Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Apologies to the Iroquois is an extremely interesting, attractive and yet finally unsatisfactory discussion of these questions. The interest and attraction derive from Mr. Wilson’s well-known and unflagging powers of observation and description, and especially his watchful respect for individual members of an alien culture: the unsatisfactory character is probably the result of the peculiar requirements of The New Yorker, in which most of the material originally appeared. The more obviously irritating characteristics of New Yorker reporting—artfully-artless meandering, and an affection for detail above and beyond the call of duty—are certainly not dominant here, but the reader is conscious that something of the kind has been expected, and that something better has been lost by reason of this expectation. “The nationalist movement of the Iroquois,” writes Mr. Wilson, “is only one of many recent evidences of a new self-assertion on the part of the Indians. The subject is much too large and complicated even to be outlined here, but …” No doubt it is large and complicated, and no doubt there is much to be said for Mr. Wilson’s method of confining himself to a few tribes and a few concrete problems, rather than indulging in generalizations about Indian movements. Yet as a long description of a dance follows a long account of a lawsuit and these are followed by another lawsuit and another dance, it is possible to feel that room could, after all, have been found, if not for an outline of American Indian nationalism today, at least for something more than the shrewd, tantalizing hints scattered through the three hundred pages of this volume. Not that there is anything frivolous about either the lawsuits or the dances: it is the slow, restless oscillation from subject to subject, The New Yorker’s ton de bonne compagnie, that is frivolous. But the white serpent has come to crave this cunning mixture of information and distraction, and even Mr. Wilson must sacrifice to him.

  In Mad Bear’s allegory there is also a black serpent, who eventually defeats the red and white serpents, and whose victory is the prelude to the return of the Indian messiah, Deganawida, and the restoration of the Indian nation. The culminating moment is already at hand. The big war between the red and white serpents is due to begin in 1960, and as a result of it the United States is to come to an end and a great light will come to the Indian people.

  No doubt such fantasies are common to all oppressed peoples—and a people can still feel itself oppressed even if no one is any longer conscious of oppressing it. Nor is there anything new in what is represented by the red serpent—a sporting flutter on the enemy of one’s enemy. “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” was for long the watchword of the most irreconcilable “minority people” in Western Europe. What is probably new, however, is the role of the black serpent—the feeling that a general victory of oppressed non-white peoples is at hand. Mr. Wilson writes:

  They know that they came from the Orient … and they know what has been happening in China. They also know that India has freed herself, that Ghana is now a free state, and that the Algerians are struggling to become one. They have sensed that the white man has been losing his hold, and, like the rest of the non-white races, they are sick of his complacency and arrogance. They find this a favorable moment for declaring their national identity because, in view of our righteous professions in relation to the Germans and Russians, they know that, for the first time in history, they are in a position to blackmail us into keeping our agreements and honoring their claims.

  Cold war, unlike hot war, has probably more beneficiaries than victims, but it resembles hot war in that those who are most apt to benefit are those who manage to avoid taking part in it. The American Indians, like so many African and Asian peoples—but unlike the people of Tibet—may greatly gain, materially and politically, from the cold war. Agreeable as this is, it is not without its dangers, even for the beneficiaries. All weak peoples are apt to cherish a sense of superior virtue, corresponding to the magnitude of the crimes they have been powerless to commit. This sense, in times of oppression, is a relatively harmless consolation. On the emergence of freedom it becomes a costly delusion. Atavistic practices, being felt to guarantee the tribal distinctness—and therefore superiority—become more cherished than intelligence or even common sense. The reverses brought about by this scale of preferences will in the long run, if there is one, overthrow it; in the short run they are more likely to intensify atavism: “The Sacrifice of the White Dog was not, it seems, enough….”

  Logically, the discredit of racism should have done nothing to make primitive animism respectable. In practice the white man’s shame does tend to have that effect. The eighteenth century pronounced the Savage noble, in cheerful ignorance of how the Savage behaved; the twentieth century, having had the opportunity to study all varieties of savagery, refuses to pronounce a value judgment at all. The resources of civilization have, apparently, become exhausted quicker than Mr. Gladstone would have thought possible. It is only “apparently,” of course; the anthropologist who writes as if he thought that the practices of head-hunters were no less valuable and no less commendable than the proceedings of the Royal Society is playing a scientific game, which most of his readers understand. But members of the communities studied might be forgiven for taking the game seriously, for reaching the conclusion that Western civilization, having studied what it wrongly took to be a primitive form of society, had been forced to see that this society was in fact an alternative civilization, of no less value than that of the declining West. The relativist anthropologists of the twentieth century may be seen in retrospect to have been no less disastrous than the absolutist ethnologists of the last century. For something like the dream which haunts Mad Bear—and no doubt many other Mad Bears in other parts of the world—may very easily come true. The red and white serpents may indeed destroy each other, and the black serpent may inherit the earth. In the perspective of human history this need not be an unmitigated disaster—except for amateurs of a particular pigmentation—provided that the transit of civilization has already been successfully accomplished. But it will be a pity if the survivors of the human race are in such a mental state—as a result, among other things, of anthropological “respect”—that they fancy their survival to be a result of their persistence in sacrificing dogs.

