The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 29 (2018)
Copyright © 2018 Michio Arimitsu. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

De-Occidentalized “Projections in the
Haiku Manner”: Poetics of Indeterminacy
and Transcultural Reconfiguration of “Frog
Perspectives” in Richard Wright’s Last Poems

Michio Arimitsu*

A world of grief and pain:
Flowers bloom;
Even then . . .
—Kobayashi Issa, Hachiban nikki, 1819
When the feeling and fact of being a Negro is accepted fully into theconsciousness of a Negro, there’s something universal about it,
something saving and informing, something that lifts it above being a
Negro in America. Oh, will I ever have the strength and courage to tellwhat I feel and think; and do I know it well enough to tell it.
—Richard Wright, journal entry, February 12, 1945
Introduction: Transnationalizing Richard Wright
Prior to the posthumous publication of Haiku: This Other World in 1998,
most of the three-line poems that Richard Wright (1908–60) had produced,
only months before his untimely death in France, remained largely
forgotten. Out of over 4,000 of these gem-like poems—he called them“projections in the haiku manner”—the African American poet had himself*Associate Professor, Keio University45

46    Michio Arimitsu

picked 817 and painstakingly revised them while battling his illness, only tohave his prospective publisher reject the final manuscript.1 Many of Wright’s
haiku-inspired poems (all numbered but untitled) are vivid and humorous
snapshots of nature, while others present evocative interactions of humanbeings with their natural or urban environment. From sparkling moments ofjoy and surprise to ruminations on loneliness, poverty, illness, and death,these poems register and evoke a remarkably wide range of emotions andthoughts.
Projection 630, for instance, presents a humorous dialogue between
human beings and nature:
For each baptized,
The brown creek laughs and gurgles,
Flowing on its way.
Embodying cultural hybridity, this poem successfully uses the 5–7–5
syllabic structure to recapture the Southern rural landscape of Wright’schildhood, where many African Americans were baptized in rivers, swamps,
and lakes. This jubilant projection in the haiku manner may surprise thereaders of Wright’s earlier fiction and cultural criticism. Wright’s humorous
celebration of religiosity in the wild here contradicts his controversial (andduly criticized) views, not only of religion as an impediment to progress andmodernization, but also of the American South as a hell-like place of fearand despair.
Rendered in a style that insists on its foreignness, this projection in the
haiku manner is also fascinating, as its context-shedding brevity
translocalizes the image. Though this poem seems to refer to the African
American sacred ritual, there is no guarantee that those being baptized in thescene are all black or American. For all we know, the creek could be
anywhere, from the Mississippi of Wright’s childhood to the Jordan River,where Christ himself was baptized. The readers might interpret this poem
(and by extension, Wright’s other adaptations of haiku) as an allegory of
Afro-Asian unity or a pictorial illustration of his cosmopolitanism, as we areinvited to envision a grand river downstream where cultural tributaries flow
together into—in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois—a translocal “kingdom ofculture” beyond race and nation.2
In this article, I explore the contemporary relevance of Wright’s global
imaginings by juxtaposing his antiracist, anticolonial writings with his latepoetry inspired by haiku. In an age when critical terms such as “hybridity,”De-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    47“border-crossing,” and “transculturalism” have become the sine qua non ofliterary scholarship, Wright’s projections in the haiku manner offer
instructive examples of a utopian poetic remaking of the world throughcultural mixing—contesting and destabilizing, not just the racialized
dichotomy of black and white in the United States, but also the supposed
civilizational boundaries between East and West.
Despite literary scholars’ enduring associations of Wright with therhetoric of violence and indignation, I argue that haiku served the African
American poet as a restorative mnemonic device that made it possible forhim to revisit the painful past from alternative perspectives of disarmamentand reconciliation. These perspectives, I argue, enabled him to write about
black people without turning them into flat stereotypes of racial protest,
a flaw that James Baldwin criticized as fundamentally marring Wright’s
early fiction.3 Furthermore, I claim that Wright’s haiku-inspired poetry
performatively supplemented his postcolonial vision of “deOccidentalization,” a dream of worldwide liberation from both white
supremacy and the colonization of the mind.4 The classic haiku’s rejection ofsymbols notwithstanding, I demonstrate that the recurring imagery of frogs
in Wright’s projections in the haiku manner enacted and embodied hisantiracist decolonization dream, subtly but radically canceling out what hecriticized in his political writings as “the frog perspectives” of oppressedpeoples.
I. A New “Negro” Literature andPeregrine Poetics of Indeterminacy
Among the existing scholarship on Wright’s haiku-inspired poetry, themost influential has been a Zen-focused approach that typically comparesand contrasts Wright’s poetry with the Japanese classics to argue whether or
not the former faithfully adheres to the latter’s standards. In numerous
articles and books on the subject, Yoshinobu Hakutani has emphasized“selflessness,” “the state of nothingness,” and creative interactions withnature as some of the essential characteristics shared by classic Japanese
haiku and the majority of Wright’s haiku-inspired work.5 Hakutani thus
reads Wright’s late poems as more-or-less direct expressions of Zen, as
literary confirmations of a certain level of Buddhist enlightenment that theAfrican American poet may or may not have reached.
Including Michel Fabre’s 1973 pioneering reassessment of Wright’s late
poems,6 readings by several critics implicitly or explicitly complicate this48    Michio Arimitsu

