The Impact of Baldwin’s Artistry on Artists and Writers

A discussion exploring James Baldwin's impact on artists and writers chaired by Douglas Field. The video includes presentations from artist Topher Campbell — founder of rukus! Federation archive — and artist Lydia Julien, who works as an archivist at Hackney archives. It features contributions from writer and photographer Johny Pitts and writer, scholar and literary activist, Kadija George Sesay.

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DF: Good morning everybody and welcome back or welcome if this is the first time that you’re here. My name’s Douglas Field, I’m one of the organisers of this gathering. We’re going to go straight in. We’ve had a little bit of time for people to shake off hangovers and broken-down buses, broken down planes, fire, you know, it’s been quite dramatic.

So just a couple of very brief details. If there is a fire, which I hope there won’t be, exits are there and there. Lunch will be provided for you. If you have any allergies, then let one of us know but everything is listed, the ingredients. The event is being filmed. If you don’t wish to be filmed, then if you could let one of us know, they can put a sticker, we need to indicate that you don’t wish to be.

The microphone…this is a, kind of, fancy setup where it has this [recording cuts out] any rustling, thank you very much Kennetta for illustrating that.

K: I’m doing a demonstration to help you.

DF: So, it’s too clever for its own good, you know. So, if you can be aware of that, that would be great.

So, I’m delighted to welcome our speakers today on this session, which is James Baldwin, which is The Impact of Baldwin’s Artistry on Artists and Writers. Which is, you know, a really strong theme I think which we’ve picked up on yesterday as well. So the beginning, the order of speakers. What we’re going to do is we’re going to have…there are two presentations and then we’re going to have two conversations and then we’ll have questions at the end.

So, to begin with, Topher who’s there in the, you know, remarkable hoodie. Topher is an artist and filmmaker whose practice is dynamic, collaborative, interactive and disruptive. He’s dedicated his life to reframing dominant narratives to provoke new paradigms of thought inspired by Black queer aesthetics. And there are longer bios available, so you can read more about [recording cuts out].

And then I’m going to go on to Lydia here. Lydia Julien’s artistic practice is gathered around expanded autobiographical narratives around race, restoration, work, labour and culture with participatory or collaborative interaction. Working as the Engagement and Outreach Officer and Senior Archives Officer at the London Borough of Hackney, she’s passionate about preserving, documenting and building a community cultural heritage. So really [recording cuts].

And then we are on to Johny Pitts, to my left. Johny is a self-taught artist who works with words and images. He’s the author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe 2019, which is on sale through the other room with wonderful Beacon Books, as are other books. So please do, you know, burn Kindles, destroy Amazon, buy from Beacon Books, which is their new slogan I think now. But please do support the wonderful selection of books there.

Johny’s work’s been translated, this book, Afropean, into nine languages, award-winning book. And Johny’s also, as I’m sure many of you are aware, is a well-known photographer who’s…and his work, his writing and photograph has appeared in The Guardian, New York Times, British Journal of Photography, Condé Nast amongst others.

So also, we’ll get onto this but Johny might be one of the few people here who met Baldwin. So, it’s a little tease that we’ll get onto later on. But you might be thinking, you know, he looks quite [voices overlap] [recording breaks] said I met him, you would have been, like, yeah, you probably did. But I was 13 when Baldwin died but [recording cuts] clarify things, so it could have happened.

And last but by no means last, Kadija George Sesay who’s a scholar, activist, an editor and co-editor of this, a wonderful book which we’ll be talking about, Encounters with James Baldwin, a rich and wonderful publication which is also on sale from Beacon Books.

So, without further ado, Topher, the floor is yours. And then we’ll carry on with the presentation and questions after.

T: Good morning everybody, hi. I’m going to [recording cuts] press buttons as I go along, so bear with me. I’ve literally just got the system. I’m going to speak for about 10 minutes I've been told. Hopefully it won’t be longer than that so I don’t hog all the time.

And yeah, I, kind of, had a…I’m sure everybody did this when they were invited how do you, kind of, think about how one enters into this conversation really. And I, kind of, think that the thing that I come in is very much as an artist and creative lens and also as a queer man of colour, a Black man particularly in this day and age. And so, like, I wanted to just bring in that, kind of, artistic sensibility in terms of my meditation on the influence of Baldwin on artists and on myself particularly. So I’ve called this…I haven’t put the title up here but I’ve called this Gurrrrl, Yes Me Love which is, kind of, like a way of imbuing both this androgenous spirit, this queer spirit of reading, of showing up, and of joy.

And so, as an artist, it’s my job to deal with the imagination, so everything I’m going to be talking about [recording cuts out] the sort of things that people don’t want to do, we’re just doing this, particularly from an academic point of view, I’m going to project because the artist is all about projection and the conjuring up of things not seen. And Baldwin is somebody who I think reflects the first template of a truly revolutionary Black queer artist and who has left artists like myself with, kind of, a way of operating in the world from a Black queer perspective. And that, kind of, develops very much in terms of the way that he represents himself in different forms in a polymathic way.

I feel that, you know, if I was, like, born in the 1920s, I’d be hanging out in Harlem with him. I was…like Baldwin, grew up as a poor Black child and I also was a lay preacher at 15, 16 years of age. So, I would be looking at him, because he was a preacher’s son, at the front pulpit and I’d be eyeing him up. And he’d be very different in his persona. He’d be very…slightly camp, he’d be smaller than me. And, you know, we’d probably have got it together, you know what I’m saying, we would have hung out.

So, there are a lot of parallels I feel with Baldwin. Him being a preacher has obviously…has imbued a huge amount of the ways in which he has, kind of, intervened as a narrator, but also in the way that he writes. But he also knew that he was different, and he knew that he had to negotiate his difference physically in a way that was probably very, very…had lots of…you know, the stakes were quite high for him in some ways. Particularly because he had to negotiate the twin pillars of racism and homophobia, which can conspire to force those of us who find ourselves in that position into areas of self-destruction or violence or exploitation towards ourselves and others.

We don’t jump out of the womb as artists and we don’t just stand up and run fully formed as writers, painters, filmmakers or sculptors, we discover this through how we play, how we interact with others, how we fuck. And Baldwin, as it’s already been mentioned There be dragons [sic]. And Baldwin was working out his place in the world in relation to how he himself was acted upon in the world. These men looked like cops, football players, soldiers, sailors, marines or bank person, admin, boxers, construction workers. They had wives, mistresses and children.

