Letter to Jimmy

by Alain Mabanckou

  How many times during my long stay in France do you think, Jimmy, I was asked if I was Senegalese? The collective imagination crafted a stock character that we inherited from our participation in World Wars One and Two, fighting for the French. Answering these inquiries with the response that I was Congolese required the patience and precision of a school-teacher, to explain that there were two Congos, even though the borders between the former Zaire (today called the Democratic Republic of Congo) and my country (the Republic of Congo) were carved out by Europeans! Did I also need to inform them that my capital, Brazzaville, had been the capital of Free France during the Occupation? Infuriated, I often gave up and accepted whatever had been decided about me, a “Senegalese” man. With some perspective, I realize that I was unwittingly reenacting the experience of my relatives who, in the French army and in the minds of everyone, were known as “Senegalese Tirailleurs” and accepted it.

  •••

  What place is there, then, for a black American in this “Tower of Babel”? Your quest proves to be greater than you anticipate, Jimmy, extending beyond your particular case as an American citizen of color. It now encompasses the behavior of other migrants, and their way of life, but above all else, it encompasses France’s attitude toward this juxtaposition of people washed up on its shores, each with his own motive, each with his own past . . .

  In Paris, the African students you meet live “. . . in groups together, in the same neighborhoods, in student hotels and under conditions which cannot fail to impress the American as almost unendurable.”91

  Far from being alienated from himself, an African man does not harbor the same fear of rootlessness as an American man of color, even though he has endured history’s injustice, and, unlike an American man of color, has not, “all his life long, ached for acceptance in a culture which pronounced straight hair and white skin the only acceptable beauty.”92

  On the contrary, Africans have the self-confidence—perhaps even an exaggerated one—of coming from a continent of clearly defined borders, from a supposedly sovereign nation, which they dream deep in their hearts will be emancipated, unchained from the bonds of dependence on colonial power. In this respect, they share a common heritage with other immigrants whose lands are still under French control.

  Black Americans, on the other hand, have to seek out their identity. The product of a historical rape and a ruinous voyage, they want to retrace the steps of the crossing that cast them out of their native continent, Africa, into the cotton fields where strains of gospel rang out between cracks of the whip and the barking of guard dogs. Americans cannot forget the desire to rebel, or the leg cut off after an escape attempt, or the ropes of the gallows. Nor do young girls forget the vicious Master’s abuse of power that would produce an entire line of bastard children.

  In America, as Frantz Fanon points out, “the negro struggles and is opposed. There are laws that disappear, piece by piece, from the Constitution. There are decrees that forbid certain types of discrimination. And rest assured those things did not come as gifts. There are battles, defeats, cease-fires, and victories.”93

  Black Americans ran aground in a land that was not their own—the New World. This land of refuge reduced them to a status so low that they do not participate in the decisions of this nevertheless multi-racial nation, dominated by whites with a heavy hand. With this in mind you declare, “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.”94

  In short, while Africans are naturally attached to Africa, black Americans for their part mythologize it, spin legends about it, dream of it as a promised land, as if it represented the ultimate and absolute freedom. They long to return to the birthplace of their ancestors. Their Africa is, as a result, a kind of “dreamland.”

  Meanwhile, Africans want to change their land, their “real countries,” to reclaim from the colonizers the power to decide the fate of their own people, to put an end to the exploitation of the wealth of their natural resources. It is a fight for freedom, a struggle to regain territory. Africans want to drive out the colonizers; black Americans are fighting simply to be recognized as full citizens.

  And yet, black Americans and Africans are strangers to one another. Africans have a clear idea of Africa which involves them regaining control of the fountainhead, a fountainhead from which they believe all of the lost children—the so-called blacks of the diaspora—will one day come back to drink. Blood is thicker than water, after all.

  Black Americans do not have a clear idea of Africa, but they do have certain ideas of Africa that situate them on one side of an unbreachable gap between myth and reality. There is the myth of their ancestors, torn from the continent; the reality is the battle they fight for acknowledgement and identity in their new homeland.

  The uneasiness between Africans and black Americans is even more apparent when it comes to intellectual debate.

  From the 19th to the 22nd of September 1956, the first literary congress of black writers and artists convenes at the Sorbonne in Paris, under the initiative of Alioune Diop, founder of the journal Présence Africaine. You are enlisted to cover the event for Preuves et Encounter, and you watch closely the birth of the Negritude movement by Aimé Césaire, Léon Gontran Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Instead of drawing you closer to Africa, this encounter heightens your feeling of confusion. You consider the congress to be a true disappointment. The representatives of the Negritude movement are disconnected from reality, and when they express themselves—in France, in the French language, the language of their colonizers—their approach to the issues at hand is biased, in the sense that it is Franco-French leaning, and drowns the fundamental questions in theoretical posturing.

