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INTERVIEW: JAMES BALDWIN

Looking Towards the Eighties

 

James Baldwin, like an Old Testament prophet whose insistent voice refuses to fall silent, has been one of this country’s most persistent witnesses. He is a witness in that he testifies to everything he thinks and feels as we move through the minefields of love/hate, Black/white, rich/poor relationships in twentieth century America.

His complex prose style has often been favorably compared to the King James Version of the Bible (primarily the fire and brimstone old testament). Although books such as The Fire Next Time have earned Baldwin a reputation for being a harsh critic, James Baldwin is actually most concerned with the problems and possibilities of finding and holding love.

While he has not found it easy to live and work in this country, Baldwin continues to prolifically produce novels and essays. Most often he writes from a small town in France, but on occasions he has sent work to us from Turkey. The important thing is that he is not running away but rather searching out a rock, a desk, a stone tablet from which he can find the needed moments of silence and rest out of which will come rushing full force another letter, or a new nerve- jangling essay, or perhaps a huge and rich novel (such as his latest Just Above My Head which some critics think is his best since his first novel Go Tell It On The Mountain).

Having crossed the half-century mark, he is no longer an angry young man: he is an elder. He is a seer who has seen much. There is much we can learn from the visions he has, visions which have been tempered by a long time coming.

James Baldwin, a witness, a writer, a Black survivor: listen, he speaks and it is life-song he is singing.

Now that you are back in this country, do you plan to stay?

BALDWIN: I’ll be here for a while. I’m sort of a commuter.

Why do you choose to commute?

BALDWIN: I’m not sure I chose it. I went to Paris a long time ago, didn’t stay away as long as people thought I had. I came back home in 1967 and was based here until 1969. Since then I have been more or less commuting because it’s very hard for me to write here.

What makes it difficult to write?

BALDWIN: Well, there are so many other demands which have to be met. There is no way to sit in an ivory tower.

During the sixties there were a number of people who attempted to say what the role of the writer was? I remember a quote of yours which said that the “role of the writer is to write.” Do you still think that quote encapsulates what should be the role of the writer?

BALDWIN: The role of the writer is to write, but this is a cryptic statement. What I’ meant is that a writer doesn’t dance. His function is very particular and so is his responsibility. After all, to write, if taken seriously, is to be subversive. To disturb the peace.

Why do you say that?

BALDWIN:  What it is must be examined.  Reality is very strange.  It’s not as simple as people think it is.  People are not as simple as they would like to think they are.  Societies are exceedingly complex and are changing all of the time, and so are we changing all of the time.  Since to write implies an investigation of all these things, the only way that I can assume it up is to say that the role of the writer is to write.

In essence then, the role of the writer is to point out how things got the way they are and how…

BALDWIN: … how they can continue and change. 

You’re teaching at Bowling Green College now. Have you taught school before?

BALDWIN: No. “I’m doing a writer’s seminar which is a catch-all term that means whatever you make of it.

For a very long time until Martin died. I was operating as a public speaker in the context of the civil rights Movement. And when Martin died, something happened to me and something happened to many people. It took a while for me and for many people to pull ourselves back together. Then I had to find another way to discharge what I considered to be my responsibility. I’ve been working on college campuses and in prisons, which is why I don’t bring my typewriter across the ocean.

The responsibility the other side of the ocean is to be a writer in the sense of a craftsperson who puts words on the page. The responsibility on this side is what?

BALDWIN: On this side my responsibility is, well. It’s very difficult to answer that because It Involves being available, it involves being visible. It Involves being vulnerable, it involves my concept of my responsibility to people coming after me and to people who came before me …

To, in a sense, tell their story, so that others can understand from whence they came.

BALDWIN: Yes. I consider myself to be a witness.

On one side of the ocean, you can write about what you have witnessed, and on this side of the ocean, you bear witness to that which you would write about.

BALDWIN: That puts if about as well as it can be put.

