By: Aanya Mitra
Author Bio:
Aanya is final year English Literature student who has recently discovered a liking for the Life-Writing genre (shoutout to Simon Cooke from the English Literature department). In this review, she discusses how Baldwin leverages the memoir form to encapsulate the Black identity and voice, exploring the nuances that accompany the burden of representing an identity that seems to always be cascaded into literary margins.
THE REVIEW:
James Baldwin, a Black writer of fiction and non-fiction, has left us with a collection of essays that, to me, reads like an accidental love letter to his father and ancestors. Unapologetic, raw and emotionally charged, Baldwin's collection sheds light on the intergenerational impact of racism, evidencing just how everything in life is connected to race.
James' titular essay, Notes of a Native Son, is the author's attempt at deconstructing his identity which is quite clearly an amalgamation of his familial and ancestral lineage. He attempts to understand why his father was as intolerable as he was and comes to the conclusion that his father, like every black man, is burdened with the curse to experience whiteness. Effectively, Baldwin suggests his identity was already predestined for him at birth as his skin colour should condemn him to live the same life his father did, and his father before him. This 'whiteness' in question is synonymous with the racialised treatment prescribed to all black folk that has resulted in a genetically 'coded' bitterness, so to speak. Baldwin shares how ‘my father lived and died in intolerable bitterness and it frightened me… to realise that this bitterness now was mine’. The only way I can liken James' discussion of this bitterness is to compare it to a fatal disease, contracted through racism, and therefore hereditary to black people. Ironically, the most noticeable symptom is to live in the margins of society.
In his Autobiographical Notes, the author expresses a concern about the responsibility of (Black) representation. This preface, I should say, was written decades after Baldwin had completed his essay collection. Therefore, this section provides us with another layer of consciousness of a matured Baldwin who is directly talking to his readers. By situating his racial discourse in the form of the memoir, Baldwin illustrates and evidences how his experiences is prescribed by the broader socially and systemically induced culture of racist practice that dominated the lives of his father, and past ancestry. Baldwin views his writing as a mode of release, to simultaneously represent and break the cycle of this bitterness.
He ends this section by stating his hopes to be an honest man and a good writer. How does he achieve this? Well, to me, Baldwin's essays successfully inject Blackness into the White literary canon. Baldwin was not the first Black writer to do this, but the fact that he did ensures he won't be the last Black writer to do so either.
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