Richard Wright, Haiku Poet

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I couldn't understand how two Chicago boys, ages 10 and 11, could throw a 5-year-old from the 14th-floor window of an abandoned high-rise until I thought about the bleakness with which Wright had portrayed South Side Chicago. In contemplating the brutality of the Bloods and the Crips and the Gangster Disciples (and the Black Panthers as well), I've often thought about Wright's essay 'How 'Bigger' Was Born,' a personal and sociological recounting of the creation of Bigger Thomas, Native Son's antihero and Wright's most famous character. I wonder what it must have cost Wright to watch the city's soul-killing carnage, to understand its inevitability and write it down.

And yet, in all the violence and outrage and truth of Wright's vision of black life in North America, some human elements are missing. Wright drew 'large and startling figures' (Flannery O'Connor's phrase) because he felt the urgent need and responsibility to convey the previously unacknowledged psychic suffering and limitations imposed on American blacks. But the question remains: In the aggressive facade Wright presented to the world, where are tenderness and humor and stillness?

Born into extreme poverty in 1908 on a plantation outside Natchez, Mississippi, Wright learned the value of craft and secrecy, using stealth and the aid of a friendly white man to gain access to the then-forbidden world of books. Escaping to Chicago as a young man, he went on to write such American classics as 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and Black Boy (1945) as well as Native Son. A literary and cultural hero, Wright also became a threat to national security-or so said the FBI, the CIA, and others who saw him as a communist and rabble-rouser. Wright spent much of his life in conflict with these groups, and there were rumors that his death in 1960 may have been an assassination.Did Wright risk too much in his work? Did he become the facade he presented to the world?

Such questions were recently brought to the fore with the appearance of a compelling, previously unpublished collection of Wright's poetry called Haiku: This Other World (Arcade, 1998). The thought of Wright scribbling thousands of these short poems, the Japanese mode of high contemplation, while also throwing brick after brick, in the form of his books and essays, at the plate-glass window of American racism, is astonishing. Wright organized 817 of his 17-syllable haiku into a manuscript he was unable to publish before his death. The poems are uneven: Many could be student work, and some are utter failures. But then the reader encounters something like this:

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