But both of those conditions (my own awareness of being a native of this country and as an alien in it) are of interest to me as a writer, and I’d like to talk about that expected and perhaps inevitable sense of separateness from the culture that pervades the country I live in. The remarks I have to make are applicable to probably every group that has ever existed. And I paraphrase Miss Head to say that I can tolerate the overweening culture that is not mine because the things I love cannot be touched by it. It sounds hostile, I know, and unsharing, I know; and ungenerous and defensive. I know that. But I am nevertheless convinced that clarity about who one is and what one’s work is, is inextricably bound up with one’s place in a tribe—or a family, or a nation, or a race, or a sex, or what have you. And the clarity is necessary for the evaluation of the self and it is necessary for any productive intercourse with any other tribe or culture. I am not suggesting a collection of warring cultures, just clear ones, for it is out of the clarity of one’s own culture that life within another, near another, in juxtaposition to another is healthily possible. Without it, a writer lives on whatever pinnacle he achieves in loneliness and whatever road he walks on is finally a cul-de-sac. It is vital, therefore, to know what “the things we love” are, in order to care for and to husband them.
I have always myself felt most alive, most alert, and most sterling among my own people. All of my creative energy comes from there. My stimulation for any artistic effort at all originates there. The compulsion to write, even to be, begins with my consciousness of, experience with, and even my awe of black people and the quality of our lives as lived (not as perceived). And all of my instincts tell me that both as a writer and as a person any total surrender to another culture would destroy me. And the danger is not always from indifference; it is also from acceptance. It is sometimes called the fear of absorption, the horror of cultural embrace. But at the heart of the horror for me is what I know about what the history of the culture that pervades this country has been.
My instincts combine therefore with my intelligence to inform me that there are many aspects of that culture that are not trustworthy and are not supportive.
Every and each attempt I have made to write has centered on that assumption and this question: What is there of value in black culture to lose and how can it be preserved and made useful? I am not very good at the writing of tracts, so I frequently identify the things I love and find of value by showing them in danger; things in my novels are threatened and sometimes destroyed. It is my way of directing attention at sensitized readers in such a way that they will yearn for, miss, and, I hope, learn to care for certain aspects of that life that are worth the preservation.
Now in order for me to try even to identify those things, I need to know a lot or try to find out a lot about the civilization within the civilization in which I grew up. I mean the black civilization that functioned within the white one. And the questions I must put to it are: What was the hierarchy in my civilization? Who were the arbiters of custom? What were the laws? Who were the outlaws—not the legal outlaws, but the community outlaws? Where did we go for solace and for advice? Who were the betrayers of that culture? Who did we respect and why? What was our morality? What was success? Who survived? And why? And under what circumstances? What is deviant behavior? Not deviant behavior as defined by white people, but what is deviant behavior as defined by black people?
I have been for years, and it will probably be a fascination that lasts all my life, continually fascinated by the fact that no bestial treatment of human beings ever produces beasts. White marauders can force Native American Indians to walk from one part of the country to another and watch them drop like flies and cattle, but they did not end up as cattle; Jewish people could be thrown into ovens like living carcasses but Jews were not bestialized by it; black people could be enslaved for generation after generation and recorded in statistics along with lists of rice, tar, and turpentine cargo, but they did not turn out to be cargo. Each one of those groups civilized the very horror that oppressed it. It doesn’t work, and I don’t think it can. It never works; what preoccupies me is why. Why was the quality of my great-grandmother’s life so much better than the circumstances of her life? How was it possible without the feminist movement, without a black arts movement, without any movement, how was it possible that the sheer integrity and quality of her life were so superior to its circumstances? I know that she was not atypical among the women of her day. She was as average a black woman as there ever was. And no amount of quisling scholarship, no amount of psychological tyranny, no number of black colonizers, who in their quest for jobs and national prominence join hands with those who would rape us culturally, none of them will ever convince me otherwise. Because I knew her—and I knew the people she knew.
