Love, Labor, and Loss: The Trans-Atlantic Homelessness of James Baldwin

Abstract

How does an African-American writer experience Americanness? What does one do when one feels himself born an outcast in one’s own country and then discovers that that country is the only one he can regard as home? Despite—or perhaps because of—his extraordinary gifts, James Baldwin viewed himself as a stranger in America, and his sense of exclusion was threefold, arising not only from his blackness but also from his homosexuality and his identity as an intellectual. At the age of 24, fearing that his life in the United States might soon topple either into violence or a fatal self-contempt, Baldwin traveled to Paris, where he remained for many years. In a superficial sense, Baldwin’s transatlantic life afforded him two homes instead of one. Yet, as his writings confirm, Baldwin’s experiences outside the United States convinced him that he had no true spiritual home anywhere. He could not be truly, comfortably himself in either location. This essay discusses how Baldwin’s European sojourns served to confirm his Americanness — a confirmation he could regard only as bittersweet and tragic. Having observed White Americans both at home and abroad, Baldwin was able to reflect eloquently on the American need to regard itself as somehow exempt from the judgments that hang heavily over the rest of the world. He saw America’s desperate insistence on its own innocence as pervading the nation’s character, whether it was expressed in racial attitudes, foreign policy, or the complex repressions of sexual longing. And that need for exemption circled back to America’s distrust of serious thought and the fear that earnest intellectual labor would tear aside once and for all the mask and myth of American purity. The failure of America, he believed, was a failure of honesty compounded by an incapacity to love. Finding nothing outside of America in which to place his faith, Baldwin placed his profoundly reluctant confidence in the United States. Like Baldwin, we must place our reliance in sympathy, forgiveness, and a rediscovery of common ground. We must, in short, rediscover love, for we, too, have no other place to go.