James Baldwin, a Guide in Dark Times

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/195641/james-baldwin-guide-dark-times


James Baldwin in Los Angeles, 1969 (Credit: Sedat Pakay)

These are ripe times to read Baldwin. Not just the essays on racist policing; those are, in a way, too easy. “A Report From Occupied Territory,” which appeared in The Nation, burns hot a half-century after it was published. That its depiction of black vulnerability and police volatility could describe the contemporary scene; that its central metaphor of occupation is not too hyperbolic to have been echoed by Eric Holder last year, nor its concern with personal disintegration too dated to anticipate Ismaaiyl Brinsley; that even its particulars (“If one is carried back and forth from the precinct to the hospital long enough, one is likely to confess anything”) feel gruesomely fresh in light of known CIA torture regimens—all of these, enraging as they are, only confirm what we already tell ourselves in weaker words.

The police are brutal, the government is brutal, the populace is aroused (taking to the streets) or accommodating (switching from CNN to Homeland to football), brutalized or brutal too. America, cauldron of damaged life.

Baldwin wrote “Report” in 1966, about Harlem, not Staten Island; during the war in Vietnam, not the “global war on terror”; amid the dim promises of the Great Society and a Top 40 soundtrack playing “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” We may study that past, track today’s news and shout the louder, but that is not why Baldwin is the most important American writer of the twentieth century, or why we should read him now.

A passage from a famous essay called “Everyone’s Favorite Protest Novel,” written in 1949, suggests a better reason:

What constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds?

[merrily]

1. A friend on James Baldwin, purely as a writer:

"When Baldwin uses a word, you know what it means and what it ever meant and probably what it ever can or will mean."

[NuttyFluffers]

2. oh how is this not kicked? Library of America, folks, Library of America

i don't capitalize much on this forum, but i will capitalize them. their collections of american masters of literature is a sheer treasure and i wish i owned the whole set for my own library.

go check out Baldwin's collection, both the fiction one and the non-fiction one. like words on fire from pentecost. if i was a high school teacher would be required reading. few things like passion for justice, and compassion for humanity, mixed in strange alchemy like spoken flame.

the LOA complete works, especially since it is chronological, gives such context to his progression as a human being. it is to see the middle years of the 20th century america from fresh eyes cleared from rheumy jingoism & myth.

[Bluenorthwest]

3. I love James Baldwin's work, a great genius many years ahead of the class....

They thought he was too gay to speak at the March on Washington in spite of his work and popularity.