Zen-focused interpretation. While recognizing the therapeutic aspects of
Wright’s engagement with Zen and haiku, these critics have politicized andhistoricized Wright’s projections in the haiku manner as a whole and haveshown more interest in how and why the African American poet adapted theJapanese tradition rather than whether he was faithful to the timeless“truths” of Zen and the standards set by haiku classics.
Such insightful non-Zen readings have shed light on Wright’s
ambivalence toward nature and have firmly established continuities from his
earlier writings. For instance, Sachi Nakachi and Eugene E. Miller haveobserved the similarity of Wright’s attraction to the blues and to haiku.
According to these critics, the African American author believed that thesecultural forms not only shared folk origins but also were similarly endowedwith a unique power of speaking in a “double voice,”7 a strategicallyambiguous use of words and images that allowed for a “paradoxical linkingof disparate elements.”8 These and other politically informed but nuanced
readings have also identified a variety of social themes from poverty,
oppression, alienation, objectification of women to the enduring legacies ofracism in the United States, even as many of Wright’s verbal paintings may
seem to represent innocent, dehistoricized, and deterritorialized scenes ofnature.9
Perceptive readings of Wright’s projections in the haiku manner
invariably acknowledge irreconcilable tensions or inherent indeterminacy
between the racial and the nonracial, the literal and the figurative, thepolitical and the aesthetic, or the social and the natural in Wright’s three-line
poems. Meta L. Schettler and Richard A. Iadonisi, who have most explicitly
discussed this significance of indeterminacy in Wright’s haiku-inspired
poetry, are correct in observing that Wright was drawn to haiku precisely
because of its power to contain a perspective-dependent multiplicity of
meanings.10 In Haiku, Wright’s sourcebook for the Eastern poetic tradition,
R. H. Blyth also insists on the paramount significance of such power:
Japanese readers will all have slightly different translations andmeanings to give most of these verses. This is both the power and theweakness of haiku. It is a weakness in that we are not quite sure of themeaning of the writer. It is a power in that haiku demands the free
poetic life of the reader in parallel with that of the poet.11
To underplay this centrality of indeterminacy in haiku (and Wright’s
adaptations of it) is to lose sight of his lifelong fascination with shifts inDe-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    49perspective. From early on in his writing career, Wright was struggling tofind an ideal perspective that would allow him to juxtapose or interweave
the particular and the universal, to tease out the transracial and transnationalsignificance out of the specific experiences of African Americans, as hememorably articulated in the epigraph of this article.
Dwelling on Blyth’s theory of indeterminacy as haiku’s enabling
weakness, as both its power and limitation, might also help us better
understand why Wright himself was unsure about the ultimate value of his
own haiku-inspired poems. As he was about to finish editing his manuscriptin spring 1960, Wright wrote Margrit de Sablonière, his Dutch translator, an
excited letter tinged with anxiety:
These haikus, as you know, were written out of my illness. I was, andam, so damnably sensitive. Never was I so sensitive as when myintestines were raw. So along came that Japanese poetry and harnessed
this nervous energy. Maybe I’m all wrong about them. Maybe they
have no value, but I will see.12
Though Blyth asserted that haiku could not be subjected to “wild,”“irresponsible,” and “arbitrary” readings despite its indeterminacy of
meaning,13 I propose that Wright was anxious not just because he wasexperimenting with a foreign tradition but also because he feared that thereaders of his projections in the haiku manner might fail to register thecomplexity of his new endeavor and receive (or dismiss) them as simple
nature poems.
In a re-examination of Wright in terms of postracialism, Sandy Alexandre
has emphasized the disjunction between the author’s earlier career and his“late style” and characterized his haiku-inspired poetry as “a quixotic[postracial] fantasy of true artistic freedom.”14 Just as Wright feared,
Alexandre reads these poems as signaling a depoliticization of the oncemilitant race man on his deathbed. Such a reading belies, however, Wright’s
lifelong struggle with racism and, more important, misses the singularachievement of his late poetics of indeterminacy. Despite the poet’s own
uncertainty about them, I argue that some of these poems that imaginatively
play with indeterminacy provide a critical opportunity for interrogating anddestabilizing the persistent dichotomies between the racialized subject (aspolitical) and nature poetry (as nonpolitical), between the burden of theAfrican American artist and artistic autonomy—what Langston Hughes
famously called the dilemma of “the Negro artist and the racial mountain.”15

50    Michio Arimitsu

II.

Beyond East and West: Ambivalent Images of Japanand the “De-Occidentalization of Mankind”

Far from being a timeless, apolitical expression of Zen, Wright’s haikuinspired poetics of indeterminacy must be situated in the context ofworldwide decolonization and struggle against white supremacy. In
particular, the significance of the connection between his decolonizing,
antiracist dream of “de-Occidentalization” and his seemingly sudden
fascination with non-Western poetics deserves much more scrutiny than it
has received before.16
Wright first used the term “de-Occidentalization” in 1955. Asked by aFrench newspaper to name “the historical date most charged withsignificance,” he picked 1905, the year of Japan’s victory over Russia. “Thatdate,” he explained, “marked the beginning of the termination of theGodlike role which the Western white man had been playing to mankind.
That date marked the beginning of the de-Occidentalization of the world.”17
If this answer reflected Wright’s growing consciousness as a global
intellectual whose horizons transcended the borders of the United States, hisconception of de-Occidentalization also attested to his abiding, yet
ambivalent, interest in Japan. As early as in 1940, Wright had Bigger
Thomas, the disgruntled black protagonist of Native Son, express a similarly
broad view of the world, albeit through a lens skewed by ressentiment:
Of late he had liked to hear tell of men who could rule others, for inactions such as these he felt that there was a way to escape from thistight morass of fear and shame that sapped at the base of his life. He
liked to hear of how Japan was conquering China; of how Hitler was
running the Jews to the ground; of how Mussolini was invading Spain.
He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong;they simply appealed to him as possible avenues of escape.18
In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” an essay published in the same year, Wright
expanded on the mental process through which disempowered and thwarted
African Americans might identify with imperialist Japan:
I’ve even heard Negroes, in moments of anger and bitterness, praise
what Japan is doing in China, not because they believed in oppression(being objects of oppression themselves), but because they would
suddenly sense how empty their lives were when looking at the dark

