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Conversations with James Baldwin
This collection of interviews with James Baldwin covers the period 1961-1987, from the year of the publication of Nobody Knows My Names , his fourth book, to just a few weeks before his death. It includes the last formal conversation with him.
Twenty-seven interviews reprinted here come from a variety of sources―newspapers, radio, journals, and review―and show this celebrated author in all his eloquence, anger, and perception of racial, social, and literary situations in America.
Over the years Baldwin proved to be an easily accessible and cooperative subject for interviews, both in the United States and abroad. He frequently referred to himself as “a kind of transatlantic commuter.” Whether candidly discussing his own ghetto origins, his literary mission and achievements, his role in the civil rights movement, or his views on world affairs, black-and-white relations, Vietnam, Christianity, and fellow writers, Baldwin was always both popular and controversial.
This important collection contributes significantly to the clarification and expansion of the ideas in Baldwin's fiction, drama, essays, and poetry. It gives additional life to a stunning orator and major literary figure who considered himself a sojourner even in his own country. Yet early in his career Baldwin told Studs “I am an American writer. This country is my subject.”
Twenty-seven interviews reprinted here come from a variety of sources―newspapers, radio, journals, and review―and show this celebrated author in all his eloquence, anger, and perception of racial, social, and literary situations in America.
Over the years Baldwin proved to be an easily accessible and cooperative subject for interviews, both in the United States and abroad. He frequently referred to himself as “a kind of transatlantic commuter.” Whether candidly discussing his own ghetto origins, his literary mission and achievements, his role in the civil rights movement, or his views on world affairs, black-and-white relations, Vietnam, Christianity, and fellow writers, Baldwin was always both popular and controversial.
This important collection contributes significantly to the clarification and expansion of the ideas in Baldwin's fiction, drama, essays, and poetry. It gives additional life to a stunning orator and major literary figure who considered himself a sojourner even in his own country. Yet early in his career Baldwin told Studs “I am an American writer. This country is my subject.”
312 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1989
About the author
James Baldwin
287 books12.8k followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.
James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.
He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France but often returned to the United States of America to lecture or to teach.
In his Giovanni's Room, a white American expatriate must come to terms with his homosexuality. In 1957, he began spending half of each year in city of New York.
James Baldwin offered a vital literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s.
He first partially autobiographically accounted his youth. His influential Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time informed a large white audience. Another Country talks about gay sexual tensions among intellectuals of New York. The black community savaged his gay themes. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers stated the Baldwin displayed an "agonizing, total hatred of blacks." People produced Blues for Mister Charlie, play of Baldwin, in 1964.
Going to Meet the Man and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone provided powerful descriptions. He as an openly gay man increasingly in condemned discrimination against lesbian persons.
From stomach cancer, Baldwin died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. People buried his body at the Ferncliff cemetery in Hartsdale near city of New York.
Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.
James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.
He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France but often returned to the United States of America to lecture or to teach.
In his Giovanni's Room, a white American expatriate must come to terms with his homosexuality. In 1957, he began spending half of each year in city of New York.
James Baldwin offered a vital literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s.
He first partially autobiographically accounted his youth. His influential Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time informed a large white audience. Another Country talks about gay sexual tensions among intellectuals of New York. The black community savaged his gay themes. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers stated the Baldwin displayed an "agonizing, total hatred of blacks." People produced Blues for Mister Charlie, play of Baldwin, in 1964.
Going to Meet the Man and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone provided powerful descriptions. He as an openly gay man increasingly in condemned discrimination against lesbian persons.
From stomach cancer, Baldwin died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. People buried his body at the Ferncliff cemetery in Hartsdale near city of New York.
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August 20, 2021A compelling collection of interviews with James Baldwin; very interesting to see the development of his thinking over time.
September 19, 2020
I loved everything about this, James Baldwin really means so much to me. Some important excerpts from this which will probably stay with me forever:
“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. (...) The effort, it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover, too, the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to everyone of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered 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 wouldn’t be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
“I’m not a believer in any sense which would make sense to any church, and any church would obviously throw me out. I believe—what do I believe? I believe in . . . I believe in love—that sounds very corny . . . I believe we can save each other. In fact I think we must save each other. I don’t depend on anyone else to do it. I don’t mean anything passive [by love]. I mean something active, something more like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you. I mean energy. I mean a passionate belief, a passionate knowledge of what a human being can do, and become, what a human being can do to change the world in which he finds himself.”
“I’m terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves so long, that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this in their conduct and not on what they say. and this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.”
“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. (...) The effort, it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover, too, the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to everyone of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered 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 wouldn’t be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
“I’m not a believer in any sense which would make sense to any church, and any church would obviously throw me out. I believe—what do I believe? I believe in . . . I believe in love—that sounds very corny . . . I believe we can save each other. In fact I think we must save each other. I don’t depend on anyone else to do it. I don’t mean anything passive [by love]. I mean something active, something more like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you. I mean energy. I mean a passionate belief, a passionate knowledge of what a human being can do, and become, what a human being can do to change the world in which he finds himself.”
“I’m terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves so long, that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this in their conduct and not on what they say. and this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.”
November 25, 2014
It's interesting...I could be wrong but I don't think Baldwin considered himself a Christian per se. But the attitude he reflects in many situations is totally Christian. When faced with raw racism, he isn't overcome with an all consuming desire for revenge. But rather he reflects on the sorry state of human relations and the sordid upbringing of people that result in feelings of ignorance and prejudice. In other words, he feels sincerely sorry for those who are so warped that they feel wholesale, irrational hatred towards an entire race. (In Notes of a Native Son he relates an incident that pushed him over the brink, but that was early in his life, and a rare exception.)
He is an eloquent writer who is passionate about getting his message across.
He is an eloquent writer who is passionate about getting his message across.
March 30, 2014
a wonderful collection of interviews and articles displaying Baldwin's consistency of thought, philosophy and critical engagement with the American racial dilemma. A must-read for anyone seriously interested in the life and times of an American icon.
September 22, 2008
i love this book. if you ever wondered just how much Baldwin understands human behavior all you have to do is read this book.
January 29, 2018
Since first reading “The Last Conversation with James Baldwin,” I have come to admire him more and seek out his speeches, debates, other recorded conversations, etc more than his written works. His eloquence, both in thought and language, his evolution as a writer, thinker, man, and admirably, his consistency through out the years — it’s simply inspiring!
This extensive collection of conversations allowed me to see and discover more of James Baldwin than anything I have read of or by him so far. In addition to all the beautiful and powerful things I’ve known and loved about him for years, I also got to see the flaws, sad ironies, disconnects, etc of his journey. This, of course, didn’t lessen my admiration for him; rather, it offered a fuller humanity of Jimmy Baldwin.
Interestingly and annoyingly enough, most of these interviews asked about why he left America: underneath some of these questions lay a resentment, a weakly disguised objective to devalue his criticisms/arguments/writings in general about the American problem because he ‘left it behind’...as if an extended period of physical absence severs all ties or revokes any right to take a critical look at what was left behind. I reject and resent this view. As Jimmy explains, with which I fully agree from personal experience, “If I hadn’t gone away, I would never have been able to see it, and if I was unable to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it.”
The American hubris that centers the U.S. and the American experience as a focus and savior of the rest of the world is also, sadly, present here, esp. in the early interviews. Thankfully, this transforms over the years as Jimmy’s encounters with the world expand, particularly after his milieu in the Civil Rights movement (or the 1960s slave insurrection, as he prefers to call it) and travels to Africa.
