Martin Kilson lecture, "Richard Wright's African Phase II," at the University of Iowa, July 30, 1971

Speaker 1: The following is a lecture by Martin Kilson, recorded at the Third Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture on July 30, 1971. Mr. Kilson speaks on Richard Wright's African Phase, two. Martin Kilson: Now, I ended last time on the proposition that Wright stood out in vivid and graphic form over and against, what one might call I suspect, the main stream of the Afro-American intellectual African Orientation. In the years 1920s to the 1940s, Wright was outside the mainstream. And I have tried to characterize for you my conception. One, my conception of in what form Wright remained outside the mainstream, as it were of Afro-American African Orientation in these years. And two, to provide a set of descriptive and analytical propositions, in effect, a method of attack upon the problem of explaining why Wright remained outside of the mainstream of Afro-American intellectual African Orientation in the years 1920s to 1940s. Martin Kilson: Now, I said in general, Wright's African Orientation seems to fall within two periods, phases or era. The one that I've just talked about, 1920s to 1940s, and this mature or second phase, the last 13 years of his life in effect, 1947 to 1960. I shall now describe my understanding of what happens in this phase and the extent to which it is a continuation of phase 1, 1920s to 1940s. Or the extent to which it diverges, deviates from the formative phase and becomes something distinctly and intrinsically different. To anticipate the conclusion that, well, I shall say, on the second phase, Wright's second phase does not distinctly and intrinsically diverge from... That's the conclusion that I shall draw, and that is drawn by what I shall say. Does not diverge, but is rather a very delicate, tenuous, tension laden continuation, an organic continuation of the first phase. Martin Kilson: He dies, as it were, in the midst of the second phase, and one might, I suspect, easily project certain scenarios out of this tenuous, tension laden continuance of phase one that occurs in phase two. Which might persuasively convince me that this tension would ultimately be resolved by a more classically nationalistic Afric-centered Blackness being adopted and internalized by Richard Wright. And that is conceivable, but anyway that, I suggest, is not demonstrable on the basis of the fictional and in fact less than significant for the fictional than the non fictional reported on travel literature he produced in the second phase. I call the second period of ritualized African Orientation, the mature period, simply because it entailed a reinforcement of Wright's natural pan Black consciousness with explicit connections with Africa and Africans. Throughout Wright's early period of African Orientation, he lacks precisely this explicit connection with Africa. Martin Kilson: And this Wright differed from virtually all other Negro intellectuals of significance in the years 1920s to 1940s. Robeson, Dunham and others traveled to Africa in this period, while other leading Negro intellectuals of this era like Langston Hughes, cultivated close links with African students that Negro colleges like Lincoln University, Hampton Institute and Howard University. And still others cultivated ties with African students or intellectuals in the urban Black middle class social networks. But alas, Richard Wright lacked the class background which provided these kinds of opportunities to make social and cultural connections with Africans in the 1920s to the 1940s. He did not receive in his stable working class rearing the family inspirations to go to college which are typical, taken for granted in middle class and upper middle class and short in boys law households of the Renaissance artists and intellectuals like Langston Hughes. Martin Kilson: And not having gone to college in the 1920s, Wright lacked access to those special Black middle class or bourgeois social networks. You can name all kinds of them. Professional associations, quintillions, social clubs, and of course, the Greek letter fraternities where he might encounter as indeed the middle class literati of the Harlem Renaissance did encounter innumerable African students who were themselves, one must remember, in process of fashioning bourgeois lifestyles and outlook. Richard Wright did, however, experience an occasional meeting of African students in the 1930s to the 1940s. But he did so not through Black bourgeois social networks, but rather through those unique social networks of Marxist or left wing white intellectuals in the 1930s. Martin Kilson: Wright met perhaps his most important African associate in this period just before the dawn of the second phase, Kwame Nkrumah to become the first prime minister as he did in 1952. Well, the first head of government in 1952 of Ghana and the first prime minister of independent Ghana in 1957. In the United States he met through these left wing networks, this most important of his African student associates. What is more, many subsequent encounters in the second phase, late 1940s till his death that Richard Wright had with Africa and Africans were also mediated. Not by bourgeois social networks, typical of those in which mainstream Afro-American artists of the 20s and 30s spent much of their time, but in left wing networks of white intellectuals, in which white intellectuals participated prominently. One such left wing network was provided Richard Wright his first extended