Haiku Poems by Richard Wright, Terebess Asia Online (TAO)

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Richard Wright's self portrait outside Normandy, France, circa 1959.

Haiku Poems
by Richard Wright
From "Haiku: This Other World", 1998
Selected for Hungarian translation by Gabor Terebess

Richard Wright (1908-1960) by Ty Hadman
Female Images in Richard Wright’s Haiku: This Other World by Shawnrece D. Miller
Richard Wright's Unpublished Haiku: A World Elsewhere by Floyd Ogburn, Jr.

Richard Wright (1908-1960), one of the early forceful and eloquent spokesmen for black Americans, author of "Native Son," and "Black Boy", was also, it turns out, a major poet. During the last eighteen months of his life, he discovered and became enamored of haiku, the strict seventeen-syllable Japanese form. Wright became so excited about the discovery that he began writing his own haiku, in which he attempted to capture, through his sensibility as an African American, the same Zen discipline and beauty in depicting man's relationship, not to his fellow man as he had in his fiction, but to nature and the natural world.

In all, he wrote over 4,000 haiku, from which he chose, before he died, the 817 he preferred. Rather than a deviation from his self-appointed role as spokesman for black Americans of his time, Richard Wright's haiku, disciplined and steeped in beauty, are a culmination: not only do they give added scope to his work but they bring to it a universality that transcends both race and color without ever denying them.

Wright wrote his haiku obsessively--in bed, in cafes, in restaurants, in both Paris and the French countryside. His daughter Julia believes, quite rightly, that her father's haiku were "self-developed antidotes against illness, and that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath." They also offered the novelist and essayist a new form of expression and a new vision: with the threat of death constantly before him, he found inspiration, beauty, and insights in and through the haiku form. The discovery and writing of haiku also helped him come to terms with nature and the earth, which in his early years he had viewed as hostile and equated with suffering and physical hunger. Fighting illness and frequently bedridden, deeply upset by the recent loss of his mother, Ella, Wright continued, as his daughter notes, "to spin these poems of light out of the gathering darkness."

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

Keep straight down this block,
Then turn right where you will find
A peach tree blooming.

Make up you mind, Snail!
You are half inside your house,
And halfway out!

You moths must leave now;
I am turning out the light
And going to sleep.

All right, You Sparrows;
The sun has set and you can now
Stop your chattering!

Sparrow's excrement
Becomes quickly powdery
On sizzling pavements.

The dog's violent sneeze
Fails to rouse a single fly
On his mangy back.

On winter mornings
The candle shows faint markings
Of the teeth of rats.

With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.

The webs of spiders
Sticking to my sweaty face
In the dusty woods.

A bloody knife blade
Is being licked by a cat
At hog-killing time.

In the falling snow
A laughing boy holds out his palms
Until they are white.

One magnolia
Landed upon another
In the dew-wet grass.

As the sun goes down,
a green melon splits open
And juice trickles out.

A sparrow's feather
On a barb of rusty wire
In the sizzling heat.

Sleety rain at night
Seasoning swelling turnips
With a tangy taste.

Heaps of black cherries
Glittering with drops of rain
In the evening sun.

The day is so long
That even noisy sparrows
Fall strangely silent.

Spring begins shyly
With one hairpin of green grass
In a flower pot.

An apple blossom
Trembling on a sunlit branch
From the weight of bees.

Leaving its nest,
The sparrow sinks a second,
Then opens its wings.

Like a fishhook,
The sunflower's long shadow
Hovers in the lake.

In the setting sun,
Each tree bud is clinging fast
To drying raindrops.

101

Quickly vanishing,
The first drops of summer rain
On an old wood door.

117

The crow flew so fast
That he left his lonely caw
Behind in the fields.

120

Crying and crying,
Melodious strings of geese
Passing a graveyard.

134

One autumn evening
A stranger enters a village
And passes on through.

142

A wounded sparrow
Sinks in clear cold lake water,
Its eyes still open.

