James Baldwin (1924-1987) wrote some of the most influential American books of the 20th Century, including “Another Country,” “Giovanni’s Room” and “Notes of a Native Son.” Ayana Mathis (“The Unsettled”) and Viet Thanh Nguyen (“A Man of Two Faces”) discussed the influence of Baldwin’s work on writers of all stripes with Eric Deggans at the 2024 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C
Speaker 1 (00:00:01):
And as was mentioned, yeah. I’m Eric Deins. I’m the TV critic and media analyst at NPR. And this is an amazing time to talk about the centennial of James Baldwin’s birth. I feel like NPR has done a hundred stories about the centennial. We really covered it, and it’s amazing to me because it’s been, what, 70 years since the publication of his first book. It’s been nearly 40 years since he died. And we are still talking about James Baldwin. We may be talking about him more now than we ever have. And so the first question I wanted to ask you guys is why are we talking about James Baldwin now more than we ever have?
Speaker 2 (00:00:52):
We have to get the rhythm of,
Speaker 1 (00:00:55):
I see. I violated the public radio rule where you direct a question at a person rather than making it a jump ball. So I would say,
Speaker 2 (00:01:06):
I mean, it’s funny, we were saying this a little earlier when we were signing books that the unfortunate reality is that he is ever and increasingly relevant. And I mean, I think part of that is because in books like the Fire Next time 1963, obviously we’re sort of in something that almost feels like a parallel moment. This kind of everything is on the line, civil rights are well at that point. It’s all sort of dead in the middle of the civil rights movement. All of these big questions are being decided. It is incredibly urgent. The urgency is fierce, right? To quote MLK and James Baldwin sort of comes out and says, look, this is a country that is on a precipice. We have a choice here. We can decide to move forward. And as he wrote in the fire, next time in a letter to a region, from my mind, we can move forward and we can realize our country or we can. And it feels very much like that’s the moment that we’re in now. And then sadly then in 1972 when we’ll probably get into this later, in no name in the street, we’ve come sort of nine years after that civil rights series of essays or two essays in that first collection. And Baldwin, MLK has been assassinated. Malcolm X has been assassinated. Fred Hampton, not yet, no. Yes,
Speaker 1 (00:02:39):
Medgar
Speaker 2 (00:02:40):
And Medgar, of course. So then James Baldwin is like, what the hell happened here? He’s in sorrow, he’s in grief. And he finds himself having to sort of reiterate in a certain way the same argument, but this time it’s mixed with a sort of incredulous sorrow. We had a chance, we didn’t take the chance. What now? And both of those things I think feel incredibly relevant to this moment.
Speaker 3 (00:03:10):
Yeah. What do you think? Well, I think we still read Bowing because he’s a great stylist. He’s a great writer, mean, so it’s a pleasure to read his prose regardless of what it is that he’s writing about. So we return for that. But I think he’s also relevant because he’s politically relevant and he’s culturally relevant. And the reason why is because the central contradictions that he’s working with were the central contradictions of the country itself. They weren’t the contradictions of the 1940s or the 1950s. They were the contradictions of the founding of the country. And what I mean by that is we as a country, like many countries want to believe we have a linear history. We started off from somewhere worse and we’re going to go somewhere better. But if we look at the very origins of the country, and we look at the fact that we were a country born out of democracy, freedom, and equality, we were also a country born out of enslavement and genocide and colonization.
Speaker 3 (00:03:56):
And both these realities coexisted at the same time. They coexisted during Baldwin’s time. They coexist now. So when we look at our contemporary moment and we see Kamala Harris and we see Barack Obama and we see Donald Trump, these are repetitions of cycles that have already happened before in American history. So the fact that Baldwin was writing about these things in the 1950s at a time when we were undergoing crisis, only foreshadows what is happening today. And another thing about Baldwin that I think is becoming increasingly clear with time is that he was writing not only about the United States, but he was writing about the United States in the world.
Speaker 3 (00:04:33):
And many of his insights were coming about from his time when he was outside of this country. Obviously the time in Paris and in France is very well known to all of us. But he was also spending time Istanbul. That was a very formative period. And he had things to say about the role of the United States as an imperialist country and how that imperialism could not be separated from the domestic issues of race and inequality that concern us as Americans. And he had a lot to say about things like places like Palestine. And so surprisingly, to go back to Baldwin is to see that he is not simply relevant because he’s talking about some of the more sentimental ideas that this can be a better country. He’s actually much more pessimistic once we get into some of the arguments that he was making.
Speaker 1 (00:05:16):
I mean, in a way, it sort of feels like we caught up to his ideas. And what he was saying back then was just so ahead of his time that people didn’t even really understand it until you had a little time to see it play out. So I wanted to ask you guys, and I know the answer for you, when you first encountered
Speaker 4 (00:05:37):
Baldwin
Speaker 1 (00:05:38):
And you were 19, right? And you encountered him in a class, talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2 (00:05:44):
So my first encounter with him, and I should say, so I’m from Philadelphia and I went to a really great high school and all these sorts of things in the eighties. And the reason that’s relevant is because aside from Langston Hughes, I did not encounter a black author in the eighties. Wow. I get to college and I start taking these kind of FM lit courses, African-American literature courses, et cetera. And this is how I encounter Tony Morrison. This is how I encounter Alice Walker. This is how I encounter all these writers. And this is also how I encountered James Baldwin. The particular novel was his first written when he was a very, very, very young man. Irritatingly. I know. It’s so brilliant. Annoyingly.
Speaker 2 (00:06:46):
He grew up very religiously, famously. So he was a child preacher in a Pentecostal church in Harlem where he grew up. And then of course, he also equally famously left the church and had a very contentious relationship with it. But that novel is about the sort of year it’s set on a particular day when he turns 14. And this is a day of accountability. What’s on the line on this day is that he’s come from this religious family, but he has not yet accepted Christ into his heart. And this is a problem for the family, and it’s a problem for him. He feels that perhaps something is a little bit wrong with him or what have
you. And so we follow him on this particular day. And in the course of following him on this day of accountability, we meet his family, his father, his mother, his aunt, and we learn about the ways in which these people found their way to the church.
Speaker 2 (00:07:47):
It’s mingled, it’s fraught. The church is both a place of solace and comfort and safety as much as it is a place of a kind of imprisonment. It is a weaponized religion in his father’s hand. And this was all significant to me because it was sort of my own experience in many ways as a young person growing up in a very, very religious family, less the weaponized part, but certainly the sort of centrality of and strictures of a very, very harsh religious upbringing. We didn’t play cards, we didn’t dance, we didn’t go to the movies. We didn’t drink alcohol, all these sorts of things. And then of course, James Baldwin becomes James Baldwin. So by the time 19-year-old me encounters this book, he is already the storied thinker and writer and artist that he is. And I sort of scribbled around my little poems when I was in high school United. And I don’t think that I understood that it was possible for me to become who I might want to become, not just by virtue of race, also by virtue of class. That novel is very much about class. The Grimes is in go on the mountain. They were a poor family. We were a poor family. So it was this sort of process of, it almost felt as though we were in this kind of conversation that he was whispering in my ear about all of these things that it didn’t seem that anybody else could know,
Speaker 2 (00:09:22):
And a future that I had not necessarily understood could be possible.
