DOCSLIB.ORG

5. Another Country

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
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. A. Scott Henderson & P. L. Thomas (eds.), James Baldwin: Challenging Authors, 77–89. © 2014 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. SION DAYSON 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 78 .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 2. Why Theater, Mr. Baldwin?
    SUSAN WATSON TURNER 2. WHY THEATER, MR. BALDWIN? The Amen Corner and Blues for Mister Charlie The personal relationship each author has with another author can be tangible or intangible since great authors make themselves known to us through their work. Great authors travel with us, go to bed with us, and enter other very personal aspects of our lives. Such is the case with James Baldwin and me. Before I ever actually set eyes on him, his book Another Country was my constant companion for almost a month. Admittedly I was a slow reader, yet I remember savoring this particular book like a favorite ice cream cone—and then finishing reluctantly, since finishing meant an end to the amazing sensation I was experiencing. When I did turn the last page of that book (on a bus ride in Cleveland Ohio on a brutally cold day) I distinctly recall wanting more. I was saddened that the last page had been turned—but also delighted to begin what I hoped would be a lifetime connection to Baldwin’s work and fervent life. I devoured his fiction, studied his dramatic work, and painstakingly analyzed his essays. This unknowingly prepared me to meet him at Ohio University, the site of my undergraduate study in theater. Causally walking across campus one day, I noticed a standing-room-only crowd overflowing from the theater. I asked what was going on or who was speaking, and in a hushed tone someone said, “Oh, James Baldwin is lecturing for the English Department.” An uncontrollable, unbelievable emotional rush came over me.
    [Show full text]
  • James Baldwin and James Cone: God, Man, and the Redeeming Relationship
    Obsculta Volume 8 Issue 1 Article 3 5-22-2015 James Baldwin and James Cone: God, Man, and the Redeeming Relationship Rea McDonnell S.S.N.D. College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/obsculta Part of the Christianity Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons ISSN: 2472-2596 (print) ISSN: 2472-260X (online) Recommended Citation McDonnell, Rea S.S.N.D.. 2015. James Baldwin and James Cone: God, Man, and the Redeeming Relationship. Obsculta 8, (1) : 13-54. https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/obsculta/vol8/iss1/3. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@CSB/SJU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Obsculta by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@CSB/SJU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. OBSCVLTA J AMES B ALDWIN AND J AMES C ONE : G OD , M AN , AND THE R EDEEMIN G R ELATIONSHI P Sister Rea McDonnell, S.S.N.D. (1972) Abstract - Pope Francis calls us to live among the wounded and marginalized, letting them heal us and free us. How very cur- rent that makes this article, written as a Master’s thesis in 1972. Apart from anachronisms such as writing about God as “man” (instead of men/women), about redeeming (when I meant sav- ing), what is so apropos is the good news proclaimed by both James Cone and James Baldwin. James Cone wrote ground- breaking books on liberation theology. James Baldwin, as an author, expresses Black theology through his characters.
    [Show full text]
  • Sonny's Blues Study Guide
    Sonny's Blues Study Guide © 2018 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher. Summary The narrator, a teacher in Harlem, has escaped the ghetto, creating a stable and secure life for himself despite the destructive pressures that he sees destroying so many young blacks. He sees African American adolescents discovering the limits placed on them by a racist society at the very moment when they are discovering their abilities. He tells the story of his relationship with his younger brother, Sonny. That relationship has moved through phases of separation and return. After their parents’ deaths, he tried and failed to be a father to Sonny. For a while, he believed that Sonny had succumbed to the destructive influences of Harlem life. Finally, however, they achieved a reconciliation in which the narrator came to understand the value and the importance of Sonny’s need to be a jazz pianist. The story opens with a crisis in their relationship. The narrator reads in the newspaper that Sonny was taken into custody in a drug raid. He learns that Sonny is addicted to heroin and that he will be sent to a treatment facility to be “cured.” Unable to believe that his gentle and quiet brother could have so abused himself, the narrator cannot reopen communication with Sonny until a second crisis occurs, the death of his daughter from polio.
