5. Another Country

SION DAYSON

5. ANOTHER COUNTRY

James Baldwin at ‘Home’ (and) Abroad1

“You can take the child out of the country,” my elders were fond of saying, “but you can’t take the country out of the child.” They were speaking of their own antecedents, I supposed; it didn’t, anyway, seem possible that they could be warning me; I took myself out of the country and went to Paris. It was there that I discovered that the old folks knew what they were talking about: I found myself, willy-nilly, alchemized into an American the moment I touched French soil.––James Baldwin (Baldwin, 1998, p. 187, emphasis added) Depending on who’s speaking and for what purpose, James Baldwin can be classified as one of the twentieth century’s best essayists and fiction writers, a fiery black spokesman with an agenda, or the celebrated Negro author of his generation. But by my lights, he was simply a great American writer. That’s how Baldwin would have it, too. Though his work most often deals with the searing issues of race, he himself wanted to be thought of not as a black writer, but an American one. This distinction speaks not only to the limitations of being boxed in as an artist (and a human being), but also to the conception of identity–– his own, and the nation’s. Race, after all, is very much an issue for all Americans, not the concern of just one group in the country. This identification as an American arises from Baldwin’s many years as an expatriate. We see in his work and hear in his comments over the years that he began to define and understand both himself and America only when he left America. The idea for Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, his first novel which was influenced heavily by his experience growing up in Harlem and the black church, had been with him for eight years. But he was unable to write any sort of satisfactory draft. During a feverish three months of work in a small Swiss village, however, he finished it. In a strange, white Alpine setting that couldn’t have been farther from the streets of Harlem, he was able to see his home with shocking clarity. “Once you find yourself in another civilization,” he notes, “you’re forced to examine your own” (Thorsen, 1989). I was only a little girl when Baldwin died, so I speak not as someone who has any intimate knowledge of the period in which he lived and wrote. Instead I serve as proof that he continues to touch younger writers, too, despite our new concerns, the fact that the racial and social landscape looks far different than the one he confronted.

Yet so little feels dated about Baldwin’s work. To read his writing now is to be as roundly astonished––by his insight, his almost prophetic observations––as when he first penned the words. That’s because he could take a precise event and transform it into a broader meditation. In the title essay of 1955’s Notes of a Native Son, for example, Baldwin turns the day of his father’s funeral into a deeper reflection on the nature of rage and hatred, an examination of the human psyche in the face of systematic injustice. And even when delving into the most difficult of subjects, Baldwin’s work pulses with a soaring love for humanity. Indeed, he’s incensed by injustice because it is contrary to humanity. From The Fire Next Time (Baldwin, 1962): Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace … in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. (p. 128) Baldwin’s attentions, however outraged, were a form of love, his own daring quest to describe what was “really happening here,” to unravel the “myth of America” (Baldwin, 1998, p. 142). What’s fascinating––and this brings me to the main impetus behind this essay–– is that Baldwin was so often not here, not in America. The United States––her people and her struggles––were his main preoccupations, but he wrote about them most often from a remove abroad.

BALDWIN’S LIFE AND WORK ABROAD James Baldwin lived in Paris from 1948-1957. Even when he returned to the States for the civil rights movement in the sixties, he continued what he’d later term his “transatlantic commutes”––and what scholar Magdalena J. Zaborowska (2009) termed his “Turkish Decade,” Istanbul being the site of his most productive writing during that period. And in the end, he found himself back in France, in a small village called St-Paul-de-Vence this time, for his final years. Little of his adult life, then, was actually spent in the America of which he wrote. His self-imposed exile, however, helped him become an American writer. The distance from his birthplace allowed him space to start deconstructing our myths, come to the terms with the fact that he was American. Baldwin’s evolution as a writer is intimately tied to his years living abroad. “The best thing I ever did in my life was leave America and go to Paris,” Baldwin said (Thorsen, 1989). Critics would agree, as his most lauded works date from his first sojourn in the City of Light. After Europe pushed him to finish the much-praised Go Tell It on the Mountain––the largely autobiographical and most disciplined of all his novels––he tackled his second one from abroad, too. Giovanni’s Room is one of my all-time favorite books, and apparently, also his favorite, too. That novel brought me to my knees when I first read it and it had nothing to do with the fact that it was set in Paris, but everything to do with its portrayal of the suffocating effects of self-hatred, repressed desire, and the denial