2024-08-01 10:15:05
Soh luck! Such a nice accompaniment to a modern style that is not good in every respect. But here returning to identity, “Black Lives Matter” and verbal attacks on the concept of “white supremacy” have produced something completely interesting: a renewal of the mind, not least in social networks, that has been going on for many years happened to American storyteller, essayist and playwright James Baldwin. We were born 100 years ago today in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. He died in 1987 in his home of St. Paul de Vence near Nice.
Already in the last decade of his life, but even in the following decades, there is silence about the pop icon of the black civil rights group, gay Dandy, author of social novels that, for the first time in the book North American history. , shows both homosexuality and sexual encounters with one describing the openness that exists. And they don’t shy away from taking a breath any more than they do from the relentless problem of American racism. But what happened inevitably in the sixties and seventies hurry up The dominant group among American intellectuals lost its magic and, above all, its novelty value at the end of the last century.
Even Fritz J. Raddatz, a leading literary critic in the spirit of this movement, who, during his time at Rowohlt Publishing, kept one of his best horses in the stable, James Baldwin, was, accordingly to his journals from the 1990s. , gradually influenced by his friend “Jimmy” left. When he began by selling his library of exclusive copies of famous authors, he also gave up Baldwin’s books, suspecting that he would never carry them again.
We don’t know if it stayed that way. But one thing is clear: reading or re-reading books like “Go and announce it from the Hill,” “Giovanni’s Room,” or especially “Another World” is one of the most amazing reading experiences imaginable.
Baldwin’s debut was a disaster
For example, Baldwin’s debut “Go Proclaim It From Above,” which made him famous in 1953, goes straight. Unfortunately, in the new translation by Miriam Mandelkow in dtv, it has been given the unintelligible title “From this World”. This is the story of a young man’s religious awakening, with which James Baldwin outlines his own experiences and, incidentally, also portrays his illustrious grandfather, a typical black preacher of the time – neither of which is conform “of this world. “. It is in this atmosphere that Baldwin writes a high note; This is where his penchant for pathos comes from, which has never been lost, although he has expanded his style of repetition over the years.
But he is a writer of great emotions. The fears and needs of people from the precariat (black), but also the personal doubts and desires of artists and intellectuals, all hopes and fears, failures and getting back to our feet that form the world come, if we are honest, this is a great feeling, always a pity for “everyone in his night”, all this makes Baldwin’s words unique and rich. Perhaps his most complex novel, “Another World,” published in the United States in 1963 and here in 1965, benefits most from this.
Paris that saved his life
At this time, when literature is understood in a way that is not always (in Germany anyway, but also in other European countries and, surprisingly, even among Americans), Baldwin, without any writing understood , there is a man who “sees with his heart.” It is not by chance that borrowing from Saint-Exupéry’s much-used book takes place here. Because as Baldwin is a product of North America, as it is clear that he must be considered a student of the black writer Richard Wright, from whom he, Aktion Patricide, separated from him in a surprising way early, literary work -his writing is also inextricably linked to France.
“Paris is the city that saved my life,” Baldwin said in one of his stories. And the sentence also applies to the author himself In 1948, at the age of 24, James Baldwin turned his back on the internal and external injuries that he had experienced in his home and started a new life in Paris. Here, without being subjected to racist persecution, he was able to live out his heterosexual life and continue his art.
Around 1950, André Gide, who had already written the socialist, “The God that is not,” in the 1930s, acted as a teacher for young intellectuals in France. In 1947 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. James Baldwin was also influenced by this liberal lone warrior, to whom he dedicated his first literary essay. And perhaps it was this good spirit that prevented Baldwin, even in his activist days, from falling for the siren songs of Marxism that clouded the minds of many post-war writers.
However, he did not touch the conflict discourse. In his history, Baldwin often explains the advocacy of violence to solve the racial conflict in America to characters such as the jazz singer Ida in “Another World” or “Black Christopher” in “How, tell me, of husband the railroad is gone (1968) ) does not reflect the author’s position. But in his essays at least he doesn’t skimp on many one-dimensional facts about “white people” or “the West”.
“The Conference of the Sun is over”
“The Western Conference is over and the sleep of the white people has set. Basta!”, he declared fiercely in his critically acclaimed 1972 memoir No Name Left for Him. It was a time when Baldwin saw white Americans, especially those who come from the southern states, like cute wimps, about which he blithely rambles. : “It is beginning to seem that the South is not a completely heterosexual community for one reason, namely the inexorable absence of men.” There is no doubt that Baldwin liked to be prejudiced, and he was often prejudiced. Especially when it comes to the alleged unmanliness of white people, he is at his polemical best.
And how do you know real manliness? In Baldwin’s eyes, big cocks and their unrelenting sex work, as black people can show. But the “wrinkled faces” of white men are to be understood as “an exact indication of what is happening below the belt.” After all, Baldwin did not advocate freeing white men to overcome their prejudices against black people. But the mythology of his sexuality – especially in novels and stories – has bright colors. In “Another World,” a single French gay man is lavishly gifted by Baldwin with a virile membrum that rises “as tall as Chartres Cathedral.” Well, you’ll have to be French.
The whole truth about James Baldwin is that not only are his essays sometimes florid nonsense, but that his literary works have also lost their compositional rigor over the decades. This is especially clear in the previously mentioned artist’s novel “How long, tell me, has the train gone?”, which dtv has also published (600 pages: phew!). The scenes that take place in the black protagonist’s childhood in New York are particularly gripping.
Everything that makes Baldwin’s prose great comes into its own here: a real feeling for the memorable situations that caused the suffering of black people of that time, memorable dialogues and a touching portrayal of the family as a community of shared destiny. The way two brothers behave in harmony with each other is one of the most interesting things in American literature in the 20th century.
What caused the decline of his literary work is interpreted differently by Baldwin’s biographers, René Aguigah assures us in the definition of his student as etude “James Baldwin. Witness” (CH Beck). Torn between literature and activism, busy and with an unstable life, he, who was famous for a while like Martin Luther King or Marlon Brando, repeatedly fell into self-destructive depression, drugs and alcohol . But this author has created enough characters who perish because of their early traumas. This is what people will have to say about him: he dies at last of a broken heart. In other words, the cause of death behind all clinical diseases is susceptible people (in the case of Baldwin’s esophageal cancer).
James Baldwin: “How long, tell me, is the train gone?” we had “There is no name left for him anywhere”. Translated from English by Miriam Mandelkow. dtv, 670 or 272 pages, 28 or 22 euros.
René Aguigah: “James Baldwin. Witness. A Portrait”. CH Beck, 233 pages, 24 pages.
#James #Baldwin #100th #man #heart