    [Show full text]
  • Use of Music in a Literary Text: the Masses, Security of the Middle Class, and Social Ascent in James Baldwin's “Sonny's B
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE 横浜市立大学論叢人文科学系列 2017 年度：Vol.69 No.1 Use of Music in a Literary Text: The Masses, Security of the Middle Class, and Social Ascent in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” Takashi NAKATANI Introduction James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” frequently anthologized and arguably the most well-known of the writer’s short stories, was first published in 1957,1 when the Civil Rights Movement was making progress. The story deals with the conflict between the unnamed narrator, an African-American high school mathematics teacher who has made a social ascent to the middle class and his younger brother Sonny, an aspiring jazz pianist with a criminal record of using and peddling drugs, and with their reconciliation; their understanding of each other is based on the power of the music Sonny plays at the climactic ending of the story. James Darsey, for example, says that “Baldwin’s portrait of Sonny playing at the club while his brother watches and listens is a beautiful statement of the artist as a poet, the power of poietes –– the ability to create out of itself, to take the chaos of the world into the self and represent it as universal narrative” (200; italics original, underlines added). This ending of the story, however, remains ambiguous: first, the reader cannot literally “listen to” the music in a text that consists of words; second, the narrator is initially portrayed as a respectable person with poor understanding of, and little interest in, music, which makes his judgment on the quality of the blues his brother plays appear rather unreliable in the narrative.
    [Show full text]
  • Sonny's Blues
    Faculty of Humanities Social Science and Education An Investigation of Empathy in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” — Marie Seljehaug Johansson ENG-3981 Master’s Thesis in English Literature and Education, 40ECTS Spring 2019 Abstract This master’s thesis aims to look at how empathy is thematized in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” To do this, the thesis will start by introducing affect theory. Affect aims to put emotions back into the study of literature. Emotions become even more important because of the notion of empathy. Empathy is the ability to imagine oneself in somebody else’s shoes. Baldwin’s short story invites empathetic responses in its readers, by using narrative techniques such as first-person narration, symbolism and thematizing empathy in the text through topics such as poverty, drug addiction, music as a language of its own and silences. The readers are urged to undergo the same change as the narrator, as he transitions from feeling pity for those who are less fortunate, to having empathetic responses towards his brother and people similar to him. Baldwin’s writing constitutes an effort to make readers able to identify with people who are outcasts in society. Preface Setting off to write a thesis about literature, I had to ask myself: why do we read literature? Do we do it purely for fun, to escape reality, to learn, be inspired or to feel something? Maybe we read literature to learn about other people, to dive into their reality, in a pursuit to understand them better. If we read a sad story, we react by feeling sad, maybe it even makes us cry.
    [Show full text]
  • “Something Unspeakable”: James Baldwin and the “Closeted-Ness” of American Power
    ESSAY “Something Unspeakable”: James Baldwin and the “Closeted-ness” of American Power David C. Jones Edge Hill University Abstract This article reads the work of James Baldwin in dialogue with that of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Taking its cue from Baldwin’s claim that Americans “live […] with something in [their] closet” that they “pretend […] is not there,” it explores his depiction of a United States characterized by the “closeted-ness” of its racial discourse. In doing so, the article draws on Sedgwick’s work con- cerning how the containment of discourses pertaining to sexuality hinges on the closeting of non-heteronormative sexual practices. Reconceptualizing Sedgwick’s ideas in the context of a black, queer writer like Baldwin, however, problematizes her own insistence on the “historical gay specificity” of the epistemology she traces. To this end, this article does not simply posit a racial counterpart to the homosexual closet. Rather, reflecting Baldwin’s insistence that “the sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined,” I highlight here the interpretive possibilities opened up by intersec- tional analyses that view race, sexuality, and national identity as coextensive, reciprocal epistemologies. Keywords: James Baldwin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, closet, closeted, Black Queer Studies, African-American literature, Queer Theory In September 1963, James Baldwin appeared on American radio alongside Malcolm X. Tasked with assessing the efficacy of the contemporary “sit-in” move- ment, Baldwin shifts the conversation to what he perceives as the imperative to “re-examine the basis” on which American race relations are predicated.1 Where Malcolm cautions against the movement making racial integration its primary goal, Baldwin counters that integration is a “false issue,” given the preponderance of already existing biracial people in the United States.2 He insists instead that it is the “standards of this country,” standards that fail to acknowledge this integrated James Baldwin Review, Volume 3, 2017 © The Authors.