De-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    51faces of Japanese generals in the rotogravure supplements of the
Sunday newspapers. They would dream of what it would be like to live
in a country where they could forget their color and play a responsible
role in the vital processes of the nation’s life.19
While Wright understood why some African Americans felt this way, hecame to have a more sober view of the empire in the East, which had turned
out to be no less violent and brutal than its white Western counterparts.
In The Color Curtain (1956), a report on the landmark 1955 meeting (inBandung, Indonesia) of African and Asian leaders in search of an alternative
to both communism and Western imperialism, Wright again referred to the“de-Occidentalization of mankind,” this time as the ending of the“supremacy of the Western world” in all dimensions of life.20 He hoped that“in time, the whole world will be de-Occidentalized” and “there will be no
East or West!”21 He optimistically declared that the realization of thisdecolonization dream would give birth to a new democratic world without
the burdens of tradition, racial discrimination, economic exploitation, or
parochial ethnoracial chauvinism.
In this book, Wright also warned that modernization in the non-West
could give rise to aggressive cultural and political hybridization at the handsof rabid nationalists and religious fundamentalists, citing Japanese fascism
as “the flower of such incongruous grafting of plants of different genres.”22“It is not difficult to imagine,” Wright further admonished, “Moslems,Hindus, Buddhists, and Shintoists launching vast crusades, armed withmodern weapons, to make the world safe for their mystical notions.”23
Typified in this passage, Wright’s categorical rejection of organized religion
and vernacular spiritual practices worldwide has been widely noted and duly
criticized.24 This is not to say, however, that Wright was a neocolonial
rationalist in black skin who advocated total westernization of the non-West,as some critics have mischaracterized him.25 As his repeated call for deOccidentalization makes clear, Wright instead insisted on a dual process ofprogressive modernization and racial reform in the belief that it would rid
both the West and the non-West of pernicious customs and traditions, on the
one hand, and Eurocentrism and white supremacy, on the other. As Wrightreiterated, his struggle was against what he viewed as “irrationalism” onboth sides.26
For this reason, Wright dedicated White Man, Listen! (1957) to the leadersof Africa, Asia, and the West Indies. In Wright’s mind, these “Westernized
non-Westerners” would be his fellow travelers on a long and arduous

52    Michio Arimitsu

journey toward a postcolonial, transcultural, and transracial utopia,27 though
he admitted that they were, at that time, little more than “the lonely outsiders
who exist precariously / on the clifflike margins of many cultures.”28 In fact,
Wright had high hopes for these chosen pioneers “who amidst confusion andstagnation, / seek desperately for a home for their hearts: / a home which, iffound, could be a home for the hearts of all men.”29 Echoing what Du Bois
had famously theorized as African Americans’ “double consciousness,”30
Wright argued that Western-educated leaders of non-Western nations had a
special office to perform, because their liminality between the West and the
non-West had given them an alternative vision, “a third but not quite yet
clearly defined point of view.”31
It is certain that Wright projected his own increasingly globalized
consciousness onto this group of elite non-Westerners who had gathered in
Bandung. Earlier in The Color Curtain, Wright identified himself in such a
way as to defy the arbitrary distinction among races while also contesting
the persistent dichotomy between the East and the West:First of all, my position is a split one. I’m black. I’m a man of the West.
These hard facts are bound to condition, to some degree, my outlook. I
see and understand the West; but I also see and understand the non- or
anti-Western point of view. . . . This double vision of mine stems frommy being a product of Western civilization and from my racial identity.
. . . I’m not non-Western. I’m no enemy of the West. Neither am I an
Easterner. . . . I see both worlds from another and third point of view.32
In this revealing passage, Wright addressed the world beyond the UnitedStates, identifying himself as an insider/outsider, a “marginal man” (toborrow the sociologist Robert E. Park’s well-known formulation, withwhich Wright was familiar)33 in search of a cosmopolitan home, a utopia
beyond race and nationality. As Bill V. Mullen has compellingly shown,however, the trope of “being outside” at times reified and reinforced thebinaries of “black” and “white” and “East” and “West.”34 Moreover, it is also
true that Wright in the 1950s, having moved away from the structural to thepsychological/existential in his critique of racism and colonialism, failed tocome up with a feasible and practical political solution to bridge the gap
between these binaries. After all, as Wright himself admitted, his “third
point of view” was “not quite yet clearly defined.”De-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    53III. The Frog Perspectives, a Third Ear,and Haunting Memories of the American South
Traveling to Africa and Asia in the mid-1950s and meditating on his
feelings and thoughts in Black Power (1954) and The Color Curtain, Wrightnonetheless sought to transform the peculiar double vision of American“Negroes” into a unique “gift” to address not only the domestic problems of
the United States but also larger issues of global modernity.35 However, toclaim this “gift,” Wright believed that people of African descent in the
United States, just like their counterparts who were similarly oppressed
elsewhere in the world, would first have to acknowledge the enduring
legacies of internalized thinking based on racial hierarchy.
In “The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People,” collected in
White Man, Listen!, Wright expounded on specific forms of psychologicalsubjugation found among oppressed peoples worldwide. Among others, hereferred to “frog perspectives” as constituting a psychologically restrictedvisual field of the oppressed:[“Frog perspectives”] is a phrase I’ve borrowed from Nietzsche todescribe someone looking from below upward, a sense of someone
who feels himself lower than others. The concept of distance involved
here is not physical; it is psychological. It involves a situation in which,for moral or social reasons, a person or a group feels that there isanother person or group above it. Yet, physically, they all live on thesame general material plane. A certain degree of hate combined withlove (ambivalence) is always involved in this looking from below
upward and the object against which the subject is measuring himself
undergoes constant change. He loves the object because he would liketo resemble it; he hates the object because his chances of resembling it
are remote, slight.36
To illustrate this historically and politically conditioned psychology,
Wright cited African Americans’ seemingly innocuous embrace of theideology of uplifting, encapsulated in the statement “We are rising.”37 He
criticized this upward aspiration among blacks for uncritically assuming
white values as the norm.38 Although Wright did not mention Native Son, thefamous scene in his early novel in which Bigger Thomas enviously looks up
at an airplane in the sky might also serve as a perfect illustration of thisperspective.39

