The last days of Richard Wright through his haiku.

Zheng, Jianqing

A year and half before his death in Paris, Richard Wright became obsessed with haiku and wrote four thousand of them. He said he could not give up "those damned haikus" (Michel Fabre. The World of Richard Wright. [Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985]: 54). His daughter, Julia, reminisces in her introduction to Haiku: This Other World that Wright wrote haiku "at all hours: in bed as he slowly recovered from a year-long, grueling battle against amebic dysentery; in cafJs and restaurants where he counted syllables on napkins; in the country in a writing community owned by French friends, Le Moulin d' And J" (vii).

Haiku, as a poetic form that focuses on the human relationship with nature, reveals a poet's sensibility and tenderness not only to nature but to human nature as well. For Wright, writing four thousand haiku during his illness may show that his anger, which prevails in Native Son and Black Boy, has gradually abated into a tender sensibility to nature and humans, and this sensibility may have been latent within him for his discovery. But, as soon as he finds it, he cannot stop digging into it. Wright's haiku also show what he has been seeking is a self-enlightenment, to borrow a Zen saying, "seek within, you are the Buddha." Only when a person is enlightened, he can see nature with his enlightened eye. For example, in haiku 425 (all are from Haiku: This Other World. NY: Arcade, 1998):

   An empty sickbed:
   An indented white pillow
   In weak winter sun.

This haiku creates a world where sickness or death is associated with nature; it is a world where Wright gains satori, enlightenment that is "defined as the state of mu, nothingness, which is absolutely free of any thought or emotion" (Hakutani Yoshinobu and Robert L. Tener. Afterword. Haiku: This Other World. [NY: Arcade, 1998]: 250). The association of the empty sickbed with the weak winter sun reveals the mu of personal emotion since death itself is mu.

On the other hand, it is interesting to note that some of Wright's haiku record his feelings about his illness, as in haiku 224:

   While convalescing,
   The red roses have no smell,
   Gently mocking me.

This haiku reveals the speaker's momentary stay against illness. He tries to be light-hearted by saying the roses mock him. In haiku 361, Wright also pretends to be light-hearted and mock himself in a humorous, but bitter, tone:

   At slow intervals
   The hospital's lights wink out
   In the summer rain.

Margaret Walker elaborates in Daemonic Genius that Richard Wright "had been ill since the summer of 1959.... He was chained to a bed of sickness. He had never before had a long, confining illness in his life ... and he had always been susceptible to colds and upper-respiratory infections, like grippe and flu ... but nothing like his present illness. He complained of an enervating weakness, of sudden changes in his body temperature, and of breaking out in cold sweats ... Amoebic dysentery was very debilitating, and the medicine made him feel even worse" (NY: Amistad P, 1988: 329). Sometimes his illness makes him feel lonely, and this feeling of loneliness becomes stronger when it is juxtaposed upon the season of autumn, as in haiku 243:

   Leaving the doctor,
   The whole world looks different
   This autumn morning.

Sometimes his illness exhausts him, as he suggests in haiku 250:

   Even toy soldiers
   Perspire with weariness
   In the autumn mist.

The seasonal reference and the use of hyperbolical use of toy soldiers make the weariness more unbearable. The haiku below shows Wright's reliance on the use of senses to express his feelings about illness:

   The sound of the rain,
   Blotted out now and then
   By a sticky cough. (34)

The auditory image of the rain becomes a background for the sticky cough that sounds louder than the rain. Wright is always good at describing abstract feelings in a concrete way, as in haiku 290:

   A freezing morning:
   As sharp as an aching tooth,
   A long icicle.

On November 28, 1960, Wright died at the age of 52. His life, which was exhausted in the last and half years of his illness, burned out like a candle, as he predicted in haiku 647:

   Burning out its time,
   And timing its own burning,
   One lonely candle.

A few days before Wright's death, he was interviewed by Frank Tenot, who said he saw the novelist in Wright, "but through the novelist, the jazz lover" (Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. [Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993]: 242). I just wonder what Wright would say if he was told he was a haiku lover. It is no doubt that Wright devoted his life to haiku writing in his final stage. His interest in haiku, as Margaret Walker says, "may have been the beginning of an interest in Eastern philosophy and religion" (314). Wright dies with haiku, an exotic art he has been enamored of because "art," as he ruminates, "is such a ruthless taskmaster that when the artist stumbles perhaps he pays with his life" (Oliver W. Harrington. Why I Left America and Other Essays. [Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993]: 20). Wright's haiku reveal his sensibility not only to nature but to human nature as well, and his haiku on illness suffice to prove. Chester Himes says in an interview that Wright's work belongs to "a literature for the world" (Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner Skinner. Conversations with Chester Himes. [Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995]: 7), and this should include his haiku.

Jianqing Zheng, Mississippi Valley State University