James Baldwin The Fire Next Time. Tuesday May 30 th

Transcription

1 James Baldwin The Fire Next Time Tuesday May 30 th

2 LECTURE OUTLINE 1) Biography and history 2) Letter To My Nephew 3) Letter From a Region in My Mind/Down at the Cross

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4 BIOGRAPHICAL Born 1924 in Harlem, New York 8 siblings Stepfather Became a teen preacher at 14 Orilla Bill Miller Essays (The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, Notes of a Native Son...) and novels (Go Tell It On the Mountain, Giovanni s Room, Another Country... )

5 HARLEM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Harlem as the largest site for incomers from the Great Migration ( ) Both of Baldwin s parents migrated from the south (separately) Site of civil unrest in protest of police brutality Harlem Renaissance 20 th century cultural movement, self-affirmative Black identity W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Zora Neal Hurston, Jean Toomer, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker...

6 BIOGRAPHICAL Life abroad: France and Turkey Confrontation of different racial dynamics Baldwin as witness Died in the South of France in December 1987

7 CATEGORIZING BALDWIN Black Gay Civil Rights figure... sort of Expatriate Self-imposed exile

8 ESCAPE FROM THE U.S. Baldwin was trapped by his Americannness. (Magdalena Zaborowska, James Baldwin s Turkish Decade) I got to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out of New York. My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people. Reading had taken me away for long periods at a time, yet I still had to deal with the streets and the authorities and the cold. I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. The Paris Review, Incident at the restaurant in New Jersey (Notes of a Native Son)

9 AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCES IN THE U.S. Mid-twentieth century Conditions of life at the time Civil Rights Movement Black Nationalism But no one totalizing experience

10 FRIENDSHIPS Malcolm X Martin Luther King, Jr. Medgar Evers Marlon Brando Sedat Pakay Expat circles abroad

11 THE FIRE NEXT TIME Published in 1963 Two letters: Letter to my Nephew and Letter From a Region in My Mind (also known as Down at the Cross) Both originally published as essays in The Progressive and The New Yorker respectively

12 MY DUNGEON SHOOK: LETTER TO MY NEPHEW ON THE ONE-HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE EMANCIPATION First published in The Progressive in 1963 Baldwin addresses his teenage nephew, also called James Emancipation Proclamation (1863) Mix of public and private The talk about race Question of audience

13 TA-NEHISI COATES, BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME Comparison to Baldwin Father to Son, Uncle to Nephew: Black male heritage Who is Coates audience?

14 OPENING LINES Baldwin places nephew into the family lineage Also places him into lineage of violence Well, he [your grandfather] is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him (333) Death, racism, and white supremacy introduced immediately

15 THE QUESTION OF INNOCENCE It is the innocence which constitutes the crime (334) Aim of letter: to prepare nephew for the denial of the innocents I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, No! This is not true! How bitter you are! but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist (334) This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it is intended that you should perish (335)

16 EXPLAINING HIS NEPHEW S CIRCUMSTANCES You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever (335) Think about letters of this genre hopeful and optimistic about the future You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity Warns against his countrymen Take no one s word for anything, including mine but trust your experience

17 KNOW THYSELF Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go (335) Self-knowledge as a tool against white supremacy The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear (335) Self-knowledge one of the enduring themes in Baldwin s works

18 THE FALSENESS OF ACCEPTANCE AND INTEGRATION What is entailed in acceptance and integration? Baldwin s final injunction: to accept the innocent people Flips the meaning of integration The innocent are ignorant to and trapped by their own history We cannot be free until they are free

19 LETTER FROM A REGION IN MY MIND Take up the White Man s burden Ye dare not stoop to less Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your Gods and you. Kipling.

20 Down at the cross where my Saviour died, Down where for cleansing from sin I cried, There to my heart was the blood applied, Singing glory to His name! Hymn.

21 RECAP OF SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT Civil Rights period Fight for integration Nation of Islam Fight for separation

22 COMPONENTS OF THIS ESSAY A coming of age narrative Encounter with the Nation of Islam Islam as an alternative to the dominant culture Separatism vs. integration

23 A COMING OF AGE NARRATIVE I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. Teen years in Harlem From sense of entrapment to freedom to travel

24 BALDWIN S DEFINITION OF RELIGIOUS Discovery of God and Hell Confined within the Church Our Church Necessity of religion for protection against evil Discovery of religion tied in with discovery of sex

25 HARLEM AS A SITE OF RESISTANCE Against the rest of New York Fighting the man i.e., the white man Sense of hopelessness and humiliation Sense of entrapment: stay uptown [i.e., Harlem] where you belong (339) So the Church becomes a place of escape

26 RHETORIC OF CAPITALISM For the wages of sin were visible everywhere (339) Inevitability of crime Work not enough to escape: a means of inspiring fear also necessary Self-determination and creation of own standards

27 BALDWIN S POLITICS Fear of criminality Resistance against being defined by others Finding a gimmick to escape these circumstances The church as Baldwin s gimmick

28 BEING BLACK IN A WHITE WORLD The Negro construct unique to the U.S. taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. White supremacy as ordained by God: White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared.