contact with African intellectuals was the African Bureau which was an influential anti colonial organization in London after World War II. Martin Kilson: The major figures in the African Bureau were, of course, African intellectuals like Jomo Kenyatta, later to be the first prime minister of Kenya, and Kwame Nkrumah already mentioned. Was Indian intellectuals who were probably even more important in the African Bureau in its early period than were African intellectuals, particularly George Padmore, C.L.R. James, and Fitz Braithwaite. And also English white intellectuals very prominently Dorothy Pizer, George Padmore's wife, English wife, and W.E.F. Ward, an English historian who once in fact worked for the British colonial government in Ghana. Who rejected colonialism and colonial governmental roles in order to become a critic of colonialism and a very important figure in the African Bureau. Martin Kilson: Richard Wright first encountered numerous African intellectuals through this left wing group in the late 1940s. And he developed a particularly close relationship with Kwame Nkrumah and Nkrumah's close West Indian friend and confidant, George Padmore. As well as with Padmore's wife, English wife, Dorothy Pizer. It seems in fact, that the Wright eventually got to know Nkrumah and other African intellectuals well, he was always much closer to George Padmore, who like Wright, had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s and had left the party but remained partly a Marxian socialist in outlook and intellectual style. Thus, although Richard Wright gained his first avenues of direct connections with Africans in the late 1940s onwards, he persisted in preference for a Marxist or socialist type outlook that is, in preference for the marginal man networks to mediate his new relationship with Africa. A relationship of intensity which he had never acquired in the first period, 1920s to 1940s. Martin Kilson: Wright indeed never quite trusted, I suggest, the mediation of his new relationship with Africa in the second period, to an ethnocentric set of networks and propositions. Or if this is too strong a description, and I'm not sure, because it might very well be of Richard Wright's position on this issue in the second phase, then at least it seems, as a minimal statement of that situation, Wright was ambivalent about allowing an ethnocentric pattern to mediate his new and more intensive encounters with Africa and Africans. Thus, it seem that throughout the last 13 years of his life, when Wright acquired his closest connections with Africa and confronted annoying dilemma, on one hand he nursed continually persistently strong desires to come into closer association and interaction with Africa's postwar endeavor to free itself from Western colonial oligarchies and racist practices, and to reorganize African societies along African nationalist lines. Martin Kilson: But, on the other hand, Richard Wright could not, it seems, in his new African relationships anymore than he could in his American Negro relationships, affect or accept the kind of Black ethnocentric and culturally separate outlook and behavior patterns that distinguished the Garvey movement. And which in recent years characterized, of course, wide segments of militant American Negroes, especially bourgeois Black militants. And a word throughout the era of Richard Wright's most determined journey, figuratively speaking, to the historical heartland of his gut racial awareness, he persisted and remaining a marginal man. This basic feature of Wright's character, as an artist an intellectual was never really allowed to be superseded by competing desires and processes like gaining a closer awareness of Africa and Africans. Martin Kilson: In other words, however basic Wright's new African experience was in the second phase to his larger self realization as a Black, it was not allowed to develop at the expense of what might be called Wright's to his identity, namely, his marginal identification. What this meant about Richard Wright, during the last 13 years of his closest African Association, is that he maintained intact the distinguishing features of his marginal identification. Most obviously perhaps, he did not discard his wife, who was a white American. This might appear peripheral on first encounter, but on closer observation, it is rather fundamental. If one considers for a moment, for instance, recent examples, current examples of Negro intellectuals who in the past decade have straightened Black nationalist militancy among American Negros have embraced the new Black nationalist identification by visiting Africa, acquiring so called Afro hairstyles, wearing African garments, and in some instances, adopting so called African religion. Martin Kilson: Many of these intellectuals moving into the most intense Afric-centered Blackness ever known to an American Negro intellectual community who might have affected that attribute of cultural marginality in an earlier period, which is associated with interracial marriage proved not at all secure in their emergent, marginal identification, and expressed this by separating from their white spouses. Leroy Jones, of course, is perhaps the most prominent example of this mode of retreat as it were, from marginal intellectual identification. And there, of course, are many others. All displaying, in fact, a not unfamiliar insecurity, with marginal identification as the psychological, ideological and cultural alternatives to the causes of marginal identification become increasingly more