144

Amidst the flowers
A China clock is ticking
In the dead man's room.

171

With indignation
A little girl spanks her doll, –
The sound of spring rain.

172

The scarecrow's old hat
Was flung by the winter wind
Into a graveyard.

175

Coming from the woods,
A bull has a lilac sprig
Dangling from a horn.

179

The summer moonlight
Gleams upon a blacksmith's forge,
And cools red embers.

183

All the city's bells
Clang deafeningly this midnight,
Frightening the New Year!

184

No birds are flying;
The tree leaves are still as stone, –
An autumn evening.

187

In an old woodshed
The long points of icicles
Are sharpening the wind.

191

Little boys tossing
Stones at a guilty scarecrow
In a snowy field.

193

Standing patiently,
The horse grants the snowflakes
A home on his back.

196

Tossing all day long,
The cold sea now sleeps deeply
On a bed of stars.

200

A silent spring wood:
A crow opens its sharp beak
And creates a sky.

202

A cock's shrill crow
Is driving the spring dawn stars
From out of the sky.

212

From the skyscraper,
All the bustling streets converge
Towards a spring sea.

214

While plowing the earth,
All my crows are visiting
A neighboring farm.

217

Surely that spring moon,
So yellow and so fragile,
Will crack on a cloud!

222

Holding too much rain,
The tulip stoops and spills it,
Then straightens again.

226

Like a spreading fire,
Blossoms leap from tree to tree
In a blazing spring.

228

The sudden thunder
Startles the magnolias
To a deeper white.

243

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

254

They smelt like roses;
But when I put on the light,
They were violets.

288

A freezing morning:
I left a bit of my skin
On the broomstick handle.

301

A spring sky so clear
That you feel you are seeing
Into tomorrow.

303

A balmy spring wind
Reminding me of something
I cannot recall.

307

I feel autumn rain
Trying to explain something
I do not want to know.

334

A lakeshore circus:
An elephant trumpeting
Waves on blue water.

365

The Christmas season:
A whore is painting her lips
Larger than they are.

368

While she undresses,
A spring moon touches her breasts
For seven seconds.

370

The baby's hiccough
Dies down and the hum of flies
Fills the sunny room.

371

A peg-legged man
Stumps about in the garden,
Pruning the roses.

375

The first day of spring:
The servant wears her blonde hair
In a new manner.

382

A valley village
Lies in the grip of moonlight:
How lonely it is.

407

In a light spring rain
An old woman is spitting
Into a handkerchief.

408

A dead mouse floating
Atop a bucket of cream
In the dawn spring light.

412

In this rented room
One more winter stands outside
My dirty window pane.

422

My cigarette glows
Without my lips touching it, —
A steady spring breeze.

423

Settling on the screen
Of the crowded movie house,
A white butterfly.

425

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

427

While crows are cawing,
Poppies are dutifully
Deepening their red.

436

A nude fat woman
Stands over a kitchen stove,
Tasting applesauce.

448

A washerwoman
Dyes a tub of water blue, –
The sunlit spring wind!

450

In a barbershop
The stench of soap and hair, –
A hot summer day!

455

The green cockleburs
Caught in the thick wooly hair
Of the black boy's head.

459

I am paying rent
For the lice in my cold room
And the moonlight too.

461

Entering my town
In a heavy fall of snow,
I feel a stranger.

468

I have lost my way
In a strange town at night, –
A sky of old cold stars.

477

On a bayonet,
And beyond the barbs of wire, –
a spring moon at dawn.

481

Shut in the ice box,
A cricket chirps sleepily
In an alien winter.

482

At a funeral,
Strands of filmy spider webs
On coffin flowers.

500

The sport stadium:
Every seat is taken
By whirling snowflakes.

504

Across the table cloth,
Ants are dragging a dead fly
In the evening sun.

518

Creamy plum blossoms:
Once upon a time there was
A pretty princess...