A favorite conversation from this collection is his dialogue with Chinua Achebe on defining an African/Black aesthetic. A lot of thought-provoking gems from a meeting of such minds; e.g. “Art is unashamedly, unembarrasingly, if there is such a word, social. It is economic. The total life of man is reflected in his art...those who tell you “Do not put too much politics in your art,” are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is. What they are saying is not don’t introduce politics. What they are saying is don’t upset the system. They are just as political as any of us. It’s only that they are on the other side.” This conversation happened mere 38 years ago; it’s incredibly timeless and timely. I’m acutely aware of our collective loss in Jimmy’s and Chinua’s permanent (physical)absence, though their works continue to stay relevant and inspire a new generation of witnesses.
I can’t recommend James Baldwin’s works enough; more than his novels/plays/essays, or along with them, I should say, I’d recommend reading/watching his interviews. This specific collection is an excellent place to start!
This extensive collection of conversations allowed me to see and discover more of James Baldwin than anything I have read of or by him so far. In addition to all the beautiful and powerful things I’ve known and loved about him for years, I also got to see the flaws, sad ironies, disconnects, etc of his journey. This, of course, didn’t lessen my admiration for him; rather, it offered a fuller humanity of Jimmy Baldwin.
Interestingly and annoyingly enough, most of these interviews asked about why he left America: underneath some of these questions lay a resentment, a weakly disguised objective to devalue his criticisms/arguments/writings in general about the American problem because he ‘left it behind’...as if an extended period of physical absence severs all ties or revokes any right to take a critical look at what was left behind. I reject and resent this view. As Jimmy explains, with which I fully agree from personal experience, “If I hadn’t gone away, I would never have been able to see it, and if I was unable to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it.”
The American hubris that centers the U.S. and the American experience as a focus and savior of the rest of the world is also, sadly, present here, esp. in the early interviews. Thankfully, this transforms over the years as Jimmy’s encounters with the world expand, particularly after his milieu in the Civil Rights movement (or the 1960s slave insurrection, as he prefers to call it) and travels to Africa.
A favorite conversation from this collection is his dialogue with Chinua Achebe on defining an African/Black aesthetic. A lot of thought-provoking gems from a meeting of such minds; e.g. “Art is unashamedly, unembarrasingly, if there is such a word, social. It is economic. The total life of man is reflected in his art...those who tell you “Do not put too much politics in your art,” are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is. What they are saying is not don’t introduce politics. What they are saying is don’t upset the system. They are just as political as any of us. It’s only that they are on the other side.” This conversation happened mere 38 years ago; it’s incredibly timeless and timely. I’m acutely aware of our collective loss in Jimmy’s and Chinua’s permanent (physical)absence, though their works continue to stay relevant and inspire a new generation of witnesses.
I can’t recommend James Baldwin’s works enough; more than his novels/plays/essays, or along with them, I should say, I’d recommend reading/watching his interviews. This specific collection is an excellent place to start!
January 15, 2021
This is the second book I've read from Univ. Press of Mississippi's "Conversations With..." series. These interviews range from 1961-1988. There are quite a number of questions that get asked to Baldwin again and again, particularly "Why did you leave for France?" and a form of "Please speak as spokesperson on behalf of all black people" even though he does not wish to have that role nor does he see it as possible. He emphasizes that he is just one person, but he also recognizes that much of the world has thrust this celebrity status upon him. I am tempted to fault the editors of this collection for allowing these repetitive questions to resurface, but then again, this helps us understand the full context—and it reveals much about the interviewer as well. Still, unless one is an in-depth scholar of Baldwin, I'd rather not hear his answer to the same question ad infinitum if the answers are the same.
While I did disagree with him on certain points where I felt, for example, he was drawing too broad of a brush-stroke, still, this book is wonderful for Baldwin's trenchant gems. I appreciate that Baldwin was fairly comprehensive in his views in the sense that he did not just advocate for one group of people, but he was advocating, ultimately, for humanity. Of course, many have had this goal and many have disagreed on the means. Baldwin distinguishes himself from what I think he referred to as the Black Nationalist Movement, which he felt was just a role reversal.
The one thing I take most with me after reading this is that I need to stop deceiving myself, lying about what I feel if I look. Baldwin recounts his own journey with coming to his own truth and stopping his own self-deception, and it's a brave, inspiring account.
Here are some passages that impacted me greatly:
"One is born in a white country, a white Protestant Puritan country, where one was once a slave, where all the standards and all the images...when you open your eyes on the world, everything you see: none of it applies to you.
You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish." (5)
"You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you." (6)
"Nobody ever recovers, really, from his earliest impressions." (8)
"It is very important to remember what it means to be born in a Protestant Puritan country, with all the taboos placed on the flesh, and have at the same time in this country such a vivid example of a decent pagan imagination and the sexual liberty with which white people invest Negroes—and then penalize them for." (8)
"In order to make the act of love, there has got to be a certain confidence, a certain trust. Otherwise it degenerates into nothing but desperate and futureless brutality." (11)
"It is too easy, in another way, for the country to sit in admiration before the sit-in students, because it doesn't cost them anything. They have no idea what it costs those kids to go through that picketed building, for example, where people upstairs are spitting down on your head or trying to vomit down on you. This is a tremendous amount to demand of people who are technically free, in a free country, which is supposed to be the leader of the West.
It seems to me a great cowardice on the part of the public to expect that it is going to be saved by a handful of children, for whom they refuse to be responsible." (13)
"I think the country has to find out what it means by freedom. Freedom is a very dangerous thing. Anything else is disastrous. But freedom is dangerous. You've got to make choices. You've got to make very dangerous choices. You've got to be taught that you life is in your hands." (18)
"What Malcolm tells them in effect, is that they should be proud of being black, and God knows that they should be. That is a very important thing to hear in a country which assures you that you should be ashamed of it. Of course, in order to do this, what he does is destroy a truth and invent a history. What he does is say 'You're better because you're black.' Well, of course, that isn't true. That's the trouble." (43)
"That's Malcolm's great authority over any of his audiences. He corroborates their reality; he tells them that they really exist." (43)
“It is…comparatively easy to invest a population with a false sense of superiority, and it will always break down in a crisis. That is the history of Europe simply—it’s one of the reasons we are in this terrible place. It is one of the reasons that we have five cops standing on the back of a woman’s neck in Birmingham, because at some point they were taught and they believed that they were better than other people because they were white. It leads to moral bankruptcy. It is inevitable, it cannot but lead there. But my point here is, that the country is for the first time worried about the Muslim movement. It shouldn’t be worried about the Muslim movement, that’s not the problem. The problem is to eliminate the conditions which breed the Muslim movement.” (44)
“the intellect is one more way of avoiding yourself” (74).
“I was being a cultured Negro. I was always wearing a sort of iron corset. And it didn’t make me white. And it didn’t make me a man either. And it means I couldn’t talk to white people, because I was talking in a certain kind of way, and I couldn’t talk to black people either, because I was too busy not being one of them. And I hated white people from the bottom of my heart. And I hated black people for being so common! I realized, too, that if a white man were doing any of those things I was not told not to do, no one would say he was acting like a n*****. It was only me who was acting like a n*****, because I was a n*****. No matter what I did, I was acting like a n*****. So I decided to act like a n*****, or at least act like me.” (76)
“When I say poet, it’s an arbitrary word. It’s a word I use because I don’t like the word artist. Nina Simone is a poet. Max Roach is a poet. There is a whole list of people. I’m not talking about literature at all. I’m talking about the recreation of experience, you know, the way that it comes back. Billie Holiday was a poet. She gave you back your experience. She refined it, and you recognized it for the first time because she was in and out of it and she made it possible for you to bear it. And if you could bear it, then you could begin to change it. That’s what a poet does. I’m not talking about books. I’m talking about a certain kind of passion, a certain kind of energy which people produce and they secrete in certain kind of energy which people like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Max Roach because they need it and these people give it back to you and they get you from one place to another.”
