Quote: James Baldwin

James Baldwin (Associated Press)

"Until my father died I thought I could do something else. I had wanted to be a musician, thought of being a painter, thought of being an actor. This was all before I was nineteen. Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible. When I was young, people thought you were not so much wicked as sick, they gave up on you. My father didn’t think it was possible—he thought I’d get killed, get murdered. He said I was contesting the white man’s definitions, which was quite right. But I had also learned from my father what he thought of the white man’s definitions. He was a pious, very religious and in some ways a very beautiful man, and in some ways a terrible man. He died when his last child was born and I realized I had to make a jump—a leap. I’d been a preacher for three years, from age fourteen to seventeen. Those were three years which probably turned me to writing."
--James Baldwin (born on August 2, 1924), from "James Baldwin: The Art of Fiction, No. 78," interviewed by Jordan Elgrably, The Paris Review, Issue 91, Spring 1984.

James Baldwin Conference at Université Paul-Valéry

The James Baldwin: Transatlantic Commuter conference is underway at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, and it has been an amazing experience thus far. Organized by D. Quentin Miller of Suffolk University and Claudine Raynaud of Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, the conference has brought together many of the major scholars of Baldwin's work, as well as creative writers, filmmakers, longtime friends of Baldwin, and graduate students now in the process of writing and thinking about Baldwin's life, work and legacy.

Thus far there have been several keynote talks. Yesterday David Leeming, widely considered one of the leading Baldwin scholars and his major biographer, delivered the first, offering personal anecdotes about his experiences with "Jimmy," with one highlight an extraordinary story about the time he collected painter-seer Beauford Delaney from his Paris apartment-temple, though only after lying head to head with him on cots, in a sheet-draped room, and talking about everything for five days. He then drove Delaney and another poet to Baldwin's lodgings in Istanbul, and to keep Delaney from running off (he was falling apart mentally) had to hold him in bed to keep him lying down.

Today Magdalena Zaborowska, author of the award-winning James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke, 2009), who talked about Baldwin's final home in St. Paul de Vence, France, and how we might recover from "the material the metaphorical," and "the literal the literary" new ways of thinking about Baldwin's archive. One aspect of her forthcoming project that I found particularly fascinating was her discussion of how Baldwin's interest in certain women in his life increased toward the end of his life, and in his clothing and mannerisms began to play with gender more openly. She linked these shifts to his final work, The Welcome Table, which captured both this turn and social aspects of his life, including his relationships with women friends, in his final days.

On a plenary panel yesterday author and screenwriter Cecil Brown spoke about his friendship with Baldwin from the early 1970s on, when Baldwin was being heavily surveilled by the FBI and carefully considering the terms of his exile. A number of his anecdotes centered on time he spent with Baldwin at the house in St. Paul de Vence, and on the relative rarity in those days, compared with today, of American black people in France. Some of Brown's comments veered into problematic territory and his comments today in response to a presentation again did so, but one way of looking at this was that he was giving his unvarnished truth, offensive as it might be. Jacqueline Jones Compaore, who was Baldwin's student during his stint at the western Massachusetts 5-college system, joined him on the plenary panel, talking quite movingly of Baldwin as a teacher who could terrify students by challenging their BS outright, but also showed great care for many of them and deeply inspired her. 

Amidst the keynotes have been full days of panels, on all aspects of Baldwin, from discussions of music in his work to his public and private lives to a digital annotations project now underway to to his transatlanticism. My panel, on new approaches, was the first of this afternoon, and I gave an abridged (because of time) version of a paper on "queer futurity" and James Baldwin's final novel, Just Above My Head, which I think even more now having reread and thought about it carefully deserves to have much stronger cases made on its behalf. It is a novel in which nearly all of Baldwin's concerns come together--often felicitously but sometimes not--with some of his most astonishing prose, and, as David Leeming noted in his talk, it is a "experimental," often shocking work that rewards its reader in multiple ways.

The other panelist's talks, Brian Norman's on the "Cassandra effect" of Baldwin's use--the "ventriloquism" of him after his death--and Nigel Hatton's, on his work teaching Baldwin's fiction to young people in prison, and including the great writer's work in the field of narrative medicine, were excellent. Other panels have ranged widely, but in general, have provided a rich critical engagement with every aspect of James Baldwin the artist, the intellectual, the critic, the theorist, the activist, the visionary, the man. Concluding the today's session was a screening of The Price of the Ticket, with filmmaker Karen Thorsen present to discuss many aspects of her process, her contact with Baldwin, some particulars of the film, and related anecdotes. I have seen this film before, but hearing her provide background information enriched my thinking about it. There's one more day of Baldwiniana, and I'm looking forward to it and to seeing more of Montpellier!