Looking at our current situation, in your opinion, what are some of the key themes that need to be expressed?

BALDWIN: That is so vast.

I understand that it is vast, but, for example, alter fifty-four and going into the sixties, it was critical that people understand the necessity of the civil rights struggle. Do you think there is anything that has a similar Gutting edge for us today?

BALDWIN: I think that what you’ve called the civil rights movement, although it is an acceptable ‘term, . Well, it might clarify matters if one thought of it as, in fact, a slave insurrection. When one thinks of it in that way, in the first place, one is prevented from descending into despair, On one level the civil rights movement was betrayed, but on a much  more important level, we all learned something tremendous out of that effort and out Of me betrayal something important about ourselves.

What are some of the things we learned about ourselves?

BALDWIN: That the people who call themselves “white,” I must put it that way, well, as Malcolm X said, “white is a state of mind.” The implications of that statement are enormous because It finally means that the people who call themselves white have really invented something, which is not true. The key to this is European power which is a very complex thing and which Involves the history of the church. White people invented Black people to protect themselves against something which frightened them.

Which was?

BALDWIN: I don’t Know. Life.  I guess. All the legends about Black people are very revealing. They are all created by white people:  “Aunt Jemima,” “Uncle Tom,” “Topsy,” the Black stud, the nigger whore.  Those descriptions, which are labeled legends, do not describe Black people at all.

They describe the creator.

BALDWIN: That’s right. Whatever you  describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

As you pointed out earlier, if white is a state of mind, then there are many of us who have a Black legacy but who also can be very much white.

BALDWIN: Yes, you could not tell a Black man by the color of his skin.

Let’s talk about that betrayal of civil rights. In your opinion, who did the betraying and how was it done?

BALDWIN: It was inevitable from the moment it started. From the moment it started. we came up against tremendous political and economic machinery which was not going to dismantle itself. The attempt was made by some very well meaning people. I’m not putting down or condemning Black people, but finally, these estates could find no way to accommodate this discontent and no way to respond to it. All of the civil rights acts passed during that time, including the Supreme court decision outlawing segregation In school, were all gestures attempting to ameliorate something which could not be ameliorated without a profound change in the state and that profound change in the state Involves an absolutely unthinkable revision of the American identity.

Drawing them out then, there are some of us who believe that the present state of the entertainment, arts is in fact a true reflection of what those who think they are white would like to believe about those whose faces Black?

BALDWIN: Precisely. That is why there are only minstrel shows on Broadway now. And white people flock to them in droves to be reassured of their legends, to be reassured of their state, their Identities. That’s the brutal truth and the bottom line.

So, how do you assess the seventies? The civil rights period and the sixties brought our struggle to a point of sharpness, so much so, that it was unthinkable to believe that we didn’t have to struggle.

BALDWIN: But of course. Out of that something was clarified for us and, even more importantly, for our children.

Which was what?

BALDWIN: That one was no longer at the mercy of white imagination – I was born fifty-five years ago. In a sense, I was born in the nightmare of the white man’s mind.  A lot my growing up and all my early youth was first that discovery and then the bloody struggle to get out of that mind, to destroy that frame of reference for myself and for those coming after me.  I’m the oldest of nine children; this is very important. I know that my great-nieces and great-nephews are living in a different world than the world In which I was born. They can not imagine the world which produced me, but I’ve seen the world for which they are going to be responsible.

So, although they can’t imagine the world that produced you, you understand the world which produced them and understand still the state which remains to be dealt with?

BALDWIN: Precisely. And I trust them to do it. We have so far. There’s no reason to despair now.

When you say we have so far, how does that correlate with your assessment that the civil rights struggle was betrayed?

BALDWIN: The civil rights struggle was betrayed and the people who betrayed it are responsible for that betrayal. We are not.