“Question: How do you see the role of the artist in general?
The role of the artist is exactly the same role, I think, as the role of the lover. If you love somebody, you honor at least two necessities at once. One of them is to recognize something very dangerous, or very difficult. Many people cannot recognize it at all, that may also be loved; love is like a mirror. In any case, if you do love somebody, you honor the necessity endlessly, and being at the mercy of that love, you try to correct the person whom you love. Now that’s a two way street. You’ve also got to be corrected. As I said, the people produce the artist, and it’s true. The artist also produces the people. And that’s a very violent and terrifying act of love. The role of the artist and the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I become conscious of the things that I don’t see. And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me. No one wants to see more than he sees. You have to be driven to see what you see. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love. You can call it a poem, you can call it whatever you like. That’s how people grow up. An artist is here not to give you answers but to ask you questions.” (155-56)
“One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.” (160)
Regarding the rejection of “standard English”: “I think it is important to reject it as a standard but whether to reject it in toto is another question It is a standard that obviously does not work, for it is not big enough to carry your experience and in that sense one is forced to snatch the language and do things with it that cannot be done within the confines of the Queen’s English. There is a reality of a painting. There is a reality of a Black life that is not that of Rembrandt. Everything must be learned but to be put to your own purposes.” (170)
“No one in love or trouble or at the point of death is only a recognizable color. What he is at that moment is his experience. It is himself.” (171)
“When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” (235)
“I had to be released from a terrible shyness—an illusion that I could hide anything from anybody.” (236)
“…the hardest thing in the world [in writing] is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.” (245-46)
“Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.” (247)
“You begin to see more than you did before in the same event. It reveals itself—more. There’s more to it. It’s not a conscious decision to refashion the anecdote. In time one of the things that happens is that you become less frightened because there’s less to be frightened of—quite unconsciously. That is not something which is cerebral. I don’t know whether you can hunt more and more of your own life or if more and more of your own life will hunt you, but it comes back to you during points in your life in another light. One’s relationship to the past changes. Yet that boy, the boy I was, still controls the man I am. If I didn’t know as much as I think I do know about that boy, I would still be his prisoner. This happens to many people who are effectively stopped between the ages of seventeen and twenty and when they are fifty or sixty are still imprisoned by the boy or girl they have been. Perhaps what I’m saying is that all the actions is to understand enough to be liberated from first of all one’s terror and then one’s self-image, to keep moving into a larger space.” (277-78)
“I’m still terrified [to write autobiographical accounts]. But I think that in time terror begins to be a kind of luxury; you can’t do anything with it, but it can do a lot with you. You have to learn how to ride it. When I was writing Just Above My Head, I’d never been more frightened in my life either as a man or as a writer. Yet I knew it had to be done.” (278)
“You have to be aware of the temptation to invent [your identity], which is the same thing as the temptation to evade. You have to be aware that you would not like to violate your self-image, and on the other hand at the very same moment, you have to be aware that your self-image is entirely false. You have to discard your self-image. You don’t have to be corrected by your public; you can be corrected by your friends or your lovers. They see you quite beyond your self-image in a way you don’t see yourself. And without that you couldn’t live at all. I’m writing for the people who would know if I were lying. They can call me on it. Otherwise, I’d be locked into my own fantasy.” (279)
“This is a curiously and dangerously fragmented society while, perhaps unlike any society in the past, it has all the stirrings of well-being. It has at its back the resonance of the American Dream and the history of conquest. But it is also based on a lie, the lie of Manifest Destiny. So it’s a county immobilized, with a past it cannot explain away. That’s why everyone’s so cheerful, and the Americans who are crying have to be cheerful. Everyone is friendly, and nobody is friends. Everybody has something to hide, and when you have to hide, you have to cry for despair. Despair is the American crime. So one is trapped in a kind of Sunday purgatory, and the only way out of that is to confront what you are afraid of. The American image of the black face contains everything America most wants and everything that terrifies it. It also contains the castrations, the lynchings, the burnings, the continual daily and hourly debasements of life, and you cannot do those things without doing something to yourself.” (280)
While I did disagree with him on certain points where I felt, for example, he was drawing too broad of a brush-stroke, still, this book is wonderful for Baldwin's trenchant gems. I appreciate that Baldwin was fairly comprehensive in his views in the sense that he did not just advocate for one group of people, but he was advocating, ultimately, for humanity. Of course, many have had this goal and many have disagreed on the means. Baldwin distinguishes himself from what I think he referred to as the Black Nationalist Movement, which he felt was just a role reversal.
The one thing I take most with me after reading this is that I need to stop deceiving myself, lying about what I feel if I look. Baldwin recounts his own journey with coming to his own truth and stopping his own self-deception, and it's a brave, inspiring account.
Here are some passages that impacted me greatly:
"One is born in a white country, a white Protestant Puritan country, where one was once a slave, where all the standards and all the images...when you open your eyes on the world, everything you see: none of it applies to you.
You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish." (5)
"You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you." (6)
"Nobody ever recovers, really, from his earliest impressions." (8)
"It is very important to remember what it means to be born in a Protestant Puritan country, with all the taboos placed on the flesh, and have at the same time in this country such a vivid example of a decent pagan imagination and the sexual liberty with which white people invest Negroes—and then penalize them for." (8)
"In order to make the act of love, there has got to be a certain confidence, a certain trust. Otherwise it degenerates into nothing but desperate and futureless brutality." (11)
"It is too easy, in another way, for the country to sit in admiration before the sit-in students, because it doesn't cost them anything. They have no idea what it costs those kids to go through that picketed building, for example, where people upstairs are spitting down on your head or trying to vomit down on you. This is a tremendous amount to demand of people who are technically free, in a free country, which is supposed to be the leader of the West.
It seems to me a great cowardice on the part of the public to expect that it is going to be saved by a handful of children, for whom they refuse to be responsible." (13)
"I think the country has to find out what it means by freedom. Freedom is a very dangerous thing. Anything else is disastrous. But freedom is dangerous. You've got to make choices. You've got to make very dangerous choices. You've got to be taught that you life is in your hands." (18)
"What Malcolm tells them in effect, is that they should be proud of being black, and God knows that they should be. That is a very important thing to hear in a country which assures you that you should be ashamed of it. Of course, in order to do this, what he does is destroy a truth and invent a history. What he does is say 'You're better because you're black.' Well, of course, that isn't true. That's the trouble." (43)
"That's Malcolm's great authority over any of his audiences. He corroborates their reality; he tells them that they really exist." (43)
“It is…comparatively easy to invest a population with a false sense of superiority, and it will always break down in a crisis. That is the history of Europe simply—it’s one of the reasons we are in this terrible place. It is one of the reasons that we have five cops standing on the back of a woman’s neck in Birmingham, because at some point they were taught and they believed that they were better than other people because they were white. It leads to moral bankruptcy. It is inevitable, it cannot but lead there. But my point here is, that the country is for the first time worried about the Muslim movement. It shouldn’t be worried about the Muslim movement, that’s not the problem. The problem is to eliminate the conditions which breed the Muslim movement.” (44)
“the intellect is one more way of avoiding yourself” (74).