available. Martin Kilson: As the experience of Irish, Jewish, and other ethnic intellectuals have, in fact demonstrated, marginal identification is not at all easy to maintain. Only those artists or intellectuals I suggest, who grasp the subtle and profoundly elusive dialectics of marginal identification. Both in terms of one's personal and one's intellectual or creative life, are capable of sustaining the features of marginal identification to their grave. Richard Wright was clearly in this unique and special category of intellectuals of marginal identification. And I think the maintenance of his marriage to Ellen Poplar, a white woman until death is fundamental to understanding the fiber of Wright's marginal identification at the very point when he gets closer than ever before to Africa, the historical and cultural heartland, so to speak, of his native racial consciousness. Indeed, in a sense and without being sentimental, for those who grasp the centrality of marginal identification in both his personal and intellectual or creative ingredients. Martin Kilson: For those who grasp the centrality of marginal identification to certain forms or styles and motifs of creativity, then Richard Wright's persistence in martial identification warrants celebration. Men after all are most fragile precisely in matters of identity, as of course psychiatry cycle analysts, like Erickson have told us in the last 25 years. And only certain men can endure identity discrepancies, if you will, as preconditions of the creative life. Richard Wright also remain intellectually, or ideologically true, I suggest in the second phase to marginal identification. Throughout this period of what I have figuratively called his most determined journey to the historical and cultural heartland of his gut racial consciousness. Martin Kilson: A clue to this intellectual and ideological persistence in martial identity occurred just before Richard Wright boarded, in fact, a ship in 1953 for his first voyage to Africa, Ghana, then the Gold Coast, his destination. Speaking to Madame Vijaya Pandit, the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, at a cocktail party in London, Richard Wright expressed his view of how Asian and African emergent anti colonial nationalist countries must pursue modernization if they are to succeed. I quote, "Can't you see," he said to Madam Pandit, "The feudal states, tribal states are lost in the world today? Can't you see that the great powerful industrial states set the tone and conditions of living in this world? Why not borrow instrumentalists' techniques from the west?" He concluded. Martin Kilson: What Wright is saying in effect, is that the institutional and technological dimensions at least of modernity have been laid down by the West and any pretensions on the part of Asian and African societies emergent into modernity, to modernize outside of these Western dimensions would fail. Richard Wright entered Ghana in 1953 with something like this proposition as his guiding principle, I suggest. And Wright to suggest something, I'll try analyze something for you. So you can look at it many ways anyway. Yeah, he also entered Ghana as an American Negro, whose most intellectually convincing perceptions of the Black experience in a white dominated world have their origins as I've suggested in my first lecture, and rise profoundly instinctual or native, or gut racial consciousness. Thus, throughout his Ghanaian tour, two modes of perception were to dominate what he saw, and how he evaluated what he saw in 1953. Martin Kilson: One mode of perception was that of Western rationalism and pragmatism, mediated for Wright by a Marxist socialist worldview of some sort or the other. The other mode of perception was simply his intensely, but yet extraordinarily creatively native Black racial consciousness. The hold of one or the other, of these modes of perception over Richard Wright during his Ghanaian tour, is of course vividly exhibited in his published record of that tour. And his first travel book, in fact, Black Power, subtitle a record of reactions in the land of Pathos, published in 1954. And the same clash of these two modes of perceptions that I have delineated reappear subsequently in Richard Wright's two other books, essentially books of travel that deal again with the endeavors of Asians and African societies to modernize. Namely, The Colored Curtain published in 1956 and White Man Listen, published in 1957. Martin Kilson: Thus, I have analyzed what kinds of relationships afforded Richard Wright his closest experience ever with an Afric-centered with a chance of realized AN Afric-centered Blackness in the last 13 years of his life. This experience was, I suggest, as profoundly affected by all those personal and intellectual attributes that made Wright a marginal man, as were his efforts to grapple with the meaning of Blackness in America. Whether subsequent to his African Germany, Richard Wright ever grasped the internal.... Sorry, whether subsequent to his African journey to Ghana, Richard Wright ever grasped and internalized the more nationalistic strident form of what I call Afric-centered Blackness, is really difficult to say. It is certainly not especially apparent in his works of fiction which followed his African journey in 1953. Martin Kilson: And in his travel report on his Ghanaian visit, that is Black Power, Wright is sufficiently suspended still, I suggest upon my reading of that book, between the two modes of perception, which I have delineated, which compete for