In fact, I’m probably suffering from a species of postnatal depression. Something very weird happens to you when a book is over, you feel old and useless, and all that effort, which you can’t, anyway, remember, seems to have come to nothing. But I’ll feel less grim, probably, when I write you again, from Paris, and I’m pushing ahead with the essay and will get it to you before I leave for Dakar.
Loèche-les-Bains, February 1962
Got to Paris, late, as you know, and began tracking down debts and possessions—no easy matter—with the intention of leaving almost at once.
Anyway, partly because I was running around Paris without a winter coat, I came down with the grippe, which rapidly developed into a heavy and painful bronchitis—I thought it was pleurisy, and had visions of pneumonia. The doctor filled me with drugs and told me that, fantastically enough, there was nothing seriously wrong with me, except the bronchitis, but that I was terribly run down and ought not go on to Africa in my exhausted state. I was glad enough to hear this, in a way, I was certainly tired and sad; and so I came here, to the mountains, to the village where I finished my first novel, ten years ago. And Lucien, very much as he did then, came up with me to help me get settled—and he has now gone back on the road (he is a salesman) to feed his robins.
So, I meant to write you sooner, but at first I simply could not get myself together enough to do it, and then couldn’t stay awake long enough: the French notion of medicine is to knock you out. Then, when I got to the mountains, all I did was sleep—the mountain air, I guess. I feel much better now, ready to start again—though I also feel very still and sad.
This is not quite the tone I meant to strike when writing you, for I know that you tend to worry about me, but it seems to be the only tone I can manage—but please do not worry, everything is much better now. And in fact, Paris was the only really bad spot and that might not have been so bad if I had not fallen ill. Though, in another way, I think that that might have been lucky.
I am again reworking the interminable “Down at the Cross,” and will send it off to you as soon as I’ve sent the rewrites to Jim. You’ll see, I imagine, when you read it, why it has been so hard to do, and it probably also illuminates some of the unsettling apprehensions which have so complicated this journey.
Which brings us to the third point: I’ve kept, as I’ve told you, a kind of incoherent, blow-by-blow account of this trip, and I intend, before I leave the mountains, to get at least the Israeli section out to you, so that you can send it to [William] Shawn. Again, I think that this will make clearer than any of my letters can, how complex, once I got to Israel, the whole idea of Africa became. It became clear to me at once that I could not hope to manage that confrontation with an exhibition, merely, of journalistic skill. I could deal with it only in an extremely, even dangerously personal way, and try to make the reader ask his own questions and make his own assessments. And this sorrow, if I may call it that, was deepened in Turkey, where the whole somber question of America’s role in the world today stared at me in a new and inescapable way; and the question of America’s role brings up, of course, the question of what the role of the American Negro is, or can be. Well. I suppose the Israeli piece will cause some people to think I’m anti-Semitic, and God knows what the reaction to the Turkish chapter will be. But they are part of the African book, they must be.
As for Africa, I’d rather like your advice at this point. I, personally, would like to go from here to Dakar at the end of this month—Dakar and Brazzaville—and stay down there until I meet Grove Press in Mallorca at the end of April. In May, I have a tentative rendezvous to meet Elia Kazan in Greece—I saw him just before he left Paris. My own idea was to finish the play during May and June, and then return to Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, and return to New York in the fall. Once I get to Africa, I imagine that I will be extremely busy, particularly with students, and I don’t want to stint: it has taken me so long to get there!
The only problem, as far as I can see, involves the American lectures. As you know, I don’t have any very clear idea of what that schedule was: but it’s my impression that the only firm commitment was Monterey College, sometime in April. If need be, I can fly back for that, since Grove Press, in any case, will fly me out. What do you think? I don’t see that there’s any great need for me to be home for Country’s publication—though I am willing to listen, of course. Finally, though, I must say, I simply dread facing the tigerish Negro press if I return to America without having visited the land which they so abruptly are proud to claim as home. The more particularly as neither Another Country nor my report on Africa is likely to please them at all.
This trip has had the effect of opening something in me which I must pursue, and I do not think that I can do that and be a Negro leader, too. And, in any case, my whole attitude toward the fact of color undergoes several melancholy changes: I don’t know where they will lead me, but I must buy the time to find out. There is a very grim secret hidden in the fact that so many of the people one hoped to rescue could not be rescued because the prison of color had become their hiding place. I don’t know what this means, for me, for us, for the world, for the future of Africa—I don’t yet know what color means in Africa (but I will know). Life has the effect of forcing you to act on your premises—the only key I can find to my spectacular recklessness—and I have said for years that color does not matter. I am now beginning to feel that it does not matter at all, that it masks something else which does matter: but this suspicion changes, for me, the entire nature of reality.