“I was being a cultured Negro. I was always wearing a sort of iron corset. And it didn’t make me white. And it didn’t make me a man either. And it means I couldn’t talk to white people, because I was talking in a certain kind of way, and I couldn’t talk to black people either, because I was too busy not being one of them. And I hated white people from the bottom of my heart. And I hated black people for being so common! I realized, too, that if a white man were doing any of those things I was not told not to do, no one would say he was acting like a n*****. It was only me who was acting like a n*****, because I was a n*****. No matter what I did, I was acting like a n*****. So I decided to act like a n*****, or at least act like me.” (76)
“When I say poet, it’s an arbitrary word. It’s a word I use because I don’t like the word artist. Nina Simone is a poet. Max Roach is a poet. There is a whole list of people. I’m not talking about literature at all. I’m talking about the recreation of experience, you know, the way that it comes back. Billie Holiday was a poet. She gave you back your experience. She refined it, and you recognized it for the first time because she was in and out of it and she made it possible for you to bear it. And if you could bear it, then you could begin to change it. That’s what a poet does. I’m not talking about books. I’m talking about a certain kind of passion, a certain kind of energy which people produce and they secrete in certain kind of energy which people like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Max Roach because they need it and these people give it back to you and they get you from one place to another.”
“Question: How do you see the role of the artist in general?
The role of the artist is exactly the same role, I think, as the role of the lover. If you love somebody, you honor at least two necessities at once. One of them is to recognize something very dangerous, or very difficult. Many people cannot recognize it at all, that may also be loved; love is like a mirror. In any case, if you do love somebody, you honor the necessity endlessly, and being at the mercy of that love, you try to correct the person whom you love. Now that’s a two way street. You’ve also got to be corrected. As I said, the people produce the artist, and it’s true. The artist also produces the people. And that’s a very violent and terrifying act of love. The role of the artist and the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I become conscious of the things that I don’t see. And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me. No one wants to see more than he sees. You have to be driven to see what you see. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love. You can call it a poem, you can call it whatever you like. That’s how people grow up. An artist is here not to give you answers but to ask you questions.” (155-56)
“One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.” (160)
Regarding the rejection of “standard English”: “I think it is important to reject it as a standard but whether to reject it in toto is another question It is a standard that obviously does not work, for it is not big enough to carry your experience and in that sense one is forced to snatch the language and do things with it that cannot be done within the confines of the Queen’s English. There is a reality of a painting. There is a reality of a Black life that is not that of Rembrandt. Everything must be learned but to be put to your own purposes.” (170)
“No one in love or trouble or at the point of death is only a recognizable color. What he is at that moment is his experience. It is himself.” (171)
“When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” (235)
“I had to be released from a terrible shyness—an illusion that I could hide anything from anybody.” (236)
“…the hardest thing in the world [in writing] is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.” (245-46)
“Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.” (247)
“You begin to see more than you did before in the same event. It reveals itself—more. There’s more to it. It’s not a conscious decision to refashion the anecdote. In time one of the things that happens is that you become less frightened because there’s less to be frightened of—quite unconsciously. That is not something which is cerebral. I don’t know whether you can hunt more and more of your own life or if more and more of your own life will hunt you, but it comes back to you during points in your life in another light. One’s relationship to the past changes. Yet that boy, the boy I was, still controls the man I am. If I didn’t know as much as I think I do know about that boy, I would still be his prisoner. This happens to many people who are effectively stopped between the ages of seventeen and twenty and when they are fifty or sixty are still imprisoned by the boy or girl they have been. Perhaps what I’m saying is that all the actions is to understand enough to be liberated from first of all one’s terror and then one’s self-image, to keep moving into a larger space.” (277-78)
“I’m still terrified [to write autobiographical accounts]. But I think that in time terror begins to be a kind of luxury; you can’t do anything with it, but it can do a lot with you. You have to learn how to ride it. When I was writing Just Above My Head, I’d never been more frightened in my life either as a man or as a writer. Yet I knew it had to be done.” (278)
“You have to be aware of the temptation to invent [your identity], which is the same thing as the temptation to evade. You have to be aware that you would not like to violate your self-image, and on the other hand at the very same moment, you have to be aware that your self-image is entirely false. You have to discard your self-image. You don’t have to be corrected by your public; you can be corrected by your friends or your lovers. They see you quite beyond your self-image in a way you don’t see yourself. And without that you couldn’t live at all. I’m writing for the people who would know if I were lying. They can call me on it. Otherwise, I’d be locked into my own fantasy.” (279)
“This is a curiously and dangerously fragmented society while, perhaps unlike any society in the past, it has all the stirrings of well-being. It has at its back the resonance of the American Dream and the history of conquest. But it is also based on a lie, the lie of Manifest Destiny. So it’s a county immobilized, with a past it cannot explain away. That’s why everyone’s so cheerful, and the Americans who are crying have to be cheerful. Everyone is friendly, and nobody is friends. Everybody has something to hide, and when you have to hide, you have to cry for despair. Despair is the American crime. So one is trapped in a kind of Sunday purgatory, and the only way out of that is to confront what you are afraid of. The American image of the black face contains everything America most wants and everything that terrifies it. It also contains the castrations, the lynchings, the burnings, the continual daily and hourly debasements of life, and you cannot do those things without doing something to yourself.” (280)
November 2, 2020
It is full of the words of James Baldwin, so of course it is 5 stars.
I can only say there was too much interviewer(s) chatter, and not enough of James' words.
The tragedy of this book for me is how much Baldwin foreshadows what we are (still) going through today in America. Racism is alive and kicking, and White Supremacist America, led by their (burning) cross-bearer, #45, is fighting tooth and nail to hold on to the last vestiges of violence, hate, and oppression - what they call history, values, and rights - before the entire edifice burns to the ground. Nothing has changed, truly, except the sinister mechanisms of control and debasement utilized by the power structure to deny basic human dignity to anyone they dislike. I will always love Baldwin for his honesty and erudition. He was a true intellectual and an amazing man. His writings are superior to his recorded interviews, in my mind, as he is not limited by the questions posed or the audience he addresses. But they contain no less power, emotion, or fight.
I can only say there was too much interviewer(s) chatter, and not enough of James' words.
The tragedy of this book for me is how much Baldwin foreshadows what we are (still) going through today in America. Racism is alive and kicking, and White Supremacist America, led by their (burning) cross-bearer, #45, is fighting tooth and nail to hold on to the last vestiges of violence, hate, and oppression - what they call history, values, and rights - before the entire edifice burns to the ground. Nothing has changed, truly, except the sinister mechanisms of control and debasement utilized by the power structure to deny basic human dignity to anyone they dislike. I will always love Baldwin for his honesty and erudition. He was a true intellectual and an amazing man. His writings are superior to his recorded interviews, in my mind, as he is not limited by the questions posed or the audience he addresses. But they contain no less power, emotion, or fight.
April 5, 2019
When it comes to Baldwin's interviews I think I prefer watching and listening to them to reading them. Tone is so important in an interview and it doesn't come across as well in written form. I appreciate these interviews because they flesh out his thoughts on some of his books and they show some of the fire he had (especially in the interview with the English man, it seems like in written form they just spent an hour yelling at each other). I think the problem I had with this book is actually mentioned in the introduction. Many of the ideas and themes are repeated over and over again in the interviews. If anything I come out impressed at how consistent Baldwin was in his answers over the years.
For people that are really into James Baldwin I would recommend this. For people just getting into him I would say start with his fiction or essays and work up to this down the road.
For people that are really into James Baldwin I would recommend this. For people just getting into him I would say start with his fiction or essays and work up to this down the road.
December 13, 2020
On James Baldwin, to borrow from Mary Oliver: “I never met any of my friends, of course, in a usual way—they were strangers, and lived only in their writings. But if they were only shadow-companions, still they were constant, and powerful, and amazing. That is, they said amazing things, and for me it changed the world.”