  WHITE GODS AND BLACK AMERICANS

  In Accra recently a Nigerian company, under the direction of the brilliant young artist Demas Nwoko, presented a dramatized version, in Yoruba, of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. The highlight of the evening was “The White Gods,” a European couple, as they appear to a simple West African, interpreted by a very sophisticated West African. Lank straw-coloured hair hung round their pallid masks; they seemed all knees and noses, their movements angular, their courtship birdlike, their voices shrill and sad. They were felt to be benevolent, in a sense, and powerful, in a sense, but the benevolence and the power had strayed in different directions, and all this was somehow conveyed by the movements of these dislocated dolls. The audience before which these figures mopped and mowed was black and white. The black part laughed heartily, in frank, spontaneous recognition. As for the white part, we laughed too, but later and less. It was disconcerting to feel oneself seen in this way: one felt naked, awkward, ruffled. Les Blancs riaient, mais jaune.

  And here is James Baldwin describing, in Another Country, a white man dancing with a black girl:

  Ida and Ellis had begun a new dance; or, rather, Ida had begun a new cruelty. Ida was suddenly dancing as she had probably not danced since her adolescence, and Ellis was attempting to match her—he could certainly not be said to be leading her now, either. He tried, of course, his square figure swooping and breaking, and his little boy’s face trying hard to seem abandoned. And the harder he tried—the fool! Cass thought—the more she eluded him, the more savagely she shamed him. He was not on those terms with his body, or with hers, or anyone’s body. He moved his buttocks by will, with no faintest memory of love, no hint of grace; his thighs were merely those of a climber, his feet might have been treading grapes. He did not
know what to do with his arms, which stuck out at angles to his body as though they were sectioned and controlled by strings, and also as though they had no communion with his hands—hands which had grasped and taken but never caressed.

  Reading this I was instantly both reminded of the White Gods and struck by a contrast. Those arms “sectioned and controlled by strings” are exactly those of the White Gods, but the spirit of the scene is very different. The laughter of the black audience at the White Gods had no more hatred or bitterness than the laughter of an English Edwardian audience at the Dixie Minstrels: some contempt, yes, some affection too, in both cases. In Baldwin’s tone there is neither amusement nor affection; there is cold contempt with a touch of something else, either pity or cruelty. True, this white character is a particularly unsympathetic one and he is supposed, at this moment, to be seen through the eyes of a white woman. But she is a white woman invented by James Baldwin and her vision and her tone are characteristically and unmistakably Baldwin’s.

  It is not surprising that a West African and an American Negro should contemplate the jerky progress of the Caucasian with quite different emotions. The historical experience of the American Negro has been far more bitter; his present, though in absolute economic terms more prosperous, is socially and psychologically much harder to bear. The West African’s house is a modest one, but he is master in it; the American Negro lives in the basement of a rich man’s house, as a poor relation.

  The relationship makes the poverty much more bitter. “That’s part of the dilemma of being an American Negro,” said James Baldwin in a radio interview;

  that one is a little bit colored and a little bit white, and not only in physical terms but in the head and in the heart, and there are days when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how are you going to communicate to the vast headless, unthinking cruel white majority: that you are here, and to be here means that you can’t be anywhere else. I could, my own person, leave this country and go to Africa, I could go to China, I could go to Russia, I could go to Cuba, but I’m an American and that’s a fact.

  It is Baldwin’s achievement that he has convinced an important section of his white fellow-countrymen that he “is there.” He has not only made them see him, but made them see how he sees them—a feat which no American Negro writer, not even Richard Wright, had ever before succeeded in performing. His fellow-countrymen had seen him as a specialized abstraction: not seeing “a man” or “another American,” but only “a Negro,” that is to say, a phenomenon about which the most important facts were certain physical characteristics. The presence of these characteristics reduced “him” almost to “it”: an object about which one held certain views, possibly even liberal views, and whose movements were restricted to certain grooves, both in the mind and in the city. When this object flew from its groove, when America discovered Baldwin discovering America, the effect was something between that of a clear message from a mind in Outer Space and that of a stinging rebuke from a deaf-mute.

  It was not that other American Negroes, from the late and great W. E. B. Du Bois to Richard Wright, had not written, and written well, about the Negro situation. What Baldwin did was to shift the ground, to talk about American situations, human situations in America. He threw away the placards of the “literature of protest”; he tells us in Nobody Knows My Name how he did that and how he had to quarrel with Richard Wright about it. He wrote without flattery, either of the white people or—what was harder—of his own people. The hatred and fear of whites which had inevitably marked his youth dissolved into his imagination, leaving his consciousness unusually clear, his tone calm and casual. “What white people have to do,” he said, “is to try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger it means you need it. Why?”