I sometimes saw them in other settings, as it were, in the daytime. Sometimes they spoke to me, sometimes not. But anguish has many days and styles. If they found me when they were alone, they spoke to me very differently, frightening me, I must say, into a stunned and speechless paralysis. But when they were alone, they spoke very gently and wanted me to take them home and make love. Speaking to and testifying to the ways in which queer men particularly or men who had sex with men had to live in the shadows, had to, kind of, negotiate the corners, the bits in between. And he made it very much aware that he was a target for those men. And that really made him think very much about the kind of choices he had.

And I thought about…in terms of art making, I thought about this work by Shirley Clarke, A Portrait of Jason. I think Jason’s probably contemporary five, 10 years of Baldwin. And I think about how Jason had to show up as a queer Black man and how his choice was to be a performative, kind of, entertaining guest in high society New York. And he himself became, you know, dejected and drunk and an alcoholic and had to negotiate his way. I think Baldwin, you know, knew that he was going to, sort of, find himself in this kind of position so he chose to leave.

And I’m just, sort of…this was me around sometime in the ‘80s. And I, kind of, feel very much in the same way. I felt that I was also a young Black queer whose physicality was one which invited being acted upon and had to make certain choices about how I moved through the world, particularly as I looked like that.

And I felt…I feel that Baldwin and I would have had a lot of…a lot to say. And after we would have got out of each other’s bed, whichever bed we wanted to choose to be in, he would have hot-footed it to Harlem. And I would have wondered about how he escaped and how he got out and he got away. Because I knew that he had something…I would have known he had something very special to offer and he would know that himself. And he'd know that he had to get out, otherwise it was death and destruction. And that’s all.

So, it was really a, kind of, very limited bandwidth, particularly in terms of Black masculinity as well because, you know, the idea of we have all this language now of masculine presenting, feminine presenting that kind of, both box us in and create a way in which the world operates on us, particularly Black men. And the idea that we are somehow hypersexual, we are naturally athletic, we’re naturally this, we’re naturally that in relation to the way that we move through the world.

And I think Baldwin didn’t have the language for that but he, kind of, knew that he sat within this…he sat within a more disruptive space around his own masculinity in terms of those definitions because he could see the hiding that those men had and he could see the fact that, from the preaching and all the, sort of, stuff that he had in relation to his family and the enslaved, kind of, heritage, he knew that those two things were traps. So, he had to get out. And this notion of getting out was very, very important to him in terms of his [recording cuts out]. And I think that’s something that adds to him being very much a template for me as an artist and for many other people.

So, he hot-footed to Harlem. This is obviously a depiction of Harlem by Isaac Julien in Looking for Langston, which, kind of, predates Baldwin obviously. What I love about Baldwin also because he, kind of, knew his legacy in some ways, he would have known of Langston, obviously he wrote in reference to slaying bigger icons like Richard Wright, we heard of that. So, he knew that he was writing within a tradition of Black African American writing, and he knew that he had a place that he wanted to take in that, sort of, tradition. But Harlem, basically going down to the village as well after that and finding, sort of, a milieu of artist and jazz musicians and drug addicts and people who had more, sort of, you know, a sense of adventure and a sense of frustration, a sense of seeking, enabled him to also think about how he might escape the country as well.

I was very interested in what happened when he got to Paris. And also, we talk a lot about Go Tell It on the Mountain, the first novel and [recording cuts out] but I think Another Country was a very interesting novel because it’s the one in which Richard Wright commented after reading it. And that’s what Baldwin was telling white Americans is, allow Negros to sleep with your daughters or we homos will sleep with you. And it was Ralph Ellison who said this. And I think what he was thinking about was a very, kind of, binary idea of sexuality. Because Baldwin was presenting sexuality in a very unapologetic, non-hierarchical way and more in the context of desire, the idea that we all desire somebody and that that desire should be a free desire. And he couldn’t do that while he was in America, he had to do that while he was in Paris in some ways.

And the homophobia basically that Ralph Ellison represented and a lot of Black culture, Black literati culture it represented was something he had to, sort of, liberate himself from. And it wasn’t so much that he was declaring his own sexuality, and we’ve had conversations about that while we’ve been here, it was more that he was using sexuality as a territory for the discovery of freedom and the freedom of expression. And the idea that the category isn’t important but we should recognise the truth of our desire and that in doing so, that is itself a liberation.

And I think that’s something that positions him very much in terms of his sexuality, his desire for same sex or opposite sex but also offers and invites us into the conversation about what true liberation is. And I think that’s very interesting in terms of how he was portrayed…how he’s portrayed sex. And the idea of what you do as an artist in terms of your audacity.

And that’s why I think he’s very interesting for us as queer people but also for us as artists is that in doing…in writing about sex in such an upfront way, and all kinds of sex, sex with…sex that you pay for, sex that you accidentally stumble into, sex that borders on abuse, he was, kind of, having a conversation about things which were very much taboo. And I think that is something that…that audacity is something that I really, really relate to.

Because audacity is not easy. Because when you wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth and you put your clothes on and you go…you know, you go about your business, it takes…there’s an intention you need in order to, kind of, bring certain things into the world. And I think that Baldwin, through his work, shows us a template of what that might be and how that might come about.

There’s something about his exploration, I’m just…it was interesting, I want to share about Essex Hemphill…we talked about Essex Hemphill, who was a writer in…an African American writer who succumbed to the AIDS complications before his death. The poster on the left is him doing a gig in North London. He was also a lover of Ajamu X and Dennis Carney. And he’s probably one of the first writers to, sort of, publicly engage with the lyricism that Baldwin allowed writers to work within. But also, I just wanted to show what his face was like because he was [recording cuts out] he existed and what he was like. The fact that he followed in Baldwin’s footsteps by coming here and also going to the continent as well.

And obviously we have work like Moonlight which was Tarell McCraney’s work, which was a chorial poem originally, with this notion of telling it through the lyricism, was very something that Baldwin, kind of, really embodied and gave us artists a lot of permission to do. And he was probably one of the first people to do it so loudly, although we can talk about Langston Hughes, we can talk about Richard Wright, I’m not denying those kind of histories. And we can also talk about women, we can talk Alice Walker, we can talk about Audre Lorde, in terms of essay writing, we can talk about Chinua Achebe in terms of the politics. But the point is that Baldwin created a template for a lot of this work, that’s what I’m…

So, you have the sexuality, this is a still from If Beale Street Could Talk. Because also, I think it’s important that…and this is the first novel, as you probably know, where he centred Black women as the cornerstone of the community. So again, I’m not necessarily judging this notion of whether Baldwin was a misogynist or whether he was a feminist, I’m just demonstrating by the range of the work that he had…that he gave us, that he has…he was able to embrace these different spaces of the imagination these different spaces of bold and audacious imagination at a time when people like Black women were not front foreground or centred in novels in any way.