So on James Baldwin: An intellectual landing point, whose coherence and long-sighted contemplation, whose way of knowing and moving, connect me to the place I can be, human, where I can reassemble and re-articulate my private points of view, for my own place to speak from, and then live in the world. In love.
So on James Baldwin: An intellectual landing point, whose coherence and long-sighted contemplation, whose way of knowing and moving, connect me to the place I can be, human, where I can reassemble and re-articulate my private points of view, for my own place to speak from, and then live in the world. In love.
May 27, 2019
Speaking to the most heartbreaking and pernicious way in which all bigotry infiltrates the psyche and shrinks it from the inside, Baldwin and Achebe ruminate on the long, erotic, unended wrestling of art and politics.
What I particularly enjoyed however, was the dialogue between Baldwin and Giovanni on the complexities of race and what it means to be an empowered human being.
That this time-capsule of genius and prescience has fallen out of print is a tragic testament to the commercialist rift between the profit of culture and the value of culture.
What I particularly enjoyed however, was the dialogue between Baldwin and Giovanni on the complexities of race and what it means to be an empowered human being.
That this time-capsule of genius and prescience has fallen out of print is a tragic testament to the commercialist rift between the profit of culture and the value of culture.
December 14, 2018
I can think of no late 20th century literary figure with more nuance and foresight into the subject of America than James Baldwin who, to the extent that in baffling his contemporaries, was able to blow the future wide open. This is a great collection of his dialogues and interviews, where he has dropped pearl after pearl of heavy truth. I had a fantastic time reading it.
October 10, 2018
This book offers great insight into Baldwin’s mind and spirit. I enjoyed it.
December 10, 2018
James has become my favorite. You really get insight into his mind, while also learning some of his writing practices !
October 28, 2019
Good Read.
February 9, 2024
It allows you to spend time with a brilliant thinker and master writer. I’ll probably reread it.
November 18, 2018
منذ تعرفت على جيمس بالدوين في “أنا لست زنجيك��، أعجبت كثيرا بأفكاره وخطاباته ومناقشاته ومحادثاته المسجلة، في الفكر واللغة، وتطوره ككاتب ومفكر ورجل مثير للإعجاب وتناسقه عبر السنين.
https://m7raby.wordpress.com/2018/11/...
الكتاب عبارة عن مجموعة مقابلات (27 مقابلة) مع جيمس بالديون، تم إعادة طبعها من مجموعة متنوعة من المصادر (الصحف، الإذاعة والمجلات…)، وتغطي الفترة 1961 – 1987، أي من سنة نشر كتابه “لا أحد يعرف اسمي”، إلى بضعة أسابيع فقط قبل وفاته، ويشمل آخر محادثة رسمية معه.
وتظهر هذا المؤلف الشهير في بلاغته وغضبه وتصوره للأوضاع العرقية والاجتماعية والأدبية في أمريكا. بغض النظر عما إذا كان يناقش بصراحة اصوله اليهودية، ومهمته الأدبية وإنجازاته، ودوره في حركة الحقوق المدنية، أو وجهات نظره حول الشؤون ا��عالمية، والعلاقة بين الرجل الأسود والرجل الأبيض، وفيتنام، والمسيحية، وزملائه من الكتاب، كان بالدوين مشهورا ودائما مثيرا للجدل. تكمن أهمية هذه المجموعة في مساهمتها بشكل كبير في توضيح وشرح أفكار وآراء بالدوين سواء في الرواية والدراما والمقالات والشعر.
هذه المجموعة الواسعة من المحادثات سمحت لي برؤية واكتشاف المزيد من جيمس بالديون أكثر من أي شيء قرأته لحد الآن. بالإضافة إلى كل الأشياء الجميلة والقوية التي عرفتها وأحببتها فيه سابقا، رأيت أيضا العيوب، المفارقات المحزنة، وبالطبع لم يقلل من اعجابي به بل عرضت لي جانبه الإنساني الذي أكمل لي الصورة التي كونتها عنه.
ما أثار انتباهي وأيضا أزعجني هو تكرار سؤال عن سبب مغادرته لأمريكا، وكأنهم محاولة لإضعاف وإنقاص من قيمة وقوة انتقاداته وحججه وكتاباته بشكل عام حول مشاكل أمريكا لأنه تركها وكأن غيابه الطويل عنها يقطع كل العلاقات أو يلغي أي حق له في إلقاء نظرة فاحصة على ما خلفه. وأعجبني كثيرا رده عن السؤال حيث قال: إذا لم أغادرها لم أكن لأتمكن من رؤيتها، وإذا لم أتمكن من رؤيتها، لم يكن باستطاعتي أن أسامحها”.
محادثتي المفضلة من هذه المجموعة هي حواره مع تشينوا اتشيبي Chinua Achebe حيث دار حديثهما حول الفن، والأخلاق، والمهمة السياسية للفن والفنانين، ودور الفن وقيمته في مواجهة هيمنة الرجل الأبيض والأساطين المؤسسة لتفوقه وغطرسته.
هنا بعض من مقابلاته وجدتها على يوتيوب
https://youtu.be/_Xy3ounRw9Q?list=PL2...
https://m7raby.wordpress.com/2018/11/...
الكتاب عبارة عن مجموعة مقابلات (27 مقابلة) مع جيمس بالديون، تم إعادة طبعها من مجموعة متنوعة من المصادر (الصحف، الإذاعة والمجلات…)، وتغطي الفترة 1961 – 1987، أي من سنة نشر كتابه “لا أحد يعرف اسمي”، إلى بضعة أسابيع فقط قبل وفاته، ويشمل آخر محادثة رسمية معه.
وتظهر هذا المؤلف الشهير في بلاغته وغضبه وتصوره للأوضاع العرقية والاجتماعية والأدبية في أمريكا. بغض النظر عما إذا كان يناقش بصراحة اصوله اليهودية، ومهمته الأدبية وإنجازاته، ودوره في حركة الحقوق المدنية، أو وجهات نظره حول الشؤون ا��عالمية، والعلاقة بين الرجل الأسود والرجل الأبيض، وفيتنام، والمسيحية، وزملائه من الكتاب، كان بالدوين مشهورا ودائما مثيرا للجدل. تكمن أهمية هذه المجموعة في مساهمتها بشكل كبير في توضيح وشرح أفكار وآراء بالدوين سواء في الرواية والدراما والمقالات والشعر.
هذه المجموعة الواسعة من المحادثات سمحت لي برؤية واكتشاف المزيد من جيمس بالديون أكثر من أي شيء قرأته لحد الآن. بالإضافة إلى كل الأشياء الجميلة والقوية التي عرفتها وأحببتها فيه سابقا، رأيت أيضا العيوب، المفارقات المحزنة، وبالطبع لم يقلل من اعجابي به بل عرضت لي جانبه الإنساني الذي أكمل لي الصورة التي كونتها عنه.
ما أثار انتباهي وأيضا أزعجني هو تكرار سؤال عن سبب مغادرته لأمريكا، وكأنهم محاولة لإضعاف وإنقاص من قيمة وقوة انتقاداته وحججه وكتاباته بشكل عام حول مشاكل أمريكا لأنه تركها وكأن غيابه الطويل عنها يقطع كل العلاقات أو يلغي أي حق له في إلقاء نظرة فاحصة على ما خلفه. وأعجبني كثيرا رده عن السؤال حيث قال: إذا لم أغادرها لم أكن لأتمكن من رؤيتها، وإذا لم أتمكن من رؤيتها، لم يكن باستطاعتي أن أسامحها”.
محادثتي المفضلة من هذه المجموعة هي حواره مع تشينوا اتشيبي Chinua Achebe حيث دار حديثهما حول الفن، والأخلاق، والمهمة السياسية للفن والفنانين، ودور الفن وقيمته في مواجهة هيمنة الرجل الأبيض والأساطين المؤسسة لتفوقه وغطرسته.