521

Just enough of snow
To make you look carefully
At familiar streets.

526

The arriving train
All decorated with snow
From another town.

530

My shadow was sad
When I took it from the sand
Of the gleaming beach.

552

A small spring island
Is being measured by a
Ribbon of ship smoke.

554

The summer rainstorm
Drenches chickens in the fields,
Making them smaller.

555

So cold it is now
That the moon is frozen fast
To a pine tree limb.

556

The big light in the fog
Was but a little lantern
When we came to it.

559

In this tiny pond
The great big lake in which
I swam as a boy?

571

From across the lake,
Past the black winter trees,
Faint sounds of a flute.

579

Amid the daisies
Even the idiot boy
Has a dignity.

580

My cold and damp feet
Feel as distant as the moon
On this autumn night.

582

A limping sparrow
Leaves on a white window sill
Lacy tracks of blood.

587

In a damp attic,
Spilling out grains of sawdust,
A wounded rag doll.

588

For six dark dank years,
A doll with a Christmas smile
In an old shoe box.

591

A sick cat seeks out
A stiff and frozen willow
Under which to die.

592

Sitting in spring rain,
Two forgotten rag dolls,
Their feet in water.

598

The blindman stumbles,
Pauses, then walks slower
Into the autumn night.

602

A slow creeping snail;
Moments later I could not
See it anywhere.

611

As the popcorn man
Is closing up his wagon,
snow begins to fall.

613

While plucking the goose,
A feather flew wildly off
To look for snowflakes.

616

The snowball I threw
Was caught in a net of flakes
And wafted away.

618

High above the ship
On which immigrants sail,
Are departing geese.

625

The caw of a crow:
On a distant summer field
Goes a silent train.

635

An empty seashore:
Taking a long summer with it,
A departing train.

638

In my sleep at night,
I keep pounding an anvil
Heard during the day.

647

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

658

The naked mountains,
Washing themselves in spring rain
As green fields look on.

667

That sparrow bent dawn,
Its head tucked beneath its wing, –
Sewing a button?

669

A leaf chases wind
Across an autumn river
And shakes a pine tree.

673

A flood of spring rain
Searching into drying grasses
Finds a lost doll.

686

A darting sparrow
Startles a skinny scarecrow
Back to watchfulness.

704

The scarecrow's big sleeves
Advertising in the sun:
Huge, red tomatoes!

711

With solemnity
The magpies are dissecting
A cat's dead body.

713

The creeping shadow
Of a gigantic oak tree
Jumps over the wall.

721

As my anger ebbs,
The spring stars grow bright again
And the wind returns.

730

From the cherry tree
To the roof of the red barn,
A cloud of sparrows flew.

737

In the summer sun,
Near an empty whiskey bottle,
A sleeping serpent.

738

In the burning sun,
A viper's tongue is nudging
A cigarette butt.

762

Droning autumn rain:
A boy lines up toy soldiers
For a big battle.

766

Standing in the snow,
A horse shifts his heavy haunch
Slowly to the right.

774

On my trouser leg
Are still a few strands of fur
From my long dead cat.

776

Empty autumn sky:
The bright circus tents have gone,
Taking their music.

782

From the dark still pines,
Not a breath of autumn wind
To ripple the lake.

783

I cannot find it,
That very first violet
Seen from my window.

787

This autumn evening
Is full of an empty sky
And one empty road.

788

Around the tree trunk,
A kitten'paw is flicking
At an absent mouse.

795

A tolling church bell:
A rat rears in the moonlight
And stares at the steeple.

809

Why did this spring wood
Grow so silent when I came?
What was happening?

---------------------------------------

Ty Hadman
RICHARD WRIGHT (1908-1960)

Ask someone who has read haiku if they can name any female Japanese haiku poets besides Chiyo. The answer you will get almost every time is a blank stare. What does that have to do with the selection for this month's poet profile? Maybe nothing, but now ask this same "someone" if they know of any Afro-American haiku poets. Did you get another blank look? I won't, though I am tempted, ask you to ask about Hispanics or other minorities.