And I don’t know if you know about this. This was something that was an exercise called ‘Giovanni’s Room’ Revisited. It was an article by Hilton Als, the photographs are by John Edmonds and styling by Carlos Nazario. And this was this notion of Giovanni being revisited but David being Black was something that was, kind of, part of the argument of this essay that they worked together on.

I’m, kind of, very interested in this because some people talk about Giovanni’s Room in relation to race, why did he choose white protagonist as opposed to Black protagonist? There’s lots of conversations, some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t know. But I think my take is that he was, kind of, demonstrating the freedom of the artist. And the freedom of the artist is fundamental really.

And that’s what I take away from it, that actually we can do…this question of, you know, what is Black art, what is white art, what is queer art becomes, kind of, part of this whole conversation about Giovanni’s Room. And I think that, sort of, audacity, that freedom of the artist is quite important. And I think it’s something, that’s the way I, sort of, read it. And like people, many queer or LGBT people, Giovanni’s Room was probably the first novel that they discovered around Baldwin, I discovered it around 18. And I didn’t know it was…I didn’t know who James Baldwin was at the time, [recording cuts out] a really good, old novel by some white geezer. And then discovered Baldwin out of that. But there was something about the lyricism that taught me something different about it.

And then I just wanted…I was going back to the Paris thing, the liberation and freedom. Baldwin…this is a film by…recently by Yashaddai Owens and it’s called Jimmy. And it’s literally hot off the press last year. And it’s…what I love about it is it explores Baldwin as a discoverer of himself, as somebody who was…who went to another land and found out that there was a different way of being.

It's very difficult for us in this day and age to understand what that might mean for an African American and…because we can travel, we can get on planes, we can go places much more freely. But travelling itself was, you know, a huge statement of…a huge, kind of, disruptive statement. Although he was obviously following in the tradition of many other African Americans. And he had the privilege of being an African American as opposed to someone perhaps from my background [recording cuts out] descended from British colonialism, he had a, sort of, privilege. But then that privilege gave him a lot of freedom. And what I was very interested in, in terms of his Paris and perhaps his Turkey life was just how that, kind of…how he was able, through that freedom, to constantly find truth in the writing that he decided to commit himself to.

I guess the last thing I want to say is I think that Jimmy had a queer consciousness as an artist and he had to find a way to live truthfully through both his semi-autobiographical work and he had to allow that consciousness to motivate his art. I think that’s why Giovanni [recording cuts out].

And as Kevin Quinn said, what can queer consciousness teach us? I think as artists, it’s tough to work with fearlessness. I think Jimmy shows us it’s possible, he’s given us a template for standing up as ourselves. I think truth was something that he was very much interested in and, you know, the unexamined life wasn’t worth living and the idea that to be truthful through the imagination, through artistic creativity is something. But I also think there’s something even more some of my work was influenced by filmmakers like Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien but also in terms of the lyricism of Baldwin. Also…I also did a work for BBC Drama called Facing Leicester Square, which is based on No Name in the Street and the idea of being seen and not seen [recording cuts out].

But there’s also…I also did this piece called Quantum Baldwin, which is this other thing about Baldwin, how to see him as an artist. And it’s, kind of, an idea that’s introduced by…I’m sure some people have read it, it’s by Michelle Wright in Physics of Blackness. And this notion that we look at…instead of looking at Baldwin as somebody who completes an idea, look at Baldwin in terms of the energy that he brings into the world. And when we talk about energy, we can talk about the quantum, physics.

That’s a whole, kind of, you know…I’m not a physicist but to be…to simplify it. The quantum is an ever-shifting space where energy is expressed through particles, as a, kind of, directness, like a bright light. So, you’ve got this political writing, this, kind of, forcefulness, this absoluteness, this committed energy that Baldwin had. But also, it’s a wave, it can be expressed through waves energy, which is, kind of, a breath, literally a wave, which is like wind and water. So, you have this other sort of energy which is more, kind of, open and discursive and soothing and loving at the same time. And that’s the point. So, these energies, this quantum, notion, kind of, exists at the same time.

And with this piece of work, I was making…I made a, sort of, big theatre installation work and it was really about how the quantum in Baldwin, the queer consciousness is expressed through love. Because love is the opening up. It is the place of full imagination, the place of full joy, the place of full pain, the face…place of full learning and the place of full truth. And that we’re needing to love is the quantum and then we become somebody who can somehow discover ourselves more truthfully.

And that’s a, kind of, legacy really. I think it’s also about him not wanting to be pinned down. We talked about it a little bit yesterday, the idea that he is this thing, he’s that thing. I see him more as, sort of, a legacy that allows us to be queer artists, to be artists who have a methodology for moving in the world.

That’s it.

[applause].

DF: Thank you, Topher, that was wonderful. Lydia. Are you okay to start? Beautiful. Sorry.

LJ: Hi everybody, it’s lovely to see you here today. So, my name is Lydia Julien and I actually wear quite a few hats. As Douglas said, I work as an Engagement and Outreach officer for Hackney Libraries but also a senior Archives Officer for Hackney Archives. And I’m also in training to be an art psychotherapist. And I will say a little bit later how all of these connections, sort of, come together. And I also run an annual summit called the Global Kinship Conference, which is about community connection and, kind of, create an intentional space for reflection, repair and restoration.

And actually, I’m really glad I followed you, Topher because a lot of what I’m about to talk about really, sort of, dips into that in terms of that negotiation into spaces and trying to find yourself in spaces and how difficult and tricky that can be and maybe having to relocate yourself elsewhere or finding spaces where you can embody your full subjectivity.

So, I was actually looking over so much of James [recording cuts out] and I went backwards and forwards between pieces I had read [recording cuts out] years and new pieces that I’d, sort of, found in his archive in the New York Public Library, selecting things that I wanted to, sort of, see virtually and read. And I actually found it really difficult and I wanted to, sort of, narrow it down to a few pieces. But there’s a whole landscape of his work and I thought, okay, how do I actually tie it in? And some things that I might say in terms of his work might be untethered but I think in my mind, in my body, it is all connected.

