[A new book invites us to revisit the world and ideas of one of
our great writers, who also served, during the 20th Century, as a one
of our societys outstanding voices of conscience and tribunes for
justice.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

BEGIN AGAIN: JAMES BALDWIN’S AMERICA AND ITS URGENT LESSONS FOR
TODAY  
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Ashish Ghadiali
January 11, 2021
The Guardian
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_ A new book invites us to revisit the world and ideas of one of our
great writers, who also served, during the 20th Century, as a one of
our society's outstanding voices of conscience and tribunes for
justice. _

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_Begin Again
James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own_
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Crown
ISBN 9780525575320

Michael Ondaatje once wrote that if Van Gogh was “our 19th-century
artist-saint” then James Baldwin was “our 20th-century one”. For
many, Baldwin’s writing has long been a touchstone of anti-racist
humanism, but the sense of that particular epithet has never landed
more emphatically for me than while reading Eddie S Glaude Jr’s
_Begin Again_, his potent meditation on the enduring legacy of
Baldwin’s life and thought, a _New York Times _bestseller and one of
a number of titles that have spoken to the soul of public outrage at
George Floyd’s killing
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May.

Glaude [[link removed]], who is
distinguished professor and chair of the African American studies
department at Princeton University (where he has been teaching a
seminar on Baldwin for several years), is also a native of Jackson
County, Mississippi, the US state that suffered the highest number of
lynchings [[link removed]] – 581
between 1882 and 1968. The trauma of that inheritance – “our
bodies carry the traumas forward,” Glaude writes – is never far
from the page. Nor is the trauma felt across black America in his
parents’ generation when in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was
assassinated, crushing hopes for “fundamental change” that had
been gathering around the US civil rights movement for the best part
of a decade.

It was out of despair, Glaude writes, that in 2018, two years after
what he calls “the disastrous election of Donald Trump”, he
started to write this book, “saying to myself, they have done it
_again_. Millions of white Americans had chosen Trump, and _we _would
have to deal with the consequences of that choice.”

Reckoning with that “betrayal”, like so many previous betrayals of
democratic possibility in America, perpetrated by those hell-bent on
preserving the fantasy that America is or ever was a white nation, he
recalls his dad’s claim, growing up, that he just didn’t “do
white people”. Now Glaude, too, “understood a bit better” that
separatist impulse, though, in these new times of Trumpian ascendancy,
it was Baldwin, not his disillusioned father, to whom he turned in
order to deal with his despair. “Baldwin,” Glaude suggests,
“offers us resources.”

As a figure of Glaude’s parents’ generation, Baldwin was both a
giant and an anomaly – the kid from Harlem whose depiction of black
American life through the great migration (in 1953’s _Go Tell It on
__the Mountain_) had made him a literary sensation while still in his
20s. By the age of 30, he was a household name, at which point he
dared, at the height of his celebrity, to write, in 1956’s
_Giovanni’s Room_ and 1962’s _Another Country_, from the viewpoint
of protagonists who were both white and gay, endearing himself to
liberals and to fashionable society but suffering, as a result, “the
label of bootlicker [back home] for making this point that categories
can shut us off from the complexity within ourselves”.

The son of a preacher, Baldwin wrote repeatedly of love, and of his
belief in America’s future as a multiracial society, and his hope of
redemption for white Americans and black Americans alike – a vision
that perhaps saw its most focused articulation in the blistering
essays of 1963, _The Fire Next Time__, _which were seen as giving
voice to the emerging civil rights movement.

As the 1960s unfolded, though, and the optimism of the civil rights
era was met with renewed violence and resistance, Baldwin’s own
voice hardened and his tolerance of liberals became short – “I
don’t want anybody working with me because they are doing something
_for _me,” he said – and a question arose for him, writing in
defence of a new generation of young black radicals, the first
exponents of black power, whether white America was really worthy of
so much energy and concern (as Martin Luther King continued to insist
that it was).

Then King was killed and, like so many of his time, Baldwin found
himself derailed. “He went to pieces,” Glaude tells us. “He
witnessed what was happening in ghettos, where the workings [of white
supremacy] impoverished millions. He saw the beginnings of mass
incarceration and its effect on black communities. He also felt the
emotional trauma of dashed hopes and expectations.” He remained a
witness to it all and “12 years later”, Glaude continues, “he
watched the country elect Reagan, a clear indication, if there ever
was one, that white America had no intention of changing when it came
to matters of race”.

“What we are living through,” Glaude writes of the current
context, “even with our cellphone cameras, is not unlike what
Baldwin and so many others dealt with as the black freedom movement
collapsed with the ascent of the Reagan revolution.” Baldwin’s
response demonstrates the resilience that’s needed to be a witness
through an era of despair.
There is a common reading of his career, dismissed by Glaude as a
“stale characterisation”, that he hit the heights of his literary
genius in 1963; that, thereafter, “his rage and politics got the
best of him” but that he subsequently lost his nuance, lost touch
with the love that had distinguished his voice in his prime, abandoned
his gift for complexity; that in the aftermath of King’s
assassination and with the collapse of the civil rights movement,
he’d left himself nowhere to go; that by 1972 he was a writer in
decline; that by the time of his death from stomach cancer in 1987, he
was, to use a phrase from Darryl Pinckney, “a spent force”.

Glaude challenges this convention with conviction. He invites us with
him to “read Baldwin to the end” and reveals a writer, not spent,
but rather illuminating the path beyond despair – the work of a
saint if ever there was such a thing. This witness through the dark
times, which Glaude argues are upon us once again, is, he says, the
true measure of Baldwin’s greatness: an enduring testament to his
love and the belief that the US can and must be something more than it
is.

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