Richard Wright's haiku, zen, and the African "primal outlook upon life"

Yoshinobu Hakutani

pp. 3-21

in: Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed), Cross-cultural visions in African American literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Richard Wright is acclaimed for his powerful prose in Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), books that he wrote early in his career. But later in his life he became interested in poetry, especially the haiku. In the 1950s he enjoyed gardening in his Normandy farm, an activity that supplied many themes for his haiku.¹ Of his other experiences in this period, Wright's travels to the newly independent Ghana in West Africa are also reflected in his haiku. The African philosophy of life that Wright witnessed among the Ashanti—the "primal outlook upon life," as he called it—served as an inspiration for his poetic sensibility.²