primacy in his observations and in his measurement of those observations, and in how he articulate those observations on route to what he intended to be, perhaps the acquisition of a more nationalistic form of Afric-centered Blackness. Yet, it is clear that at many points in his report of his African tour, Black Power, he does get nearest to some articulation or approximation of a more nationalistic, Afric-centered Blackness than any other time in his creative writing career. Yet, my belief upon reading Black Power, is that Wright essentially remains suspended between the two modes of perception which always vied for dominance IN his intellectual and creative observation and evaluation throughout his life. Martin Kilson: In conclusion, and by way a very brief and pithy illustration, I shall read several passages from Black Power. Hope, I bought the right book. From Black Power to illustrate my own particular conception of the tenuous dialectical balance Wright struck in the last phase, the last 13 years, between the intellectual outlook of a radical Western marginal man, and that of nationalistic and separatist oriented, Afric-centered Blackness. Martin Kilson: Page 343 from which I take the first quote by way of a quick and pithy illustration of my proposition and conclusion, Wright says to Kwame Nkrumah in a letter that he writes, in which he sums up what he's all about in the book. "Have no illusions regarding Western attitudes. Westerners high and low, feel that their codes, ideals and conceptions of humanity do not apply to Black men. If, until today, Africa was static, it was because Europeans deliberately wanted to keep her that way. They do not even treat the question of Africa's redemption seriously. To them it is a source of amusement merely. And those few Europeans who do manage to become serious about Africa are more often prompted by psychological reasons than anything else. The greatest millstone, perhaps, about the neck of Africa for the past 300 years, he says, has been the psychologically crippled white seeking his own perverse personal salvation." That is about as near as you get to anything you've ever read books Wright I suggest.Speaking directly himself now through the medium of a artistic creative character to articulation of what I call the classical nationalist separatism, Afric-centered Blackness. Martin Kilson: What's the other page? 350. Or you can take anyone you want but if you do this, I think it is illustrative of the problem I'm trying to analyze for you. Well, here we are. In your hands, he's talking to the crew I guess. His first and I guess in a certain sense, his most intense African personal linkage. "In your hands lies the first bid for African freedom and independence in the modern world. Thus far you have followed an African path," he underlines, is italicized. I say, and he italicized the following, "So be it! Whatever the west or east offers, take it. But don't let them take you. You have taken Marxism, that intellectual instrument that makes meaningful the class and commodity relations of the modern state. But the moment that that instrument ceases to shed meaning, drop it. Be on the top of theory," he advises the first prime minister of an independent African state in 1954. "Don't let theory be on top of you. In short, be free." beyond lines italicizes. "Be a living embodiment of what you want to give your people in modernity." Martin Kilson: It's another Richard Wright talking. The Wright who is the radical Marxist oriented in some sort, marginal man. And finally, another variation then I shut up. In the same document of advice, an extraordinary document actually. This letter of advice is Appendix to the book is extraordinary now as it was when I first read it when I was a graduate student in 1955/54, when it first came out. 18, 17 years ago. "The basis concrete and traditional," he says, "For the militarization of African life is there already in the truncated distorted tribal structure. The ideological justification for such measures are simple survival. The military is but another name for fraternization for cohesiveness. And a military structure of African society can be used essentially for defense. Most important of all, however, a military form of modern African society will atomize," smash/break up that is what he means, "The fetish written past." This is Richard Wright talking. Martin Kilson: "Abolish the mystical and nonsensical family relations that freeze the African in his static degradation." Could almost be racist talking, a European official. He's calling a document the only part of the century, you see the same thing. He's talking about a complex human being. "It will render impossible the continued existence of those parasitic chiefs." He is right actually, they are parasitic. I'm writing a book on, that's why I dropped my manuscript just to come here. I'm writing a book on chiefs, they are called chiefs peasant politicians. The analysis of the relationship of these three constituent groups in the modern structure of power of Nana under Nkrumah. In fact, I hope to finish it in about two months. "It will render impossible the continued existence of those parasitic chiefs who have too long bled and misled the naive masses. It is the one and only stroke that can project the African," he advises Nkrumah immediately until the 20th century. I'm finished. Speaker 3: Anyone has any questions? Speaker 4: [inaudible] Martin Kilson: No I meant the document, the letter to advice. That's what I'm reading from. It's not an extraordinary