The inner voice urging me to return to a more creative path was getting louder by the day. The veneer of my half-decade “career” as a music publicist and rock journalist was starting to wear thin. I first became enamored with Baldwin’s voice when I came across this clear-eyed assessment of the American condition at a pivotal turning point in my mid-20s. It is a lifelong, even eternal conversation between the listener, reader, and the personal and global times in which that exchange takes place. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.” Baldwin debating William Buckley, 1965Ī writer’s voice, like any work or element of art, is not static.
“It comes as a great shock to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance has not pledged allegiance to you. But Baldwin lived long enough and wrote, spoke, debated, taught, and lived deeply enough that most of his detractors eventually walked back their denouncements and became allies of his. His being a forceful, forthright, eloquent, and erudite gay black man was no small part of his being perceived as a threat in certain circles. Maybe that’s why even the great James Baldwin, while respected his entire life, was not always invited to the artist-activist-changemaker conversations of the day. It is about the very bedrock of our society and civility as Americans. It is not even about one era or movement. It is not about one election, however crucial that one was. For Baldwin, “the big lie” is nothing new. James Baldwin never had a problem with history. What we love is nostalgia.” Spoken word poet Regie Gibson, 2018 “I think our problem as Americans is that we actually hate history, so we can’t really connect the dots. And no one has ever arrived at his sense of identity without it.” Baldwin speaking to high school students, 1963
It is through your sense of history that you arrive at your own identity. It is historical and it is personal… It is my responsibility, speaking now as your educator, to give you as true a version of your history as I can. This turmoil is sometimes described as racial. “We are living through a certain kind of turmoil which endangers all of our relationships.
0 kommentar(er)