And I was, sort of, interested in short pieces of writing that really spoke to me, like “In Search of a Majority”, “The Artist’s Struggle for Identity”. And I watched a lot of his interviews and in some respects, it was actually quite painful in that it always seemed that he had to engage in this, kind of, combat, this friction. And to simply have a space of speaking thoughts and activism in this resistance, he was incredibly agile. And it made me think about my own navigation in the world as a Black body, as a Black woman. And in that navigation and in that, sort of, constant transaction and also that friction, that so often one encounters in just a myriad of spaces, the donning and casting off of armour.

So, I wanted to have a conversation with him. I wanted to have a conversation with James Baldwin. And in some ways, I did. Sitting, we were sitting together, we were talking in this reimagining. And, of course, it would be within a library space because I know that would be comfortable for us. And for me and James, as I think of him, I knew it would be a comfortable, enlivening and enriching space. And so, in this reimagining, we got to discuss and reflect on how we both move through the world, its similarities and differences.

So, in the short piece that he wrote in “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist”, Baldwin possets, “There is a division of labour in the world as I see it. And that people have had quite enough reality to bear, simply getting through their lives, raising children, dealing with the eternal conundrums of births, taxes and death. They do not do this with all of the wisdom, foresight or charity one might wish. Nevertheless, this is what they are always doing. And it is what the writer is always describing”.

And so, I sit in this place of reimaging with…you know, in my world with evidence, archival history and archival material. And we can look and think about James Baldwin in this photo here. The circumstances. How he came to be, this group of people in front of the CLR James Library with staff and some visitors. And I know a little bit about the traces of the memory of the people that were there, the circumstances, the condition that gave birth to this really wonderful and fertile photo. And I went back to what was actually happening in 1985.

So, this library, it’s located on Dalston Lane, was renamed the CLR James Library to coincide with Hackney’s Council Antiracist Year. And while that renaming of the library after CLR James can be seen as…it was part of, like, a broader initiative in the 1980s, many London councils to incorporate Black history into its institutions. And the renaming also resulted from calls within the local community itself.

So, there was an incredible amount happening in Hackney, a huge amount of activism, protest, resistance and calls for justice. Justice and defence against police violence, harassment and brutality. And Baldwin knew that sense of injustice and being there with the community fighting, thinking and that call for activism and being together.

And actually, I often say this in lots of talks and when hosting events and things. Sometimes the act of merely getting together, being with a group of people, debating, discussing, reflection, speaking, engagement, it’s one of the greatest forms of activism by simply being in the room together. Because even that can be and has been surveilled and looked on with suspicion.

Meeting together can be dangerous. So, when Baldwin was walking down the streets in Hackney, maybe by bus, coming out of a car, coming to the library, which has now moved and located down the road, just going in, talking to library users, to staff. And one of the people there is MacKenzie Frank. And he was Hackney’s first African heritage community librarian. And it was an act of intent and it was in order to change and amplify the library collections in the borough to reflect the demographic of the community because it wasn’t there before and there was a need and demand for it and continues to be.

And so, I turn back to this specific piece of writing, “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist”. And what I take from it and who it speaks to, it speaks to myself as an artist. It speaks to another part of myself as an ordinary person going about finding spaces where I feel comfortable and able to be. Where one isn’t surveilled, one isn’t under suspicion. A place where you can get not just what you need, it’s a space for enrichment. So even if that enrichment is sitting in a warm and comfortable space with other people, alongside other people, in sight of other people, you don’t necessarily have to directly engage with them but there’s an exchange that’s going on physically and emotionally and non-verbally.

And so, as you can, sort of, deduce, I always talk about libraries and the library and I always talk about the library space. And like Baldwin, I’ve been going into library spaces for many, many years. And I was actually taken by my school, I was quite young on there. And it’s been a real lifelong, kind of, love affair. I think because there’s no other space in society where you can just walk in and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a transaction like a pub or a shop, for instance.

I’ve got, like, a little quote about what James Baldwin said about libraries.

“I went at least three or four times a week and I read everything there. I mean every single book in that library. In some blind and instinctive way, I knew what was happening in those books was also happening around me. And I was trying to make a connection between those books and the life I saw and the life I lived”.

I think it’s a space that you can simply walk in with your friends, your family, yourself and people. So that space of transformation. Talking about like an instant transformation. I’ve been going to libraries for years and I feel transformed by merely sitting there, the books and the collections that I’ve encountered and I’ve read and was able to acquire there. Because at various points I didn’t have the money to buy all of the books that I wanted. I can buy a few of them now [voices overlap] the space, so to have all those books, but I wanted to be able to access them. And the reading of people and the encapsulation of it.

So, in that encapsulation, that room, we talk, James Baldwin and I. And we’re walking through those spaces as an artist and writer, writer and artist. A hive of activity, sanctuary and learning. Thriving across this landscape of Hackney and beyond. Spaces and places of coming together, innovation and the excitement or possibility is embedded within. And I think he would find it immensely comfortable. I can just imagine him, sort of, smiling, sitting and I can imagine him thinking, doing his writing and, kind of, reflecting on the slowness but also, paradoxically, the speed of change.

Over the years…I’m going to close now. All that I was reading, I was struck by one thing. His works are deeply relevant, critical today. So glad that we’re here in this space because we’re not looking at it in the past, we’re not just looking at 1963, ’64, ’85, ’83 where I’ve got some of these texts and resources that I was looking at. Just I was struck that his words have this constant agency and his words have meaning today, now are critical and have acute relevance.

And I just want to close with a quote from him.

“I feel very strongly that this amorphous people are” – and I…we’re included in that – “are in desperate search of something which will help them re-establish their connection with themselves. This can only begin to happen as truth begins to be told. We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here. A metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our [recording cuts out]. The mass culture in the meantime can only reflect our chaos. And perhaps we had better remember that this chaos contains life and of great transforming energy”.

Thank you.

[applause]

DF: Thank you.

DF: Beautiful, poetic

DF: Thank you. We’re going to move on to talk to Johny, to my left here and then to Kadija. And then we’ll have some questions at the end. And I’m really taken aback by those first two talks, really…presentations, really, really moving, very poetic and lyrical. And it was striking that…hearing, Johny, that we’ve had Baldwin in different spaces, Baldwin in…that photograph of you, I mean, it was…wow, you looked 18, it’s beautiful, the way it’s shot as well.