book actually. And only the document is the most important thing of book, book is discursive, he didn't spend much time, he didn't prepare. For someone to write such a book, I never thought I'd write that book, for someone to write such a book... Well think of great books of travel. Think of the Tocqueville, I mean, of sociologists you think of. I mean, you'd have to prepare for it, you have to discipline yourself around how people think about this extraordinary set of historical events that are going the transition of African preliterate on age and in some cases, even Neolithic African societies, into modern industrial, post industrial and the post atomic world. You get my point. He tried to face the facts raw, so to speak, with except for two perceptual tools that I've talked about. His particular variant of the race, conception of consciousness as a perceptual tool as it is for the artist, or whatever. It is called ethnic consciousness, doesn't have to be raised. Martin Kilson: It could be a Jew going into a similar situation as a hat. And then going into Israel, some interesting literature on that. Well, it could be anybody, an Irish mill or anyone else. And of course, his particular bag of Marxism, that all he had. But there are just general ordering propositions, which if they're going to handle a new set of data, of facts, of evidence, as of course, the visit to transitory emergent African societies represent, then you have to do homework. Because that's the first weeks of the book, no bloody homework. You just couldn't write such a book. And obviously, the book is also I would argue, I don't know about people who know more about Wright as a creative person than I do. But the book is also heavily as well as a trip was heavily a psychological thing, an experiential thing as it were. Martin Kilson: And with experiential things you can be at this cost indifferent to homework and preparation as you want. As long as you've got something that will make that experiential thing click and pull it off as a mode of creativity. I don't think this is a creative piece of travel literature. I mean, travel literature is almost art. The Tocqueville stuff is almost art, as well as extraordinary sociology. But I wouldn't call this art. It is another travel thing that's almost art by an American, that's Wilson. I recently read it because I become interested in the Caribbean. Read Out of being Black, the Black is Haiti. And the first thing I know, I started a literary critical study I know of Haitian literature of the 20s between the two world wars. But that book is a piece of art. Does anyone know that book? You read Out of Being Black? People don't read enough. You can't become clever social scientists or artists or whatever, unless you're reading. Speaker 4: [inaudible] Martin Kilson: Now, he doesn't do any reading. He doesn't any reading, he picks up facts, he uses the the most convenient intellectual tool perceptual tool it has for giving those facts somewhere, that's Marxism. All the stuff about colonial is to be found in any typical, left wing pamphlet, anti colonial pamphlet. I'm not saying it's wrong, what I'm saying it doesn't take many facts or any preparation at all to do that. You can simply go to an encyclopedia, he probably went to the new state yearbook or any comparable collection of annual indices of economic, social political relations and index of society. Why not? I will take anything from it. This, I think, is a very important document not because it's worth the other tribal travel document. It's important because where it falls in this last stage of this perpetual interplay between these two perceptual propositions which I think, governed the man as an artist. Speaker 5: But Wright actually is quite upset about the criticism he got from Blacks because he was British. [inaudible] Martin Kilson: Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. Yeah, I gathered that from web that he was very defensive about it. I didn't know this. But I don't see what kind of evidence they one could deduce to say that the defense had a base in a rational evaluation of the book as as even good reportage or not alone as approximating an analysis of what brought Ghana where it was at the point in time that he saw his first bit slice of Africa. It's got some perception in it but it's hardly that. I don't think that could be the cause of his reaction. And again, it's not very, I mean, if you look at it, you want to see some anti colonial literature. Christ, I'll read Black Power, I mean, for this period. Martin Kilson: He's still in a period where the colonial system has made a primary decision to the colonized in effect, which they made before he first made his extensive contacts with African intellectuals in London for 1947. Most colonized system made that decision in 44 as the British or French did. So as soon as the war was over all the machinery toward decolonization was already set into motion. So the problem was of one of speeding up that machinery of creating a pattern of nationalist structured political pressures and patterns of political direct actions and demonstration that sped up, that increased, accelerated the rate at which decolonization was going to end. Because Africa decolonize without hardly any bloodshed, apart from Mau Mau. And of course, Algeria. Martin Kilson: But for the most part, this great area of five times the size United States is moved out from under historical relationship of colonialism for 70 years before World War II with Europe, or without anything