Excerpt from “A Weekend with Richard Wright
PMLA 126, no. 3
Beb Vuyk
Translated by Keith Foulcher
May 2011
Originally published in the Dutch left-wing periodical Vrij Nederland as a two-part article titled “Weekeinde met Richard Wright” on November 19 and 26, 1960, Beb Vuyk’s essay offers an intimate account of African American writer Wright’s visit to Indonesia. One of the few written by a woman. Vuyk grew up in the Netherlands and went back to Indonesia in 1929 until she was forced to return to the Netherlands in 1957/8 as part of the “former Dutch people” who had Indonesian passports who left under threats of passport cancellation from Sukarno. While most accounts of the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung focus on the aspirational rhetorics of Third World international solidarity, Vuyk writes about a personal encounter with Wright. She narrates a series of exchanges between Indonesian intellectuals and Wright that evoke a sense of unease particularly about ideas of color and colonialism. While Wright sees in the discourse of color a surefooted source of solidarity, the group of Indonesian intellectuals identify “shared colonial past as a tie stronger than color.” What Vuyk’s essay captures is the complexity of the colonial experience outside what Wright would discern as “color curtain,” or what Vuyk describes as the writer’s “black-and-white view of the world.” The essay captures the limits of this racialism, especially in the context of Southeast Asia, wherein what becomes the simplistic monochrome of Wright’s worldview is refracted by a history of colonialism that knows no sympathy to color.