Another Country by James Baldwin
Over the past few years, I’ve made it a yearly ritual to read at least one Baldwin novel a year, sometimes it’s taken me months, because of work and life. I was first introduced to Baldwin’s work in my political theory course in undergrad. We read his non-fiction work The Fire Next Time, Baldwin’s incisive views on race in American society are worth exploring even today. The first Baldwin novel I read was Go Tell It On the Mountain, the review I posted on the readers’ social networking site, Goodreads, is reproduced below:
Go Tell it on the Mountain is not merely a story of Black Consciousness, it is a story of the depths of people’s hearts and the effect, or affect, that love, religion, race and class have on our lives. At once tender and bittersweet, the story spans three generations of a Black family moving from south to north and trying to hold on to what is constant. Although there are moments of deep passion, I was left with the uncomfortable feeling of the impermanence of hope and, indeed, of life itself. A classic.
In hindsight, I don’t think Go Tell it is about black consciousness at all. Baldwin certainly wrote from a place of deep love for the community that raised him and probably had the nascent Civil Rights movement in the back of his mind. Black power, and the related black consciousness movements wouldn’t come for another two decades. The rest of this short review stands, I think. I can still hear the jazz in that novel. I read something recently from an introduction to Jimmy’s Blues, poems; “I believe Baldwin saw himself more poet than anything else: the way he cared about language. The way he believed language should work. The way he understood what his mentor had taught him- to look close, not just at the water but at the oil sitting there on top of the water.”
Recently, I finished reading Another Country, a work completed almost 10 years after Go Tell it was published. Set in a rather Bohemian New York, it is the most difficult of his works I’ve read and yet the most hopeful. Some of the difficulty might be that it is 60 years old and some of the language is dated. I wonder, however, what it would have been like to read it in the 1960s, when society was opening up but still treated so many people as second class citizens and so many topics as taboo. This is not to say things have improved much since then but there are certainly more rights and, we hope, more awareness of certain issues.
After I finished reading the last chapter, I couldn’t hold back the tears. I don’t know what it was about it, the way he had built up the back stories of the three couples and held the reader’s soul until the final release. The truth hit me hard; it is as if Baldwin was saying it is our fate to love and suffer.
I do not want to spoil the plot for those who would like to read it, so I will only share a couple of quotes that stood out to me. Before that, I should note that there is sex in this book. Beautifully written scenes of intimacy. (Remember the movie If Beale Street Could Talk, based on James Baldwin’s novel and directed by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins? How the cinematography captured the radiance of black bodies and the raw intensity of youthful love is peak Baldwin—Jenkins captured his spirit). I also couldn’t help noticing how strong Ida, one of the main characters, is. Ida is a black woman in a white world. She glows, even as her brother Rufus is betrayed by the world before he grows from a boy to a man. In this way, love is shaped by politics and society.
Love is messy and requires lots of compromise, and we may need to go to ‘another country’ to discover it:
“She thought of his face as it had been when they met; and watched it now. She thought of all they had discovered together and meant to each other, and how many small lies had gone into the making of their one, particular truth: this love, which bound them to one another. She had said No, many times, to many things, when she knew she might have said Yes, because of Richard; believed many things, because of Richard, which she was not sure she really believed.” p.94
If we are lucky, we might find someone who helps us suffer less:
“He and Yves had been together for more than two years and, from the time of their meeting, his home had been with Yves. More precisely and literally, it was Yves who had come to live with him, but each was, for the other, the dwelling place that each had despaired of finding.” p. 158
The line between love and hate is thin indeed:
“I don’t see how I can live with Ida, and I don’t see how I can live without her.” p.287
To love is what we were put on earth to do, everything else connects to this:
“But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable — only love, and love itself mostly failed; and he had never loved her.” p.340
This was such a treat but it is unlikely that I’ll have much time to read fiction as I begin to write my thesis in the coming months, at least not such dense literary fiction. But like great art everywhere, this has been a really transformative experience. I am reminded of a quote from Kafka’s 1904 letter to a friend:
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
What Kafka was trying to get at is the healing power of words and how truly great literature, it seems to me, can be difficult to read. I stood on holy ground for the few months I’ve slowly paged through this book in my spare moments. I thank my mentor who many years ago told me that this book changed his life, it has changed mine too. It is not lost on me that James Baldwin died the year I was born. It has been one of the great pleasures of my tumultuous life the past few years to spend time exploring the fictional worlds that he spun. Baldwin may be gone but his words are timeless.