motivation for succeeding. King wants to destroy harmful metanarratives, and Chaym wants love and acceptance and personal success for himself—to live a noble lie. Earlier, Smith says, “All narratives are lies, man, an illusion” (Dreamer 92). Later, Bishop, in discussing King’s oratory style, reflects on whether the self we constructed was anything more than a fragile composite of other selves we’d encountered . . . indebted to all spoken languages, all evolutionary forms, all lives that preceded our own, so that, when we spoke, it could be said, in the final analysis, subjectivity vanished and the world sang in every sentence we uttered. (And thus narrative was not a lie)”. (Dreamer 104)

The parenthetical comment about narrative is clearly also self-referential to Dreamer itself. Even though the novel draws on another man’s life and other people’s events, this postmodern drawing from earlier sources and predecessors does not render Dreamer’s fictionalization invalid. To call narratives lies is like calling them fictions, like calling the black self a fiction or a lie. But to call them illusions, as Smith does, particularly in a novel entitled Dreamer that sets up parallels with King and Buddha, is to invoke Maya, the Buddhist concept in which the real world and its distractions from enlightenment are illusions. In this novel of dreams and double identities, it may also invoke the famous story of the man who dreamed he was a butterfly, a dream that seemed so real that upon awaking, he was not sure which was his true reality. Is King the true self, and Chaym the fiction, or is Chaym, with his rather plausible spiritual troubles, the true self, and King just an ideal he wishes he could attain? In spite of Johnson’s techniques, Smith’s view is more deconstructive than purely postmodern and strongly contrasts with the postmodern crowd of sources within King. When Bishop begins to believe that perhaps Smith can indeed mimic King, Smith replies, “Sure, I can mark him . . . Everybody’s playing a role anyway, trying to act like what they’re supposed to be, wearing at least one mask, probably more, and there’s

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nothing underneath, Bishop. Just emptiness . . . ” (Dreamer 86). One should note the reference to Cain’s mark, although it is made to sound also like carny huckster patois. However, it is hinted that the lack of human substance that Smith senses at King’s core represents his faith in the Divine, while Smith, without faith, cannot understand how to copy it. “He’s about total surrender, giving it all to God. I been trying to get a handle on him, but sometimes it’s like he ain’t there. Like he’s an instrument, not the music itself—a conduit for something else” (Dreamer 111). Smith’s surprise at the perceived inner nothingness within King betrays how unstable Smith’s philosophies of life can really be, since the idea behind Buddhism is to achieve a sense of nothingness, an acceptance of nothingness. Storhoff also points out Johnson’s love of emptiness, which Johnson, according to Storhoff, sees as redemptive (Storhoff 22). Storhoff feels that Middle Passage’s claim of the identity of the black race being a fiction served the same purpose and points out that the critics disliked that claim (Storhoff 22). However, believing in false, impermanent things, as Johnson points out in Turning the Wheel, is nothing and, thus, suffering. Therefore, there is a division between nothingness and emptiness—spiritual emptiness denotes a lack of spiritual obstacles, while living a life based on nothingness, including false, racist metanarratives, amounts to nothing and is ,therefore, painful. “The black experience in America, like the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, begins with suffering” (Turning 46), writes Johnson. “If the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha are about anything, they are about a profound understanding of identity and the broadest possible meaning of liberty . . . ” (Turning 48). Johnson states that he has “tried to dramatize that insight” (Turning 54–55) of emptiness being the ultimate nature of reality. He also sees politics in general as being Us versus Them—to view the political differences of opinion as a struggle of winners and losers, situated in the realm of desire, which doesn’t really exist, is harmful, since the suffering caused by desire is real or at least notable or destructive (Turning 43). Finally, Johnson notes that “through the Dharma, the black American quest for ‘freedom’ realizes its profoundest, truest, and most revolutionary meaning” (Turning 57). Therefore, freedom becomes, for Johnson, a signifier of spiritual freedom, whereas political metanarratives are simply obstacles—all the more reason to reframe the struggles for freedom as cultural, and in the case of Johnson’s work, as literary. After all, Diamelo goes too far and sinks the ship by creating a grudge-based narrative of hatred, a negative pattern for living, based on the pains of the past: “But there in the crowded barracoon Diamelo found his long-delayed focus: Ebenezer Falcon, a true (godsent) devil to despise” (Middle Passage 154).