29 A WHITE UNIVERSE Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum; there is no way, no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs as who has not? of human love, God s love alone is left. But God and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly is white. And if His love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far? (344)

30 DEPARTURE FROM THE CHURCH Several factors: Reading especially Dostoyevsky His Jewish friends: people who were, by definition, beyond any hope of salvation They force him to confront the promotional materials he brings from the church to his school The church s message as blackmail Love of God versus fear of Hell The Bible was not written for people like him

31 THE QUESTION OF COLOR His Jewish friends also force him to confront his race Christianity as a white religion Inevitability of his fate: to be excluded from salvation Jesus, the sun-baked Hebrew, is not the real architect of the Christian church Paul is A call for the U.S. and other Western nations to re-examine themselves Gesturing at history of colonialism and imperialism

32 IF CHRISTIANITY IS WHITE... And God is on the side of the West What s the alternative? The Muslim God God had come a long way from the desert but then so had Allah, though in a very different direction. God, going north, and rising on the wings of power, had become white, and Allah, out of power, and on the dark side of Heaven, had become for all practical purposes, anyway black (352)

33 NATION OF ISLAM Elijah Muhammad Malcolm X second in command Black Nationalism Reclamation of identity the X surname Separatism (versus integration) Encounter with the police in Harlem (352-3) The white man is the devil

34 THE IDEA OF A BLACK DEITY God is black. All black men belong to Islam; they have been chosen And Islam shall rule the world. The dream, the sentiment is old; only the color is new. And it is this dream, this sweet possibility, that thousands of oppressed black men and women in this country now carry away with them after the Muslim minister has spoken, through the dark, noisome ghetto streets, into the hovels where so many have perished. The white God has not delivered them; perhaps the black God will (357)

35 TREPIDATION AT MEETING ELIJAH MUHAMMAD Muhammad tries to reach Baldwin What does it mean to become myself? Elijah mentioned having seen me on television and said that it seemed to him that I was not yet brainwashed and was trying to become myself. He said this in a curiously unnerving way, his eyes looking into mine and one hand half hiding his lips, as though he were trying to conceal bad teeth. But his teeth were not bad. Then I remembered hearing that he had spent time in prison. I suppose that I would like to become myself, whatever that may mean, but I knew that Elijah s meaning and mine were not the same. I said yes, I was trying to be me, but I did not know how to say more than that, and so I waited. (360)

36 ODD DYNAMIC BETWEEN MUHAMMAD AND HIS FOLLOWERS Servility of followers begins to annoy Baldwin Indirect way of questioning Baldwin Trying to get him to believe that the white man is the devil and Baldwin s resistance this message

37 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION S MESSAGE The brutality of the African American experience Lack of representation, lack of credibility in a white supremacist world Obstruction of the truth

38 ISLAM AS A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE Radical to the status quo white Christian supremacy As a means of discovering the truth As a means of resistance to white supremacy For where else, after all, could I go? I was black, and therefore a part of Islam, and would be saved from the holocaust awaiting the white world whether I would or no. Baldwin himself was atheist. "I left the church 20 years ago and haven t joined anything since." Elijah asked, "And what are you now?" Baldwin explained, "Now? Nothing. I'm a writer. I like doing things alone."

39 SEPARATISM AND ITS VICES Baldwin s evidence of good white people: they are exceptions to the rule. His reality versus the reality of the world He has a sudden thought experiment where he humanizes white people: In the eeriest way possible, I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman. I had almost said, after all, Well, take my friend Mary, and very nearly descended to a catalogue of those virtues that gave Mary the right to be alive. And in what hope? That Elijah and the others would nod their heads solemnly and say, at last, Well, she s all right but the others!

40 ...AND ITS VIRTUES African Americans are the only group of people who don t have their own land and nation Integration is a grudging and tardy recognition of Black humanity No wonder Black Muslims don t want to integrate Black Muslims take the definition of humanity into their own hands instead of allowing it to be determined by white people Forming a separate nation: only hope of not perishing in the American backwater and being entirely and forever forgotten, as though he had never existed at all and his travail had been for nothing.

41 REVIEW OF THE NATION S RULES Return to your true religion Protect your women Malcolm X: The most disrespected women in America is the Black woman Black is beautiful

42 BALDWIN S FINAL POSITION Baldwin argues that the power of the black community the source of its wealth comes from the whole of the U.S. economy Will their power including spending power be the same after separation from land and economy How to imagine life as separate nations? Necessity to accept the truth of one s past: the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. Versus an invented past, which is not viable.

43 A UNIQUE CREATION Difficult to compare their status as African Americans to Africans (which the NOI sort of does) The most despised creature in his country Not the most optimistic about Black success

44 A WHITE NATION? America and the question of color Vs Europe presumed to be synonymous with the word civilization This country s denial of its status Bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them The Negro as the key figure to the U.S. Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

45 CONCLUSION In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white. But white men with far more political power than that possessed by the Nation of Islam movement have been advocating exactly this, in effect, for generations. If this sentiment is honored when it falls from the lips of Senator Byrd, then there is no reason it should not be honored when it falls from the lips of Malcolm X. And any Congressional committee wishing to investigate the latter must also be willing to investigate the former. They are expressing exactly the same sentiments and represent exactly the same danger. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores (375-6)