Writing with Fields of Light

As the semester has progressed, I am becoming increasingly aware of the complexity of the world and the toll these various forms of oppression has made upon entire cultures, races and countries. I had always considered my self fairly knowledgeable on world events, especially with the various world wars and the American Civil War. I could recite dates and numbers and even, in some cases, units and individuals involved in the events.

I remember reading Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels when I was in my teens and feeling for the first time that I understood some of the psychological motivations and the cost of going to war for some of these men and their families. I remember also walking Little Round Top at Gettysburg and seeing the woods where the 20th Maine Volunteer Regiment led by Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain held off the 15th Confederate Regiment and 47th Alabama Regiment all day on July 2, 1863.

The Confederates were attempting to flank the Union line at Gettysburg, and some historians speculate that had the 20th Maine failed, the course of the war would have been altered, in addition to jeopardizing a victory at the sleepy Pennsylvania junction.

Not too many years later, the movie Gettysburg was released and the first half (one of only two movies I've seen in my life with an intermission due to length) ended with the battle at Little Round Top. The entire audience was silent when the screen went blank after the harrowing stand. There were tears in many of the viewer's eyes and the stillness was extraordinary. The feeling lasting more than a full minute before the effect seemed to lift enough that people went out to use restrooms or stretch their legs. Even then, the patrons were hushed and seemed in awe of this moment in history come alive.

This combination of reading personal accounts combined with factual knowledge and the visceral experience of a movie has stayed with me my entire life. This semester seems to consist, more and more, of marrying this dry knowledge of events with the personal account. History lives in the words of the memoirs we've been reading. The true value of the idea of being witness is that humans seem to need a way to connect and understand the actual impact of these horrible events. The terror of one family is felt and can be wed to the data of the times.

That being said, the darkness of the 20th Century and it's toll on humanity is still almost incomprehensible. I think it would be easy to continue with memoir after memoir and find oneself almost overwhelmed with these stories. That's why Fields of Light came almost as balm for the soul. Hurka's lyrical writing and undercurrent of optimism were sorely needed and welcome. His account of his and his family's journey to find some space for freedom and triumph and perseverance was beautiful and very human.

The way Hurka incorporated the perspectives of his family directly into the text as internalized movements was also very interesting from a writing perspective. The construction is something I'm looking forward to discussing this evening.

Paranoia

In the books that we have read, we see how terror and fear are used to subdue entire countries. When people are arrested, tortured, and murdered without reason, it creates an uncontrollable, lasting paranoia. How does one live in a world in which nobody can be trusted? Can this really be called living, or is it simple being able to outlast the oppression? It is not just the secret police that people must fear, but they must also deal with betrayals by friends and neighbors. This type of atmosphere instills inescapable doubt and suspicion. Throughout the semester, we've seen this idea play out over and over again, which is why I wanted to examine the following passage in Fields of Light:

About four hours into Josef's stay, the door opened, and a man was shoved inside with such force that he landed, hard, against the far side of the cell. The steel door slammed shut behind him.  

"Bastards," the man said. He had a hard, unshaven face, and dark eyes. He rubbed his arms and legs. "I had an argument with the guard and he kicked me," he said. "He has no right to do that."

Then the newcomer seemed to take in Josef completely, for the first time. "I am glad to see that I shall not be alone," he said. "I am Franta Zeman." He held out his hand. (81-82)

 Upon my first reading of this excerpt, upon witnessing "Franta Zeman" being literally thrown into the page and hearing him insult the guards, my immediate reaction was to think, wow, what an introduction! In that split second, I believed that Zeman would be an interesting addition to the story, someone that could at least commiserate with Josef or give him knowledge that would help keep his spirits up. A few milliseconds after having these initial thoughts, the searing doubt crept in and my intrigue turned into the utmost suspicion. I realized that this was very likely a trap, and I took a moment to reflect on how gullible I had been.

All of these thought whirled through my mind in a time span of less than five seconds.

Of course, after meeting "Anton," I felt justified in my mistrust, like I was ahead of the game. But this short passage in the book made me realize just how easy it is to succumb to the type of distrust that we see in these novels. It makes me wonder. We'd all want to do the "right thing" if ever we meet difficult circumstances, but it's so easy to be swept away.

Thoughts After Hurka

As we've gotten further into the semester, and read more and more, I've started to consider my history. A history that, of course, traces back to an ancestry of which I know very little. In the first few months of my life, my mother filled out a "Family History" book for me to have later in life. (It's still sitting back at my parents' house in NY.) Each page is for a different family member, and she would fill in the blanks (name, birth date, death date, occupation, education, children, etc.). These simple facts, I've realized, are all I know of anyone older than my grandparents. And even now, without the book, I can't seem to remember much aside a couple of names. My parents were not first or even second-generation Americans. I'm not even sure who is. And so reading Hurka and Balakian in particular, who some of you have called "secondhand witnesses," has me wondering what kind of history I'm leaving uncovered. I also had the misfortune of losing my maternal grandparents at the age of two, and my paternal grandparents when I was in high school, well before I could have ever thought to talk to them about our family history, let alone consider what it would mean to write/document it. 

What I enjoyed in Hurka's book was to be able to see his research in action--conversations with his father in the hospital in Vermont, for example, and his trip to visit Mira. Balakian included this, too. And I also have been thinking of a book I read last semester called One Drop by Bliss Broyard, in which she seeks to find out the history of race in her family once she discovers her father's Creole history, which he had kept secret for much of his life. A long book, Broyard takes us on her journey of research and discovery, too. 

What all of this also makes me consider, though, is the notion of atrocities and survival that has seemed to hang over all of these twentieth-century memoirs. I wonder, if I were to look back, would either of those be present in my family history? This is related to Michaela's post, I think, in the questions of what is "memoir worthy," and what prompted Hurka, in this case, to feel that urgency to write this memoir. How did he know this was important? Or is it always important? History, it seems, is always important, especially in the way it informs the present. 

However, I'm also thinking of the other books we've read this semester that were firsthand accounts of history. Some written not long after the particular event or set of circumstances. And in that case, how can we know that we should write about our own present rather than telling the story of a family history and working to preserve that past. I'm not sure there is an answer to the question of which to write or focus on, and perhaps the solution or compromise is to understand that even if writing in a present context, history is still important. 

Where Do I Fit In It All? The Michaela Papa Story

As I read through other people's blog posts, I couldn't help but realize that a lot of us are thinking in terms of us.  Maybe that's the point of memoirs.  To read about somebody else's life through the lens of you--what I bring to the table when I read: my history, my thoughts, my beliefs.  Everybody takes something different from a memoir and it's interesting to see what and why that is. 

