Tag: James Baldwin

When the next time is now

“The Fire This Time” ed. by Jesmyn Ward (2016)

Recently, I enjoyed very much picking my way through this 2016 selection edited by Jesmyn Ward; someone I have been truly thrilled to discover in recent years. Presumptuous of me perhaps, but I think I have read enough of Ward’s work and garnered enough information about some of the known aspects of her life, to understand her concerns as a writer and how her identity as a Black Southern woman is the beating heart of her creative output.

A project that came out of Jesmyn Ward’s anger and frustration, not just at the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin (to whom amongst many she dedicates the book) but long simmering within from the violent deaths of young black men close, very close, to her. Collected are some of the voices of a generation of Black writers, in the middle of life like herself, who articulate in their own personal and creative way their anger, their fear, their grief, but never without hope. Her introduction expands upon her motivation and intentions, and is a valuable piece in and of itself.

Ward makes a further contribution of her own in an essay called “Cracking the Code”, which is a very interesting appraisal of her personal genealogy and is, in itself, exemplary of the intricacies of race and how it manifests over generations; not just biologically but in the stories told and assumptions made. Now, given her roots in the Mississippi delta, Ward knew enough from family lore to surmise a broad mix – African, Native American, Creole, European – but the results of a 23andMe test gave her pause for thought. Strongly identifying as Black all her life, and that it surely followed that her ancestry must lay predominately on the African continent, Ward was momentarily taken aback when the analysis in fact concluded her to be of thirty odd percent sub-Saharan African ancestry and in fact forty odd percent European. The discrepancy is relatively small, but it bothered her. Who am I?

But it was only a momentary distraction, for Ward then rationalises genetic information to be that which it is, one piece only of the puzzle – just as relevant, or more so, is the familial, societal, cultural history that formed her and which she embraces (and which embraces her back). Nor does she throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak – Heaney, Larkin, Harry Potter amongst others are more than welcome still in Jesmyn’s world. (And, Doctor Who! The Doctor? I ain’t ever met a Doctor fan that I didn’t like – even if my original Doctor is of an earlier regeneration.)

Also, and she doesn’t mention this, but any DNA databank is dependent on input, and is always expanding, and as time goes on that affects the analysis parameters. Should Jesmyn have another test now, some years on, she would almost certainly find that again she is not exactly that whom she thought she was. In some ways, the reading of the code, if not the code itself, is as fluid as the greater identity of any person through a lifetime.

Continue Reading…

Black on Black

The New York Times delves deep into its archives for reciprocated reviews from Langston Hughes and James Baldwin – Hughes on Baldwin’s collection Notes of a Native Son in 1956 and Baldwin on Selected Poems of Langston Hughes in 1959.

“When James Baldwin and Langston Hughes Reviewed Each Other” NYT June 26, 2020

The Times is of course quick to point out that writers are no longer, for obvious reasons, allowed to review each other, but this was it seems once an accepted practice. Who knows how much of Baldwin’s response to Langston Hughes’ collection – no artist wants to be told of their wasted gifts, and in the opening sentence! – was influenced by the latter’s review of his work a few years prior, in which, whilst admiring of the young Baldwin’s talents and the provocations of his arguments, bemoans the lack of emotion and artistic imperative. Hughes ends by stating that Baldwin’s points of view are too often attenuated by the tension he creates between an “American” society and a separate “Afro-American” identity, and only when he “fuses” these into a coherent entity, would he be able “…[to write] about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity that should influence for the better…”.

Perhaps, here we have more than anything else a generational conflict (Hughes was born in 1901 and Baldwin in 1924), about what exactly a “Negro” writer should and could be during those pivotal years at the dawn of the civil rights movement, and where the balance is to be laid between art and the often harsh circumstances of reality. Langston Hughes rejected the too virulent anger he discerned in the younger generation and remained committed to the integrative possibilities of art, but for Baldwin that is is not enough and concludes his review piece by saying, and with dismay, that Hughes is : “…not the first American negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable.”