5 Richard Wright in the House of Girls

How poor indeed is man.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

There is a staggering, provocative, and ever so slightly macabre moment of instruction guarding the gates of Richard Wright’s enigmatic treatment of mid-twentieth-century Spanish society and culture, Pagan Spain. Wright reports that in the final days of her life Gertrude Stein, “racked with pain and with only a few days to live,” solemnly counseled,

“Dick, you ought to go to Spain. . . .

“You’ll see the past there. You’ll see what the Western world is made of. Spain is primitive, but lovely. And the people! There are no people such as the Spanish anywhere. I’ve spent days in Spain that I’ll never forget. See those bullfights, see that wonderful landscape.”1

What startles and sends the alert reader scampering to consult his notes and reevaluate his assumptions is just how easily the codes of influence and mastery on display might be interpreted and broken. Stein, deathly ill and tugging girlishly “with the fingers of her right hand a tuft of hair on her forehead,” seems most concerned to pass on to Wright the mantle of genius and intellectual leadership that she so ably wore during the previous four decades. Her dominance of the development of American modernism was indisputable.2 It was made more impressive still by the fact that she lived most of her adult life in Paris as an unmarried woman, a lesbian, and a Jew. The very pretension of the comments that Wright ascribes to her, “You’ll see what the Western world is made of,” suggests a woman who has long since delivered herself from marginality. Not only does she know what the Western world is made of, but she also knows where to find it. More startling still, Wright’s narration of this scene works to place Stein’s genius against the background of her insistent and vengeful flesh. The many images of a stout, short-haired woman, covered from head to foot in heavy, concealing clothing, are eclipsed by a picture of a weak, girlish body garishly forcing itself into Wright’s narrative and thereby making itself no longer useful as an “invisible” vehicle of a presumably disembodied Manhood.

For his part, Wright stands beside Stein as an apt and deserving pupil, one with the combination of intelligence, endurance, and humility necessary to carry on even as his mentor falters. What we see is nothing less than a manhood ritual. With the last of her strength, Stein invites Wright to the center. The exiled African American writer whose two major works, Native Son and Black Boy, literally name the author’s minority status, his childishness, has now been hailed as a quintessential modern, one whose only major fault is his lack of familiarity with the primitive. Stein’s imperative syntax—“go to Spain,” “See those bullfights, see that wonderful landscape”—reiterates not only her confidence in her interlocutor, not simply their equality, but also their singular presence among a transnational literary and cultural avant-garde.

Still, the forcefulness of the language that Wright deploys is seriously undermined when one takes into account the timing. Stein died in 1946, while Wright did not make his first trip to Spain until 1954, eventually publishing Pagan Spain in 1957. I wonder, therefore, if the vigor of Stein’s advice rests less with Wright’s desire to fulfill the dying wishes of a dear comrade than with the extremely productive rhetorical work that her words do. What I argue is that the best way to break the rather breathtaking critical silence that attends Pagan Spain is to pay careful attention to the ways that it is not simply an example of the grand novelist’s indulging himself with a journalistic writing experiment in the style of Truman Capote’s 1966 “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood.3 Nor does it represent Wright’s aloofness in relation to the aesthetic experiments that helped to distinguish European and American fiction of the mid-twentieth century. Instead, in this meticulously planned—if only haphazardly researched—project, Wright was attempting to disestablish those conceptual structures that effectively worked to obscure the distinctions between the white, the European, the modern, and the universal. He did so, moreover, by relentlessly reversing the terms of Euro-American exceptionalism, not only ascribing backwardness, provincialism, and indeed paganism to the Spaniards, but also reserving for himself status as Western, modern, cosmopolitan, and—importantly for the arguments that I make in this chapter—male. He achieves this through reference to rather precise cartographies of difference in which the paganism and primitivism of Spain are always framed as closed, cloistered, inside, and inaccessible. Thus images of women, hungry in their desire to free themselves from the restrictive confines of traditional society, abound in this text. In the process Wright offers an impeccable rescripting of many of the dominant tropes of capture, exploitation, abuse, and complicity that have structured our understandings of Euro-American colonization and Atlantic slavery.

If the bifurcation of human being into its animal and intellectual aspects is itself a primary artifact of post-1492 procedures of colonization and enslavement, then it follows that in his most basic, most clumsy resistance to this reality, the enslaved/colonized subject might at the very least be expected to claim that the line dividing Man from human has been too haphazardly drawn. When the black cries, “I am a man!” he does not so much disrupt the hierarchies of human being with which we are concerned as assert his right to rise within them. What Wright is after in Pagan Spain, however, is somewhat more ambitious than this. As I have argued already, he attempts to turn the tables, refusing commonsense cartographies in which humanity is always associated with the colonized world, particularly Africa, while Manhood is strictly limited to Europe and its outposts. Taking advantage of a loophole of retreat, Wright, the (black) American living in France and writing about a “marginal” European country that he only briefly visited and whose dominant languages he never learned, is nonetheless able, at least temporarily, to place his blackness under erasure in order to announce the cosmopolitanism and theatrical aloofness that are the very markers of Manhood. In doing so, he actively works to rehearse many of the tropes associated with slavery and colonization: excessive religiosity, obsequious deference to power, infantilized sexuality, suspicion of strangers and nonconformists, and most especially the systematic exploitation of women. For Wright, it is the Spaniard and not the Negro who deserves the pity of the missionary and the anthropologist. The problem, of course, is that this line of thought leaves the clumsy distinction between Man and human very much intact. What one finds most chilling about Wright’s efforts in these arenas is how easily—and ignorantly—he places himself in the position of the (white European) chronicler of the marginal and the primitive, a sort of mid-twentieth-century Marlow casting his bemused gaze from a safely distant perch atop the Pyrenees.

In preparation for the composition of Pagan Spain, Wright created a prospectus, “An Outline Tracing the Treatment of Material on a Proposed Book on Spanish Life, Tentative Title, Lonesome Spain.”4 Therein he describes his plans for a book of eight sections: “Life after Death,” “Gods for Sale,” “The Underground Christ,” “The Love of Death,” “The World of Catholic Power,” “The Pagan Heritage,” “Flamenco, Sex, and Prostitution,” and “Spain in Exile.” Upon publication, the book contained only five sections: “Life after Death,” “The Underground Christ,” “Sex, Flamenco, and Prostitution,” “The World of Pagan Power,” and “Death and Exaltation.” One of the things we can easily discern from the selections that Wright was forced to make as he pruned nearly 50,000 words from the 150,000-word manuscript that he submitted to Paul Reynolds, his editor at Harper and Brothers, was his understanding that the intellectual environment that he described was one in which the conceptual and ethical problems confronting Western humanism were met by equally pressing issues of how one might exist beyond the restrictions of human flesh.5 Death, religion, sex, and exaltation, including ecstatic art forms like flamenco, were central to Wright’s understanding of Spanish society and culture. The Spain that Wright describes is a remarkably kinetic location. Everything and everyone is in motion. Thus Wright’s treatment of Spain is altogether impressionistic. As with his commentary on pre-independence Ghana in the seminal 1954 work, Black Power, Wright finds himself much more capable of describing the disembodied forces that he finds in Spain versus the blunt, everyday realities of the many individuals whom he encounters.6

Understanding this reality gets one closer to understanding why Wright has so little to say about how Spaniards of the 1950s coped with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. He fails to offer any considered discussion of the geopolitics that sent the country lurching through a shockingly bloody civil war that ended only fifteen years before he edged the nose of his Citroën across the French-Spanish border. One of the most serious criticisms that one can make of Wright is that, like Hegel briefly considering what he took to be the native African’s absence from the ever forward-moving march of world history, he could never fully recognize anything akin to either Spanish individuality or creativity. The paganism that Wright represents is essentially a marker demonstrating that “the fundamental customs, habits, and emotional attitudes of the people have not altered and are not likely to alter for centuries” (Wright, “An Outline”). In this sense, the Spanish Civil War could not be said to be the explosion of competing economic and cultural forces that pitted Marxists, anarchists, intellectuals, urban workers, and landless campesinos against royalists, large landowners, the military, and the Guardia Civil. Nor could it be said to have been the first important salvo of fascist Germany and Italy in their decades-long efforts to dominate the rest of Europe. Indeed, the involvement of foreigners in the war is never mentioned. Instead, the conflict was explained by Wright as entirely a matter of what one might think of as an elemental bloodlust. He quotes at length an interview he conducted with a prominent Spanish journalist, one Señor G., who begins their conversation by informing Wright, “The Spaniard is an animal that is spoiled from the cradle. We are made to feel that we are something precious, something that needs no improvement” (Wright, Pagan Spain, 239). One might easily see then how for Wright, the 1936–1939 civil war could easily be understood as the articulation of a certain undercivilized humanity whose primary purpose was to reflect and define the frank and aloof Manhood that both Wright and his Spanish interlocutor demonstrate.