    [Show full text]
  • “Here Be Dragons:” the Tyranny of the Cityscape in James Baldwin's Intimate Cartographies
    ESSAY “Here Be Dragons:” The Tyranny of the Cityscape in James Baldwin’s Intimate Cartographies Emma Cleary Staffordshire University Abstract The skyline of New York projects a dominant presence in the works of James Baldwin—even those set elsewhere. This essay analyzes the socio-spatial rela- tionships and cognitive maps delineated in Baldwin’s writing, and suggests that some of the most compelling and intense portrayals of New York’s psychogeo- graphic landscape vibrate Baldwin’stext.InThe Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin’s highly personalized accounts of growing up in Harlem and living in New York map the socio-spatial relationships at play in domestic, street, and blended urban spaces, particularly in the title essay, “Dark Days,” and “Here Be Dragons.” Baldwin’sthirdnovel,Another Country (1962), outlines a multi- striated vision of New York City; its occupants traverse the cold urban territory and struggle beneath the jagged silhouette of skyscrapers. This essay examines the ways in which Baldwin composes the urban scene in these works through complex image schemas and intricate geometries, the city’s levels, planes, and perspectives directing the movements of its citizens. Further, I argue that Baldwin’s dynamic use of visual rhythms, light, and sound in his depiction of black life in the city, creates a vivid cartography of New York’s psychogeographic terrain. This essay connects Baldwin’s mappings of Harlem to an imbricated visual and sonic conception of urban subjectivity, that is, how the subject is con- structed through a simultaneous and synaesthetic visual/scopic and aural/sonic relation to the city, with a focus on the movement of the body through city space.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Giovanni's Room' Revisited
    The New York Times Style Magazine ‘Giovanni’s Room’ Revisited James Baldwin’s 1956 novel is a layered exploration of queer desire — and of the writer’s own sense of self. By Hilton Als Published Sept. 5, 2019 Updated Sept. 6, 2019 Nobody wanted it. Certainly not the folks at Alfred A. Knopf, who published his first novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” in 1953. Back then, the young James Baldwin — he was just 28 when “Mountain” came out — had a protector named William Cole, who was Knopf’s publicity director. Always on the lookout for fresh voices, the publicist read magazines like The New Leader, Commentary and The Nation, where, a few years earlier, essays and reviews by a man named James Baldwin had begun to appear with some frequency. And what Cole found in the emotionally charged writing were thoughts that sometimes — thrillingly — strained against its own gorgeous, literary, knowing style: Baldwin “read,” but from up high. Cole brought a few of his pieces to Knopf’s editor in chief, Harold Strauss, who contacted Baldwin’s agent and learned that he was at work on a novel. When Knopf eventually received the manuscript for “Mountain,” it appeared that its peripatetic author — who had lived abroad, mostly in Paris, since 1948 — had typed the story out on all sorts of typewriters and on many different kinds of stationery. No matter. What held the book together was Baldwin’s extraordinary sensibility, and his deep understanding of his 14-year-old protagonist, John, who feels — who knows — life might be something else if prejudice and poverty and his hateful and hated father, a part-time Pentecostal preacher named Gabriel, didn’t threaten to follow him all the days of his life and beat him out of heaven when he got there.
