Richard Wright's search for a counter-hegemonic genre: the anamorphic and matrixial potential of haiku

AbstractExamining Richard Wright's vast haiku oeuvre, this article shows how he used haiku to reinvent the form in English by repeating playfully anamorphic imagery so as to construct a poetic matrix modelled on, but distinct from, the categories he saw used in Japanese haiku. Writing haiku in this productive manner produced Nietzschean jouissance rather than resentment, so that the affective dimension of a multitude of socio-economic relations, including race, could be demonstrably reframed in this matrix of anamorphic imagery which maintained political allegories and critical consciousness in the landscapes of his invention. He asserted measured displacements and anamorphic transvaluations of how one sees (in Jacques Rancière's sense), and as such presented a modernist haiku constructed not in isolate verses (as haiku are often read), but in refrains and nodes, suggesting an intertextual matrix asserting new commonplaces (locus communis) and self-evident ways of seeing. This article also points out the lack of evidence for the current consensus in literary criticism which mistakenly asserts that Wright discovered a Zen spirit which elevated his spirit and brought him closer to nature. Moreover, the editing of the book manuscript is shown to be not only flawed in its critical framing, but in the very ordering of haiku, presentation, and even title.Keywords: Richard Wrighthaiku in Englishintertextuality and ideologycounter-hegemonic artcomparative poetics AcknowledgementsThe author wishes to thank the excellent readers for exceptional suggestions and Guy Mark Foster for his comments on an earlier draft of this argument, which was presented in the panel ‘Ain't No Going Back?: African American Cultural Production At Home and Abroad’ at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, 31 March–3 April 2011. The author sincerely thanks Simon Fang, as well as Julie Shih, Cathy Cheng and Analeigh Chang, for excellent research assistance.FundingThe author sincerely thanks the National Science Council of Taiwan for a research grant [#NSC 99-2410-H-032-008-MY2, 2010–2012].Notes1 Most current extended criticism of Wright's haiku is by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener, who edited and wrote the ‘Afterword’ for Haiku: This Other World (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), pp. 245–304. Other works by the editors include: Yoshinobu Hakutani, ‘Richard Wright's Haiku, Zen, and the African ‘Primal Outlook upon Life', in Haiku and Modernist Poetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 111–26; Robert Tener, ‘The Where, the When, the What: A Study of Richard Wright's Haiku’, in Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed.), Critical Essays on Richard Wright (Boston: Hall, 1982), pp. 273–98; Robert L. Tener, ‘Union with Nature: Richard Wright and the Art of Haiku’, Chiba Review, 10 (1988), pp. 19–34; and Robert L. Tener, ‘Richard Wright's Haiku: This Other World’, in Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed.), Modernity in East-West Literary Criticism: New Readings (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), pp. 137–57. Most readings of Wright's haiku seem to begin with an essay published much earlier and initialising this misleading approach to Wright's haiku: Sanehide Kodama, ‘Japanese Influence on Richard Wright in His Last Years: English Haiku as a New Genre’, Tamkang Review, 15.1 (1985), pp. 63–73. It would seem that later scholars tend to generalise Kodama's argument, propagated in the recent collection, edited by Jianqing Zheng, The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), which consolidates this whole collective support for an ungrounded approach to Wright's haiku. Echoing Hakutani and Tener, Jianqing Zheng, the editor, writes in an article on Wright appearing in The Southern Quarterly, ‘This large quantity of haiku shows the world that, in looking to nature for poetic and spiritual inspiration, Wright found a way to reveal his true self for a harmonious union with nature and to enjoy through this harmony the aesthetic faculties of natural beauty’ and ‘It was likely that Wright wrote haiku against illness, out of loneliness, and for oneness with nature and that writing haiku had a healing power on him. What Wright had been searching for was beauty’. See ‘Richard Wright's Haiku’, Southern Quarterly, 46 (2009), pp. 61, 63.2 For an analysis of the gap between American haiku culture and Japanese, see Haruo Shirane, ‘Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson, and Modern Haiku Myths’, Modern Haiku, 31.1 (Winter–Spring 2000), pp. 48–63.3 Kodama, ‘Japanese influence’, pp. 68–69.4 See Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 362.5 See Richard Wright, ‘This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner, Final draft, Typescript Carbon’, in Haiku from the Richard Wright Collection. Richard Wright Papers (New Haven, CT: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, n.d.), Box 70, Folder 834. Hereafter abbreviated FD. Subsequent references to the Richard Wright Papers collection itself abbreviated as RWP. See also ‘Final draft, selected verses, typescript’, Box 70, Folder 835.6 Reginald Horace Blyth, Haiku. 