Jesmyn Ward’s Anthology of Race Builds on the Legacy of James Baldwin

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/books/review/fire-this-time-edited-by-jesmyn-ward.html

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THE FIRE THIS TIMEA New Generation Speaks About RaceEdited by Jesmyn WardIllustrated. 226 pp. Scribner. $25.

In James Baldwin’s day, they called it the “Negro Problem” — shorthand for racial tension, that unfortunate term publicized in Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 study “An American Dilemma.” The “Negro Problem” was a misnomer for what we might otherwise call “the white man’s burden”: the responsibility of those who benefit from structural white privilege to dismantle it in favor of racial equality for all. But as Baldwin told us in “The Fire Next Time,” it’s easier said than done. After all, whiteness and its trappings remain all too appealing.

“The danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity,” Baldwin wrote in the letter to his namesake nephew that begins his 1963 classic. “Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature.” Imagine that warning in the context of the volatile racial climate of the Obama era and the Trump presidential campaign, and you can see why Baldwin remains essential reading even today.

Baldwin, dead since 1987 and an expatriate for many years before that, remains a talisman in the midst of American racial chaos. We keep digging him up whenever there’s a crisis, laying eyes on his words for spiritual healing and affirmation. Even as someone who came to Baldwin’s work much later than most, I find that his thoughts are not only inescapable, but also seductive in their naked truth. It is a positive thing, then, that writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jesmyn Ward have sought to follow Baldwin’s lead as they translate race in America in their own works.

Ward, the author of the National Book Award-winning novel “Salvage the Bones” and the memoir “Men We Reaped,” sought out Baldwin’s words after the teenager Trayvon Martin was shot to death by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla., in 2012. As news outlets covered Zimmerman’s trial on second-degree murder and manslaughter charges, Ward eventually put aside the catharsis of Twitter for “The Fire Next Time” and Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” where she found the relief and comfort she truly needed. She also found inspiration there.

Ward writes of it in the introduction to “The Fire This Time,” a stirring anthology that takes more cues from Baldwin than just its title. Inspired by the chronological structure of the two sections of “The Fire Next Time,” Ward organizes the poems, columns, essays and other ruminations in this collection into three sections confronting the past, present and future of blackness in America. I say blackness more than race or racism; the anthology cannot avoid these last two uglier constructions, but the joy and pain of existing while black is what’s celebrated here. That is to the credit of Ward, and the writers (like Edwidge Danticat, Kiese Laymon and Isabel Wilkerson) whose works she arranges in this volume. Wrestling with her feelings about Zimmerman’s acquittal gave her the idea to “gather new voices in one place, in a lasting, physical form, and provide a forum for those writers to dissent, to call to account, to witness, to reckon.”

The first call to account, appropriate given the name of the volume, is for Baldwin himself. The journalist and essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, through the lens of her visit to Baldwin’s abandoned expatriate homestead in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, explores her past reluctance to revere him in her essay “The Weight.” Ghansah had once been inclined during her youth to view Baldwin as a patron saint for black writers who seek to chronicle black experiences in a mostly white media universe. But soon, Ghansah writes, “I quietly felt repelled by him — as if he were a home I had to leave to become my own.” It’s a healthy approach to take to heroes, and it’s the best way to plunge into this anthology. It seeks not to repeatedly dig up Baldwin’s legacy, but to provide a model for contextualizing and building upon it so that, perhaps, the man can finally rest in peace. This volume has found a new generation to carry the weight, hence the title of Ghansah’s contribution.

The essay appeared earlier online, and about half of the work in this volume has also been previously published, like Wendy S. Walters’s ponderous “Lonely in America” and Carol Anderson’s powerful “White Rage.” Yet what matters is not the amount of original material, but the book’s arrangement. As she describes biting into the bitter oranges from the tree on Baldwin’s property and writes about his “black death” at 63, Ghansah puts his humanity at the forefront. That’s a common theme throughout an anthology that deals with everything from the Charleston church shooting to OutKast’s influence to Rachel Dolezal’s chicanery, all through a black lens that is still too rare in literature and elsewhere. The pain of black life (and death) often inspires flowery verse, but every poem and essay in Ward’s volume remains grounded in a harsh reality that our nation, at large, refuses fully to confront. In the spirit of Baldwin’s centering of black experiences, they force everyone to see things our way.