Many people are quite surprised when they discover that the author of books such as Native Son, Black Boy, Black Power, White Man, Listen!, American Hunger, Rite of Passage, etc. also wrote haiku poetry. It is even more startling when it is learned that he wrote over 4,000 haiku! Many haiku poets that have been writing for 20 or 30 years have not written that many, and yet Wright accomplished that amazing feat in less than one!

Wright was first introduced to haiku during the last year or two of his life. Haiku became the calm eye within during this stormy period marked by a series of traumatic and chaotic events. His mother Ella, who he had written of so emotionally in Black Boy and who had given him the kind of childhood in Mississippi of which he had so many fond memories, died in January, 1959. That same month, the French writer Albert Camus, who Wright highly admired, died in an auto accident. The year before, his favorite editor and a good friend, Ed Aswell, also died. After his mother's death, Wright sold his retreat in Ailly, Normandy, moving his family off the farm from where they had lived during the previous 12 years, to England so that he could be near his close friend, "Uncle" George, who he had excitedly been making plans with for another trip to Africa in the up-coming months. They never made the journey. George Padmore died unexpectedly in September, 1959. To add to his grief and difficulties, the British Passport Office turned down his immigration application, so he had to return with his family to France where he had been living in self-exile.

Wright was working during this period on a book, titled Island of Hallucination, that never got finished. The material he was gathering for this book centered around racial tensions on Army bases in Europe. The U.S. government was using counterintelligence tactics and Wright was one of the radical black expatriates being targeted. Perhaps it should also be mentioned that this was a particularly sensitive time for the American government. France had been fighting in Vietnam for several years and was losing the war. Secret high level discussions were being conducted on possible future U.S. involvement in the case of a French withdrawal.

Besides all this grief and tension and on the top of dwindling finances, Wright spent 12 of the last 18 months of his life in a grueling battle recovering from amobic dysentery.

It was amidst the backdrop of all this grief, suffering, fear, chaos and uncertainty that Wright was introduced to haiku in the summer of 1959 when he borrowed R. H. Blyth's four volumes of Haiku from a young South African and began his intensive research of the Japanese masters.

By March of 1960, Wright went into high gear composing haiku. During the final months of his life, he practically lived and breathed haiku, always carrying his haiku binder with him under his arm everywhere he went. He wrote haiku in Parisian cáfes and restaurants; in Le Moulin d' Anduve, a writing community in the French countryside; but many, like Shiki, were written while he was bedridden during his period of convalescence.

In Paris, he transferred his poems written on paper napkins to sheets of paper and then hung them up on long metal rods and strung them across his dingy studio to examine, similar to Paul Reps' idea of hanging his haiku up on lines stretched between bamboo poles.

Wright scrutinized his haiku in this way before choosing the personal favorites that he wanted to see published, 817 in all. This manuscript can be found among the Wright collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Richard Wright died November 28, 1960, exactly 40 years ago. It was not until just a couple of years back that this manuscript finally got published. Why so long a wait? Good enough to be hidden and tucked away in the Yale Library, but not good enough for the public to read? For whose eyes only then?

Unfortunately, at this late date, much of his work will appear to most readers as very outdated, so again, his work will continue to be ignored by most. But from a historical and cultural standpoint at least, this is neither fair nor a particularly good idea in my opinion. And what about the other 3,200 haiku, will we ever get to see some of them someday or will we have to wait for another 38 years? I have a sneaking suspicion that many of them are as good or better than what got published.

A few of his haiku were first published in Ebony in 1961, the year following his death. Several more trickled out in the following years: 1968, 1970, 1971, and 1978 in literary publications, his biography, and a book of selected writings, but his haiku have remained unknown to the majority of haiku poets. His name and work were excluded from haiku publications and anthologies. His name does not even appear in Brower's Haiku In Western Languages.

