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Books by and about James Baldwin
Go
Tell It on the Mountain /
The Fire Next Time
/
Notes of a Native Son
/
If Beale
Street Could Talk
Nobody Knows My Name /
No Name in the Street
Carol E. Henderson,
James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical And
Critical Essays.
Peter Lang
Publishing, 2006.
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James Baldwin: The
Preacher Poet
By Kalamu ya
Salaam
|
I would like to use the
time that’s left to change the world, to
teach children or to convey to the people
who have children that everything that lives
is holy.—James
Baldwin |
1
James Baldwin
voiced us—articulated black experiences with a searing
intensity that frightened some and enraptured others of
us. Even if you could not read, once you heard Baldwin
you were convinced of the power of words. His ability to
move air was such that the vibrating oxygen Baldwin set
in motion spoke to us as surely as if the words had
issued from our own mouths.
Baldwin’s sermons (and that’s what
his words were, instructions for living) entered us,
vital as breathing.
Baldwin’s breath
proclaimed what it meant to be flesh, and black. He told
us of the here and now, told of barbarians who feared
life in others and feared those who truly lived to love
rather than to conqueror.
Baldwin spoke of
racist hatred for black people, telling us that their
hatred was but a mask for the intense hatred they felt
for themselves and the sordid, twisted mess they had
made of their own lives.
The gritty texture
of Baldwin’s voice testified to the realities of black
life, the ups, the downs, the terrors, as well as the
hard-won tenderness found in our usually brief but
nonetheless frequent stolen moments of exquisite and
redemptive love. He was no romantic, but oh how he
loved. He loved us all and gave his all in the love of
us.
Indeed his very
behavior posed the quintessential question: if not for
the opportunity to love, what are we living for?
Certainly not labor and toil, nor riches and fame, which
we can never take with us when we inevitably exit the
world; If we do not love our selves and our children,
what will our living matter in the future? And if we do
not understand that everyone’s child is our child, then
how whole can we be as a human being?
When I was younger,
when I thought I had a taste for anger, a yearning for
retribution, I was always mystified and sometimes even
miffed by Baldwin’s insistence on love. Now I am older,
directed by the wisdom of age: sooner or later, most of
us grow tired of fighting but we never tire of love.
What was bracing
about Baldwin was his insistence that we be humans
regardless of how inhuman our tormentors might act, and
as Baldwin so eloquently reminded us, their behavior was
an act, most likely a ruse to mask their fear of us, or
worse yet a lie to camouflage their fear that they were
not what they tried to make us believe they were; they
were not gods, conquerors, lords and such. No. They were
merely what we all are, human beings trying to survive
and prosper.
It is easy to think
of Baldwin as an Old Testament prophet, raining down
fire and brimstone. He was, after all, a professional
evangelist as a teen. It is easy to think of Baldwin as
a Shakespeare in and of Harlem since his command of
language is now legendary. But it is wrong to reference
Baldwin solely from outside of black culture. Think of
this black voice as a life-force, as the sound of us, as
the sound of living, as a drum. A drum, an insistent
beating drum whose rhythm was synchronous with our own
heartbeats.
The fullest
appreciation of James Baldwin the writer is not
understood until James Baldwin the voice is heard. Only
once your heart was moved by the way this man moved
words could you fully understand the power he brought to
us who were told time and time again, in a million ways,
day, night and seemingly always that we were totally
powerless, or at least powerless to prevent first our
enslavement and now our ongoing oppression and
exploitation.
The power Baldwin
brought to us was a clear-eyed recognition of world
realities, we, just as everyone else, were the range of
behaviors and emotions, memories and dreams that it
means to be human, and as such our task was to be the
best human we could be, which best necessarily meant the
embracing of other humans. You are a human and you must
embrace other humans is a powerful message to give to
those who have been taught otherwise.
And this fire to be
wholly human that Baldwin breathed into our lives was no
mere mental exercise. Baldwin went far, far beyond
thinking because he spoke with a passion for life, a
passion to get the most out of life even as he admitted
that as we struggled on inevitably we would err, we
would make mistakes, we would fail from time to time,
even backslide, and knowingly do wrong, after all we are
humans and that’s part of what humans do, but Baldwin
would remind us as long as we are alive we have the
opportunity, indeed we have the obligation to correct
our mistakes and to strive to be better than we have
been.
Baldwin was telling
us: grow up. Of course, you’ve been done wrong and
you’ve done wrong. We all have. We all have been done
wrong. We all have done wrong. Grow up, face life. All
the wrong in the world does not mean that you and I
can’t do what’s right.
And ultimately,
while James Baldwin the writer is important, James
Baldwin the human voice is equally important, especially
now that the technology exists so that we can all hear
him, we can all experience the ways in which he
manipulated human sounds of communication. In other
words, the fullest appreciation of James Baldwin the
writer is not totally understood until James Baldwin the
voice is heard.