  Negritude remains a vague and empty notion that seems separate from you. Certain African intellectuals—such as Manthia Diawara—do not attempt to hide their reservations on the subject. Diawara is not convinced that having a mutual “white adversary” creates a shared culture. And when Senghor, in a poetic speech, praises Richard Wright’s Black Boy, you realize that the Senegalese poet has not yet understood the scope of the total misunderstanding that characterizes relations between Africans and black Americans. Senghor’s interpretation of Black Boy in fact underlines Richard Wright’s African heritage. Yet what Richard Wright authored in truth was an American autobiography that one cannot comprehend outside of the context of his personal experience as a black man in America, and all of the struggle, repression, denial and displacement that entails. In reality, the African intellectuals’ takeover of this 1956 congress demonstrates their desire to appropriate the personal experiences of black Americans into the concept of Negritude in order to give the latter the appearance of being more open, of having a broader base.95 Your uneasiness with this surfaces when, three years after the congress, you would confide the following to the historian Harold Isaacs: “[Africans] hated America, were full of racial stories, held their attitudes largely on racial grounds. Politically, they knew very little about it. Whenever I was with an African, we would both be uneasy . . . The terms of our life were so different, we almost needed a dictionary to talk.”96

  7.

  the years of fire

  Your essay, “The Fire Next Time,” is published in 1963.

  This text calls into question the structure of American society, which is deaf to the claims of minorities. In the same year, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is assassinated as he begins his re-election campaign. This tragedy is a major blow to the progress of civil rights. Kennedy was fighting against racial segregation that was still common in some states, despite the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed it. He offered his support to Martin Luther King, Jr., and had received the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the White House.

  During this time, concerned about not participating in the fate of your country, you leave France temporarily. You are not a simple spe
ctator, and certainly not merely a witness to history. Your voice is now counted among those at the center of the black community. It is your duty, first as a citizen, but also as a writer, who is seen henceforth as the spokesman of the voiceless. You could have uttered as your own the potent words of Aimé Césaire upon returning to his own homeland:

  “And behold here I am!”

  “Once again this life hobbling before me, no, not this life—this death, this death without sense or pity, this death that falls pathetically short of greatness . . .”97

  Published in the United States in January, The Fire Next Time immediately springs to the top of the bestseller list. Several months later, your rising star lands you on the cover of Time magazine. Your words are closely monitored, and, even before this time, the FBI had opened a file on you (the famous file 100146553). You are not unaware that the FBI is watching you. You discuss it with your friends and family, talking about it more and more, as you fear that one day you will fall victim to a conspiracy, and that your days will end in mystery, like Martin Luther King, Jr., or certain members of the Kennedy clan. The smallest of your movements and activities is carefully recorded, to the point of being ridiculous, if one remembers that national security is at stake. File 100146553, now consultable via Internet, contains for example details such as “The current residence of James Baldwin, the negro writer and playwright, is unknown. He had a romantic visit with Paul Robeson at the Americana Hotel. We report that Baldwin could be a homosexual; everything leads us to believe that he is.”

  In 1963 you are racing against the clock.

  You undertake a tour of the South, the heart of the “Negro Problem.” During this trip you do not hesitate to return to church, this time to preach another way of loving your neighbor—through tolerance, and the recognition of minority rights. You push the envelope so far as to call upon Robert Kennedy to respond to the police brutality with which a peaceful civil rights protest met in Birmingham, Alabama. Robert Kennedy invites you to speak with him along with other leaders of the black community. Could it have been any other way?

  It is finally in August of 1963 that the famous March on Washington occurs. We hear Martin Luther King’s, Jr., unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech.

  Throughout the course of the march, you are in the crowd, not far from Marlon Brando.