In my own writing, in order to reveal what seems to me the hard and the true and the lasting things, I am drawn to describing people under duress, not in easy circumstances, but backed up into a corner, people called upon to fish or cut bait. You say you are my friend? Let’s see. You say you are a revolutionary? Let me see how it looks when I push you all the way out. You say you love me? Let’s see. What happens if you follow your course all the way through? What are the things you will give up? And, under duress, I know who they are, of what they are made, and which of their qualities is the last to go, and which of their qualities never go. It gives a melancholy cast to my work. I know. And it leads me to exceptional rather than routine characters. I know. And it leaves me wide open for criticism about bizarre characters and nonpositive images. I know. But I am afraid I will have to leave the “positive” images to the comic-strip artists and the “normal” black characters to some future Doris Day, because I believe it is silly, not to say irresponsible, to concern myself with lipstick and Band-Aid when there is a plague in the land. The so-called everyday life of black people is certainly lovely to live, but whoever is living it must know that each day of his “everyday” black life is a triumph of matter over mind and sentiment over common sense. And if he doesn’t know that, then he doesn’t know anything at all. As the young African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile put it, “The present is a dangerous place to live.” Superficial literary cosmetics will not save us from that danger. As a matter of fact, literature will not save us at all. All it can do is point out the need perhaps for defense, but it is not itself that defense. What it can do is participate in the process of identifying what is of value, and once that surfaces, once black tradition can be extricated from black fashion, once black writing stops posturing and catering to the voyeurs of black life, once it stops doing an American version of airport art, then an even harder job presents itself.
Because it is relatively easy to recognize values in isolation. The problem gets complicated when those values are in conflict with other values. For then you have to figure out how to protect the very best of the group sensibilities; how to protect the noblest impulses. What are the nurturing structures worth keeping in the community? What are the culturgens that provide emotional safety, the customs that allow freedom without excessive risk or certain destruction, that allow courage minus recklessness, generosity without waste, support without domination, and in times of deep, deep trouble (as in some of the black countries abroad) a resource for survival that may very well include sustained and calculated ferocity.
Black writers who are committed to the renewal and refreshment of values can be identified by their taste, by their judgments, by their intellect, and by their work. They do not use black life as exotic ornament for pedestrian nonblack stories. The essence of black life is the substance, not the decoration, of their work. Their work turns on a moral axis that has been forged among black people. They do not impose alien moralities about broken homes, and house-bound fathers, and petite power, and what is or is not gainful employment on their characters.
They do not regard black language as dropping g’s or as an exercise in questionable phonetics and inconsistent orthography. They know that it is much
more complicated than that.
And they waste no time explaining, explaining, explaining away everything they feel and think and do—to the other culture. They are challenged by and concerned with the enlightenment of their own, even when the enlightenment includes painful information.
They do not view the habits and customs of their people with the eye of a charged-up ethnologist examining curios.
The writers who are also scholars in so-called black studies are unimpressed with standard cries of “lowering standards” when any change in curricula is recommended. They know their job doesn’t have anything to do with maintaining standards. It has to do with reshaping the content of those standards in order to improve them and raise them.
Those black writers who are critics are not busy painting Bertolt Brecht black and relabeling his thoughts (which were perfectly suitable to his own cultural needs) as some sort of “new” black criticism. Any critical apparatus or critical system that is inappropriate to and foolish when applied to black music or non-Western black art is fraudulent when applied to black literature.
Once, when I first began to write, I didn’t know a lot about how to dramatize and I was forced sometimes to use exposition as a way of saying something I could not properly show. And in the first book, The Bluest Eye, I wrote a passage at the end that is as close as I have ever gotten to sustained didacticism. It is a wholly unsatisfactory passage to me, and I had certainly hoped to read it to you in context, but I haven’t got a copy of the book with me. But in the last two pages of The Bluest Eye, is, in essence, what I believe to be the dangers when one assumes that you can substitute license for freedom, when one assumes that you can use another’s deficiency for one’s own generosity, when one assumes that you can use another person’s misery and nightmares in order to clarify your own dreams. When all of those things are done and completed, then the surrender and the betrayal of one’s culture is also complete.
PART II
God’s Language
James Baldwin Eulogy
Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and much too much to feel. The difficulty is your life refuses summation—it always did—and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here, I thought I knew you. Now I discover that, in your company, it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: you gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish. We are like Hall Montana watching “with a new wonder” his brother sing, knowing the song he sang is us, “he is—us.”
I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you made on me, the challenges you issued to me were nevertheless unmistakable if unenforced: that I work and think at the top of my form; that I stand on moral ground but know that ground must be shored up by mercy; that “the world is before [me] and [I] need not take it or leave it as it was when [I] came in.”