First morning registration

The organizers, D. Quentin Miller
and Claudine Raynaud

Dennis Tyler, who gave the first talk
of the day, and D. Quentin Miller

David Leeming

Site St Charles, Université Paul-Valéry

Cecil Brown and Jacqueline Jones Compaore

Anti-fascist posters near the university 

Jezy Gray, Ed Pavlic, giving his paper,
and Quentin Miller 

Magdalena Zaborowska,
at right, at her keynote 

Actor and videographer Samuel
Légitimus, founder of the
Collectif James Baldwin

Rasheeda Briggs, Monica Miller,
and Christopher Driscoll

Scenes of Marseille & Montpellier

The James Baldwin: Transatlantic Commuter conference at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, has begun, and I'll post some photos from it tomorrow, but here are a few photos from Marseille, into which I flew yesterday, and Montpellier, where the conference is taking place. I'll note about the journey only that the plane I was to fly on from JFK was struck by lightning as it was arriving in New York, which meant that before we could take off it was grounded for hours until the repair crew could assure themselves and the pilots that everything was working well. That meant a horribly delayed flight into Toronto, sprints across two airports to make flights, and so on. Not for the faint-hearted.

But so it was, and I got to Marseille in one piece, took the train to Montpellier, settled in, and began the conference this morning, excited to be among the Baldwinophiles. It has been an excellent experience so far, especially meeting new people and seeing old colleagues, hearing Baldwin's famous biographer, David Leeming, offer personal anecdotes about the writer, and noting the smart, contemporary scholarship on one of America's greatest writers. Amidst this academic conversations I also got in a quick walking tour (to get a plug adapter) across Montpellier's old city, a visit to the Jardin des Plantes, and dinner one of the liveliest art gallery-tapas restaurants, located in a former pharmacy school, that I've ever set foot in. Well, it's the only art-gallery-tapas restaurant I've set foot in, but I'm glad I did. Some photos:

On the plane: Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth
screening under "Avant Garde" films! 

Marseille from the sky

Marseille from the highway

At the train station

Arles, Van Gogh's and Gauguin's
one-time home, along the route from
Marseille to Montpellier 

Montpellier's aviary-church-like
main rail station 

The ancient gate leading to
the Rue de l'Université

The former Ursuline Convent, now
a center for dance 

One of the numerous old,
winding streets of Montpellier 

A protest facing the Préfecture 

Soft sculptures in a
courtyard 

A colloquy 

L'Opéra Comédie

On a Montpellier street

Église St. Pierre 

An allée of cypresses at the Jardin des Plantes

A statue honoring the founder
of Montpellier's Jardin des Plantes

A bamboo thicket in the
Jardin des Plantes 

A lily pond in the Jardin des Plantes 

A greenhouse (closed), housing
cactuses and succubuses 

Bougainvillea 

A tree of wishes
(it was quite full of them)

The tram line

The roofs of Montpellier 

The St. Pierre Church from on high 

Ubiquitous graffiti

Wall art (graffiti)

A tunnel-like street

Night life

Out and about

Poem: James Baldwin

One of the treats of this year's Inter/National Poetry Month is the publication of a new collection of poems by James Baldwin (1924-1987), one of the greatest figures in 20th century African American and American literature and culture. Baldwin was an exemplary essayist, social critic and public intellectual whose vision and insights, nearly three decades after his death, still provides a vital lens for understanding our society, and a talented, pioneering fiction writer and playwright, whose courage in tackling subject matter, especially racism and white supremacy, and the complexities of black and queer lives, and whose lyrical voice, sometimes achieving a condition not unlike poetry and song, enshrine him as an important author always worth returning to.