like the war that you had to use to get the Dutch out of Indonesia between the 44 and 49. And to get the British, the French out of Indochina. And what other major so called anti colonial military wars we had. Or to get the French out of Algeria. The great Sub Saharan Negro African part of the continent was amazing thing. My point is during this period that anti colonial literature develops, and some of this literature continues right on down through the middle 50s, depending on what country it is. Ghana gets out before everybody else, and then Sierra Leone and Nigeria next. But in Kenya, there's an eight year time difference, they don't get out until what, 1965, 1964, and so forth, and so on. Martin Kilson: And so literature continues, read other forms of anti colonial literature. My point is, it's not very anti British. Christ, the British confronted far more vitriolic, and almost what you might call if you were a colonial official, what's the term, insurgent literature. Even from Azikiwe, who after he gets power becomes of course, Africa's biggest capitalist, which is part of the whole business about that nationalism. He did very many splendid things, maybe that's the best way of putting it. It's a technique of mobilizing historical relationships, reorganizing historical relationships in favor of one set of people as over against another. Once the technique realizes his immediate goal of redefining social political power, what's done with it by the people who get it, it may be very different from what they were articulating ideologically, symbolically, verbally during the nationalist stage. Martin Kilson: Read the West African palette, from the 19 1944, which was the major national newspaper in Ghana, which Azikiwe owned down until late 1950s when Nigeria gets independence as it does 1959. What the anticolonial and Richard Wright appalls into almost baby talk compared to it. Or if you read the stuff that comes from Portuguese militants now who have to mount warfare, in fact, against one of the more reactionary and less enlightened colonial powers on the African continent in the last century. Portugal or the stuff that the sort of quasi modern rule semi peasant kind of a rule work across elements who mounted Mau Mau between 53 and 58/57 when it was finally brought to an end, and a different leadership took over the nationalist cluster in Ghana. I mean, in Kenya more bourgeois type of leadership under Jomo Kenyatta and Tom. Read that and compare that, that was being written the same time that he wrote. Martin Kilson: Read those old Mau Mau things, that stuff is blood and gore. And of course what occurred consequent to that particular form of really insurgent literature was blood and gore. I mean, Mau Mau was a bloody operation, people weren't playing games. All I'm saying is that it's not that easy rolling, this is typical knee jerk. This is what anybody would say who was a Black intellectual going as what you're saying today, going into Afro-American Studies Department, I was sitting you say you have knee jerk thing. If you're not a serious intellectual and don't take your marginal status seriously as many of us do. There are all kinds of lectures. And obviously, Wright is a very special kind of lecturer, he is not like most of us. He is in my reading superior to most of us. Martin Kilson: So all I'm saying is this is not much, he's just doing his... What else could he do, so to speak. And that's not the core of the book at all. The core of the book if it has a core is probably where he's sorting out certain observations about, he heard white folks always said as part of their use of a racist psychological techniques to more effectively control and dehumanize and disintegrate the Black, that the Blacks can dance better. And we can do all these things that are out of the motive and out of the physical. And if you come from either the stable working class going up, the stable class has a lot of trying to articulate yesterday upwardly mobile aspirations. when I say work off to the middle classes, you fought that because your goal was to conquer the the cerebral skills, the intellectual and techniques. Martin Kilson: And therefore you didn't want that want to have an image of yourself as being only capable of playing the piano, and cake walking and whatever it was at any given point in time, judo bugging, and so forth. So any middle class back as well as the wipe white work press back is always ambivalent towards the thing. As a boy you always had an illness towards any middle class. Actually, I don't know what lower class feels because not many have written about this thing, this business. There are artists, writers who write about lower class who train themselves but I can't think of any those written that well. But all I'm saying is that's interesting. Martin Kilson: Have you read Black Power? That's an interesting, that's what you should have zeroed in on Black Power, not on the anti colonial stuff, that's all major. That's what you should have zeroed in on because that's interesting. He never concludes it, does he? I haven't looked at it for some time except for this thing. But he doesn't conclude it, if I remember. He doesn't conclude this issue. It talks about a number of places, he says white folks maybe, he said they were using the statement of what is natural cultural or psychological makeup was given the fact that different people do have certain native psychological makeup surely a wasp is different from an Irishman, you don't believe to come to Boston. And there's