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1. Baldwin’s Reception and the Challenge of His Legacy
- Michigan State University Press
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Baldwin's Reception and the Challenge of His Legacy I. W hen James Baldwin died in 1987, five thousand people attended his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Harlem. The people came to celebrate his life and to mourn his passing because he had changed their lives; he was "quite possibly for his times their most essential interpreter."! Literary agent Marie Brown described Baldwin's passing as "the end of an era." He was "the last survivor ... of those few most powerful moral articulators who could effectively lecture the society, among the very few whom we could quote almost daily as scripture of social consciousness."2 A substantial number of leading American writers, intellectuals, and musicians came to pay tribute to Baldwin. Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Amiri Baraka each gave eulogies, and many more wrote tributes to Baldwin's life and work that were published in newspapers around the world, some later in Quincy Troupe's James Baldwin: The Legacy and other venues. In her funeral address Toni Morrison said that Baldwin, like the Magi, had given her three gifts: a language to dwell in, 2 WITNESS TO THE JOURNEY the courage to transform the distances between people into intimacy, and the tenderness of vulnerability: No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest-genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what you called "exasperating egocentricity," you gave us undecorated truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, "robbed it of the jewel of its naivete," and un-gated it for black people so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion-not our vanities but our intricate, difficult, demanding beauty, our tragic, insistent knowledge , our lived reality, our sleek classical imagination-all the while refusing "to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [us]." In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive.3 Baldwin's funeral was a dramatic testament of his influence as a writer, thinker, friend, and social activist for the generation that followed him. However, this funeral service, especially in its omissions, suggests the difficulties of interpreting Baldwin's legacy. Writing for the Gay Community News, Barbara Smith said: "Although Baldwin's funeral completely reinforced our Blackness, it tragically rendered his and our homosexuality completely invisible. In those two hours of remembrance and praise, not a syllable was breathed that this wonderful brother, this writer, this warrior, was also gay, that his being gay was indeed integral to his magnificence."4 Baldwin wrote against a dominant strain of black nationalist thought which placed homosexuality in opposition to black resistance, an ideology that regarded homosexuality as a product of white oppression and evidence of internalized self-hatred. Given the homophobic climate, it is not surprising that interpretations of Baldwin's work that stress his contribution to repBaldwin ·s Reception and the Challenge of His Legacy 3 [54.88.179.12] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:28 GMT) resenting black experience have, until quite recently, ignored or denied the importance of his homosexual themes and the homosexuality of his subjects , as if it were not possible to read his texts as expressions of both black and homosexual experience.5 Baldwin also wrote against an ideology that reified racial categories, insisting that "white" and "black" were inventions that oppressed blacks but also imprisoned whites in a false innocence that denied them selfknowledge . The only speaker at Baldwin's funeral who was not an African American was the French ambassador. Clyde Taylor found the irony inescapable: "Jimmy, like so many black artists, had been more fully honored and respected abroad than by his own society. France had given him its highest tribute, the Legion of Honor. By contrast, what had American society done?"" Perhaps the absence of an official honor from a representative of the American government was, finally, a testament to Baldwin's willingness to sharply criticize American institutions, and to his determination...