Speaker 1 (00:09:28):
So do you think that you realized you could be a writer, writer, a serious writer after reading that?
Speaker 2 (00:09:35):
I think I understood that it was a possibility. I think more than that, what I understood was I think that I thought that in order for me to become a person who was a thinking artist in the world, I think I thought that I had to abandon with deep scorn every element of the religious kind of environment that I had grown up with. And of course, Baldwin’s, and I’m sure we will end up getting into it, but Baldwin’s relationship with the religion of his childhood and his relationship with the church in general was really complicated. He had a lot to say about its harms and its weaponization and its recruitment to most of the bad stuff the West has done in the last 2000 years or so. But he also had another sense of it as being valuable to him as an artist and valuable to him in some other ways. And so I think that one of the things that happened was that it wasn’t so much that I understood that I could be a writer. I think that was part of it. But I think what it helped me understand was that I didn’t necessarily have to jettison everything about what I had known and the people that I had known in order to be a thinking discerning person in the world.
Speaker 3 (00:10:58):
When did you first Pretty much roughly the same time I went to school at uc, Berkeley, and I wanted to be a writer, and I also wanted to be an activist. So I had come from this very sort of elite white education. And I went to Berkeley and I discovered that I was an Asian American and got me very angry and very upset. So I became an Asian American activist.
We love the hyphen.
Speaker 3 (00:11:20):
Yes, hyphen
Speaker 2 (00:11:21):
Is fun. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:11:22):
But it’s very formative for many folks like me. But I was looking for role models, and so I was finding that in Asian American literature. But the other tradition that was really powerful for me was black writing, black literature, the reading, a lot of black writers and James Baldwin was among them. And I’m pretty sure the first book by Baldwin that I read was Notes of a Native Son. And it’s a collection of critical essays where he is really establishing his critical voice and his place as a black writer in the American tradition. And the opening essay of that book is everybody’s protest novel where he takes on Richard Wright and Hart Beecher Stowe, uncle, Tom’s cabin and native son. And of course, he has very harsh things to say about the protest novel. And those two books in particular, and Richard Wright, there’s a whole lore that’s built up around the conflict between Richard Wright and James Baldwin.
Speaker 3 (00:12:13):
And that was really important for me to think through what does it mean to be a writer of color Here I’m looking at this model, what black writers are offering these arguments that they’re putting forth about the relationship of politics to literature and to art and to being, and it was a very fundamental debate. I think it shaped a lot of people, and we’re still talking about that to a certain extent today. I think you commented on it at one point from what I saw. And so I’ve always thought about that debate. And in fact, I thought about it for so much so often that last year I wrote a lecture in which that debate between Baldwin and Wright was a very important part of that, because I think that they were both right in their own ways, and it’s a false choice to have to choose.
Speaker 3 (00:12:54):
Between Richard Wright and James Baldwin, they were both approaching the same dilemma of blackness, which Baldwin characterized as being Kafkaesque in their own ways. And if we look at the long evolution of their careers, Baldwin was probably actually moving closer to Richard Wright’s trajectory that he was critiquing by the end of Baldwin’s life. I mean, Baldwin was becoming more conscious of international arena, more focused on issues of decolonization that Richard Wright was also dealing with in the 1940s and the 1950s. So that was the starting point for me, looking at the young Baldwin and then moving on from there to many other later works.
Speaker 1 (00:13:30):
I find it interesting that you could be so even handed about the conflict between Wright and Baldwin.
Speaker 2 (00:13:36):
I know,
Speaker 1 (00:13:36):
Me too. I’m just like, well, given that your son is named Ellison. Yeah. Oh, like, oh, okay. This is an even-handed guy. But one of the things that I find interesting is that what I think Baldwin does really well is highlight white America’s hypocrisy on social issues, especially
Speaker 4 (00:13:58):
Race.
Speaker 1 (00:13:59):
And you often highlight America’s hypocrisy in terms of imperialism. And you’ve talked about how America is the empire that pretends to not be one. And that sounds like something that Baldwin could have written.
Speaker 3 (00:14:12):
And I think, okay, so I was born in Vietnam. I came as a refugee from the Vietnam War to the United States, and I grew up in a very anti-communist Vietnamese refugee population that was also deeply, deeply Catholic. So some of the agony that Baldwin is describing that you have talked about around religion and the community are things that I have felt too, especially since I felt to be a part of this Vietnamese refugee community. My parents raised me to be an anti-communist Catholic, and I came out a Marxist atheist. So how did that happen? I don’t know. But I feel that same agonized relationship to the community
Speaker 4 (00:14:45):
And
Speaker 3 (00:14:45):
What is a writer supposed to be when the writer loves the community, but is also in sincere disagreement in many ways with that community. So for me, it is been a long struggle to wrestle with the idea of the United States, its mythology, the American dream, which is so seductive to so many immigrants and refugees who come here anti-communism as a part of that package. And to be able to root out American mythology from within oneself is extremely difficult to do. I mean, even those of us who are critical of the United States, for example, it may be very hard for us to decenter an American perspective as we approach the world. And I think Baldwin was really trying to do that by leaving the United States. And of course people make a lot out of the fact that he came back for the civil rights struggle, but then he left. He died in France. I think that says a lot. And so for me, it’s been a difficult struggle to not only think of myself as someone engaged with American domestic struggles of equality and inequality and multiculturalism and racial empowerment and all this kind of stuff, which is all very important. But to also, again, link that to the fact that none of these issues
Speaker 3 (00:15:54):
Can be resolved ever if we don’t give up our imperial power, our military industrial complex, our dreams of global hegemony. These things are interconnected. And the black tradition that I’m attracted to is the one that is prophetic and foresightful enough to see that this is true. You cannot have black liberation without America giving up its weapons. It’s just not going to be possible. Martin Luther King Jr. Went exactly along that trajectory as well. When he gave his Beyond Vietnam speech in 1967, the speech that most Americans have never read,
Speaker 4 (00:16:27):
We
Speaker 3 (00:16:27):
Would much prefer to think of, I have a dream because it affirms our American dream. But beyond Vietnam says, no, we are a racist, militaristic, capitalist society, and that is inseparable from the way we treat black people in this country. And I think Baldwin was also there as well.