If I understand you correctly, you ·are suggesting that although there was a betrayal of the civil rights struggle, there was also a profound impact whose shock waves are still being felt. In fact, although the state may have not toppled at the first blow, it is still tottering and the winds are still blowing.

BALDWIN: Oh, yes. In fact, the winds are getting stronger because it is not only this particular state, it is the whole western world.

You are obviously hopeful about the eighties.

BALDWIN: Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. But I’m far from being in despair. We cannot afford despair. We have too many children. Despair is a luxury only white men can afford.

You mentioned the church. In your new novel you suggest that the church has proven not to have been the redemptive force.

BALDWIN: This is something very complex. It depends.   When I said the church, I was thinking about the overall, two thousand year history of the Christian church, one of the results of which was the enslavement of Black people. On the other hand, what happened here in America to Black people who were given the church and nothing else, who were given the Bible and the cross under the shadow of the loaded gun, and who did something with it absolutely unprecedented which astounds Black people to this day. Finally, everything in Black history comes out of the church.

Given that the church, In the classical sense of church, was both an offer we could not refuse and also has not fulfilled Its role as a redemptive force for our people, but at the same time, at the juncture where our people took the church, it did serve as a bridge cross troubled water …

BALDWIN: Yes it did. The essential religion of Black people comes out of something which is not Europe.  When Black people talk about truereligion, they’re “speaking in tongues” practically. It would not be understood in Rome.

If you believe that the church is the foundation for our people…

BALDWIN: It was how we forged our identity.

What do you see for the generations who are here and who are to come, who have no sense of church?

BALDWIN: This is an enormous question. In the first place, I’m not absolutely certain that they have no sense of church, although I hear you very well. I know what you mean when you say that. I don’t know if one can divest one’s self of one’s inheritance so easily. I would go so far as to say it’s not possible. Things are changing all of the time. The form changes but the substance remains.

What do you think about the current group of students?

BALDWIN: People are very critical and very despairing of the young. But I can only say that in my own experience, and admittedly it’s limited, and even admitting I’m in somewhat of a special situation, I must say that my experience in all these years on campus has given me a great deal of hope. Kids ask real questions, I begin to suspect that, in fact, the elders who are so despairing of the young are actually despairing of themselves. Kids ask real questions. very hard questions. Those questions imply a judgment of the man of whom you’re asking the Question. All you can do is be as open as possible and as truthful as possible and don’t ever try to lie to the kids.

You know in the early sixties, if someone had come along and judged the then current crop of students in the Black colleges, they might have felt the same way some people feel about students today.

BALDWIN: Of course, and I must repeat myself, that’s a luxury one can’t afford. I’ve dealt with junkies, lost girls, ex-prisoners, people ruined by bitterness before they were eighteen years old, ok. But that’s not all there is to that.

What would you note about prison experiences?

BALDWIN: The candor of the prisoners, their knowledge, and I’m not being romantic about prisoners. People get lost. But, I’ve encountered very few prisoners, and of course this is not a Gallup poll, but I’ve encountered very few people who did not really understand their situation.

The college situation sets up the type of environment that leads to questioning and the prison situation sets up the type of environment that leads automatically to reflection, whether or not you want that.

BALDWIN: Yeah. you could put it that way.  The college situation is exceedingly difficult. The Black kid in college, no matter how we cut It, risks paranoia, risks schizophrenia because there is no way for this society to prepare them for the same future that the white boy is prepared for.

The real meaning of the word progress in the American vocabulary for the most, and there are exceptions to the rule, but for the most part when they say progress they’re talking about how quickly a Black kid can become white. That’s what they mean by progress. Well I don’t want my nephew to grow up to be like Ronald Reagan, or Richard Nixon, or Jimmy Carter.