What I am attempting to show is the fundamental structure of Pagan Spain’s narrative strategy. I would hazard to guess, in fact, that Wright was able to produce such a long manuscript not in spite of the fact that the ex-Communist author eschewed materialist analysis, but because of it. What this awkward analysis of Spanish culture did for Wright was to free him to experiment with a much more obviously modernistic style. The language and imagery that he deploys are recognized as but reflections of timeless realities that can be said to exist only for themselves. Wright’s descriptions were significant only to the extent that they demonstrated universal truths about the human condition that might be applied not only in Spain, but also in much of the so-called primitive world. The master is not writing in order to change Spain, but only to describe it. “I don’t agree with the setup in Spain, but my job in this book is not so much to condemn as to understand and present my understanding to others” (Wright, “An Outline”).

Writing Spain became for Wright an exercise in approaching thin, immutable surfaces and then recording his marvel at the infinitely multiplying reflections they provoked. One can begin, therefore, to understand the motivations underwriting Gunnar Myrdal’s grumpy, only half-complimentary letter thanking Wright for having dedicated the book to him:

If you will permit me to offer a criticism, my feeling is that this is really only a preface to the serious, penetrating and enlightening analysis of the Spanish situation which you should write. What you give are flashes of insight, incisive impressions by the stranger. . . . I want you to write a bigger and deeper book. Do not forget that this is meant as praise, both for your present installment and, still more, for your potentialities of human analysis! (Quoted in Rowley, Richard Wright, 485)7

Even as I readily agree with Myrdal’s basic claims, I would push against his logic a bit by reminding you that Pagan Spain was hardly an anomalous part of Wright’s oeuvre. On the contrary, it was the third installment in a three-part series of what we might think of as sociological travelogues: Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957). Myrdal’s sense that with Pagan Spain Wright had only just begun a project ostensibly devoted to the examination of the structural and cultural realities of Spanish society misses the point. As Wright traveled through Spain, he was attempting to continue the work on colonization and decolonization that he had initiated in Black Power, his 1954 study of the transition of the British Gold Coast colony into the independent nation of Ghana. This was almost immediately followed by The Color Curtain, Wright’s examination of the institutionalization of the Non-Aligned Movement as represented by the Afro-Asian Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955. At the same time, Wright was obviously aware of the quickening pace of the civil rights movement in the United States and sensitive to the dynamic geopolitical confluences that drew together the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the 1955 Bandung Conference, and Ghana’s independence in 1957. What he was after in Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain was less an examination of the specific political, economic, and cultural realities of the nations he examined than something akin to a capacious articulation of the ways that race and colonization operated in the production and reproduction of humanism. Wright’s conception of what we might think of as the space of race and empire was at once flat and broad. While much of the rhetoric of Pagan Spain turns on his naming what amounts to Spanish exceptionalism in relation to the rest of Europe, the work is relentless in its depiction of Spanish paganism as largely indistinct from the primitivism so often associated with the African and the black.

Richard Wright had been attempting to draw seamless connections between Spaniards and (African) Americans since at least 1937, when he worked as a writer for several Communist Party–affiliated journals. In a September 20, 1937, essay in the Daily Worker entitled “Harlem Spanish Women Come Out of the Kitchen,” Wright describes a meeting of one of the party’s all-female Pasionaria cells, named for Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, a Communist militant whose bracing speeches in defense of Republican Spain often included the defiant slogan ¡No pasarán! (They will not pass!), earning her the sobriquet “La Pasionaria.”

Each Wednesday at 1 P.M. some 70 women in Spanish Harlem lay aside their aprons, turn off the gas in their cook stoves, tell their children to be good (or better, take them with them), and go to a small, dingy meeting at 84 West 111^th Street. They are not going to a women’s sewing circle, or to a temperance meeting or to a Bible class; these dark-haired, bright-eyed women are about much more serious business. They are members of the Communist Party and the ideal in their hearts is la Pasionaria, the heroine of the Loyalist Spanish masses. Some of the women are elderly; some are young; almost all of them have children; eleven of them have husbands in the Loyalist trenches. . . . They assemble in the room and wait for their comrades. The room is quiet. Soon is heard a faint humming; it grows louder, then finally breaks into song. NO PASARÁN!8

One of the things that make it easy to admire Richard Wright is that regardless of his public disavowal of Communism and the Communist Party, he continued throughout his life to think of himself as a radical advocate for working-class and poor people in their struggles against the most severe forms of capitalist domination. Moreover, as is well known, he was particularly forceful in his critiques of colonization and the ways that capitalism and white supremacy are mutually constitutive. At the same time, it is obvious that at even this earliest point in his efforts to fashion rhetorical structures equal to the task of bridging what many might take to be yawning differences of race and language, Wright’s descriptions remain surprisingly bland. None of the Spanish women whom he describes are named. With their aprons, cook stoves, and slightly less than well-behaved children, they are all of a type, all creatures of the flesh. Their actions are measured and repetitive, recurring with a devoted regularity each Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. What he takes to be their normal business—sewing, temperance, and Bible study—quickly gives way to the serious matters at hand, all of which seem to turn on either their reproductive abilities (“Some . . . are elderly; some are young; almost all of them have children”) or the status of their men (“eleven of them have husbands in the Loyalist trenches”). What Wright describes are not women per se, but instead reflections of what he imagines women ought to be.

I must remind myself to be generous toward Wright, to remember that much of what he was after was the disarticulation of what he took to be the common sense of space, race, and human subjectivity. As Wright pushes his female protagonists out of their kitchens, he is less concerned to deliver them to West 111^th Street than to have them enter into the expansive, worldwide terrain that he imagines La Pasionaria inhabits. It is obvious, however, that Wright fails in these efforts to the extent that he simply reverses the terms of the very gendered conceptions of space that he attempts to attack. Stereotypical notions of proper femininity are hardly disrupted in this passage. Instead, these beliefs were stolen wholesale from the ideological larders of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, then delivered without fanfare to the cause of the multinational struggle against fascism.

It behooves us to turn again to the idea of the war archive that I developed in the first chapter. While much of that discussion pivoted on drawing attention to the ways that theaters of war might be understood as sites of aesthetic intervention, places where breaks in established aesthetic and ideological structures might be at once acknowledged and sutured, I do not want to limit myself to consideration of only the mechanics of military combat. Even in the absence of guns, bombs, planes, and gas, practices of violence and domination are constantly reiterated and refined in domestic spaces. The ideological assemblies binding war and the domestic are the very structures that produce a necessary and inevitable pairing of Man and anthropophorous animal. The viciousness of the war theater is not so much disappeared as domesticated at the end of official hostilities.