هنا بعض من مقابلاته وجدتها على يوتيوب
https://youtu.be/_Xy3ounRw9Q?list=PL2...
April 25, 2007
Not sure if I read this in HS at the time I was doing my research project on him... but I bet it would be good! I will have to check it out myself :)
Read
September 26, 2014818.5409 B1816 1989
September 21, 2015
Brilliant
April 14, 2017
Introduction
p.vii – While remaining a controversial figure to the end, Baldwin nevertheless sustained a clear perception of his own literary mission and described it variously as being a “witness” (“I am a witness. That’s my responsibility, I write it all down.”) and “a disturber of the peace” (“Artists are here to disturb the peace. Otherwise chaos.”) “real writers question their age. They demand yes and no answers. Typers collaborate. You collaborate or you question.” To witness, to disturb the peace, and to question meant for him that a writer was constantly having to confront the dilemma “to be immoral and uphold the status quo or to be moral and try to change the world.”
“James Baldwin Breaks His Silence,” Cep Dergisi, Atlas, March, 1967, 47-49
p.61 – The brutal fact is that the economy does not know how to make room for the Negro – it does not have room, after all, for many, many white people – and it would not know how, even if the bulk of the population were less brainwashed than it is. The American people are paying the price for the lie concerning Negro inferiority which they have told themselves so long, and which they have persuaded themselves in the truth. But the legend came about only to afford moral justification for slavery. If you buys and sell a man like an animal, then you must persuade yourself that he is an animal. The terrible thing about this dynamic is that the man who is being used like an animal exerts all his energy in not becoming one; while the man who is so using his fatally descends in the human scale and becomes something much worse than an animal. Black Power means the recognition that neither the American government nor the American people have any desire, or any ability, to liberate Negroes or – which comes to exactly the same thing – themselves. Well, the job must be attempted, we must save ourselves if we can; and if we can save ourselves, we can also save the country; it is now absolutely and literally true that the American Negro is America’s only hope.
“Are We on the Edge of Civil War?” David Frost, The Americans, 1970, 145-50
p.94 – Frost: Presumably you feel there has been some progress since 1956, but you used the phrase, “the life and death of the civil rights movement.” Do you think the civil rights movement is dead?
Baldwin: I feel the civil rights movement always contained within itself something self-defeating and Martin knew this finally, too. That’s why he died in Memphis fighting for a raise for garbage men. In the beginning we thought that there was a way of reaching the conscience of the people of this country. We hoped there was, and I must say that we did reach several blacks and several whites. We did everything in our power to make the American people realize that the myths they were living with were not so much destroying black people as whites. It’s one of the things one lives with, to have one’s head broken, but it is quite another thing to be a representative of the people in whose name it is done. It is one things to be a victim, one thing to be one of our niggers, and another thing to be one of the people who are described when we talk about “our niggers.” You see what I mean?
p.96-97 – Baldwin: Something very important is happening in this country now, and I think for the first time the people legally white and the people legally black are beginning to understand that if they do not come together they’re going to end up in the same gas oven.
Frost: Gas oven?
Baldwin: Gas oven.
Frost: That’s overstating the point, isn’t it?
Baldwin: So were the Jews in Germany told that.
Frost: But there’s no parallel, surely.
Baldwin: There is a parallel, if you were born in Harlem.
Frost: But you’ve never had a policy here like the one in Germany.
Baldwin: I will tell you this, my friend, for every Sammy Davis, for every Jimmy Baldwin, for every black cat you have heard of in the history of this country, there are a hundred of us dead. I can carry you to some of the graveyards, where boys just like me, or brighter than me, more beautiful than me, perished because they were black.
“James Baldwin Interviewed” John Hall, Transatlantic Review, 1970/71, 5-14
p.101 – Baldwin: None of this has anything to do with colour, that’s true. Colour is a great American myth. Babies and corpses have no colour. It’s part of the great American masturbation. You see, it’s easy to label a man this or that, maybe “nigger,” and the label permits you to do all kinds of monstrous things to him because he’s no longer a man; he’s a label. But what the label says about the people’s opinion of a man is what leads them to their doom. The old nigger is just something in people’s minds.
p.102 – Hall: You talk about a people being led to their doom by an attitude of mind, and much of what you say seems to repeat what you were saying seven years ago, in The Fire Next Time, when you said, in effect, OK, one more chance, but if it’s not taken immediately, there’ll be a holy conflagration. America seems to be fending off that doom pretty effectively, if at a high cost. What do you say now about the fire?
Baldwin: The fire is upon us. When construction workers in New York can walk, under the eyes of the police, and beat up kids and anti-war demonstrators, helped by the police really, and nobody cares, it’s very sinister. Sinister as the Reichstag fire. When the police become lawless, and are allied with the visibly lawless, a society is in trouble. I’m chicken; I don’t even want to say what I see.
Baldwin: Formative influences: my father, the Church, and Charles Dickens. For the past year I’ve been in Istanbul, writing, as you know, a long essay on the life and death of what we call the civil rights movement.
Hall: It died?
Baldwin: It died with Martin.
Hall: But people are still going through the motions?
Baldwin: Well, we marched and petitioned for a decade, and now it’s clear that there’s no point in marching or petitioning. And what happens I don’t know, but when they killed Martin they killed that hope. They didn’t kill that dream, but they did kill that hope. Now everybody knows one cannot reach the conscience of a nation that way. My book doesn’t offer any answers about where we go from here.
“Exclusive Interview with James Baldwin” Joe Walker, Muhammad Speaks, 1972, 11-12
p.127 – Walker: How do you view what is going on in the United States today?
Baldwin: I have a feeling that the people in power are really figure-heads… [Nixon 1969-74] I really do wonder in whose hands exactly the American people are. It is really striking in my experience that the government has been so blatantly contemptuous of the needs of the American people. Not only the Black people but the needs of the whole country.
Walker: Has the U.S. federal government ever represented the people? Doesn’t it today represent the corporate elite as it did the big plantation owners in the South and the big manufacturers in the North from the beginning?
Baldwin: Until very lately I thin it has made some attempt to seem to represent the people. And at certain moments, after all in our history, some pressures from below reflected themselves on high. It is not the case today. The government and the people have nothing to do with each other. We hear about a silent majority and I prepared to believe it exists but they aren’t the only people in the country and besides I’m not sure Agnew speaks for them. (Being in the United States) is a little like finding yourself in a backward nation and you read the company press and then you go out into the streets and they don’t jive. What you’re told is happening and what you see is happening are not the same thing. That can be a very eerie and frightening feeling.
p.131 – Walker: What unique form do you envision socialism in the U.S.A. taking?
Baldwin: I don’t know, but the price of any real socialism here is the eradication of what we call the race problem. The usage of how that problem has been put has always had a terrible inhibiting effect on the development of this society.
Walker: You don’t believe that racism in the U.S. was an accident, do you?
Baldwin: Racism is crucial to the system to keep Black and whites at a division so both were and are a source of cheap labor.
p.132 – Walker: Your writing has been done almost totally overseas. Is there a reason for that?
Baldwin: In order to write you have to sit down and concentrate on that. Which means you’ve got to turn your back on everything else. It is impossible to do that in the situation in this country now. For me it was also necessary to move out so that I could see it because you don’t see a situation very clearly when you’re in it. You can’t. you spend all of your time reacting to it, resisting it or resenting it, but you are not able to obtain any distance from it. Everything is too urgent. It is a matter of life and death. You must react everyday to what is happening. But that is no way to write a book or a sentence.