54    Michio Arimitsu

To remedy this constrained vision of the oppressed, Wright advocated theuse of “a third ear,”40 a trope also appropriated from Nietzsche. While
Nietzsche used it to deplore how his fellow citizens had become tone-deaf toliterary artistry,41 Wright encouraged his readers to use this alternative
extrasensory perception as a heuristic and therapeutic means of diagnosing
and rehabilitating the psychological/perceptual “difficulties and disabilities”
of the oppressed.42
As his entire oeuvre confirms, Wright knew well that colonialism andracism had placed an overwhelming symbolic and epistemological weighton visual differences, the most prominent of which was skin color. The third
ear was therefore evoked to neutralize such Eurocentric “visualism,”43 theprivileged centrality of sight that inscribed and reinforced hierarchicallyracialized differences based on color. Similar to the decolonizing and deOccidentalizing “third point of view” discussed earlier, Wright encouraged
African Americans and other subjugated peoples of color worldwide to use
this auditory intelligence for their epistemological liberation from the visual
dominance of whiteness.
From his own experience and extensive reading, Wright came tounderstand that systematic oppression constrained the perceptions of the
oppressed and skewed their perspectives regarding not just theirinterpersonal relationships but also their interactions with nature. For theenslaved in the American South, nature was indeed a constant source oftrouble and dread, as they were forced to toil in the fields while being
subjected to a viciously dehumanizing economic, political, and cultural
institution that equated them with exploitable objects, such as agricultural
products, domesticated animals, or wild beasts.44 Growing up in rural
Mississippi, Wright knew firsthand the irony of being close to nature but
deprived of the freedom to fully experience its beauty:
When an American Negro harbors a yearning for a landscape, it wisely
behooves him to choose with care, for, for him, most American
landscapes have been robbed of the innocence of their sylvan beauty by
the fact that almost every lynching in American history has taken placein such an arcadian setting.45
As Fabre has astutely observed, Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1942)
nevertheless contains vivid descriptions of nature in the American South,
prefiguring the world of his later haiku-inspired poems.46 Indeed, in thischronicle of the Great Migration, a historic movement that saw millions of

De-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    55formerly enslaved people and their descendants flee the Southern plantations
during the first half of the twentieth century, apple buds laugh andsunflowers nod, magnolias fill the land with their sweet scent, and birds singjoyously.47 Wright also memorably wrote about “the throaty boast of frogs[that] momentarily drowns out the call and counter-call of crickets.”48
It is crucial to add that Wright painted these moving and lush pastoral
pictures of the South, only to divulge the horrors and the toils hidden
beneath their surfaces:
But whether in spring or summer or autumn or winter, time slips past us
remorselessly, and it is hard to tell of the iron that lies beneath thesurface of our quiet, dull days.
To paint the picture of how we live on the tobacco, cane, rice, andcotton plantations is to compete with mighty artists: the movies, theradio, the newspapers, the magazines, and even the Church. They havepainted one picture: charming, idyllic, romantic; but we live another:full of the fear of the Lords of the Land, bowing and grinning when wemeet white faces, toiling from sun to sun, living in unpainted wooden
shacks that sit casually and insecurely upon the red clay.49
Not surprisingly, Wright found it difficult—and even irresponsible andimmoral—to write lyrically about nature and the Southern landscapewithout simultaneously adding an explicit social commentary on thewidespread and deep-rooted realities of racism.
In Black Boy (1945), Wright wrote about his determination to make peacewith these memories of the South one day, for he knew that physicallyleaving the South for the North, or even for Europe, would not automaticallylead to psychological liberation:
I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that some day I
might understand it, might come to know what its rigors had done tome, to its children. I fled so that the numbness of my defensive living
might thaw out and let me feel the pain—years later and far away—of
what living in the South had meant. . . . I was taking part of the Southto transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could
drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to thewarmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom. . . . And if that miracle
ever happened, then I would know that there was yet hope in thatsouthern swamp of despair and violence, that light could emerge even