a difference, culture does shape us. Ethnicity, whatever it is, does shape us and we pass it on over time. Scientists know this, we know this. We know that beliefs and values and hunches and all these things are part of the way you pass on. What distinguishes a an Irishman from a salt install, and on and on, and if an item. Martin Kilson: Well, he began to have more scientific understanding of what it was. But another thing happens. I think he begins to increasingly, as I was saying, he gets near to Blackness. Because he says he had this stuff beat out of him. Don't do that, stay away from those. Did I read that section from what he tells his his biographer, where his mother stay away from those, you're all Black. My mother told me same thing. Stay away from those, I can relate to that very well. I have a sister who was more deviant, relative to not following my mother's dictates she's a much better dancer than I am. We're from the same father, mother as far as I know. We look alike but we're told we take it for granted. Doesn't really matter. Martin Kilson: All I'm saying is that depending on how you behave relative to all these cues, it determines a lot of things. And he says that he really couldn't dance well anyway. But that establishes you in on him. There is some personal stuff like that. But most of the book is not important, except this document at the end is important, at least for what I'm trying to do. Work out some of the sort of political, sociological as well as intellectual components of Wright as a artist among other Negro artists of this generation and this era. In that respect, this document is of great intellectual importance. These last five pages, it's a letter to Kwame Nkrumah, then the Prime Minister of Ghana. Yes. Speaker 6: Regarding the document, and then in regard to your own approach, you defined two perceptions of which Wright went into Africa. How is your own approach, or perception or role as a marginal man different from Wright's? Martin Kilson: Well, I'm not an artist so that's the basic difference. You get my point. That said that I am a margin, how did you know I was marginal? [crosstalk] You are insisting upon it. I might have said it, I say lots of things. I say them in seriousness, but I don't remember all the things I say. But yes, Wright. Well, the difference, I guess, is that I'm not an artist. That's to say that I might be wrong, there must be some people who are artists here. I think an artist is always much more up against marginality, and all of these ingredients than I am, then that is a social scientist I would say. I don't know. I mean, I would say that's the basic difference. I'm not up against them all the time. I don't have to draw upon those specific special ingredients that make for marginality, and therefore, they differentiate me from other social scientists of my genre, or background, or ethnicity, or whatever. Martin Kilson: And I have to draw upon those things all the time. It's because social sciences are a more applied thing, let's say the ingredients, the sources of what you do, are often more exogamous to you than endogamous and so forth. So whatever, it makes an artist different from other intellectuals. And that's what would be the difference. I understand marginality as well as he does, I think, but I don't experience it quite. For these you have to stay sane, probably, I think as a social scientist, whose marginal than it is. It's not easy, I think, to stay sane or whatever you want to call it to always have a sense of having your grip. Martin Kilson: I think in Wright's writing there's a lot of insanity. I don't want to say that but I don't know how to put it. I mean, there's a lot of evidence of as it is, and I think all creative artists who clearly have marginality as one of the crucial artistic structural trades, there's always an evidence as they get nearer to that other side of existence, and they can dance at the edge of the bloody thing much more than most of us can and so forth. I'm a frustrated writer. I wanted to actually but I think I wasn't much good and I was bread and butter. You can't be bread and butter oriented either if you're a great artist, it will really take your chances. You're happy when you make a lot of money or whatever they have the sources of ingredients of influencer or whatever, but you're just as able to continue, persist without a penny. Martin Kilson: I'm sure that's one reason why I say though forget all about trying to write and it's a tough world. It is a tough world without prostituting yourself to the tough world to be persistently creative, but there would be no difference between us I guess otherwise. Speaker 5: I just want to say something about what I gathered through alliance in Wright's world. That is inn many places she's quite accurate about the relationship between Wright and Nkrumah. Martin Kilson: Well, I don't remember that section. I didn't use that. I used somebody else's. Speaker 5: Well, you're talking about a close relationship but that didn't exist. Martin Kilson: Well, I said it was the closest relationship he had with Africans. That was a different statement than that. Speaker 5: Well, I think he had a close relationship with [inaudible] When I read the book looks like they didn't know each other at all, and I was under the impression that they did. So I'm not so sure. Martin Kilson: He might be I just don't know. That would not to alter my point. Speaker 6: Can I say in regard to that point? It seems to me that it's still essentially correct that