Follow-up to my post #285880:
Wright was the pioneer and leader of a school of black writers who left behind the hazards of daily life in the United States in the late 1940s and early '50s for the comparative freedoms of France. Those who followed included not only Baldwin but also Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith and Richard Gibson. In his journal in January 1945, a year before his migration, Wright described Paris as "a place where one could claim one's soul."
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thenation.com
In 1946 Wright was invited to France. After he returned to the United States he decided he could no longer tolerate the racism he experienced even in New York City. 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 on the streets. And he was still called "boy" by some shopkeepers. So in 1947 he moved permanently to France and settled in Paris. Wright never again saw the United States. 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 nineteen-year-old Bigger. During filming in Buenos Aires and Chicago, the production was fraught with problems. The film was released briefly but was unsuccessful. European audiences acclaimed it, but the abridged version failed in the United States and the film disappeared.
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english.uiuc.edu
Now, tell me, Tejek, if 2006 France/Europe is but the modern-day avatar of 1956 America, what of her Muslim Wrights, Baldwins and Gibsons? I'm not aware of any exodus of France's Muslim luminaries to the Disneyesque Gulag, the so-called Land of the Freak --how come? No Muslim intellectuals have fled France to find solace and freedom in America --quite the contrary... Just see what happened to our would-be-intellectual-refugees:
Message 21826256
Message 20446346 |
