Paradoxical Birth (wk 4)

This is one of the best texts I have read so far in this class. Not for anything but for the use of language; the breath taking poetic language/expression of Richard Wright’s 12 million Black Voices. His expression sounds more like a song than a narration in a way. Objectification of the human body was repeatedly emphasized like “free trade in our bodies”, “…the seven seas in search of our bodies”, “…traders brought rum and swapped it to corrupt chiefs for our bodies” , “…the new England Puritans and the imperialists of Europe erected the traffic in our bodies into the big business” (13). “Our black bodies were good tools that had to be kept efficient for toil” (25), “the Lords of the Land rose and threatened to resort to a wholesale breeding of slaves in order not to be deprived of our living bodies (26). “In their withered bodies” (36). “…it does not matter who, the innocent or guilty-and, as a token, a naked and bleeding body will be dragged through the dusty streets”, “our bodies will be swung by ropes from the limbs of trees, will be shot at and mutilated” (43). The image of the body could be seen in almost all the pages of the text. However, Wright discusses in detail the great concern of the paradoxical birth of the black people in America whose ancestors were Africans. He states thus:
We millions of black folk who live in this land were born into Western
civilization of a weird and paradoxical birth. The lean, tall, blond men of
of England, Holland, and Denmark, the dark, short, nervous men of France,
Spain, and Portugal, men whose blue and gray and brown eyes glinted with
the light of the future, denied our human personalities, tore us from our
native soils, weighted our legs with chains, stacked us like cord-wood in the
foul holes of clipper ships, dragged us across thousands of miles of ocean,
and hurled us into another land, strange and hostile, where for a second time
we felt the slow, painful process of a new birth amid conditions hash and
raw (12).

It is interesting to know that both the blacks and the poor whites were involved in slaving for the rich people who Wright calls the Lords of the Land. And none of these people (blacks and poor whites) had any formal education and so the only way they could keep record of the events in the 1940’s was to take photographs of people and places to be kept in the archive (xii). But when schools were being established, Wright said it was decreed that the black people were exempted and so literacy acquisition was not part of their lives.