When at last I met Jimmy in person in the jungles of Florida in 1980 I actually greeted him with Mr. Baldwin, I presume! You should have seen his eyes dancing, his remarkable face working in ripples of joyfulness. During the four days we spent down there I saw how easy it was to make Jimmy smile; and how the world he was doomed to inhabit would remorselessly deny him that simple benediction.
Baldwin and I were invited by the African Literature Association to open its annual conference in Gainesville with a public conversation. As we stepped into a tremendous ovation in the packed auditorium of the Holiday Inn, Baldwin was in particularly high spirits. I thought the old preacher in him was reacting to the multitude.
He went to the podium and began to make his opening statements. Within minutes a mystery voice came over the public address system and began to hurl racial insults at him and me. I will see that moment to the end of my life. The happiness brutally wiped off Baldwin’s face; the genial manner gone; the eyes flashing in defiant combativeness; the voice incredibly calm and measured. And the words of remorseless prophecy began once again to flow.
One of the few hopeful examples of leadership in Africa was terminated abruptly two months ago. Captain Thomas Sankara, leader of Burkina Faso, was murdered in his fourth year of rule by his second-in-command. The world did not pay too much attention to yet another game of musical chairs by power-hungry soldiers in Africa. In any event, Sankara was a brash young man with Marxist leanings who recently had the effrontery to read a lecture to a visiting Head of State who happened to be none other than President Mitterand of France himself. According to press reports of the incident, Mitterand, who is a socialist veteran in his own right, rose to the occasion. He threw away his prepared speech and launched into an hour-long counter-attack in which he must have covered much ground. But perhaps the sting was in the tail: “Sankara is a disturbing person. With him it is impossible to sleep in peace. He does not leave your conscience alone.”1
I have no doubt that Mitterand meant his comment as praise for his young and impatient host. But it was also a deadly arraignment and even conviction. Principalities and powers do not tolerate those who interrupt the sleep of their consciences. That Baldwin got away with it for forty years was a miracle. Except of course that he didn’t get away; he paid dearly every single day of those years, every single hour of those days.
What was his crime that we should turn him into a man of sadness, this man inhabited by a soul so eager to be loved and to smile? His demands were so few and so simple.
His bafflement, childlike—which does not mean simple-minded but deeply profound and saintly—comes across again and again and nowhere better perhaps than in his essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown.”
Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement containing seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud and the Bible find this statement impenetrable.2
This failure to comprehend turns out to be, as one might have suspected, a wilful, obdurate refusal. And for good reason. For let’s face it, that sentence, simple and innocent-looking though it may seem, is in reality a mask for a profoundly subversive intent to re-order the world. And the world, viewed from the high point of the pyramid where its controllers reside, is working perfectly well and sitting firm.
Egypt’s Pharaoh, according to the myth of the Israelites, faced the same problem when a wild-eyed man walked up to him with a simple demand, four words long: “Let my people go!” We are not told that he rushed off to his office to sign their exit visa. On the contrary.
So neither history nor legend encourages us to believe that a man who sits on his fellow will some day climb down on the basis of sounds reaching him from below. And yet we must consider how so much more dangerous our already very perilous world would become if the oppressed everywhere should despair altogether of invoking reason and humanity to arbitrate their cause. This is the value and the relevance, into the foreseeable future, of James Baldwin.
As long as injustice exists, whether it be within the American nation itself or between it and its neighbours; as long as a tiny cartel of rich, creditor nations can hold the rest in iron chains of usury; so long as one third or less of mankind eats well and often to excess while two thirds and more live perpetually with hunger; as long as white people who constitute a mere fraction of the human race consider it natural and even righteous to dominate the rainbow majority whenever and wherever they are thrown together; and—the oldest of them all—the discrimination by men against women, as long as it persists; the words of James Baldwin will be there to bear witness and to inspire and elevate the struggle for human freedom.
An address presented at the Memorial Service for James Baldwin on 16 December 1987, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was a member of the faculty and returned to teach at intervals.
