Poetic Awakening of Richard Wright Essay

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As a poet, Wright becomes like a surrogate for the man, or a medium who channels the man's spirit: "And then they [the lynchers] had me, stripped me, battering my teeth / into my throat till I swallowed my own blood."

This is a poetic awakening for Wright, even though it is painful. By entering the "Inferno" of the woods, Wright finds his calling. He finds it through the guidance of apprehending the dead man, the dead man who becomes his guide through the underworld that is life for a black man in America during the era when Wright lived and for many years afterwards. Wright calls it a 'baptism' by gasoline, and by the end of the poem, Wright has fully 'become' the dead man: "Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in / yellow surprise at the sun...."

According to Orlando Patterson's book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, to be a slave is to be in a state of social death. A slave has no identity, no name or role other than being owned by his master. Although Wright chronicles a period long after slavery, lynching confirms African-American's place as existing in limbo, in a kind of social death. No one will avenge the crime. Additionally, the man is never formally tried for rape, instead the community has free reign to do what it wants to this man, regardless of his rights as a human being. Wright realizes this in a cruel shock, so he resolves, almost against his will like a prophet having a forced calling from God, that he must speak for the man. He sees that no liberation from racism has occurred in American society, and while once upon a time a "master's death was the occasion for the release of the slave," this is no longer the case -- a slave is forever bound because of the way that blackness and slavery is viewed as permanently intertwined in society (Patterson 227).

In the poem, Wright makes it clear that he has witnessed a profound trauma, a trauma that has gripped his soul. However, this trauma is not merely a personal trauma that affects him alone, but affects all of his people.

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His poetic awakening thus is not personal and internal, unlike Dante's. His call to write is a call to write on behalf of others, just as the lynched man he sees is not simply a man, but 'every' black man who has been lynched and ignored by the community of whites, who do not care, and the community of black men and women who are too afraid to bring the revelation to light. Wright must speak and write on behalf of the collective. "In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything to encourage forgetting" (Herman 8).

When an individual commits violence, he or she wishes to hide the crime and community historical erasure, just as first whites denied blacks were unhappy under slavery, then denied the disenfranchisement that occurred regarding blacks after slavery was prohibited after the end of the Civil War. The lynching is a secret crime, easily hidden and forgotten -- except for the saving presence of Wright, who possessed by the muse and the persona of the man, and every dead man at the hands of whites, will continue to speak on in poetry.

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