Ah. Bear with me, dear friend. I make my journeys by a radar I must trust, and must pursue and bear my discoveries in the best way I can. I know it’s hard on everybody’s nerves, and it’s certainly hard on mine, but I’m not being frivolous and it is done out of love.
Write me, quickly, please, the morale is wildly fluctuating, I’m always afraid, and I’m pregnant with some strange monster.
(1963)
The International War Crimes Tribunal: Reader’s Forum, Freedomways
Bertrand Russell, the 3rd Earl Russell (1872–1970), was a philosopher, mathematician, historian, linguist, and antiwar activist. He wrote more than seventy books on a vast range of subjects that garnered him the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature. A student of Wittgenstein, he helped establish the field of analytic philosophy. In his later years he dedicated himself to the eradication of nuclear weapons, and at the age of ninety-four he established, through his Peace Foundation, an International War Crimes Tribunal. The goal of the project was to try Lyndon B. Johnson and his administration for war crimes against the people of Vietnam. James Baldwin was named a member of the tribunal. This piece was written for the Reader’s Forum of Freedomways, a quarterly review.
· · ·
MY NAME IS INCLUDED among the members of Lord Russell’s War Crimes Tribunal, and it is imperative, therefore, that I make my position clear. I do indeed have my own reservation concerning this tribunal. There may be something suspect in the spectacle of Europeans condemning America for a war which America inherited from Europe, inherited, in fact, directly from France. In spite of my somewhat difficult reputation, I have never had any interest in attacking America from abroad. I know too much, if I may say so, concerning the complex European motives, of which envy and fury are not the least. It might be considered more logical, for example, for any European, and especially any Englishman, to bring before an international tribunal the government of South Africa, or the government of Rhodesia, which I would do, if I had the power, at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. No Englishman has suggested this. Neither did Jean-Paul Sartre suggest that France be brought before an international tribunal during the war which we have inherited from France, or during the French-Algerian war. It is possible, in short, to consider the tribunal to be both misguided and inept, and I can see to what extent that this is so. But I can also see why. The tribunal, ideally, wishes to make the conscience of the world aware of the crimes being committed in Southeas
t Asia by the American government, in the name of the American people; and wishes to do this, not only to bring the horror to an end, but to pull all of us back from the brink of total disaster. But this world can only be the Western world, this conscience can only be the Western conscience, and all the Western world is guilty. If I should make the attempt to accuse the Western powers of the crimes they are now committing in Rhodesia, Angola, South Africa—to leave it at that; or should I attempt to bring to the world’s attention the actual intention, and the actual result, of those treaties the Europeans, who were not yet Americans, signed with the American Indian, to say nothing of what happened to the blacks, concerning which we know at once too much and too little; I would certainly encounter from the Western powers the very same opposition that Lord Russell’s tribunal has encountered. And for the very same reason: such an attempt not only brings into question the real morality of the Western world, it also attacks what that world considers to be its material self-interest. Such a trial should really be held in Harlem, U.S.A. No one, then, could possibly escape the sinister implications of the moral dilemma in which the facts of Western history have placed the Western world.
I speak as an American Negro. I challenge anyone alive to tell me why any black American should go into those jungles to kill people who are not white and who have never done him any harm, in defense of a people who have made that foreign jungle, or any jungle anywhere in the world, a more desirable jungle than that in which he was born, and to which, supposing that he lives, he will inevitably return. I challenge anyone alive to convince me that a people who have not achieved anything resembling freedom in their own country are empowered, with bombs, to free another people whom they do not know at all, who rather resemble me—whom they do not know at all. I challenge any American, and especially Mr. Lyndon Johnson and Mr. Hubert Humphrey and Mr. Dean Rusk and Mr. Robert McNamara, to tell me, and the black population of the United States, how, if they cannot liberate their brothers—repeat: brothers—and have not even learned how to live with them, they intend to liberate Southeast Asia. I challenge them to tell me by what right, and in whose interest, they presume to police the world, and I, furthermore, want to know if they would like their sisters, or their daughters to marry any one of the people they are struggling so mightily to save. And this is by no means a rhetorical challenge, and all the men I have named, and many, many more will be dishonored forever if they cannot rise to it. I want an answer: if I am to die, I have the right to know why. And the nonwhite population of the world, who are most of the world, would also like to know. The American idea of freedom and, still more, the way this freedom is imposed, have made America the most terrifying nation in the world. We have inherited Spain’s title: the nation with the bloody footprint.
The American war in Vietnam raises several questions. One is whether or not small nations, in this age of superstates and superpowers, will be allowed to work out their own destinies and live as they feel they should. For only the people of a country have the right, or the spiritual power, to determine that country’s way of life. Another question this war raises is just how what we call the underdeveloped countries became underdeveloped in the first place. Why, for example, is Africa underpopulated, and why do the resources of, say, Sierra Leone belong to Europe? Why, in short, does so much of the world eat too little and so little of the world eat too much? I am also curious to know just how a people calling itself sovereign allows itself to be fighting a war which has never been officially declared, and I am curious to know why so few people appear to be worried about the arresting precedent thus established. I am curious indeed to know how it happens that the mightiest nation in the world has been unable, in all these years, to conquer one of the smallest. I am curious to know what happens to the moral fabric, the moral sense, of the people engaged in so criminal an endeavor.
