The
Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin
Click to Order via Amazon
by James Baldwin edited by Randall Kenan
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (August 24, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307378829
ISBN-13: 978-0307378828
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
An Essay from The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin
Every writer in the English language, I should imagine, has at some point
hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous achievement with a kind
of sick envy. In my most anti-English days I condemned him as a chauvinist
(“this England” indeed!) and because I felt it so bitterly anomalous that a
black man should be forced to deal with the English language at all—should be
forced to assault the English language in order to be able to speak—I condemned
him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression.
Stoop then, and wash.—How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
What I suddenly heard, for the first time, was manifold. It was the voice
of lonely, dedicated, deluded Cassius, whose life had never been real for me
before—I suddenly seemed to know what this moment meant to him. But beneath
and beyond that voice I also heard a note yet more rigorous and
impersonal—and contemporary: that “lofty scene,” in all its blood and
necessary folly, its blind and necessary pain, was thrown into a
perspective which has never left my mind. Just so, indeed, is the heedless
State overthrown by men, who, in order to overthrow it, have had to achieve
a desperate single-mindedness. And this single-mindedness, which we think of
(why?) as ennobling, also operates, and much more surely, to distort and
diminish a man—to distort and diminish us all, even, or perhaps especially,
those whose needs and whose energy made the overthrow of the State
inevitable, necessary, and just.
And the terrible thing about this play, for me—it is not necessarily my
favorite play, whatever that means, but it is the play which I first, so to
speak, discovered—is the tension it relentlessly sustains between individual
ambition, self- conscious, deluded, idealistic, or corrupt, and the blind,
mindless passion which drives the individual no less than it drives the mob.
“I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet...I am not Cinna the
conspirator”—that cry rings in my ears. And the mob’s response: “Tear him
for his bad verses!” And yet—though one howled with Cinna and felt his
terrible rise, at the hands of his countrymen, to death, it was impossible
to hate the mob. Or, worse than impossible, useless; for here we were, at
once howling and being torn to pieces, the only receptacles of evil and the
only receptacles of nobility to be found in all the universe. But the play
does not even suggest that we have the perception to know evil from good or
that such a distinction can ever be clear: “The evil that men do lives after
them; The good is oft interred with their bones . . .”
Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world—once one has begun
to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the
reason that no one is—some of the self- protective veils between oneself and
reality begin to fall away. It is probably of some significance, though we
cannot pursue it here, that my first real apprehension of Shakespeare came
when I was living in France, and thinking and speaking in French. The
necessity of mastering a foreign language forced me into a new relationship
to my own. (It was also in France, therefore, that I began to read the Bible
again.)
My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected
none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another
way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the language;
but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I
had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were
so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find
the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.
In support of this possibility, I had two mighty witnesses: my black
ancestors, who evolved the sorrow songs, the blues, and jazz, and created an
entirely new idiom in an overwhelmingly hostile place; and Shakespeare, who
was the last bawdy writer in the English language. What I began to
see—especially since, as I say, I was living and speaking in French—is that
it is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls
an experience. The structure of the French language told me something of the
French experience, and also something of the French expectations—which were
certainly not the American expectations, since the French daily and hourly
said things which the Americans could not say at all. (Not even in French.)
Similarly, the language with which I had grown up had certainly not been the
King’s English. An immense experience had forged this language; it had been
(and remains) one of the tools of a people’s survival, and it revealed
expectations which no white American could easily entertain. The authority
of this language was in its candor, its irony, its density, and its beat:
this was the authority of the language which produced me, and it was also
the authority of Shakespeare.
Again, I was listening very hard to jazz and hoping, one day, to translate
it into language, and Shakespeare’s bawdiness became very important to me,
since bawdiness was one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous,
loving, and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which
the body contains, which Americans have mostly lost, which I had experienced
only among Negroes, and of which I had then been taught to be ashamed.
My relationship, then, to the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as
nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light,
this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the
way a flower opens at morning, but more probably the way an atrophied muscle
begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw.
The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is
found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through
love—by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever
was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was
easier than ours, but I doubt it—no time can be easy if one is living
through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them,
and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private
streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he
trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly
bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer—to be part of a
people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see
not—I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we
must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is
responsible to them.
That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his
joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate
all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as
breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives
in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the
breath has left him, the people—all people!—who search in the rubble for a
sign or a witness will be able to find him there.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Related Links
Read an AALBC.com Review of the entire collection of essays
http://aalbc.com/reviews/cross_of_redemption.html
