Letter to Jimmy

postscript, James Baldwin the brother, the father

The paths that lead us to a writer are as mysterious as the ways of the Lord. Several years ago, I was far from imagining that I would one day “talk” with the American author James Baldwin, who died in the south of France in 1987, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. I was not drawn to him because we had the same color skin. I was born in Africa, the land of his ancestors. I had lived in France, his land of refuge. And now I live in his homeland: America. Was this reason enough to devote my admiration to him, even though most of the writers I admire often have nothing to do with Africa, France or America? Was I simply in awe before a writer whose uncommon path and chaotic life could not help but move me? More than this, the life of every author is often its own novel, sometimes even a tragic one. This is perhaps why the genre of biography exists. .

And so, in 2007, on the twentieth anniversary of Baldwin’s passing, I devoted a book to him—Letter to Jimmy. As I wrote this “love letter,” I had the feeling that Baldwin was reading the manuscript over my shoulder, without really interfering in the process. At most, he may have been smiling when I lost myself in my theories, or when I surrendered to the notions I had formed while reading his work. His writing encompasses most literary genres with a dazzling skill that made Jimmy one of the most important figures in American literature. This diverse body of work quickly projected the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain to the intellectual forefront of his country’s civil rights movement, with an intensity and a sense of commitment that can be summed up in this phrase from his essay “The Fire Next Time:” “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.” At the same time, the themes Baldwin explored in his various novels go beyond the limits of race, such as in Giovanni’s Room where one notices the absence of the “Negro question,” where taboos are shattered by evoking homosexuality, where there are only white characters, and in a plot that unfolds in Europe — France in particular — not in America as in the novels of his colleagues of that period (Richard Wright, Chester Himes. .). This type of approach was risky at a time when, in Africa as well as in black America, an author of color was expected to champion the black cause and the idea of “negritude,” in vogue in Paris, too, the gathering place for most American intellectuals threatened by racial segregation. Baldwin retaliated against this type of socially mandated literature, and in this way his stance enticed me.

If I imagined Baldwin coughing slightly from time to time when I was writing Letter to Jimmy, or imagined his footsteps near my library, I would lift my eyes and see before me the photo taped to the wall, in front of my desk. This photo is essentially the source of our encounter. I had bought it in the late 80s from a bouquinistes, a used bookseller’s kiosk, along the Seine. Baldwin had looked at me then as if he were begging me to save him from his public display. The bookseller shared with me the information that he had known the author, whom he had seen walking around “over there”—he pointed to the Place Saint-Michel. Should I have believed him? I bought the photo and walked down into a Metro station. .

Sitting in the Metro, I studied Baldwin’s features closely. I was half dozing. My own life appeared to me now in black and white, like the image. I had the feeling that I had known this man, that I had met him in the old quarters of Pointe-Noire, in Congo. He had the face of the brother I would have liked to have had, and of the biological father I had never known — Baldwin had not known his father either, a fact that played an undeniably major role in his work. In essence I was asking Baldwin to adopt me, to take my hand, to lead me to “another country” where “no one knows my name.” And so I invented for myself a brother in his image, and a father in his image. Alas, I would discover that he would make David, his main character in Giovanni’s Room, say: “People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” These words echo through my thoughts still today. The destruction they inflicted on my imaginary world was similar to that endured by a kid to whom it has been suddenly revealed that Santa Claus does not exist. To console myself at the time, I tucked Baldwin’s image between the pages of books I was reading, whether they were written by him or by others. In this way we were reading the same books and we were traveling together. Much later — I had already moved to the United States — I came upon the same image in a bookstore in a new edition of one of Baldwin’s novels. I no longer felt the same as I once had in France, since my image of him now hid a story behind it, a chance encounter that could not be reproduced. .

Every time I look again at “my” photo, my eyes linger on the wrinkles of Baldwin’s face. They are furrows, footpaths I have to follow in order to make my way to the clearing where I might hear his voice, where he might share with me at last the secrets he did not reveal during his lifetime. His smile is faint, and changes as often as I try to describe it. But his eyes, most of all! “Those big eyes — prominent on your face, that once mocked your father, unaware that they would later peer into souls, or that they would pierce through the darkest part of humanity, before closing forever — still hold their power to search deeply, even from the next life,” I would write, at the beginning of my Letter to Jimmy. .

I situate Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room at the peak of his creative production, and The Fire Next Time at the height of his thought as a champion of civil rights. With it, Baldwin changed my previous understanding of the world. After reading The Fire Next Time, you can no longer look at society in the same way. What, after all, does Baldwin teach us if not that desperation, internal agony and “the unbearable lightness of being” haunt all races? From there, the writer must invent — or even reinvent — a universe in which neighborly love is our only salvation, since none of us can hide from the inevitable truth: “Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.” Baldwin based his dream on the redemption of human nature, on reclaiming what we lost a long time ago: the beauty of life. When all is said and done, what can inspire us more than these words? “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have.”

Alain Mabanckou