James Baldwin: A Biography by Leeming David

Author:Leeming, David [Leeming, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628724691
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2015-02-24T08:00:00+00:00

must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.

Having disposed for the moment of the old religion of the black diaspora, Baldwin turns his attention to the new religious hope of the black dispossessed, the religion of Elijah Muhammad. This was a religion that had in many ways succeeded where Christianity had failed. It had reached out to junkies, to drunkards, to prostitutes, to the poor, and had inspired pride, self-respect, and the possibility of material achievement. Yet, behind these achievements was a parody of a familiar point of view: “God is black. All black men belong to Islam; they have been chosen. And Islam shall rule the world. The dream, the sentiment is old; only the color is new.”

During his visit to Elijah Muhammad, Baldwin had felt “I was back in my father’s house,” back in a set of puritanical taboos and totems that could not speak to the real nature of our problems as a nation, that, like all ideologically based forms, could only serve to imprison us further, to keep us from the “sensuality” which is an acceptance of life: “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have…. One … ought to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the eonundrum of life.” To accept death—and, therefore, life—in this way is to be free, but “freedom is hard to bear.” The Nation of Islam’s call for a separate nation is no less ironical or dangerous than the de facto establishment of exactly that by the white power structure in America.

At the end of his essay Baldwin points, as he had elsewhere, to the power of love as our only hope, love “not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth,” the sense represented metaphorically in Another Country. The final words are a Jeremiah-like last-chance charge to a nation on the brink of disaster; they are James Baldwin’s “I have a dream”:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.