From TBN Archives: The Long Road; Baldwin Gives The Way Forward
Dear Reader,
James Baldwin and the Trap Of Our History
James Baldwin is everywhere. To account for the latest disasters around race in this country—grief over the death of another black person at the hands of police; the fact that we have vomited up the likes of Donald Trump—activists often reach for him. Baldwin circulates. His words inspire on social media; his phrases speak from T-shirts; his face covers a throw pillow on Etsy. But apart from his marketability—that people can use him as an avatar of supposed seriousness—what does Baldwin offer us in this moment? What does he force us, as Americans, to confront?
In Teju Cole’s brilliant new book of essays, Known and Strange Things, he writes of a trip to Selma, Ala. This essay, like much of the book, reveals Cole’s extraordinary talent and his capacious mind. But one immediately gets the sense that, for him, the American South is primarily a landscape of tragic memories. The distinctive sounds and smells of the region don’t find their way to the page. No laughter. Just sadness, triggered by the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the violence exacted there.
Cole asks, “Long after history’s active moment, do places retain some charge of what they witnessed, what they endured?” As he walks the streets of Selma, listening to John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” that past comes into full view. It could not be otherwise. “History,” Cole writes, “won’t let go of us. We’re pinned to it.”
The formulation reminds me of James Baldwin. It certainly echoes Cole’s engagement with Baldwin throughout the book—one of embrace and of distance. For example, he repeatedly returns to Baldwin’s essay, “A Stranger in the Village.” He does so not to align himself with Baldwin’s expressed feelings of alienation in a remote Swiss village that had never seen “a negro.” Instead, his invocation of the essay occasions a moment of contrast: that his anxieties are not Baldwin’s. The reader learns that Cole is an American—a Black American—of a different sort.
He writes of his visit to Leukerbad, the place in Switzerland where Baldwin finished his classic novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain: “They’ve seen blacks now; I wasn’t a remarkable sight.” And, unlike Baldwin, Cole does not feel that he resides on the outside of the Western tradition looking in. He possesses it as his own. William Shakespeare is as much his as is Wole Soyinka. He writes, “I disagree not with [Baldwin’s] particular sorrow but with the self-abnegation that pinned him to it.”
Known and Strange Things refracts that difference with unadorned brilliance and deft strokes. Cole’s worldliness, as seen in the wide range of his reading and in his inquisitive presence all over the world, jumps from every page. Epiphanies abound. But Baldwin and his questions about history, memory and identity still haunt.
In August 1965, Baldwin penned an essay for Ebony magazine titled “The White Man’s Guilt,” a relentless indictment of white America. Of course, 1965 was a difficult year. Malcolm X was assassinated in February. In March, the world witnessed the brutality of Selma. And on Aug. 11, Watts exploded. The special issue of Ebony—black with a white face in profile, and a cover line announcing “The White Problem in America”—hit the stands as people took to the streets. The magazine signaled that something deep down had changed. In it, Baldwin demanded a wholesale confrontation with a history that white America desperately avoided. As he wrote:
White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us.… And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. …In great pain and terror because,…one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to recreate oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating…
For Baldwin, white America needed to shatter the myths that secured its innocence. This required discarding the history that traps us in the categories of race; histories that justify the belief that white people matter more than others. He echoes here a critical point in Notes of a Native Son (1955): “Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization.” Those categories (like ‘nigger,’ ‘welfare queen,’ ‘thug,’ and the ‘white people’ who invented them) arrest our ability to recreate ourselves and to imagine a more just world. Instead, we’re bound to a kind of thinking that orders the world on the backs of black people and fixes the place of white people in legend and myth. But, as Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time (1963), “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling.”
“White Man’s Guilt” draws on much of Baldwin’s earlier thinking, but the tone of the essay is decidedly different. Rage seeps through the page. Loss shapes every sentence. Perhaps this reflects his grief over the murders of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. Their deaths, along with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., frame one of his most powerful books, No Name in the Street (1972), where memories of loss remind us of the broken souls hidden beneath our cherished form of life. But, even with the shift in tone, the claim about history and about who we are as creatures of history remain. For Baldwin, white people seemed hopelessly trapped by their myths, and others catch hell because of that fact. As he wrote in Ebony,“people who imagine that history flatters them are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”
There’s that image again: we’re pinned to a history—or, perhaps, a lie—that keeps us from creating better selves, a better world. Stuck right where we are.