56    Michio Arimitsu

out of the blackest of southern night.50
In leaving the American South and then the North for Europe, Wrightmight have partially cut his roots; instead of becoming a cultural déraciné,
however, he would eventually succeed in “transplanting” the seeds of his
painful memories into “alien soil,” in exposing them to “the warmth of othersuns” and finally in letting them sprout and bloom as his haiku-inspired
poems.
IV. New “Negro” Writing, World Literature,and Poetics of Complex Simplicity
Far from being outlandish or “quixotic,” Wright’s haiku-inspired poetry
significantly echoed the African American author’s early (if sporadic andlittle-documented) interest in Japanese literature, which should be carefully
juxtaposed with his abiding fascination with Japan’s political and militarydevelopment. In an unpublished five-page essay entitled “Personalism” (c.
1935–37), Wright expressed his desire to reconceive “Negro” literature froma revolutionary perspective.51 In the short text, he explored the possibility of
sublimating the petit bourgeois “theory of art for the sake of art” totransform literature into a kind of “anti-literature,” an artisticallyautonomous vehicle of radical individualism that would nevertheless be
informed with “the highest intensity of social consciousness possible.”52 Of
particular relevance to the present discussion is Wright’s emphasis on theimage and the transculturally eclectic nature of his projected aesthetic:“Personalism will use all techniques, or part or wholes of techniques, such[as] dadaism, surrealism, imagism, symbolism, realism, etc. as vehicles of
expression.”53 Significantly, Wright imagined this new heterogeneously
informed “Negro” aesthetic as comprising more than Anglo-European
literary traditions:
The basic unit of personalist creation will be the image, that is, anemotional perception of reality. The unity, emotional and philosophic,of these images will constitute the ruling symbol of the work. Thissymbol, constituted of images born of emotional perception, will carryorganically embedded within it the message or judgment of the writer.
This image can be as simple as the picture of rain; it can be as complex
as a character of Dostoe[v]sky’s. The symbol can be as simple as thatused by Japanese writers in their short stories.54

De-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    57Though there is no record of which specific Japanese writers Wright hadin mind, suffice it to note here that his conception of personalist new“Negro” literature was explicitly informed by readings of some Japanese
texts (or at least by some indirect knowledge of them through white Western
writers’ earlier adaptations and appropriations).
In his better-known literary manifesto of the same period, “Blueprint for
Negro Writing” (1937), Wright preempted Baldwin’s later critique andcalled for a transcultural/transracial perspective that would enable him andother African American writers to move beyond the language of protest andmourning. In this article, Wright insisted on African American writers’ needto emulate their vernacular traditions, such as folklore, blues, gospel andwork songs. While turning to these African American vernacular culturalexpressions as his models and sources of inspiration, Wright also argued thatthe new “Negro” writing should aspire to constitute an integral part of world
literature:[The new Negro writer’s] vision need not be simple or rendered inprimer-like terms; for the life of the Negro people is not simple. The
presentation of their lives should be simple, yes; but all the complexity,
the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheenover the most sordid existence, should be there. To borrow a phrasefrom the Russians, it should have a complex simplicity. Eliot, Stein,
Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, andJack London no less than the folklore of the Negro himself should form
the heritage of the Negro writer.55
The transcultural/transracial aesthetic of complex simplicity was given a
black-and-white genealogy in this particular instance, but the radical literarytransculturalism articulated here clearly anticipated Wright’s willingness toexperiment with any foreign and seemingly outlandish form, such as haiku,
in the future.
V. Frog Perspectives versus Projectionsof Frogs in the Haiku Manner
Though many critics have examined Wright’s abiding concern with theissue of perspective and haiku’s cathartic effects on him,56 little has been
said about any meaningful connection between the “frog perspectives”
discussed in his anticolonial writings and the recurring figure of frogs in his

