Erica Hunt: Baldwin wrote from the inside out, that is, from the core of his thinking/feeling/being, in a prose so supple as to limn complexity with furious precision. When he says, he “felt […] a physical sensation, a click at the nape of my neck as though some interior string connecting my head to my body had been cut. I began to walk,” Baldwin takes the reader with him from the visceral to a dissociative experience that sculpts him, his black being-in-the-world, into frozen rage, scripted, manacled, airless, loveless, locked inside unending injustice. How terrifying, and as Baldwin observes, how commonplace for black people.
Baldwin’s thirst was to undo this trap and he used two abstract nouns “love” and “justice” as the measure of his relationships—family, friendships, literary and political—as the core from which he mined meaning below obvious meaning, with all the implications to map a way to “free.”
Cornel West, who must have drawn inspiration from Baldwin, gave us this syllogism to ponder: “Justice is what love looks like in public” meant to point with Baldwin’s unswerving sense of direction, as terms we must contend with to navigate a path to “free.” To get there, it is implied, we have to bring about a society that comes clean about its origins, its plunder and demanded sacrifice, and that gets its past (and present) right in order to live into a democracy built on equity and fairness.
[…] Despite the difficulty of facing the unlovable seamed into past and present, artistic intelligence, approach, and free play gives writers and artists indispensable tools. The works we create now are charettes for an imagined or preferred future, utopian, dystopian, figurative or concrete.
Art and writing are sites to rehearse the open predicate of choice—and the work we do now, speculative and specific, demolishes the confining brackets of a zero sum game, the presumptive culture of absolute winners and losers. There is no line of demarcation, really, that separates us from another’s pain, is a paraphrase of what Baldwin wrote and would say for us again. Love is, as he insisted, “a growing up.” When I reread Baldwin, at his best, I am undone. And I find the edge again, where the language gives. More here.