Speaker 1 (00:16:45):
Well, and what I also like about what you’ve said is that this idea of American exceptionalism to support it, white people have to believe that the excesses of American culture, the oppression of people of color, it’s like some kind of accident or some kind of unintended consequence
Speaker 4 (00:17:07):
When
Speaker 1 (00:17:07):
It’s actually structurally part of the whole machine. It’s
Speaker 3 (00:17:11):
A feature, not a bug, right. There’s a very interesting book called Notes on a Foreign Country by Susie Hansen, who’s a white woman, and she takes inspiration from Baldwin. She was turned on by Baldwin. And so she discovered that he had spent time in Istanbul. So she went to Istanbul, confronted her whiteness and her Americanness. And what she says is exactly what you say, that Americans persist in believing in their own innocence. They cannot give this up. So somehow we acquired an empire. How did we acquire an empire? We don’t know. It was just a bunch of happy accidents. What did William McKinley say? Well, God just dropped the Philippines in our laps. What are we going to by accident? We have an empire. But if you look at Baldwin, if you look at what Susie Hansen is arguing, no, we’ve made a series of very strategic decisions throughout our history that we’re going to conquer and acquire territory and people, and most Americans are in a serious state of denial about how fundamental that is to the United States, which is how we ended up in Iraq, Afghanistan, just accidentally, no, this is a trajectory of the United States.
Speaker 2 (00:18:14):
I mean, Baldwin calls it that word innocence. That’s the word that he uses in the fire next time. He says that the problem with America is this assumed innocence, right? And that he says, even it’s in a letter to my nephew, and he’s talking to his nephew. For folks who haven’t read that about the sort of the world that awaits him on his nephew’s 15th birthday. And one of the things he talks about is this sort of this, not just the fact that there is this kind of corrupt and hostile country that is waiting for him, but that perhaps the greatest crime and the greatest obstacle to the country ever becoming less corrupt and less hostile is the fact that it insists upon this innocence. And he says the innocence is almost the greater crime.
Speaker 1 (00:19:01):
Right. I wanted to ask you too about Baldwin’s ability with language. His way of writing is just so compelling, and I saw something you wrote for the New York Times where you quoted from Sonny’s Blues, and there’s a character that is worried about his sibling, and he says, I was scared. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins. Tell me about the poetry of that writing and the way that he’s able to draw people in with the way he puts sentences together.
Speaker 2 (00:19:42):
Sundays Blues is one of these, I have a friend of mine, a very dear friend who’s a poet, and we were talking one day about Robert Hayden’s poem, those Winter Sundays. And my friend said, well, the problem is you can’t teach Robert Hayden’s those winter Sundays because it is so perfect that it becomes unteachable.
Speaker 4 (00:19:58):
You
Speaker 2 (00:19:59):
Can’t disassemble it into its parts. And there’s a lot of James Baldwin, particularly among the fiction, particularly Sunny’s Blues, which I will die on the Hill, that it is one of the greatest short stories that America’s ever produced. It’s tremendous, and it becomes a little disassemblable because of its just mastery of language. But I think there’s a couple of things, not to return too much to this kind of pastor’s upbringing of Baldwins, but I think that it’s incredibly important. And I think it’s in all of the prose. It’s in the essays. It’s also in the fiction.
Speaker 2 (00:20:42):
He’s a master of the refrain. He’s a master of sort of lyricism but sound. You can read Baldwin aloud very, very easily, and you sort of find yourself in a certain kind of a cadence. He’s very tuned to tone, to rhythm and to sound. There’s a musicality there. And that is especially the case in Sonny’s Blues who are, for folks haven’t read it, is a story about two brothers, one of whom is sort of a more conventional type and a school teacher, and then this brother of his whom he never really quite understands, who never can quite see who is a jazz musician. This is also a story about art. It is also a story about suffering. And this jazz musician, brother of his is a young man who is much more aware of the fact that suffering is what most folks do, or he is a little bit more comfortable with being in that space, but also drives him a little bit mad. And so he’s a drug problem for a little while. He spends some time in prison. And so that sentence is from early in the story when our narrator learns that his brother has been arrested and this news sits in him all day, he’s a school teacher. So he learns about it in the morning and all day, it’s just trickling down through his being, this dread, this fear. And so Baldwin, he’s incredibly able to, he’s aware that he’s often trading in the inarticulable
Speaker 2 (00:22:18):
And that his job in many ways is to attempt to articulate things that are not in fact articulable. And to return a little bit just to the sort of religious stuff, I think that even those kinds of things play in, there’s a lot of Old Testament in Baldwin, not necessarily directly in terms of things that happened, but this idea that story has to stand in for and communicate the biggest and least communicable aspects of what it is to be a human being, suffering evil that we die, jealousy, striving, faith, all of it. And he’s really attuned to that. And he read the Bible quite a lot as in his capacity as a young preacher. And so you can kind of hear that in the sentences. And you can also see this sort of striving to make story, do things on a level of allegory sometimes, but also on the level of what cannot be spoken. That narrative has to do it.
Speaker 1 (00:23:22):
Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about his religious connection because he writes in letters from a region in my mind about having a religious crisis at age
Speaker 4 (00:23:32):
14
Speaker 1 (00:23:33):
And about feeling like he fled into the church to survive. And that’s a journey of course, similar to John and go tell it on the mountain. But the church also had, the black church in particular just had a really terrible connection to gay people, like condemning them and rejecting them. And so is that tension between him being him, fleeing to a place that he knows doesn’t fully accept him, religion and America, is that part of the tension that makes this work so compelling?
Speaker 2 (00:24:10):
I think it is. I think it’s central to the tension. One of the things that, on the one hand, James Baldwin would say many, many times throughout his career in various different books, he would say, the church is indelible in me.
Speaker 2 (00:24:23):
I never got over it. There’s no pathos like that. Pathos. There’s no beauty like that beauty. There’s no supplication like that. Supplication. And then he would also say, in order for Christianity to in any way redeem itself from the moral morass into which it has sunk, we have to reexamine it. He said this all the time, and it was interesting. It’s almost as though he was making a kind of strange distinction, I think, between what belief could do inside of a person, what it could offer them and what the church could do. On the other hand, when I teach Baldwin a lot, I differentiate them between the two by calling it the church, small C and the church capital C,
Speaker 2 (00:25:06):
The church small C is I think really wonderfully expressed by Alice Walker in the Color purple when Suge Avery says, any God I ever encountered in a church I brought in with me? And so there’s that. And then there’s the church big sea. So we mean the institution, we mean the historical horrors, we mean all of that stuff. But the trappings of the institution, its aesthetics are also useful to Baldwin. So he’s always kind of in this sort of strange space in which he has had to learn, forgive the euphemism, but he has had to learn very painfully to walk and chew gum at the same time. He had to learn that he decided that he wasn’t going to throw the baby out with the bath water, but that the bath water was really bad. He was really bad. And so he’s always sort of in this place where he’s trying to navigate what the church does, big C church, what belief and those aesthetics do small sea and the sort of larger horrors that Fiera has talked about, the ways in which Western Christianity is just sort of been just a tool of decimation. And he’s always sort of occupying this kind of triangle. And he’s sort of in the middle of it, I think,
Speaker 1 (00:26:22):
Man, it sounds like you’re describing what it means to be a person of color in America,
Speaker 2 (00:26:28):
But it is right in micro these forces that are interested in destroying you and a lot of other people, these forces that are interested in their preservation at all costs and their expansion at all costs. And if you yourself, to be the object or in the way of those forces, and those forces include class, they include nationhood and nation state, they include race, of course, they include gender. So in a certain way they, that feeling of similarity seems to repeat itself because there’s a sort of central dynamic. That dynamic itself kind of tends to repeat itself, I
Speaker 1 (00:27:09):
Think. Yeah. So Viet, I wanted to ask you, I joked a little bit about your son being named Ellison, even though you love Baldwin, but Baldwin was also highly critical of protest stories like Native Son. But I was wondering, do you think that a book like the Sympathizer that you wrote, that there are elements of it that are also, that are also a bit of a protest? And how do you connect what you did to Baldwin’s critique of it? And did it fuel your art? Did it make you think any differently about it?