Acknowledging this fact gets us a bit closer to understanding why in the previous passage Wright works so hard to relate the celebrated bloodletting of the Spanish Civil War to what we might think of as the naïve activities of Communist women. The homes that these women promptly exited at 1:00 p.m. each Wednesday were themselves sites of war, locations at which the complex work of absorbing and redirecting violence was accomplished. Wright’s investment in Spain was part of an effort to disturb the ways that the transnational, complex, and multivalenced structures of white supremacy could be so readily misnamed in local contexts. The scene of “Spanish” women attending meetings in West Harlem might be dismissed as females going about their inconsequential business, perhaps pausing for a moment to sigh over the fact of their country’s ever-present racism and its crushing hostility to females. What Wright attempts to do, however, is sharpen the critical faculties of his audience. He wants to rip through the veil of misrecognition that obscures the obvious connections between La Pasionaria and her Harlem doppelgängers. What is vividly demonstrated in Pagan Spain is that even on the European continent, the realities of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation are ever present. What is lacking, however, is a fully developed language of anticolonialism that might allow Spaniards (and the many other Europeans whom presumably they represent) to acknowledge not only their complicity with slavery and colonization but also the ways that the overvaluation of the fantasy of whiteness retards the ability of Spaniards—and other “white” Europeans—to acknowledge the basic facts of their own exploitation and submission; that is to say, the very many ways that their own flesh has been forced to endure the never fully articulated horrors of (white) Western humanism.

I direct you now toward the awkward approach that Wright forces his readers to make toward Black Power, his study of the Gold Coast in the days immediately prior to its achieving independence and becoming Ghana. Wright, at once an unmistakably American and yet self-consciously European (black) intellectual, cannot seem to make his way “back” to Africa except through Spain. Traveling as the sole American passenger aboard the Accra from one notorious slaving city, Liverpool, to another, Takoradi, his copy of Eric Williams’s masterful work, Capitalism and Slavery, ever at hand, Wright was keenly aware of the fact that he was retracing a key portion of the Atlantic trade. He writes of Liverpool, “This was the city that had been the center and focal point of the slave trade; it was here that most of the slavers had been organized, fitted out, financed, and dispatched with high hopes on their infamous but lucrative voyages” (Wright, Black Power, 22).

What surprises, however, is that even as he outfits Black Power with all the trappings of anticolonialist gravitas, he seems in no way allergic to the inclusion of a bit of sophomoric and vaguely pornographic farce. Also traveling aboard the Accra was one Justice Thomas of the Nigerian Supreme Court, a character Wright uses to demonstrate what Frantz Fanon describes as the national bourgeoisie, that thin layer of colonial elites who bristle at the usurpation of power and resources by armies of often less than impressive civil servants sent from European metropoles, but who greedily claim (and protect) the positions vacated by these so-called whites once formal independence is gained.9 “We are Creoles,” boasts Justice Thomas. “It’s from us that the English draw their best African leaders, teachers, doctors, lawyers. If we didn’t have the help of the English, we’d be swamped by the natives” (32).

Later, as Wright, Thomas, and a minor character whom Wright labels “Mr. Togoland” disembark from the Accra, anchored off Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, the justice casually mentions, “Once, when I was passing through Las Palmas . . . someone offered to take me to a house of prostitution.”

“Did you go?”

“I refused,” Mr. Justice said with moral indignation. “I never let anybody take me to places like that. Things like that are to be found by yourself. I pity the man who can’t find a woman.” (39)

What is rich about this passage is how effortlessly Wright seems to rehearse the most commonplace fantasies and phobias about the (necessary) mingling of black, white, African, European, English, and Spanish in the articulation of colonialism. The theatrics of border crossing are so broadly drawn that the first thing to which the wide-awake reader must attend is the simple question, “Where are we?” Las Palmas, the largest city in the European Union to exist outside the continent, is one of the two co-capitals of the Canaries, an archipelago of thirteen islands lying some one hundred kilometers off the coast of Morocco. (Two Spanish cities, Ceuta and Melilla, are located on the African continent itself.) European colonists began arriving in the Canaries during the fourteenth century. By 1495, the resistance of the native Guanches had been overcome and the Canaries were absorbed into the Kingdom of Castile, eventually becoming important sites for sugar production and the outfitting of Spanish galleons for the Atlantic crossing. Thus large numbers of enslaved Africans both worked the plantations and passed through the islands’ forts and prisons. Considering these facts, it becomes nearly impossible to deny the complexity and depth of a seemingly humdrum statement of misogynist braggadocio such as “I pity the man who can’t find a woman.”10

That the three men do eventually make their way to a house of prostitution, an institution that I prefer to refer to by the more colloquial title “house of girls” or “girls’ house” (casa de chicas), forces us to reconsider some of the most well-established methods by which we have conceptualized the ideas of transnationalism. Paul Gilroy, writing in his epoch-making treatment of Atlantic culture, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, argues,

The image of the ship—a living micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion—is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons. . . . Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to the African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts.11

Gilroy’s language here represents a singularly precise rendering of the situation aboard the Accra. Wright self-consciously names the ways the ship’s passengers are representative of the calcified structures of control and domination that the British erected for their colonies. The ship is full of “men and women going to Africa to assume civil service jobs or returning from a few months’ leave in England. . . . a mediocre lot to administer the destinies of millions of blacks” (Wright, Black Power, 35). Moreover, Wright’s status as an (African) American “returning” to the continent can be said to approximate one of the “projects of redemption” to which Gilroy gestures. Regardless, Wright seems bored by life aboard the Accra, describing it as a vault of “self-conscious stodginess” that he negatively compares with the “simplicity, honesty, and straightforwardness” of the house of prostitution (42).

What neither Gilroy nor Wright names, however, is the fact that our conceptions of life aboard ship are often erroneously keyed toward romantic notions of men alone at sea. Though the metaphor of the ship as “a living micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” is put to the service of exploding the idea that culture, politics, and economics can be understood within narrowly defined national boundaries, it nonetheless gains its own rhetorical vigor from the idea of the presumed social isolation of those on board. Stated slightly differently, as many of the “civilizing” practices in our societies are necessarily absent onboard ships, one might see which of the presumably most common, most “natural” aspects of human social interaction will be called upon to take their places. As we saw in Langston Hughes’s chilling description of a young girl’s gang rape by the all-male crew of the Malone, the ship was not simply the vehicle of an ill-defined and transcendent modernity. It was also a location in which the ugly work of putting human flesh in service to humanism’s basic ideological structures was enacted. Once we recognize this fact, we can move beyond a precious understanding of ships and sailing in order to examine the many places at which flesh, particularly black and female flesh, is attacked, “tamed,” processed, and made ready for proper utilization as a vehicle of anthropophorous (non)subjectivity.

Immediately after disembarking from the Accra, Wright and his companions set a straightforward land course toward the girls’ house. Part of what Wright accomplishes with this extremely evocative interlude is the disruption of the fantasy of the sea in favor of what one might think of as a much more holistic understanding of the mechanics of racialism and colonial contact. Hurrying toward what I take to be the most significant of my claims in this chapter, I argue that the house of prostitution, the girls’ house, is hardly peripheral to the articulation of humanism. Its primary role in the articulation, rearticulation, maintenance, denial, and dissemination of the common sense of colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism is bolstered by the fact that it exists as a thing that everyone knows, but never names. It is always approached via side streets and back entrances. Its inmates have no social presence, and even the value of their labor is acknowledged only haphazardly in the more respectable precincts of society. “The girls” are never understood to be laboring at all. Instead, they are always at rest. Dressed in party wear or lingerie, they linger, pose, and coo, apparently oblivious to the often brisk flow of dollars, pesetas, and pounds through the currents of their bodies. The very strength of the girls’ house, the reason that it can operate as such a potent ideological apparatus, is that it is imagined as existing outside the social. It is at its best an answer to a set of base/basic desires that are decidedly pre-social.12 I would add to this that Wright’s heavy reliance on farce and slapstick in his description of the house further obscures the complexity of the ideological work being accomplished.

