The first book I read about sex was "If Beale Street Could Talk". I don't remember much about it except for the sexy parts, and what I recall of that was that it was gentle and not dirty. It was a love story, an honest love story which reinforced that which I wanted to believe about love. I cannot remember if it was my parents who thought I should read the book, but I seem to remember that Pops was pleased that I enjoyed it.
Fast forward 20 years or so and I found myself reading James Baldwin once again, after all that time. This time it was 'Another Country'. Again, a love story. But an entirely new set of details was embedded in my skull from that reading, which is the danger that love poses against the expectations of society, and how difficult it is to love with your whole heart if you are afraid of the consequences of love. How distorted a person can become for not being able to love honestly and what a mockery of a society of lies one can make if one finds the courage to love honestly.
So when I got married a few years after having read Another Country, I was certain that the rest of James Baldwin would be teaching me something about black love and not revolution. I put down my Cornel West and my organic intellectual hat for the promise of sated wisdom, surrounded by the anti-revolution that is Baldwin's truth. In Baldwin I had found the understanding that it is through the courage to change that freedom is achieved.
And now it has come to today, when at the spur of the moment yesterday I decided to pick up and read 'The Fire Next Time'. As it is my intention to do a great deal more reading and a lot less interactive writing with the blogosophere, an overview of literature is in order. You see, my current byline on blackness (which is in the process of being reconstructed) is 'Why Do I Bother'? It's a very serious question and at bottom it is the question of whether or not it is interesting or necessary to be culturally black at this moment in American history. I think it is akin to asking the question of whether or not it is interesting or necessary to be Roman after the fall of Rome, or even today in modern Italy whether or not it is interesting to be Roman.
My preliminary answer is that I haven't found the right connections as of yet to know. Which means that I have to make better sense of Western Civilization. Which means I have a lot of reading to do, starting with Jacques Barzun and James Baldwin. What I expect to find are a few salient reasons to be black which I will share with an ever shrinking number of individuals in my generation, and a deeper insight into the principles which make The West what it has become. I will emerge with stronger connections to both which will perplex and astonish myself and my readers. Chances are that the blog will survive, but in a yet unknown third form. Most assuredly, I will emerge with a harder head, at least that is my hope.
This may very well be 'The End of My Blackness, Part 7', I've lost track of the number of times I've shed my skin. But at this moment the impetus is manifold. Most recently it was made more pressing by the reading of the intro to Montaign's Essays. You see, he began writing because he had lost his best friend. I continue to write because I have no best friend. The impetus began particularly in September of this year when I started writing something I still haven't finished called 'What It Feels Like to Become Unblack'. The import of that was basically a meditation on living in the American diaspora - something I share with my homies, growing up in the hood, moving somewhere to do college, moving somewhere else to do work, moving somewhere else to get married and have kids, moving somewhere else entirely as your family grows. For myself personally, I have probably lived about 7 places, and other than the home in which I lived until I was 19 or so, I've never stayed in one place for more than 5 years. What does that do to someone who is supposed to belong to a 'black community', is the substance of that still unfinished essay. There are only perceptions and articulations there at the moment, but not much speculation as to meaning. Because, after all, what is black?
What you can know is what it means to you and what it means to people who write about it, and one could do considerably worse than James Baldwin. But actually, that depends...
I'm not sure the blackness of James Baldwin holds up over time, and so I have to look deeper into Western Civilization, as I have said. We face enduring challenges and I desire to be on the proper side of it whether or not that side is identifiably black. In the end, it may only be identifiably Michael Bowen. If that is to be black then all audiences will have to compare my black diasporic experiences in America to those of Mr. Baldwin. And I can tell you straight away that as I read 'The Fire Next Time' I am awestruck by the contrasts.
I should not be so quick to dismiss this Baldwin as I am wont to do. After all, he wrote it in 1963, and there were fires the next time. I should move, and probably will, up to his last collection of essays and leave this older stuff alone. Completeness has its merits. Yet there is so much fear in his narrative that I am stunned. It has been so very long since I have experienced the head raising efforts of my own father to make me fearless that I forgot how crucial it was. Reading about Baldwin's Harlem, his church and the pimps and whores on his Avenue served to remind me what a distance has been traveled by the consciousness embedded in my family away from those elements of society that mash down the spirit.
Now I'm going to get some lunch and then finish reading the book today or tomorrow depending on what work I get done. But so far, I'm beginning to wonder what part of James Baldwin's literature isn't flavor.
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