Notes
1: An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (this page)
1. Albert J. Guerard, introduction to Heart of Darkness, New York, New American Library, 1950, p. 9.
2. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer, New York, New American Library, 1950, p. 66.
3. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, London, Chatto and Windus, 1948; second impression 1950, p. 177.
4. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, op. cit., pp. 105–6.
5. Ibid., p. 106.
6. Ibid., p. 78.
7. Ibid., p. 78.
8. Ibid., p. 148.
9. Ibid., p. 153.
10. Ibid., p. 82.
11. Ibid., p. 124.
12. Conrad, quoted in Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism, New York, Random House, 1971, p. 143.
13. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, op. cit., p. 142.
14. Conrad, quoted in Bernard C. Meyer, M.D., Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography, Princeton University Press, 1967, p. 30.
15. Ibid., p. 30.
16. Frank Willett, African Art, New York, Praeger, 1971, pp. 35–6.
17. About the omission of the Great Wall of China I am indebted to “The Journey of Marco Polo” as re-created by artist Michael-Foreman, published by Pegasus magazine, New York, 1974.
18. Christian Science Monitor, Boston, 25 November 1974, p. 11.
2: Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South (this page)
1. Janheinz Jahn, Muntu, New York, Grove Press, 1979, 14th edn., p. 20.
2. New York Times Book Review, 13 May 1979.
4: The Novelist as Teacher (this page)
1. W. H. Whiteley (ed.), A Selection of African Prose, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964.
5: The Writer and His Community (this page)
1. Herbert M. Cole, Mbari: Art and Life Among the Owerri Igbo, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 100.
2. C. H. Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, 1962, René Juillard, trans. from the French by Katherine Woods, New York, Collier, 1963, pp. 105–6.
3. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, New Brunswick, N. J., Transaction Books, 1974.
4. O. Manoni, Prospero and Caliban, New York, Praeger, 1966, p. 141.
5. New York Times Book Review, 24 October 1982.
6. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-nine Novels, London, Alison and Busby, 1984, p. 18.
7. Ibid.
8. Simon Ottenberg, Masked Rituals of Afikpo, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 1975, p. 74.
9. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, New York, Random House, 1975.
10. J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man, New York, Harper and Row, 1960, p. 83.
7. Colonialist Criticism (this page)
1. Iris Andreski, Old Wives’ Tales, New York, Schocken Books, 1971, p. 26.
2. Charles Larson, Books Abroad, Norman, Oklahoma, Winter 1974, p. 69.
3. Chinua Achebe, “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” Nigeria Magazine, no. 75, Lagos, 1962.
4. Charles Larson, The Emergence of African Fiction, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1971, p. 230.
> 5. Philip Allen, “Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouloguem,” Pan-African Journal, vol. iv, no. 4, New York, Pan-African Institute Inc., Fall 1971, pp. 518–523.
6. Margaret Lawrence, Long Drums and Cannons, London, Macmillan, 1968, p. 9.
7. Ivan Van Sertima, Caribbean Writers, London, New Beacon, 1968, foreword.
8. Ibid., p. xiv.
9. Sunday O. Anozie, Christopher Okigbo, London, Evans Bros., 1972, p. 17.
10. Adrian A. Roscoe, Mother Is Gold, Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 98–9.
11. Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, London, Faber, 1952, p. 100.
12. Ibid., p. 92.
13. Camara Laye, interviewed by J. Steven Rubin, Africa Report, Washington, D.C., May 1972, p. 22.
14. Davidson Abioseh Nicol, The Truly Married Woman and Other Stories, London, Fontana, 1965, introduction.
15. Kofi Awoonor, quoted in Per Wästberg (ed.), The Writer in Modern Africa, Uppsala, Almqvist & Wiksell.
16. Frank Willett, African Art, New York, Praeger, 1971, p. 102.
8: Thoughts on the African Novel (this page)
1. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God, London, William Heinemann, 1964, p. 112.
