Wednesday, November 4, 2009

From the End of Richard Wright's Black Boy

I finished reading Richard Wright's Black Son (part one and two) this afternoon alhamdullilah!

Definitely highly recommended.

Just a few quotes from the very end:

I headed toward home along, really alone now, telling myself that in all the sprawling immensity of our mighty continent the least-known factor of living was the human heart, the least-sought goal of being was a way to live a human life. Perhaps, I thought, out of my tortured feelings I could fling a spark into this darkness. I would try, not because I wanted to because I felt that I had to if I were to live at all.


Well, what had I got out of living in the city? What had I got out of living in the South? What had I got of living in America? I paced the floor, knowing that all I possessed were words and dim knowledge that my country had shown me no examples of how to live a human life. All my life I had been full of a hunger for a new way to live...


If this country can't find its way to a human path, if it can't inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain...

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.
-pg. 384-5

Subhana Allah, what at ending!

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