Over thirty years has passed since the death of a titan of African American and American literature. In his lifetime, essayist/novelist/playwright James Baldwin achieved fame for his impassioned and erudite writings, especially his searing essays on America’s chronic “race problem” and unwillingness to confront its tortured history. Though known primarily for his sermonic essays, all shaped by his upbringing in Harlem’s fundamentalists black churches in the 1920s and 1930s, Baldwin also achieved prominence for novels that relentlessly addressed the price we all pay for failing to uphold Christianity’s most basic tenet: to love without condition and expectation. From his autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), to the groundbreaking Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), Baldwin was truly a literary maverick, daring to explore then-taboo topics such as same-gender love at a time when doing so was considered salacious. Though his works were mainstays on bestseller lists in the 1960s, he paid a personal and professional price—attacked by both fellow black writers/activists and American institutions such as the FBI: under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, it compiled a voluminous “file” on Baldwin, persecuting him as much for his scalding critiques of American racism as for his sexuality.
The prescience and wisdom of Baldwin’s irrepressible voice continue to reverberate well into the 21stcentury, the past few years representing something of revival of his life and work. Haitian director Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, was a meditation on race and America based on one of Baldwin’s unfinished manuscripts. The film garnered an Oscar nomination and provided a fitting companion to Karen Thorsen’s neglected but definitive 1994 documentary, James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. Novelist and essayist Randall Kenan’s 2007 work, The Fire This Time, paid homage to the author he considered his literary godfather, the book’s cover explicitly invoking that from Baldwin’s most famous nonfiction work, The Fire Next Time (1963). Journalist and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 National Book Award winning Between the World and Me drew both structurally and thematically from Baldwin: whereas Baldwin framed Fire as a letter to his nephew on America’s ongoing racial turmoil and the wages of its unwillingness to confront it, Coates addresses his to his own son. Baldwin’s legacy has even been acknowledged here at GMU: I had the pleasure of organizing a session, “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Roomat 60: Sexuality, Textuality, and the Legacy of a Literary Classic,” as part of our 2016 Fall for the Book literary festival. And on November 16, 2018, the Center for the Arts will present “A Rap on Race,” a dance/theatre collaboration inspired by a discussion between Baldwin and anthropologist Margaret Mead, which was published in a 1971 book of the same name.
The most recent indicator of Baldwin’s continuing relevance is the 2018 film If
Beale Street Could Talk, based on the author’s 1974 novel. On the surface, Beale Street might not have seemed like an obvious choice for director Barry Jenkins following his 2017 Oscar-winning Moonlight. Jenkins’ coming-of-age story (based on playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue) was applauded for its ambitious, nuanced depiction black male sexuality, given its often degrading and monolithic representations in film and other media. Compared to Moonlight, Beale Street is a fairly conventional love story between a young African American woman and man; thus, it’s not nearly as provocative in its exploration of black sexuality. However, the issues the film explores—black men’s less-than-judicious treatment in an often-biased criminal justice system; the too-often contentious relationship between the police and African Americans; suicide—are regrettably as pressing in 2018 as they were in the nearly 45 years since the novel’s publication. Though the novel is not on par with Baldwin’s best fiction, If Beale Street Could Talk nevertheless entails the author’s most heartfelt concerns: the artist as unrelenting prophet in a world that has lost its moral and spiritual bearings; how multiple forms of violence (physical, institutional, psychological), often engendered by racial animus, devastate perpetrators as much as victims; the misuse of Christianity to uphold a toxic, divisive social status quo; and ultimately, the transcendent power of love that can potentially vanquish differences of gender, class, and ethnicity.
Baldwin’s uncompromising vision and persistent belief in what he once called “these yet-to-be United States” is captured in a quote from his first major literary achievement, Notes of a Native Son (1955): “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” The recent release of the filmed adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk reminds us that Baldwin still matters, and I’m optimistic that this flurry of works and events inspired by his life and work will spark the interest of an entirely new generation of readers unfamiliar with the writings of an American literary icon and prophet.
February 07, 2019