Well, the season was always Christmas with you there, and like one aspect of that scenario, you did not neglect to bring at least three gifts. You gave me a language to dwell in—a gift so perfect, it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts so long, I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes so long, I believed that clear, clear view was my own. Even now, even here, I need you to tell me what I am feeling and how to articulate it. So I have pored (again) through the 6,895 pages of your published work to acknowledge the debt and thank you for the credit.
No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest—genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern, dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity; in place of soft, plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what you called “exasperating egocentricity,” you gave us undecorated truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, “robbed it of the jewel of its naïveté,” and ungated it for black people, so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion. Not our vanities, but our intricate, difficult, demanding beauty; our tragic, insistent knowledge; our lived reality; our sleek classical imagination. All the while refusing “to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [us].” In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be—neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive.
It infuriated some people. Those who saw the paucity of their own imagination in the two-way mirror you held up to them attacked the mirror, tried to reduce it to fragments that they could then rank and grade; tried to dismiss the shards where your image and theirs remained—locked but ready to soar. You are an artist, after all, and an artist is forbidden a career in this place; an artist is permitted only the commercial “hit.” But for thousands and thousands of those who embrace your text, and who gave themselves permission to hear your language, by that very gesture they ennobled themselves, became unshrouded—civilized.
The second gift was your courage, which you let us share. The courage of one who could go as a stranger in the village and transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole world; courage to understand that experience in ways that made it a personal revelation for each of us. It was you who gave us the courage to appropriate an alien, hostile, all-white geography because you had discovered that “this world [meaning history] is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” Yours was the courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges. To see and say what it was; to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand in awe of it. It is a courage that came from a ruthless intelligence married to a pity so profound it could convince anyone who cared to know that those who despised us “need the moral authority of their former slaves, who are the only people in the world who know anything about them and who may be, indeed, the only people in the world who really care anything about them.” When that unassailable combination of mind and heart, of intellect and passion was on display, it guided us through treacherous landscape, as it did when you wrote these words—words every rebel, every dissident, revolutionary, every practicing artist from Cape Town to Poland, from Waycross to Dublin, memorized: “A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving because it is so blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.”
The third gift was hard to fathom and even harder to accept. It was your tenderness. A tenderness so delicate I thought it could not last, but last it did and envelop me it did. In the midst of anger it tapped me, lightly, like the child in Tish’s womb: “Something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider’s web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart …. The baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me; tells me, in that instant, that what can get worse can get better …. In the meantime—forever—it is entirely up to me.” Yours was a tenderness, a vulnerability, that asked everything, expected everything, and, like the world’s own Merlin, provided us with the ways and means to deliver. I suppose that is why I was always a bit better behaved around you, smarter, more capable, wanting to be worth the love you lavished, and wanting to be steady enough to witness the pain you had witnessed and were tough enough to bear while it broke your heart; wanting to be generous enough to join your smile with one of my own, and reckless enough to jump on in that laugh you laughed. Because our joy and our laughter were not only all right; they were necessary.
You knew, didn’t you? How I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me?
How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn’t you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is a jubilee. “Our crown,” you said, “has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,” you said, “is wear it.”
And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us.
The Site of Memory
My inclusion in a series of talks on autobiography and memoir is not entirely a misalliance. Although it’s probably true that a fiction writer thinks of his or her work as alien in that company, what I have to say may suggest why I’m not completely out of place here. For one thing, I might throw into relief the differences between self-recollection (memoir) and fiction, and also some of the similarities—the places where those two crafts embrace and where that embrace is symbiotic.
But the authenticity of my presence here lies in the fact that a very large part of my own literary heritage is the autobiography. In this country the print origins of black literature (as distinguished from the oral origins) were slave narratives. These book-length narratives (autobiographies, recollections, memoirs), of which well over a hundred were published, are familiar texts to historians and students of black history. They range from the adventure-packed life of Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1769) to the quiet desperation of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), in which Harriet Jacobs (“Linda Brent”) records hiding for seven years in a room too small to stand up in; from the political savvy of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) to the subtlety and modesty of Henry Bibb, whose voice, in Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849), is surrounded by (“loaded with” is a better phrase) documents attesting to its authenticity. Bibb is careful to note that his formal schooling (three weeks) was short, but that he was “educated in the school of adversity, whips, and chains.” Born in Kentucky, he put aside his plans to escape in order to marry. But when he learned that he was the father of a slave and watched the degradation of his wife and child, he reactivated those plans.
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