I hope that the rather striking structural and ideological parallels between the girls’ house, the hold, the baracoon, and the market are readily apparent. In each case we encounter a closed environment in which the most basic architecture has been designed to refine and reiterate the Man/human distinction. Much of what I have attempted to accomplish in this book has been to nominate these presumably dead spaces as potent locations of meaning, key archives in the articulation of post-humanism, the disruption of the Man/anthropophorous animal binary. Tellingly, Wright’s description of the sociality of the girls’ house remarks it as a place literally brimming with humanity, full of bodies, but with apparently very few actors. The girls, lost and sinful, pretty and always receptive, remain largely silent and inactive throughout the scene, pausing only to fill drinks or rise promptly to service less taciturn customers in one of the house’s back rooms. Conversation takes place almost exclusively between men and about men. The very fact that neither Wright, “Mr. Togoland,” nor the justice spoke anything more than the most rudimentary Spanish sets a scene in which the point seems to be to ignore what is happening in front of them in favor of using this experience as a platform to name and celebrate their newly achieved status as (black male) cosmopolitans.

“Let me tell you a personal story,” Mr. Justice said, relaxing, smiling. “Years ago, when I was young man, I went into one of those houses. When I presented my card, the madam said: ‘Why your name is familiar to me. Wait a moment; I’ll find a card with a name on it like yours. . . .’ The madam pulled out from a closet a big glass bowl in which calling cards were kept. She fished around in it and a few minutes later she pulled out my father’s calling card, all yellow and dusty. . . . Boy, oh, boy was I proud!” (41)

This passage stretches the concept of homoerotic triangulation to new limits. Justice Thomas encounters his father through the offices of a bright-eyed, friendly madam. She presents him with his father’s calling card, a sanitized emblem of sexual exploits that is nonetheless yellow and full of dust, suggesting that hidden animality/primitivism/paganism has reasserted itself in the very fiber of the text. Moreover, the catalyst for the woman’s impressive acts of cataloging and retrieval is presumably the strangeness of the dark face presenting itself in her parlor as well as the incongruity of the names that both father and son carry. They are black and African, yet their cards, carriage, and ready access to British pounds mark them as men of distinction. The justice enters looking for a girl but leaves carrying with him Manhood’s many accoutrements. The entire scene is narrated by Wright, who, though seemingly unimpressed by the idea of entering a house of prostitution in the company of two other men, nonetheless continues to present himself as the very paragon of sobriety, assigning the stigma of greediness, hypocrisy, and pretension to the judge. Wright revels in making Justice Thomas uncomfortable and thwarting his desires, writing, “I could have easily put him at ease, could have spoken a sentence and released him from the high-flown sentiments of honor and Christianity and he could have done what he wanted to do, but I was perverse enough to make him sit there on top of his platitudes and grin nervously” (43). Wright is absolutely aware that though ritualized violence against women is a central reality, a necessity, of humanism, it is important to behave as if nothing is happening, as if the production of the Man/anthropophorous animal binary involves no force at all. Instead, it exists as an elemental reality to which our intellectual procedures and social structures are more or less attuned.

The corralling of human bodies, including female bodies, was perhaps the most widely utilized means with which to control and extract value from enslaved Africans. I suggest, therefore, that we ought to pay very close attention to the theatrics of the encounter between men and market-ready women that Wright describes. We should dare to see those male buyers braced with alcohol, capital, and impressively effective powers of self-deception. We ought to strive to recognize the women as self-aware participants, eagerly attempting to judge and influence their prospective clients. Dress, demeanor, those few words of English and Spanish nonchalantly bandied about, were all designed to facilitate the exchange of flesh and cash as well as to announce and revivify a set of protocols with roots deep in the practices of the Atlantic trade. The farce that Wright narrates took place in the context of a set of ideological and discursive assemblies in which the notion of a disembodied Western Manhood was established through the production—and immediate disavowal—of anthropophorous animality. Here in the city of Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria, where the notion of an absolute distinction between Europe and Africa ceases to be strange and becomes ridiculous, not only was the slave trade once practiced, but also those traditions binding together white supremacy and capitalism structured the most basic, most intimate aspects of (Atlantic) society and culture.

Though I am grateful for the insights left to us by Wright in Black Power and Pagan Spain, I am also extremely frustrated by his consistent tendency to steer his readers away from a full appreciation of the radical potential inherent in treating enslavement and the enactment of slave culture as realities that have structured the basic realities, the basic aesthetics, of Western humanism. Wright’s tendency is to remain too firmly fixed on surfaces, too eager to advance rather underdeveloped arguments about human psychology where a thoroughgoing treatment of the history underwriting the societies that he examines would be more in order. In my more generous moments, I can see that part of what motivated Wright was his desire to move away from Communist-inspired forms of cultural analysis that were at once much too derivative and far too prescriptive. Where his efforts chafe, however, are in those many locations at which the considerable power of his voice overshadows the complexity and the preciousness of the often extremely interesting scenes that he narrates. One of the most regularly repeated maneuvers in Pagan Spain is one in which Wright produces often quite satisfying rhetorical effect by flattening the elements that he has available to him. We have seen several examples of his tendency to produce two-dimensional, thin caricatures, particularly of women. We will see others as we continue in this chapter. Instead of simply castigating him for his presumed misogyny, however, I would like to suggest that Wright, who took hundreds of photographs in both the Gold Coast and Spain, was fascinated by the aesthetic/ideological possibilities available within the two-dimensional graph, that place at which the complexities of the flesh are compressed, fixed in time, and made redundant yet infinitely available for circulation as symbols of humanism’s breadth and stability. For Wright, the female lacks both aggression and ability. As a consequence, her presence does not inhibit the explorer, secure in his newly found Manhood, from moving forward. The girls he encounters have no need, no pathos; their lives are not inextricably bound to his. The loveliness that they inhabit is all of a moment, even if their shoes are scuffed and their dresses torn. As a consequence, their savage fecundity might be noted and approached without threatening the most significant conventions of Manhood.

Wright’s biographer Hazel Rowley relates the details of an affair the author had in 1959 with “German Jewish, blue-eyed and bottle blond” Celia Hornung. In the course of his seduction, Wright apparently asked Hornung whether she had ever slept with a black man and whether she was a member of the Communist Party. She had not and was not. Rowley then reports that Hornung’s relationship with Wright was largely built around their rehearsal of a sort of peek-a-boo aesthetics of sexuality:

Wright liked to tell her about seducing other women. He would describe the scene in graphic detail. Hornung was never jealous—personally she did not think him much of a lover—but she thought it bad taste. Sometimes he bought pornographic photos at Pigalle, and they used to look at them together. He preferred to take his own. Hornung enjoyed being his model. (Rowley, Richard Wright, 500)

What startles me in this passage is the phrase “graphic detail.” Wright’s description of the activities that presumably took place between him and his lovers is already removed from the activities themselves. The erotic charge that passes between Wright and Hornung is built upon Wright’s articulation of more and more complex procedures of graphing. In lieu of actual human coupling, he introduces pornographic photographs into the equation, suggesting that the action of the erotic scene always takes place at the site of re-presentation.