58    Michio Arimitsu

haiku-inspired poetry. In this section I elucidate the significance of thisfigure as Wright reimagined and reconstructed it in his projections in the
haiku manner. If he failed to bring about a political and socioeconomic deOccidentalization, I argue that Wright successfully created what might bedescribed as a de-Occidentalized world literature rooted in his singularexperience as an African American.
While underscoring for Wright the importance of indeterminacy in haiku
poetics, Blyth’s Haiku was also responsible for introducing the African
American poet to a treasure trove of frog poems. Blyth, a British expat who
was interned in Japan during World War II, divided his book into sections
that deal with different seasons and themes. The section entitled “Birds andBeasts” devotes eleven pages to frogs.57 If the subspecies of frogs areincluded, a total of thirty-nine poems are cited, ten of which are by
Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828). This poet, known for his resilience andtragicomic humor, seems to have influenced Wright as much as the more
austere Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) did. According to Blyth, Issa believed too
much seriousness was “the cause (and effect) of egotism and self-pity,” andtherefore the poet subtly mocked it throughout his work.58
In the following haiku, for instance, Issa humorously cheers for the weakin the face of the powerful:59
Thin frog,
Don’t be beat,Issa is here!60
In his interpretation of the poem, Blyth comments, “We have an instinct
against the survival of the fittest that Nietzsche could not shout away.”61
With Issa, Blyth sympathetically defends the underdog (underfrog?) against
the elitist moral philosophy of Nietzsche, who notoriously rejectedcompassion for the lowly and the foreign as the morality of the slave.62
The significance of Blyth’s reference to Nietzsche becomes more evident
if the reader recalls Wright’s prior appropriation of “frog perspectives” fromthe German philosopher. As mentioned, only a few years before Wright read
Blyth’s account of haiku and produced his own haiku-inspired poems, he
was fascinated with Nietzsche, even applying some of his insights to the
problems of racism and colonialism. Moreover, in The Outsider (1953),
Wright conceived of the protagonist, a serial killer named Cross Damon, as alonely antihero who literally embodied the Nietzschean master’s morality:
the self-identified outsider believes himself to be liberated not just from aDe-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    59racialized sense of inferiority and ressentiment but also from the social
norms of good and evil. In contrast, Issa’s comic sympathy for the thin frog
must have suggested to Wright a different way of liberating the oppressed,
as Issa built what might be described as a posthuman solidarity with the frogby bringing his perspective to the same level as that of the little creature. In
this and other haiku by Issa, frogs time and again challenge Nietzscheanfrog perspectives.
Finally, let us turn to Wright’s own frog poems. This Other World includes
six projections of frogs, making them one of the most frequently occurring
subjects in this book, along with the moon, the sun, snow, magnolias,
scarecrows, and geese. For example, projection 636 uses frogs to highlightthe narrator’s sense of isolation:
How lonely it is:
A rattling freight train has left
Fields of croaking frogs.
This scene recalls two frog references in Wright’s earlier writings. In
addition to the aforementioned description of the American South in 12
Million Black Voices, Wright also alluded to frogs in Black Power tounderscore his sense of insecurity after arriving in Gold Coast: “Night felland suddenly out of the blue velvet dark came the sound of African crickets
that was like an air-raid siren. Frog belches exploded. A soft, feathery thud,
like that of a bird, struck the window screen. Reluctantly, I climbed intobed.”63 This reference to frogs (and crickets) in Black Power expresses his
sense of disorientation and alienation in his ancestral land by analogizing thescene to that of an imminent “air raid.” Though not as sinister, the frog haiku
above also expresses the speaker’s isolation, estrangement, and implicit
longing for connection with other human beings.64
In contrast, 227 offers a radically different image and sound of frogs. As if
to contest Nietzsche’s figurative denigration (and Wright’s appropriation of
the trope in his antiracist, anticolonial writings), the frogs in this projection
live a carefree life, liberated from inferiority complexes or ressentiment:
In the damp darkness,
Croaking frogs are belching out
The scent of magnolias.
The first line (“In the damp darkness”) cancels out the whiteness of60    Michio Arimitsu

magnolias—historically a symbol of the American South—in the third line,
foregrounding instead their fragrance. Just as the visual image of magnolias
is thus displaced, the frogs’ “croaking” draws the reader’s attention to thepastoral soundscape, presumably an aural memory of the American South
from Wright’s childhood. At the same time, as in many of the otherprojections in the haiku manner, the ultimate geographic indeterminacy ofthis autobiographical poem also universalizes the particular, for the scene
might be set wherever magnolias and frogs can be found together.
Projection 240 also presents a colorfully animated image that defies frog
perspectives. This particular frog commands (or claims to command) themoon as the poet’s surrogate:
In a red sunset
A frog commands the night wind
To roll out a moon.
As the frog looks up at the moon in the sky, there is no bitterness, nojealousy!
Another projection, 318, explores the complicated relationship between
sight and hearing through a perceptual illusion:
The fog’s density
Deepens the croak of the frogs
On an April dawn.
Depending on the reader’s perspective, vision and hearing can be perceived
here as working against each other (in opposition) or together(supplementarily). The poem might be suggesting that the less one can see,the more one can hear or that the more one can see (the fog), the more one
can hear (the frogs). Playfully magnifying such a subtle but significant
difference (fog/frogs and visibility/invisibility), this projection encourages
the reader to explore the fascinating workings of human perception,
particularly when they are not constricted by oppression.
Projection 815 stands out as it realizes Blyth’s ideal of haiku by its
effective use of indeterminacy:
Glittering with frost,
A dead frog squats livingly
In the garden path.

De-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    61The frog’s frozen body “squats” on the border between the dead and theliving, evoking “some poise of the mind, some balance of conflicting
elements from which arises that pleasure whose peculiar quality causes us togive it the name of humor.”65 Leaving the reader to determine whether theimage is tragic or comic, this subtly humorous poem immortalizes the deadfrog’s uncanny liveliness.
The various ways of perceiving—seeing, hearing, and even smelling—frogs in Wright’s haiku-inspired poems demonstrate that this non-Western
poetic form served multiple purposes for the African American poet: it
enabled him to revivify his formerly “disabled” sensitivity to (or selfcensored appreciation of) nature, to use his subtle sense of humor, and to test
the power and limitations of condensed lyrical images without framing themwith any explicit social commentary.
Conclusion: “For the Hearts of All”
As a beguilingly simple crystallization of Wright’s complex humanity andcosmopolitan aspiration to draw creatively from multiple cultural traditions,his projections in the haiku manner shatter the conventional image of theAfrican American author. Far from being a somber and embittered antiWestern rebel, who used words only as weapons to protest against thedehumanization of the “Negro,” or a culturally insensitive neocolonial
rationalist in black skin, Wright was a haiku poet who dreamed of acosmopolitan utopia and sought to capture “all the complexity, thestrangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over themost sordid existence.”66
By way of conclusion, I turn to yet another projection, 563, a selfreflexive poem in which Wright meditates on the transportability and thetranslatability of a poetic tradition:
Could this melody
Be sung in other countries
By other birds?
Performatively answering the question he asks in this poem, Wrighteloquently affirms his ability to make the peregrine poetics of haiku his
own, while inviting other birds/bards to take on a similar challenge oftranscultural adaptation. Though a more sinister reading foregrounds
anxiety, a nagging sense of the difficulty of intercultural translation, this62    Michio Arimitsu