Why were there not more Black Americans and Hispanic Americans writing haiku in the past or even today for that matter? Were there and are there perhaps more poets belonging to minority groups that wrote or are writing haiku that we should all know about? Why have so few haiku on blacks and black culture been published? Is it because they aren't being written or are not part of most haiku poets' experience or simply because the vast majority of haiku moments refer to human experiences common to all cultures, races, and religions? Is haiku perceived amongst many writers of minority groups in America as a poetic form that mainly reflects Asian and European cultures, values, and religious philosophy and is therefore not seen as a relevant part of their cultural environment and experience? Is
and was the importance of Buddhist philosophy, especially Zen, overemphasized today and in the early years of American haiku history? History, culture, and religion were an integral part of traditional Japanese haiku and that is also true of American haiku, but as we all know, America is the world's "melting pot". Does American haiku then accurately reflect the true cultural and religious diversity in America? Has the publication of American haiku in the major haiku periodicals and anthologies been a democratic representation? And what about black women who wrote haiku? At least an example or two of Alice Walker's haiku and a couple of her brief comments on haiku in haiku publications and anthologies would have helped, even a little, in bringing greater cultural diversity to American haiku. Why the exclusion? Reading American haiku, you wouldn't think that most Americans were either Christians, Catholics, or Jewish. I clearly remember reading Nick Virgilio's haiku that won the Eminent Mention Award in Modern Haiku in 1978:

Old rabbi
unrolling Torah scroll:
bitter cold

His haiku was a real eye-opener for me. How many haiku that reflect some aspect of the Jewish religion and culture have you read since then? I suppose I have been on this theme long enough now. I don't have the answers; I only suspect and wonder. Perhaps I have opened a can of worms, but I ask the questions because I have not heard or read very much discussion on these topics and I think they should be addressed.

Let's now have a look at some of Richard Wright's haiku taken from HAIKU – This Other World, Arcade Publishing, 1998.

Keep straight down this block,
then turn right where you will find
a peach tree blooming

Wright wrote mainly 5-7-5 haiku, deviating only a bit at times. I want the readers of this column to understand that I have neither a preference for this style nor a prejudice against it. However, that being said, it is true that Wright, like most others who have chosen to follow this discipline, could have obviously written better versions of some of his haiku if he had not been so rigid on this point. The above haiku contains 16 one-syllable words with one two-syllable word at the end! Amazing! Haiku
containing more than 13 or 14 words with a total of 17-22 syllables are extremely difficult to get accepted for publication in haiku periodicals and included in anthologies. For this reason and because of the general avoidance and criticism of the 5-7-5 form in English over the years, minimalist haiku have gained in popularity. Some excellent results have been achieved due to this shift. But now, longer haiku are written less frequently or not at all by some poets partly because they are more difficult to get published. If there are no superfluous words and assuming
there is merit, then I ask, why not accept them too?

In Wright's haiku above, the poet knows exactly where to go and how to get there. So let's go!

Heaps of black cherries
glittering with drops of rain
in the evening sun

I think that Wright admired Buson and Shiki. Most of Wright's haiku contain strong visual images, often colorful. The use of the words black, white, or other words like molasses and snowflakes are prominent in many of his haiku.

More examples of his use of color:

An old winter oak:
Once upon a time there was
a big black ogre . . .
* * *
Creamy plum blossoms:
Once upon a time there was
a pretty princess . . .

Buson, Issa, and other Japanese masters occasionally referred to Japanese fairy tales in their haiku, but Wright in the two haiku above, has a tale of his own to tell.

