James Baldwin by kalamu ya salaam
Mosaic #5 April 1999
James Baldwin voiced us — articulated black experiences with a searing intensity. Even if you could not read, once you heard Baldwin, you were convinced of the power of words. His ability to move air was such that it spoke to us, proclaiming what it meant to be flesh and black. He told us of the here and now, told of barbarians who feared life in others and those who truly lived. He spoke to their hatred of black people, telling us that their hatred was but a mask for the intense hatred they felt for themselves and the sorted, twisted mess they had made of their own lives.
The gritty texture of Baldwin’s voice testified to the realities of black life, the ups, the downs, the terrors, as well as the hard-worn tenderness found in our sometimes brief but frequently stolen moments of exquisite love. He was no romantic, but oh, how he loved. He loved us all and gave his all in the love of us.
It is easy to think of Baldwin as an Old Testament prophet, reigning down fire and brimstone; he was, after all, a professional evangelist as a teen. It is easy to think of Baldwin as a Shakespeare in and of Harlem; after all, his command of language has become legendary. But it is wrong to reference Baldwin solely from outside of black culture. Think of this black voice as a black-life force, as the sound of us, as the sound of living, as a drum—a drum, an insistent beating drum, whose rhythm was synchronous with our heartbeats.
The fullest appreciation of James Baldwin, the writer, is only understood once James Baldwin’s voice is heard. Once your heart is moved by the way this man moved words, you can understand that the power he brought, the fire he brought, was no mere mental exercise, that Baldwin was indeed an elemental force of nature. Baldwin was full of passion and the very firelight of life. To reduce him simply to books is to miss the music that this man made of words.
Thus, if you think you know James Baldwin, if you think you love our literature, and you have never heard him deliver the word, and you do not have his spoken word CD, then you don’t really know his breadth and depth.
Between September 19, 1986, and September 18, 1987, James Baldwin spent a year working on a spoken word CD with producers/composers/musicians David Linx and Pierre Van Dormael. Recorded in Brussels, France, and New York City. “A Lover’s Question” (Les Disques du Crepuscule, Austria) is a masterpiece of merging words with music, a precursor to what is now a popular art form.
The producers succeed in more than providing a sonic backdrop for the words; they actually composed orchestrations that both complemented and mirrored the intent and expression inherent in Baldwin’s delivery of his complex poems. The success is then on three levels: the poems are phat, the music is tight, and the musicians respond with an exhilarating verve that lets you know they, too, were giving their all, giving their love, and not simply going through the changes to get paid.
Aside from a brief musical introduction and an elegiac solo rendition of Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord,” on which Baldwin talk-sings the famous gospel composition, only three poems are on this CD. One poem, “The Art of Love,” features operatic. Vocalist Deborah Brown did it as an art song, an interlude between two poetic suites.
Two parts of “A Lover’s Question” continues in the vein of The Fire Next Time. Baldwin questions the citizens of his birth nation as to their desire to hate: “Why / have you allowed / yourself / to become so grimly / wicked?” and “No man can have a / harlot / for a lover / nor stay in bed forever / with a lie. / He must rise up / and face the morning / sky / and himself, in the / mirror / of his lover’s eye.” As Baldwin knew, true love is always honest, even though honesty is seldom an easy fact to live within a land where lies and commerce replace truth and reciprocity.
The concluding number is the three-part opus “Inventory / On Being 52,” and it is the introspective Baldwin fingering his wounds (some of them self-inflicted). He does not flinch as he cross-examines his own life and realizes the terrible costs of his mistakes, the terrible beauty of embracing both the terrors and joys of being human. Baldwin uses a stream-of-consciousness style to encourage us to live the good life, suggesting that we not simply march to the beat of a different drummer but be a different drummer.
Tap out the real rhythms of life with your every footstep in the dark, your every embrace of what you and others are. Reject the wisdom of materialism and accept the wisdom of the earth. Thus, Baldwin says, “Perhaps the stars will help, / or the water, / a stone may have / something to tell me, / and I owe a favor to a couple of old trees.”
”Inventory / On Being 52″ is a deep song Baldwin sings, but then, as he says, ”My father’s son / does not easily / surrender. / My mother’s son / pressed on.” Every young poet needs this old man’s CD in their collection, this compass of compassion, this example of the passionate heights the spoken word can attain. If you, as a poet, do not know “A Lover’s Question,” then you do not know the full history of your human heartbeat.