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Dreamer is about copying, taking on new elements into oneself found elsewhere. It is also about power, including the power of words, and the dangers and high stakes of racial politics, racial self-identity, and how heavily these affect America’s future. It is also about authorship of speeches and stories, of having a talent for weaving, jazz-like, a new vision together for the audience, composed not only of real and fictional histories, but also of different religious narratives about how to live. King’s best-remembered speech offers America a new story, a story in which Americans of all races and creeds live together in harmony. Smith cannot believe in such a world, but he wants to do so so badly that he is willing to undermine his own story to replace it with King’s, although Smith’s equally natural craving for King’s immortality gets in Smith’s way, as this desire is very alien to King’s identity and his individual, personal narrative. Dreamer offers a local narrative in the Lyotardian sense even more directly than does Middle Passage. It challenges a smaller but nonetheless important set of metanarratives than does Middle Passage, for example, “There is only one ‘true’ or ‘correct’ history that is possible, and Good and Evil are absolutes that take on singular forms and never resemble each other.” This metanarrative seems philosophical in nature without acknowledging the existence of other metanarratives that associate goodness and evil with racial absolutes as well. Another such metanarrative would state that “Identity is a solid and concrete concept.” For the purposes of Johnson’s explorations, this bleeds over into racial identities as well. In fact, Johnson seems to be making a suggestion through both novels that becomes even clearer from a Buddhist perspective, and it is a powerful one: that the social stresses caused by the placing of importance upon identity are what create the dissonance of racial prejudice. The Buddhist themes, inlaid throughout each novel with the tools of postmodernism, allow Johnson to strike at some of the root causes of American suffering. Works Cited Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997. Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen, eds. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999. van Dijk, Teun A. Elite Discourse and Racism. Newbury, CA: Sage, 1993. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Johnson, Charles. Dreamer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. ———. Middle Passage. New York: Plume, 1990. ———. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing. New York: Scribner, 2003.

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charles johnson’s middle passage and dreamer / 203 ———. “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction.” I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and about Charles Johnson. Ed. Rudolph P. Byrd. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. 85–90. Kennedy, Alex. The Buddhist Vision. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1987. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Tran. from the French by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Storhoff, Gary. Understanding Charles Johnson. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004.

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Con t r i bu tor s

Preston Park Cooper attended Texas Tech University for his undergraduate and Master’s degrees and received his Ph.D. in literature from Kent State University. He presented a shorter version of his essay “ ‘A Beautiful Black Butterfly’: Eastern Aesthetics and Postmodernism in Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring” at the 2007 MLA conference. He also recently had two book reviews on postmodern African American fiction published in the journal African American Review. He currently teaches English at Austin Community College in Texas. Yoshinobu Hakutani is Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at Kent State University. His recent books and editions include Haiku and Modernist Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Art, Music and Literature 1897–1992 by Theodore Dreiser (U of Illinois P, 2007), Cross- Cultural Visions in African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku (Ohio State UP, 2006), Theodore Dreiser and American Culture: New Readings (U of Delaware P, 2000), and Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright (Random House, 2000), with Robert L. Tener. Peter Landino has been a college instructor for 12 years after completing degree programs in English Literature at John Carroll University. He has taught undergraduate courses in American literature, African American literature, poetry, and composition. His recent research interests have been in African American literature and cross-cultural studies, having published articles on the poetry of Richard Wright and Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson. He has also presented shorter versions of his essays “Wordsworthian Nature Poetry, Ashanti Culture and Richard Wright’s Haiku: This Other World” and “Wright’s Poetics and Black Power” at the 2005 and 2007 MLA conventions respectively. Mera Moore (T. Mera Moore Lafferty) teaches Asian American Studies, Cinema Studies, and Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. While pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii, she studied American theater, literature, and cinema. Her journal articles and book chapters focus on works by Americans and immigrant Americans, and she is co-editing with Nilgun Anadolu-Okur an anthology, Plays by Muslim Americans. Virginia Whatley Smith, Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, edited Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections (UP of Mississippi, 2001). She has also published essays in African American Review, OBSIDIAN, Mississippi Quaterly, as well as the MLA Approaches to