So, we have Baldwin in the bedroom, Baldwin in the library, which is fantastic. Johny, when did you first… I did a little teaser at the beginning where I mentioned that you’d…can I just shake your hand because [voices overlap].

JP: Yeah.

DF: Obviously you haven’t washed it since you met Baldwin. So yeah, can you tell us how that happened.

JP: Unfortunately, no, I’ve washed it many times. And the reason why is because I didn’t know that I’d met him until 2019, which is the year that my dad passed away. And as, you know, sort of, Black dads do, it was, kind of, just this throwaway conversation towards the end of his life. He was…my book had just come out and he’d read it and then he said, oh, you know you met James Baldwin. That is the first time he’s ever, ever brought that up.

And how I met him…and as soon as he said it…I was very young, I’m an ‘80 baby but as soon as he said it sort of, a vison appeared of an…and I don’t know if I’m making it up or if the vision is real, you know, but, like, something appeared. And James Baldwin was a big…one of his good friends was a guy called Lon Satton, who was in a musical with my dad…actually an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical called Starlight Express. Which is quite an interesting place, right, because you don’t think of Andrew Lloyd Webber as any kind of radical, especially Thatcher’s Britain.

But Starlight Express was a really interesting space because at one point in the 1980s, it had more Black actors, it hired more Black actors than the West…the rest of the West End combined. So Starlight Express was a super-interesting place. And also, the people that came through it, you know, Jeffrey Daniel, who was the first person to do the moonwalk before Michael Jackson, was the first Electra in Starlight Express. You had…Michael Jackson himself was a fan and came through to the Apollo Victoria to see sometimes.

My dad was an understudy for Lon Satton for the title role. And I remember this place, I was speaking to one of the actors who was in Starlight Express and he was, sort of, bringing back certain memories that…like I said, some of my earliest memories. There was a place called the Westminster Suite and it’s where Lon Satton would have his…it’s like a little…they say that the Apollo Victoria is like a haunted space. But there was this little suite, I’ve got some photographs of it, with, sort of, that kind of bamboo wallpaper that you used to get.

DF: Lovely.

JP: Yeah. And that is the space in which I encountered Baldwin for the first time, my dad and Lon Satton would often be in there talking. And that’s where…and James Baldwin when he was in London would often just pass through. I don’t think he was interested in Starlight Express, you know, but he would pass through into that space.

DF: That’s great. And the way you’ve, kind of, told that, I hadn’t thought about those connections with your father. I do know, funny enough, that my late father was friends with Tim Rice and I know that Tim Rice went to Paris with a mutual friend of my dad’s and Tim Rice’s, to try and find Baldwin’s hotel. So, there’s strangely, kind of, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, which is not how I thought this would go but, you know, you never know.

So that encounter, I mean, that’s something very special to…I guess to, kind of, rethink and reframe your relationship with Baldwin in a sense, it’s not just someone that you just encountered as a writer but someone that you were in the presence with. And how has Baldwin shaped…this is a leading question I guess, but…or has he shaped, has he been someone that has influenced your artistic practice?

JP: Oh, massively, he’s one of the big figures in my creative life. I think what’s…the reason why I loved hearing this story from my dad is because it chimed with…I have all these, sort of, on-the-ground pieces of writing by people that I know, people like Caryl Phillips who was, sort of, on the ground during that time and was an adult and has all these memories that chimed with that space in the 1980s.

And it’s easy to forget that, you know, Baldwin was, sort of, out of fashion really towards the end of his life and very worried about legacy. But also, just a, kind of, reminder that he was somebody who entered various spaces. He would…yeah, I could…it’s weird you say about Andrew Lloyd Webber. I could imagine Baldwin, you know, holding court with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

And I think something that he opened up for me was a, kind of, map. He broke down the rules of what a working class Black experience could be and he looked out at the world. I always remember a quote from Michael Eric Dyson who talked about how, you know, the key thing is to be rooted in but not restricted by Blackness. And I think Baldwin’s a really good example of that, of how he was always concerned with Black political movements, he was an activist, you know. But he was also…he also, sort of, managed to, in a way that wasn’t at all oblivious, free himself from this map that the world insisted.

I remember, you know, there’s that famous quote by him where he says, as soon as I was born, the world wanted to put, like, a sweeping up brush in my hand and I realised from an early age that I had to defeat the world’s intentions. And that…and he did defeat the world’s intentions and…which is why I’m specifically interested in his life, kind of, outside of America. And with my dad being African American and moving over to Europe, you know, a little bit later than Baldwin but around the same time as Baldwin made his second move to the South of France. I was just thinking about people who managed to transcend their…this geography that they’re born with and, kind of, create solidarity, you know.

And that’s the one thing about…I always found about Baldwin, he was a very generous man, you know. Even when he was writing about his enemies. I was in Leukerbad recently where he wrote Go Tell It on the Mountain. But also, where he wrote “Stranger in the Village”. And even though it’s a critique, it’s a…there’s a generosity and a love there. And I think that’s what differentiated himself from so many writers is that he refused to reduce even his enemy or even you can call it his enemy I suppose but, like, white society, he refused to reduce that, you know, which makes his work so compelling.

DF: Is that…one thing you said, Leukerbad or Loèche-les-Bains, which is [recording cuts out. Did you go to the hot springs, the thermal springs there?

JP: Yeah. It’s very odd though, you know, there’s all this, kind of, corruption, so it’s not what I was expecting.

DF: No.

JP: Because what happened is, there was a corrupt…I won’t go on a tangent but there’s a corrupt mayor and I’d say it’s the only time a canton of Switzerland has been made bankrupt. And he had all this, kind of, money. And so, when you go there, it’s this weird, post-modern…it feels like a, sort of, giant ‘90s leisure centre.

DF: Like a Disney [voices overlap]. It’s a bit strange.

JP: I got told that it was different in Baldwin’s day.

DF: I got shouted out for wearing…because there’s all these different, kind of, rooms, you’re supposed to be naked and I just had my trunks on. And I got shouted at by a woman saying, take your clothes off [voices overlap]. Anyway, I’m digressing.

One thing, you mentioned in the time towards the end of Baldwin’s life that he wasn’t that well-known. And because I’m slightly nosey, I noticed that you have a copy of Architectural Digest here. And is this the Baldwin issue?

