by Stan Grant
But Baldwin fixed me in the firmament – the place between worlds, separating the waters of the white and the waters of the black. Here was a place for me. Here was a writer of courage and truth. The people of his book arrived fully formed, they didn’t exist as a reflection of whiteness, this wasn’t blackness as imagined, but real and flawed and courageous and pitiful. People who surprised and disappointed. These were people – black people – who were human.
Baldwin said, ‘I wish only to be an honest man and a good writer.’
He was both.
A black man confronting his country’s legacy of racism. A son confronting his father’s hypocrisy. A gay man confronting his sexuality. Through his exploration of identity and belonging he became a touchstone for me. After Go Tell It on the Mountain, I devoured whatever I could find. His essays were searing meditations on race and history. Each line quotable and a lesson in life. Words so brutally rendered that they make me wince even now. Words now unutterable, almost unthinkable.
‘For the state, a nigger is a nigger is a nigger . . . sometimes Mr or Mrs or Dr Nigger.’
They speak to the America of Black Lives Matter, the America that questioned the citizenship of Barack Obama, as powerfully as they spoke to the Jim Crow segregated south of Baldwin’s time.
Baldwin said that he had to learn to navigate this world that so controlled him, he had to learn to ‘outwit white people’ in order to survive. This was my world too. How to navigate a world where I was always underestimated, trapped by the tyranny of low expectations? I knew what he meant when he wrote that fear ‘rose up like a wall between the world and me’. Baldwin gave voice to what I knew but could not say. On the centenary of the emancipation proclamation – the freeing of the slaves – Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time, a letter to his nephew, his brother’s son:
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
I have returned so often to Baldwin, his work has been a touchstone throughout my life. I have often disagreed with him – at his worst there is a nihilism that I could never embrace – yet he has never been less than captivating. In post-Obama America, a new generation of black writers have turned to Baldwin once again. When I read his words I feel their weight. They are as sharp, as penetrating today as when I first encountered them. What a world they reveal; the tragedy of so many lives laid waste. I turned to Baldwin when I heard the news that another Indigenous child had taken her life. She was only ten years old, living in a remote northwestern corner of Western Australia. Ten years old – we know what that looks like, what that should look like. Ten years old should be giggling at the back of the school bus. Ten years old should be swapping notes behind the teacher’s back in class. Ten years old should be singing into a hairbrush and dancing in front of a mirror. But ten years old to this girl looked like hopelessness. This would be shocking if it were rare . . . but for Australia’s First Peoples this is so numbingly familiar. Indigenous kids under the age of fourteen are almost ten times more likely to kill themselves than their non-Indigenous counterparts.
I turned again to Baldwin when we as a nation heard the screams of Aboriginal boys locked up and beaten. James Baldwin – so unflinching, so unbowed a man writing free of the white gaze. I turned again to The Fire Next Time:
You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.
Those words are so harsh that they are brutal, and there are times I want to recoil. While I have been inspired by Baldwin, angered by Baldwin, saddened by Baldwin, I have struggled with his certainty. Race is such a part of our lives, it so defines us that it can be hard to imagine an escape. But does it answer everything? The United States, a country that once held people in bondage, went to war with itself to free those same slaves. White boys gave their lives for the freedom of others. The Civil War is still the determining moment in that nation’s history, a blood vow that, in the words of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, ‘These dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.’
Doesn’t my life tell me that race is not a prison? Unlike Baldwin, I look for the spaces in between, those questions that defy easy answers. My instinct is to soften the blow. Even knowing what I know I struggle to accept that my country should be condemned by the worst of its history. Are we – black people – still in Baldwin’s words ‘worthless’? Is this my country? Today, at this time, is this who we are? I think of my fellow Australians of goodwill – those who have loved and cried with us – and I say surely this, the better angels of our nature, is the true measure of us.
But then I think again how 97 per cent of kids locked up in the Northern Territory are black kids. I think of their parents too likely to have been behind bars. I think of their grandparents likely gone too soon, dead before their time. In this country Indigenous people die ten years younger than other Australians. I think of how suicide remains the single biggest cause of death for Indigenous people under the age of thirty-five. I think of Aboriginal women, forty-five times more likely to suffer domestic violence than their white sisters. An Aboriginal woman is more than ten times more likely to be killed from violent assault.
I think of lives chained to generations of misery.
To write about this is confronting. I have to cast aside any self-doubt; to care more for what I want to say than how people might react. We are vulnerable when we write; but we must be ready to risk rejection or condemnation, if we are to write free of what has been called ‘the white gaze’. The white gaze – it is a phrase that resonates in black American literature. Writers from W.E.B. Du Bois to Ralph Ellison to Baldwin and Toni Morrison have struggled with it and railed against it. As Morrison – a Nobel Laureate – once said:
Our lives have no meaning, no depth without the white gaze. And I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.