The more I read about other people's documented history and perspectives, the more I think about my own.  How much do I really know about my family?  I know the basic history, but I'm sure there is more.  My great-grandmother immigrated to America from Italy and got her eye shot out by a bullet machine while she was working in a factory in WWII.  But, should I wrote a memoir on her?  What makes something memoir worthy?  If there is a story to tell, write it--but there is ALWAYS a story to tell. 

I'm curious to find out what prompted Joseph Hurka to write this memoir.  Obviously, I read the book and know the events that lead up to it but was there one incendiary detail? Was there something he found out and he couldn't let it go unexplored, undocumented, unwritten?  Perhaps, the sad faces he describes his Czech family as having--exhausted and worn down.  Was there something that made him want to continue?  His dad working for the Resistance, seeing his grandmother's grave in Zebrak...what made him continue through this hard past?

Also, I was interested in the integration of Vaclav Havel's first major speech as president.  He worked that in really well.  I'm in an archival research class this semester and have been doing a lot of creative nonfiction writing.  The way he works in historical text and familial reactions and emotions is done very admirably. 

Moral of the story, I can't stop thinking about my family and my family history the more I read about other people's.  What if mine is super memoir-worthy?

Housing

In his opening chapters, Hurka did an excellent job of "touring" the Czech scenery, helping the reader visualize the space and how fractured it was. His descriptions helped me think about Communist architecture as a unique part of the landscape--more so than Mandelstam's descriptions, perhaps because he was describing a city as historically diverse as Prague, perhaps because he was commenting on the scenery after the fact. As Hurka and Mira ride the bus into the city from the airport, Mira comments on the hopelessness emitted from the architecture:

Apartments put up during Communist times. Aren't they terrible?

The reader understands that there's not only a difference between how people lived in and out of communist times, but also where they lived and what their homes were allowed to look like. The ahistorical, equalizing aim of Stalinist/communist regimes used architecture as a way of overwhelming all other narratives that would witness on behalf on any other way of doing things. Fascist architecture, too, sought to enforce a propagandist narrative, but did so with bombastic ties to the past and future, making their imagined architecture "fabulous"and expansive; compared to the communists regulations. It would be terrible to have to see architecture that reflects too perfectly your repulsion toward your ugly government--Hurka himself draws the parallel to neighborhoods in Harlem he'd passed on the way to airport. I was reminded of other times architectural relationships have influenced my perception of "home"--in South Florida, where I grew up, you can tell how long ago a certain neighborhood was supposed to be the avant-garde by observing how up-to-date is the design of their fast-food buildings, when the restaurant chains stopped investing in new state-of-the-art locations. In Gainesville, where I went to college, you can tell how old the campus buildings are by observing whether there are windows on the ground floor or not--the buildings built during the 60's and 70's were made riot-proof against the heavy student activist threat (a trait common to many American college buildings built during this time, I've found/heard). But, under those communist regimes, the imposed style of government-built buildings and the difficulty in getting materials if an individual wanted to build their own house would seem to totally delay or repell all attachments people would have to their homes or communities. But I think Hurka shows that those attachments are somehow much more difficult to sever than one might think. In America there's a pretty even divide between American-born adults who still live in or near their hometowns and those who move from home to home after leaving home. We try for that balance of people moving around and bringing new ideas to new places and of people staying put and improving communities they know.

framing in fields of light vs. black dog of fate

Like Jennifer, I too was reminded a lot of Balakian's Black Dog of Fate while reading Fields of Light. I appreciated the concept of Hurka as a secondhand witness, much like Balakian, but to step aside from the content for a moment, I wanted to note the framing of the book. I found myself comparing the way that this novel was framed with the way Balakian's was: in Balakian's work, we were presented with a cast of characters that was fleshed out and given life before we got to see how these characters identified with the past and what it truly meant to Balakian to uncover the atrocities of the Armenian genocide. In contrast, Hurka opens in media res, in a sense; we are with him on the plane to the Czech Republic, already in the middle of the story, in that it is through his immediate experiences on this trip to the Czech Republic that we are able to uncover, along with him, what happened in the past and how it affects his present experience.

I wanted to note this because I was struck by how, while differing from one another in their framing, both methods were successful and effective in bringing their stories to life. In Balakian's novel, we get to know Balakian as a character, grow up with him and his family, and finally feel the impact of his journey to Armenia while understanding what it truly means to him as a person and to his family as a people. In Hurka's novel, we are given less of that background context but, rather, tidbits are revealed to us as we journey with him through the present-day Czech Republic. I enjoyed how the chapters alternated between Hurka's trip, and the past memories of his father's experiences. I found myself, like Hurka, feeling the weight of so much oppression and atrocity as we covered the same grounds where, fifty years earlier, his father had fought and suffered. I felt, with Hurka, Barbora's sadness as she walked outside of the prison praying for Josef, while Mira and Hurka visited the grounds on a peaceful, quiet day. I marveled at the freedom of Prague's youth and appreciated that the Prague Hurka visited was not the same Prague his father had left so many years before, and just what that meant.

Hurka writes, " .... there was a newer, more positive attitude between people that Mira told me she had not seen for many years; citizens were not afraid to speak and be kind. During the Communist days, she said, these human sentiments and the collusion of humanity that they suggested were ultimately dangerous elements to the State, and they could land you in jail. The feeling I had, not only in these back-streets but also in the tourist areas of Prague, was akin to moving within the body of a giant who has carefully measured his breathing for too long, and now at least breathes freely and without danger or restriction." (p.110.)

The Similarities Between Hurka and Balakian

I enjoyed Fields of Light.  It reminded me a lot of another book I truly enjoyed reading in this course, Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate.  Like Balakian's book, Fields of Light is a young man's exploration into his family's somewhat mysterious culture and history.   Though Hurka doesn't seem to be as in the dark about his family culture as Balakian was, he does uncover, through family interviews and pictures, individual research and a visit to his family's homeland, far more insight into his father and his father's family than he ever had, just as Balakian does.  Both men are also incredibly moved and forever changed by their visits to their family's homeland.  For Balakian, his journey to Armenia brings him face to face with the unacknowledged genocide of his people.  For Hurka, his visit to the Czech Republic and to his aunt Mira allows him to truly understand what the Soviet Union's communist stronghold did to the Czech people and how much his father sacrificed in his stubborn fight to free his country. 