Long, long before the Americans decided to liberate the Southeast Asians, they decided to liberate me: my ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and so will I. A racist society can’t but fight a racist war—this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad, and every American Negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first “Vietcong” victim. We were bombed first. How, then, can I believe a word you say, and what gives you the right to ask me to die for you?
The American endeavor in Vietnam is totally indefensible and totally doomed, and I wish to go on record as having no part of it. When the black population of America has a future, so will America have a future—not till then. And when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future—and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.
I think that mankind can do better than that, and I wish to be a witness to this small and stubborn possibility.
(1967)
Anti-Semitism and Black Power
Written for the Reader’s Forum of Freedomways, a quarterly review.
· · ·
WE ARE IN THE HIDEOUS CENTER of a mortal storm, which many of us saw coming. Many of us will perish and certainly no one of my generation can hope, honorably, to survive. And, whether or not one agrees with me, I think it is useful to assume that America will not survive this storm, either. Nor should she; she is responsible for this holocaust in which the living writhe; it is American power which makes death an enviable state for so many millions of people. We are a criminal nation, built on a lie, and as the world cannot use us, it will presently find some way of disposing of us. I take this for granted; and the future of this nation, even though it may also be my own, cannot concern me any longer. I am concerned with the living, I am concerned with a new morality, and a new creation. I hope I do not sound literary; in any case, I mean what I say. I really believe that it is possible for human beings to make the world a place in which we all can live.
I think I understand, in spite of my limits—for I know more about my limits than anyone else can know, and no tribunal frightens me; I am my own tribunal—a great deal about the crisis which we, black, in America, are now enduring. The crisis has been produced by the history of Europe and the brutality of the Christian church; and I think it is very important to bear in mind that, whereas we, black, are enduring a crisis, the descendants of Europe and the defenders of the faith are witnessing their doom. Indeed, they are graceless—but they are human. This is hard, hard, hard to remember: I know how hard it is. But if one does not remember it, the battle is for nothing.
I think I know how white America operates to destroy the black integrity—and not by accident, but deliberately. You will observe, I hope, that in doing this, it has also destroyed its own integrity. I hope you will understand me and I hope you will believe me when I say that I would rather die than see the black American become as hideously empty as the majority of white men have become. I would like us to do something unprecedented: to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy. But since we are surrounded by enemies, I think I should spell that out.
A black high-school dropout in Watts, for example, has every reason to hate the police, the lawyers, the judges, the priests, the teachers, the bosses, the landlords, the mayor, the governor, and Ronald Reagan. I do not shrink from asserting that the human value of these people can only exist in the sight of God, and, happily, I’m not God (who is also, in any case, and not a moment too soon, about to go out of business). But he has no right to hate the governor’s child, and no one has a right to teach him to hate. I think that we, human beings, must try to change each other. I am perfectly aware that nothing will ever change Governor Wallace or Senator Eastland. But it is the system which created these people
and gave them their power which must be isolated, anatomized, attacked, and destroyed. And I think we must be very clear-headed about this, for no people have ever been in a revolutionary situation so bizarre. It is a revolution which has all the aspects of a civil war; but at the same time, it is happening all over the globe, and America is fighting it all over the globe—using, by no means incidentally, vast numbers of its surplus and despised population. Hopefully, for example, if enough Vietnamese and black Americans are blown into eternity, the world will be made safe—for business. There is a very good reason, after all, why the government which could so severely compromise the Cuban economy can do nothing whatever to intimidate the South African economy. A revolution in South Africa would have a terrible effect on Wall Street and on the Bank of the Holy Ghost—which latter institution stands, as you know, in Rome: a monument to what is probably the most extensive, successful, murderous, and blasphemous enterprise in the history of mankind. If the Bank of the Holy Ghost should fail, the heathen could no longer be saved. And you remember, I hope, how desperately we heathens longed for salvation.
Well, then: the nature of the enemy is history; the nature of the enemy is power; and what every black man, boy, woman, girl, is struggling to achieve is some sense of himself or herself which this history and this power have done everything conceivable to destroy. But let us try to be clear. Black power is not a mystical or a poetic concept, for example; it is simply a political necessity. It has nothing to do with bad guys or good guys, and it really has nothing to do with color. Black arts has nothing to do with color, either. It is an attempt to create a black self-image which the white Republic could never allow. It is an attempt to tell the truth about black people to black people because the American Republic has told us nothing but lies.
The Cross of Redemption Page 25