you're playing that Wright was introduced into this world through London in 1947. And one of the reasons for whatever, this anticolonialism, which is outweighed by the time Black Power emerges is because of that particular kind of introduction, wouldn't you say? Martin Kilson: Probably, yeah. Speaker 5: No, I don't think that was particularly significant but [inaudible] Martin Kilson: Yes I know. But still there was none of what you would call the kind of sudden wrenching of oneself from the... If you would lay out some of the basic building blocks when gradients of the marginal, artistic intellectual, and because one for all of them that we know of, is always of course moving across this very important barrier that defines different levels of social groupings and social pecking, that is the marriage barrier. Irish will marry of wasp and Judaism will marry a wasp and you just name it. And so on, Catholic will marry a Protestant. It is very important, there's no wrenching. Nothing like what I was trying in comparing his persistence in the ingredients of marginality with those who all of a sudden wrench themselves and with greater course public and celebrated symbolic flair from the ingredients of marginality as a concept. I think it works now. Martin Kilson: Oh, yeah, I knew that and that's enough. But all I'm saying is that, that is not at all what's involved in... At least I don't have any evidence of it. It's not at all that what's involved at least with this relationship right down through. Because marginality is the man so to speak, is the message you. Not literally anything else, anything else as Dr. [inaudible] said so well, yesterday afternoon. Anything else is really ultimately subdued by whatever marginality is for this particular artist. Whether it's Marxism and it's more inclusive and therefore, of course, subjecting form or whether it's different forms of Blackness that ultimately if you allow them in will be also totally inclusive and submissive and subjective to some sort. Martin Kilson: White not only is the message I would say for Wright. And if that is true, then of course you will find, if you dissect this proposition then one was likely to find the greater persistence in those particular ingredients or building blocks or preconditions of marginality. And one of them is clearly Of course moving across those lines that called the marital lines. They are very, very common ingredient of marginality. Or many other homosexuality or so forth or so on. You can move into all kinds of things, you can move across homosexuality that correlates very highly with modern studies and marginality anyway, so I'm not really saying anything new. I am saying you're new in terms of the way people thought about Wright but we know a lot about marginality, creativity and a few conditions and building blocks of it. Martin Kilson: Homosexuality is of course very important one. So I don't think there's any difference between, unless you have another point on that. Speaker 5: Well, I just think symbolically they are the same but [inaudible] In aspect he was really narrative. Martin Kilson: Well, yeah. But you see facts have no meaning. Unless you have facts as such. The important aspect of that fact was some important enlargement of that separation. I mean, for example, he'd probably been separated. I mean, for example, I suspect, it's not good to say that about a person. I won't say it. I'll say it. I suspect for example, since I know a lot of marginal artists, I suspect for artists who are marginal men, I suspect, for example, that Wright was was oddly a man who had some built in barrier to adultery. For example, let me show you that your point is not really well taken. If I was to try and say something about the man, would you say that because he moves into the bed of X, Y, and Z while legally according to the documents, establishing that marriage in New York City in 1942, or whenever, he is not married. You get my point. Martin Kilson: It's what the man does with these particular pieces of facts, diversions of variation, divergence from other facts, expected in the eyes of others to be more truly him, as well as he does with it. I mean, there are people, of course, who do things of a more celebrated, of a more conspicuous and more externalizing sort with adultery. But we know that something's happening to that man, who'd do far more with separation than from all evidence I can find out that Wright did with separation, and so forth and so on. All I'm saying is that that factor doesn't count to really fundamentally counterman or contradict an effort to talk about the ingredients of marginality. Martin Kilson: And Wright at this point, where he's moving now toward a set of both physical personal, as well as emotional relationships with Africa, of a sort that he never had before. And with what we know can be the implication of the Negro intellectual artists moving for the first time into a new realm, called a new realm of interaction with things that African. With that thing I call that historical and cultural heartland of one's native racial consciousness. We know what others have done. Anyone who knows anything about and even intellectuals who have had some marginality characteristic about them in the last 10 years will understand this. And Wright somehow, therefore, I think stands out extraordinarily. And the others too, Wright's not the only one actually. But he happens to be one of them. Darwin Turner: Anyone has any question? I want to thank Professor Kilson again for his performance.