#onhisbirthdaytoday
James Baldwin’s
writings have always had such a quaint charm of their own!
Rarely a writer of finest ‘gems
serene’ one could spot, in literary fiefdoms of this past century!
Bloom’s
encomiums on Baldwin’s oeuvre is one such case in point!
Baldwin paddles with
finesse in genres of all hues, and with Dr. Johnson’s ‘epitaphic’ lines on Goldsmith,
one could say with all reasonable conviction that, ‘he left scarcely any style
of writing untouched and touched nothing that he did not adorn!’
As a Black American in
the United States, much of his works detail on the ignominies and the stigmas,
the humiliation and the opprobrium the Blacks had to undergo at the hands of
the whites.
In his memoir titled, Notes
of a Native Son he discusses amongst a host of other personal events and
incidents, on how he was able to find the ‘call’ of the artist within him!
One cannot help but
host a toast to Baldwin’s phenomenal narrative style, and his amazing way with
words in this little memoir.
In fact, Notes
of a Native Son, has added appeal to the avid reader, because of his textual
allusions from such great minds that adorn the entire gamut of these ‘Notes’!
On the Civilised –
Savage binary, [a pivotal point of reference in Postcolonial Studies,] Baldwin
points out the sad fact that the so-called ‘civilised’ have never honoured,
acknowledged or recognized the so-called ‘savage’, the source of their wealth!
On the other hand, the savages have always described the Europeans as ‘people
from heaven!
He says -
Not once have the Civilized been able to honor, recognize,
or describe the Savage. He is, practically speaking, the source of their
wealth, his continued subjugation the key to their power and glory.
I have said that the Civilized have never been able to
honor, recognize, or describe the Savage. Once they had decided that he was
savage, there was nothing to honor, recognize or describe.
But the savages describe the Europeans, who were not yet, when
they landed in the New (!) World, White, as the people from heaven.
Neither did the savages in Africa have any way of foreseeing
the anguished diaspora to which they were about to be condemned. Even the
chiefs who sold Africans into slavery could not have had any idea that this
slavery was meant to endure forever, or for at least a thousand years.
On his high school
buddy’s motivation that made him publish personal reflections, Baldwin says –
It was Sol Stein, high school buddy, editor, novelist,
playwright, who first suggested this book. My reaction was not enthusiastic: as
I remember, I told him that I was too young to publish my memoirs.
I had never thought of these essays as a possible book. Once
they were behind me, I don’t, in fact, think that I thought of them at all.
Sol’s suggestion had the startling and unkind effect of causing me to realize that
time had passed. It was as though he had dashed cold water in my face.
If I was trying to discover myself—on the whole, when
examined, a somewhat dubious notion, since I was also trying to avoid
myself—there was, certainly, between that self and me, the accumulated rock of
ages.
This rock scarred the hand, and all tools broke against it.
Yet, there was a me, somewhere: I could feel it, stirring within and against
captivity. The hope of salvation—identity—depended on whether or not one would
be able to decipher and describe the rock.
One song cries, “lead me to the rock that is higher than I,”
and another cries, “hide me in the rock!” and yet another proclaims, “I got a
home in that rock.” Or, “I ran to the rock to hide my face: the rock cried out,
no hiding place!”
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me,
certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.
The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American,
be he/she legally or actually Black or White. It is a fearful inheritance, for
which untold multitudes, long ago, sold their birthright. Multitudes are doing
so, until today.
This horror has so welded past and present that it is
virtually impossible and certainly meaningless to speak of it as occurring, as
it were, in time. It can be, and it has been, suicidal to attempt to speak of
this to a multitude, which, assuming it knows that time exists, believes that
time can be outwitted.
“And,” says Doris Lessing, in her preface to African
Stories, “while the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among
the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, colour prejudice is not
our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that
prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the
sun.”
Amen. En avant.
18 April 1984
Amherst, Massachusetts
There ends Baldwin’s
Preface to the 1984 Edition of Notes of a
Native Son!
Now for added snippets
for y’all from this wonderful read, for a teaser to reading the book –
In those days my
mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies. As
they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other.
The children probably suffered, though they have since been kind enough to deny
it, and in this way I read Uncle Tom’s
Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities
over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I read just about
everything I could get my hands on…
By the time I was
twenty-four I had decided to stop reviewing books about the Negro problem—
which, by this time, was only slightly less horrible in print than it was in
life—and I packed my bags and went to France, where I finished, God knows how, Go Tell It on the Mountain.
In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that cornerstone of
American social protest fiction, St. Clare, the kindly master, remarks to his
coldly disapproving Yankee cousin, Miss Ophelia, that, so far as he is able to
tell, the blacks have been turned over to the devil for the benefit of the
whites in this world—however, he adds thoughtfully, it may turn out in the
next. Miss Ophelia’s reaction is, at least, vehemently right-minded: “This is
perfectly horrible!” she exclaims. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel,
having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women.
Sentimentality, the
ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of
dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray
his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always,
therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.
