James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (review)

The critical project to revise James Baldwin's legacy has gained traction over the past decade. The consensus that Baldwin lost his relevance and his talent after the 1963 publication of The Fire Next Time is now a thoroughly outdated and naïve notion, and Magdalena Zaborowska's new study clearly demonstrates that reconsiderations of Baldwin's career have opened up rich new possibilities for important criticism. By focusing on Baldwin's period of expatriation in Turkey—roughly 1961 to 1971— Zaborowska effectively recenters our notion of Baldwin and situates him in a broad transnational context. Doing so enables Zaborowska to arrive at smart, coherent conclusions about the elements of Baldwin's life and work that are too often compartmentalized: race, sexuality, national identity, literary accomplishment, and political relevance.

Zaborowska's methodology is somewhat unorthodox. James Baldwin's Turkish Decade is a hybrid of deeply informed and sophisticated literary analysis, biography, and even autobiography. Because she interweaves these elements so deftly, Zaborowska manages to produce a work of scholarship that is substantial and entertaining at once. This is a difficult juggling act, but one that Baldwin would approve of, as his work self-consciously resisted classification and also combined deep analysis with biography and autobiography. Zaborowska also synthesizes two distinct strains in Baldwin scholarship to date: biographies of Baldwin are nearly equal in number to scholarly monographs on Baldwin. This book manages to amplify the biographical material that has already been published rather than to simply reiterate it, and it does so in the service of a strikingly original reading of some of Baldwin's most familiar work (the 1962 novel Another Country) and an appreciation of some of his less familiar work (the 1972 essay No Name in the Street). Redolent with visual ancillaries, this book should appeal not only to Baldwin scholars but also to readers interested in gender studies, African American cultural history, and global history more generally.

Turkey may seem like a surprising place for an artist like Baldwin to expatriate himself because it is so removed from the American imagination. The first place he went to, Paris, was, on the other hand, one of the most common destinations for twentieth-century American writers; going there was nearly a rite of passage or even a cliché for aspiring starving artists. Baldwin could not be content with the familiar or the expected, and readers and critics often did not know what to make of him as a result. For this reason, Baldwin's choice of Turkey as one of his homes away from home makes sense. As Zaborowska notes, "While relating Baldwin's prolonged stays in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey, this book engages the part of the world that has been persistently eroticized, exoticized, and Orientalized but little understood by the West" (6). There is a clear parallel between this cultural misunderstanding and critical misunderstanding of Baldwin himself, who has frustrated scholars' attempts to interpret him through a standard critical lens. Zaborowska looks at Baldwin through a number of lenses, illuminating and clarifying the Baldwin we thought we knew through kaleidoscopic vision rather than a conventional portrait of the artist.

The book's introduction and first chapter rely heavily on a short film of Baldwin produced in Turkey by Sadat Pakay, James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973). This film is a recurrent touchpoint in Zaborowska's study: she reads it with the help of Mikhail Bakhtin as an economical metaphor for the way the self can only truly be examined if we consider how others see us. Baldwin's attempts to articulate his identity in writing and in speeches are only part of his completed portrait; Pakay's film, along with photographs he took of Baldwin in Turkey and Zaborowska's interviews with Baldwin's friends and collaborators in Turkey, allow for a deeper vision of a writer who remains enigmatic despite his insistence on honesty. Zaborowska is admirably patient in her...