“You can’t change everything you face, but nothing can change until you face it.” From a 1972 essay, Driven out of the light (No Name in the Street), this sentence of implacable logic is emblematic of the thinking of James Baldwin, the African-American writer and activist whose centenary of birth is currently being celebrated.
James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924 in the Harlem neighborhood of New York. In 1948, at the age of 24, to escape racism and explore his homosexuality, he left the United States for France. On August 1, 1948, he left the United States for France to escape racism and explore his homosexuality.er December 1987, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the Alpes-Maritimes, he died of cancer at the age of 63. Throughout his life, the man devoted himself with uncommon conviction and sensitivity, demonstrating astonishing courage and avant-gardism, to writing novels, poems, short stories, plays and essays. One hundred years after his birth, 37 years after his death, Baldwin is more popular than ever, his revolutionary ideas having become indispensable to today’s activists.
Born in Switzerland to Cameroonian parents, Fabrice Nguena has lived in Quebec since 2007. The author ofAfroqueer (Écosociété, 2024), an essay that brings together portraits of 25 Afro-descendant, queer and French-speaking people, is convinced that James Baldwin has been made invisible because of his homosexuality: “While he is one of the greatest African-American writers, and he was a fervent human rights activist, how else can we explain the fact that he remained in the shadows for thirty years? It took I Am Not Your Negrothe documentary by Haitian Raoul Peck, in 2016, so that Baldwin would be brought back to the forefront. At that moment, we will discover or rediscover him, realize the exceptional thinker and debater that he was.
In the few pages he devotes to Baldwin in his book, Nguena confides: “His writings not only kept me from giving up, they literally healed me.” At the end of the line, the author adds: “I am part of the generation of Afroqueer people who grew up without role models to identify with. Reading Baldwin, I realized that our stories of alienation had a lot in common. Like me, he was born to an unknown father. While he left America for France, I left Africa for Canada. And like me, he fully assumed his dual identity as a black and queer man. Living in the grip of three oppressions, homophobia, racism and classism, Baldwin was able to observe what is now called the intersectionality of dominations. No wonder, given his great insight, that major writers such as Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison have expressed such admiration for him.
If Baldwin were to return today, Fabrice Nguena believes that he would still be alarmed by the situation in the United States: “He would notice a certain evolution, but he would be obliged to recognize that America is similarly fractured, that stupidity persists, that social inequalities are maintained, that police aggressions remain, in short that the system is still profoundly racist. I think that he would be just as critical today as he was in the past, and that is why his writings have lost none of their relevance.” At the end of the chapter he devotes to Baldwin, Nguena states: “Thanks to the power of words, he was able to transform his suffering, his anger and his indignation into strength, to fight for human dignity. He used his pen as a weapon to confront and denounce humiliation and contempt.”
A decisive reading
Born in Quebec to a Tunisian father and a mother from Saguenay, Mélikah Abdelmoumen is the author of around ten works, including Baldwin, Styron and Me (Mémoire d’encrier, 2022), a very beautiful book in which she draws on the friendship that linked James Baldwin, grandson of a slave, to William Styron, grandson of a slave owner, but also on her personal journey, in order to offer an enlightening reflection on racism.
Abdelmoumen first heard of James Baldwin in 2015, while living in France: “I stumbled upon a website that highly recommended the short story collection Facing the white man (Going to Meet the Man1965). This was after the assassination attempt on Charlie Hebdobut before the release of Raoul Peck’s acclaimed documentary. It was a defining read, the beginning of a love affair between Balwin and me. I did a lot of research on him. I read all his books. I discovered a man ahead of his time, an intellectual capable of nuance, endowed with a complex mind, and able to carry out an intersectional analysis of the situation, well before it was commonplace.”
In an interview with the magazine Lifein 1963, Baldwin said: “You can spend years believing that you are experiencing a pain unprecedented in the history of humanity, wallowing in this pain, believing that you are going to die from it… until the day you open a book and suddenly you are no longer alone.” For the African-American writer, there is no doubt that literature is one of the keys to living together, an opinion shared by Abdelmoumen: “Baldwin recognized something of his situation as a gay black man in the fate reserved for other minorities, notably the Algerians who, in Paris in the 1960s, were often harassed by the police. I agree with him that the convergence of struggles is essential.”
While having firm convictions, James Baldwin was capable of discussion. “He had what I call constructive anger,” explains Abdelmoumen. “That’s what’s missing in our time, people capable of debating according to the rules of art, of really exchanging, of putting forward a reflection in which the other has a place.” Fortunately, there is hope, since, as the author puts it in her book, today’s young people, some of whom were not even born during Baldwin’s lifetime, “rely on his writings, his interviews, his voice, to think and to continue the struggles that he once led.”