from here to the corner

from Conversations with James Baldwin, University Press of Mississippi (May 1, 1989)

‘This collection of interviews with James Baldwin covers the period 1961-1987, from the year of the publication of Nobody Knows My Names, his fourth book, to just a few weeks before his death. It includes the last formal conversation with him.’

fragment from –

James Baldwin, an Interview with Wolfgang Binder, 1980, from Revista/Review Interamericana, 10 (Fall 1980), 326-41

Binder: In A Rap on Race, your dialogue with Margaret Mead, you state that no people nor individual can really escape, if that person is honest, history and the effects of history.

Baldwin: Well, it is impossible.

Binder: In what sense does this apply to whites and blacks in America?

Baldwin: I have been living with those questions for a long time. You see, the trouble I am having right now is with the word itself. History means one thing in a European head. It actually means something else in an American head, and yet again something else in a black man’s head. To leave it at that is enough for openness. I am not sure any longer what the word means. Especially as the white world now is calling on what it calls history to justify its dilemma without having the remotest sense of how they got to where they are. In spite of their adulation of history. So history in the context in which the French, or the English, or the Germans are operating is an enormous dead letter. Because if history means something, it means that you have learned something from it. If you haven’t then the word has got to be changed. History in England, or France, or Germany, or indeed in Europe is now meant as an enormous cloak to cover past crimes and errors and present danger and despair. In short, it has become a useless concept. Except that it can be used as a stick to beat the people without history, like myself, over the head. That worked as long as I believed that you had history and I did not. And now that it is clear that that is not so, another kind of dilemma, another kind of confrontation, begins. Perhaps history has got to be born for the first time. It is certainly true that all the identities coming out of history with a capital H are proven to be false, to be bankrupt. We cannot live with them for another five minutes, they are going to carry us from here to the corner. And no one knows how we got here, from Maggie Thatcher in London to Ronald Reagan in America. If that is not the bottom of the barrel! And in terms of America, the Americans are even more abject than the Europeans who are stifling among their artifacts, their icons, which they call history. The Americans have never even heard of history, they still believe that legend created about the Far West, and cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers, and black and white, and good and evil. There is a reason that the most simple-minded men, Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan, who might be considered to run a post-office, are the only candidates America can find to run the world. If the Europeans are afflicted by history, Americans are afflicted by innocence.

~ by wehavetobehavetobeerrant on November 13, 2009.