Following the lead of Maurice Wallace, who himself takes inspiration from Susan Sontag and Charles Johnson, I argue that Wright’s aesthetic in Black Power and Pagan Spain articulates an “ethics of seeing the world” in which all of everyday life is seen as a potential photograph. Value is a product of reproduction and fungibility. Thus the sexual act has little importance in and of itself. (Wright was not much of a lover, they say.) Instead, pornography works at exactly the level of titillation. The heat is produced from the knowledge that there is a necessary and insurmountable divide between image and act. The continual return to the pornographic image is motivated by the self-conscious awareness that the two-dimensional scenes before us are never equal to the real thing. Likewise, the value of the widely circulated lynching postcards that Shawn Michelle Smith examines in Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture was built upon the recognition that some Negro somewhere was murdered, tortured, burned, and dismembered while the basic elements of the viewers’ worlds remained intact.13

There is nothing particularly natural nor inevitable about the ability and will to graph the largely unspoken ways that we live in our animal bodies. Even more to the point, these processes of representation exist in history and are structured at the deepest levels by methods of representing the human form developed in and by colonization, enslavement, and the Atlantic trade. The pornographic aesthetic that Rowley associates with Wright is made coherent by the suffocating presence of slavery and colonization that suffuses all relations—even and especially erotic relations—bounded by Western humanism. Wright, fleeing from American-style white supremacy, approaches his Jewish lover, fleeing German-style white supremacy, well armed with camera and film. It is almost as if his efforts as a photographer are designed to produce a new archive of white supremacy. His practice seems almost talismanic. He attempts to appease the vicious beast of racial representation by feeding it, attending to its needs in an effort to turn it, ever so slightly, toward less noxious projects. What he achieves is the articulation of the simple fact that the slave culture that has been so clumsily narrated as having a rather proscribed existence (among the blacks on the plantations of America) is very much alive and well in the heart of Europe.

After receiving the nearly six-hundred-page manuscript for Pagan Spain, Wright’s editors at Harpers extracted from the author a number of painful concessions designed to address the length and unwieldiness of the document. Wright had omitted already his discussions of both “Gypsies” and Spanish exiles. To further appease the press, he shortened the discussion of his stays in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, and Granada, cut the chapter on Protestantism by half, and eliminated altogether a chapter on the annual Las Fallas (The Faults) festival in Valencia.14 Even with these cuts, it is fair to say that Pagan Spain is a text that is at times needlessly rambling, and sometimes surprisingly shallow. Nonetheless, one wonders whether the editors ever allowed themselves to hear clearly Wright’s many provocations. He understood that at the level of everyday culture, at those many sites of unexamined ritual, even the most casual of observers might see that at the center of Spanish culture there stood a transnational, cross-racial cultural exchange in which Spaniards pressed against the unstable border separating “white” Europe from “black” Africa. Pagan Spain might be seen, in fact, as Wright’s attempt to produce a sort of aesthetic palliative to this state of affairs. Like a woman alone in her rooms fingering the edges of some socially proscribed image, Wright produces in Pagan Spain a sort of diagnostic and therapeutic template that allows the viewer to remember traumatic experience without exactly reliving it.

It is in this sense that the excision of the Las Fallas chapter from Wright’s text seems a particularly ill-considered act. It is here that Wright most clearly demonstrates what were for him the most important of his aesthetic/ideological insights.

The origin of Las Fallas stems from the time when the father of Jesus—No, that’s not the way to say it. But how does one say it? Let’s see, Joseph, the father of Jesus, but who did not sire Jesus,—yes, that’s the way to say it and not hurt anybody’s feelings, was a carpenter, so relate the Good Christian citizens of the city of Valencia. And, legend tells us, on that day of spring when the evening sky became bright enough so that no artificial light was needed in Joseph’s carpenter shop, Joseph, in celebration of the lengthening of the day and the nearness of summer, amassed all the shavings, sawdust, and the odd, unusable bits of wood and piled them in a heap in an open space in front of his shop and set fire to them while he and his neighbors sang and danced about the roaring flames.15

As with his description of women attending a Pasionaria cell meeting, Wright’s tone in this passage evinces a healthy portion of tongue-in-cheek derision and belittles the history advanced by “the Good Christian citizens of the city of Valencia.” Instead of simply enjoying the festival, in which professional artists created massive sculptures that lampooned religious, political, and economic elites only to be burned on the final day of the festival, Wright remains focused on his own interpretive talents. His flippant description of Joseph as “the father of Jesus . . . who did not sire Jesus” alerts his readers to the improbable distinction between ideality and flesh that stands at the heart of both Christianity and the forms of Western humanism that presumably eclipsed it. Much of what Wright hopes to do is deepen the community’s narrative (suggesting that the origin of the festival was pagan sun worship) while also modernizing it, telling us that “inhibitions expected from men in the name of civilization . . . stimulated the population to seek emotional release in the making of these bonfires.” He adds that the sculptors “fashioned images . . . embodying thoughts and ideas forbidden by the State and Church, images into which one poured the illicit longings of one’s heart” (Wright, “Las Fallas”). For Wright, the Las Fallas sculptures amplified realities of the human animal that predate the structures of historical narrative announced by Foucault while somehow remaining firmly entrenched in the everyday actualities of modern life. At the same time, however, Wright’s commitment to humanist protocols often led him away from full consideration of the ways religious notions of transcendence and disembodiment function in modern aesthetic practices.

We have seen that Wright obsessively depicted his own presumably vibrant masculinity in relation to highly manicured images of exploited and cloistered women. From postcards bought at Pigalle to prostitutes demurely attending to the needs of their clients, Wright liked his women tame. The master’s manipulation of a thin, two-dimensional female figure allowed for the articulation of fully formed masculinity while simultaneously inoculating him against the threat of undisciplined female-initiated reproduction, the “law of the mother,” to borrow Hortense Spillers’s apt phrase.16 One thinks of the way that Picasso obsessively imaged his lovers and wives, extracting from them some feminine essence that overshadowed the social realities of the actual individuals. Intimately attached to this are the ways that each of the artists seemed fascinated by the (necessarily) fetishistic function of the best modern art. Picasso’s large collection of African and Oceanic statues and masks was certainly an inspiration for the experiments with form, perspective, and scale that secured his dominant position in twentieth-century painting and sculpture. At the same time, the famously superstitious artist was fascinated with the idea of the beautiful object that was not simply decorative, but also talismanic. He attempted to produce works that not only referenced some exterior world but also existed for themselves, producing effect from within their very being. While Wright evinced no such metaphysical leanings, he did believe that the weeklong Las Fallas celebration was less a modern cultural event than the articulation of a complex worldview in which the physical, the emotional, the erotic, and the religious were indistinct. “These safety-valves are widely known in primitive societies,” he writes. “Some African tribes set aside one day in the year in which everybody has the right to say exactly what he pleases to or about anybody else, with no punitive measures attached” (Wright, “Las Fallas”).

Again, what I find most fascinating about Wright is how effortlessly he reverses the rhetorical and ideological codes that maintain the clumsy notions of “the Western” and “the modern,” by reserving for himself status as a privileged, cosmopolitan interloper among (white) natives. Moreover, he is relentless in his efforts to assign to Spain many of the stereotypes of primitive society:

My primary reaction to the revealed sculptures was one of amazement at the amount and degree of assertive nudity that they contained; it was odd that, in a nation where the human body was a shameful and loathsome object, the first opportunity given its artists and citizens for public self-expression resulted in so demonstrative a preoccupation with the naked human form and its physiological functioning. (Wright, “Las Fallas”)

That is to say, Spaniards were as hopelessly controlled by their fascination with the limits and possibilities of human flesh as were native Africans.

