James Baldwin, born 100 years ago today, on how to live through your darkest hour.
Today, August 2 2024, would have been James Baldwin's 100th birthday.
― Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
“Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, hélas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.” (…) “Somebody,” said Jacques, “your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.”
- Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."
- James Baldwin, The Artist's Struggle for Integrity
"In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves. 'The so-called straight person is no safer than I am, really. The terrors that homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn't want to admit.'
As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it, but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual. One way to think about this is that homophobia is the outward expression of heterosexual misery; a kind of subconscious jealous rage against the gendered and sexual possibilities that lie beyond the violence and disappointments of straight culture."
-Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
that screenshot going around where that random person says james baldwin sounds like a pretentious blogger is driving me insane because like, imaging living in one of the most racist time periods in modern history, cultivating an eloquent and sophisticated manner of speech in part out of interest but also out of necessity to deflect racially motivated accusations of being uneducated (all while making irreplaceable contributions to literature and the humanities), only to still have deeply incurious white adults scoff at how seriously you seem to take yourself before defaulting to elevating (white) european literature like it's their factory setting decades later 🥴
Stranger in the Village - From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came…
Notes of a Native Son - On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born…
Letter from a Region in My Mind - I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis…
A Talk to Teachers - Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time…
If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? - The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing…
Many Thousands Gone - It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story….
In Search of a Majority - I am supposed to speak this evening on the goals of American society as they involve minority rights, but what I am really going to do is to invite you to join me in a series of speculations….
A Letter to My Nephew - I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times…
Sonny’s Blues - I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again…
Everybody’s Protest Novel - A rejection of the protest novel and call for complexity
James Baldwin
“The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it…If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world”
— James Baldwin
““You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.””
— James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin
Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris(1970) dir. Terence Dixon
“Everyone wishes to be loved, but, in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it. However great the private disasters to which love may lead, love itself is strikingly and mysteriously impersonal; it is a reality which is not altered by anything one does. Therefore, one does many things, turns the key in the lock over and over again, hoping to be locked out. Once locked out, one will never again be forced to encounter in the eyes of the stranger, oneself, who is loved. And yet – one would prefer, after all, not to be locked out. One would prefer, merely, that the key unlocked a less stunningly unusual door.”
– James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
What a journey this life is! dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
I know we often lose, and that the death or destruction of another is infinitely more real and unbearable than one's own. I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again. And yet, on pain of death, one can never remain where one is. The light. The light. One will perish without the light.
James Baldwin, “Nothing Personal.” 1964.
