Richard Wright : Native son

Literature, novel most specifically, enables a difficult and rather unusual exercise: walk into the incredible, incomprehensible, fantastic, violent universe of someone else.

The reading of some novels gives that unique opportunity to pause and sometimes discover what’s unfathomable.

Richard Wright confronted me with rage. A guts-seizing rage. A muffled fury that’s been waiting for the moment to express itself. Richard Wright has chosen the mighty pen to put words on the tremendous rage his peers  were going through. And he did that with two fabulous and absolute must-read novels: Native Son and Black Boy.

Native Son takes the reader in the 50’s America. A highly anti-communist and racist America where minorities would play a second role. Wright takes us down the road to hell with Bigger Thomas, a young African-american from a slummy ghetto in Chicago, charged with a murder he committed “accidentally”. This disturbing, revolting novel though set in the 50’s still enlightens the realities of today’s America and in some point, in a lesser extent, France’s.

Article original traduit du français par Titilayo Agbahey

Richard Wright, Native son 
Ed. Harper Collins, 1940, 504 p.