I will repeat that for Wright, when one shouts the word “Spain,” one hears “Africa” as its echo. More to the point, what Wright seems to be able to forgive neither Africans nor Spaniards is their lack of reserve, the ways their emotional lives are presumably lived entirely at the surface, creating societies that are at once vibrant and brittle, coyly reserved and surprisingly lurid. In making these arguments, I am struck by the similarities in the ways that street celebrations were narrated by Wright in both Pagan Spain and Black Power. Describing the final night of the Las Fallas festival, in which the prizewinning statue was set ablaze, he writes,

There sounded a series of tremendous explosions that stilled every voice. It was crushing, with a promise of menace to it. A mob of about five thousand stood in a vast ring. . . . When the explosions died, a band struck up a blare of music. A young man stepped forward and tossed a match onto a keroscene [sic] -soaked statue. A tiny flame licked uncertainly, then with a poof, a huge red blaze leaped toward the sky and screams of awed delight went up from the mob as it backed fearfully away. (Wright, “Las Fallas”)

Compare this with a quote from Black Power describing an Akan funeral procession:

The parade or procession or whatever it was called was rushing past me so rapidly that I feared that I would not get the photograph that I wanted; I lifted my camera and tried to focus and when I did focus I saw a forest of naked black breasts before my eyes through the camera sight. I took the camera from my eyes, too astonished to act; passing me were about fifty women, young and old, nude to the waist, their elongated breasts flopping loosely and grotesquely in the sun. Their faces were painted with streaks of white and sweat ran down their foreheads. They held in their hands a short stick—taken from packing boxes—and they were knocking these sticks furiously together, setting up an unearthly clatter, their eyes fixed upon the revolving coffin of brass. (Wright, Black Power, 164)

The most obvious thing that one can say about these passages is that in both cases Wright is startled by the fleshy excessiveness of what he encounters. The crowds, the fire, the music, the clatter all seem to work together to stretch the idea of human being to its limits. As Manhood is defined by its limitations, that breaking, ripping, tearing, and discomfort to which the human animal is subject, Wright sees in these scenes an overabundance of both human physicality (that forest of breasts) and human affect (those screams of awed delight) that work together to disrupt the clear distinction between Man and animal.17 The camera is rendered useless in such situations. The author’s graphic abilities are simply too severely taxed. The spectacles are too large, too noisy, too primitive, too unabashedly human to be captured by the artist and properly reproduced for his audience. As with the discursive structures created by imprisoned Africans crossing the Atlantic, narratives of Manhood are disrupted by the copiousness of both human flesh and those many sublingual expressions (the tremendous explosions, the blare of music, the unearthly clatter) that reassert the presence of an untamed and untutored human animality darting alongside the practice of Western humanism.

Beating a fast conceptual/aesthetic retreat, Wright regains his balance by assigning to both Spain and Africa the label “pagan.” In neither location has the work of civilization been accomplished. Instead, as a fully formed Western Man, Wright stands face to face with his primitive kin, sensing something less than the comforting shock of human simplicity. Spain represents a site of failure, a place at which the terror of Franco, the repressiveness of the Catholic Church, and the social domination of the Falange act as necessary bulwarks against an unchecked animality that might be read as abject not so much because it represents a threat to civilization but instead because it disrupts all of the most sacrosanct of our modern social boundaries.18 For Wright, the true conceptual problem is that while he sees in Spain much evidence of just how tired the notion of a clear distinction between Europe and Africa actually is, he also recognizes a potentially radical challenge to the entire edifice on which so-called Western humanism rests. In response, he not only turns to images of cloistered and exploited women, but also unleashes a mocking narrative voice that domesticates the Spanish/African threat by lampooning it.

It is in this manner that I suggest we approach one of the most jarring of the snapshots that Wright took on his trip to Valencia (see figure 5.1). The black and white photograph of one of the Las Fallas sculptures offers a breathtakingly accurate graphic representation of the historical, psychological, and ideological structures that Wright was at pains to demonstrate in Pagan Spain. It is, in fact, a study of the many similarities that presumably exist between Spanish and African culture. At its center are two kings attended by emaciated servants. The one is black, fat, and dressed only in a crown and grass loincloth. The second is white, also fat, and dressed smartly in a top hat and fashionable business suit. The African king sits outside a hut topped by a thatch roof and adorned with a human skull. The Spanish king sits in front of his mantle, over which hangs a tasteful piece of modernist art. Both men are eating. It appears, moreover, that the African king has the remains of a human hand nonchalantly pressed between arm and chest, while the object that he rips with his teeth appears decidedly phallic. Regardless, a small sign, written in Catalan, alerts the sculpture’s audiences that in both cases what we are witnessing is a species of cannibalism: Hi ha mes d’un pobre caníbal emigrat i desmenjat, estos pobres cobren fama però mireu al costat. (There is more than one poor, emigrated, and listless cannibal; these poor ones steal all the attention, but look to the side.) The white king of commerce consumes his fellow humans just as readily as the African savage. The motivation for the accumulation of wealth, including the accumulation of such markers of sophistication and cosmopolitanism as modern art, is imagined as not particularly modern at all. Instead it is again an expression of an ancient, elemental bloodlust that civilization presumably works to mitigate. The sculpture—and Wright’s photograph of it—provide remarkably clear illustrations of the great conceptual strain that accompanies the reproduction of ideologies of Manhood and anthropophorous (non)subjectivity. The kings represent both the pinnacle of human possibility and the vulgar/comic strain of human corporeality/animality necessary to achieve this state. Attending them are servants whose physical desiccation demonstrates the actual price of the kings’ elevation to Manhood. Wright forces a properly social consideration of the master/slave dialectic. The very clumsiness and grotesqueness of the graph prove how limited our understanding of the mechanics of dominance and repression, subjectivity and (counter)subjectivity can be.

I am not simply attempting to name the androcentric and Western-focused nature of Wright’s criticism. Instead, the “post” of this work’s post-humanism represents not a new methodology per se, but instead a refined skepticism regarding the possibility of defeating white supremacy and woman hating through recourse to ever more “liberal” forms of critique. Instead, I invite my readers to join in an exploration of alternative modes of thought and inquiry in which (human) flesh is no longer disavowed. In articulating these arguments, I make a great deal of Wright’s failures in Pagan Spain. I suspect, in fact, that the crucial silence around the work stems from the clear clumsiness and unwieldiness of the text as well as from the fact that Wright does such a bad job of hiding his tracks as he reiterates humanism’s racialist and masculinist conceits.

One of the many challenges Wright faced while writing a book that ostensibly dealt with the ungainly topic of “the Spanish character” was the matter of how to arrange and pace the work. As he was forced seriously to edit his discussions of life in the country’s major cities, Wright had necessarily to look for other structuring schemes with which to hold together his text. What he hit upon was the insertion of long passages from a book of fascist catechism issued by the national government and directed at girls and young women. The quotes he selected worked perfectly as he attempted to demonstrate the ways that Spanish culture was rigidly hierarchical, excessively religious, and rather impressively vexed about the proper role of women in modern society.

Are there cases of women dying while fighting like men?

Yes, in the War of Independence against France, but it is unusual.

So what is the real heroism of women?

Giving up the pleasures of life when we feel we have to do a duty over and above them.

What do “pleasures of life” mean?

All that is pleasant in life, beginning with life itself. (Wright, Pagan Spain, 90)

The female becomes in this configuration less a marker of human distinction than a key resource for the articulation of state and society. The heroism of women is always framed negatively. The only action open to the girl being hailed by this text is to “give up.” Like the African mother in Cabrera’s De español y negra, mulata, her strength is in her passivity, the aloof stance she takes in relation to life itself. Females are most powerful, most heroic when they are (socially) dead. I remain confused, however, about the matter of how Wright positions himself in relation to this conservative line of thought. On the one hand, he offers vivid descriptions of the ways that females are particularly oppressed under Spanish fascism. At the same time, the very consistency and vibrancy of his discussions suggest an author who is more than a bit titillated by the sequestration of the female form. As I suggested earlier, Wright the porno-grapher, with his collection of naughty photos, postcards, and female accomplices, cannot be easily distinguished from Wright the cosmopolitan intellectual eager to create new arenas of action for black men in a frankly white supremacist world. What is most attractive about Pagan Spain, then, is in fact that unwieldiness of which I have just spoken. Wright attempts to broach the question of the black’s exclusion from the main precincts of Western humanism by placing Spaniards and females into supporting positions. As a consequence, Pagan Spain becomes overburdened with images of cloistered Spanish femininity. The indelicacy of Wright’s prose demonstrates those many aesthetic/ideological cleavages where one might properly initiate the critical archival project that I believe must stand at the heart of an anti–white supremacist and anti-misogynist post-humanism.