JP: It is, yeah. Yeah, this is part of something that I draw from Baldwin and I consider like an African American tradition. I got this from a scholar called Chelsey [inaudible]. And she talks about how sometimes…how in my family in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, there would always be this, kind of, saying where they say, I’ll bring something to the party. But Chelsey, sort of, I guess theorised this idea of what does that mean to bring something to the party? You know, you bring something to the party, you bring a good vibe, that’s one way, a good vibration. You wear an amazing outfit, you have an incredible anecdote.

And so, every time I’m invited to something like this, I want to bring something to the party. It could be physical, it could be an energy. And so, what I wanted to bring is my copy of, yeah, the 1987 Architectural Digest where they visit James Baldwin at his home in St Paul de Vence. But I think that idea of, kind of, bringing something to the party is also [recording cuts out] the idea of the welcome table. And when you read somebody like Caryl Phillips, his experience then, everybody’s experience, or Henry Louis Gates that incredible story of him going with, is it Josephine Baker?

DF: Yeah.

JP: Driving Josephine Baker to Baldwin’s house. And Caryl Phillips talks about how, you know, he’s just there having a chat one evening and randomly, there’s a knock on the door. He opens the door and James said, oh, can you get that? And it’s Miles Davis. But it’s this sense of, like, a, kind of…somebody mentioned it [recording cuts out] space and how Baldwin was constantly doing that but that physical…that notion of the welcome table as an opening up for people from different places to come and…especially I think at that time, Harry Belafonte and stuff would visit. You have a…it’s the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, where I often feel like that in some ways they succeeded, but this is the Reagan era as well. And a lot of their thinking is, sort of, out of fashion. They won it on the one hand but on the other hand, I think they’re reflecting on where those victories had led them.

M: Can I…just for a second, is everyone familiar with the welcome table and Baldwin? So, I imagine most people are but I think there’s a picture of it here, Johny, is that right? There are a number of photographs.

JP: There is, yeah.

DF: So, Baldwin’s table in St Paul de Vence, which was an amazing provincial house that I broke into 10 years ago.

JP: Around the time I did.

DF: Yeah. And I got slightly told off for it. But yeah, there’s…we had this beautiful…I don’t think it was actually physically that but I mean in terms of a huge table where people would gather and break bread together and drink. And shaded, you had almond trees and it was…I believe it’s still in…the physical table is still in…nearby, you know, from the Baldwin’s archives, the actual table. The Lost Archives of James Baldwin, the Radio Four programme which if you haven’t heard, do have a listen to.

JP: Which was made by Caryl’s brother Tony as well.

DF: Yes.

JP: It’s weird, I just cannot find this anywhere, it’s ridiculous.

DF: What…do you know what’s striking about this though, this publication that Baldwin’s not on the front cover, this is 1987.

JP: Yeah.

DF: And he’s not that prominent.

JP: No, he’s not.

DF: So, you could miss it, you could be…but I’m not an Architectural Digest reader, you know, particularly but it’s…there’s also in the same…yeah, there’s also…there’s an earlier…in the same edition, there’s something about Bobby Kennedy’s widow who talks…who’s showing off her very patrician house which looks like a, kind of, mausoleum, one of these really patrician houses that’s like a country club. And then you’ve got Baldwin’s here, it’s really striking.

JP: It is. And yeah, just that sense of normality and the idea of access as well, he was almost…I think in the ‘80s especially, anybody could access Baldwin, you know.

DF: [Inaudible] a sense of…

DF: You can have a look at it as well, please feel free…

?: Is that alright, Johny, is that alright?

JP: Yeah. [voices overlap]. I want it back.

DF: The adverts are amazing, I mean, that watch, that Rolex is one that I have, of course. It’s…yeah, I mean, it struck me that…

JP: The year he died that actually as well. Yeah.

DF: Yes. I mean, it’s been going for a while, it has quite a big circulation but it’s not necessarily…it’s fascinating the way that Baldwin, kind of, moved in terms of his…in the 1980s in terms of where he was being published. And presumably he was paid quite well, it was…I don’t know but I think they probably paid. And at that stage, he was not obviously refusing these sorts of offers because he was somewhat in decline.

JP: Yeah. And in debt as well, you know, like, he didn’t own that house.

DF: No.

JP: And that’s the thing, isn’t it? And the kind of complicated relationship he had with his landlady and then how that complicated relationship continued on after his death even, you know, like, yeah.

But no, for me, Baldwin is just somebody who opened up possibility. Like, you know, there’s…I keep thinking of this notion from Walter Benjamin of a weak messianic power. And it’s these histories that suggest alternative futures that are, kind of, always in danger of being lost.

Even with someone like Baldwin though, who I do think gets rejoined, like the Harlem Renaissance, you know, there’s an idea of who Baldwin is and then…but there are these, sort of, other things that are going on like…and I think Caryl Phillips belongs to that tradition, I think Langston Hughes belongs to that, I think Claude McKay belongs to it. It’s these men, you know, there are photographs of Claude McKay in, like, Azerbaijan. Claude McKay met Lenin, do you know what I mean? And it’s like, you know…

DF: Langston Hughes was in the USSR.

JP: Yeah.

M: Yeah, Claude McKay was incredible as someone who was travelling around. The latest biography really tries to, kind of, straighten him but he was queer …

JP: Yeah.

DF: …and really importantly so and someone who was…travelled around, Banjo: A Novel Without a Plot, which is quite hard to read but it’s exciting the way that he moves.

JP: Yeah. And just like a little bit…you know, it’s interesting when you look at the correspondence between, like, McKay and Du Bois at that time. I actually think, you know, you have Black intellectual inside the establishment making work and then you have someone who’s outside the establishment making work and the correspondence is so critical of each other, I think there was a love there as well.

But Baldwin for me was almost like a mix of the two. And I think it’s true that, you know, if Baldwin was really comfortable in a library, Baldwin’s also comfortable in a bar, let’s not forget that, you know. And a naughty man, you know.

I always think of something that…you know, one of the heads of the Black Panther Party said about the men in the Black Panther Party. And it’s strange to bring up the Black Panther I suppose in relation to Baldwin because they were so homophobic about him actually. But this idea of that, you know, she said, we didn’t get these brothers from revolutionary heaven. And that always sticks with me because I think, like, we can flatten these heroes but I’m also [recording cuts out] I get the feeling from what I hear that Baldwin was a naughty man, you know. Not to genderise it, a naughty person. And these rebels I think there’s something beautiful about the, kind of…

DF: I think just the smile, the, kind of, cheeky smile there. Yeah.

