James Baldwin: The guiding star

A century after his birth, the writer-activist’s searing insights on race, love, and justice continue to illuminate our path through troubled times.

James Baldwin at a press conference in London on February 22, 1965, where he spoke about assassination of Malcolm X., the Black American nationalist leader, who was shot and killed in Harlem on as he addressed a meeting of his supporters. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

Thinking with Baldwin. Yes, this happens when you read an author and cannot get their words out of your head. Their words become the background music to your thoughts.

For this to happen, writers must be incredibly in love with life while in search of their roots, battling their own pain and seeing themselves beyond it. As B.R. Ambedkar said: “[T]he battle to me is a matter of joy.” We find this profound understanding of life in the works of the American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924-87), who was born this month a hundred years ago. One of the first generations of “free” Black men in America, he lived through the turmoil of 1950s’ and 1960s’ America, a nation that hardly made him feel free and did not give him any respite until he died in France in 1987, leaving behind a legacy of words that continue to inspire and lead oppressed people all over the world.

I first came across the works of Baldwin in the winter of 2014. Little did I know then that his words would stay with me forever, guiding me through the thick and thin of life, encouraging me to embrace the inevitable failures in the path of writing and transform them into life lessons. I remember I silently wept when I first read Baldwin’s collection of essays Notes of a Native Son (1955). With those tears, I felt that some amount of the darkness in my heart faded away. The feeling was priceless and strengthening. Baldwin was the second author after Ambedkar who not only shook my heart but also enriched my perspectives on life in every conceivable way.

The 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck, is based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House. It traces the history of racism in the US. Baldwin, in dark glasses, is at the centre. | Photo Credit: Dan Budnik/Magnolia Pictures via AP 

Baldwin’s emotionally frank and intellectually stimulating description of his relationship with his father in Notes of a Native Son consoled me, to an extent that I began to see beyond my own father’s anger, which had disturbed me until then. I could now understand his inability to connect with his family, and his own traumas, which were transferred to me in the same way that his blood and flesh made my body. Baldwin overcame his disgruntlement with his father once he managed to overcome the anger and explored the origins of the social constructs that caused it. This rang a bell with me, clarifying aspects of my relationship with my father. While I read Baldwin, I experienced a kind of euphoria, as if I had now acquired the sight to see nuances in my relationship with my father to which I had been oblivious so far, or at least not capable of deciphering into words. A writer’s mind seeks clarity through words, written and read. I sought this when I read Baldwin for the first time, to connect with my own emotional world.

Messiah of love

In 2021, I wrote an article on Baldwin in the book Singing/Thinking Anti-Caste (published by Panther’s Paw), where I said: “Baldwin’s words do not spring only from the experience of being black in America. His words essentially are of a man who has risked all to see beyond his Blackness, who has daringly put all the actors involved in the historical crime of enslavement in the witness box, where they are questioned by him about their cruelty, their silence, their violence, and their ability to inflict pain. I found that Baldwin questioned the entirety of America.”

Even more startlingly, Baldwin managed to move beyond the perennially reactive situation of being trapped in the clutches of anger, pain, and trauma to talk about love. “Love has never been a popular movement,” he said. I watched in awe the documentary Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970) as he talked passionately, expressing, like someone wailing from the depths of his heart, his urge to repair the world, both within and outside, so that next generations can thrive unhurt.

Cover of No Name in the Street. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Listening to Baldwin talking about love, compassion, and justice is like listening to the most stimulating jazz. When you pursue the words of such a person, you end up getting involved in a struggle that has a beginning but no end. This is the struggle in pursuit of love and justice, a hazardous one for someone who aspires to be a writer. Because in order to write, one must think, and in order to think, one must read, and when one reads, one cannot unsee the ugliness and lies that erase all the contours of love and justice from our lives. We realise then that we are failed by the very institutions that are supposed to protect us from harm: family, schools, communities, universities, etc.

Baldwin expanded the ability of my heart to endure this struggle, and write—using the same words with which they have constructed the ugliness and lies—to announce to the world that I am here and that I am not conforming to their false standards, that I dream of a world functioning with love, justice, and common sense.

Touching hearts

On July 21, 2021, I shared a quote from Baldwin’s 1972 book, No Name in the Street, on my Instagram handle. It went: “There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.” In a couple of days, it got 7,560 Likes (mostly from people outside India who were strangers to me) and was shared by almost 2,000 people.

Cover of The Fire Next Time. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

At this, the first thought that crossed my mind was that words, written with passion for love and justice, still have the potential to touch the hearts of people. In a world that is increasingly losing faith, Baldwin never fails to attract those who are in search of love and justice. For them, stories must be written, and words must be said so that they do not feel alone. Words beckoning, words connecting broken hearts and restless minds, creating a community. Reading Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and, subsequently, in the span of the next eight years, The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street linked me with other people like me.

Some people who, as victims of systemic oppression (racism, casteism), are forced to cultivate hate in their hearts rise above it as soon as they realise that the suffocating burden of loathing crushes their heart and their ability to connect with people and love them. Has the caste system not been destroying for generations our ability to empathise and live in fraternity?

Baldwin (right of centre) with Hollywood actors Charlton Heston (left) and Marlon Brando (right) at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Sidney Poitier (rear) and Harry Belafonte (right of Brando) can also be seen in the crowd. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

Writers like Baldwin belong to each and every person on the face of the earth who is struggling to rebuild their life around love and justice so that they can heal the wounds people have been inflicting on each other, and raise generations who will believe that love and justice are not mere ideas, or big words, but something humans need to practise in their lives on a daily basis.

Baldwin offers courage

Reading Baldwin provided me with the emotional clarity I needed as someone who has been subjected to the systemic oppression of caste from birth. This abuse that shapes the emotions and feelings of its victims in such complex ways that the victim often dies without having a language to express the pain that governs most of their life. (Most people born with caste privilege to an English-language education will hardly get my point here, but that is fine.)

For such victims, Baldwin offers courage. Baldwin encourages me to face my fear, my pain, with the weaponry of words, and to defeat the despair that threatens to erase us from the human imagination, and so from the history of the nation. Baldwin always talked face to face with his oppressors, asking them to meet his eyes so that he could tell them to step outside their circle of ignorance and embrace love—the original instinct of the human heart. In a casteist society like India, we need Baldwin for exactly this, if we want to survive as a society.

Yogesh Maitreya is a writer, poet, translator, and publisher. He is the founder and editor of Panther’s Paw Publication, which is dedicated to publishing literature by Dalit-Bahujan writers (in English and in translation from other Indian languages). He is the author of Flowers on the Grave of Caste (2019), a collection of short stories; Singing/Thinking Anti-Caste (2021), a book of essays on music and memories; and Ambedkar 2021 (2021), a book of prose poetry.