The white gaze: it traps black people in white imaginations. It is the eyes of a white schoolteacher who sees a black student and lowers expectations. It is the eyes of a white cop who sees a black person and looks twice – or worse, feels for a gun. Du Bois explored this more than a century ago in his book The Souls of Black Folk, reflecting on his conversations with white people and the ensuing delicate dance around the ‘Negro problem’.
Between me and the other world there is an ever unasked question . . . All, nevertheless, flutter around it . . . Instead of saying directly, how does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent coloured man in my town . . . To the real question . . . I answer seldom a word.
The flame has passed to a new generation. In recent years I have looked to three more black writers who have stared down the white gaze. In their own ways Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine and George Yancy have held up a mirror to white America. These are uncompromising and fearless voices. Coates’ searing book-length essay Between The World And Me critiques America against a backdrop of black deaths at the hands of police. He says the country’s history is rooted in slavery and the assault against the black body. In the form of a letter to his son, Coates writes:
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.
In Citizen – An American Lyric, poet Rankine reflects on the black experience from the victims of Hurricane Katrina, to Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old black youth shot dead by a Neighbourhood Watch volunteer who was acquitted, to black tennis star Serena Williams. In each case Rankine sees lives framed by whiteness. She writes:
because white men can’t
police their imagination
&nb
sp; black men are dying
Philosophy professor George Yancy penned an article for the New York Times in 2015, a letter he addressed to ‘Dear White America’. Yancy asked his countrymen and women to listen with love, and to look at those things, he said, that might cause pain and terror. ‘All white people,’ he said, ‘benefit from racism and this means each, in their own way, are racist.
‘. . . don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism . . . practise being vulnerable. Being neither a “good” white person, nor a liberal white person will get you off the proverbial hook.’
Yancy’s letter was not tempered by the fact a black man was in the White House; that only made voices like his more urgent. Coates, Rankine, Yancy, each has been variously praised and awarded, yet each has been pilloried as well. This is inevitable when some people don’t like what the mirror reflects.
It takes courage for a person defined and judged as black to speak to a white world; a world that can render invisible people of colour, unless they begin to more closely resemble white people themselves: an education, a house in the suburbs, a good job, lighter skin. In Australia, too, black voices are defying the white gaze. We may not have the popular cut-through of a Morrison or a Baldwin or a Coates, but we have a proud tradition – Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Kevin Gilbert, Ruby Ginibi Langford and more recently Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Anita Heiss. Their styles and genres are many and varied but there is a common and powerful theme of defiance and survival.
This is a world so instantly recognisable to us – Indigenous people – but still so foreign to white Australia. I think of Natalie Harkin’s book of poetry, Dirty Words, a subversive dictionary that turns English words back on their users. A is apology, B is boat people . . . on and on . . . G is for genocide . . . S for sovereignity.
‘How do you dream,’ she writes, ‘when your Lucky-Country does not sleep?’
Bruce Pascoe’s award-winning Dark Emu challenges the white stereotype of the ‘primitive hunter-gatherer’. He says the economy and culture of Indigenous people has been grossly undervalued. He cites journals and diaries of explorers and colonists to reveal the industry and ingenuity of pre-colonial Aboriginal society. He says it is a window into a world of people building dams and wells and houses, irrigating and harvesting seed and creating elaborate cemeteries.
Tony Birch is an acclaimed novelist, whose Ghost River is remarkable. It is the story of two friends navigating the journey into adulthood, guided by the men of the river; men others may see as homeless and hopeless. It is a work infused with a sense of place and belonging. Ellen van Neerven – someone I have mentioned earlier – is one of the most exciting young writers in our country. She challenges comfortable notions of identity: sexual, racial and national. Her writing is provocative and challenging and mind bending, and altogether stunning.
I share a kinship with these writers, even if, like Baldwin, I don’t always share their world-view. A nation is its stories, and these are stories that shake our confidence. That these works are not more widely read is a national shame.
George Yancy asks white Americans to become ‘un-sutured’, to open themselves up and let go of their white innocence. The same could be said here. That it is past time that we truly knew each other. Why is this important? Well, for white people it may simply be a matter of choice, the fate of black people may not directly affect them. For others it is survival; the white gaze means people die young, are locked up and locked out of work and education.
When I come to write, I still come with Baldwin as my guide. I come to write free of the white gaze yet aware too that to understand myself, to understand my country, is to understand how we are all bound by race.