The green cockleburs
caught in the thick wooly hair
of the black boy
* * *
An Indian summer
heaps itself in tons of gold
over Nigger Town
* * *
As the sun goes down,
a green melon splits open
and juice trickles out

Humor is often lacking in Wright's haiku, but not in this one below:

Coming from the woods,
a bull has a lilac sprig
dangling from a horn

Occasionally Wright's haiku take place in an urban rather than a rural environment:

From this skyscraper,
all the bustling streets converge
towards the spring sea

Compare the next haiku with the one that follows by Taigi:

A freezing morning:
I left a bit of my skin
on the broomstick
* * *
bamboo broom
too cold to hold
left under the pine

Wright very occasionally uses a technique that I call a "haiku round". Simply explained, in haiku rounds the reader goes from the third line back to the first line again, going around in an unending circle, repeating the haiku as often as one wishes. Some of the Japanese haiku masters also wrote haiku rounds. It's a technique that should probably be explored more than
it has in English. Rhythm and rhyme are often employed when using this technique.

The neighing horses
are causing echoing neighs
in neighboring barns

Here's an example of a "haiku round" by Taigi:

the mountain roses:
green, yellow, green
yellow and green

another by Buson:

rising & falling
all day the spring sea
rising & falling

Wright occasionally deals with socioeconomic issues in his haiku:

The Christmas season:
a whore is painting her lips
larger than they are

Remember Basho's "Traveler" haiku?

First winter shower;
you can just call me
a traveler now

Wright's circumstances were quite different:

Their watching faces,
as I walk the autumn road
make me a traveler

Here's a good haiku on an ecological theme:

With the forest trees cut,
the lake lies naked and lost
in the bare hills

Compare the next haiku with one by Alexis Rotella that follows:

In a dank basement
a rotting sack of barley
swells with sprouting grain
* * *
a bag of barley bursts
onto the floor:
winter moon
* * *
Standing in the snow,
a horse shifts his heavy haunch
slowly to the right

Compare the above haiku with Timothy Russell's 1999 Shiki Salon Grand Prize winner:

noon
the egret shifts from stillness
to stillness

The question mark is not often used in American haiku. Making a quick check, I found it used only once in over 700 haiku in The Haiku Anthology edited by Cor van den Heuvel for example. Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, invented a new poetic form in the last book he wrote before he died which might be considered a special type of Hispanic haiku. The book published the year after his death, The Book Of Questions, contains verses in two-line stanzas written as questions with a cutting word often at the end of the first. Haiku are usually open-ended, especially at the end. The open-ended question can be more effective than perhaps many haiku poets realize. Wright uses the question more than just a few times in his haiku. Here are a couple of examples:

That frozen star there,
or this one on the water, –
Which is more distant?

Here's one with a double question:

Why did this spring wood
grow so silent when I came?
What was happening?

One of the most memorable and most quoted examples of the use of the question in Japanese haiku is Basho's:

Autumn deepens . . .
What does my neighbor do
to survive?

Compare Wright's haiku with one that follows it by the world famous Argentine poet, Jorge Luis Borges:

A balmy spring wind
reminding me of something
I cannot recall
* * *
The afternoon and the mountains
have told me something,
but now it's lost . . .

Julia, Richard Wright's daughter, was reading through the haiku manuscript in her father's study in Paris just after the funeral and upon coming across the haiku below, she exclaimed, "This is Daddy!"

Burning out its time
and timing its own burning
one lonely candle

I would like to close, if I may, with a postscript of four haiku of my own and four by Mexican poets on Afro-Americans:

playing hide-and-seek
a little black boy crouching
behind the snowman
(Ithaca, NY)
* * *
coming out of the shadows,
a beautiful black woman
steps into the moonlight
(Atlanta, GA)
* * *
long rows of shacks
on the other side of the tracks:
Blacks
(Puerto Barrios, Guatemala)
* * *
filling sand bags under the hot sun
soul brothers singing
soul music
(Dong Ha, Quang Tri, Vietnam)
* * *
the flowing tears
of the black prostitute,
clear – like mine!
(José Juan Tablada – 1922)
* * *
NEW YORK CABARET
A jazz band jamming . . .
African masks on all the walls
some ivory, some ebony
(José Juan Tablada – 1922)
* * *
A painful song
of Negroes and guitars:
the blues, the blues, the blues
(Rafael Lozano – 1921)
* * *
BEAUMONT, TEXAS
Under the full moon:
whites to the right,
blacks to the left . . .
(Efrain Huerta – 1949)

