Baldwin Abroad
Center for Public Secrets
January 18, 2025
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” That’s James Baldwin, a guy to whom pain and heartbreak could not have happened more if he tried. Gay and Black, born in 1924, writing before and inside the Civil Rights Movement, he traced an unrivaled path across literature and activism, calling Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X friends and colleagues.
When I, a little white kid from rural Oklahoma, found his book Notes of a Native Son on a bookshelf at New York City’s Strand Books in 2015, my obsession with his work developed to such an extent that Baldwin himself might have categorized it as fetishism: I read his work exclusively for over a year, devouring novels, essays, plays, poetry, biographies, biographical films, critical studies, interviews, whatever I could get my hands on.
Real Baldwin heads like me got a treat recently, when the Center for Public Secrets and Dreamland hosted a viewing of biographical films studying Baldwin abroad: 1973’s From Another Place, 1970’s Meeting the Man, and 1968’s Baldwin’s N****r (asterisks my own), which presented three very different ways of looking at one of the most important writers and thinkers of the 20th century.
From Another Place, directed by Baldwin’s close friend Sedat Pakay, is a loose, artistically arranged portrait of Baldwin. From the beginning, we see him nearly naked, dragging himself from bed, smoking cigarette after cigarette from a holder, and acting the flâneur around the streets of Istanbul. People on those streets regard him with less interest than they do the camera: the men and women of that ancient Turkish city stare with wide eyes at the lens that follows him around. We watch him getting his shoes shined (an act that must have held no small significance to him as the world’s premier communicator of America’s white and black dichotomy), signing a translated book for a fan, and boating through the Bosporus Strait.
The screening’s second film, Meeting the Man, saw a group of English filmmakers following Baldwin through the streets of Paris, hoping to hear from him about his 22 years in that city, but receiving instead an education on the rage of black Americans. The hostility between Baldwin and the English film crew is evident and sometimes hilarious; through the din of raised voices, Baldwin spreads his trademark gap-toothed grin. It’s a stunning back-and-forth, in which Baldwin and his young friends’ annoyance about the English not understanding the American revolutionary position is obvious and, as it often was, used as fodder for Baldwin’s rhetorical genius.
In its second and third acts the film softens, landing in the studio of painter Beauford Delaney, one of Baldwin’s earliest and longest mentors. It was stunning to see Delaney, one of Baldwin’s earliest and oldest mentors, captured on film; before this viewing, I didn’t know such a record existed. Baldwin holds court surrounded by a group of young black Americans who are clearly enraptured by the literary superstar. “I read your book, Another Country, cover to cover,” one tells him. “I haven’t read another book since.” “I wrote it, in a sense, all for you,” Baldwin tells the young man. Baldwin’s earnestness is evident.
Directed by the Trinidadian-British Horace Ové, Baldwin’s N****r sees Baldwin lecturing to and taking questions from West Indian students at London’s West Indian Students’ Centre. A clipped version of the film was once available on YouTube; the exciting thing about watching the full version was seeing all of the crowd questions that were left out in that bootlegged version. An English white liberal asking Baldwin if the movement for Black liberation has any room for white liberals gets roundly mocked. Baldwin is asked why he uses the term Negro instead of Black for himself; he answers that his own mother called herself the slur that gives the film its name, ultimately cautioning patience as to the evolution of language one uses for oneself. It’s a poignant portrait of the time and place: everyone smokes indoors as Baldwin pours finished prose out of his brain for nearly twenty minutes.
The films alone would have made the night a powerful event. In between the showings, however, moderator and Dreamland co-founder Kolby Ari asked the crowd to share thoughts. Conversation, as it often does when discussing Baldwin and his ideas, settled along racial lines, with occasional offense and defense being taken, both intentionally and accidentally, by white, Black, and Native sides. There’s no easy way to talk about these issues, and thus the event stretched from 7:00 pm to 11:30 pm, despite the films only running an hour and a half cumulatively. We all went out into the frigid night having explored ourselves, and each other, publicly, in a little more depth than we would have if Ari hadn’t emphasized the conversational nature of Baldwin’s work. I think it’s what Baldwin would have wanted.