“The Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin” The Black Scholar, 1973, 33-42
p.150 – Baldwin: White America is unwilling to recognize its history. I don’t think they can. I’m speaking about the generality, but the exceptions must be noted. You must consider that a lot of white people in America understand what's happening, especially young kids. But then to the extent that they understand it and to the extent that they act on what they understand, they become indistinguishable from the nigger. Indistinguishable, because, in a sense, they are worse than the nigger because they are traitors.
History is a very strange crucible and I don’t pretend to understand it; but I do understand at least in my own mind that you are lucky if you are forced to understand your own history. A black American who has, in effect, or who is told he has no history has achieved some kind of identity in any case. And then you begin to recreate your history out of weapons you didn’t know you had. This is what happened to black Americans, I think. I don’t think that we were born with any particular sense of history.
“James Baldwin: Looking Towards the Eighties” Kalamu ya Salaam, The Black Collegian, 1979,105-110
p.178 – Baldwin: The role of the writer is to write, but this is a cryptic statement. What I mean is that a writer doesn’t dance. His function is very particular and so is his responsibility. After all, to write, if taken seriously, is to be subversive. To disturb the peace.
[…] For a very long time until Martin died, I was operating as a public speaker in the context of the civil rights movement. And when Martin died, something happened to me and something happened to many people. It took a while for me and for many people to pull ourselves back together. Then I had to find another way to discharge what I considered to be my responsibility. I’ve been working on college campuses and in prisons; which is why I don’t bring my typewriter across the ocean.
p.179 – Q: What are some of the things we learned about ourselves?
Baldwin: That the people who call themselves “white,” I must put it that way, well, as Malcolm X said, “white is a state of mind.” The implications of that statement are enormous because it finally means that the people who call themselves white have really invented something which is not true. The key to this is European power which is a very complex thing and which involves the history of the church. White people invented Black people to protect themselves against something which frightened them.
p.181 – Q: So, how do you assess the seventies? The civil rights period and the sixties brought our struggle to a point of sharpness, so much so, that it was unthinkable to believe that we didn’t have to struggle.
Baldwin: But of course. Out of that something was clarified for us and even more importantly, for our children.
Q: Which was what?
Baldwin: That one was no longer at the mercy of white imagination. I was born fifty-five years ago. In a sense I was born in the nightmare of the white man’s mind. All of my growing up and all my early youth was first that discovery and then the bloody struggle to get out of that mind, to destroy that frame of reference for myself and for those coming after me. I’m the oldest of nine children; this is very important. I know that my great-nieces and great-nephews are living in a different world than the world in which I was born. They can not imagine the world which produced me, but I’ve seen the world for which they are going to be responsible.
“James Baldwin, an Interview” Wolfgang Binder, Revista/ Review Interamericana, 1980, 326-41
p.194 – Baldwin: Malcolm X asked a very important question years ago, which I did not quite hear at that moment. We were doing a radio program with young students in 1961 when there were the two poles in America, Black Muslims on one hand, and the very beginning of the student sit-ins on the other. And I was there as moderator, because it was Malcolm and the students who were talking. And Malcolm was very good with a kid when he said: “If you are a citizen, why do you fight for your civil rights? If you are a citizen, you have civil rights. If you don’t have them, you are not a citizen.” Very harshly put, but absolutely correct. Therefore, the Civil Rights Movement is a misnomer in a sense. It clarifies matters at least for me to think of it as the last slave rebellion, for that is what it was. The last slave uprising, and the very last time that the American black people who are no longer alone as they were even twenty years ago, will petition the American government.
[…] The bankruptcy of the western world is simply the end of the possibilities of plunder. So great corporations are leaving what we now call “off-shore operations” to build cheaper cars in other parts of the world, because labor is cheaper there, will be cheaper there for the next ten minutes. But that’s now the bottom of the barrel, too. There is nothing which will prop up this system, nothing nothing. It depends on slave labor and it lost its slaves. And by the year 2000, which is only twenty years from now, the power of the western world will be over. It will be chaos, and what we will have to go through will not be pleasant, but it is the price we are going to pay to get something else. […] In any case, the system is doomed. The human race cannot afford it.
p.vii – While remaining a controversial figure to the end, Baldwin nevertheless sustained a clear perception of his own literary mission and described it variously as being a “witness” (“I am a witness. That’s my responsibility, I write it all down.”) and “a disturber of the peace” (“Artists are here to disturb the peace. Otherwise chaos.”) “real writers question their age. They demand yes and no answers. Typers collaborate. You collaborate or you question.” To witness, to disturb the peace, and to question meant for him that a writer was constantly having to confront the dilemma “to be immoral and uphold the status quo or to be moral and try to change the world.”
“James Baldwin Breaks His Silence,” Cep Dergisi, Atlas, March, 1967, 47-49
p.61 – The brutal fact is that the economy does not know how to make room for the Negro – it does not have room, after all, for many, many white people – and it would not know how, even if the bulk of the population were less brainwashed than it is. The American people are paying the price for the lie concerning Negro inferiority which they have told themselves so long, and which they have persuaded themselves in the truth. But the legend came about only to afford moral justification for slavery. If you buys and sell a man like an animal, then you must persuade yourself that he is an animal. The terrible thing about this dynamic is that the man who is being used like an animal exerts all his energy in not becoming one; while the man who is so using his fatally descends in the human scale and becomes something much worse than an animal. Black Power means the recognition that neither the American government nor the American people have any desire, or any ability, to liberate Negroes or – which comes to exactly the same thing – themselves. Well, the job must be attempted, we must save ourselves if we can; and if we can save ourselves, we can also save the country; it is now absolutely and literally true that the American Negro is America’s only hope.
“Are We on the Edge of Civil War?” David Frost, The Americans, 1970, 145-50
p.94 – Frost: Presumably you feel there has been some progress since 1956, but you used the phrase, “the life and death of the civil rights movement.” Do you think the civil rights movement is dead?
Baldwin: I feel the civil rights movement always contained within itself something self-defeating and Martin knew this finally, too. That’s why he died in Memphis fighting for a raise for garbage men. In the beginning we thought that there was a way of reaching the conscience of the people of this country. We hoped there was, and I must say that we did reach several blacks and several whites. We did everything in our power to make the American people realize that the myths they were living with were not so much destroying black people as whites. It’s one of the things one lives with, to have one’s head broken, but it is quite another thing to be a representative of the people in whose name it is done. It is one things to be a victim, one thing to be one of our niggers, and another thing to be one of the people who are described when we talk about “our niggers.” You see what I mean?
p.96-97 – Baldwin: Something very important is happening in this country now, and I think for the first time the people legally white and the people legally black are beginning to understand that if they do not come together they’re going to end up in the same gas oven.
Frost: Gas oven?
Baldwin: Gas oven.
Frost: That’s overstating the point, isn’t it?
Baldwin: So were the Jews in Germany told that.
Frost: But there’s no parallel, surely.
Baldwin: There is a parallel, if you were born in Harlem.
Frost: But you’ve never had a policy here like the one in Germany.
Baldwin: I will tell you this, my friend, for every Sammy Davis, for every Jimmy Baldwin, for every black cat you have heard of in the history of this country, there are a hundred of us dead. I can carry you to some of the graveyards, where boys just like me, or brighter than me, more beautiful than me, perished because they were black.