The enforced frailty and enclosure of Spanish women that so fascinate Wright are nowhere better articulated than in the character of Lola, a young Catalan woman living with her mother, their housekeeper, and their vicious dog, Ronnie, in a large Barcelona apartment. Wright met the family when he boarded with them soon after arriving in the city. While settling himself into his room, he was interrupted by Lola, carrying Ronnie in her arms. In the course of their conversation, Lola asks Wright whether he is a Communist, then explains that her father had been taken by party members and that she and Ronnie would not return “home” until he was returned. We later find that the girl’s father had been shot during the war and that the ensuing trauma forced Lola into a life of stoic passivity, while the ever-volatile Ronnie acts as the avatar of those parts of her that are hysterical, raging, and animal. Trapped in a household lacking paternal authority, the girl cannot be reborn as a social being capable of negotiating the complexities of modern, postwar Spain.

Wright deftly uses the character of Lola to continue the articulation of his problematic relationship to the presumed liberation of females in Communist political and ideological structures. The members of the La Pasionaria cell are noble but indistinguishable one from the other. La Pasionaria herself was an abstraction of a living, multifaceted woman, Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez. Wright’s attraction to Celia Hornung was partially motivated by the fact that she was not Communist. And in the case of Lola, we see a girl who is ill precisely because of (anti-paternalist) Communist intervention. I would like to suggest that part of what this pattern demonstrates is not only Wright’s fraught relationship to the self-consciousness with which Communists attempted to resist—or at least restructure—hierarchies of race and gender, but also his hesitant approach to the project of critiquing forms of humanist discourse in which the black—and the female—are always already repressed. When Wright asked Hornung about her party affiliation, he complained that he was tired of interactions with white Communist women eager to sleep with black men in order to prove that they were not prejudiced (Rowley, Richard Wright, 499). He was not yet prepared to give up on the “necessity” of a repressed femininity. Even so, the females approaching Wright turn the tables, producing him as a fetish while also de-romanticizing sexual desire, placing it decidedly in the realm of politics and ideology.

I have used the term “Manhood” throughout Archives of Flesh in order to represent the ways that processes of globalization begun after 1492 produced rigid ideas about the essentially hierarchical nature of human being such that to be a member of the species homo sapiens is never enough, in and of itself, to mark one as a “Man.” Moreover, though most females lack the ability to achieve this status, I do not claim that the Man/human distinction is exclusively a matter of gender. Instead, what rankles Wright is that there is no easy way to cleanly distinguish the disabilities of the black from those of the female. While Manhood status may be understood to adhere to only a small minority of persons, humanity is a conceptual category literally overflowing with possibility. As within the darkness of the slave hold, the question of where “I” begin and “you” end can never be fully resolved for the human. One of the most common slurs of the white supremacist as he surveys the sea of black, yellow, red, and brown faces before him is that he cannot distinguish one from the other. Much within Pagan Spain is specifically directed at rectifying this issue. The graphic procedures that dominate the text work specifically to produce an aesthetics of categorization in which the (black) Man might gain social presence by producing documents capable of idealizing, aestheticizing—and disrupting—messy practices of human assemblage.19 In this context, the female becomes a desperately important stabilizing device. As with an incongruously feminine Gertrude Stein, the female helps to steady systems unsettled by the opening of Manhood status to formerly disqualified humans such as Wright.

Understanding this allows us to wrestle more effectively with Wright’s extremely complicated interaction with Lola and Ronnie. Taking place in Wright’s small room, a place overcrowded with animal and human presence, the scene recycles the themes of compression and enclosure that are not only shot through Pagan Spain but are also some of the primary tropes in the various literatures that narrate Western humanism. “I hope that you won’t be like all the others who come to live here,” Lola states with tearful aggression.

“They go away. Always, they go away. . . . I don’t like that. Why do people always leave?” She beamed a sudden smile upon Ronnie, who sat watching her face. “We don’t like that, do we, Ronnie?” she asked. Then she lifted appealing eyes to me. “But you’ll stay, won’t you?” (Wright, Pagan Spain, 60)

We see both the horror and the promise of human frailty and complexity. Wright, hemmed within a space dominated by women, finds himself in a carnival of boundary crossings. Lola disturbs his manly privacy. She stays in constant physical contact with Ronnie, erasing the line between girl and dog. Together they charge Wright with ontic disloyalty. He threatens to leave, to break the overdetermined communality that underwrites the expression of a steadily disintegrating/reintegrating character like Lola. Wright attempts to dismiss the girl’s peculiarity by naming it as a factor of the trauma she experienced during the war. “For Lola there had been no peace, no armistice. The bullets had long since stopped whining, and the bombs were bursting no more, but memories of violence and horror lived on and kindled mental and emotional pain” (Wright, Pagan Spain, 61). What he misses, however, is that the structures of violence and domination that sparked the Spanish Civil War were in no way peculiar to the Iberian Peninsula. Instead, domestic space, the girls’ house, is a key site in the management of the ever-present violence of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. The rage directed at Wright, the way Ronnie’s eager greeting of the stranger turns to vicious barks and bites at the moment of his departure, can be understood as nothing less than a militant’s response to a traitor. He might leave to seek his noble Manhood elsewhere, but it is not incumbent upon those he has left behind to celebrate his exit.

One of the things that most troubles me about Pagan Spain is the sheer repetitiveness of Wright’s descriptions of bewildered virgins and world-weary prostitutes. The master is almost obsessive in his reiteration of the idea that any female character might be read as every female character. They are all “Woman,” the fleshy repository of Spanish society’s breath-stealing fears and its tawdry, if only half-acknowledged, desires.

I had the feeling that, if I had said: “All right, now, pull off your clothes and lie there on that couch!” she would have been momentarily shocked, but would have obeyed at once. The girl was the living personification of sexual consciousness; one could have scraped sex off her with a knife. (99)

The girl, another character to whom Wright never speaks directly, is not quite there; or better put, she is only “there” as a reflection and echo of his own consciousness. Wright never imagines that what he reads as her sexual desire could have arisen from anything other than the most elemental drives. She does not want Wright per se. Indeed, to place the words “girl” and “wanting” side by side in one’s sentences would risk the commission of the most horrendous of syntactical errors. Instead, modes of aspiring and choosing developed by thousands of years of “Spanish history” course through and around her. She may smell of sex, but it is not a thing that emanates from within. Instead, sex adheres only to her exterior, where it reflects Richard Wright, ready if necessary to scape the substance off with his knife.

Part of what it is to be a slave, part of what Hegel himself reminds us, is to possess no interiority, to exist only as a reflection of the master’s desires.20 No matter the many trappings that may litter one’s prose, when we speak of the slave’s desire, our efforts always return us to the master’s wanting. Thus much of what motivates my efforts here is my profound frustration with the fact that the discursive and ideological complexities of the master/slave, Man/human divide are so deeply embedded in our social and cultural practices that they have become invisible, nearly unimaginable. When the liberal scholar approaches the subjects of kidnapping, enslavement, forced migration, and human trading (if he approaches them at all), all too often the result is a sort of teary regret in which Africans and their descendants continue as thin, voiceless subjects, specters of a guilty white imagination only now coming to scratch their marks onto the planet. The even greater insult, however, is that though these conceptual habits continue to organize our societies at the most basic, most obvious levels, so much within our cultural studies seems ill-suited to note this most rudimentary fact. The culture of Western humanism is slave culture. It is held firmly in place by a willed—and viciously defended—clumsiness in relation to our understandings of society and aesthetics in which our most cherished cultural artifacts, the precious markers of European and American Manhood, are only very infrequently understood to continue the discursive structures established during centuries of colonization and bondage.