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206 / contributors Teaching Wright’s Native Son. She presented a shorter version of her essay “Jean Toomer Revisited in James Emanuel’s Post-Modernist Jazz Haiku” at the MLA in 2007. She is currently writing a biography of Richard Wright. Jianqing Zheng is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Mississippi Valley State University, where he edits Valley Voices: A Literary Review. He has published essays on Richard Wright, Ezra Pound, and some other American writers in Paideuma, Southern Quarterly, ANQ, POMPA, and Modern Haiku. He has also published hundreds of translations of American poems in The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Exchanges, Callaloo, and Poetry East. Yupei Zhou is Professor of English at Xiamen University, P. R. China. Among her recent publications are “American Nationalist Ideology in Asian American Literary Criticism,” Journal of Literature, History and Philosophy (Shangdong University, 2006), “The Oprah Book Club and American Literary Institution,” Foreign Language Review (Foreign Literature Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2007), “American Literary Criticism as Motivated by Both the National and Disciplinary Forces,” Foreign Language Review (2009), and “Asian American Literary Criticism and Post-modernity,” Nankai Journal (Nankai University, 2009).

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I n de x

Adventures of Fu Manchu, The, 130 Akan religion, the, xix, 5 Aldridge, A. Owen, 42; Reemergence of World Literature: A Study of Asian and the West, The, 42 Anderson, Crystal S., 158 Ando, Shoei, 127; Zen and American Transcendentalism, 127 Anon., 31–32; “Back from Flower-viewing,” 31–32 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 93, 107; Cosmopolitanism, 107 Armstrong, Louis, 106, 123 Asada, Akira, 180 Ashanti, the, xix, 3, 45–46, 50–51, 54–55, 57 Baldwin, James, ix, xiv, xv, 132 Baraka, Amiri, xv, 72 Barthes, Roland, 20, 103, 107; Empire of Signs, 20; “Rhetoric of the Image,” 107 Basho. See Basho, Matsuo Basho, Matsuo, xxii, 3, 6, 8, 10, 15, 24, 29–31, 33–39, 41, 69–70, 82, 94, 96–98; “Autumn Moon,” 35; “Autumn Sunset, An,” 37; “Come, Let’s Go,” 38; “Crow, A,” 12–13, 15, 37–38; “Darkening Waves,” 30; “How Quiet,” 34; “How Cool It Is,” 69; “In the Garden,” 32–33; “Irises Blooming,” 33; “It’s Deadly Quiet,” 12–13, 70; “Loneliness,” 38; Narrow Road to the Deep North,

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33–34; “Not One Traveler,” 35; “Old Pond, The,” 34; “On the Dead Limb,” 36; “Sick on a Journey,” 41 Bassui, xii, 125 Beauvoir, Simone de, xiii Beiles, Sinclair, xii, xxi, 23, 32 Bezner, Kevin, and Ishmael Reed, 158 Bhabha, Homi, 81, 107, 194; Location of Culture, The, 107 Blyth, R.H., xii–xiii, xxi–xxii, 6, 7, 32–33, 42, 45–47, 50–52, 56, 61, 63; “Buddhism and Haiku,” 42; Haiku, xxii, 6, 32–33, 50; Haiku: Eastern Culture, xiii, 20; History of Haiku, A, xxii, 6, 20, 45, 63, 79 Bo, Shi, 163; Guo Yu, 163 Boyd, Melba Joyce, 107; Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and The Broadside Press, 107 Bridge on the River Kwai, 130 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 11, 75–77; “Mother, The,” 75–77; Selected Poems, 77, 79 Brown, James, 77 Buber, Matrim, 160 Buck, Pearl S., 131; Good Earth, The, 131 Buddha, Gautama, 45 Buddhism, xix, xxviii, 5, 71, 193, 199, 202 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 136; Land That Time Forgot, The, 136; Tarzan of the Apes, 136 Burroughs, William, xii