Let’s discuss the relationship, the understanding, the reality of sex and sexual relations in our people’s lives.  On one level our relationships have been vulgarized …

BALDWIN: In the lives of Black people-everyone overlooks this and it’s a very simple fact-love has been so terribly menaced. It’s dangerous to be in love, I suppose, anytime. anywhere. But it’s absolutely dangerous to be in love if you’re a slave because nothing belongs to you, not your woman, not your child, not your man. The fact that we have held on to each other in the teeth of such a monstrous obscenity, if we could do that, well I’m not worried about the future.

So you would think that the so-called sexual revolution that going on…

BALDWIN: What do you mean “sexual revolution?”

What I’m basically asking is for a commentary on the current situation.

BALDWIN: All I can tell you is that, as regards for example gay liberation. I’m very glad that it seems to be easier for a boy to admit that he’s in love with a boy, or for a girl to admit that she’s in love with a girl, instead of, as happened in my generation, you had kids going on the needle because, they were afraid that they might want to go to bed with someone of the same sex. That’s part at the sexual paranoia of the United States and really of the western world.

Homophobia.

BALDWIN: A kind of homophobia, but it’s …

Actually it’s life-phobia.

BALDWIN: Yeah, that’s what it is.  

Afraid of someone who is living.

BALDWIN: Everybody’s journey is individual. You don’t know with whom you’re going to fall in love. No one has a right to make your Choice for you, or to penalize you for being in love. In a sense, I think they’ve put themselves in prison.

That’s what you meant in your story about the sheriff who could not love his wife (“Going To Meet the Man”)?

BALDWIN: That’s right. He was going to meet the man!

Yeah, he was going to meet the man, and every time they meet men or women they try to kill them.

BALDWIN: Exactly.

There is a technological revolution happening.  Do you think there is a future for writing within this revolution?

BALDWIN: The technological revolution, or rather the technological situation, I am not as worried about it as some other people are. First of all, it depends entirely on the continued validity and power of the western world. I don’t think it is in our power to eliminate human beings. And although it may seem at this moment that the television has rendered everyone illiterate and blind, the world cannot afford it. When’ you talk about writing today, you’re talking about the European concept of writing, you’re talking about the European concept of art. That concept, I assure you, has had Its day. There will be things written, in the future, coming out of a different past, and creating another reality. We are the future ….

Thank you very much James Baldwin the witness and James Baldwin the writer.  We encourage both of you to continue.

BALDWIN: Thank you very much and keep the faith.

 

by kalamu ya salaam

 

First published in THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Dec./Jan. 1979

>via: http://tbcmonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1517:james-baldwin&catid=125

 

__________________________

 

 

 

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – November 30, 1987)  

________________________________________________ 

 

INVENTORY / ON BEING 52 (parts 1, 2 & 3)

Music by David Linx, Pierre Van Dormael

James Baldwin – narration

David Linx – vocals, drums, percussion

Pierre Van Dormael – guitar

Michel Hatzigeorgiou – bass

Deborah Brown – vocals

Viktor Lazlo – vocals

Steve Coleman – alto saxophone

Slide Hampton – trombone

Jimmy Owens – trumpet, fluegelhorn

Pierre Vaiana – tenor saxophone

Diederik Wissels – piano

________________________________________________ 

 

 

JAMES BALDWIN:

The Preacher Poet

 

I would like to use the time that’s left to change the world,

to teach children or to convey to the people who have children that

everything that lives is holy.

—James Baldwin

 

-1-

 

James Baldwin voiced us—articulated black experiences with a searing intensity that frightened some and enraptured others of us. Even if you could not read, once you heard Baldwin you were convinced of the power of words. His ability to move air was such that the vibrating oxygen Baldwin set in motion spoke to us as surely as if the words had issued from our own mouths.

 

Baldwin’s sermons (and that’s what his words were, instructions for living) entered us, vital as breathing.

 

Baldwin’s breath proclaimed what it meant to be flesh, and black. He told us of the here and now, told of barbarians who feared life in others and feared those who truly lived to love rather than to conqueror.

 

Baldwin spoke of racist hatred for black people, telling us that their hatred was but a mask for the intense hatred they felt for themselves and the sordid, twisted mess they had made of their own lives.