I am born of deep traditions. My footprints trace the first steps on this land. I am born too of the white imagination – this imagination that said we did not exist. The imagination that said this was an empty land – terra nullius. It is not just a legal doctrine, it is a state of mind. We were rendered invisible, our rights extinguished. If we existed at all, we were just as likely dismissed as the fly-blown savages unfit to be counted among the civilised races of the earth. The story here was a story written in other lands; a story of colonisation, subjugation, invasion, disease, death, dispossession. As Canadian political scientist Joyce Green has written:
The dehumanisation of indigenous peoples was necessary for dispossession and subsequent judicial oppression.
Dispossession and oppression, the white gaze that justified or could turn a blind eye to the ravages of massacre and disease that devastated my people. It was the white gaze of settlers that left some of my ancestors dead on the plains. It was the white gaze that left no place for us in this new nation. It was the white gaze that at the time of Federation forecast our doom, a race bound for extinction and not fit to be counted among the citizens of this country.
We hear the white gaze in the words of our second prime minister, Alfred Deakin:
We have power to deal with people of any and every race within our borders, except the aboriginal inhabitants of the continent, who remain under the custody of the States. There is that single exception of a dying race; and if they are a dying race, let us hope that in their last hours they will be able to recognise not simply the justice, but the generosity of the treatment which the white race, who are dispossessing them and entering into their heritage, are according them.
Think about that. That we would die out and that we would be grateful for small mercies. By the time I was born in 1963 the white gaze had placed us on the margins of society, on the outside looking in. My parents’ lives had been singed by the fires of bigotry and poverty. We moved from town to town, my father having little to offer but his muscle and his willingness to work.
I have wondered how people, comfortable in their place in Australia, would have looked upon me as a child: a dozen schools before I was in my teens, no permanent home, an itinerant labourer father, a gypsy caravan of extended family, born black and poor. Would they have argued I would be better removed from those who loved me? Yet this same family raised me from sawmill shacks to stand in the oval office at the White House and the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. My journey has taken me around the world.
I found a personal liberation in countries torn by their own histories yet where I could walk free of mine. I am of my people – the First People of this land – yet I have lived far from them. I have made a life – a good life – in an Australia that still struggles to acknowledge the rights of those people I call my own. It is a contradiction, a maddening contradiction, that race alone cannot resolve. It is a reason that true peace often feels just out of reach. It is the restlessness of someone in between, who can at times find belonging suffocating; someone neither black nor white.
Surely to be free of the white gaze is to simply write free. I must be free too of the black gaze; my writing allows me to explore identity but not to be limited by it. It is why I cannot accept those who tell me to ‘stay in my lane’. I have never been convinced by the argument that only black people can write about the black experience or that I could not imagine a white life. The same goes for any identity group: racial, religious, sexual or gender. What is a black writer? Why should we assume that every writer of colour will share the same experience or world view? Writing – any art – is a deeply human experience and I could not possibly divide or privilege one part of myself against another. To be trapped in identity for me would be a creative and intellectual death. My life has been enriched by reading what some now deride as ‘old white men’. How would Shakespeare have written Othello, if his whiteness precluded him from writing of blackness? Thomas Keneally has said he would not now write The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, yet what is that book if not an intensely Australian story? The story of a man both black and white, defined by race at the birth of a new nation, became a touchstone for me as a boy. Writing is inextricably political and the ‘white gaze’ has obliterated or marginalised blackness, but once free why would I swap one prison for
another? Those Indigenous writers who speak to the black experience are white as well – like me – so which part of our humanity do we seek to suppress? Toni Morrison, a writer who as much as anyone has stared down the white gaze, has said, ‘My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderised, sexualised, wholly racialised world.’
I come from a long line of storytellers – I look to the world of poets not politics. Poetry is the world of deeper truths, truth that must not be bound by political ideas of identity. As the poet John Keats said, ‘a poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity’. As always, for me there is James Baldwin. In this time of heightened race politics, so many are looking back to Baldwin, yet are often guilty of seeing the Baldwin they wish to see. I look to the James Baldwin who wrote, ‘Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other – male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other.’
I came across an article in the New York Times, remembering Baldwin, and again I was reminded of how this writer from another time and another country spoke so much of what I feel. How race, for all that it seeks to define us, for all that others cling to it, is a straitjacket. It suffocates and strangles us. That there is a white gaze is true; but we can be trapped in the judgment of our own, those who would revel in race and tell us what to think, who to love or who to be. As Baldwin said, those who are quick to say, ‘You are acting white.’ Baldwin reminded me again that we are all trapped in the vicious, twisted logic of race.
I was a maverick, a maverick in the sense that I depended on neither the white world nor the black world. That was the only way I could’ve played it. I would’ve been broken otherwise. I had to say, ‘A curse on both your houses.’ The fact that I went to Europe so early is probably what saved me. It gave me another touchstone — myself.