2. Eldred Jones, “The Essential Soyinka,” Introduction to Nigerian Literature, Bruce King (ed.), Lagos, University of Lagos; London, Evans, 1971, p. 132.
3. Ibid., p. 121.
9: Work and Play in Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (this page)
1. Adrian A. Roscoe, Mother Is Gold, Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 98–99.
2. Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, London, Faber, 1952, p. 7.
3. Ibid., p. 7.
4. Ibid., p. 39.
5. Ibid., p. 84.
6. Ibid., p. 85.
7. Ibid., p. 69.
8. Ibid., p. 71.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12: Language and the Destiny of Man (this page)
1. Sonia Cole, The Prehistory of East Africa, New York, Macmillan, 1963, pp. 122–3.
2. G. E. Igwe and M. M. Green, Igbo Language Course, Ibadan, Oxford University Press (Nigeria), 1967.
3. Mugo Gatheru, A Child of Two Worlds, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1966, p. 40.
4. Ulli Beier (ed.), The Origin of Life and Death, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1966.
5. Camara Laye, The African Child, London, Fontana, 1959, p. 53.
6. Jerome Rothenberg (ed.), Shaking the Pumpkin, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1972, p. 45.
7. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “East Coker,” New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
8. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Ibid.
9. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in Essays, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1954.
10. Dr. F. Nwako, “Disorders in Medical Education,” Nsukkascope, Nsukka, 1972.
11. Beier, op. cit.
12. Edmund Leach, Lévi-Strauss, London, Fontana/Collins, 1970.
13. Beier, op. cit.
13: The Truth of Fiction (this page)
1. Matthew Arnold, “Memorial Verses,” The Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 1, New York, AMS Press, 1970, p. 251.
2. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, New York, Oxford University Press, 1967.
3. Ibid.
14: What Has Literature Got to Do with It? (this page)
1. Proceedings of the Tokyo Colloquium, October 1981.
2. W. Arthur Lewis, “The State of Development Theory,” American Economic Review, 1984; reprinted in Economic Impact, 49, 1985, p. 82.
3. J. K. Galbraith, in Proceedings: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, second series, no. 35, New York, 1984.
4. Proceedings of the Tokyo Colloquium, published in The Daily Yomuiri, 18 November 1981.
5. The Vice-Chancellor of Ibadan University, Professor Ayo Banjo, was reported as making the point that Ibadan does not teach mass communications and yet “has produced most of the best writers in Nigerian journalism today”: Sunday Concord, 16 February 1986.
6. Ulli Beier (ed.), The Origin of Life and Death, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1966.
7. M. W. Alcorn and M. Brachcr, “Literature, Psychoanalysis and the Reformation of the Self. A New Direction for Reader-Response Theory,” Publications of the Modem Language Association of America, New York, May 1985, p. 350.
8. Ibid., p. 352.
Postscript (this page)
1. New York Times, 23 August 1987, p. 10.
2. James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” first published in Esquire, June 1960. Reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, New York, St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985, p. 211.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan.
His early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as Director of External Broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War. Mr. Achebe joined the Biafran Ministry of Information and represented Biafra on various diplomatic and fund-raising missions. He was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad.
From 1972 to 1976, and again in 1987 to 1988, Mr. Achebe was a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and also for one year at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Characterized by the New York Times Magazine as “one of Nigeria’s most gifted writers,” Chinua Achebe has published novels, short stories, essays, and children’s books. His volume of poetry, Christmas in Biafra, written during the Biafran War, was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Of his novels, Arrow of God is winner of the New Statesman-Jock Campbell Award, and Anthills of the Savannah was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize in England.
Mr. Achebe has received numerous honors from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as twelve honorary doctorates from universities in England, Scotland, the United States, Canada, and Nigeria. He is also the recipient of Nigeria’s highest award for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award. In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.
At present, Mr. Achebe lives with his wife in Annandale, New York, where they both teach at Bard College. They have four children.
Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-87
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