 

The gritty texture of Baldwin’s voice testified to the realities of black life, the ups, the downs, the terrors, as well as the hard-won tenderness found in our usually brief but nonetheless frequent stolen moments of exquisite and redemptive love. He was no romantic, but oh how he loved. He loved us all and gave his all in the love of us.

 

Indeed his very behavior posed the quintessential question: if not for the opportunity to love, what are we living for? Certainly not labor and toil, nor riches and fame, which we can never take with us when we inevitably exit the world; If we do not love our selves and our children, what will our living matter in the future? And if we do not understand that everyone’s child is our child, then how whole can we be as a human being?

 

When I was younger, when I thought I had a taste for anger, a yearning for retribution, I was always mystified and sometimes even miffed by Baldwin’s insistence on love. Now I am older, directed by the wisdom of age: sooner or later, most of us grow tired of fighting but we never tire of love.

 

What was bracing about Baldwin was his insistence that we be humans regardless of how inhuman our tormentors might act, and as Baldwin so eloquently reminded us, their behavior was an act, most likely a ruse to mask their fear of us, or worse yet a lie to camouflage their fear that they were not what they tried to make us believe they were; they were not gods, conquerors, lords and such. No. They were merely what we all are, human beings trying to survive and prosper.

 

It is easy to think of Baldwin as an Old Testament prophet, raining down fire and brimstone. He was, after all, a professional evangelist as a teen. It is easy to think of Baldwin as a Shakespeare in and of Harlem since his command of language is now legendary. But it is wrong to reference Baldwin solely from outside of black culture. Think of this black voice as a life-force, as the sound of us, as the sound of living, as a drum. A drum, an insistent beating drum whose rhythm was synchronous with our own heartbeats.

 

The fullest appreciation of James Baldwin the writer is not understood until James Baldwin the voice is heard. Only once your heart was moved by the way this man moved words could you fully understand the power he brought to us who were told time and time again, in a million ways, day, night and seemingly always that we were totally powerless, or at least powerless to prevent first our enslavement and now our ongoing oppression and exploitation.

 

The power Baldwin brought to us was a clear-eyed recognition of world realities, we, just as everyone else, were the range of behaviors and emotions, memories and dreams that it means to be human, and as such our task was to be the best human we could be, which best necessarily meant the embracing of other humans. You are a human and you must embrace other humans is a powerful message to give to those who have been taught otherwise.

 

And this fire to be wholly human that Baldwin breathed into our lives was no mere mental exercise. Baldwin went far, far beyond thinking because he spoke with a passion for life, a passion to get the most out of life even as he admitted that as we struggled on inevitably we would err, we would make mistakes, we would fail from time to time, even backslide, and knowingly do wrong, after all we are humans and that’s part of what humans do, but Baldwin would remind us as long as we are alive we have the opportunity, indeed we have the obligation to correct our mistakes and to strive to be better than we have been.

 

Baldwin was telling us: grow up. Of course, you’ve been done wrong and you’ve done wrong. We all have. We all have been done wrong. We all have done wrong. Grow up, face life. All the wrong in the world does not mean that you and I can’t do what’s right.

 

And ultimately, while James Baldwin the writer is important, James Baldwin the human voice is equally important, especially now that the technology exists so that we can all hear him, we can all experience the ways in which he manipulated human sounds of communication. In other words, the fullest appreciation of James Baldwin the writer is not totally understood until James Baldwin the voice is heard.

 

Baldwin was full of passion and the very fire light of life. To reduce him simply to books is to miss the music that this man made of words.

 

Thus, if you think you know James Baldwin, if you think you love our literature and you have never heard him deliver the word, and you do not have his spoken word CD, then you don’t really know the breadth and depth of James Baldwin.