“White Man’s Guilt” ends with a reference to Henry James’s novel, The Ambassadors. We are urged to live and trust life. “[I]t will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.” For Baldwin, black jazz musicians know this; the old wisdom of black life reflects this. But white people, at their peril, do not know this and do not want to know it. They are “barricaded inside their history.”
The turn to Henry James is telling. According to Baldwin’s biographer, David Leeming, both shared a central theme: “the failure of Americans to see through to the reality of others.” That blindness and moral failing, especially with regards to black people, stood at the heart of the problems of this country, and it blocked the way to a more democratic future. As Baldwin stated, “freedom [meant] the end of innocence.”
Baldwin’s writing does not bear witness to the glory of America. It reveals the country’s sins, and the illusion of innocence that blinds us to the reality of others. Baldwin’s vision then requires a confrontation with history (with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, with whiteness) to overcome its hold on us. Not to posit the greatness of America, but to establish the ground upon which to imagine the country anew.
That grand project begins with each of us engaged in the arduous task of self-creation—to break loose from the stranglehold of white supremacy and to recreate ourselves in the light of what is possible. It involves a relentless confrontation with that “historical creation, Oneself.” This, Baldwin believed, was a revolutionary act. As he wrote in “Black Power” (1968): “[W]hen a black man[sic], whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given to him by others, he is talking revolution.”
Perhaps this is the allure of James Baldwin: he takes us to the heart of what ails this country, and he does so while insisting on the individuality of black people. We aren’t reduced to mere sociological categories. Instead, in his hands, we are flesh and blood, with fleshly desires and profound sorrows. Vulnerable and powerful all at once. Baldwin’s writing makes space for us to be exactly who we are, in all of our complexity, and who we desire to be in spite of what white folks think about us.
And, yet, history haunts.
Jesmyn Ward’s new anthology, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, reveals the burdens of history, memory, and identity in these troubling times. The title explicitly connects the book to Baldwin’s witness. For Ward, his words, especially in The Fire Next Time, served as a balm in the aftermath of the death of Trayvon Martin (and of so many others). Reading Baldwin affirmed the full scope of her—of our—humanity. Ward has curated a book, with some of the best contemporary writers of color in the country, to help us feel and think our way through this current moment. Baldwin looms large here—as inspiration and as a long shadow.
For most of the authors, history funds the present and its excavation reveals how we are pinned in. But this isn’t an abstract consideration. Throughout the book the reader confronts the stark facts of black life and the difficult task of actually living those facts: of what it means to walk the cobbled streets of a slave market that has been removed from view, to raise children knowing that they can be killed simply because they are black, to know the dangers of white rage and to tell its long history, as Carol Anderson writes; to keep track of those sources, like Grandma’s love and the music, that made you who you are, as Kiese Laymon writes. To laugh at the silliness of the categories that trap us, to be in and long for those places that feel, if just for a moment, like home.
I was particularly taken by Garnette Cadogan’s essay. Just in the mere act of walking the city he takes heed of the openings and limitations of what it means to be black here: that at any moment, and simply because of the fact that you’re black, you can be an object of suspicion. Cadogan cleverly upends Walt Whitman’s walking. “Instead of meandering aimlessly in the footsteps of Whitman, Melville, Kazin, and Vivian Gornick, more often I felt that I was tiptoeing in Baldwin’s….” He learned Baldwin’s lesson: this is a different kind of song of America.
The book ends with Edwidge Danticat’s letter to her daughters. It is an echo of Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in The Fire Next Time. Danticat writes: “we realize the precarious nature of citizenship here: that we too are prey, and that those who have been in this country for generations—walking, living, loving in the same skin we’re in—they too can suddenly become refugees.”
And, Danticat’s formulation brought me back to Teju Cole. These are different black Americans; their histories, intertwined as they are with my own, complicate any easy invocation of black identity in this country. They complicate James Baldwin. He would expect nothing less. Our times have changed in so many ways. Even so, as Danticat’s letter shows, Baldwin’s insight remains: that, as we fight our evils, we must confront, without flinching, the history of this country that continues to shape who we are and limit who we can be. In great pain and terror, we have to do this even as we bury our dead if we—and I mean all of us—are to be truly free.
This appears in the August 29, 2016 issue of TIME.