“James Baldwin Interviewed” John Hall, Transatlantic Review, 1970/71, 5-14
p.101 – Baldwin: None of this has anything to do with colour, that’s true. Colour is a great American myth. Babies and corpses have no colour. It’s part of the great American masturbation. You see, it’s easy to label a man this or that, maybe “nigger,” and the label permits you to do all kinds of monstrous things to him because he’s no longer a man; he’s a label. But what the label says about the people’s opinion of a man is what leads them to their doom. The old nigger is just something in people’s minds.
p.102 – Hall: You talk about a people being led to their doom by an attitude of mind, and much of what you say seems to repeat what you were saying seven years ago, in The Fire Next Time, when you said, in effect, OK, one more chance, but if it’s not taken immediately, there’ll be a holy conflagration. America seems to be fending off that doom pretty effectively, if at a high cost. What do you say now about the fire?
Baldwin: The fire is upon us. When construction workers in New York can walk, under the eyes of the police, and beat up kids and anti-war demonstrators, helped by the police really, and nobody cares, it’s very sinister. Sinister as the Reichstag fire. When the police become lawless, and are allied with the visibly lawless, a society is in trouble. I’m chicken; I don’t even want to say what I see.
Baldwin: Formative influences: my father, the Church, and Charles Dickens. For the past year I’ve been in Istanbul, writing, as you know, a long essay on the life and death of what we call the civil rights movement.
Hall: It died?
Baldwin: It died with Martin.
Hall: But people are still going through the motions?
Baldwin: Well, we marched and petitioned for a decade, and now it’s clear that there’s no point in marching or petitioning. And what happens I don’t know, but when they killed Martin they killed that hope. They didn’t kill that dream, but they did kill that hope. Now everybody knows one cannot reach the conscience of a nation that way. My book doesn’t offer any answers about where we go from here.
“Exclusive Interview with James Baldwin” Joe Walker, Muhammad Speaks, 1972, 11-12
p.127 – Walker: How do you view what is going on in the United States today?
Baldwin: I have a feeling that the people in power are really figure-heads… [Nixon 1969-74] I really do wonder in whose hands exactly the American people are. It is really striking in my experience that the government has been so blatantly contemptuous of the needs of the American people. Not only the Black people but the needs of the whole country.
Walker: Has the U.S. federal government ever represented the people? Doesn’t it today represent the corporate elite as it did the big plantation owners in the South and the big manufacturers in the North from the beginning?
Baldwin: Until very lately I thin it has made some attempt to seem to represent the people. And at certain moments, after all in our history, some pressures from below reflected themselves on high. It is not the case today. The government and the people have nothing to do with each other. We hear about a silent majority and I prepared to believe it exists but they aren’t the only people in the country and besides I’m not sure Agnew speaks for them. (Being in the United States) is a little like finding yourself in a backward nation and you read the company press and then you go out into the streets and they don’t jive. What you’re told is happening and what you see is happening are not the same thing. That can be a very eerie and frightening feeling.
p.131 – Walker: What unique form do you envision socialism in the U.S.A. taking?
Baldwin: I don’t know, but the price of any real socialism here is the eradication of what we call the race problem. The usage of how that problem has been put has always had a terrible inhibiting effect on the development of this society.
Walker: You don’t believe that racism in the U.S. was an accident, do you?
Baldwin: Racism is crucial to the system to keep Black and whites at a division so both were and are a source of cheap labor.
p.132 – Walker: Your writing has been done almost totally overseas. Is there a reason for that?
Baldwin: In order to write you have to sit down and concentrate on that. Which means you’ve got to turn your back on everything else. It is impossible to do that in the situation in this country now. For me it was also necessary to move out so that I could see it because you don’t see a situation very clearly when you’re in it. You can’t. you spend all of your time reacting to it, resisting it or resenting it, but you are not able to obtain any distance from it. Everything is too urgent. It is a matter of life and death. You must react everyday to what is happening. But that is no way to write a book or a sentence.
“The Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin” The Black Scholar, 1973, 33-42
p.150 – Baldwin: White America is unwilling to recognize its history. I don’t think they can. I’m speaking about the generality, but the exceptions must be noted. You must consider that a lot of white people in America understand what's happening, especially young kids. But then to the extent that they understand it and to the extent that they act on what they understand, they become indistinguishable from the nigger. Indistinguishable, because, in a sense, they are worse than the nigger because they are traitors.
History is a very strange crucible and I don’t pretend to understand it; but I do understand at least in my own mind that you are lucky if you are forced to understand your own history. A black American who has, in effect, or who is told he has no history has achieved some kind of identity in any case. And then you begin to recreate your history out of weapons you didn’t know you had. This is what happened to black Americans, I think. I don’t think that we were born with any particular sense of history.
“James Baldwin: Looking Towards the Eighties” Kalamu ya Salaam, The Black Collegian, 1979,105-110
p.178 – Baldwin: The role of the writer is to write, but this is a cryptic statement. What I mean is that a writer doesn’t dance. His function is very particular and so is his responsibility. After all, to write, if taken seriously, is to be subversive. To disturb the peace.
[…] For a very long time until Martin died, I was operating as a public speaker in the context of the civil rights movement. And when Martin died, something happened to me and something happened to many people. It took a while for me and for many people to pull ourselves back together. Then I had to find another way to discharge what I considered to be my responsibility. I’ve been working on college campuses and in prisons; which is why I don’t bring my typewriter across the ocean.
p.179 – Q: What are some of the things we learned about ourselves?
Baldwin: That the people who call themselves “white,” I must put it that way, well, as Malcolm X said, “white is a state of mind.” The implications of that statement are enormous because it finally means that the people who call themselves white have really invented something which is not true. The key to this is European power which is a very complex thing and which involves the history of the church. White people invented Black people to protect themselves against something which frightened them.
p.181 – Q: So, how do you assess the seventies? The civil rights period and the sixties brought our struggle to a point of sharpness, so much so, that it was unthinkable to believe that we didn’t have to struggle.
Baldwin: But of course. Out of that something was clarified for us and even more importantly, for our children.
Q: Which was what?
Baldwin: That one was no longer at the mercy of white imagination. I was born fifty-five years ago. In a sense I was born in the nightmare of the white man’s mind. All of my growing up and all my early youth was first that discovery and then the bloody struggle to get out of that mind, to destroy that frame of reference for myself and for those coming after me. I’m the oldest of nine children; this is very important. I know that my great-nieces and great-nephews are living in a different world than the world in which I was born. They can not imagine the world which produced me, but I’ve seen the world for which they are going to be responsible.
“James Baldwin, an Interview” Wolfgang Binder, Revista/ Review Interamericana, 1980, 326-41
p.194 – Baldwin: Malcolm X asked a very important question years ago, which I did not quite hear at that moment. We were doing a radio program with young students in 1961 when there were the two poles in America, Black Muslims on one hand, and the very beginning of the student sit-ins on the other. And I was there as moderator, because it was Malcolm and the students who were talking. And Malcolm was very good with a kid when he said: “If you are a citizen, why do you fight for your civil rights? If you are a citizen, you have civil rights. If you don’t have them, you are not a citizen.” Very harshly put, but absolutely correct. Therefore, the Civil Rights Movement is a misnomer in a sense. It clarifies matters at least for me to think of it as the last slave rebellion, for that is what it was. The last slave uprising, and the very last time that the American black people who are no longer alone as they were even twenty years ago, will petition the American government.
[…] The bankruptcy of the western world is simply the end of the possibilities of plunder. So great corporations are leaving what we now call “off-shore operations” to build cheaper cars in other parts of the world, because labor is cheaper there, will be cheaper there for the next ten minutes. But that’s now the bottom of the barrel, too. There is nothing which will prop up this system, nothing nothing. It depends on slave labor and it lost its slaves. And by the year 2000, which is only twenty years from now, the power of the western world will be over. It will be chaos, and what we will have to go through will not be pleasant, but it is the price we are going to pay to get something else. […] In any case, the system is doomed. The human race cannot afford it.
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