Like many writers of prose, Baldwin loved and wrote poetry all his life. From my perusal of his 1983 volume Jimmy's Blues, I would say that he saw poetry as a way to memorialize not just moments but people, and thus among his oeuvre are some famous occasional poems, including "Sweet Lorraine," a tribute to his friend, another great, pioneering writer, Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965). For him poetry often served as as a way for Baldwin to register the rich currents of personal and societal feeling, flashes of intellection, in and as language, without the systematic approach a writer choosing poetry as her primary mode of expression might follow. Nevertheless his poetry, as Nikky Finney argues persuasively in her introduction to Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), Baldwin's poetry merits our reading. Its rewards are multiple. To quote Finney, excerpted on the Poetry Foundation's website Harriet:

James Baldwin, as poet, was incessantly paying attention and always leaning into the din and hum around him, making his poems from his notes of what was found there, making his outlines, his annotations, doing his jotting down, writing from the mettle and marginalia of his life, giving commentary, scribbling, then dispatching out to the world what he knew and felt about that world. James Baldwin, as poet, was forever licking the tip of his pencil, preparing for more calculations, more inventory, moving, counting each letter being made inside the abacus of the poem. James Baldwin, as poet, never forgot what he had taught me in that seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word essay — to remember where one came from. So many of the poems are dedicated back to someone who perhaps had gone the distance, perhaps had taught him about the rain: for David, for Jefe, for Lena Horne, for Rico, for Berdis, for Y.S.

and

When the writer Cecil Brown went to see James Baldwin in Paris in the summer of 1982, he found him “busy writing poems,” quite possibly these poems. Brown reports that Baldwin would work on a poem for a while and then stop from time to time to read one aloud to him. “Staggerlee wonders” was one of those poems, and “Staggerlee wonders” opens Jimmy’s Blues, the collection he published in 1983. The poem begins with indefatigable might, setting the tone and temperature for everything else in this volume, as well as the sound and sense found throughout Baldwin’s oeuvre. “Baldwin read to me from the poem with great humor and laughter,” Brown wrote in his book Stagolee Shot Billy.

Here is one of the poems from the collection, which I am reprinting from Buzzfeed.com, which originally ran three. Enjoy!

“MUNICH, WINTER 1973 (for Y.S.)”

In a strange house,
a strange bed
in a strange town,
a very strange me
is waiting for you.

Now
it is very early in the morning.
The silence is loud.
The baby is walking about
with his foaming bottle,
making strange sounds
and deciding, after all,
to be my friend.

You
arrive tonight.

How dull time is!
How empty—and yet,
since I am sitting here,
lying here,
walking up and down here,
waiting,
I see
that time’s cruel ability
to make one wait
is time’s reality.

I see your hair
which I call red.
I lie here in this bed.

Someone teased me once,
a friend of ours—
saying that I saw your hair red
because I was not thinking
of the hair on your head.

Someone also told me,
a long time ago:
my father said to me,
It is a terrible thing,
son,
to fall into the hands of the living God.
Now,
I know what he was saying.
I could not have seen red
before finding myself
in this strange, this waiting bed.
Nor had my naked eye suggested

Debt-Limit Ceiling Blues II (The Fix Is In) + Video: James Baldwin

President Obama signing the bill to raise the debt limit ceiling (Pete Souza/The White House)

So the bill to raise the debt-limit ceiling has passed both houses of Congress and the President has signed it. The GOP, the President and presumably a large number of Democrats in both the House and Senate got what they wanted, which is a plan to impose massive cuts to discretionary spending, with potential cuts to the social safety net and non-discretionary sectors of the government down the road, and above all no guarantees of future federal income tax increases whatsoever, including no repeal of the deficit-expanding Bush tax transfers to the rich.  We currently are suffering through 9% unemployment, with about 25 million of people are more jobless, many of them for years, and perhaps double that in underemployment. We are still facing record domestic housing foreclosures. The economy is barely growing and contracted far more severely than previously estimated between 2007 and 2009.  There simply is not enough demand to power the economy forward, because millions of people have little or no money, and millions have no jobs or are barely working. 

Despite this the President and Democratic leaders--save House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (R-CA)--could not be bothered to make a compelling, let alone a weak case, to the American people that an all-out push, using all the levers of the federal government and Federal Reserve, to create jobs would lower the deficit by ensuring more revenues.  They were silent about the fact that reverting to the Clinton-era rates, in conjunction with the Affordable Care Act (the health insurance reform bill), would also dramatically lower the deficit at least by the same margins or more as the current bill's spending cuts. Because, it's clear, the fix was in. The President, the Democrats and the Republicans, for all their pantomime, they achieved their main goal: not to raise any additional federal taxes on rich people. That's it. That's what this is all about.