While reading Hurka's book, I was drawn to his style of writing and the format of his memoir, both of which reminded me of Balakian's book.  Both books are written by men who grew up in suburban America so there is a similar sensibility in their storytelling and the way they struggled to understand their fathers, who both seemed to vacillate between being staunchly American and yearning for their hidden cultures.  Both men are talented writers who have studied the art for some time, and that is evident in their descriptive, heart-wrenching prose.  Their  lyrical writing truly evokes images of the people around them and the historical places they visit.  They both manage to convey through words the complexity of a culture that has fought against being erased throughout its history.   They also manage to give a face to the suffering of their people through well researched and well reasoned imagined scenes.  Hurka, for example, imagines the thoughts that must have been running through his grandfather's mind as he waits for a train, shortly after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia.  By doing this, he puts the reader in the mind of an average person trying to live during such a precarious time.  Balakian did a similar thing when he chose to re-create Dovey's story as a first person narrative passage.  Obviously, Balakian couldn't know for sure what thoughts were going through Dovey's head and the exact conversations she had as she was marched across the desert, but he made this creative choice anyway.  He did so to make Dovey's suffering more powerful and relatable. And he succeeded.   They both followed up such personal stories and anecdotes with detailed historical accounts to give the reader a point of reference and to lend a sense of authority to their memoirs.  Hurka, for instance, followed up an imagined scene of his grandfather looking at a newspaper with a picture of Reinhard Heydrich on the front page with a historical account of Heydrich's assassination by two Czech Resistance fighters.  Balakian utilizes a similar method when he includes a history of the various Armenian cities after a scene in which he has a heated debate with his aunt about the use of poetry.   Both men manage to seamlessly weave the personal with the historical, making for a more enriching read.

Most of all, these two books are similar in that they both explore cultures that have struggled for existence.  In Black Dog of Fate, Balakian delves into the history and culture of Armenia, a country that has been persecuted throughout its history.  The Armenian people, as a whole, were almost completely eradicated by the Turks during the World War I genocide, which, to this day, is still unacknowledged by the global community.  This genocide, along with a lack of global support, had forced Armenians to be without a country of their own for many years, leading to various Armenian diasporas.  These diasporas, in turn, led to the dilution and disintegration of the Armenian culture and history.  Balakian uses his book as a way of remembering an entire generation of Armenians lost to genocide and to keep Armenian culture and history alive.  His book teaches readers about the resiliency of the Armenians, a people forced to honor their traditions and lost love ones in secret for many years.  In a similar vein, the Czech Republic, formerly Czechoslovakia, has fought for its own identity and independence throughout history.  After years of serving the Habsburg Empire, Czechoslovakia declared it independence in 1918 and became a democratic society, similar in structure to that of the U.S.  Czechoslovakia then enjoyed a couple of decades of peace and prosperity before being invaded and absorbed by the Nazis.  At the end of World War II, Russia "freed" Czechoslovakia shortly before it enslaved Czechoslovakia in the chains of Soviet communism.  For decades, the Czech people fought to return to the prosperity and freedom they experienced under Masaryk's democratic leadership.  Hurka's book is a memorial and a celebration of the Czech people's long fight for their freedom from communism.  His book reminds the world that the Czech people were unwilling to be absorbed by other cultures.  They were a people who fought long and hard against totalitarianism.  In essence, Hurka and Balakian both teach readers the importance of bearing witness in an effort to avoid cultural extinction. 

Pictures of the Past

The presence of the pictures was something that struck me while reading Fields of Light. Their use in exploring a family history was a fascinating choice on Hurka’s part, especially in the earlier chapters. Since we, as readers, know little about Hurka’s past, both his and that of his family, we are placed in a similar situation that he once was. Starting from the image that opens the book, of his grandfather, aunt, and father, which, to us, is a mystery before we begin reading. Then, as he explains it to us, it takes on a different shape than just a random artifact, but instead gains a story, gains its meaning. It had me thinking about what sort of connection we can have to images of the past, as they are often the only gateway that we have into actually seeing the past, as opposed to strictly keeping it within our imaginations.

That being said, the information that we are supplied (and I am suspecting that was relayed to Hurka through family testimony with corroboration with whatever records may still have existed) is that which, while providing a sort of grounding for understanding their context, doesn’t necessarily bring us any closer to the truth of what may actually lie within the photographs. All we have to rely upon is the stories that Hurka is told, which we are now told in turn through the text.

 I suppose this is something that I’ve been thinking about this entire course so far: the subjective experience of history. While reading this book, with a focus again toward the start, with Czechoslovakia’s first president and democracy, to how the nation is essentially abandoned by its allies before the Nazi invasion, and so on, are views from one group of people. We have to rely on Hurka’s telling and the sources that he used. While I do not doubt the stories relayed of the family’s history, I’m sure there are other accounts of the other side of the coin, though I suspect it would be infused with propaganda.

I'm going to go a little off topic to make a separate connection here when I admit that a lot of these thoughts were brought about by a conversation I had with girlfriend yesterday. She spent time over the weekend with her family down in DC, but they all originally hail from St. Petersburg, moving to the States in 1998. She was showing me pictures of their history, which gave an interesting look into the USSR from a familial perspective in the 1980s, which further struck me because she didn’t know all the stories to the photos that were from previous decades. I found myself wanting to know these unknown tales, the same way that I wanted to know the ones of those that Hurka included in Fields of Light. Thankfully, in one instance, I was able to get them. 

The Incomplete Witness

I found (as I'd guess most of us did) that Mr. Hurka's text was most similar to Hope Against Hope in that they both place the author in the role of the secondhand witness (as Chris discussed in his blog post). However, I found that Hurka had a bit of a disadvantage only because he was writing from a generation behind his father and Mira, and thus, there were pieces of his witnessing that were missing.

This is not to disparage the book (which I thought was fascinating), it was just interesting to see the difference in detail between Mandelstam and Hurka given that they were covering a lot of the same ground (Communist oppression) from the same secondhand standpoint. It seemed Hurka wasn't able to get into the same level of specificity and detail that Mandelstam was, and at times, it distanced me from the trauma and terror of the period his father must have lived. The closeness that Mandelstam had to the situation allowed her to report with much greater clarity, and also to get into each episode of her husband's struggle with more depth. Hurka seems at times only able to scratch the surface (also in part because his Father doesn't or cannot tell him certain things).

I wonder how this relates to how the act of witnessing can be diluted and weakened by the passing of time. We live in an age of instantaneous information, so anyone can bare witness to anything and have it saved online and dispersed to a large group of people (which can be good or bad, depending on circumstances, but that's another argument). But when I think back on past traumas or more restrictive societies (North Korea, Turkey cracking down on social media), I wonder how much we'll ever be able to understand if the only witnesses we have come generations after the events have occurred. It seems that the generational gap and subsequently less detailed account/witnessing may make it easier for us to overlook or downplay atrocities that we know less about (with Hurka, we already have a great understanding of how oppressing Soviet-style communism was from other texts).

Secondhand Witnesses

The majority of the works we have read in this class have been firsthand accounts of historical events. Memoirs like Goodbye to All That and Homage to Catalonia at times feel like pieces of that history themselves--voices salvaged from another time. Joseph Hurka's story is, as it is told even in the title, less the story of a personal witness than one of a man recovering buried history. It reminded me very much of Black Dog of Fate, in that Hurka and Balakian both try to piece together the salvageable fragments of truth to construct a narrative. It is also telling that both authors are advancing histories of overlooked regions. I for one had never learned a thing about Armenia before Black Dog of Fate, and I only knew Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring through Milan Kundera. The "bigger" events of World War I and the Cold War seem often to crowd out the histories of smaller countries. So these personal histories of families from such countries seem to carry an extra weight and significance. They speak out to that world which hasn't bothered to listen, which considered the Sudentenland as just another in a series of World War II factoids. The memoirs give voice to a nation as well as to a single family.

Hurka's and Balakian's project also seem particularly meaningful to us as writers because they haven't been witnesses to history in the same way that, say, Primo Levi or George Orwell have been. Yet Hurka and Balkian are equally dedicated to putting together and forwarding a history that they have not seen first hand. They have the imaginative capabilities to envision these worlds in exquisite detail, and they have the ability to render them in a way that makes it seem like they have seen the events themselves. Anyone has a connection to history, and they don't necessarily have to have been in the trenches to build that connection.

From last week's reading, James Baldwin stated that "the making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties...it baffles the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation until today" (29). It is refreshing to read Hurka's and Balakian's books because they work against this trend. Rather than reject their histories they work actively to salvage them, and by the end these two second generation immigrants do not seem on edge. They are embracing their family and their history, and they've shown us how to do it.

A Guiding Rule

The more I encounter nonfiction work, whether it be memoir, essay, or any other sub-genre, the more I find the implementation of a "guiding rule" necessary. No rule can tell us how we can or should write a story, or what we should call the writing we produce, but I think the words that Joseph Hurka writes on the final page of his memoir, Fields of Light, can serve as this important axiom for nonfiction writers. 

He writes, "I am haunted by the story I have come to these pages to tell. Throughout my writing, my father's voice has been with me, giving me a simple message that now I thoroughly understand. Serve the truth, he says: resist all trespass on the spirit" (159). 

Serve the truth—let the search for truth guide us in our inquiries; let truth be more important even, than the beauty of the prose that serves as the vehicle for uncovering that truth; let the inquiry be led by a reverence for the truth and its power to restore, to remedy. 

Resist all trespass on the spirit—let discomfort of the soul, too, serve as our guide; let the intuitive resistance that arises in the face of atrocities and inhumanity fuel us; let us listen to and protect our instinctual beings.

In the section where Hurka describes his meeting with Father Maly, he shares with us many of the principles that Maly embraces. Of those principles, one is particularly similar to the one I mentioned above—to resist all trespass on the spirit. 

Hurka writes, "The communist era had offered his countrymen the lesson of 'knowing personal conviction through sacrifice,' he said, and the opportunity to 'win certain spiritual values.' It deepened for all of them the meaning of their current freedom. Freedom, according to Maly, didn't mean 'simply to do what one wants, but to accept personal limitations: then one is really free.' One must find a place inside, he seemed to suggest, where oppressive forces, whatever they may be, are not allowed entrance into the soul—and thus one gains true personal freedom" (135).

This power is perhaps the greatest power a person can obtain. It is a power that Nadezhda Mandelstam certainly carried and utilized throughout her entire life. That no one can take this away from a person, no matter if all of your physical belongings have been stolen, no matter if your body itself has been manipulated and abused, is a fact to survive by. If one always knows that they have the ability to protect their spirit and therefore knows that they will always have in their possession the most important piece of themselves, perhaps one can survive atrocities such as those we see inflicted upon Hurka's father and the people of Czechoslovakia.

Those Czech people, both young and old, have done more than survive the communist era as individuals. As a people, they survive alongside their history, and that history—still very alive and present in their everyday lives—continues to affect them (Hurka's father especially). On page 130, Hurka writes of the 1989 protest, of history's persistence: "Most of these students could hardly have been born then, and yet they marched as if they felt every moment of the last forty years in their bones." History collides with the present, neither present nor past pushing the other away but rather, in the most natural and necessary of ways, feeding one another. 

If history were to suddenly disappear, vanish—irreversibly erased, no longer influencing the present—there would be no hope of stopping the past from repeating itself. The present needs the past as the past needs the present. We need memory to know the past, and to then understand it. If we are wiped of our memory, of our ability to claim history, we are bound to live the past over and over and over again. 

But, I might add: if we are wiped of memory, if we live and relive the past, how will we even know that what we are experiencing is what we have already experienced again and again? Will we, like Hurka, suddenly feel as though we’ve been connected to something—a country, a person, a belief—for longer than is logically possible? Will we wake one day and think, I know this people, this place, this feeling. I know that I know what it was like to walk this land two hundred years ago, but I do not know how this can be true. 

And will that feeling be enough?

The Alabama Greek System and a Refusal to Come to Terms

To read James Baldwin and to not be angered, disgusted and overwhelmed with the brutality of history toward the African-American is practically impossible even if one were living in a vacuum. To read Baldwin -- with his power of prose and eloquence -- and even take a cursory glance at today's world is to be outraged.

Baldwin writes: "I don’t think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it."

"In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."

One of the great things about attending a university like Emerson is this process of engaging inequality both in programming and intellectually. That there exists the idea of an institutional ackowledgment that there is work to be done on social issues is extremely important. We will all meet or have met those individuals who profit either socially or economically from oppression in some form. I'd like to think that most universities are having discussions like we do in this class.

The University of Alabama Greek system took some heat last year for allowing several sorities to deny membership bids to women based on their race. The ensuing discussions from university leaders and students seemed to indicate that some change was taking place. Because, well, slavery only ended 140 years ago (but whatever, this is Alabama) and it seemed like there would be a modest resolution to encourage inclusiveness within fraternities and sororities on campus.

This week the student senate decided not to vote on this resolution because of what many are calling the influence of the Greek "machine" upon student government. In fact, 27 members of SGA voted yes to keep the bill from being voted on, 5 no, and 2 voted present.

To read these essays by Baldwin about institutional power and race and then look up and be literally gob-smacked with a massive example of how deep inequality still runs within this nation is kind of frightening. It just shows how much work needs to be done even on the institutional level. And if the bare bones of this story isn't enough to anger you, here is the Alabama bill encouraging inclusion in it's entirety:

"Whereas, Given the history of the University of Alabama in the Civil Rights Movement, it is imperative that the campus takes every necessary action to remove the stigma that currently surrounds this campus regarding its legacy of segregation.

Be it further resolved, The Senate supports the complete integration of all Greek letter fraternities and sororities at the University of Alabama, with respect to social diversity among its membership."

A modern student government couldn't even pass that!

Wallace '48

Firstly, this band called the Hangdogs made a really good album of progressive union and folk/country/rock songs called Wallace '48 in 2003. Really good songs.

Secondly, throughout the collection and mainly in the essays "Journey to Atlanta" and "Encounter on the Seine" I found myself thinking of how different our views of politics and race across age lines, even within just 10 years of each other. Once while I was in college, I returned to my high school to edit their literary journal. This was during the Obama/Clinton Democratic primaries in '08. There were several essays extolling the virtues of Obama's "Hope" campaign, stories of how invested in the political process the Obama campaign had made these high schoolers feel. Baldwin might say that they had not been conditioned to not expect anything from politicians yet. Baldwin also made me consider teaching undergrads at Emerson. When we try to come to terms in class with essays that deal with contemporary racism, many students frustratingly claim that the author is exaggerating or that things are better now, only a few years since the article. The same goes for feminist arguments; you often get the "she's just been dumped too many times, she's on her period" responses. But queer rights arguments aren't questioned in that demographic nearly as often. Baldwin's line about Americans being "lovers of justice" but not lovers of the victims of injustice rang true to me through these responses.

James Baldwin

After reading Baldwin's book, I find myself thinking about the concept of America as a "melting pot." This phrase is one that I could have easily written on a fill-in-the-blank question in elementary or middle school or drawn a line from word to definition on a the much beloved matching section of a test. But here I take a look at the actual definition and try to figure out what it all means.

Merriam-Webster defines melting pot as "a place (such as a city or country) where different types of people live together and gradually create one community"; "a place where a variety of races cultures or individuals assimilate into a cohesive whole." We are taught that the concept is a wonderful thing, that everyone conveniently mixes together as we all attempt to live out the American dream. This definition leads me to recall Baldwin's words about sentimentality, in which he describes the act as "the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of he sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, and his arid heart" (14). And, more so, this leads me see that what we learn in our early education is, in effect, a giant cover-up. After all, how is one to explain the complexities and intricacies of a broken and damaging system to a child? It is so much easier to gloss over the facts, and, as we are taught to do so at an early age, it's no wonder that the idea that everyone gets an equal change at success still prevails.

 But as Baldwin states, "The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible" (65). In this way, the melting pot is crushing, and the act of assimilation is neither possible, reasonable, nor fair.

How does one combat the injustice of American society? In the book, Baldwin tells that many, including his father, turned to religion, but that this too has become skewed, for "religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge" which "provide excellent springboards for sermons thinly coated with spirituality but designed mainly to illustrate the injustice of the white American and anticipate his certain and long overdue punishment" (66). In this way, everything is interconnected, so that even the promise of freedom of religion takes on a different meaning for those looking for answers. We see how this affected Baldwin's father: "He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm . . . he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful" (87). And we see that Baldwin himself would "rather write than preach" (108).

Since it is through Baldwin's own voice that we, as readers, are made aware of this convoluted history, it fits that we must follow in his footsteps and avoid blunting the words that will lead to a true understanding of what exactly America is and what has made the country this way.

racism and white-washing

I found Baldwin's essays to be so eloquently written that, at times, I couldn't put the book down. The grace of his words is almost difficult to reconcile with the ugliness of what he is writing about - that is, the struggles of being black in America and how deep racism runs.

Something that I thought was interesting was Baldwin's perspective on not only the racism in how blacks are perceived by others, but how blacks perceive themselves. On page 23, he writes, "This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt." I found this quote interesting because of the self-hatred inherent in these words, specifically, "possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt." Elsewhere in the book, Baldwin touches on appropriating white culture because he felt he had no place in his own culture; he perceived a lack of art and even genius to call his own, and resented that. That's interesting because, while I have read of the racism of whites appropriating other cultures, I never quite considered that it works both ways. Furthermore I had never considered that appropriation might be the only way to forge one's identity.

And yet, how do you define an identity that is mired in centuries of racism and oppression, while still giving merit to these experiences? Later on page 23, Baldwin continues, "One writes out of one thing only- one's own experience. ... This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that which is art. The difficulty, then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely. [...]"

Relatedly, Bigger Thomas' struggles mirror this conundrum, as Baldwin writes on page 46: " ... for it is not his love for them or for himself which causes him to die, but his hatred and his self-hatred; he does not redeem the pains of a despised people, but reveals ... his own fierce bitterness at having been born one of them."

Another aspect of the book that I found interesting was the amount of "white-washing" that not only history but art and literature has assigned to black culture. In speaking about Uncle Tom's Cabin, Baldwin notes how Stowe's characters can only be redeemed or salvaged when they are given white attributes. On page 53, we get: "They could easily have been dreamed up by someone determined to prove that Negroes are as 'clean' and as 'modern' as white people and, I suppose, in one way or another, that is exactly how they were dreamed up." The idea is that the characters Baldwin is referring to can only be likable - or even, dare I say, human - if they mirrored white people; that is, if they were black and black alone, then they had no merit. Their value lies in how "white" they appear, and if they are not able to appear white or as "clean and modern" as white people, then they are worth nothing. It perpetuates the idea that white is the only thing that matters in this country. The oppression of blacks is not always so obvious as to enslave them or to have them use separate water fountains; rather, how can a culture be positive if it is undermined constantly by what it is not?

This was written in 1954, and yet a lot of these ideas and this oppression is still prevalent today. In the book, Baldwin touches on the idea that man is created in God's image, but not all are created equal; that is, not all men are created in the manufactured, "white-washed" image of God that has endured over the centuries. It is over fifty years later, and while we have made progress - even elected a black President! exclaim those eager to pretend that racism is a thing of the past - what stuck with me most about this book is how things are still very much the same now. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Baldwin

In the autobiographical notes of Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin touches on a key aspect to the writing of these essays: "But it is the business of the writer to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source....I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly" (6). This book, therefore, serves to act as a more honest assessment of the past and also as a means to point out the American tendency to deny the past and history. The latter is something we've discussed at length in class, and I found that Baldwin addressed the idea eloquently and rather thoroughly in these essays.

We've talked in class about how literature (or films or music or any other cultural medium) have often taken to inserting a hopeful message, which ultimately undercuts the severity or truth of a circumstance or an atrocity. Baldwin addresses this in Part I. Wright's book Native Son, for example, is "so trapped...by the American necessity to find the ray of hope that it cannot pursue its own implications" (41). This reminded me of the addition to The Diary of Anne Frank (the play), that ray of hope at the end that contributes to a denial of an atrocity and allows for them to repeat in history. This type of sentimentalizing is also evident in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Baldwin also criticizes in "Everybody's Protest Novel." However, I'm also reminded of our discussion last week about hope versus delusion, and how complex this distinction can be. We talked about how hope and illusion are similar, and that perhaps an acknowledgement of the fact that it is actually an illusion--that self-awareness is what keeps us in touch with reality. Yet I don't feel that the literature Baldwin criticizes contained that kind of self-awareness, as least so far as his critique is presented in the essays.

I think he speaks to both Stowe and Wright's storytelling and the pride that a protest novel or a novel like Wright's can provide white Americans--the pride of doing something with good intentions. He states, "For, let us join hands on this mountain as may, the battle is everywhere. It proceeds far from us in the heat and horror and pain of life itself where all men are betrayed by greed and guilt and bloodlust and where no one's hands are clean" (45). He's speaking to the dream of liberal men that there will be no distinction between black and white--we will be simply human (or maybe just American). And this led me to consider that notion of being "colorblind," which seems to be a more modern sociological notion. The argument in favor of colorblindness is the promotion of that liberal dream of equality, so that race doesn't hold any power or influence. The argument against holds that to be colorblind is to be in denial of white privilege and the racism that still pervades society, the inequalities that still very much exist. So which is better?

Clarifying Conversations

This past week I worked an event called Clarifying Conversations.  There was 1 black man who was the moderator, and a panel: 1 black woman, 1 foreign (Latina?) woman, 1 white man, 1 Asian man.  At one point the Emerson professor who identified as a black woman, brought up the point from an article in The NYT (possibly The New Yorker) that brought up the qualifying of race.  When writing or reading articles, we qualify people by race when they are something other than white.  We say things like John Doe, a black man of 42...as opposed to John Doe, a white man of 42.  If race is not stated, we assume the person is white.  White is the default.  This was such an interesting concept to me, primarily because I never really thought about it. 

I feel like Baldwin would have a lot to say on this matter.  In the opening he talks about how the history of a people is never a pretty one.  However, despite the dirty history of white people, the qualifying adjective gets erased and whiteness is assumed until otherwise noted.  However, if a person is of any other race, he/she is immediately stated as such. 

Another interesting part of the Clarifying Conversations event was the notion of why continuing to talk about race is still important.  Chris discussed this in his blog post--slavery wasn't that long ago.  It really wasn't.  As much as we whitewash history, math doesn't lie.  James Baldwin talks about the importance of identity and the inability/ability to chose it.  The panel discussed if everybody continues to mix and breed together, will the issue be solved?  Will there no longer be the plight of the colored man?  Nobody on the panel thought so, and I would agree--as I think Baldwin would.  We cannot fix the problem through muddling it and mixing everybody and pretending like nobody was wronged because now things may be right.

Overall, I really enjoyed Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son.  It gave me a lot to think about. 

Living With that Old Nightmare of History

I found myself, having finished Notes of a Native Son, thinking the most about the third and final part, focusing on when Baldwin was living in Paris. I was focused here because this was a situation that I had not considered before: what it would be like for an African American living in Europe during the post-war years as an expat. This section, with Baldwin’s contemplation not only what it felt like to be black but also as an American, and how the latter had as much importance as the former in this case, fascinated me, especially during “Equal in Paris,” when Baldwin found himself at the mercy of the French legal system for his friend removing the sheet from his previous hotel. The fact that such an act, which, as Baldwin notes, was commonplace in America, would be such a cause of trouble had more to do with the nationality than the color of his skin. 

It struck me that this concept, of having to live both with one’s nationality and other nation’s assumptions about it, is something that evolves over time. The moment that Baldwin found himself in Europe, during a time after the continent had torn itself apart again and when there could still be towns essentially cut off from the world (the fact that the town in which he found himself in the final essay was in Switzerland offered an interesting contrast to his life in Paris, due to Switzerland’s position in WWII), in that moment before the student protests of the late 1960s is a very unique one. As he explored the concept of a city that has taken centuries to define itself, something that no American can be able to claim, he was dealing with a larger scope of history than our nation likes to consider. Our nation, it often seems to me, having forged an identity for itself that was both tied to and suspicious of the European cultures that we sprung from, has existed in an enhanced speed, where we want to fit the entirety of an organic national development into our brief existence, and do so while thinking we are the only nation to go through such changes.

I thought this was exemplified well as Baldwin found himself in the small Swiss village, where the concept of a black man was known but never actually seen. That he, in a sense, couldn’t blame the people of the village for their “astonishment” at him, but also couldn’t ignore it and the feelings that it brought about for him because of both his personal and national past, was a perfect place to end this book on. The world moves at different speeds, each whose “people are trapped in history and history trapped in them” (163). We cannot be completely connected, cannot be the same, as much as we try to—like the Americans in Paris who think that they could ever be Parisians. We cannot understand the cathedral as the Swiss do, but they can’t see it as we do, as Baldwin did. There is always a viewpoint that is going to remain unknown to us, leaving only our duty to attempt to explore it, or, at the very least, bear witness to it. We may not be able to wake from the nightmare of history, but we can at least seek to understand the nightmare and how these waking moments will fit into it somewhere down the line. Then again, as he began to see in some of the faces of the townspeople, the distrust of "the other" may always be there, as we always look for something outside ourselves to blame for our current woes, so we may avoid having to look closer at the communities in which we live, or ourselves as we exist within them both publicly and in our private moments and thoughts. It's that avoidance which is the danger, as it avoid reality, and, as Baldwin writes near the end of "Stranger in the Village": "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in this state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster" (175). The world has to be adapted to, as it adapts to us, always with the knowledge of what came before. Again, it's that old nightmare of history, the one that creates the present, and from which we'll never truly wake.

Baldwin & 12 Years a Slave

In many ways, it felt like I went into Baldwin's text with the most historical knowledge (as compared to say, Balakian, where I was learning about an event), which was interesting because it allowed me to focus on Baldwin's more prominent philosophical and existential issues with his place in contemporary American society and culture.

One thing Baldwin continues to come back to (and which is appropriately detailed in the book's first essay) is the idea that America has never completely explored or come to terms with how African-Americans were socially destroyed by the actions of the past; and thus their marginalization continues. He initially lays out the foundation of this problem in his assessment of the failures of the 'protest novel' with Uncle Tom's Cabin up through his contemporary society where the same challenges are faced by him and other black artists/intellectuals.

Being a film person, this got me thinking about 12 Years a Slave and how that film seems to be the most direct confrontation with America's past, yet refuses to fall into the trappings and failures that Baldwin found in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Two things about that movie interested me in relation to this book. The first is the lack of direct message in the film. Obviously, the film is anti-slavery, but rather than seeking to argue a thesis (as Stowe's novel does, to it's detriment in Baldwin's mind), it simply shows us things as they were and lets us take from it what we will. There are no winners in the film. It distinctly lacks the sort of shiny spin that other historical films on the same topic (or historical "issue" movies as a whole) typically have. We might call that the Spielberg-moment; whatever it is, it's certainly absent here.

