James Baldwin: America and Beyond

11. What Is Africa to Baldwin? Cultural Illegitimacy and the Step-fatherland

 eleven What Is Africa to Baldwin? Cultural Illegitimacy and the Step-fatherland douglas field Baldwin’s nose, like the North-seeking needle on a compass, is forever pointed toward his adopted fatherland, Europe. —eldridge cleaver, soul on ice In an intriguing interview with Harold Isaacs, presented at the Third Annual Conference of African Culture in 1960, James Baldwin recalls how his ‹rst thoughts of Africa were inextricably linked to his father. “I don’t know when Africa came in ‹rst,” Baldwin told Isaacs, adding, “It must have been from my father”: Somehow my ‹rst association with Africa comes through him. I compared the people in my father’s church to African savages. This was because of my relation to my father. . . . I was ten or twelve. The church and my father were synonymous. Music and dancing, again sweat, out of the jungle. It was contemptible because it appeared to be savage. But this was also my image of my father. I guess I was hipped on being American and things they did seemed so common, so vulgar.1 Baldwin’s early associations with Africa are not in the context of a longedfor motherland, but through his father and his church. By connecting 209 Africa with his father, Baldwin not only illustrates his uneasy relationship with David Baldwin but also hints at his complicated relationship with Africa, illustrated by his striking use of the words “contemptible,” “savage ,” and “vulgar.” Baldwin’s troubled relationship with his father, David, had already been well documented by the time Isaacs’ paper was published in 1960. In “Notes of a Native Son,” the title essay of his ‹rst collection, Baldwin recalled how he “had got on badly” with the man he called his father, noting how his father disapproved of his desire to become a writer. David Baldwin “looked to me,” the young writer recalled, “like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains: he really should have been naked, with warpaint on and barbaric mementos standing among spears.”2 Baldwin’s discussions of Africa elsewhere in Notes of a Native Son (1955), like those of his father, are characterized by uncertainty and unease. In “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown,” Baldwin quashes notions of fraternity between “the Negro and the African,” instead emphasizing “the gulf” between the two.3 Baldwin’s links between his father and Africa gain further signi‹cance in “Autobiographical Notes,” the opening essay of Notes of a Native Son. For Baldwin “the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West,” a statement that surely refers back to his own illegitimacy.4 Born James Jones, Baldwin never knew the identity of his biological father, and this question of lineage haunts his ‹ction and non‹ction—not least in the title of his ‹rst collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. In the interview with Isaacs, Baldwin refers once again to his father, noting that “my father thought of himself as a king . . . and he would have said something like we were descended from kings in Africa,” a comment that would have sidelined the young James Baldwin.5 Again, in his ‹rst novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) (titled “In My Father’s House,” in an early version), the protagonist ’s father, Gabriel, envisages “a royal line,” with John on the outside as the bastard stepson.6 In “Notes of a Native Son” Baldwin had recounted his painful and embittered relationship with his father, whose patrimony was “bitterness,” which “now was mine.”7 This chapter focuses on Baldwin’s complicated, shifting views on Africa, tracing his early writings on the continent until the 1980s.8 According to James Campbell, “Baldwin never came to a coherent or thought-out position on the Afro-American’s predicament vis-à-vis his ancient African cousins,” adding that “it is impossible to discern a meaningful pattern.”9 Campbell is right to suggest that Baldwin’s views of Africa vacillated over 210 james baldwin the years and that it can be dif‹cult to make sense of the writer’s conclusions . In sharp contrast to African American writers who dream of a connection with the motherland, Baldwin’s at times acerbic comments suggest removal and distance, echoing his strained relationship with his (step)father. During speeches Baldwin at times invoked his African past for rhetorical effect, claiming...