Uncovering Writing

5 of 5 stars

What a fantastic collection of essays from James Baldwin. They are powerful, insightful, fast-flowing, and sadly still wholly relevant 65 years after their publication.

There were ten essays grouped into three sections. I thought “Many Thousands Gone” from the first part was excellent, with its analysis and critique of Richard Wright’s Native Son. The essays in the second section were also excellent, including “Journey to Atlanta”. I didn’t enjoy as much the first two essays in the third section, but like “Journey to Atlanta”, I was engrossed in “Equal in Paris”.

The best essay in the collection is the final one, entitled “Stranger in the Village”. It’s about his experiences living in an isolated Swiss village while working on his writing over a period of years. His use of imagery, metaphor, and ethnographic detail work together to craft a strong argument. It only took about 12 minutes to read this essay but I felt that I came out much older and wiser. One quote that was powerful:

“The black man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, that the white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a human being. This is a very charged and difficult moment, for there is a great deal of will power involved in the white man’s naïveté. Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors. He is inescapably aware, nevertheless, that he is in a better position in the world than black men are, nor can he quite put to death the suspicion that he is hated by black men therefore. He does not wish to be hated, neither does he wish to change places, and at this point in his uneasiness he can scarcely avoid having recourse to those legends which white men have created about black men, the most usual effect of which is that the white man finds himself enmeshed, so to speak, in his own language which describes hell, as well as the attributes which lead one to hell, as being as black as night.”