Wright refers to a “wall of flesh,” the scores of female prostitutes whom he encounters “in bars, cafes, pensions, hotels, sidewalks, churches, parks, etc.” (177). And he rightly indicts poverty and illiteracy as the primary motivations for women’s entry into the profession. What he avoids, however, is any consideration of the stunning feats of discursive and ideological gaucherie necessary to maintain the assumption that this overwhelming presence represented either the backwardness of the Spanish psyche or the feebleness of the Spanish economy but not the continuation of the very legacies of flesh peddling that produced the writer himself. The history that Wright evokes is never longer than a single human lifetime. Instead, he continually stresses narratives of psychological development that suggest that all problems in Spanish society stem from a childish petulance brought about by the essentially inward-focused nature of the culture. “Girls quickly develop traits of wild jealousy,” he opines.

They cultivate tantrums of protest, practice the imperious policy of being the sole objects of amorous solicitation. They learn to bedeck themselves with flowers, earrings (I’ve seen earrings six inches long!), develop the arts of gesturing sensually with their arms, shoulders, and fingers; they master the violent, sexual contortions of flamenco dancing and singing; in short, being a woman in Spain means being mistress of all the tricks of sexual seduction and almost nothing else. (180)

What Wright seems unwilling to imagine is anything approaching what one might think of as gendered social interlocution. The seductiveness of the Spanish woman seems all of a piece, a thing established as part of an inevitable process of self-alienation. If she moves at all, she moves for him. Her jealousies, tantrums, and solicitations have but one motivation. Yet even within this rigid schema, there seem to be moments of awkwardness, places at which the rigid elegance of the Spanish women whom Wright describes unravel.

Sitting in a hotel room in Seville, stunned and irritated by the baroque rituals of Semana Santa, Wright confided to his diary about the feelings of distress brought about by his encounter with a young Spanish girl who had approached him, begging for money.

She upsets me. I shook my head at her; it is not that I don’t want to give her anything, but I don’t want to encourage this kind of begging in a tiny little girl who looks as though she would grow up into a pretty young woman. I tried not to look at her, I kept my eyes on my book. . . . Then she did something that made me ill somewhat; she lifted her tiny little dress and pointed to her vagina. . . . She knows everything. I’m hardboiled, but not that hard. (Quoted in Rowley, Richard Wright, 460–61)

Where elsewhere Wright maintained a studied aloofness, presenting himself as a disinterested chronicler of a complicated culture, here the emphasis is on concern and stress. There are dozens of sentences in Pagan Spain in which the prostitution of girls is noted without the least furrowing of the brow. Here, however, some previously unbreachable boundary appears to have been crossed. The girl is not simply young, but also tiny and little. And though Wright seems to have resigned himself to the notion that in Spain female children quickly developed baldly provocative schemes of sexual seduction, here it seems that the matter has been taken one step too far. It is the child’s sophistication and self-consciousness that bother Wright. She demonstrates an alternative form of intellectualism. She knows everything. She is infinitely aware that not only might she trade sex for food and money, but also that in the eyes of the traveling man, the individual caught up in the complexities of border crossing, any female of any age is a potential prostitute and a fungible commodity. It seems, in fact, that the sense of unease that accompanies the figure of the girl selling sex is motivated by the half-formed awareness that within routes of exchange established by capitalism and white supremacy, her status as quintessential modern subject is much more certain that that of the intrepid intellectual.

Perhaps the most usefully provocative thing I can say at this juncture is that Atlantic cosmopolitanism is much more weighted toward the human than the Man. Where Wright is to be celebrated is in his hardheaded articulation of the ability of an elite black to wear comfortably the mantle of intellectual sophistication so long monopolized by elite whites. What he largely ignores, however, is that much of the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism represents a retreat from the lived reality of Atlantic travel and cultural exchange. The social and discursive assemblies that define humanism have been produced through the interposition of itinerants whose journeys have been taken in the dark, whose forms of knowledge have necessarily involved, indeed privileged, the enclosure and close contact of bodies, not so much the relentless erosion of the mind/body split as subordination of flesh to dream. To imagine the Atlantic, one must embrace one’s ignorance and concede the fact that established rhetorics of self and other are woefully inadequate to the procedures at hand. The confident and aloof intellectualism that Wright models in both Black Power and Pagan Spain is first and foremost a celebration of a willed blindness, the fetishization of a rigidly narrow intellectualism that represents at its core a will to ignore the base, poorly delineated, undecided, and animal aspects of humanity in favor of a pristine Manhood.

One of the most startling moments for Wright in his travels was when he met a pimp, S., gathering together a group of women in order to install them in Moroccan houses of prostitution. Again Wright describes a scene in which, surrounded by prostitutes, he self-consciously covers himself in a (theatrically presented) veil of ignorance. Wondering aloud why the women seemed so solicitous toward him, he hears from S.,

“Boy, these girls’ll do anything on earth for you. They think you’re the boss from Africa. . . . You don’t look like a sailor. So I wanted to see how they would receive you.”

“They think I’m the one they would work for in Africa?” I asked.

“They think you own the cathouses in Casablanca,” he guffawed. . . .

“White slavery?” I asked him haltingly, leaning forward and speaking into his ear.

He looked at me mockingly.

“No. Not white slavery,” he chuckled. “Olive-skinned slavery.” (Wright, Pagan Spain, 216–17)

If you can bear the insult for a moment, I will submit that what disables Wright in this passage is his status as a Man. S.’s sneering response to Wright is an announcement of his awareness that the great author’s status as an intellectual is brought into focus not so much by his erudition as his ignorance. S. stands in for those many readers who, having waded through dozens of pages describing prostitutes and prostitution, find Wright’s incredulousness difficult to swallow. That Wright immediately seeks to sanitize the scene before him, to place it within already well-established, continually marshaled narrative structures, is itself an indication of just how inadequate and indeed frail many of our most cherished constructions for articulating Atlantic society and culture are. The notion of “white slavery” is useful only to the extent that it signifies a break with “black slavery.” This is while the methods put into place to carry on the respective trades are one and the same. Wright asks coyly, “You smuggle them out of the country?” S. answers, “Hell, no! They travel on the train and ferry. I buy their tickets.” Just as Wright had described Liverpool as a city in which slaving ships had been “fitted out, financed, and dispatched with high hopes on their infamous but lucrative voyages,” we might see in Seville a city infinitely available for the support of the contemporary trade (Wright, Black Power, 22). “This was white slavery,” Wright reflects. “How simple and jolly it was!”

If there is any lesson that can be drawn from the failures of Wright’s critical practice in Pagan Spain, it is less that we need to develop even more sophisticated critical apparatuses and more that we need simply to pay attention. You will have noted that once again, Wright never directly engages the women who so fascinate him. As with much of the knowledge that we have of the transportation of enslaved Africans to Europe and the Americas, the archive that we consult is one primarily constructed and controlled by slavers. Thus, as Stephanie Smallwood brilliantly argues, the lived realities of kidnapped humans is graphically represented in neat columns of logs and ledgers, creating marks where human beings once stood.21 All too often, notions of cosmopolitanism, modernity, and “the imaginary” gain meaning precisely to the extent that they represent pure abstraction. To do otherwise would risk breaking with the logics of colonialism, white supremacy, and Western humanism such that the distinction between slave history and world history would become unsustainable, ultimately forcing one to the conclusion that a Man is nothing more than a broken human.