Speaker 3 (00:27:46):
I think when I said I was even handed about writing Baldwin, what I was trying to imply is that for me, protests and politics is, it’s a vast spectrum.
Speaker 3 (00:27:56):
And I think there’s a way in which Baldwin’s writing has been used by people who Baldwin might repudiate to say, we should not be political in our literature. I don’t think that’s what Baldwin was saying at all. That’s not what he was saying, because I think Baldwin is very political as a writer. He just didn’t particularly agree with Native Sons approach. But I think there’s room in our approach to literature, we think of ourselves as political to think that sometimes you need to be angry and sometimes you need to be some other kind of emotion.
Speaker 4 (00:28:24):
And
Speaker 3 (00:28:24):
Baldwin has been identified more with the other more graceful expression of anger and right with the more blunt expression of anger. And my experience has been you need that entire spectrum of possibility to get people to pay attention and to wake up. And so if you read the sympathizer, there is some of that blunt anger in there. And you know what? It was so much fun, so much fun. I finally get to say some of these things that I’ve been feeling for decades and decades, and I didn’t have the capacity to say it. And this is nothing about Baldwin in style. I think Baldwin resonates with a lot of people because we feel the writing. We say, oh, I identify with whatever he said, I lived through that experience. But it’s not just enough to live through it. You have to be able to give expression to it. And that’s what he was able to accomplish. And so for those of us who are writers, I think we all hopefully feel deeply because the depth of the emotions is where the power comes from.
Speaker 3 (00:29:14):
And no matter whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction, we have to tap into those emotions and then we have to find the art to express them. That’s what Baldwin was able to do and write too. So when we talk about politics and literature in the sympathizer, I wanted to write a very political novel drawing from this vast spectrum. So there is some very blunt critiques in the novel of whiteness of America, of imperialism and so on. But then there’s hopefully a lot of sorrow and empathy and melancholy things that we might associate more with Baldwin as well. So they both offered me a great range of lessons. And Ellison, Ralph Ellison, invisible man, he had a huge impact on me. And so the sympathizer was also modeled on that as well. So when I say that, when I say that I drew in the black tradition of literature, what I mean is that all of these writers that were so influential for me were all in their own ways trying to tackle the same core set of problems with different styles. And I had the privilege of coming along a few decades later and borrowing from each of them the lessons that they offered. And then finally, the fact that so much can be drawn from this tradition and from Baldwin and from these other writers is testimony again of what one of Baldwin’s central insights, blackness is universal, that you cannot talk about American experience without talking about black experience. And if you talk about black experience, you’re talking about the United States.
Speaker 3 (00:30:33):
And so there’s no way that we can compartmentalize black experience and say it’s only for black writers, or it’s only for black readers, or somehow it’s only about black people. It’s in fact a human and a universal experience. I mean that in the most non sentimental way, I think he was very non sentimental.
Speaker 1 (00:30:49):
Oh, yeah. But I like the way he made the point that by trying to suppress and deny the presence of blackness, because that ruins that exceptionalism narrative,
Speaker 4 (00:31:01):
That
Speaker 1 (00:31:01):
White people are hurting themselves, that you are denying a part of yourself by cutting us out of that story, which I always found
Speaker 3 (00:31:09):
Really, that’s always been the central dynamic. I mean, Tony Morrison talks about that in playing in the dark, whiteness in the literary imagination. I mean, one of the points that she was making in that book is that the heart of darkness is within white people. It’s not in Africa. It’s like the heart of darkness is within
the colonizer and the racist and the white supremacist that they’ve projected onto everybody else, and that they can’t acknowledge that and they can’t root that out, then they’re going to be condemned. And of course, that’s terrible for white people, and it’s terrible for everybody else onto whom those fears and phobias are projected. And again, Baldwin, as you were saying, was also making that point.
Speaker 1 (00:31:44):
And as writers, I think we kind of realized that there is money to be made and power to be had in feeding that mythology. And the other thing that I found, so I’ve debate with William F. Buckley, and what struck me about that debate is that Buckley was defending the
Speaker 4 (00:32:06):
Myth,
Speaker 1 (00:32:07):
And Baldwin was trying to get him to face the hollowness of that myth. And there’s a lot of money in upholding that myth even today. But I wonder if one of the lessons of Baldwin, and I don’t know if either of you feel this way, is showing us the necessity of confronting that myth and bringing that truth and puncturing that bubble.
Speaker 2 (00:32:30):
Yes, I think absolutely. Also in the fire next time, Baldwin says in letter from a region, in my mind, he says at some point a thing that I didn’t understand for a long time, or maybe took too literal. He says, at some point, he says that the problem with white Americans is that they don’t believe in death. And what he means by that, I think is a belief in the permanence of empire. And the belief in a permanence of a mythology of Americanness empire depends on its ability to continue smoothly forever. It depends upon an illusion of it always having been there, it always will be there. It will always continue. It is as natural as the weather. That’s what it depends on. And so then of course, it can’t contend with things like death or impermanence or an end. And so I think a lot of Baldwin is always sort of trying to be like, if we can confront the fact that there is in fact impermanence, that the American mythology is not a never ending stream of flags on and on at infinitum filled with innocence and heroism, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 2 (00:33:50):
Then perhaps we can actually begin to have a conversation about what happens inside the country, and then also what the country does outside of its own borders. So I think that he was very much always trying to disavow, and I think he was trying to disavow in these very overt political ways. But one of the really, I think, amazing things about Baldwin is that, and maybe this is back to the preacher’s son stuff, there was always this sort of element of metaphysics, this element of, in which he was also thinking about what does a human being? What does a human being do? One of the things human beings do is die permanence is an illusion. It’s not real. And so we can’t project it onto another human being anymore than we can project it on an empire. And if we start to project it on an empire, then we’re in really big trouble. It becomes a foundation of a certain kind of mythology. And I think he was always trying to grapple with that.
Speaker 3 (00:34:49):
Well, I think the mythology is the mythology of American exceptionalism, right? But there’s also a mythology in which that is built upon American individualism as well. We’re all atomized individuals. We have no connection to each other and to Baldwin is trying to build community. And he is also trying to build solidarity. And this is one of those powerful things about Baldwin for me, is that he’s always trying to make these connections, connections across space, across time. So if you read his work, he connects black experience to Native American experience. I mean, he’s very explicit in saying that these two crimes happened simultaneously, that you can’t separate enslavement from genocide. And once, maybe Buckley was really resistant to deflating the mythology, because once American mythology is deflated, you can’t see the world in the same way again.