  If white Americans—and other whites—are having to give increasing attention to this question, this is obviously not just because of Baldwin, or any other writer. But it is Baldwin who made this question explicit in this particular way, not thundering at injustice but probing for the roots of a sickness. He has made white men listen to him, and simply because of this—so deep is the alienation of “black” from “white” America—he has made some Negroes suspicious of him. Their suspicions have been summarized for them by another important American Negro writer, Julian Mayfield—who himself admires Baldwin—in these words:

  There must be something wrong with Baldwin because his books are on the best-seller list and his articles appear in prestige, mass-circulation magazines. Worst yet, he’s always on television giving his opinion about this or that; and although I usually say “hear, hear” to his ideas, tell me—since when did Mr. Charlie White Man Boss become so interested in the opinion of any black man but an Uncle Tom? And why should Baldwin be writing about “queers” all the time when there are so many more important things to concern Negro writers?

  If Baldwin is a “queer” Uncle Tom, he must be a very queer Uncle Tom indeed. He told his New York television audience, for example, in May 1963, that he would have trouble convincing his nephew to go to Cuba “to liberate the Cubans in the name of a government which now says it is doing everything which it can do but cannot liberate me.” Mr. Mayfield rightly stresses—in relation to the role of spokesman for his people which has been almost forced on Baldwin—the importance of an article which Baldwin contributed to The New York Times Magazine in March 1961 and which is now reprinted in Nobody Knows My Name under a new title, “East River Downtown.” This article was about the violent demonstration which a group of American Negroes staged in the gallery of the United Nations Security Council, after the news of the murder of Lumumba. Some prominent American Negroes were shocked at this behaviour, and Dr. Ralph Bunche made himself their spokesman; James Baldwin spoke up for other and much more numerous Negroes. At a time when the newspapers made “Communist-inspired” the prescribed epithet for the demonstration, Baldwin condemned “the American assumption that the Negro is so contented with his lot here that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest.” And he told the readers of The New York Times—not at all accustomed to such thoughts—that a young American Negro today will not “settle for Jim Crow in Miami” when he can “feast at the welcome-table in Havana.”

  It is true, and it is significant, both for Baldwin’s hostile critics and for his friends, that when he has made his point about Miami and Havana he adds the words: “These are extremely unattractive facts …” Thus discreetly, and without loss of dignity, he intimates to his reader that he is not a Communist, and that—at the least—he would wish to be a loyal American. (In his earlier writings he uses “we” in speaking of Americans generally, both black and white. I have not noticed this pronoun, thus used, in his later work.) Such words are passwords, the minimum guarantee without which his voice could not be so widely heard; the fact that he can give, and has given, this password is what makes him distrusted by some, like Mr. Mayfield’s querist, among the Negro left. In a community whose “leaders” have so often turned into the tools of its oppressors, it is natural enough that people should worry about Mr. Baldwin, lest he too be “got at”; that there should be a sharp intake of breath every time he is heard from, or heard about, at a meeting organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Yet because Uncle Tom is an anti-communist, it does not follow that Mr. Baldwin, to be justified, must be a Communist, or pretend to be a Communist, or even sedulously refrain from letting it be known that he is not a Communist. He could not follow such lines without ceasing to be himself, without losing what one of his angrier critics, with perhaps unconscious felicity, called his “excruciating detachment.”

  Why should he write so much about homosexuals instead of the “so many other important things to concern Negro writers”? He writes, of course, about what is important to
him, not about what should interest “Negro writers” as a class, and he has denied that he belongs to such a class: “I am a writer. I am not a Negro writer.” In the same sense Mauriac denied being “a Catholic novelist,” gave scandal to Catholics by writing about sex and money; Yeats, although a good Irish nationalist, could not pretend that he found gerrymandering in County Fermanagh more interesting than sex and magic. Yet Mauriac remained a Catholic, Yeats an Irishman and Baldwin a Negro. When Baldwin writes about homosexuals he writes with a Negro’s sense of another “outlawry,” and also, it seems, with some sense of release at a transposition of values: escape into a world where the colour of a man’s skin is less important—in reality, not just in theory—than another attribute, in this case a particular sexual bent. It is not as simple as that—exploitation of black boys by white homosexuals is one of Baldwin’s themes—but in general, homosexuality, in Baldwin’s work as in Proust’s, is felt to provide an alternative set of hierarchies and values to those of the larger society. Proust felt torn by this; Baldwin is less torn because, by the nature of his situation, he cannot feel himself to be a part of the white, heterosexual Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture under which—not in which—he grew up.

  Even Baldwin’s harsher critics among American Negroes show some affection and admiration for him. The respected left-wing intellectual Negro quarterly, Freedomways, devotes some space to him regularly—many of my quotations are taken from its pages —and its contributors oscillate between rebuke and applause. If a reviewer finds Baldwin’s style “self-conscious and affected” and himself “disturbingly responsive to the Seducers,” Mr. Mayfield, in the same issue, more pertinently observes Baldwin’s “ability to capture in beautiful, passionate and perceptive prose the essence of Negro determination to live in the American house as a free man or, failing that, to burn the American house down.” But the most moving and I believe the most representative comment is the reply of a very militant American Negro, Mr. Sylvester Leaks, to Baldwin’s claim to be just “a writer”: