James Baldwin’s Exile, His Conflicts and the Prophetic Writings That Lead to Liberation (VIDEO)

By: Joseph Evans, Ph.D.

Something For Sunday James Baldwin Series Part II

Prophetic writing seems to begin in exile. One reason may be that the exiled have a need to speak on behalf of the oppressed.  James Baldwin was in exile. He believed he had to leave his country in order to find himself.  While in exile, Baldwin found space to write about his country’s unrelenting oppression; an oppressive narrative which is designed to condition the oppressed to accept its terms or else, the non-compliant will be cast into non-being or nothingness. Baldwin was oppressed but did to accept the oppressive narrative’s conditions. There is little doubt he felt that the predominating people and the people’s predominating culture were his oppressors.  We suggest that our claim is reinforced by David Leeming’s account in James Baldwin a biography:

James Baldwin Part I: https://www.reelurbannews.com/notes-of-a-native-son-dr-cornel-west-on-the-unpopular-baldwin-video/

In fleeing America for Paris, Baldwin was following a long line of Americans – especially black Americans – in the arts. Most important, his old mentor Richard Wright had found refuge and success there. He maintained that he needed distance from the racial realities at home so that he could become the writer he wanted to be. But an equally compelling reason for the move was the need to confront in a new context the personal problems that, since the days in the Harlem pulpit, had undermined his role as a witness (56 p.). 

Baldwin left Harlem in 1948 and lived abroad in Paris, France.  By practicing social distancing from racist’s America, its systemic racism, and its threatening phobias, Baldwin hoped that he would discover himself. In short; similar to those who follow Jesus of Nazareth, the leader of the world’s most controversial movement; the liberators must be liberated.  This begins with becoming a disciple by immersion. This only means that the liberation process begins with disciples who are baptized into the emergent liberation movement.  Afterward, the liberated may create liberation motifs. 

Indeed Baldwin would need to discover his personhood which is nothing less than a courageous person who seeks self-definition. That is, some people want to find and accept their self-determined identity. Baldwin’s self-discovery would empower him to love and free him to love others and to accept other’s love. These are important reasons to go into exile. However there was a second intersecting reason; which points toward Baldwin’s need to find non-judgmental space. Non-judgmental space, Baldwin hoped, would inspire his creativity. That is, first; Baldwin needed to find himself and secondly; Baldwin needed a non-judging space – that would accept him as he learned to accept himself. 

For Baldwin, Paris was that space. He would take advantage of the newly emancipated France which had approached three years free of Nazi occupation (Nazi occupation ended in 1945). It was in this space, place and time in history; Baldwin sought to finish his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).  Baldwin’s Paris was representation of social distancing from his oppressor’s virus which is racism and other phobias. 

We see this as a primary reason for Baldwin’s exile. He needed to develop psychological confidence which leads to self -trust. It is the healthy psychological self- trust which permits people to build confidence in our talent, creativity and genius.  We think of it this way, if a person loves; that person will need to trust and affirm that growing love.  Similarly, Baldwin’s experiences seem to be an example worthy of examination. That is, the plausibility of our claim. 

Let us characterize Baldwin’s writings as exilic writings. In this way, we can further characterize his worldview as a result of a man who had been deeply hurt by an invisible matrix, which is a hidden web designed to sustain human oppression.  If we place this template over Baldwin’s writings, we may gain a glimpse into his soul – Baldwin was desperate to find ways to reconcile what he thought should be possible but that possibility was inconsistent with what he witnessed every single day of this life – namely humanity refuses to be made whole.  This is the prophetic – this is the language of the oppressed. The person who struggles with two competing poles that pull against each other are the “ought-to-be” and the “what-is.” – Of course this is the ethical struggling with the unethical, the moral struggling with the immoral.  On the surface, we believe we have located Baldwin as an ethical writer.

During this time, though not in a straight line, and not without internal and external struggles, and neither without doubt, depression and despair, we believe that Baldwin accepted his calling into the prophetic tradition. What is more, Baldwin became a public theologian – only posing as an ethical writer.  Thus beneath the surface, we notice that  Baldwin’s writings were thematically aligned with religious constructs that were reinforced by Baldwin’s referential and deferential use of biblical language and allusions that were grounded in biblical ethics.  

Of course, Go Tell it on the Mountain was an allusion to the Negro spiritual. Mahalia Jackson made this spiritual well known to broader audiences. It was her physical interpretation of this Negro spiritual which highlights the Negro’s faith. This is a kind of faith that juts its jaw and lifts its chin into the face of the threat of non – being. It is this threat which most people of color closely associate with behavior of being white. Baldwin’s biblical allusions and ethics alongside referential and differential use of biblical language inform liberation theologians.  

Indeed Baldwin influenced many black theologians and James Cone among them.  The insightful Cone took upon himself – the invention of black theology which is broadly recognized as an academic discipline.  To take on this task, Cone needed to write black theology into existence – something out of nothing (ex-nihilo). Black theology, at least at its taproot, is an existential response to the threat of non-being. Each time that an Ahmaud Arbery and a Breonna Taylor are murdered; we feel the existential threat of non-being. We could say that black theology is similar in cosmological ways to the very beginning of creation; which is, the difference between being something and not being something or being alive and not being alive or being worth something and not being worth something. 

There is not a more powerful expression of creation, fear and nothingness [ex-nihilo] than what we read in Genesis 1:1-3: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth.  The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep [the abyss or the absence]. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light and there was light.’” We make only this comment; notice that only the earth was without form and light but not heaven.  Heaven was  is wholly a different concept and space. 

While Cone provided light necessary for the genesis of black theology, we empathize and believe that Baldwin felt the weight of his country’s racism and phobias, his queerness, and his quest for self – identity.  We add that like the biblical prophet Jonah, Baldwin attempted to escape the dreadful call of God to prophesy against imperialism and hegemonic authorial power.  Like Baldwin, Cone, understood – black folks live in a constant existential crisis. This is another way to say that black folks are a day’s social distancing from non-being and nothingness. Therefore; black theology is an existential invention!  It may not provide adequate answers to all existential questions but it seeks to provide adequate answers to all adequate existential questions. 

In our view, Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power describes black theology as exilic writings.  This species of writing is a psychological and an emotional catharsis. It is a purging – purge that fights against the temptations of self – hatred and it vibrates against hatred of others.  Cone quotes Baldwin:

The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country are treated simply cannot be overstated; however unwilling white men may be to hear it.  In the beginning – and neither can this be overstated – a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him [or her] as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people [is] to destroy him – for that is what it is – is utterly gratuitous it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils (See Black Theology and Black Power, 15 p.).

Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (this is where the preceding quote is located) was written in 1963. That year Martin Luther King, Jr., was incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama and while he was exiled, he wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail.  Later that year, King delivered his I Have a Dream civic – sermon on the nation’s mall on the front side of the Lincoln memorial into a sea of nameless faces beneath the stagnant heat caused by human proximity. But it was this proximity that signifies that there is a shaft of light that shines into this abysmal shapeless void. Once again however that light has receded. Its recession is ever increasing and remaining so pervasive in our world’s societies. 

These events had to influence and inform Baldwin. His The Fire Next Time alludes to the Noahic covenant which Yahweh made with Noah and his descendants (see Genesis 9: 8-17).  The second coming of God however comes with fire (2 Peter 3:7). The reckoned – coming is a picture that points to Jesus of Nazareth who comes reinforced by his legions of fighter angels. The Fire Next Time is an allusion to that reckoning. Baldwin points to reckoning – judgment for those who have neglected eradication of the absurdity of Negros’s human conditions that Negroes experienced not only in 1963 but since 1619.  

And Baldwin wrote about the Negro leaders too who would join countless preceding Negro martyrs, people who walked among the nation’s candle sticks soberly in order to offer liberation to this nation and all peoples and nations of this world. Of Baldwin, we ponder; did he know that he was writing about more than a redefinition for a dysfunctional, if not warped view and understanding of patriotism? Of Baldwin, was he aware that his new authentic definition of patriotism was prophetic? Of Baldwin, was he aware that his writings pointed out that there were and are contemporary prophets present – in our time and space? 

Baldwin, while in Parisian exile had time to formulate a resistance narrative.  His Parisian musings on his country indeed had informed his sage-like warnings; warnings that appeared in his essay of 1963. Baldwin not only wrote about a resistance movement but he had participated in the liberation movement from 1948 to his death December 1, 1987.  Once again, Baldwin created a narrative that underlines our emergent pathology.  A black pathology is necessary then for a black narrative and a black narrative is necessary to craft a black liberation theology; all are a comprehensive expression of the inhumane absurdity of Negro and black existence in the United States, and ultimately in the world. For Baldwin, living in Paris was only palpably tolerable to the exiled.  

We keep in mind; Paris was not a utopian for women and men of color in the Anglophone world as Leeming further reminds us: 

The violence in Algeria was coming to a head and was spilling over into Paris.  Here, in the place to which he had once come to escape bigotry, where people had been so universally critical of American racism, he now discovered in the treatment of Algerians all the elements of prejudice he had so recently encountered in the [American] South. Like the Americans, the French appeared to be victims of their own myths (153 p.). 

Nevertheless, Baldwin’s words in The Fire Next Time gave Cone rhetorical space to confront detractors –and space to inform black folks who boldly spoke for themselves theologically. For those who speak boldly for themselves is a political act.  For Cone, we believe, Baldwin’s work expanded Cone’s theological constructs beyond the Anglophone’s hidden hegemonic webs. Cone acknowledged and added psychological conditions affect and shape theological claims. These additions produce light into nothingness and add shape and form to the basic foundation for black theology. 

It does seem that prophetic writings are born while the writers of the prophetic genre are in exile.  The exile however provides space for these writers to reflect and  process that which has agitated  them so deeply that they feel, they have been forced into their exile. One last note, we must explore this again: prophetic writing that appears in common publication or the biblical canon indicates that the writers thereof are in conflict with themselves and their subjects and yes their understanding of God – this includes the prophet Mr. James Baldwin.