All translations from the Japanese and Spanish by Ty Hadman

Shawnrece D. Miller
Female Images in Richard Wright’s
Haiku: This Other World

In traditional haiku, nature is not a representation of goodness, truth, or beauty but often uncovers truths. These truths are often revealed in a relationship between the human subject and nature. Traditional haiku often include a clear reference to the season in which they were written, often showing how nature transforms sensations to the human psyche—where nature’s tangible presence stimulates a cathartic experience.

Wright’s haiku reveal that there can be a conflict between nature and culture. Nature on its own is neither good nor bad; the interiority of the seer defines what is seen, When there is a conflict between the natural subject and the culture it sometimes suggests that certain members of this culture are being exploited by their culture and are made unnatural by the culture and its demands of the subject, such as women exploited for labor and sex.

Like writers of traditional haiku, Wright uses nature in his poems; however, his use of nature often does not show the wonders or mysteries of the natural world and how these wonders/mysteries correlate to the wonders of the internal (the human heart, psyche, etc.). It is Wright’s use of human nature—its ability to exploit, abuse, and injure—that exposes suffering. His natural world discloses women and young girls suffering exposure to natural elements like rain and snow rather than learning from them, pondering them or enjoying them. Something they are unable to do because of cultural economic deprivation and/or exploitation. Thus, nature itself is not necessarily a wellspring of either transcendent sensationalism or of horrific pain in and of itself; rather, it is the subject’s social/cultural position in the world that causes suffering and which enables him or her to see what he or she sees in nature. If one is treated unjustly, exploited, and/or hurt, nature can be an agent of pain and suffering.

Wright reveals in his use of nature that the social position of the speaker and his object in the haiku are relevant to the haiku’s meaning—to meaning-making in general. This seems to be very much in line with Wright’s views of nature and culture in Native Son. What one sees is made possible because the culture provides the means, or lack thereof, for one to see it (or not). Instead of nature revealing epiphany-like, transcendent moments, in Wright’s haiku nature reveals the truths of his subjects—women and young girls who suffer and who are separated from the natural world because they are physically and economically exploited by their culture.

The female imagery in Wright’s haiku reveal his concern for the exploitation and suffering of women. Wright’s female subjects’ perceptions of the natural world rely on their experiences in their unnatural “natural” worlds. Unlike the Japanese noblemen, priests, writers, singers, and artists who had the time to find beauty and pleasure in natural phenomena, Wright’s female subjects have to contend with the negative aspects of nature.

Nature often has a dual role in Wright’s haiku, occupying not only the position of mother nature but playing the role of human nature as well. It is overwhelmingly human nature that impedes Wright’s female subjects’ abilities to enjoy mother nature. As a result, many of the female subjects in Wright’s haiku experience the type of cultural determinism Wright emphasizes as controlling the fate of the male protagonists in his prose. The following haiku (number 415 in the book) is an example of Wright’s harking back to the theme of cultural determinism present in his fictional works:

In a drizzling rain,
In a flower shop’s doorway,
A girl sells herself

The theme of human nature causing women to suffer natural elements because of cultural demands is clearly presented in this haiku. Rain sets the tone—something death-like, melancholy, gray, unhappy. The speaker does not reverse the reader’s expectations. The girl (youth—connection to growth, spring, promise of flower shop flowers) sells herself shy—prostitutes herself as the flower (nature) is prostituted/appropriated/exploited in order to fulfill man’s (culture’s) desires.