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208 / index Buson. See Buson, Yosa Buson, Yosa, 3, 6, 13, 15, 67–68; “Also Stepping On,” 13–14, 67; “On the Hanging Bell,” 13, 15 Camus, Albert, xiii, xiv, 121–22, 127; Stranger, The, xiii, xiv, 121–22, 127 Cang, Yangquing, 29, 42; Three Hundred Quatrains, 42 Carpenter, Frederic Ive, 20; Emerson and Asia, 20 Carroll, Noël, 137; Philosophy of Horror, The, 137 Chai, Leon, 46, 51, 54, 63; Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, 63 Chan, Joseph, 170, 173 Charlemagne, 162 Chen, Zhi-liang, and Nai-zhong Yu, 159 Cheng, Zhi-hua, 159 Chuang Tzu, 185 Clarke, John Henrik, 89, 108; “Africa and World History in Perspective,” 108 Cleaver, Eldridge, 132 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, xxiii, 45, 50, 54 Coltrane, John, 102 Confucianism, xiii, xxvi, 157–73 Confucius, 164, 169–70, 172; Analects, The, 164, 169–70, 172–73; Doctrine of the Mean, The, 169; Mengzi Huo Wen Thauan Yao, 173; Zhou Book of Change, The, 172 Connor, Steven, 194; Postmodernist Culture, 194 Coolidge, Calvin, 162 Cooper, Merian C., 136 Cooper, Merian C., and Ernest B. Shoedsack, 137; King Kong (film), 136–38 Cooper, Preston Park, vi, xxvii; “‘All Narratives Are Lies, Man, an Illusion’: Buddhism and Postmodernism in Charles

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Johnson’s Middle Passage and Dreamer,” vi, xxvii, 191; “‘Beautiful Black Butterfly, A’: Eastern Aesthetics and Postmodernism in Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring,” v, xxvi, 177 Crane, Hart, 33 Crane, Stephen, 114 Cromwell, Oliver, 162 Cui Hu, 26; “Village South of the Capital, The,” 26 Cullen, Countee, 82 Damrosch, David, 42; Longman Anthology of World Literature, The, 42 Danquah, J.B., 4–5, 20, 57; Akan Doctrine of God, The, 3, 20, 57 Darwin, Charles, 143 Daughter of the Dragon (film), 130 Davis, Miles, 102 DeGiglio-Bellemare, Mario, 143 Derrida, Jacques, xvi, xvii, 159, 164, 180 Dickinson, Emily, 65, 69 Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pederson, 198; Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, 202 Dixon, Melvin, 61, 63; “Richard Wright: Native Father and His Long Dream,” 63 Dogen, xix; Shobogenzo, xix Dostoevsky, Fëdor Mikhailovich, xiii Douglass, Frederick, 82, 108, 132; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Hismself, 82, 108 Doyle, Conan, 136; Lost World, The, 136 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (film), 142 Dracula (character), xxv, 131–32, 134–36, 143; Dracula (film), 129 Dreiser, Theodore, ix Drums of Fu Manchu, The, 130

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index / 209 Du Bois, W.E.B., xi, 82, 100, 108, 193; Soul of Black Folk, The, 100, 108 Du Fu, 29–30; “Blue River, the Birds Look White,” 29; “I’ve Seen These Again This Spring,” 30 Dubey, Madhu, 157, 159 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 132 Dyke, W.S. Van, 137; Tarzan the Ape Man (film), 137; Trader Horn (film), 137, 139–40 Eliot, T.S., ix, xiv–xv, 32–33, 114; Waste Land, The, xiv Ellison, Ralph, ix–xi, xiv–xv, xxiv–xxv, 111–28; Going to the Territory, 114, 127; Invisible Man, x–xii, xxiv–xxv; 111–28; “Negro and the Second World War, The,” 127; Shadow and Act, xi, 112, 114, 118, 127; “Stormy Weather,” x; “World and Jug, The,” 112 Emanuel, James A., ix, xviii, 81–108; “Ammunition,” 98; “Billie Holiday,” 102; Deadly James and Other Poems, 91; “Farmer,” 98; “Got the Blues (Haiku and More),” 97, 99; “Haiku King Subjects,” 90; “Jackhammer,” 98; Jazz from the Haiku King, ix, xviii, 81–108; “Jazz Meets the Abstract (Engravings),” 102; “Jazzroads,” 100–101; “Lady Day,” 102; “Literary Happenings,” 108; “Mahalia Jackson,” 102; “Middle Passage, The,” 94–96; “Middle Passage, CD,”108; “More Stars (Jazz, Blues, and Gospel),” 101; “Old Friend,” 98; Short letter to Virginia Whatley Smith, November 24, 2007, 108; 16 Haiku Poems, 91; “Traveler,” 99 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xi, 21, 51; Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 21; “Days,” 116; Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 21; Selected Writings of