JP: And I just think…but that is so important, I wonder about this now is, like, this, kind of, syphoning off of, sort of, the academic realm and then the lumpen elements, you know. And I think Baldwin was one of those really key figures that could operate in both and bring what was going on in the street and have a drink with anybody, you know, and then but was also part of a really rigorous intellectual tradition.

And we need more of those people in society because I feel like in this world at the moment, there are these…everyone…it’s a real capsular society, you know. And I think Baldwin managed to find a way to, sort of, navigate that and I think it all fed into his work. It’s why his work’s so full and so complex and so powerful is because it’s human.

DF: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And this was really important when we were putting together this symposium this gathering that it wasn’t just an academic conference, you know, Baldwin is far too complex, too exciting to be pinned into any kind of category or any area. And this has been a running theme, you know, it’s been exciting to explore that.

Kadija, I’m going to bring you in at this point if I may. And then what we’ll do, I’m going to talk to Kadija a little bit with some focus on her wonderful collection, Encounters with Baldwin, which I have…Encounters with James Baldwin here, which is [recording cuts] And then we’ll open together as a, kind of, panel for comments and reflections. And then we’ll have some time for questions. If we run over a little bit today, that’s because we started a little bit later. But it’s fine, we’ll keep up…we’ll make up the time. So, we might run over a little bit because I think there’s quite a lot to say.

But, you know, firstly, congratulations on this.

KGS: Thank you.

DF: And as someone, you know, I’ve done some editing in my time and I co-edit a journal, James Baldwin Review, available in all good online sites for free. And yeah, but I’m…hats off to you because I try to corral 32, 33, not only, you know, you’ve got writers of different sorts, some academic, you’ve got some creative writers, you’ve got…and you’ve got poets. I mean, trying to get poets to be on time…

KGS: I know [voices overlap].

DF: Oh, it’s punctilious, yeah.

KGS: Yeah.

DF: So how…tell me about, how did it come about, what was the aim of this? I think it’s a very vibrant, fresh collection. I was saying to you that I…having worked in Baldwin for nearly 30 years, obviously started when I was tiny, that I…it’s, kind of hard, I think, oh, another collection. But actually, what was the aim of it?

KGS: Well, before I get onto that question, I’ve got to say one of the links in here, I’m sorry for [recording cuts] you’re talking about Starlight Express and who he met. So did Ray Shell, that’s where Ray Shell met Baldwin.

JP: Yeah, Ray Shell, an incredible writer as well.

KGS: Yes [voices overlap].

JP: Yeah, so Ray Shell was good friends with my dad. [voices overlap] And it’s so interesting I get to go through my childhood memories by speaking to Ray Shell and telling him, oh, what you remember there, this was actually happening, you know. Yeah, what an amazing guy.

KGS: He is, yeah. So, he talks about meeting Baldwin and being blown away with him behind the stage after Starlight Express. And it seems like Baldwin was a little bit of a flirt, said, oh, you were the star in the Starlight Express. I bet he said that to everybody.

JP: Yeah, absolutely.

KGS: Yeah, but it’s so interesting having links with so many people. I was just thinking about when Bill Schwarz said about your book Doug, the first page really hits with you. With an anthology, the first page has got to really hit you. If it doesn’t, people are like, what’s this about?

So, one of the things was, I mean, it’s just like I’d worked with the publisher Cheryl Robson and my first book that I edited was called Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers. And she just called me up or…and she said, can you just send this around please? And obviously I said, well, who’s editing it? I know that Stella Dadzie had done the intro, she…once the whole book is together, I first of all thought, well, this is just the bio that Stella has done and we could [inaudible] the bio, but it’s needed to read with the rest of the pieces, especially if you’re not familiar with Baldwin. Then everything goes together, you know, you read about Baldwin from what Stella’s done and then you read these separate pieces of people who have been impacted by his work.

And I…and Cheryl just, kind of, said to me, well, I’m doing it but you can do it as well if you like. And I very stupidly [recording cuts out] even though I was in the middle of 20 other things. But Deidre knows I do these silly things, she…I co-authored a book with Deidre and Joan Adim-Addo, this one. And in my final year of my PhD, she said, do you want to be part of this? And I thought I’m doing the final year of my PhD, I said yes.

And one of the pieces I…one of the pieces that I contributed [recording cuts out] writing about, If Beale Street Could Talk, because I felt in terms of if we’re going to have Baldwin in this book, it has to be If Beale Street Could Talk because to me, that is one of the most beautiful, tragic love stories that there is. And it talks about Black people, young, Black people in love, you know, we had to have it.

So, for me…so I knew when I said, yes, okay. So…and I just knew…I worked with a lot of, you know, poets and I was thinking specifically male at the time but we wanted to have some women in it later, I was thinking who could…who would write this, who am I going to write to who would say, oh yeah, Kadija would do it without arguing with me? Because we had a short time. We had a very short time. I think Cheryl probably spoke to me around about January, February and she’s going, it’s all got to be done by May. And I’m thinking, yeah, right.

And…but we did get a lot of it in by that time. And I just zoomed off to lots of people I knew and just said this is what we’re doing, love you to contribute, blah, blah, blah and it’s going to be a short piece, et cetera, et cetera.. And yeah, people either said…well, they basically said yes or no [recording cuts out]. Some people wanted to be in it but it was too short for them. People like Courttia Newland was going, Kadija, how can you ask me this now? I need to be in that book but I haven’t got the time, I’ve got a deadline by then, I’ve got deadlines, I’ve really got to weigh it up. And sometimes people look up and they say, well, why isn’t so-and-so in there? And it’s just because you’re doing something else.

DF: I think you did a remarkable collaborative work but a remarkable job. What I also like about it is the…well, someone who edits work of Baldwin and I have creative writing submissions and sometimes I bristle and I just think, oh no, I’m going to get a I love Jimmy comment, you know, and something like that. And occasionally it’s like that. There are…there have been some good submissions but it’s quite hard, we’ve talked about the influence of Baldwin but then it’s even harder I think when you’re writing under the influence.