Note that it is a drizzling rain and not a torrential downpour. This suggest that the girl’s prostitution and suffering are not particularly cataclysmic to the culture that demands them. The drizzling rain suggests a slow, steady, experience of suffering rather than a quick or sudden death or injury. That she stands in the flower shop’s doorway is significant also because the doorway is a bridge, a transition between two worlds—the outside world as human nature and the inside world as mother nature.

However, culture exploits nature both inside and outside the flower shop. Inside the flower shop, the natural world of flowers is exploited/sold because of culture’s demands. Outside the flower shop, the girl representing the natural is also exploited/sold because of culture’s demands. The girl and the flowers are exploited by culture’s desires to own and to use whatever it desires. Instead of being in nature and permitted their own natural experiences of life, the flowers are cut and sold in order to fulfill human (cultural) desires. Likewise, instead of being in nature as a young girl who can experience sex for its pleasures, the girl is a commodity that is cut off from her youth and its pleasures as she is bought and sold in an economy of exploitation that denies its member’s humanity.

Exploitation of women’s bodies echoes again in haiku number 378:

Upon crunching snow,
Childless mothers are searching
For cash customers.

Here a woman’s nature—her sexuality—is exploited for culture’s (the cash customer’s) desires. Being a mother is not, for these women, a part of this sexual economy of exploitation. Because prostitution relies on the use, abuse, and exploitation of women’s sexuality but not its natural result (children), the natural world and result of women’s sexuality (her own and her offspring’s) are annihilated by economic and cultural demands on her flesh, flesh the culture sees as a commodity for its own use.
Unfortunately, Wright is aware of far too many women who are represented by the plights of the women in the haiku above. He can only watch as they lose the innocence Wright expresses in haiku number 363:

A little girl stares,
Dewy eyes round with wonder,
At morning glories.

During their youth, young girls wait patiently for some unknown good to touch their lives. As this promise of hope turns into a dream deferred, the girls become victims of cultural demands who are made to suffer while they are waiting. The word “stares” suggests something unnatural about this young girl’s gaze. It eliminates the romance one might expect from such an idyllic scene which is an indication that the myriad opportunities available in life, represented by the morning glories, also will be eliminated in this young girl’s life.

Haiku number 186 represents Wright’s memory of a woman towards the end of her life of suffering:

From these warm spring days,
I can still see her sad face
In its last autumn.

The focus here is on the juxtapositions of seasons. The speaker is calling to mind an old memory during warm spring days. Because spring represents growth, renewal, and rebirth and autumn represents decay, death, and the onset of old age, this haiku suggests that the speaker may not be in tune with nature because he recalls her sad face during these warm spring days. It also suggests that the female subject is out of tune with nature since the speaker remembers her sad face in its last autumn, “last autumn” suggesting that she has experienced deaths before as a metaphor for loss.

The conflict in many of Wright’s haiku containing female imagery is between the natural human subject and her experiences in a corrupt culture. Wright’s haiku seem to emphasize that it is a cultural determinant that is to blame for his subjects’ being out of tune with nature: sun, rain, spring, autumn, flowers, and snow. Wright’s female subjects suffer because cultural elements—men’s (sexual) desires, cultural demands, forced labor, loss, pain, suffering, and injustice—will not allow them freedom to fully be or to be at one with nature.

After writing four thousand haiku, Wright seems to be more vehement than ever in his belief that two of human beings’ devices, materialism and greed, are the twin culprits of racial discord and poverty. While his fiction and nonfiction works explicitly advocate his position, he is only able to express this indirectly in his haiku. The primal outlook on life for which Wright gives witness coincides with his belief that there is a preeminence of intuition over knowledge in the search for truth. This is what leads Wright to call into question the basic assumptions of existence, that is, questioning the life one is socially and politically taught to live. In his haiku, as in all of his works, Wright admonishes us, that for us to see ourselves truly as human beings, we must give our utmost attention to comprehending the relationship between humanity and nature.

[Shawnrece D. Miller is an Assistant Professor of English
at Stephen F. Austin State University.]