THE HIDDEN WOUND

by Wendell Berry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1970

This is an honest and eloquent book (even in its attacks on eloquence) and perhaps for that reason more naked than most in its vulnerabilities and contradictions. Berry, a southerner and a professor, begins by examining the personal legacy of racism and its unwitting perpetuation through unconsidered forms of language, custom, religion. But Berry is also a farmer and a poet, and these frames of reference exert a further defining pressure on his essay. Dissecting his own experience as a farm child deeply and affectionately connected to the land and its hired black caretakers he concludes that the divorce between races arises from the delegation of basic labor from white to black, and thus it becomes a division of knowledge into mutually exclusive sectors--roughly, pragmatism and wisdom. The latter, in Berry's view, is the province of the laborer in his intimacy with natural process, and accounts for the richness, wholeness--even the popularity--of black culture. But beyond this point it becomes clear that the integration at issue is not racial but cultural, and that the key factor is not race but values generated by the working of land. There is a tendency to confuse race and poverty, to ignore the increasing numbers of urban poor (one wonders whether wisdom is transmissible to generations in urban exile), and to forget that the life he extols has a very limited access, closed especially to the poor who have left it. For all that, the struggle to account deserves respect and the failures to do so are instructive.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1970

ISBN: 1582434867

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION