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.