The Fire Next Time
I don’t know James Baldwin, other than as an eloquent voice and an American writer.
I picked this book purely for something short and different, from a respected writer.
But it is instantly recognisable as a precursor. I can see now that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me followed this book. Perhaps also Reni Eddo-Lodge.
Partly in format, but also in how these books speak to white people about race.
They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men
To be trapped in a history which you do not understand feels like a curse of mythic and ancient proportions.
I find it difficult not to admire the unreasonable magnanimity of believing your oppressors can be better, that they are tragic in their mistake, and that they lose something of themselves as they take from others. He says:
Whoever debases others is debasing himself
There’s an unflinching humanism in the writing. He asks for a coming together, but with those who might want to kill you. I wonder what America might have been if more solidarity had been extended on the basis of common means and not common race. As he puts it, the liberation of one is the liberation of the other.
You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.
Baldwin writes beautifully and well.
After "The Fire Next Time" I read: Slow Gods
Before "The Fire Next Time" I read: The Penelopiad