Baldwin was full of
passion and the very fire light of life. To reduce him
simply to books is to miss the music that this man made
of words.
Thus, if you think
you know James Baldwin, if you think you love our
literature and you have never heard him deliver the
word, and you do not have his spoken word CD, then you
don’t really know the breadth and depth of James
Baldwin.
|
James_Baldwin_-_Inventory_On_Being_52.mp3
(18686 KB)
Music by David Linx, Pierre Van Dormael
James Baldwin – narration
David Linx – vocals, drums, percussion
Pierre Van Dormael – guitar
Michel Hatzigeorgiou – bass
Deborah Brown - vocals
Viktor Lazlo - vocals
Steve Coleman – alto saxophone
Slide Hampton – trombone
Jimmy Owens – trumpet, fluegelhorn
Pierre Vaiana – tenor saxophone
Diederik Wissels - piano |
2
Between September
19, 1986 and September 18, 1987, James Baldwin spent a
year working on a spoken word CD with
producers/composers/musicians David Linx and Pierre Van
Dormael. Recorded in Brussels, Brooklyn and New York
City, A Lover’s Question (Label Beu, Harmonia Mundi) is
a masterpiece of merging words with music: a precursor
to what is now a popular artform.
The producers
succeed in more than providing a sonic backdrop for the
words; they actually composed orchestrations that both
complemented and mirrored the intent and expression
inherent in Baldwin’s delivery of his complex poems. The
success is then on three levels: the poems are phat, the
music is tight, and the musicians respond with an
exhilarating verve that let’s you know they too were
giving their all, giving their love and not simply going
through the changes to get paid.
Aside from a brief
musical introduction and an elegiac solo rendition of
Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” on which Baldwin
talk-sings the famous gospel composition, there are only
three poems on this CD. One poem, “The Art of Love,”
features operatic vocalist Deborah Brown and is done as
an art song, an interlude between two poetic suites.
The two-part “A
Lover’s Question” continues in the vein of
The Fire Next Time. Baldwin questions the citizens of his birth nation
as to their desire to hate: “Why / have you allowed /
yourself / to become so grimly / wicked?” and “No man
can have a / harlot / for a lover / nor stay in bed
forever / with a lie. / He must rise up / and face the
morning / sky / and himself, in the / mirror / of his
lover’s eye.” As Baldwin knew, true love is always
honest even though honesty is seldom an easy fact to
live with in a land where lies and commerce replace
truth and reciprocity.
The concluding
number is the three part opus “Inventory / On Being 52”
and it is the introspective Baldwin fingering his own
wounds (some of them self-inflicted). He does not flinch
as he cross-examines his own life and realizes the
terrible costs of his mistakes, the terrible beauty of
embracing both the terrors and joys of being human.
Baldwin manages in a stream of consciousness style to
encourage us to live the good life, suggesting that the
good life is a different life from the life/lie that too
many of us live. Baldwin encourages us not simply to
march to the beat of a different drummer, Baldwin
tenderly implores us to be different drummers.
Tap out the real
rhythms of life with our every footstep in the dark, our
every embrace of what we and others are and can become.
Reject the ultimately tiresome and ephemeral wisdom of
materialism / accept the rejuvenating life-cycle rhythm
of the earth. Thus Baldwin says “Perhaps the stars will
/ help, / or the water, / a stone may have / something
to tell me, / and I owe a favor to a / couple of old
trees.”
“Inventory / On
being 52” is a deep song, but then, as he says, “My
father’s son / does not easily / surrender. / My
mother’s son / pressed on.” Every young poet needs this
old man’s CD in their collection, this compass of
compassion, this example of the passionate heights the
spoken word can attain. If you as a poet do not know A
Lover’s Question then you do not know the full history
of your own human heartbeat.
3
James Baldwin. His
life, his teachings, his commitment, his words embody
one of the great paradoxes of the contradictions of
life—and regardless of misplace beliefs in idealism, in
an eternal anything, in a person being solely and only
one thing or another, regardless of our worship of the
false idol of ideas and dualism—experience teaches us,
all life, every life is contradictory. In fact, to be
alive is a contradiction, is a fight against death,
literal death, symbolic death, the death of compassion,
the death of our own humanity in terms of how we relate
to others and the world we live in.
Life is a
contradiction, and as such, isn’t it wonderful for us to
realize that one of the most insistent prophets,
preachers, and poets of love was a queer, black man
standing against the homophobia, standing against the
misogyny (and surely hating women also means hating the
earth), standing against the racism, and all the other
-isms endemic to the place and time within which Baldwin
was born.
James Baldwin.
