CHIMALUM NWANKWO

A reflection on Richard Wright must perforce begin where the writer began his
life--with escape. Before that beginning I must preempt hasty repartees by insist-
ing immediately that escaping to philosophical safety is not peculiar to Wright
alone or to the African American who thinks like Wright, but also to continental
Africans; this is something that many African writers must learn to deal with. The
cliché about the grass being greener on the other side applies strongly to many
who become very vocal about the failings of the Black world only after success-
fully escaping from the perils of life in that Black world, especially in cases where
poverty was the chief peril. In the case of Richard Wright, who also knew poverty,
added to the very grave peril of American racism, his escape involved running
from the most salient aspects of Black culture, from its humanness and expansive
fellowship with its wealth of an optimistic and dynamic eschatology to the very
arid extreme of Western philosophy--that alien wilderness of existentialism, de-
spair, and spiritual loneliness.

Richard Wright's courage and justifiable anger have been highly praised be-
cause "he successfully transformed rage into art."¹ His literary reputation is by
no means lean. He is still admired for his ability to rise from the murk of Deep
South American racism to become one of the most outstanding names in Amer-
ican literature. The great question that has not been clearly and finally settled
remains: if his name is now unassailable, what of his mind? Yes, the mind, that
quality which should radiate and perpetuate that penumbra of authority, the
stimulus for compassionate followership or even radical activity. Personally, for
instance, I feel terrified by his Gothic frescoes of macabre violence in works
like Native Son, but I am not moved to contemplate any other kind of action. I
would sooner be moved to more positive reflection by Langston Hughes, Ralph
Ellison, James Baldwin, Claude McKay, and some of Wright's other, "lesser"
contemporaries. Wright's concerns cannot in any way be considered to enjoy
any kind of distinction over the concerns of these other writers.

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