Speaker 3 (00:35:32):
And if your profit is built upon seeing the world in this way, you’re not going to give up your American mythology. But once you give it up, then you see the world in a different way, which is why I think in 1979, he was able to write letter to the Born Again, which is where he talks about Palestine. So this is what we’re dealing with. Now, go and read Letter to the Born Again, it’s online, the nation.com. And it’s as if he’s writing about our present moment, because so little has changed from then till now. But because he was able to see the connections of solidarity and community, and because he could see that the racism that happens here is inseparable from American foreign policy, he could see that what was happening to Palestinians wasn’t exercise of American. That power and colonialism channeled through Israel. And that kind of prophetic foresight, I think emerges out of that commitment to community, to solidarity, to the continual critique of this mythology
Speaker 1 (00:36:26):
You guys both teach. So you could, I think, relate to this. I find with my students, once you start telling them about stuff like this, it’s like that scene in the Matrix where he sees all the, oh, that’s how that works. Oh, okay. That’s how it works. So we’ve spent a good deal of this talking about how wonderful Baldwin is, but I do want to spend a little time maybe talking about his shortcomings. Let’s talk about where he fell short. And one way that people have criticized him for is his views about gender and the way he’s talked about
Speaker 4 (00:37:00):
Women.
Speaker 1 (00:37:02):
Where does he fall short there? What can we learn from that? Sorry to put you on the spot.
Speaker 2 (00:37:12):
No, Baldwin gender in general. Absolutely. Women in particular. He kind of just had a hard time. You know what I mean? You can read particularly in the novels, we’ve already been talking about Sonny’s Boo, because it’s a great story and it’s a short story, so it’s maybe a little easier to talk about. For our purposes right now,
Speaker 2 (00:37:40):
There are, it’s about two brothers. That’s fine. These brothers have a mom and a dad, and one of the brothers is married, so he’s got a wife named Isabel. And one of the things that happens is in these stories of just, I mean multivalent fiction, right? It is talking about history. It is moving around in time. It is talking about the contemporary moment. It is talking about art. It is talking about the role of the artist in American life. It is doing all these things. These characters are sort of loaded, right? They’re functioning on all sorts of levels, but the women aren’t. And that’s a thing. I think that happens a lot in Baldwin, the mother in this story in Sunny’s blues, she gets a little tropey bit trope. She’s sort of the carrier of the ancestral pain. So she’s the one who sort of tells the story that something very, well, I’m actually spoilers for people, haven’t something bad happened? And how old is this story?
Speaker 1 (00:38:49):
You can’t spoil a story this decades old.
Speaker 2 (00:38:52):
I feel like people might encounter it, and I just want them to sort of encounter it as freshly as they can if they haven’t read it yet. Something very bad happened in the past with his father, with the father of the young men in the story. So she sort of carries that, and she tells the story, but it gets a little weighed in the water,
Speaker 2 (00:39:18):
And it just all gets a little go down, Moses. You know what I mean? And I think that often the roles for women in Baldwin fall into the sort of trope sometimes of the caretaker, occasionally of the kind of sexy lady Jezebel type, and very, very often as the sort of ancestral sight of the deepest pain. And while the thing about tropes is that sometimes they’re true, but the way that we make them is that we layer them. You make a character who isn’t just that, they’re that. And that’s the job. If you’re a fiction writer, all those ands. And I find that with Baldwin, sometimes with women, there just aren’t enough ands.
Speaker 1 (00:40:03):
Yeah. In letters, he talks about girls going about black women going straight from being girls and being matrons.
Speaker 2 (00:40:10):
You’re just, it’s intense. Yeah. First they’re sort of little girls in fire. Next time they’re kind of little girls hanging out, just like, and then the next thing you know, they’re sort of wagging their finger at the young man trying to make ’em go to church. And then the next thing, they’re either the church ma or they’re a prostitute.
Speaker 1 (00:40:26):
That’s
Speaker 2 (00:40:27):
What you’re doing. That’s what you, and it’s a little, yeah, it can get a little like, oh dear, of a man, of such intense insight, preternatural ability to see those things become, I think, a little bit more glaring.
Speaker 1 (00:40:41):
Now, for those of you who’ve been sitting in the audience going, man, I could ask better questions than that. You probably can. And we are going to take them. So why don’t you start gathering at these mics. I’m going to ask one or two more questions of these folks, and then we’re going to get your questions involved as well. I was wondering, did you want to say anything about that?
Speaker 3 (00:41:02):
Oh, I’m going to quote Hilton Les. He wrote an article on James Baldwin in the New Yorker in 1998. And his critique, he has many critiques actually, so you can go so many. But a related one was in relationship to gender and sexuality was his romanticization of certain kinds of masculinity. And the particular example that Hilton Les pointed out was his seemingly infatuation with Black Panther masculinity, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, which is inseparable, obviously from their treatment of women as well. So on the one hand, he’s sort of criticizing Richard Wright for being a certain kind of protest writer. And the other hand he’s romanticizing a certain kind of black masculinity that was born. That was exactly what I think Richard Wright was also trying to criticize in the figure of bigger Thomas as well.
Speaker 1 (00:41:45):
And this is a little different, but I remember some of the stuff that you sent talking about referencing Baldwin, comparing the Vietcong to the Black Panthers.
Speaker 3 (00:41:57):
Now that part I think is true without having, okay, so in no name on the street, he has a section where he says What the United States is doing to the Vietcong is what we are doing to the Black Panthers. So the insurgency in Vietnam is comparable to the insurgency in the ghetto. I mean, it’s an oversimplification and it’s a romanticization of the Vietcong and the Black Panthers. But at the same time, I think again, he’s working, this is the late 1960s when he is writing this, he’s again, that same very important mode of being able to draw the connections between parallel and intersecting operations of American power. And I think in general, he’s right. The suppression of America’s enemies overseas is tied to the suppression of America’s dissonance domestically as well.
Speaker 1 (00:42:46):
And the difference between the use of violence when a white person does it, and when a black person does
Speaker 3 (00:42:52):
It well, I mean, so we are a very violent country, but we tend to romanticize violence when white men use it, the heroic tradition of the guns slinger the frontier violence. It’s heroism. But when black people, and especially black men use violence, it is not heroic. It is what the cultural historian Richard Luckin argued when white people use violence in this country, it’s regenerative violence. It makes us better when anybody else uses violence, it’s degenerative violence, it’s savagery. We see that being played out every single day in this country today.
Speaker 1 (00:43:29):
Yeah, January 6th versus Black Lives Matter.
Speaker 3 (00:43:31):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (00:43:33):
Anyway, let’s start over here. Give us your name, ask your question. We always do this, please. Questions?
Speaker 5 (00:43:43):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (00:43:44):
Question. Ask us your questions. Okay, go ahead.
Speaker 5 (00:43:46):
My name is Farley k Cleghorn. I’m from dc. We barely talked about Baldwin’s sexuality.
Speaker 6 (00:43:52):
Yes.
