I do realize that this is becoming a James Baldwin blog, but I don't care. Last week I read James Baldwin's No Name in the Street and pulled some of my favorite quotes throughout his memoir of the 1960s, documenting racism and police brutality in America, Faulkner's questionable but popular literature and influence, and his personal development while traveling around the United States and abroad.
Reading his work opens intellectual and emotional doors. Any person who interrogates their sense of self will see themselves on the pages of Baldwin's books or hear their truth spoken when he speaks.
My favorite collection of his essays and speeches is The Cross of Redemption. It contains a transcript of a speech that he gave titled, "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity." Below are some of my favorite segments of that speech.
Baldwin argues that our suffering is what bonds us to each other; it is the bridge, not only to other people, but to the whole world.
"...and what occurs at that point in this hypothetical artist's life is a kind of silence--the first thing he finds out is that for reasons he cannot explain to himself or to others, he does not belong anywhere. Maybe you're on the football team, maybe you're a runner, maybe you belong to a church, you certainly belong to a family; and abruptly, in other people's eyes--this is very important--you begin to discover that you are moving and you can't stop this movement to what looks like the edge of the world. Now, what is crucial, and one begins to understand it much, much later, is that if you were this hypothetical artist, if you were, in fact, the dreamer that everybody says you are, if, in fact, you were wrong not to settle for the things that you cannot for some mysterious reason settle for, if this were so, the testimony in the eyes of other people would not exist. The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You're bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face, lest of all the hypothetical misfit who has not learned how to walk or talk and doesn't know enough about experience to know what experience he has had.
Well, one survives that, no matter how. By and by your uncles and your parents and church stop praying for you. They realize it won't do a bit of good. They give you up, and you proceed a little further and your lovers put you down. They don't know what you're doing either, and you can't tell them because you don't know. You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bull-whipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what's important. Everybody's hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect to other people's pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around, too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you suffer less. Then, you make--oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorced, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind of another--some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are" (52-53).
[...]
"Now, what is it, at the point that the artist, since I must put it this way, begins to come of age, that he cannot keep to himself? This is the trickiest part of the whole argument. I was having lunch today with a very good friend of mine and a friend of his--and they're both artists. [...] And his friend was saying to him--and I paraphrase it very awkwardly--you must remember that most people live in almost total darkness. It is true, said this friend, that we drink too much, we suffer from stage fright and you may get an ulcer or die of cancer, and it is true that it is all very hard and gets harder all the time. And yet people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don't know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which--if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define--you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn't ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don't cheat, if you don't lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope--because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad. Hymns don't do this, churches really cannot do it. The trouble is that although the artist can do it, the price that he has to pay himself and that you, the audience, must also pay, is a willingness to give up everything, to realize that although you spent twenty-seven years acquiring this house, this furniture, this position, although you spent forty years raising this child, these children, nothing, none of it belongs to you. You can only have it by letting it go. You can only take it if you are prepared to give, and giving is not an investment. It is not a day at the bargain counter. It is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you'd like to be, where you think you'd like to go--everything, and this forever, forever" (55).
[...]
"And this is where the whole question in my own private, personal case of being an American artist, of being not yet sixty-five years old, and of being an American Negro artist in 1963 in this most peculiar of countries begins to be a very frightening assignment. One is dealing all the time with the most inarticulate people that I, in any case, have ever encountered, and i don't hesitate to say the most inarticulate group of people we are ever likely to encounter, I or anybody else, for a very long time, at least in this century. Inarticulate and illiterate and they're very particular and difficult to describe away, unlettered in the language, which may sound a little florid but there's no other way that I can think of to say it, totally unlettered in the language of the heart, totally distrustful of whatever cannot be touched, panic-stricken at the very first hint of pain. A people determined to believe that they can make suffering obsolete. Who don't understand yet a very physiological fact: that the pain which signals a toothache is a pain which saves your life. This is very frightening. It frightens me half to death, and I'm not talking now merely about race, and I'm certainly not talking merely about Southerners. I am talking really about two-thirds of my public and technical allies. People who believe that segregation is wrong. People who march on picket lines who yet have overlooked something else and are still under the illusion, I think, that what they've overlooked has something to do with social questions and in my particular case anyway that it has something to do with Negroes. I would like to live long enough--don't misunderstand me, but I would like to live long enough--to see that word or the use to which its put struck from the American vocabulary. In effect, there is no Negro problem. The problem is that one is still in a kindergarten, an emotional kindergarten, and the Negro in this country operates as some weird kind of gorilla who suddenly is breaking up all the blackboards. I am tired not only of being told to wait, but of people's saying, "What should I do?" They mean, "What should I do about the Negro problem; what should I do for you?" There is nothing you can do for me. There is nothing you can do for the Negroes. It must be done for you. One is not attempting to save twenty-two million people. One is attempting to save an entire country, and that means an entire civilization, and the price for that is high. The price for that is to understand oneself. The price for that, for example, is to recognize that most of us, white and black, have arrived at a point where we do not know what to tell our children. Most of us have arrived at a point where we still believe and insist on and act on the principle, which is no longer valid, that this is such and such an optimum, that our choice is the lesser of two evils, and this is no longer true. Gonorrhea is not preferable to syphilis.
The time has come, it seems to me, to recognize that the framework in which we operate weighs on us too heavily to be borne and is about to kill us. It is time to ask very hard questions and to take very rude positions. And no matter at what price. It is time, for example, for one example, to recognize that the major effort of our country until today (and I am talking about Washington and all the way down to whoever heads the Women's Christian Temperance Union) is not to change a situation but to seem to have done it.
[...] It's escaped everybody's notice that no other country would have had to. It is easy to admire the sit-in students in the South, and nothing is more delightful than to talk to Martin Luther King, whom I very much admire. But it is too easy to admire a Christian minister, especially if you take no responsibility for what's happening to him or to those people that he tries to represent. It is hard to begin to understand that the drift in American life towards chaos is masked by all these smiling faces and all these do-good efforts" (56-58).
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