Oh well. My federal legislators took opposing sides on this mess. I did my usual spiel of calling and sending emails, but my Congressperson, Albio Sires (D-NJ), still voted for this horrible, job-and-Democratic-Party-killing legislation. My two US Senators, Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, however, were among the 26 members of that body who voted against it. Senator Menendez said that "it simply does not force shared sacrifice as the American people have demanded," while Senator Lautenberg rightly said, "This legislation was a shakedown, not a compromise." As the American people demanded. Not that anybody leading either party really cares about what the "American people," if multiple polls or economic statistics or indicators are to be believed, demand or want or, most importantly, need. Not that following failed economic policies will lead to more failure. Ideology and politics are the most important thing, as is the chimera also known as "centrism" or "bipartisanship" or whatever label it assumes, particularly when invoking "tax reform." Because that "centrism" or "bipartisanship" ensures one thing these days: not to raise any additional federal taxes on rich people.  Don't believe me? Here's Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner stating it quite clearly to George Stephanopoulos (h/t Digby) during an ABC interview yesterday:

TIM GEITHNER: Get this budget agreement in place behind us so we remove the threat of default in the economy. Pass these trade agreements to help expand exports. Find a way to help make sure we can expand investment infrastructure so more people particularly in construction get back to work, and find ways through tax reform we can strengthen —

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: How can you strengthen investment when you’re calling for overall deficit reduction?

TIM GEITHNER: Well, you have to figure out a way to pay for it responsibly but there -- we've got a long term tradition of making sure we finance infrastructure over time in a way that's deficit-neutral. We can do that. We can afford to do that.

Nice work if you can get it....

≈≈≈

87 years ago today, the one and only James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem.  I think of him as one of the most important and still undervalued figures in 20th century American life. An author, preacher, public intellectual, political activist, cultural pioneer, sage and mentor, and fearless figure, Baldwin blazed multiple paths that I and countless others have, with deepest gratitude to him, since trod. 

I cannot but think that were he still alive, as overjoyed as he would have been at the election of President Obama and his political gifts, he also would be dismayed at his policies, and might also be speaking out, as one of the nation's eminent octogenarians, on a range of issues affecting us today. What, I wonder, might he think of many of the other shifts in racial, gender and sexual politics since the end of the Reagan era? What might he say about same-sex marriage or where the LGBTQ movement has gone?  How would he appraise contemporary American literature and culture, and African-American arts, letters and culture more broadly? How might he talk about contemporary France and Europe more broadly, where he spent a large portion of his life? I do often wonder. 

When I was younger I often wished I could have met him, but unfortunately never had an opportunity to do so, but several of my friends of mine did, and his passing in December of 1987 was the trigger for the founding of the Dark Room Writers Collective, to which I belonged for many years.  Baldwin's name and spirit were frequently invoked there, and as they have been in many other creative spaces in which I have spent time. Here is a video from the film James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, that offers a glimpse, a tiny one, of who he was.  Enjoy.

From Third World Newsreel's James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket

This Week, Pt1: Als on Baldwin + Reading @ Temple

It's been such a busy week a barely know where to begin. But I'll start with Hilton Als's (at right, in a horrible cellphone photo) provocative talk, "The Exile," which was part of this year's One Book One Northwestern series, focusing on James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain. I've been following Als's work avidly for some time, both his journalism in the The New Yorker and other venues (The Village Voice many moons ago), and his strange, compelling study, The Women (which I hope to teach one of these days). Much in line with his journalism, Als's talk, which included a brief fictional addendum that imagined Baldwin at cocktail parties, was as much about himself and his attitudes towards Baldwin, writing, Black folks, and the vexed relationship between artmaking and socialization as it was about Baldwin. He suggested that Baldwin was torn between two poles: the desire to be alone, and make his art (which a writer must do), and the desire to be social, loved, and, extending from this, famous, and he related this to the quandary many writers face, which is that they expect to be loved for their work, with the work become a kind of prosthesis for the ultimately unloved self. Fame increases the attention and phantasm of love, but doesn't in the end constitute it, and for Baldwin, he ended up becoming something he said he wouldn't but also was unable to achieve the level of accomplishment he aspired to in the genre that was most important to him, prose fiction, or the form, the novel.