Chasing James Baldwin in Paris
More than 200 activists and scholars from around the world look at, and still search for, their favorite subject, the writer-activist James Baldwin, and find that they’ve only just begun. A taste of the growing field of “Baldwin studies.”
TODD STEVEN BURROUGHS
June 1, 2016
James Baldwin is directly connected to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane in my mind, thanks to the 90-minute documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. When the Paris section of the film starts, you see mid-20th-century black-and-white footage of a security guard opening huge iron gates that lead to the Eiffel Tower while Ellington and Coltrane’s recording of “In a Sentimental Mood” fills the mind and the screen.
The film means the world to me. I’ve seen it about 20 times. The first time was when it aired on PBS’ American Masters, an artist-profile documentary series, around 1990. It unquestionably changed the direction of my life. When my hometown hero, Amiri Baraka, eulogized Baldwin in an early scene, proclaiming for the ages, “He lived his life as witness. He wrote until the end. … Let our black hearts grow big absorbing eyes like his, never closed,” my 22-year-old local-newspaper-reporter sense of the world expanded, and my purpose was set.
A quarter of a century of advanced degrees, massive debt and many, many lonely days and nights behind a computer screen followed. The search for moments of spiritual communion with my champion, the attempts to find and grasp all the (musical and handwritten) notes now embedded, have been only partially successful.
So it was not optional for me to attend the James Baldwin International Conference, sponsored by the American University of Paris. Nor did it seem to be for the group of about 240 scholars, activists, artists and just plain folks of all races and places who, over this past weekend, just wanted to take in some of the man’s and the city’s cultural-historical energy between gulps of cheese, ham, bread and wine.
James Baldwin is directly connected to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane in my mind, thanks to the 90-minute documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. When the Paris section of the film starts, you see mid-20th-century black-and-white footage of a security guard opening huge iron gates that lead to the Eiffel Tower while Ellington and Coltrane’s recording of “In a Sentimental Mood” fills the mind and the screen.
The film means the world to me. I’ve seen it about 20 times. The first time was when it aired on PBS’ American Masters, an artist-profile documentary series, around 1990. It unquestionably changed the direction of my life. When my hometown hero, Amiri Baraka, eulogized Baldwin in an early scene, proclaiming for the ages, “He lived his life as witness. He wrote until the end. … Let our black hearts grow big absorbing eyes like his, never closed,” my 22-year-old local-newspaper-reporter sense of the world expanded, and my purpose was set.
A quarter of a century of advanced degrees, massive debt and many, many lonely days and nights behind a computer screen followed. The search for moments of spiritual communion with my champion, the attempts to find and grasp all the (musical and handwritten) notes now embedded, have been only partially successful.
So it was not optional for me to attend the James Baldwin International Conference, sponsored by the American University of Paris. Nor did it seem to be for the group of about 240 scholars, activists, artists and just plain folks of all races and places who, over this past weekend, just wanted to take in some of the man’s and the city’s cultural-historical energy between gulps of cheese, ham, bread and wine.
This originally appeared on theroot.com on June 1st, 2016
Strangers in the Global Village: Baldwin & Joyce (Part One)
Beauford Delaney’s portrait of James Baldwin.
John Lavin
July 2nd, 2019
Jimmy Baldwin’s essays and novels, revisited in the recent Hollywood rage, If Beale Street Could Talk, spell out the blues. That’s beautiful. That’s also sad. Baldwin was an esthete. He knew how to find the beauty in a human story. The realities he revisited, of course, were tragic. Like jazz composers’ treatment of African American tone poem and song, Baldwin’s writing is an emotional conversation with the ancestors that has flood into the present. The tales are tortured.
Lamentably addressing past practices of lynching, African American communities today face the same threats described by Harlem Renaissance founder, Langston Hughes as “A Dream Deferred” and in the literary innovations that James Baldwin later accomplished. The stories are a dream gone bad. They reach further back to Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass denouncing arbitrary, senseless executions of Black people. In that tradition, the present moment’s Black Lives Matter movement recalls the more recent accounts by Baldwin of brutality in the 1960s, and both past and present resonate in Beale Street’s final scene of protagonist, Fonny and his family living with an innocent Black man’s incarceration.
Both as novelist and historicist, one of Baldwin’s proclaimed ancestors is the Dubliner, another Jimmy, James Joyce.