Both Gentleman’s Agreement and The Postman Always Rings Twice exemplify
this terror of the human being, the determination to cut him down to size. And
in Uncle Tom’s Cabin we may find
foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more
palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet
with a terrible power.
The figure from whom
the novel takes its name, Uncle Tom, who is a figure of controversy yet, is
jet-black, wooly-haired, illiterate; and he is phenomenally forbearing. He has
to be; he is black; only through this forbearance can he survive or triumph.
(Cf. Faulkner’s preface to The Sound and
the Fury: These others were not Compsons. They were black:—They endured.)
They are fantasies,
connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that
such movies as The Best Years of Our
Lives or the works of Mr. James M. Cain are fantasies. Beneath the dazzling
pyrotechnics of these current operas one may still discern, as the controlling
force, the intense theological preoccupations of Mrs. Stowe, the sick vacuities
of The Rover Boys.
In Native Son, Bigger Thomas stands on a
Chicago street corner watching airplanes flown by white men racing against the
sun and “Goddamn” he says, the bitterness bubbling up like blood, remembering a
million indignities, the terrible, rat-infested house, the humiliation of
homerelief, the intense, aimless, ugly bickering, hating it; hatred smoulders
through these pages like sulphur fire. All of Bigger’s life is controlled,
defined by his hatred and his fear.
In the case of the
Negro the past was taken from him whether he would or no; yet to forswear it
was meaningless and availed him nothing, since his shameful history was
carried, quite literally, on his brow.
Shameful; for he was heathen as well as
black and would never have discovered the healing blood of Christ had not we
braved the jungles to bring him these glad tidings.
However we shift the
light which beats so fiercely on his head, or prove, by victorious social
analysis, how his lot has changed, how we have both improved, our uneasiness
refuses to be exorcized.
And nowhere is this more
apparent than in our literature on the subject—“problem” literature when
written by whites, “protest” literature when written by Negroes—and nothing is
more striking than the tremendous disparity of tone between the two creations. Kingsblood Royal bears, for example,
almost no kinship to If He Hollers Let
Him Go, though the same reviewers praised them both for what were, at
bottom, very much the same reasons.
These reasons may be
suggested, far too briefly but not at all unjustly, by observing that the
presupposition is in both novels exactly the same: black is a terrible color
with which to be born into the world.
Now the most powerful
and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in
America is unquestionably Richard Wright’s Native
Son.
The feeling which
prevailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter,
uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of what strides
might be taken in a free democracy; and its indisputable success, proof that
Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful
facts.
Americans, unhappily,
have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an
innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions,
or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as
are given for heroism on the field of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride,
could never have been written before—which was true. Nor could it be written
today. It bears already the aspect of a landmark.
It is, on the surface,
remarkable that this book should have enjoyed among Americans the favor it did
enjoy; no more remarkable, however, than that it should have been compared,
exuberantly, to Dostoevsky, though placed a shade below Dos Passos, Dreiser,
and Steinbeck; and when the book is examined, its impact does not seem
remarkable at all, but becomes, on the contrary, perfectly logical and
inevitable.
We cannot, to begin
with, divorce this book from the specific social climate of that time: it was
one of the last of those angry productions, encountered in the late twenties
and all through the thirties, dealing with the inequities of the social
structure of America.
Native Son begins with the
Brring! of an alarm clock in the squalid Chicago tenement where Bigger and his
family live. Rats live there too, feeding off the garbage, and we first
encounter Bigger in the act of killing one.
One may consider that
the entire book, from that harsh Brring! to Bigger’s weak “Good-by” as the
lawyer, Max, leaves him in the death cell, is an extension, with the roles
inverted, of this chilling metaphor. Bigger’s situation and Bigger himself
exert on the mind the same sort of fascination.
The premise of the
book is, as I take it, clearly conveyed in these first pages: we are
confronting a monster created by the American republic and we are, through
being made to share his experience, to receive illumination as regards the
manner of his life and to feel both pity and horror at his awful and inevitable
doom.
This is an arresting
and potentially rich idea and we would be discussing a very different novel if
Wright’s execution had been more perceptive and if he had not attempted to
redeem a symbolical monster in social terms.
Hollywood’s peculiar
ability to milk, so to speak, the cow and the goat at the same time—and then to
peddle the results as ginger ale—has seldom produced anything more arresting
than the 1955 production of Carmen Jones.
In Hollywood, for
example, immorality and evil (which are synonyms in that lexicon) are always
vividly punished, though it is the way of the transgressor—hard perhaps but far
from unattractive—which keeps us on the edge of our seats, and the transgressor
himself (or herself) who engages all our sympathy.
Similarly, in Carmen Jones, the implicit parallel
between an amoral Gypsy and an amoral Negro woman is the entire root idea of
the show; but at the same time, bearing in mind the distances covered since The Birth of a Nation, it is important
that the movie always be able to repudiate any suggestion that Negroes are
amoral—which it can only do, considering the role of the Negro in the national
psyche, by repudiating any suggestion that Negroes are not white.
To be continued…
images: Bettmann/Corbis, penguindotcom
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