    [Show full text]
  • Evoking Baldwints Blues
    MULTI-MEDIA FEATURE ON “SONNY’S BLUES” Evoking Baldwin’s Blues: The Experience of Dislocated Listening Rashida K. Braggs Williams College Abstract “It is only in his music [...] that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear,” so wrote James Baldwin in “Many Thousands Gone.” Throughout his career, James Baldwin returned to this incomprehension of African-American experience. He continually privileged music in his literature, crafting his own literary blues to address it. Baldwin’s blues resonated even more powerfully and painfully for its emotional and geographical dislocation. In this article, Rashida K. Braggs argues that it was the combination of music, word, and migration that prompted Baldwin’s own deeper understanding. Ex- ploring her term dislocated listening, Braggs investigates how listening to music while willfully dislocated from one’s cultural home prompts a deeper understanding of African-American experience. The distance disconcerts, leav- ing one more vulnerable, while music impels the reader, audience, and even Baldwin to identify with some harsh realities of African-American experience. Baldwin evokes the experience of dislocated listening in his life and in “Sonny’s Blues.” Braggs also creates an experience of dislocated listening through her video performance of Baldwin’s words, thus attempting to draw the reader as well into a more attuned understanding of African-American experience. Keywords: James Baldwin, music, blues, migration, identity, “Sonny’s Blues,” France Multi-Media: A supplementary performance by the author is available on the JBR website.* It is only in his music [...] that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
    [Show full text]
  • James Baldwin Biography - Life, Children, Name, School, Son, Old, Information, Born, Movie, Time
    3/5/2020 James Baldwin Biography - life, children, name, school, son, old, information, born, movie, time World Biography (../in… / Ba-Be (index.html) / James Baldwin Bi… James Baldwin Biography Born: August 2, 1924 New York, New York Died: November 30, 1987 Saint-Paul-de-Vance, France African American author and playwright The author James Baldwin achieved international recognition for his expressions of African American life in the United States. During the 1960s he was one of the most outspoken leaders of the civil rights movement. Early life James Arthur Baldwin, the son of Berdis Jones Baldwin and the stepson of David Baldwin, was born in Harlem, New York City, on August 2, 1924. He was the oldest of nine children and from an early age loved to read. His father was a preacher in the Pentecostal church, and at the age of fourteen Baldwin also became a preacher. At eighteen he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, where he had written for a magazine put out by the school. Baldwin then realized that he wanted to write for a living. In 1944 Baldwin met another writer named Richard Wright (1908–1960), who helped Baldwin secure a fellowship (a writing award) that provided him with enough money to devote all of his time to literature. By 1948 Baldwin had decided that he could get more writing done in a place where there was less prejudice, and he went to live and work in Europe with money from another fellowship. While overseas Baldwin completed the books Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), and Giovanni's Room (1956).
    [Show full text]
  • Preface Cially Suited to the Study of Minority, Multicultural, and Marginalized Tradi- Tions and Authors
    p reFace Sightings It is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others. —mikhail BakhTIN, “Response,” The Dialogic Imagination The African American writer and activist James Baldwin (1924–87) was born in Harlem, thousands of miles and an ocean away from Orel, the birthplace of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), the Russian philosopher and literary critic who wrote the foregoing epigraph. Despite the linguistic, geographic, and cultural distances between them, Baldwin and Bakhtin explored, each in his own unique way, how the social environment shapes both the language and the consciousness of groups and individuals, and espoused cross-cultural dialogue based on the belief that the human desire for self-knowledge com- pels reliance on others as interpreters of our identities.1 Surrounded by the historical and social upheaval of the Soviet Revolution and its aftermath, Bakhtin spent some time in political exile and later withdrew from public life into linguistic and literary study. He is best known as a literary theorist and as the author of numerous works of criticism, among them The Dialogic Imagination (1975), a volume that made Bakhtin’s name, and that of his best- known concept, famous in the United States.
    [Show full text]
  • The Role of Love in the Fiction of James Baldwin
    THE ROLE OF LOVE IN THE FICTION OF JAMES BALDWIN A Thesis Presented to the faculty of the Department of English Morehead State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by Douglas Wayne Wright April, 1972 Accepted by the faculty of the School of fl,,.....,,d.~i'l;;/~5 , Morehead State University, in partial fulfillment of the require- ments for the Master of ~~~/1-'-'-r~t-~=--~~-degree. (Dir~to~ o~is) Master's Committee: ·.·~ 2. f'~ , Chairman 7 ~ ~· /'t?Z- (date) TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION l II. TYPES OF LOVE EMPLOYED IN THE FICTION 6 A. Heterosexual 10 B. Homosexual 18 C. Bisexual 26 III. ROLES OF LOVE IN THE FICTION 31 A. Vehicle for Social Criticism 35 B. Vehicle for Religious Criticism 50 C. A Stay Against Alienation 60 IV. CONCLUSION 67 APPENDIX 72 BIBLIOGRAPHY 73 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The fictional world of James Baldwin is a world of chaos and confusion. Baldwin goes to much length to utilize the music of the American Negro in establishing this world of chaos and confusion. It is the wailing and writhing of the blues or the brassy notes of jazz that often establish the key themes in his fiction. The messages in the blues songs of Bessie Smith and Ida Scott immediately set the despairing tone that plunges a reader into the very depth of alienation: "Do you love me?" "Who am I?" Twentieth century literature seems to be earmarked as a quest for reality, and the fiction of James Baldwin appears to be no exception.
    [Show full text]