Als began by describing how he thought of Baldwin as he watched a news report about the horrific immolation that Betty Shabazz suffered at the hands of her grandson, her husband's namesake, Malcolm Shabazz, and he rather controversially linked this moment to Baldwin by stating that the Black gay boy is regarded at times as a little Malcolm Shabazz, setting the Black house aflame with our difference (well, perhaps not so controversial, as our own Senator Barack Obama has decided to prove); he went on to add a bit about Black gay boys also going after a white Jesus of our own, which was even more problematic, though I think I grasped what he was saying with this as he later discussed Eldridge Cleaver's infamous homophobic attack on Baldwin's work as representing a "racial death wish" and, echoing Baraka's denunciation of the Black middle class in many of his works of the late 1960s, as "the apotheosis" of a "Black bourgeoisie," separated from their culture. Further ironizing this reference, Als talked about Norman Mailer's dismissal of Baldwin's "perfumed wit," or to put it more broadly, his "high faggot style," which Als noted that he loved. Baldwin, however, got his revenge in an essay, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" (title?). From here Als explored personal thoughts about his own relationship with Baldwin, and had already noted that Baldwin was born out of wedlock, as was he (Also was also, I think I heard him say, an adoptee), and was, ina basic sense, an alien in his own family. Despite these parallels, Als felt he wanted to dislike Baldwin more, and I picked up a strong sense of what, of all people, Harold Bloom described as an "agony of influence," with Baldwin not merely an ancestor and predecessor, but the source of an ongoing "agon" for Als. It is true that every Black gay male writer writes under the star (in all senses of that word) of Baldwin (and Hughes, and Nugent, and Cullen, etc.), but for Als, it seems, the relationship transcends the historical and is continually contestory. (Personally I've never wanted to "dislike" Baldwin at all, and when I was younger I reverenced him; I much more aware of his literary failings and his personal imperfections, but he remains for me, as for so many writers, a towering and essential figure. He was, I should add, the spark that light the fire that became the Dark Room Writers Collective, among other things, though his influence was also central to the Other Countries and related writing groups of the 1980s. I also have never been the sort to flee the other Black gay person--or Black person, for that matter--in the room, but that's for another discussion.)

Also tied up his talk by noting that Baldwin's unpublished letters were one of the great unknown masterpieces of American literature. Unfortunately, his family won't allow them to be published because they shed a negative light on their father, who was not his, which led to the rhetorical bow: "even a bastard can be reclaimed by his family." The house in flames, but the arsonist redeemed. I wasn't too sure about this bit, but overall it was an engaging talk--underlined, as was necessary, but Als's performance of it, as interesting and necessary to the lecture as the text itself--and one of the highlights, at least to me, of the fall. (It was also delicious to hear Als invoke his good friend, another Black gay male writer, Darryl Pinckney, as he read Baldwin's Just Above My Head, which Robert Reid-Pharr successfully defends and explicates in his new study Once You Go Black, and which my university colleague Nick Davis also defended in a question he posed to Als. I specifically asked about Black gay male literary geneology, activism, and the place of writing, both in terms of Als and other writers--from Sterling Houston to young Black gay writers of today--and got a sort-of answer; it's a topic that my former colleague Dwight McBride and Devin Carbado broach in their anthology of several years ago, and which still calls out for considerably more treatment.) After the event I got to meet Als and kee-kee with him for a hot second, which was a real treat, but I also got to praise him in person for what I still consider to be one of the best and more outrageous journalistic pieces to appear in a mainstream US publication, his profile of André Leon Talley. As soon as I mentioned it, he knew I had picked up the underlying frequencies in it completely. It will, he says, be in a book that's on its way. I can say with utter sincerity that I can hardly wait to read it.

***

On Thursday I gave a poetry reading at Temple University under the auspices of their Creative Writing program, directed by Samuel R. Delany; poet and scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis (and later, her husband Bob) was my gracious host. It was the first time I'd been to Philadelphia since the MLA Conference a few winters ago, and the first time I'd been to Temple, I think, since my cousin graduated from the Tyler School of Art. (Though my flight from Chicago was delayed an hour and the SEPTA train I was supposed to take broke down, leading to an hour-long wait, I still had a ball.) I read with a talented graduate student, Emily Skaja, and it was a fun reading on so many levels; Chip introduced it, Rachel's students were there, one of my former students from the university brought his wife, and poet and publisher Sueyeun Juliette Lee, now living in Philadelphia and doing her Ph.D. at Temple, was also present. Oh, and the audience was pretty full--for poetry, by an unknown quantity, on a Thursday! Thanks again to Rachel, Chip, Emily, and everyone else to who came out, and here are two pics over the Schuylkill (the second by Rachel--thanks!); Philadelphia's a city that I've always liked visiting quite a bit, and I look forward to going back there again in the future.