Speaker 5 (00:43:52):
When I was 14 years old, I read Giovanni’s Room. Giovanni’s Room is very indirect approach by Baldwin to sexuality. It’s written in 1956 when we had essentially state-sponsored terrorism against gay people, including here in the United States. But Baldwin used an entirely white cast set in Paris to describe his own sexuality and his own sexual longings. Why have we not talked about this? You asked better questions than I
Speaker 3 (00:44:22):
Did. I thought we covered that. What do you think? I think it’s absolutely right. I mean, I think when we talk about where does Baldwin’s pain come from, it comes from everything that we’ve been describing, but also obviously comes from his queerness, his homosexuality, his gayness. I think it’s incredibly courageous to write that novel, even though I’m not a fan of the novel personally, I think it’s a better fiction writer than nonfiction writer. It’s another kind of weakness that may be controversial, but I mean, it’s obviously extremely courageous to write that novel in that timeframe as you were pointing out. But the pain of what Baldwin was experiencing, and one of the things that makes him a really powerful writer is he’s willing to go where the pain and the hurt is and draw from that. So even if he didn’t directly express in Giovanni’s room exactly an autobiographical narrative, I think he was drawing from the pain of his own experiences as being a black gay man at a very unforgiving time in both the white world and the black world. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 7 (00:45:21):
Hi, I’m Sidney Morrison, and I just had published a historical novel about Frederick Douglass by Hawthorne books. It’s called Frederick Douglass, a novel. And I noticed there’s a through line between Frederick Douglass and today in the rejection of black leaders who become more universal, the rejection by the black community, because many of the younger black leaders see this universality developing as a diffusion of black power and the black movement.
Speaker 7 (00:45:52):
My question is this, when these leaders, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, when they Malcolm X, when they all become more universal in their perspective about empire, about war, about justice, is it possible to break this cycle of rejection that is a part of the black experience of these older or in some kinds wiser men who, and women who see that we can’t stay within one lane if we’re going to have justice in this world? Or is that just inevitable that these people who become more universal are going to be rejected by those who feel that if you get universal, you lose power in your individual? Cause that’s my question.
Speaker 2 (00:46:46):
I mean, I think the word universal is an interesting one, right? Because I think you sort of described a trajectory that most of the great leaders of that kind of find themselves on. It’s that you begin to, Martin Luther King said very explicitly that there were sort of three essential evils in the United States, and they were race class and militarism. Malcolm X was assassinated before he was going to bring your human rights charges against the United States and the un we were sort of preparing, and then obviously James Baldwin’s trajectory, et cetera. So I guess, I think it’s, how do I say this? I think that there’s a sense in which it isn’t. Sometimes younger activists feel perhaps as though something is being left behind or unattended to, when in reality what is happening is that there’s an understanding that there is sort of a nexus of evils, if you will.
Speaker 2 (00:47:47):
It sort of sounds like something from superhero movie. But anyway, and that the place where they began, which often the place where we begin is an outgrowth of where we find ourselves is not something that’s being left behind or jettisoned, but it is sort of moving forward and becoming part of an understanding that’s more like a constellation as opposed to a sort of concentration on one star. And I think sometimes I wonder sometimes if part of what happens is that it’s also a natural cycle as these leaders thinking expands, their vision expands, something else is happening. That’s interesting. They are as angry as they ever were. They are as outraged as they ever were. But something else begins to creep in, which I think also is a natural evolution of thought if you’re sort of thinking about the human situation and that something else that begins to creep in are two things. And these are going to sound like Hallmark words, but I think they’re political words, their hope and their love and those, and I don’t mean those as emotions, I don’t mean them as sentiments, I mean them as ontological and political forces.
Speaker 2 (00:49:15):
And I think that that thinking sort of begins to kind of come in more and more. And sometimes I think for younger people that can feel like a betrayal of something, it can feel like no anger is the only place that we’re supposed to be, or that you got to choose. You can either feel, think about love, or you can think about rage. And I don’t think you have to choose. And I think that often those leaders are saying, don’t
Speaker 7 (00:49:40):
Have to choose.
Speaker 2 (00:49:40):
You don’t have to choose. These things are part of it. I mean, Baldwin very famously said about Malcolm X, that the reason nobody could deal with Malcolm X was not because he hated white people, but because he loved black people. And I think, and that’s the sort of love that I’m talking about, and I know that doesn’t really quite answer your question, but it also just seems like a kind of kill your fathers in mother’s cycle, which is part of what’s happening in everybody’s protest novel, right? He’s got bones to pick, but he’s also like this guy. He is a young man. So I think it’s part of his cycle as well.
Speaker 1 (00:50:15):
I also wonder if part of it isn’t, we know how good white culture is at assimilating people at co-opting people. And I wonder if there isn’t a very natural and reasonable suspicion that once that message gets more broader, that, oh, they’re getting co-opted. And watching that Buckley Baldwin debate, what struck me was that I don’t think there were any other black people in that room, but Baldwin. And I was just thinking to myself, man, I mean, I love the points he’s making, but he’s making them to a sea of white people and he is living in France, and would you blame a young black person for saying, is this guy really connected to us? And I wonder if that isn’t some of it. Thank you. Go ahead.
Speaker 8 (00:51:08):
Alright. My name is Jaquan. Just got a quick question. You talked about how Baldwin kind of wrote about women characters and lacking some of the multifaceted aspects of things, and we know Tony Morrison was one of the pioneers of doing that. But I do want to ask you, are there any other works out there that you think are valuable with capturing that wholeness in women? Like that whole personhood that some older authors kind of lacked
Speaker 3 (00:51:32):
In the black tradition or
Speaker 8 (00:51:34):
Just on the whole spectrum of literature? Maybe there’s some other things that exist that are just as valuable.
Speaker 3 (00:51:41):
That’s the worst question to ask me. Mine just goes automatically blank when someone says, give, recommend a book.
Speaker 1 (00:51:49):
When somebody asks me to recommend a TV show. And I’m like, well, maybe there’s a, don’t say law and order. Don’t say law and order anyway. Go ahead. You first.
Speaker 2 (00:52:01):
I mean, certainly Tony Morrison, as you mentioned, certainly Alice Walker. And obviously my mind is going blank, except for the biggest Marques,
Speaker 1 (00:52:09):
You’re not going to recommend yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:52:14):
Maybe read her book. Black Women in particular, poor black women are kind of my subject. But I think a lot of these, if you’re looking for things that are maybe also a little bit older, I think a lot of Tony k Bombar, these kinds of writers, June Jordan, these folks that were in that milieu, I think are amazing. If you’re looking for someone, people that are not exactly contemporaries of Baldwins, but not uber contemporary of the right now.
Speaker 3 (00:52:48):
Okay, now you’ve prompted my thinking. All right. So Zoro, Neal Hurston, right? She’s fell out of the whole debate. I feel bad. I know that’s wrong with, so that’s why First happens to all of us.
Speaker 1 (00:53:01):
Sorry to put you on the spot like that.
Speaker 3 (00:53:03):
And Petri, the street, that novel story. And y’all asking
Speaker 1 (00:53:06):
Much better questions than that.