4 vols. (Tokyo: Kamakura Bunko, 1949), pp. 335–6.7 See, for instance, RWP ‘This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner’, ‘Working draft of Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn sections’, Box 70, Folder 833. Hereafter abbreviated WSSA.8 See Blyth, Haiku, pp. 312–43.9 Abdul R. JanMohamed, ‘Negating the Negation as a Form of Affirmation in Minority Discourse: The Construction of Richard Wright as Subject’, in Arnold Rampersad (ed.), Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995), pp. 107–23, 108.10 Hakutani and Tener, ‘Afterword’, p. 282.11 Yoshinobu, ‘Haiku, Zen, and the African’, p. 112.12 See Addison Gayle, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980), p. 220.13 See Constance Webb, Richard Wright: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons), p. 379.14 bell hooks, ‘Counter-Hegemonic Art’, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: South End Press, 1999), pp. 173–84.15 See, for instance, W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken Books, 1940), p. 52. Fabre cites a passage from ‘I Choose Exile’ which illustrates not only the pressures to conform to the rhetoric of the white hegemony and the fiction of the American melting pot, but just how powerful merely stating the facts could be outside the American ground: ‘I realized that a bare recital, when uttered in an alien atmosphere, of the facts of Negro life in America constituted a kind of anti-American propaganda’; see The Unfinished Quest, p. 356.16 In an interview published in L'Express as ‘Richard Wright: I Curse the Day When for the First Time I Heard the Word “Politics”’ (18 October 1955, p. 8), upon being asked about what historical date is ‘most charged with significance’, Wright wrote: ‘The 1905 victory of the Japanese over Russia. That date marked the beginning of the termination of the Godlike role which the Western white man had been playing to mankind. That date marked the beginning of the de-Occidentalization of the world’. Reprinted in Richard Wright, et.al. Conversations with Richard Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), p. 164.17 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 67. Emphasis in original.18 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 12–13, 22–3.19 On the importance of class (in addition to national) discourses in defining myths of race and the ‘racialization of manual labour’, see Etienne Balibar, ‘Class Racism', in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 204–16.20 FD, Box 70, Folder 834, p. 51.21 Compare FD, Box 70, Folder 834, p. 1; and RWP, ‘Haiku Collection of 824 Verses’, n.d., Oversize Writings, Broadside folder 2035, hereafter abbreviated BRDS. See the broadside with ‘command’ handwritten at top.22 See Carolyn Camp, ‘The Rhetoric of Catalogues in Richard Wright's Black Boy’, MELUS, 17.4, p. 30 (emphasis added).23 Joyce Ann Joyce notes that in Native Son ‘white, embodied by the snow, indicates the blindness and insensitivity of the white world’, in ‘Style and Meaning in Richard Wright's Native Son’, Black American Literature Forum, 16.3 (1982), p. 115 (emphasis in original).24 See Kodama, ‘Japanese influence’, p. 67. The editing of the broadside manuscripts deserves separate treatment, as the scope of this article precludes making further claims. See BRDS.25 Blyth, Haiku, p. 389.26 BRDS.27 Blyth, Haiku, p. 389.28 Ibid.29 Ibid., p. 437.30 FD, p. 8.31 In BRDS, see broadside with ‘cryptic’ handwritten at top; and RWP, ‘HAIKU, Notebooks, Collection of 4000 verses, typescript, corrected’, n.d., Box 72, Folder 844, #614, hereafter abbreviated FTV.32 BRDS.33 Blyth, Haiku, p. 444.34 Marko Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality, trans. Timothy Pogačar (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008 [2000]), p. 20.35 Ibid., p. 21.36 Ibid.37 This position, which is being challenged, is taken by Hakutani and Tener, ‘Afterword’.38 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York and Avenel, NJ: Gramercy Books, 1994 [1903]), p. 5.39 On ‘transideological irony’, see Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994).40 FD, p. 1; and Richard Wright, Yoshinobu Hakutani, and Robert L. Tener, Haiku: This Other World, 1st ed. (New York: Arcade: Distributed by Little, Brown, 1998), p. 1.41 I am indebted to a now-retired colleague, Dr. Jess Willis, who upon reading this haiku immediately pointed out this idiomatic reference in ‘sun’.42 WSSA, in ‘Winter’, p. 9.43 Jean-Francois Gounard, The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright & James Baldwin, Joseph J. Rodgers, Jr., trans. (Westport: Greenwood, 1992), p. 82.44 RWP, ‘Spread Your Sunrise’, draft, typescript [1935], Box 84, Folder 980.45 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 110.46 On the relation of how one sees to art and language, see Jacques Rancière and Steve Corcoran, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London and New York: Continuum, 2010).47 BRDS.48 See Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990), p. 13.49 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 79.50 Wright, Hakutani, and Tener, Haiku, p. 1.51 Of course, the published edition, as shown above, does not maintain the original order, frustrating readers who only have access to this corrupt rendering. See FD, p. 1.52 FD, p. 1.53 One change in the wording of the verses is found in this broadside: ‘straight’ is ‘right’ in the uppermost verse in the right column. See BRDS.54 Richard Wright, Yoshinobu Hakutani, and Robert L. Tener, Haiku: This Other World, 1st ed. (New York: Arcade: Distributed by Little, Brown, 1998), pp. 1–2.55 See Blyth, Haiku, p. 335.56 See Wright, Hakutani, and Tener, Haiku, pp. 8–9.57 Compare these texts: BRDS; and FD, p. 4.58 Wright, Hakutani, and Tener, Haiku, p. 7.59 See, for instance, examples in Wright, Hakutani, and Tener, Haiku, pp. 9, 191, and 199.60 Wright said,I would like the reader to understand that my character is looking at white values with the eyes of a Negro who has entirely absorbed the values of the society around him. This is what one of his companions expresses when he says ‘The belly of a fish is white'.Wright, ‘Interview with Richard Wright', L'Express, 479 (18 August 1960, pp. 22–3), reprinted in Conversations, p. 205.61 Gayle Gaskill, ‘The Effect of Black/White Imagery in Richard Wright's Black Boy', Negro American Literature Forum, 7.2 (1973), p. 48.62 FTV, Box 74, folder 855, #1745.63 RWP, HAIKU, Notebooks, ‘Collection of 1491 verses, typescript, carbon’, n.d., Box 70, Folder 837.64 FTV, Box 75, Folder 858, #2039.65 FD, p. 71; and Wright, Hakutani, and Tener, Haiku, p. 175.66 WSSA, ‘Winter’, p. 13.67 Ibid., p. 10; also Wright, Hakutani, and Tener, Haiku, p. 153.68 WSSA, ‘Winter’, p. 13.69 Ibid., p. 8.70 Ibid., p. 9.71 Richard Wright, ‘White Man, Listen!', in Black Power (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), p. 717.72 Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus, p. 79.

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