M. Abduh
“I left to prevent myself from killing a man.”–Simeon Brown, The Stone Face.
We arrived in Cairo at midnight. The airport was old but not as ancient as I had imagined. A sign on the wall near passport control read, The penalty for possession or trafficking of drugs is death, which set me to worry about the Benadryl in my backpack. I left America—no, I fled America—with one suitcase & a few hundred dollars. At baggage claim, I watched a hundred suitcases circle the carousel—not one of them mine. The airline had lost my luggage. I thought of Pryor’s joke about his trip abroad: “People in Africa f**k over your luggage just like people in New York.” So, I had to make do with those few hundred dollars & the contents of my carry-on bag: toiletries, cassette tapes, a dozen leather-bound notebooks, & Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. It was an old copy, worn-down, dog-eared, & pages falling from the fold. But Baldwin’s stare from the cover remained as big-eyed as the day I borrowed it from the library. The book helped shape me as a writer, a citizen, and now, an expatriate. His words firmed up my back and strengthened my resolve to go. “When I left this country in 1948,” Baldwin said, “I left this country for one reason only. I didn’t care where I went. I might have gone to Hong Kong. I might have gone to Timbuktu. I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with $40 in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than had happened to me here.” The hourly killings, beatings, jailings, and daily degradation had happened. While working in New Jersey, Baldwin went to a restaurant determined to be served, knowing he would not be. (This was Trenton, not the Jim Crow South. But as Malcolm X put it, “If you’re south of the Canadian border, you’re South.”) When the white waitress refused to take his order, something in him “snapped.” He reached for a pitcher of water to throw at her. It was the first time he ever really wanted to hurt someone. He left because if he stayed, either he or someone else was going to die. My circumstances were not as dire. At least, that’s what I thought then.
In truth, Baldwin’s America of 1948 was but a stone’s throw from mine. We had just somehow survived the crack epidemic, Yusef Hawkins, & the LA uprising. Compounded by my own tragedies, I might have gone to Beijing or Dakkar. I ended up on the outskirts of Cairo. Amiri Baraka said, “Jimmy Baldwin went to France to write. He tried to go somewhere where he was secluded & removed. More American artists need to be able to see the rest of the world as well as participate in the social development of the United States because it broadens their perspective.” Baraka is half-right. Simply traveling abroad does not create the seclusion & removal a writer needs. Wherever you go, there you are. & there was Baldwin haunting bars & cafes & writing very little. Paris proved difficult to work, so Baldwin’s partner Lucien Happersberger suggested they move to Leukerbad, an isolated village in the Swiss Alps. There, finally, he found the time & space he needed to finish his debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. He was perhaps the first black person to set foot in that retreat, where children shouted “Nigger! nigger!” at Baldwin and rubbed his skin, expecting the black to come off. In my village, no one yelled, “Nigger,” at least not to my face. The children, however, yelled, “Hello! What’s your name?” every time they saw me, and it soon became clear their tone was mocking, not welcoming. They did not let me forget I’m an American.
I can identify with Baldwin’s shock upon entering Leukerbad. With my few words of Arabic, I settled into what one would call a rooming house, which was ancient. I could have charged tourists & told them a child Pharaoh was buried there. Yet a sense of pride washed over me. I was an expatriate writer following in Jimmy’s footsteps. It was like the opening paragraph of “Equal in Paris,” where he describes the “airless, humid” establishments with “weak light” and “creaking stairs.” He suffered the “stone-cold halls” of Paris, while I dealt with sweaty walls & water bugs the size of medjool dates. Somehow, amidst it all, I wrote. I did not produce a Go Tell It on the Mountain, but I composed a good clip of poems, vignettes, short lyric narratives. By & by, I noticed a heaviness weighing down my work—a profound sense of loneliness that I also found in Baldwin’s writing. He battled loneliness & depression abroad (even attempting suicide in Paris by overdosing on sleeping pills). But just as he found some solace in his work, I continued to throw myself into those notebooks. I traveled the country, ate koshari and falafel, and read Notes.
Existential loneliness is a major theme in Baldwin’s second novel, Another Country. He captures this in the character Vivaldo:
He had often thought of his loneliness, for example, as a condition which testified to his superiority. But people who were not superior were, nevertheless, extremely lonely—& unable to break out of their solitude precisely because they had no equipment with which to enter it. His own loneliness, magnified so many million times, made the night air colder.
Perhaps this is why he left Paris for Istanbul, accepting an invitation from his friend, Turkish actor Engin Cezzar. He was searching for new land, for warmer nights. Cezzar said Baldwin connected to something ancient in Turkey & felt “closer to his African roots.” This partly prompted his later travels through West Africa: Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and Ghana, countries he described as “electrical.” However, he sensed a “language barrier.” Some writers and poets worked in French, but with the countless tongues in those townships and villages, he feared a great poet would remain unknown to the “outside world.” This is especially insightful. I recall debating a fellow MFA student in one of our countless arguments about the canon. “How can you seriously argue Shakespeare is the greatest writer to walk the earth?” I said. “Have you read the Mua’llaqat of the Bedouin Arabs? Du Fu’s verses in the Chinese?” The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I tried to explain. The language barrier Baldwin described is historic & global. It is the suckling child of White Supremacy, “the most successful conspiracy in the history of the world.” That poor grad student argued that oral traditions are forever inferior to the written word, unless, of course, the tradition is Greek and Western, like Homer’s The Iliad. But in North Africa, I was free of all that. Free from the debates. Free to walk to the neighboring village’s outdoor market and haggle with merchants over the price of plums, cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions. Free to write in my notebooks, to mark up my marked-up copy of Notes. But I was not free from longing for friends, family, and familiar faces. The heaviness, which I finally recognized as homesickness, was back. But homesick for what? Baldwin said,
In the years in Paris, I had never been homesick for anything American. Neither waffles, ice cream, hotdogs, baseball, majorettes, movies, nor the Empire State Building, nor Coney Island, nor the Statue of Liberty, nor the Daily News, nor Times Square, but I missed my brothers & sisters & my mother. They made a difference. I missed Harlem Sunday mornings…I missed, in short, my connections.
He also felt a certain guilt or survivor’s remorse, & after reading about some other American tragedy, he resolved to return. “I could simply no longer sit around Paris discussing the Algerian & the Black American problem. Everybody else was paying their dues, & it was time I went home & paid mine.” Ironically, what drove him from the country dragged him back, what Malcolm called a “vicious cycle.”
My return, like my departure, was far less noble. Someone in the rooming house stole what little money I had left, & this forced me to make the painful decision to return stateside. But I must have reread Notes of a Native Son two or three times that year, & in the end, Baldwin taught me what it means to be a poet, a repatriate, & a witness: to stay alive & work, to be an honest man and a good writer.