Who is James Baldwin? A beautiful, articulate man who carried the heavy burden of understanding a dark reality in his time and sadly mine too. His words are moving, challenging, nurturing, and sobering. A time traveler.
“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”
My first exposure to Mr. Baldwin came from this documentary I’m Not Your Negro. His smile, his words, and his passion reminded me of the power of the human. His love, frustration, joy, sadness is tangible in his voice and his language. I never met this man but will continue to hear his voice. His voice is for our today. Listen.
His Words (Some Of Them)
| To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. | It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. | The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. |
| I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. | I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. | Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. |
| Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. | But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power. | Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality. |
| The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions. | Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? | The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now. |
| The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat. | True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers, and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life. | Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be. |
| Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity. | I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative. | It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. |
| Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go. | There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. | People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead. |
| You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back. | It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. | All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. |
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
| Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. |
| You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. |
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
His Smile 🙂
Tractors & Tables 