Speaker 8 (00:53:09):
That’s awesome. And Petri?
Speaker 3 (00:53:10):
Yeah,
Speaker 1 (00:53:10):
And Petri the street.
Speaker 8 (00:53:11):
Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:53:13):
Yes, ma’am. Hi. Just move it towards your mouth a little bit there. There you go.
Speaker 9 (00:53:19):
Hi, my name’s Carolyn. And I think I’ve so far really resonated with so many of the conversations on contradictions of immigrant communities, of the country we live in, even of Baldwin himself and other similar authors. And I suppose as you’re moving closer to the Imperial Court, talking about these sorts of things, or a lot of these authors becoming anti imperialism is so popular now talking in pop culture or TV shows. What are the things you keep in mind looking back on these authors or working on things ahead and trying to make sure you’re not being co-opted into that core? It’s kind of a strange contradiction that we are experiencing right now.
Speaker 3 (00:54:09):
Anti imperialism is popular right now.
Speaker 9 (00:54:11):
I mean,
Speaker 3 (00:54:12):
With
Speaker 1 (00:54:14):
The kids, I wish it was more popular with the young kids. I don’t want it to be more popular. Having just seen all the cha shirts, haven’t you?
Speaker 9 (00:54:20):
I was in TV shows, books. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 3 (00:54:25):
Well, I mean, going back to the question about Baldwin being a black queer writer and how we barely touched on that. I mean, I think part of how you know that you’re touching on the nerve of power, the exposed nerve of power is what people don’t want to talk about, what people want to silence, what is literally unspeakable. And so what is that? That’s going to vary moment to moment. And then if we want to be anti-imperialist, we have to have the courage to put our finger on that nerve that no one else wants to touch. So for me right now, I mean, what the question is, Palestine, I mean, the Democratic National Convention didn’t even allow a Palestinian American to speak. What are people afraid of? So we may be saying anti imperialism is popular, but in fact, that is a sign that imperialism still endures.
Speaker 10 (00:55:11):
There you go.
Speaker 11 (00:55:13):
Hi, my name is Zara, and I’m kind of the second coming of an earlier question. In a very popular Paris Review interview, James Baldwin was asked about the white cast of Giovanni’s room, and in response he had said that he didn’t feel as though he could contend with the black identity, his sexual identity, and all of that set within Paris. The magnitude of such a question was beyond his ability at the time. I’m wondering, we live in an age where intersectional is such a buzz word, and also in addition to that, such an important concept in addressing the intersections of who we are. Do you feel that those limitations in addressing these nexus points of identity, is the limitations of the time? Or have you found in your work or in your process that you actually did have to contend with atomizing a particular part of your identity and putting it in isolation under the microscope to really understand it apart from all of these other pieces that might be fighting for your attention and your introspection?
Speaker 3 (00:56:35):
Well, he came to Paris in 1948 as 24-year-old, and he published Giovanni’s Room in 1956, I think. Right? That’s only eight years. And I don’t know how you write, but I write, my development as a younger writer was very, very slow. So I had all these great projects in my mind that I just could not accomplish. I didn’t
have the maturity, I didn’t have the technical capacity. I didn’t have the artistry to pull it off. So in your mind, as a writer, you may have all kinds of concepts that you know should do,
Speaker 3 (00:57:07):
But you may not necessarily have the ability to pull it off. So I read that his dilemma very generously, and then saying, imagine how complicated that must have been. He’s being very honest in terms of saying that. And so in my own personal example, I spent 17 years writing a short story collection called The Refugees, which I’m pretty proud of. I think it’s a pretty good book, but I also think that it’s much more limited in its ambitions and the sympathizer, which I wrote next. I wanted to write a novel like The Sympathizer when I was 20. I just couldn’t have done it, even though theoretically in my mind, I knew exactly what kinds of questions I wanted to work through. So I had to work my way up to it. And so yes, he was a very young writer when he was writing that book.
Speaker 2 (00:57:44):
And I would only say also that we have to always keep in mind that Baldwin was deeply interested in artistry. We’ve talked a little bit about him as an artist, but in many ways we’ve sort of been talking about it more in the context of political life and these kinds of things. But I think part of what V is saying is you have the ability to do this, but also as you said, do you have the artistry to do it? So it’s a big difference between sort of writing a pamphlet and writing a book, writing a novel, and your responsibilities are not quite the same. Your responsibility is also to artistry. And I think to answer the sort of second part of your question about an parts of your atomizing, parts of yourself, in order to, in my experience, not so much. But I think that part of that is because there’s a sense in which my understanding, and I suspect that this is also the case with really most writers worth their salt, is that you have a certain responsibility to character.
Speaker 2 (00:58:50):
You have a certain responsibility to story, you have a certain responsibility to artistry. And that means that perhaps as you are trying to form a character or create whatever worlds you’re trying to create on the page, all of those, whoever those people are, is going through the kind of crucible of your imagination and coming out on the other side. And so that takes a long time. It takes a fair amount of skill, the better that you get at it. And it also takes a holistic understanding of a human being as a human being. So if I think, well, I can’t make a whole human being that is X and Y and z and M, and what kind of full human being can I make, those are also the choices that you’re making. And I think those are also the choices maybe that Baldwin is grappling with and kind of speaking to in that Paris Review article that you mentioned.
Speaker 1 (00:59:53):
Okay. I’m getting the high sign to wrap it up, but we’re like one of the last ones today. So let’s try and get the three of you, get your questions answered, and if they pull me off the stage, just blame me for not managing the time Well, right here, here and there. Go ahead.
Speaker 6 (01:00:12):
Hi, I’m Matt. I just have two questions. And at the risk of oversimplifying how Baldwin shorted perhaps with his female characters, how do you see that shorting in relation to his queerness and the relative oppression freedom spectrum of that? How do you feel? Oh man, I’m totally bundling this question, but
Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
No problem, man.
Speaker 6 (01:00:48):
Women were more free with their sexuality in relation to queer men at the time. Do you feel like that in any way played into his underdevelopment perhaps, of female characters in his work?
Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
We’re both like
Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
Hot potato you, that one
Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
To my mind, I mean, this is maybe also an oversimplification, forgive me, but it just feels like a kind of not terribly complicated undercurrent of misogyny. You know what I mean? And not that I’m saying that Baldwin was a misogynist, exactly. But I think that in the evolved thinking of folks who are thinking about the political arena, and these are Martin Luther King’s comment about how, which was very true. These three evils are militarism, class and race, but notably gender’s not in there. And so I think that those oversights are not necessarily tied to queerness per se, because I do think that sometimes when we’re thinking about, particularly historically, but even now, sometimes when we think about queer men, we make assumptions about whatever sympathies they might have about women. And that is not necessarily the case. So I think it’s just sort of the ways in which conversations about massive inequalities and injustice and the sort of nexus of those things leaves out questions of gender. It still does. And certainly then it absolutely did. So it seems to me that it has more to do, that more, a little more to do that with that necessarily than queerness per se.
Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
What strikes me is we’re so used to Baldwin producing forward thinking work
Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
In
Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
The fifties and the sixties. That stands up to where we are now on these issues. But we’re talking about when we were talking about that other work, a black man writing about white people in France in the fifties. I mean, that’s an amazing thing to me. So I think sometimes maybe we expect a lot of him, we expect him to be writing, to have a modern take on gender and a modern take on race and a modern take on politics. He did a lot of that stuff, but some of this stuff, he was a guy who came of age in the forties and fifties. Does that sound okay? We’ll take you and then we’ll take you.
Speaker 12 (01:03:41):
Yeah. So a question on sympathizer. So during the time I was reading it, I was also reading Edwards’s Orientalism, and that kind of made me interested in this idea between knowledge creation and empire and how that’s intertwined. So with that, I’m kind of interested in what was, was there anyone in particular that motivated the professor and the sympathizer? And then what’s kind of the relation you see between Vietnam and the creation of knowledge for Empire and currently the creation of knowledge for Empire now?
Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
Oh, I mean, the professor is the professor of Oriental Studies. There’s so many of these people out there. He is definitely a template for this entire approach of white male, European American Eurocentric expertise. And it’s a satirical character. But I mean, most of the white men who study, who do Asian studies that I know have Asian wives, I don’t know why as happens in the novel. It’s a, it’s a, but satire is one of the most important ways I think, of deflating power and mythology and so on, and the pretentiousness of the knowledge production, which say is also trying to deflate in a much more high minded manner than I did in the sympathizer. But I think Vietnam, you could argue that Vietnam is central to this entire apparatus of American power, but that’s not to say anything especially special about Vietnam. I could say Korea was central too, or the Philippines was central as well, or Japan is essential too.
Speaker 3 (01:05:18):
All of these different countries in Asia broadly defined, played their role in the exercise of American power that allowed America to develop weapons and to argue that it could know the Oriental mind, that the Oriental would always submit to greater power. United States is not over and over and over and over again. So I think that Vietnam was central at the moment, and it’s still important now because I think so many of the conflicts and discussions we’re having today, in fact, can be directly traced back to the upheavals of the war in Vietnam. But again, it’s not to say anything special about Vietnam because you could go back and say that was happening during the Philippine American War as well. So what’s important about this continuity is to not claim exceptionalism about any of these tragedies, but to acknowledge as I think, again, we’ve been saying repeatedly about Baldwin is that there’s this long arc of history. It doesn’t necessarily bend towards, what is the word? Justice? Justice, right? It could be true or it could be continually being shaped by injustice as
Speaker 1 (01:06:22):
Well. Yeah, I think it takes a little elbow grease to bend it towards justice. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:06:28):
Yes.
Speaker 13 (01:06:30):
Oh God, this is a little tough for me.
Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
You can just bend that down. Bend it down. There you go. There you
Speaker 13 (01:06:34):
Go. Hello, my name is Kayla and I’m a college student, and I’ve been toying with the idea of writing. When I was applying for college, it was helpful in terms of getting scholarships, but in high school I went to a white high school and I really struggled with being judged in the standard Eurocentric ideals in writing programs. And so I’ve been told that I have a good voice, but I get demerit on not fitting certain conventional structures. And so I was wondering if either of you had any experience with breaking out of the norms of what’s typically expected when you are looking at writing programs or fellowships, but also just fermenting your craft in general? I think that when I look at black writing, there is a difference in how we tell stories, but it’s hard to do that when you’re say, going to a southern public college. So I was just wondering about that.
Speaker 3 (01:07:47):
What do you think? That’s a great question to end on actually.
Speaker 4 (01:07:50):
It
Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Is, yeah. Well, I think I appreciate the dilemma that you find yourself in. I think so many of us as writers who find ourselves cast as outsiders or marginalized or others in some way have experienced that dilemma repeatedly. For me, I wrote again, that book, the Refugees, I wrote that over 17 years, and I was writing that book for me, but I was also writing it for other people. I was worried about my professors, my editors, my agents, the reviewers. And I did still produce, I think, a decent book out of that. But the shadow of those other people’s expectations was always hanging over the work. And in writing the sympathizer, I reached a moment where I just said, you know what? I’m going to write this book for me.
Speaker 3 (01:08:32):
And that was an enormously liberating moment for me. I think I share that with other writers who I’ve talked to as well. I think it’s really difficult to get to that point where you only are able to write for yourself. It sounds easy, but I think it’s actually really, really hard to do that. I think for me to be able to do that, I had to find the artistic ability to do it. That takes years for me. It took years and years of training. You could probably do it next year, and I’ll hate you if you do that, but I didn’t have that talent. So it took me years and years to acquire the discipline to do it. But also for me, it took maturity life experience of living through 20 or 30 years until I could finally say, I don’t care. And it’s really hard to say, I don’t care when you’ve spent your life as a good student caring about what other people think. And that’s the dilemma for a lot of people in different areas, but especially for writers, you spend your life going through school training to be a writer, which means it’s really hard not to internalize
Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
Other people’s expectations, whatever those happen to be. And so for me to be a writer was decades of acquiring the ability and decades of unlearning other people’s expectations.
Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
I would only add this is you’re going to be like, oh, God, just really read and read and read and read, and not just because it sort of exposes you to things and ideas, but it exposes you to the legitimacy of styles that have been discredited. And that’s very, very, very important in helping you to sort of develop what it is that you have to say and getting to that place, both in terms of artistry and in terms of just, you’re just going to do it where you can, getting to that place where you can write whatever it is that you need to do.
Speaker 2 (01:10:30):
I doubt very much that I would’ve written a word if I had never read James Baldwin or Tony Morrison or any of these people, or Faulkner. There’s a bunch of people that I would, because these are obviously with these others, we’re talking specifically about things about identity. But either way, I mean, Faulkner is always kind of pushing boundaries of decipher ability, really sometimes. But you know what I mean? So that’s all happening. But my point is, as much as it sounds like a platitude, reading is not just your training ground, but it is the way in which you are able to learn to discern in which you are able to learn to sort of legitimize what it is that you are trying to do, even though other forces are trying to delegitimize it.
Speaker 1 (01:11:14):
I don’t know if you guys have experienced this, I experienced this even in the reading a Baldwin that I was doing to get ready for this, is that it was inspiring me to think about putting words together in different ways.
Speaker 4 (01:11:26):
It
Speaker 1 (01:11:26):
Was inspiring me to sort of tackle writing in different ways, because I was seeing him do things that worked. And I was like, wow, maybe there’s a way to, so that’s one thing that can happen. But what comes with experience is that you try things and you figure out what doesn’t work, and you figure out what works and you develop. If you’re really focused, you develop an idea within yourself of what works and what doesn’t. And you are better at judging your own work than maybe other people are. And that takes time to develop. So you have to kind of believe in your voice, but you also have to be willing to sometimes admit when it leads you astray. And that’s the hardest thing. That’s what comes with experience. That’s what he learned. That’s what you learned. I bet. So anyway, that’s my 5 cents. Thanks guys. Sticking with us big hand to our authors now.