  •••

  With “The Fire Next Time” you pen the most profound, political, and literary text on the subject of black freedom, future and status in America. Despite the initial thundering applause, voices of discord ring out shortly thereafter. Anticipating the fury about to be unleashed against you, Sheldon Binn notes in his review of your essay, “What he has drawn will not sit well even with some whites who count themselves as friends of the Negro. But he has not written this book of two essays to please. [. . .] Thus he has written from a heart which has felt a unique kind of hurt and a brain which has desperately sought hope in the face of what often seems to be the merciless logic of despair.”98

  Because of the threatening tone of your essay, you are accused of stirring up tensions between both sides; furthermore, this book is seen as a partisan act, and your ideas are labeled as extremist. Albert Memmi, who would later write the preface to the French edition of your work, remains perplexed and wonders if you are not making the same demands that Black Muslims make but in more bellicose terms: doing away with whites to leave room for blacks. He asks, “Does Baldwin ask for anything else when he suggests, calmly and level-headedly, that America should cease to consider itself a white nation? Should we also admit after reading his book that we are more afraid than Baldwin himself?”99

  It is not a question of you pitting yourself against what many call, as your father used to, the “white devil.” You must defuse both sides, rethink integration: “What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. [. . .] Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation who has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains.”100

  “The Fire Next Time” opens the doors to everyone who wishes to understand your definition—if indeed you make one—of the black American as compared to his white countryman. The roar rising from the pages, the upheaval sparked by your ideas, and the crackling of an approaching fire are omens of things to come.

  America is no fool: it has heard your message. But can it follow your lead? Is the book you have just written for or against America? Is this a book for your brothers of color, or against them? These questions are reminiscent of those that arose after the publication of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, with the subtle difference that in his text, inhabitants of Martinique confront their colonizers. In order to encourage the latter to heed the book’s message, and indeed so that they understand that Fanon’s work is addressed to their brothers of color, Jean-Paul Sartre writes, “Europeans, open this book, and enter into it. After several steps into the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire. Approach them, and listen; they are discussing the fate in store for your shop counters, and for the men who guard them. They might see you, but they will continue to talk amongst themselves, without even so much as lowering their voices . . . In these shadows, from which the sun will rise again, you are the walking dead.”101

  By the same token, America can no longer remain blind to the racial issue when it produces writers like you. The Fire Next Time warns of the dangers of the situation, but assures that all is not lost, that it is possible to elude the prophesy delivered in this song written by a slave:

  And God gave Noah the rainbow sign

  No more water, the fire next time . . .

  “The Fire Next Time” concludes with this scriptural prediction, from the very Bible that you know like the back of your hand.

  And what if America did not listen? What would happen?

  “Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.”102

  These declarations are not unlike those of Malcolm X, who advocates obtaining rights by “whatever means necessary.” Herein lies the point of convergence that Albert Memmi points out in his introduction to your work.

  •••

  In his time, your colleague W.E.B. Du Bois asserted that the problem of the twentieth century was one between whites and blacks. “The Fire Next Time” tempers this assertion by declaring that, “. . . the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion,”103 though nevertheless the racial question remains vital in the United States, in these years of fire.

  In Blues for Mister Charlie, you borrow from a racist news item that would have serious political reverberations. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a black adolescent, is murdered. A month later, his murderers are acquitted in court after a sham trial; America is even more shocked that the criminals admit their evil deed as soon as they are released from custody. The hasty verdict legitimizes the battle for civil rights that has been waged for many years already. What murder could therefore better represent the state of race relations?

  The fourteen-year-old Chicago native has come with his cousin to spend his vacation with his great-uncle in Money, Mississippi—home to William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Elvis Presley, but also to a segregationist and Ku Klux Klan stronghold—Emmett Till is kidnapped in the middle of the night by Roy Bryant, a grocer, and his half brother, J.W. Milam. They beat Emmett to death before throwing his body, completely disfigured, into the Tallahatchie River, a heavy weight tied to his neck with a piece of barbed wire. A fisherman discovers the body several days later. Although the motives for the murder vary depending on the testimony—Roy Bryant’s wife maintains for example that the adolescent may have
been disrespectful and might have spoken indecent words—was the punishment” administered to the young black boy by the husband and brother-in-law proportionate to the alleged provocation? Regardless of the answer, the fact remains that a human being has been killed. There was a crime. The motives are clearly racist.

  Disregarding the pressures put upon her by the authorities, the mother of the boy demands that his casket remain open during the ceremony, so that everyone can comprehend the barbaric nature of the act that killed him.

  The outrage generated by this heinous crime sparks an investigation by Medgar Evers and Amzie Moore, two members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They disguise themselves as farmers, in order to obtain evidence that might shed light on the death of the child. Their research led to the discovery of other black people murdered in the area, also lynched, then thrown into the river.

  Then there was the trial. One must, no matter what, have faith in the country’s justice system.

  The jury? Do not hold your breath: it is composed of twelve white men. These men acquit Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam after deliberations lasting just under an hour. One member of the jury, no doubt happy with the outcome, confesses upon exiting that he and his colleagues had to take a good “soda break” in order to reach a deliberation time that would be passable in the court of public opinion.