A Transatlantic Circuit: Baldwin at Mid-Century Opening Keynote Address

On Wednesday, September 19, 1956, the first World Congress of Black Writers and Artists opened at the Sorbonne and convened in the University’s Amphitheatre Descartes until the following Saturday. Among the confreres were James Baldwin and Richard Wright, and though African American, they could justifiably be identified as twixt and between and not really members of the official American delegation. Both living in Paris at the time, they were, like Senghor, Cesaire, and Alioun Diop, one of the founding editors of Presence Africaine, the denizens of an untranslatable African diasporic space. The United States delegation was chaired by John Davis and included Mercer Cook, James Ivy, and Horace Mann Bond, then president of Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. From the Antilles had come Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Jacques Alexis, Jean Price-Mars, George Lamming, and Albert Mangones, as well as a sterling cast of continental artists and critics, from Leopold Sedar Senghor and Cheik Anta Diop to Paul Hazoume, Davidson Nicol, and Jacques Rabemananjara. Baldwin reports on this event for Encounter, and we know it today as “Princes and Powers” from The Price of the Ticket. The first World Congress is something of a misnomer, on the one hand, because it takes its cues from the series of Pan-African gatherings that light up the landscape of the black world in 1900, 1918, pursuant to the formal closure of WWI, 1923, 1927, and 1945, each one vested with its own complex menu of urgent desiderata. On the other hand, the first World Congress strikes an innovative chord, at least to the imaginative ear of some of its participants, because it adopts black culture as its principal focus. We must also bear in mind that the first World Congress of Black Writers and Artists also takes place in the dramatic context of the 1955 Conference of non-aligned African and Asian nations, convoked only months before the Paris meetings, in the Indonesian city of Bandung. These dates, then, bearing down on the imagination as they careen our way out of the traumatized world of global warfare and its crucial aftermath of massive ruin and devastation, present us with a virtually unprecedented occasion to examine the challenges and demands of translation as it traverses the frontiers of cultures and nation-states. And in that great crossing over, getting the signifying chain right, or hearing correctly the particular and peculiar meanings of speech on the varied human tongue, is only the opening gambit.

One wonders, this considerable distance of fifty-five years, how Baldwin and Wright and the other American confreres heard the discourse rattling around them in French and English and even some Yoruba and Wolof poetry, translated into French. What Baldwin renders in English in his report on this event is translated from French, and as occasional participants ourselves in mixed-language exchanges, we are quite familiar with the sudden jolt and jerk out of one’s own comfort zone to which we are subjected in the switch to another linguistic and cultural code. Who and what mediates here, as simultaneous translation seems somehow intrusive in itself, both for you, who benefit from the translation, or you, who need no translation? And at any given time, we might be one or the other. But it is, perhaps, the most poignant of ironies that this World Congress, made up of black people from Europe, the New World, and Africa, despite sharing a single overwhelming historical fact, needed translation then and now. In the opening address to the Congress, Alioun Diop observes that this meeting, for non-Europeans, is only second in importance to Bandung and that the ten years separating the peace and the Paris meetings had been decisive for the destiny of those communities and notably, black communities. Though history had treated the latter in a “cavalier fashion,” Diop asserted that he would go so far as to say that history had even “dishonored” such communities, “were it not for the fact that this History, with a capital H, was the unilateral interpretation of the life of the world by the West alone” (Presence Africaine). The...