poem ultimately suggests that there is no telling how a cultural form mighttravel from its place of origin to different lands, where it might findunexpected audiences and new sources of energy.
As Blyth emphasized that “haiku is the final flower of all Easternculture,”67 Wright understood that the poetic genre was the product of thecross-pollination of various cultural sources. More important, Wright took
Blyth’s lesson in transculturalism and transnationalism one step further. If
Blyth never dreamed of the emergence of a haiku community beyond theborders of Japan (though he wrote an entire book on what could be
identified as the Zen sensibility in both English and Asian literary classics),68
Wright, along with other haiku-inspired poets around the world,69
participated in a creative deterritorialization of the tradition and transformed
it into a transcivilizational expression that mediated the East and the West,while duly recognizing the genre’s cultural roots.
If his critics accused Richard Wright, in his last years spent outside of theUnited States, of being culturally deracinated and out of touch with rapidlychanging reality at home,70 and even if, in moments of self-doubt anddesperation, the author sometimes felt like such a rootless outsider, his latetranscultural/transracial projections in the haiku manner will remain as a
powerful testament of a conflicted and yet hopeful cosmopolitan who lived
on “clifflike margins of many cultures,” seeking an alternative home, thisother world, not just for himself but “for the hearts of all.”71
Notes
1
Richard Wright, Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Richard L. Tener(New York: Arcade, 1998), Kindle edition. The editors somehow changed the title of
Wright’s manuscript. Although Wright himself at times referred to these poems simply as“haiku,” I make a point of highlighting the difference the author implied in his subtitle
throughout this article. See Richard Wright, This Other World: Projections in the Haiku
Manner. Richard Wright Papers, boxes 70–78, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University.
2
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 6.
3
James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in James Baldwin: Collected Essays(1949; repr., New York: Library of America, 1998), 11–18.
4
Richard Wright, “Richard Wright: I Curse the Day When for the First Time I Heard theWord ‘Politics,’” in Conversations with Richard Wright, ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel
Fabre (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 165.
5
See Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Richard Wright’s Haiku, Zen, and the ‘African Primal Outlook
upon Life,’” in The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku, ed. Jianqing
Zheng (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 3–24. See also Toru Kiuchi, “Zen
Buddhism in Richard Wright’s Haiku,” in Zheng, Other World, 25–42, and Zheng’s

De-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    63introduction, ix–xi.
6Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun. 2nd ed.
(1973; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
7
Sachi Nakachi, “Richard Wright’s Haiku, or the Poetry of Double Voice,” in African
American Haiku: Cultural Visions, ed. Jianqing Zheng (Jackson: University Press ofMississippi, 2016), 25–34.
8
Eugene E. Miller, Voices of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 244.
9
Richard A. Iadonisi, “‘I Am Nobody’: The Haiku of Richard Wright,” in Zheng, OtherWorld, 88–89; Thomas L. Morgan, “Inverting the Haiku Moment: Alienation, Objectification,and Mobility in Richard Wright’s Haiku: This Other World,” in Zheng, Other World, 92–121;
Shawnrece D. Campbell, “Female Imagery, Exploitation, and Richard Wright’s Journey to his
Other World: Haiku,” in Zheng, Other World, 57–70; Nakachi, “Richard Wright’s Haiku” and“From Japonisme to Modernism: Richard Wright’s African American Haiku,” in Zheng,
Other World, 134–47; Meta L. Schettler, “Healing and Loss: Richard Wright’s Haiku and theSouthern Landscape,” in Zheng, Other World, 43–56.
10
Schettler, “Healing and Loss,” 48, 50–51; Iadonisi calls this indeterminacy “double
consciousness” a la Du Bois (“‘I Am Nobody,’” 86–88).
11
R. H. Blyth, Haiku. 4 vols. (Tokyo: Hokuseidō, 1949–52), 1:11–12; emphasis in original.
The significance of Blyth’s four-volume Haiku is irrefutable. After borrowing these books
from the South African beat poet Sinclair Beiles, Wright had his wife purchase copies in
London and send them to him in Paris. See Michel Fabre, Richard Wright: Books and Writers(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), 14.
12Qtd. in Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 508.
13
Blyth, Haiku, 1:11–12.
14
Sandy Alexandre, “Culmination in Miniature: Late Style and the Essence of Richard
Wright’s Haiku,” in Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary, ed. William E. Dow, Alice
Mikal Craven, and Yoko Nakamura (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 252.
15
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in Within the Circle: An
Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to thePresent, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 55–59.
16
See the following notes in Nakachi, “From Japonisme to Modernism,” 137; Alexandre,“Culmination in Miniature,” 250; and Brink, “Richard Wright’s Search,” 1081.
17
Wright, “Richard Wright: I Curse the Day,” 165.
18
Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; repr., New York: Vintage, 2007), 145. For more
information on the widespread and enthusiastic reactions of African American intellectuals,
the press, and the general public to the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5, see
Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1998).
19
Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” in Native Son, 8.
20Richard Wright, The Color Curtain, in Black Power: Three Books from Exile: BlackPower; The Color Curtain; and White Man, Listen! (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 594.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., 606.
23
Ibid.
24
For a critique of Wright’s controversial views of Africans, see Kwame Anthony Appiah,“A Long Way from Home: Richard Wright in the Gold Coast,” in Richard Wright, ed. Harold
Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 173–90; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Third Worldof Theory: Enlightenment’s Esau,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 5 (2008): 191–205.
25
See Gates, “Third World of Theory,” 191–93. For a more sympathetic and nuanced