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, 116–17, 121, 127; Works of Emerson, The, 21 Escoube, Lucienne, 131 Fabre, Michel, 3, 4, 21, 23, 25, 32, 39, 41–42, 47, 59–61, 63, 83, 108, 131; “Black Cat and White Cat: Richard Wright’s Debt to Edgar Allan Poe,” 141; Conversations with Chester Himes, 42; Conversations with Richard Wright, 42; From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980, 83, 108; “Poetry of Richard Wright, The,” 42; World of Richard Wright, The, 42; Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, The, 23, 39, 42 Fabre, Michel, and Ellen Wright; Richard Wright Reader, 128 Faulkner, William, ix, xiv, xv, 114 Fitzgerald, Ella, 102–103; “Tis-Ket, A Task-Ket, A,” 103 Flaherty, Robert, 137; Nanook of the North, 137; Moana, 137 Foley, Jack, 189; “Multiculturalism and the Media,” 189 Fowles, John, 193 Fox, Robert Elliot, 179; Masters of the Dream: Black Lit/Oratures Across the Contiuum, 179 Frankenstein (character), xxv, 131–32, 143 Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (film), 142 Franklin, Aretha, 101 Freneau, Philip, 21; Poems of Philip Freneau, The, 21 Freud, Sigmund, xix, 162 Frost, Robert, 124; “Road Not Taken, The,” 124 Fujikawa, Fumiko, 30, 42; “Influence of Tu Fu on Basho, The,” 42 Further Mysteries of Dr. Fu, The (film), 130

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210 / index Galton, Frances, 143 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 82, 108, 157, 196; Signifyin’ Monkey: A Theory of AfroAmerican Literary Criticism, 108, 196 Gay Woman, The (film), xxvi Ge, Jie, 29, 42; Three Hundred Quatrains, 42 Ghana, 3, 18 Gilroy, Paul, 83 Ginsberg, Allen, xii, xxi, 78 Gomez, Ramuncho, 131 Gordon, George, 134 Green Pastures, The, 131 Gregory, Dick, 132 Griffith, D.W., 136; Birth of a Nation (film), 136 Haas, Robert, xviii Hakutani, Yoshinobu, 63, 65, 78–79, 97–98, 108, 111, 127–28, 141–42; City in African American Literature, The, 127; Creation of the Self in Richard Wright’s Black Boy,” 141; “CrossCultural Poetics: Sonia Sanchez’s Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums,” v, 65; Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku, vii; Richard Wright and Racial Discourse, 21; “Richard Wright’s Haiku, Zen, and the African ‘Primal Outlook upon Life,’” v, vii, xxi, 3; “Western and Eastern Thoughts of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, The, v, vii, xxiv Hakutani, Yoshinobu, and Robert L. Tener; Notes and Afterword to Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright, 45, 55–56 Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames, 159; Thinking Through Confucius, 159 Hallelujah! (film), 131 Hamamoto, Darrell Y., 130 Hanchard, Michael George, 158 Hansberry, Lorraine, 188; Rainsin in the Sun, A, 188

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Harding, Walter, 165, 167 Harrington, Oliver W., 42; Why I Left America and Other Essays, 42 Hayakawa, Sessue, 130–31 Hegel, Geog Wilhelm Friedrich, xiii Heidegger, Martin, xv, 159 Hemingway, Ernest, xv, 114 Hennessey, Thomas J., 89, 100–102, 108; From Jazz to Swing: African American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890–1935, 87, 100, 108 Himes, Chester, 25 Hinduism, 5 Hitler, Adolph, 162 Hoffman, Donald L., 172 Hogue, W. Lawrence, 157, 160, 162, 164, 167; “Postmodernism,” 157, 160, 164, 167; Postmodern American Literature and Its Other, 162 Hughes, Langston, x, xiv, xv, 74–75, 77, 82, 114, 188; “I, Too” x; “Negro Speaks of Rivers, The,” x, 74–75; “Weary Blues, The,” x Hurston, Zora Neale, 82 Husserl, Edmund, 47; Ideas, 47 Island of Lost Souls (film), 142 Issa. See Issa, Kobayashi Issa, Kobayashi, 3, 6, 39–40, 91; “Do Not Ever Strike!,” 40; “For You Fleas Too,” 39 James, Henry, ix, xv, 114 Jensen, Lionel M., 159 Jessee, Sharon, 162 John Reed Club, The, x Johnson, Charles, xv, 191–202; Dreamer, xvii, 191–202; Faith and the Good Thing, 198; I Call Myself an Artist, 193; Middle Passage, xxvii, 177, 191–202; Turning the Wheel, 192–93, 201; “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction,” 193 Joyce, James, ix, xv, xxv, 114

