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Research Magazine > ARCHIVE > Spring 98 > Article A Case Of Literary Arson A child sets fire to his grandmothers apartment and the blaze ignites the African-American consciousness. The death of Betty Shabazz? Well, yes. But decades before, it was also the experience of author Richard Wright. The similarity of the two events led Joel Black, a UGA associate professor of comparative literature, to draw new insights into Wrights seminal work, Native Son. "When Wright was four years old, he himself set fire to his grandparents Mississippi home and nearly killed his sick grandmother, with whom he lived," Black said. Wright was so traumatized by the fire that he used it as the open-ing scene of his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy. Black has found some striking similarities but also some important differences in Wrights experience and that of 12-year-old Malcolm Shabazz, Malcolm Xs grandson, who set fire to his grandmothers apartment in 1997. Published in 1940, Wrights novel Native Son tells the horrific story of Bigger Thomas, who kills his employers daughter and then burns the body. "The crime that Bigger Thomas commits is supposedly an accident. Hes in her bedroom and he doesnt want to be detected. In order to keep her quiet he puts a pillow over her and accidentally smothers her," Black said. Wright depicts Bigger Thomas as violent but fearful. In fact, according to Black, Bigger Thomass fear echoes the fear that haunted Wright after he set fire to his grandmothers house. The young Wright feared less for his grandmother than for himself if his role in the accident were found out. "Its as if Wright, in his character Bigger Thomas, has presented an emotionally stunted version of himself, a man whos unable to grasp the violence of his act because hes so overwhelmed by his own fear," Black said. In Bigger Thomas, Wright not only presented a traumatized youth, but he also twisted the character inside-out, according to Black. As a result, most readers experience Bigger Thomas as a nightmarish, traumatizing figure. Unlike Malcolm Shabazz, Wright had set his fire accidentally. Even so, Wrights grandmother easily could have suffered the same fate as Betty Shabazz. If Wrights grandmother had died in the fire, it probably would have spelled the end of the young mans future as a novelist, Black said. And readers never would have experienced Native Son, which Black regards as an American Crime and Punishment, the Russian masterpiece by Fedor Dostoevski. "Instead, this potentially tragic experience became a rich, primal memory for Richard Wright," Black said. "It obsessed him. He thought about it and transformed it into a scene that got replayed again and again in his writing. He worked through the experience in his writing, rather than simply let himself become victimized by it." Black presented a paper on the Shabazz fire and Native Son last summer at the International Comparative Literature Associations triennial meeting in Leiden, Holland. The paper grew out of Blacks ongoing research on the relationship between art and violence. For more information, e-mail Joel Black at jblack@uga.cc.uga.edu
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