64    Michio Arimitsu
assessment of Wright’s controversial position, see Cornel West, introduction to Wright, BlackPower: Three Books, vii–xiii; and Haralios Stecopolous, Reconstructing the World: Southern
Fictions and US Imperialisms, 1898–1976 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 132.
26
Richard Wright, White Man, Listen!, in Black Power: Three Books, 717.
27
Ibid., 633.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 11.
31
Wright, White Man, Listen!, in Black Power: Three Books, 787.
32
Wright, The Color Curtain, in Black Power: Three Books, 704–6.
33
For Wright’s intimate relationship with the Chicago school of sociology, see James
Smethurst, “After Modernism: Richard Wright Interprets the Black Belt,” in Dow, Craven,and Nakamura, Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary, 13–26.
34
Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004),
43–71.
35
In Wright’s late novel, a hunchbacked white district attorney in New York predicts that
African Americans will be “gifted with a double vision” of being both an insider and an
outsider of the culture of the United States; see Richard Wright, The Outsider (1953; repr.,
New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 163–64.
36
Wright, White Man Listen!, in Black Power: Three Books, 656–57. For an informative
discussion of this concept in the context of cultural studies and postcolonial criticism, seePaul Gilroy, “Cruciality and Frog’s Perspective: An Agenda of Difficulties for the Black Arts
Movement in Britain,” Third Text 5 (Winter 1988–89): 33–44; and Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 160–61.
37
Wright, White Man Listen!, in Black Power: Three Books, 657.
38
Ibid. For an insightful analysis of the problems inherent in the ideology of uplifting,especially its class- and gender-inflected pathologization of the black working class, see
Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the TwentiethCentury (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
39
Wright, Native Son, 46–47.
40
Wright, White Man Listen!, in Black Power: Three Books, 657–58.
41
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans.
Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 138.
42
Richard Wright, “Why Richard Wright Came Back from France,” in Kinnamon andFabre, Conversations with Richard Wright, 123.
43
I have borrowed this term from Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology
Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia, 1983).
44
For the inextricable link between the two discursive constructs of (nonhuman) nature andrace (human nature) in the American culture since the nineteenth century, see Paul Outka,
Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave,2008). Regarding the difficult relationship between nature and African Americans, see also
Camille T. Dungy, ed., Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).
45
Richard Wright, “I Choose Exile,” c. 1950, Richard Wright Papers, box 6, 110, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
46
Michel Fabre, “The Poetry of Richard Wright,” in Critical Essays on Richard Wright, ed.
Yoshinobu Hakutani (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 252–71.
47
Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United Statesof America (1941; repr., New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1998), 32.
48
Ibid. For an excellent history of the Great Migration, see Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of

De-Occidentalized “Projections in the Haiku Manner”    65Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).
Wilkerson pays homage to Wright in her title, which is taken from a passage in his memoirBlack Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945; repr., New York:
HarperCollins, 1991).
49
Ibid., 34–35.
50
Wright, Black Boy, 414–15.
51
Miller, Voices, 179.
52
Richard Wright, “Personalism,” c. 1935–37, Richard Wright Papers, box 6, folder 13, 1–4,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
53
Ibid., 4.
54
Ibid.
55
Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in Mitchell, Within the Circle, 97–106;
emphasis added.
56
See, among others, Morgan, “Inverting the Haiku Moment,” 95; and Hakutani, “Richard
Wright’s Haiku,” 4–5.
57
Blyth, Haiku, 1:530–40.
58
Though Bashō’s “The old pond; / A frog jumps in,— / The sound of the water” has been
evoked by most critics in relation to Wright’s haiku-inspired poems, a close examination of
Blyth’s Haiku suggests Issa might have been a more important influence, at least on the frog
motif. In addition to the frog poems quoted in full, Blyth noted that Issa wrote about threehundred more on the subject (1:535). One of the few critics who have pointed out Issa’s
specific influence is Lee Gurga. See “Richard Wright’s Place in American Haiku,” in Zheng,
Other World, 179.
59
Blyth, Haiku, 1:535.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.
62
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 155–56.
63
Wright, Black Power, in Black Power: Three Books, 72.
64
Morgan, “Inverting the Haiku Moment,” in Zheng, Other World, 117–18; Jianqing Zheng,“Nature, the South, and Spain, in Other World, 161–62.
65
Blyth, Haiku, 1:353.
66
Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in Mitchell, Within the Circle, 103.
67
Blyth, Haiku, 1:iii.
68
R. H. Blyth, Zen in English and Oriental Classics (Tokyo: Hokuseidō, 1946).
69
For a history of haiku’s globalization, see Jeffery Johnson, Haiku Poetics in the
Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Poetry (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011).
70
For instance, see J. Saunders Redding, “The Way It Was,” New York Times Book Review(October 26, 1958): 4, 38.
71
Wright, White Man, Listen!, in Black Power: Three Books, 633.