In conjunction with that idea, the other interesting thing about the film in relation to Baldwin's thoughts was that it was made by a non-American. It's director, Steve McQueen, is black, but British. I've wondered how that affected the approach to the film, as he isn't clouded with the sort of cultural/historical fog that Baldwin finds in many American works on the same subject. It seems to be that McQueen's non-Americanness is of paramount importance in his ability to approach and execute the material in the manner that he does. I wonder if perhaps his European upbringing gave him the sort of lens and perspective that Baldwin tried to find through his European emigration.

Perhaps this became a bit of a rant, but here's some (much more well developed thoughts) on 12 Years and it's cultural siginificance from former Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris: http://grantland.com/features/the-cultural-crater-12-years-slave/

Baldwin Taught me Binaries

"From a social point of view I am perfectly aware that change from ill-will to good-will, however motivated, however imperfect, however expressed, is better than no change at all. But It is part if the business of the writer-- as I see it--to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. " (autobiographical notes, 5)

In Many Thousands gone, Baldwin takes up the argument that Bigger from the novel "Native Son" is a doomed character that fails to convey the true nature of the negro at the time of its writing. It creates a narrative built on vengeance, a novel whose ultimate goal is to present a character who unintentionally reinforces the myth of the negro; the dangerous, monstrous other who will tear apart the fabric of society if kept unchecked; the one who has no tradition but only anger in his heart. Further, Baldwin argues that the novel's culminating ending speech suggests that the negro needs to assimilate, to be "like us" (part of the white dominated society)  to create peace. 

Before reading Baldwin, I would simply counted myself among the liberal men he mentions and hold close the ideal notion that all are created equal and the fight for general equality is as simple as putting a few lines in a punk song and screaming it on stage. I would be screaming those lyrics, and therefore I would be a part of the group who, as Baldwin points out in the following passage, is not like the "others": 

"Though there are whites and blacks among us who hate each other, we will not; there are those who are betrayed by greed, by guilt, by bloodlust, but not we; we will set our faces against them and join hands and walk together into that dazzling future where there will be no white or black. This is the dream of all liberal men, a dream not at all dishonorable, but, nevertheless, a dream (Many Thousands Gone, 44)."
I felt like because I knew that equality was important, the dream was my own reality. It was simple, almost laughably understood. It was easier to understand as a binary rather than really think about it from a human perspective. I think really what Baldwin is getting at here, and why he was so influential to my thinking, is that this sort of social justice perspective relies on binary thinking; that there are evil and good people, and if you align yourself with the good guys things will be wonderful. It relies on the idea that "the battle is elsewhere...it proceeds far from us in the heat and horror and pain of life itself where all men are betrayed by greed and guilt and blood-lust and where no one's hands are clean." Baldwin helped me realize that this way of thinking is indeed easy and unrealistic, if not problematic and damaging. It is one thing to feel for the pain of others, to recognize the cultural privilege leveraged against certain groups of people, but that doesn't mean it is okay to reduce them, their lives, their lived in experience, their culture, to talking points in order to forward an agenda of social equality. 

Of course, this is only one small sliver of the influence Baldwin had on me. This following video illustrates the power of language and how to dig into the roots of words; how the reversal of gaze is important in his delivery of a speech; how performance is important to recognize regardless of intention. 

At the same time, Baldwin always seems to recognize how the writer fits into the role of activism: 

"Leaving aside the considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust upon him of being the representative of some thirteen million people. It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressman) and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment. The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from begin able to feed the hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his own nourishment: having not been allowed -- so fearful was his burden, so present his audience! -- to recreate his own experience (Many Thousands Gone, 33)."
This resonated with me incredibly when I was representing many young people's thoughts and feelings through the power and presence of my band. Many times I would feel torn between attempting to relay my own experience and fulfill the needs of those around me; I felt I had to be the older brother to hundreds of kids every night, every aspect of myself scrutinized in writing, in performance, in interviews. As a band we would even go over talking points and mutually agree on things to say and not say, ways we would interact with others and things we would avoid. By the end it felt so far away from the artistic expression we started with and closer to a set of talking points wrapped in a musical performance. It was almost as if we co-opted ourselves.


These are just a small number of the influences Baldwin has had on me. I could go on forever, but I do want to ask a question. In Take this Hammer, "Baldwin reflects on the racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man by expressing his conviction that: 'There will be a Negro president of this country but it will not be the country that we are sitting in now.'"

Do you feel this is true? I am feeling like it isn't, but instead its buried underneath the ideas that Baldwin raises about assimilation.

Notes of a Native Son -- Running from History

There's an old Louis C. K. bit during an interview with Jay Leno when he mentions, "every year white people add a hundred years to how long ago slavery was...it was a hundred and forty years ago. That's two seventy-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That's how recently you could buy a guy." It speaks to the still pervasive American detachment from history, and it is alarming (if not surprising) how much this statement resounds with many of Baldwin's observations. I'm thinking especially of his stunning declaration in "Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown," in which Baldwin lays out the intertwined histories of black and white Americans: "Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other...they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his [the black American's] blood is in their soil. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced" (123).

Much of the bitterness and rage, that Baldwin says "not a Negro alive" (94) hasn't felt, seems to come not only from the realization of this tangled history, but also from the realization that the white American so often denies it. It is easy enough to do so, to say that slavery was so long ago, and that no living individual had anything to do with the acts that set this whole mess into motion. It's easier to deny the history and wash oneself clean of any guilt, and yet doing so contributes to the erasure of black identity all in order to soothe the consciences of those unwilling to fully see a whole population of their countrymen.

It seems like, in many of these essays, Baldwin project is to expand his readers' perspective. He is able to show how history weighs on the individual, and by doing so, he makes that history much more difficult to cast aside. As a young white guy who has never had much to complain about, I found it a particularly eye-opening to see what it really means when I or anyone I've known has said, "but that was so long ago, why are we still talking about it?"

Baldwin: Seeking to Change a Flawed American Ideology

What I found most interesting about Notes of a Native Son is that Baldwin tells us that racism in America isn't just due to the prejudice of white people against black people, but due to an inherent flaw in American ideology.  America's complicated history of owning slaves and marginalizing various immigrant sectors to industrialize has created in Americans a natural tendency towards the subjugation and belittlement of certain members of its own society.   However, what many Americans fail to realize is that these marginalized groups are still part of America and that by oppressing them, we are oppressing ourselves, our own society.    As Baldwin says, "Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his" (26).  In other words, by dehumanizing members of our country, our country as a whole is dehumanized in the process.  America can't be the land of freedom and hope if we enslave or marginalize parts of our own population.

