In 1946 Wright received an invitation to visit France having just met Jean Paul Sartre in New York. But he had problems securing a passport. He therefore enlists the help of several eminent personalities such Dorothy Norman who beefs up his credentials by appointing him co-editor of Twice a Year, Gertrude Stein, and anthropologist Claude Levi -Strauss the then French cultural attache who sends him an official invitation from the French government to visit Paris for a month. Armed with this, he thus leaves New York on May 1 1946. After he returned to the United States he decided he could no longer tolerate the racism he experienced even in New York City.

He found it intolerable that even though he was married to a white woman and living in the North, he still was not able to buy an apartment as a black man. Furthermore, he hated the stares he and his family received whilst strolling on the streets. And he could not stand his still been called “boy” by some shopkeepers.So he buys an Oldsmobile sedan to take him, his wife and daughter across to Europe. So in 1947 he moved permanently to France and settled in Paris never to see the United States again.

He worked during 1949-1951 on a film version of Native Son, in which he himself played Bigger. Wright, forty years old and overweight, had to train and stretch verisimilitude to play the part of the nineteen-year-old Bigger. The production was fraught with many problems during its filming in Buenos Aires and Chicago. The film was released briefly but was unsuccessful. European audiences acclaimed it, but the abridged version failed in the United States and then the film disappeared.

Wright begins to read more deeply in existentialism including Heidegger and Husserl. During that period he saw much of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and is particularly impressed by Albert Camus’ existentialist novel The Stranger which inspires him for the next book after Black Boy which was to be his own “existential” novel, The Outsider, which was published in 1953 to mixed reviews. Cross Damon, the main character in it, is overwhelmed by the demands of his wife, his mother, and his mistress. Seizing a chance opportunity during a train crash, he leaves his identity papers with a dead man and disappears. He ends up committing three murders to save himself, then is himself murdered by the Communist party in the United States for his independence.

Then followed Savage Holiday, a “white” novel whose main character, Erskine Fowler, a psychopathic murderer exemplifying the dangers of repressed emotion followed in 1954. Fowler obsessed with desire for his mother, marries a prostitute, then murders her; in a graphic murder scene which disturbed some readers. The novel unlike Wright’s other works has no black characters. It is published as a paperback original by Avon after having been rejected by Harper. Then it was not even a mild critical success in the United States though it is well received as Le Dieu de Mascarade in France.

During the mid-1950s Wright traveled extensively–to Africa, Asia, and Spain–and wrote several non-fiction works on political and sociological topics. He had helped found Présence Africaine with Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, and Alioune Diop during 1946-1948. He spent some time in Ghana and in 1954 published Black Power to mixed reviews. Black Power a title drawn from a term coined by Wright, concerns itself with the color line in Africa and the new “tragic elite,” the leaders of the former colonies.

From June to August 1953 Wright travelled extensively in the then Goled Coast which was awaiting independence to do research for a book on Africa. The boat in which he was travelling stops briefly in Freetown, Sierra Leone,( where this writer lives and writes from but unfortunately was yet to see the light of day, so could not have seen him) en route to Takoradi where he disembarks and travels from there 170 miles to Accra, his main destination. There he meets Kweme Nkrumah the then Prime Minister and other members of his Convention People’s Party as well as Osei Agyeman Prempeh 11 king of the Ashantis and other traditional rulers.Excursions took Wright from Accra to Cape Coast, Christianborg and Prampan , visiting slave-trading fortresses and dungeons travelling almost 3,000 miles in a chauffeur-driven car, touring the interior from Koforidua to Mampong and from Sekondi-Takorasdi to Kumasi regions. Though Wright shows some fascination for Africans he is reinforced in his sense of self as a Western intellectual. As Ghanaian writer Kwame Anthony Appiah said later Wright failed to understand Africans when he urged Africa to leave tribal custom behind and join the technological era.

On his return from this trip and having given his impressions to George Padmore in London, Wright secures funding for his projected attendance at the forthcoming conference of non-aligned nations from the Paris office of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international alliance of anti-Communist intellectuals. In April 1955 Wright attended the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. This was the first meeting of twenty-nine new nations of Africa and Asia. At the Bandung conference he shares room with the missionary, Winburn T. Thomas. Leaders attending include Nehru, Sukarno, Sihanouk, Nasseer and Zhou Enlai. He even speaks with Nehru during the course of the conference. He published his account as The Color Curtain in 1956 (after the French edition of 1955).

After Wright returned from two trips he made to General Franco’s Spain, he published a book of his observations, Pagan Spain (1956) in which with his “peasant” understanding he exposes the dark side of violence and moral hypocrisy beneath the national adherence to Catholicism.

In 1957 he put together a collection of his lectures given between 1950 and 1956 in Europe, White Man, Listen!, which includes “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” an important overview. During the 1950s Wright grew more internationalist in outlook. While he accomplished much as an important public literary and political figure with a worldwide reputation, his creative work did decline principally because he had lost contact with his base for long thus depriving his work of the pscychological and emotional weight of black life as lived in America..

Born and schooled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Arthur Smith has taught English for over thirty years now at various Educational Institutions. He is now a Senior Lecturer of English at Fourah Bay College where he has been lecturing for the past eight years.

Mr Smith’s writings have been in various international media like West Africa Magazine, Index on Censorship, Focus on Library and Information Work, myfreearticlecentral.com, freeonlinelibrary.com, mabaylareview.org and nathanielturner.com . He participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature in the U.S. in 2006. His growing thoughts and reflections on this trip which took him to various US sights and sounds could be read at lisnews.org.

His other publications include: Folktales from Freetown, Langston Hughes: Life and Works Celebrating Black Dignity, and ‘The Struggle of the Book’

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