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index / 211 Karatani, Ko¯jin, 180 Karloff, Boris, 129 Keene, Donald, 36 Kennedy, Alex, 192; Buddhist Vision, The, 192 Kenton, Erle C., 137; Island of Lost Souls, 137 Kerouac, Jack, xii, xxi Kierkegaard, Sören Aabye, xiii Kikaku. See Kikaku, Takarai Kikaku, Takarai, 10, 12, 15; “Bright Harvest Moon, The,” 12–15 King Kong, xxv, xxvi Kipling, Rudyard, xvii Kinnamon, Keneth, 32, 48–49, 52–53; “Pastoral Impulse in Richard Wright, The,” 48 Kristeva, Julia, xviii Krutch, Joseph Wood, 32 Lacan, Jacques, xviii, xix, 15–17, 21; Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, The, 124 Lacy, Steve, 107 Landino, Peter, v; “Wordsworthian Nature Poetry, Ashanti Culture, and Richard Wright’s Haiku: This Other World,” v, xxii, 45 Lao-Tzu (Lao Zse), xi, 123, 159 Larsen, Nella, 82 Lawrence, D.H., ix Lèvinas, Emmanuel, 170 Li Po, 28–29; “Sitting Alone toward the Jingting Hill,” 28–29 Liang Yan-cheng, 160 Liu, Cynthia W., 130 Liu, Yu-li, 169, 171 Liu Yuxi, 28; “Poem on Autumn,” 28 Lock, Helen, 160, 163, 171 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 177–79; Postmodern Condition, The, 177 Lu Lun, 25; “Lament for Autumn with Li Yi,” 25 Lugosi, Bela, 129

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Ma Zhyuan, 37 Macleod, Fiona, 16 Mahayana Buddhism, xiii Malraux, André, x, 114; Man’s Fate, x, 114 King, Martin Luther, 188, 197–99; “I Have A Dream,” 188 Mask of Fu Manchu, The, 129–30 Mbiti, John S., 104 McKay, Claude, 165 McKay, Nellie, 158 Mellon, Andrew William, 162 Melville, Herman, xxv, 114; MobyDick, 126 Meng Haoran, 27–28; “Mooring on the Jiande River,” 28 Milton, John, 162 Mo Ming-ren, and Li Jian-qun, 169 Moore, Mera, v, 129; “West, East, Africa: Richard Wright’s Native Son and Classic Movie Monsters,” v, xxv, 129 Moritake. See Moritake, Arakida Moritake, Arakida, 10, 68; “Fallen Blossom, The,” 10; “Fallen Petals,” 10, 68 Morrison, Toni, xv, 111, 113; Beloved, 111; Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 114 Morton, Jelly Roll, 101 Muhammad, Elija, 135 Murnau, F.W., 137; Tabu, 137 Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, The, 130 Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu, The, 130 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, xiii Nixon, Robert, 111 Noguchi, Yone, 8, 122; Spirit of Japanese Poetry, The, 123; Story of Yone Noguchi, The, 122 O’Casey, Sean, xxv, 114 Orwell, George, xiv Parker, Charlie, 102 Pauer-Studer, Herlinde, 170

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212 / index Picasso, Pablo, ix Pichel, Irving, and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 137; Most Dangerous Game, The, 137–38 Poe, Edgar Allan, 141; “Cask of Amontillado,” 141; “Pit and the Pendulum, The,” 141 Pound, Ezra, ix, xvi, 10–11, 16–18, 26, 32–33; “Alba,” xxi, 17, 73; Gaudier-Brzeska, 26; “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” xvi; “In a Station of the Metro,” xxi, 10–11, 17, 26–27, 68, 73–74; Proust, Marcel, ix; “Vorticism,” 10, 17 Pudaloff, Ross, 131 Rainey, Ma, 101 Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, The, 88 Reed, Ishmael, xv, xxvi–xxvii, 157–74, 177–90; Japanese by Spring, xxvi, 177–90; Mumbo Jumbo, xxvi, 157–74 Reynolds, Paul, 4 Rohmer, Sax (Arthur Henry Ward), 130 Ross, Bruce, 82, 86, 91–96, 103, 106 Sablonière, Margrit de, 3, 23 Salman, Rushdie, xvi; Satanic Verses, The, xvi Sanchez, Sonia, ix, xviii, 65–79; “For Sister Gwen Brooks,” 76; “How Fast Is the Wind,” 69; “How Still the Morning,” 70; “I Am You Loving,” 68; “I Collect,” 68; “I Come from the Same,” 69; “I Count the Morning,” 69; “In This Wet Season,” 68; “Let Me Be Yo Wil,” 69; “Let Us Be One with,” 71; Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums, 65–66, 70, 74, 77–78; “Mixed with Day and Sun,” 74–75; “Naked in the Streets,” 66, 69, 72–73; “Poem for Ella Fitzerald, A,” 67–68;