 

-2-

 

Between September 19, 1986 and September 18, 1987, James Baldwin spent a year working on a spoken word CD with producers/composers/musicians David Linx and Pierre Van Dormael. Recorded in Brussels, Brooklyn and New York City, A Lover’s Question (Label Beu, Harmonia Mundi) is a masterpiece of merging words with music: a precursor to what is now a popular artform.

 

The producers succeed in more than providing a sonic backdrop for the words; they actually composed orchestrations that both complemented and mirrored the intent and expression inherent in Baldwin’s delivery of his complex poems. The success is then on three levels: the poems are phat, the music is tight, and the musicians respond with an exhilarating verve that let’s you know they too were giving their all, giving their love and not simply going through the changes to get paid.

 

Aside from a brief musical introduction and an elegiac solo rendition of Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” on which Baldwin talk-sings the famous gospel composition, there are only three poems on this CD. One poem, “The Art of Love,” features operatic vocalist Deborah Brown and is done as an art song, an interlude between two poetic suites.

 

The two-part “A Lover’s Question” continues in the vein of the Fire Next Time. Baldwin questions the citizens of his birth nation as to their desire to hate: “Why / have you allowed / yourself / to become so grimly / wicked?” and “No man can have a / harlot / for a lover / nor stay in bed forever / with a lie. / He must rise up / and face the morning / sky / and himself, in the / mirror / of his lover’s eye.” As Baldwin knew, true love is always honest even though honesty is seldom an easy fact to live with in a land where lies and commerce replace truth and reciprocity.

 

The concluding number is the three part opus “Inventory / On Being 52” and it is the introspective Baldwin fingering his own wounds (some of them self-inflicted). He does not flinch as he cross-examines his own life and realizes the terrible costs of his mistakes, the terrible beauty of embracing both the terrors and joys of being human. Baldwin manages in a stream of consciousness style to encourage us to live the good life, suggesting that the good life is a different life from the life/lie that too many of us live. Baldwin encourages us not simply to march to the beat of a different drummer, Baldwin tenderly implores us to be different drummers.

 

Tap out the real rhythms of life with our every footstep in the dark, our every embrace of what we and others are and can become. Reject the ultimately tiresome and ephemeral wisdom of materialism / accept the rejuvenating life-cycle rhythm of the earth. Thus Baldwin says “Perhaps the stars will / help, / or the water, / a stone may have / something to tell me, / and I owe a favor to a / couple of old trees.”

 

“Inventory / On being 52” is a deep song, but then, as he says, “My father’s son / does not easily / surrender. / My mother’s son / pressed on.” Every young poet needs this old man’s CD in their collection, this compass of compassion, this example of the passionate heights the spoken word can attain. If you as a poet do not know A Lover’s Question then you do not know the full history of your own human heartbeat.

 

-3-

 

James Baldwin. His life, his teachings, his commitment, his words embody one of the great paradoxes of the contradictions of life—and regardless of misplace beliefs in idealism, in an eternal anything, in a person being solely and only one thing or another, regardless of our worship of the false idol of ideas and dualism—experience teaches us, all life, every life is contradictory. In fact, to be alive is a contradiction, is a fight against death, literal death, symbolic death, the death of compassion, the death of our own humanity in terms of how we relate to others and the world we live in.

 

Life is a contradiction, and as such, isn’t it wonderful for us to realize that one of the most insistent prophets, preachers and poets of love was a queer, black man standing against the homophobia, standing against the misogyny (and surely hating women also means hating the earth), standing against the racism, and all the other -isms endemic to the place and time within which Baldwin was born.

 

James Baldwin. Clearly modeling for all of us what it meant to be a man, and more importantly what it meant to be human and live in a time of institutional war and inhumanity.

 

I love James Baldwin.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

[The first version of this essay, essentially most of part 1, was originally published in Mosaic Literary Magazine, Spring 1999. The second version of this essay, part 1 & part 2, was originally published as part of the booklet accompanying the 1999 reissue of A Lover’s Question.]