Clearly modeling for all of us what it meant to be a
man, and more importantly what it meant to be human and
live in a time of institutional war and inhumanity.
I love James
Baldwin.
Note: [The first version of this essay, essentially most
of part 1, was originally published in Mosaic
Literary Magazine, Spring 1999. The second version
of this essay, part 1 & part 2, was originally published
as part of the booklet accompanying the 1999 reissue of
A Lover’s Question.]
Source:
WordUp
* *
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James Baldwin—interview pt. 1 /
James Baldwin—interview pt. 2
Excerpt of
speech from film James Baldwin Anthology
* *
* * *
Beyond talent lie all the
usual words: discipline, love, luck—but, most
of all, endurance.—James Baldwin
(1924 - 1987)
* *
* * *
James Baldwin on Malcolm X (1 of 3) /
(2 of 3) /
(3 of 3)
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* * *
James
Baldwin: the Price of the Ticket /
James
Baldwin v. William F. Buckley Jr. Debate
* *
* * *
Take This
Hammer—James Baldwin in San Francisco
KQED's mobile film unit
follows author and activist James Baldwin in the spring of 1963,
as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with members of the
local African-American community. He is escorted by Youth For
Service's Executive Director Orville Luster and intent on
discovering: "The real situation of Negroes in the city, as
opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present." He
declares: "There is no moral distance ... between the facts of
life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham.
Someone's got to tell it like it is. And that's where it's at."
Includes frank exchanges with local people on the street,
meetings with community leaders and extended point-of-view
sequences shot from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and
Western Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial
inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront and at
one point tries to lift the morale of a young man by expressing
his conviction that: "There will be a Negro president of this
country but it will not be the country that we are sitting in
now." The TV Archive would like to thank Darryl Cox for
championing the merits of this film and for his determination
that it be preserved and remastered for posterity.
* * * * *
Ancient African Nations
|
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings
By James
Baldwin
Baldwin's
published essays have been already twice collected (The
Price of the Ticket and the
posthumous
Library of America Collected Essays), but
there are gems in this collection compiled by Kenan
(Let the Dead Bury the Dead): "The Fight:
Patterson vs. Liston" is as impeccably crafted as a
short story; "Blacks and Jews" captures the speaking
Baldwin and echoes the call-and-response tradition.
The 54 pieces, none previously appearing in book
form, range from Baldwin's first published book
review in 1947 to a 1984 colloquy with college
students. Baldwin's topic can often be subsumed
under race, but he most consistently wrestles with
questions of moral integrity—in
the language ("The Uses of the Blues"), in the
artist's work ("Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare"),
in the assessment of history ("On Being White . . .
and Other Lies"), and in one's personal life ("To
Crush a Serpent"). Kenan's introduction and
headnotes are models of critical good sense; his
awareness of both "Baldwin's achievements that
beggar the imagination," and of the "grab bag"
quality of some pieces makes him the perfect
shepherd for these "lost" works. |
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* * * * *
music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
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The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction
1948-1995
By James Baldwin
The works of
James Baldwin constitute one of the major
contributions to American literature in the
twentieth century, and nowhere is this more evident
than in
The Price of the Ticket, a compendium of
nearly fifty years of Baldwin's powerful nonfiction
writing. With truth and insight, these personal,
prophetic works speak to the heart of the experience
of race and identity in the United States. Here are
the full texts of
Notes of a Native Son,
Nobody Knows My Name,
The Fire Next Time,
No Name in the Street, and
The Devil Finds Work, along with dozens of
other pieces, ranging from a 1948 review of
Raintree Country to a magnificent
introduction to this book that, as so many of Mr.
Baldwin's works do, combines his intensely private
experience with the deepest examination of social
interaction between the races. In a way,
The Price of the Ticket is an
intellectual history of the twentieth-century
American experience; in another, it is autobiography
of the highest order. |
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The State of African Education
(April 200)
Attack On Africans Writing Their Own
History Part 1 of 7
Dr Asa Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on
Africans writing and accounting for their own history.
Dr Hilliard is A
teacher, psychologist, and historian.
Part 2 of 7
/
Part
3 of 7 /
Part 4 of 7
/
Part 5 of 7 /
Part 6 of 7 /
Part 7 of 7
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John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
This
video chronicles the life and times of the
noted African-American historian, scholar
and Pan-African activist John Henrik Clarke
(1915-1998). Both a biography of Clarke
himself and an overview of 5,000 years of
African history, the film offers a
provocative look at the past through the
eyes of a leading proponent of an
Afrocentric view of history. From ancient
Egypt and Africa’s other great empires,
Clarke moves through Mediterranean
borrowings, the Atlantic slave trade,
European colonization, the development of
the Pan-African movement, and present-day
African-American history. |
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posted 12 August 2010 |