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“When We Say Good-Bye,” 72; “You Are Rock Garden,” 71; “You Too Slippery,” 72 Sartre, Paul, xiii Scanlon, Thomas M., 170–71 Schmid, Peter, 135 Schoedsack, Ernest B., 136 Shadow of a Chinatown, 129 Shelley, Mary, 132, 144; Frankenstein (novel), 132, 144 Shirer, Lloyd, 57 Shuo Wen Jie Zi, 169 Sikong Shu, 25–26; “Enjoying the Stay of My Cousin Lu Lun,” 25 Simons, Godelieve, 102 Siodmak, Curt, 143 Skinner, Robert E., 25 Smethurst, James, 132 Smith, Virginia Whatley, v; “Jean Toomer Revisited in James Emanuel’s Postmodernist Jazz Haiku,” v, xxiv, 81 Snyder, Gary, xii, xxi, 78 Spiess, Robert, 103 Stannard, David, 135 Sternberg, Josef von, 137; Blonde Venus, 137 King, Stephen, 143 Stevens, Wallace, 78 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 142; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 142 Stoker, Bram, 134; Dracula (novel), 134 Storhoff, Gary, 192; Understanding Charles Johnson, 192 Stravinsky, Igor Fëdorovich, ix Strengell, Heidi, 142; “Monster Never Dies, The,” 142 Shakespeare, William, 33 Shirane, Haruo, 35, 37 Swope, Richard, 160, 162–63 Tajima, Renee E., 130 Takeari Arakida, 26; “Fallen Blossom, The,” 26; “Off the Cherry Tree” 27 Tang Kai-lin and Cao Gang, 170

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index / 213 Tang, Yi-jie, 168; Thou Book of Change, The, 168 Taoism, xiii Targ, William, 4 Tener, Robert L., 24, 36–37, 40, 49, 56; “Where, The When, The What: A Study of Richard Wright’s Haiku, The,” 49, 63 Tenot, Frank, 40 Thief of Bagdad, The, 130 Thomas, Dylan, 33 Toomer, Jean, xxiv, 81–87, 89, 92–99, 102, 104–108; Cane, xxiv, 81–89, 92–98, 102, 105–108; “Cotton Song,” 95; “Fern,” 101; “November Cotton Flower,” 101; “Nullo,” 97–98, 106; “Red Nigger Moon. Sinner!,” 95; “Robert,” 101; “Seventh Avenue,”99, 101; “Sittin’Log Blues,” 97 Turpin, Waters Edward, x; These Low Grounds, x Twain, Mark, 111, 114; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 111 Ueda, Makoto, 90 Valéry, Paul, xi, 114 Walker, Alice, ix, xv, xvii, 111, 179; Color Purple, The, 111, 179 Walker, Margaret, 11, 33 Waller, Fats, 101 Wang Fuzhi, 29 Wang Ji, 35; “Cicadas’ Shrill,” 35 Washington, Booker T., 117 Webb, Constance, 3 Wei Yingwu, 30–31; “West Creek at Chuzhon, The,” 30–31 Wells, H.G., 136; Island of Dr. Moreau, The, 136 West, Cornel, 77 Whitman, Walt, 33, 66–67, 77; “Song of Myself,” 66–67, 77