Written in Exile, Baldwin’s essay, “Stranger in the Village,” recounts his realization of the African past by way of Joyce’s character, Stephen Dedalus, a young Irish schoolteacher who comments to his British employer on payday that, “History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Ulysses). Baldwin quotes this sentence and reworks the scene from the Joyce novel in his essay to recall the anger he felt as school children in a Swiss village follow him pointing and calling out the word for black in German which reminds him of another city, other white children jeering and yelling almost the same word, and his feelings for the peculiarly dehumanizing history that is racism in the United States.
“James Joyce,” Baldwin told an array of interviewers in Paris, London and New York, “is one of my influences.” Of course, Joyce had a style of continually, like a jazz composer, paying homage to the foremothers and forefathers by weaving into his narratives high allusions to Homer’s epic sagas, as well as Irish ballad and verse, and a proto-Indo-European collage of Sanskrit and countless indigenous oral traditions from across the globe. All configured in Joyce’s writing to awaken us to the nightmares of confusion, loss and injustice that humans seek to give meaning in storytelling.
Like Baldwin, Joyce did most of this writing in exile, escaping the former colony where he and most of his fictional characters were born. Like Baldwin, Joyce devoted a life to confirming contradictions inherent in his early life as a fervent Christian and, ultimately, unveiled inequality and inequity imposed by patriarchal systems in both Church and Government. Joyce’s women contravene gender norms whose liberation resulted in his Ulysses being censored. Joyce’s Molly Bloom recites a soliloquy expressing her sexuality, her rich sense of desire and her complexity. It was ruled pornographic. On a similar note of censorship and erasure, Baldwin's Giovanni’s Room, gave voice to a gay relationship whose intimacy and interracial tone conveyed a humane turning point of understanding and compassion that homophobic, Anglo-American courts failed to tolerate and flatly barred from publication.
Stephan James (depicted above) starred as Alfonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt in the 2018 Academy Award winning film based upon James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, If Beale Street Could Talk.
As his teacher, I remember the assignment our class discussed the Friday prior to Latif’s death (name changed to Latif here, and thus a fiction).
I have to imagine.
Before he left class that Friday, Latif and I spoke about his college applications and about the essay he was writing. I asked, “So, Latif, what are you thinking about?” and he answered with a curious, cryptic nod, “My dreams.”
Was the question in Latif’s mind when he died on Sunday?
His dreams? Or, was he remembering the nightmare?
That same Friday, reflecting about our semester’s work, Latif and our class and I had talked about James Joyce’s stories, “Eveline,” “A Little Cloud” and “Counterparts” and James Baldwin’s Novel, Another Country. I had chosen the excerpt from Baldwin’s essay, “Stranger in the Village,” where he mentions Joyce’s character Stephen conjecturing that “History is the nightmare” from which he was seeking to awaken. I had asked the class to explain in an essay of their own how authors of fiction struggled to awaken from different kinds of nightmares, –political, cultural, historical. Then, I also asked these students to express the history and the nightmares that they had witnessed and wished to recognize or awaken in their minds and hearts. That was Friday. Sunday, Latif was gunned down.
On Sunday, did the nightmare cross Latif’s mind as he passed away? Joyce’s nightmare and Baldwin’s has been at the core of how I, a white teacher in an African heritage community, recognize the empty chairs left by students whose violent deaths jeopardize surviving students’ capacity to endure the trauma, the disorientation and the despair that threaten them. Sociologist, Maria Kefalas, told me that her research showed that African American men were more likely to die in our neighborhood of Philadelphia than if they were soldiers enlisted in an active war zone such as Afghanistan.
On Monday, the young man sitting next to Latif’s empty seat in class repeated like a mantra, “I just don’t have anymore feeling left, I’m numb.”
At the funeral, I stood over Latif’s coffin, thinking, you still owe me an assignment about your dreams.
Originally posted to John Lavin's blog The Colloquy on July 2nd, 2019
Thank You to our Donors
Herbert Whren
Meet Herb Whren, Chair of the Dean’s Alumni Advisory Board at UPenn's School of Social Policy and Practice. Herb was a Social Policy student who concentrated on criminal justice and reintegration services for returning citizens. Since graduating, he has been heavily involved in workforce development, data management, program management and program evaluation. Herb currently lives in the Washington Metropolitan Area. He works as a Manager of Data, Compliance and Assessments for a network of schools in Washington, DC. Mr. Whren is also an enthused and loyal UPenn alumni ambassador and continually uses his expertise to advance the School’s growth and alumni engagement.