Posted at 12:00 p.m.
There are trials that, when closing, one wonders: would it have been possible to do better on this question? I still wonder, a week after closing Baldwin, Styron and me by Melikah Abdelmoumen.
In my life, in the future, when it comes to cultural appropriation, diversity, and identity—but also literature, sweet friendship, and righteous anger—I will think of this book. The author presents such a nuanced point of view, so far from the compartmentalization and outrageous simplifications heard a thousand times in various silos of contemporary Quebec media thinking on these issues, it is both soothing and enjoyable.
The basic question is the following, it is historical and therefore detached from the urgencies of the news and its prism suffering from presbyopia. Did a white man, William Styron, have the right to write an “I” book on the condition of a black slave at the end of the 1960s, following the incitement of his friend , James Baldwin, black author at the heart of the struggle for civil rights? The author’s answer: yes, without hesitation. The second question, just as important and which must remain inseparable from the first: were 10 black authors, brought together in a collective work, right to express their anger against Styron’s book, afterwards? The answer, just as certain in Abdelmoumen’s mind, although it took him three readings of these criticisms to be convinced, is also yes.
It’s all about articulating things, responses, and people; it’s all about not wanting to settle everything with a single question.
Two books clash in the history of literature, then. On the one hand, a work that walks on the wire between appropriation and encounter, Confessions of Nat Turner. On the other hand, a work of criticism, which marks the reception of this kind of works since well before the tensions surrounding the work of Robert Lepage, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.
James Baldwin will insist in the debate which arose from his friend’s novel to say that the two positions spoke true, without for all that defending relativism. There is a difference to be made, in fact, between relativism and a thought articulated in time. Styron wanted to decompartmentalize, perhaps clumsily, and on the contrary, readers were angry that it took a white man to interest a large American readership in this question. One thing is certain, these ten critics, eight years later, will be served, with the inevitable Roots by Alex Haley appeared in 1976. But in 1968, the debate was to take place.
I asked the question directly to Abdelmoumen, joined by telephone at the office of the magazine Quebec letters, which she has been leading for some time: would Styron’s approach still be possible today? Yes, she answered me, not without surprising me: the role of literature is precisely to put us in the shoes of the other. And if such a book appeared, the reaction would surely be just as virulent as at the time, but what has changed is that it would be heard more, and that represents real progress. Indeed, the reaction of the angry ten men has almost disappeared from the history of literature, and today this book is practically impossible to find. Let us hope that it will be republished, precisely, for the memory of a debate.
We discussed the issue of anger, the author and me. What is its role in the public debate? I thought of this collective feminist essay, published in 2018 and which had the effect of a tonic on me, release the anger, published by Remue-ménage. Either, it is impossible to debate with a person who blows his gall in our hair, but in the memory that we have of this breath, in the trace that it leaves, there will undoubtedly be something lasting, she says. Yes, anger sometimes has its place, and keeping it always under glass is certainly very noble in a certain tradition of rational debate, but nobility sometimes hides very badly the privilege of those who hold the strings.
Closing his book, I had no desire to read William Styron at all, however. I had the deep desire to re-read James Baldwin, he who instigated all this, and he whose smiling portrait adorns the back cover. I thought back to my bewitched reading of Next time the fire, in a lost motel near Cornell University where I was researching the history of hip-hop. I even remembered the color paint aqua walls, glass of whiskey on my bedside table.
Reading Baldwin, for Abdelmoumen as for me, represents a moment when the Earth stops rotating, a moment resembling the fall of the twin towers of thought; we know where we were, and when.
Baldwin has this sense of turn, like a subtle relief of the anger that growls, but does not explode at every moment, like that of Abdelmoumen herself who, on the telephone, defended a certain humanism. All this while seeming to love getting carried away with the excesses of a pendulum woke too tense on one side, which never stops partitioning identity struggles, at the risk of unifying economic struggles, for example. But the pendulum will return to the center, the drifts are coming to an end, she believes, and we can only hope that she is right, so much the Quebec left has isolated itself in steeple chicanes in recent years.
This essay, perhaps the most important, is one on friendship. Between a white man and a black man, 50 years ago, but also between a woman with an Arabic name, born in Saguenay, tired of being taken as a representative of anything, and literature, which ties and unravels our deepest impasses at the same time.
Baldwin, Styron and me
Melikah Abdelmoumen
inkwell memory
192 pages