LONELY OUTSIDERS
Plastrik, Stanley
No one knows better than Richard Wright that the white man has not listened for a century, has neither plans nor intention to start listening now and probably couldn't listen if he wanted to....
...Wright's book, as he says himself, is for the "Westernized" elite of the non-European world, the "lonely outsiders" existing on the margins of many cultures...
...192...
...He looks into this or that theory to find an idea of what has happened to him and his kind...
...About this, have we not good reason to be skeptical...
...Richard Wright tells us he is neither perturbed nor unhappy in his 191 chosen state of "alienation...
...it cannot get around the startling proof recently advanced by Gunnar Myrdal that the gap in wealth between the West and the underdeveloped countries has steadily widened...
...Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, Nehru—they are more important to the West than the West itself...
...and Wright himself is a precious example of what this means...
...First, it would seem that the central tragedy of his "tragic" elite is that try as it will it cannot lift itself up by its own economic bootstraps...
...from his lonely perch in Paris, a Paris swept by waves of "Americanization" and wasting its last energies in a futile colonial war, Wright keeps both his sense of judgment and his passion...
...THE HEART OF THE BOOK is in the two opening essays: the first, a cataloging of the "psychological reactions of oppressed people," and then the key essay "Tradition and Industrialization...
...White Europeans freed Asia and Africa from its irrational traditions and customs, but simultaneously created a rootless, westernized elite...
...And when he selects a theory, whether it be Marxism or any other revolutionary doctrine, he is not so much concerned emotionally with whether that theory is right or wrong, but whether it fits his feeling and most nearly describes what he sees and feels...
...Bandung was clearly a turning point for him, the crystalization of anti-colonialism into new forms not understood by the white man nor, for that matter, too well understood by those representing the best democratic and socialist traditions of the West...
...It is an important book and the neglect it has met in America only emphasizes the blocking off of communication between the West—all sectors of the West—and as Wright puts it...
...freer than their most sympathetic supporters of the West since they, at least, are capable of talking action...
...He is bewildered, hurt, stunned, filled with a sense of self-hate...
...The voices of Asia, Africa and the colonial world are blocked to him by an accumulation of rubbish...
...This is the only message Wright has to offer...
...He has not forgotten who he is...
...The world that such man sees is devoid of meaning...
...For Wright, Bandung was the first coming together of that "tragic elite" whose thought and mentality, whose very soul he is attempting to explain to us: The present-day attitude of the national revolutionary in Asia and Africa has the quality of a man who has been put to sleep for centuries and awakens to find the world of which he was once a functioning part roaring past him...
...This elite, feared and hated by the West, constitutes an island of free men...
...Still, the ways of communication must be kept open...
...To which might be added: and whether it works, gives results, quick results...
...This elite, says Wright, "must be given its head...
...STANLEY PLASTRIK • A major section of this was publishedin the Fall 1957 DISSENT...
...Indonesia, India, Egypt, Algeria— these are countries in a hurry, a fact that at least partly explains the bitter clashes that occur between groups within the nationalist movement itself...
...Even though it con sists of a collection of speeches delivered before European audiences, this book is the author talking largely to himself, about himself and for himself...
...a billion and a half colored people in violent political motion...
...Grateful as we must be for Wright's courage in putting things bluntly at a moment when none are listening, does he not tend to be carried away by the starkness of his own thesis...
...it is a stark one...
...More important, there is the matter of the vast personal power of men like Nkrumah, Nehru, and Nasser, which Wright tends to gloss over by urging us to believe that the elite seeks power not for itself but for its people...
Vol. 5 • April 1958 • No. 2