According to Baldwin, the only way to even attempt to correct this fundamental flaw in American ideology is to face our history head on.  We can't brush the dirty aspects of our history under the rug and choose to only highlight our proud moments.  We must also face that our history of prejudice is more complicated than that of hate and fear.  Like most relationships in life, our relationship with slavery is multifaceted and confusing.  In Baldwin's words, "It is not simply the relationship of the oppressed to oppressor, of master to slave, nor is it motivated merely by hatred; it is also, literally and morally, a blood relationship, perhaps the most profound reality of the American experience, and we cannot begin to unlock it until we accept how very much it contains the force and anguish and terror of love" (42).  Slaves were oppressed and treated like possessions, but, at the same time, some slaves were loved by their owners and some even raised and loved their owners' children.  Some owners, whether or not these were consensual sexual relationships, even fathered the children of slaves.  So, as dysfunctional and abusive as it was, America's relationship with slavery is not a simple one; it contains many shades of many different emotions.  Until this relationship is looked squarely in the face, America has no hope of healing its broken core.

Our tendency to marginalize has, as Baldwin reminds us in his book, affected other groups as well, quite notably Jewish Americans.  Throughout history, Jews have suffered persecution and unfortunately, they have suffered here in America as well.  During our history, Jews have been relegated to the status of "other" in our country and therefore have enjoyed less equality and freedom than Christian Americans.  Jews have had to work against a prevailing stigma in America, much like black Americans have.   However, instead of feeling a sort of kinship with one another, "the Jew has been taught - and too often, accepts - the legend of Negro inferiority; and the Negro, on the other hand, has found nothing in his experience with Jews to counteract the legend of Semitic greed" (Baldwin 71).  So, rather than banding together or commiserating, Jewish Americans and black Americans have a history of not trusting one another.  Both groups wish to move up the American social ladder and neither believes that association with the other will do anything to help with that ascension.  If anything, Jews believe that associations with blacks will only hurt their chances of improving their lots in life and vice versa.  The saddest aspect of this mutual distrust is that "when the Negro hates the Jew as a Jew he does so partly because the nation does and in much the same painful fashion that he hates himself" (Baldwin 78).  The same can be said of Jews in America with regard to black Americans.  Since both groups are American, they have been taught to demonize at least one sector of their own society "so there seems no hope for better Negro-Jewish relations without a change in the American pattern" (Baldwin 73).  In essence, this American cycle of looking down on and marginalizing certain groups that our society categorizes as "other" will not stop until we admit to this deficiency in our ideology and seek to change it. 

Changing our American ideology will not only affect minority groups, but will affect Americans as a whole.  It is hard to be proud Americans if being American means that we have to subjugate other citizens to achieve success and power.  By hurting sectors of society, we are hurting ourselves, as we are all Americans and all have to live with the fear and loathing that comes from such a destructive mentality.  So, seeking to change our fundamental American value system won't just improve the lives of black Americans, but all Americans.  After all, "Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country's destiny" (Baldwin 43).

The American Dream (To Continue Dreaming…)

For this post, I decided to pay closest attention to the essays in this collection that I had not already encountered and studied. Despite my focus on these particular pieces, I still found that there is an escapable notion present in nearly all of Baldwin's work, a notion that runs beneath—and, therefore, acts as a necessary and supportive platform—much if not all of his beliefs, arguments, and reasoning. This is the notion that America is founded on a series of delusions, of refusals to acknowledge reality and the issues that have and continue to plague Americans. 

From this notion follows another, one that likewise runs its supportive beams beneath Baldwin's prose: in order to understand who we are, why we are, and what is to be done about the state of our people and our country, we must accept the past. Of course, this acceptance of the past requires an acknowledgment of the present—of reality. And, Baldwin argues, the acknowledgement of reality has and continues to be the action that America least desires to take—the action that America spends much of its strength avoiding. 

So continues that vicious cycle I discussed in my previous post on Mandelstam…

In "Question of Identity," Baldwin's investigation of "the American in Europe" leads us back to that aforementioned notion; in Europe, the American (often young, often a student), first longs for an escape—for the illusion of Paris. But what the American eventually, though unwillingly, must face is what he has been running from: himself, and his uncertain identity as it relates to his country's identity. In Europe, the American has no choice but to realize his past—and to later accept it—but he is forcefully thrust into this realization and, often times, thrusts himself right back to America where he can continue chasing his relentless dream of ignoring reality.

A most articulate passage (though, aren't they all so articulate?) from this essay: "Hidden, however, in the heart of the confusion he encounters here is that which he came so blindly seeking: the terms on which he is related to his country, and to the world…the American confusion seeming to be based on the very nearly unconscious assumption that it is possible to consider the person apart from all the forces which have produced him. This assumption, however, is itself based on nothing less than our history, which is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire people from their forebears" (136). 

No wonder America is abundant with people searching to uncover their pasts, to uncover their personal and familial histories. Despite this abundance, though, there are many who haven't even the thought in their mind to acknowledge that this urge—this need to find an identity, to claim one's roots—might exist. This is a startling fact.

This notion of the American as a continually and innately alienated being is discussed in Baldwin's "Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown." He writes, "Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in relation to his past he is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is, in some, the American experience" (123). 

Also in this essay is the idea that when physically distanced from America, an American—whether he be a white student, black student, or, perhaps, a "Negro"—cannot escape confrontation with the way he perceives, the way he is perceived (in America and in Europe), and how those perceptions delude or illuminate the reality of his identity. "Dimly and for the first time," Baldwin writes, "there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other" (123). 

In "The Harlem Ghetto," Baldwin reveals the premise that the Negro and the Jew are united by suffering but that, despite this commonality, their assumptions and prejudices—which have, ironically and frustratingly, been perpetuated by the very force that caused their initial suffering—against one another stop them from becoming allies. This is an agonizing reality. The American white Gentile seemingly wins again, "two legends serving him at once: he has divided these minorities and he rules" (69). 

All of Baldwin's essays in Notes of a Native Son continually arrive at powerful conclusions and point to that notion I mentioned at the beginning of this post—that America is founded on a series of delusions, that to acknowledge reality one must accept the past. To that notion I'll add what I believe is likewise pervasive in Baldwin's work, an urgent call to action: "…the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly" (6). 

There is nothing to do but to cease dreaming, to wake from the deluded, unreal reality we have convinced ourselves is true reality, to inflict upon ourselves the wounds from which our necessary scars will appear—scars that will refuse us the ability to ignore the past and, therefore, force us to open our eyes.