American Agony: Richard Wright’s Language of Pain in Black Boy (American Hunger)

Abstract

This article examines Richard Wright’s description of bodily pain in his autobiographical book Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945). In the last few decades, there has been an ongoing debate about both the nature of physical pain and, in turn, its relationship to language. After the publication of Elaine Scarry’s monumental The Body in Pain (1987), in which the argument is made that physical suffering is “language-destroying,” there has been a burgeoning of research that has challenged this claim by tracing the dynamic relationship between the experience of pain and the social institutions, cultures, and languages that influence our perceptions of it. This article analyses the way in which Richard Wright’s text situates the first-hand qualia of hunger-pains (along with other forms of somatic anguish) within the broader social setting of anti-Black racism and violence during America’s Jim Crow era to, in turn, offer a representation of bodily agony that entwines it with the psycholinguistic dimensions of consciousness. Instead of depicting physical pain in terms of what Patrick Wall calls “a rigid, simple signaling system,” Wright collapses the dichotomy between psychological torment and corporeal distress to offer a nuanced portrayal of pain that entwines its moment-to-moment sensations with the psychological process of navigating America’s cultural matrix of anti-Black dehumanization, poverty, and hostility. As a result, Black Boy serves as a valuable example of the way in which creative storytelling can represent the culturally codified structures of feeling that shape even the most private forms of bodily hurt.