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Wilder, Roy, 32 Wilson, Woodrow, 162 Wolf Man, The (film), 129, 143 Wong, Anna May, 130 Wong, Eugene Franklin, 129 Wong, Victor, 138 Woolf, Virginia, ix Whitehead, Colson, 177; Intuitionist, The, 171 Williams, William Carlos, 95 Wordsworth, William, xxii, xxiii, 45–47, 49–50, 52–55, 59–63; “Let Nature Be Your Teacher,” 62; “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” 54; Prelude, The, 47–49, 51, 60, 62 Wright, Richard, ix–x, xiii–xix, xxi–xxii, xxv–xxvi, 3–9, 11–14, 17–18, 21, 23–25, 27, 30–41, 45–62, 65, 69–70, 76, 78, 82, 92, 111–15, 119–22, 131, 135, 141; “After the Sermon,” 9; American Hunger, 115; “And Also Tonight,” 29; “As My Anger Ebbs,” 9, 15, 24; “Autumn Moonlight Is,” 36; “Beads of Quicksilver,” 12–13; Black Boy, ix, xi, 3–4, 23, 40, 114–115, 141–142; Black Power, 5, 18, 45–46, 54, 58, 60, 62, 76; “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” ix–x, 4–5; “Blue of This Sky, The,” 53; “Burning Out Its Time,” 41; “Butterfly Makes, A,” 13; “Chill Autumn Wind, A,” 56; Color Curtain, The, xvi, xxi; “Coming from the Woods,” 32; “Dewdrop Joins Dewdrop,” 46, 52; “Drove of Spring Rain, The,” 27; Eight Men, 119–20; “Empty Canoe, An,” 30; “Empty Sickbed, An,” 24; “Fly Crawls Slowly, A,” 40; “For You, O Gulls,” 39; “From across the Lake,” 14; “From the Rainy Dark,” 30; “Golden Afternoon,” 28; Haiku: This Other World, 8, 23, 46,

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214 / index Wright, Richard—Continued 65, 122; “I Am Nobody,” 8, 14, 24; “I Laid Down My Book,” 33; “I Would Like a Bell,” 13, 15, 17; “In a Misty Rain,” 32; “In an Old Woodshed,” 49; “In a Summer Haze,” 48; “In the Falling Snow,” 39; “In the Silent Forest,” 12–13, 56; “In the Winter Dusk,” 9; “It Is September,” xii, 8, 122; “Just One Lonely Road, A,” 36; “Keep Straight Down This Block,” 41; “Lake Gulps Spring Rain, The,” 61; “Lea Chases Wind, A,” 10; “Lines of Winter Rain,” 14; “Long Empty Road, A,” 36; “Man Who Lived Underground, The,” 65, 119–20; Native Son, xxi–xxvi, 3, 23, 40, 111, 131–36, 138, 141, 143–44; “Off the Cherry Tree,” 10; “Old Pond, The,” 8; “One Vanishing Ship,” 38; “One Magnolia,” 58–59; Outsider, The, xiii, 121; Pagan Spain, xvii–xviii, xxi, 76; “Pale Winter Moon, A,” 13, 15; “Seen from a Hilltop,” 9; “Soft Wind at Dawn, A,” 58–59; “Spring Flood Waters, The,” 35; “Spring Hill Grows Dim, The,” 59–60; “Spring Lingers on, The,” 10, 14; “Spring Sky So Clear, A,” 56; “Sprinting Spring Rain,” 30; “Standing in the Field,” 55; “Summer Mountains Move,” 29; “That Road Is Empty,” 35; “Thin Waterfall, A,” 12–13, 15, 70; “This

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Autumn Evening,” 36; “There Is Where I Am,” 27; “Tossing All Day Long,” 52; “Two Flies Locked in Love,” 40; 12 Million Black Voices, 112–13; Uncle Tom’s Children, 132, 135; “Why Did This Spring Wood,” 9, 15; “Wild Winter Wind, A,” 49; “Wilting Jonquil, A,” 14 Xu Shen-xi, 169 Ye Shaoweng, 31; “Garden That Doesn’t Welcome a Visitor, The,” 31 Yeats, W.B., ix, xv, 16; “At the Hawk’s Well,” 16 Ying, Yan, 163–64; Zuo Zhuan, 163–64 Yugen, xxiii, 72–73 Zen, xi–xiv, xix, xxi, xxiii, xxv, xxvii, 7–8, 18, 45, 50, 56, 65, 71–72, 97, 122–26, 177–78 Zen Buddhism, xii, xix, 96, 121, 123, 125, 177–78, 183 Zhang, Zai, 168; Collections of Zhang Zai, 168 Zhang Ji, 28; “Night Moor by the Maple Bridge,” 28 Zheng, Jianqing, v, xxii, 23; “Richard Wright’s Haiku, Japanese Poetics, and Classical Chinese Poetry,” v, xxii, 23 Zhou, Yupei, v, xxvi, 157; “Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo through Confucianism,” v, xxvi, 157

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