KGS: That’s why it can be really hard even [recording cuts out] writing, you know, about somebody well-known and you don’t want it to sound naff and you don’t want it to sound really lame [recording cuts out]. I’ve got seven poetry contributions in there and I think one, two, three, four of them were written specifically…is it four? It might have been three, four were written specifically for that. And Roy McFarlane, some people might know, is a beautiful poet and I knew that if I asked him, if I gave him enough time and he wasn’t even one of the first people I asked to deliver something great. And he said, I just need a bit more time, I would.

And he wrote about…he wrote it from the perspective of Baldwin hearing the news that, first of all, Medgar Evers had been killed and then Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. So, you, kind of, put yourself in his space as well thinking, these are three of his friends and three amazing leaders in America and they’ve been killed, Black men being killed. How on earth do you feel? And he puts himself in that space. Wow, how do you do that, Roy, you know? And I think Roy himself came from a background of his father being a pastor I think so.

So that was just really moving and he captured it so well. But then there were other poets who I knew who were very much activists and knew who would deliver something good like Zita Holbourne. And it was great because then, of course, we did want some women writers. And another poet I know in the States, because I’ve worked…I edit a lot of anthologists and I know other anthologists so you, kind of, know each other. And Ewaure X. Osayande he’s done things around [inaudible] anthologies especially around victims of state violence. So, you know, what have you got for me? I thought he was going to write…he was going to write an [recording cuts] some of those poems are quite long, so…

And that’s the other thing is talking with poets, they’re, like, love this poem but I really don’t think that metaphor works. Especially when they’ve already written the poem and then you’re going back and telling them, I’m sorry but that doesn’t work. But you’ve got to in a way say, I want the best of what I think is going to work in the book. You can have a dialogue and it may very well stay the same but at least you’ve voiced it and you’ve exchanged it. And you’ve also got to take it out of your head that this is not just me, there’s going to be other people reading it, and does…will this work for other people reading about this subject matter? Because like you say, you want it to be varied, you want other people to engage it. And it’s not always going to be the way that you engage with it but you want enough there for people to exchange and everything.

So yeah, I’m glad we had…it would have been nice to have had more women in there but it’s interesting that the women…all the women writing about their relationship with Baldwin’s work, they wrote more theoretical pieces. Sonia Grant wrote about her space being growing up in the Pentacostal Church and her relationship with Baldwin and then, you know, basically, kind of, taking time off from where she was working or something, coming up to London and going to see the play because she heard that Baldwin might be around. That kind of thing. So, she said…so this was a big thing for somebody in the church when we are so embedded in the church, you don’t go and play hooky she said, I did because I wanted to meet Baldwin, you know. So, things like that.

But other pieces were very, very theoretical. Again, we had to cut them, which I didn’t want to. But Michelle Yaa Asantewa wrote this fantastic piece about placing Baldwin in the Yoruba…placing him as a messenger, as a Yoruba a messenger and that. And I just thought to myself, how did she do this, you know? But it was really good to see something so different.

Because we’ve all been talking these past couple of days that, you know, Baldwin as novelist, Baldwin as historian, Baldwin as philosopher, Baldwin as, oh, you don’t talk about Baldwin as a film critic, somebody was saying yesterday. So, you know. And then so placing Baldwin in this Yoruba mythology was something else. Another thing…and Baldwin as poet, we talk about Baldwin as poet. Whereas his poetry collection I think was the last one that Michael Joseph published was in 1983, was a collection of poetry. Yes, we do. Yeah, you know. And so…and it’s got a fantastic introduction by Nikky Finney. Again, it’s like all these themes that he talks about in all his other work, he goes through in his poetry. But in his poetry, it’s more subtle.

DF: Yeah. I noticed yesterday, I was on Spotify putting on Chez Baldwin, which is the Baldwin playlist which I’ll put it on again, I forgot to put it on this morning, through in the next room. And there’d an album that was made with a Belgian jazz vocalist David Linx, called The Lover’s Question. And that’s on Spotify. I’ve got this…I’ve got it on a double CD and I actually have a CD player but I’ve got the [inaudible] double CD. But it was great to hear that.

And the reason I’m mentioning that is a) not everyone will know about that album but also it’s got a very haunting rendition of Baldwin singing, Precious Lord, Take My Hand, which is really…it’s spellbinding. And there’s also some of his poems that he…and I must confess here that I’m not a huge fan of Baldwin’s poetry, I’m just going to put it out there. I’m…you know, there’s…I think he…I’m going to stop there I think.

KGS: It’s not hard-hitting [recording cuts out] because you don’t like his poetry that much, I’m going to read one of his poems. Well, this is one of my favourite poems, Imagination. “Imagination creates the situation and then the situation creates imagination. It may, of course, be the other way around. Columbus was discovered by what he found”.

DF: I like that, I like the way you read it. I just…okay. Maybe if you could read a few more to me. And there’s…and we are going hear a poem which I also really like, later on that Sea’s performing. And I really do like that poem. It’s not that I don’t like all of his poetry it’s just [voices overlap].

KGS: [Recording cuts out] language in a way that you can’t explore it in prose do you know what I mean? And I think that’s what he…maybe he used it for, to explore themes. And Nikky Finney talks about that in terms of at the times when he went to poetry, at the times when he wrote poetry to maybe help him move on with some of his other pieces of work.

DF: Yeah, that makes sense.

KGS: Yeah.

DF: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, why not? I mean, someone was talking about Baldwin as a polymath yesterday and it’s absolutely right.

KGS: Exactly, he doesn’t…yeah.

DF: Somebody who could cut across different ways.

KGS: Cuts across and that’s really difficult. Yeah.

JP: Can I just say something really quickly?

DF: Yeah, of course you can.

JP: I just noticed this picture of Baldwin with Beauford Delaney and about this unknown photographer. And you see this…them in Paris hanging out and there’s some really beautiful images. But the reason why I wanted to bring that up was because at the moment [recording cuts]. I went to the launch of it on Monday. There’s a new exhibition that’s opened up at the Centre Pompidou in Paris called Paris Noir. And it’s the history of…Black history of Paris 1950 to the year 2000. And there were some extraordinary photographs of Baldwin, Baldwin’s all over it.

DF: Ah, okay.

JP: And it’s really worth going to Paris just to see it, it’s amazing. And I think especially for our purposes, it’s been a bit controversial because I think…and I probably really agree that there’s a bit too much focus, even though it’s a French curator, a bit too much focus on African American presence in Paris. You’ve got to be really careful because of the incredible Négritude and Aimé Césaire and Fanon. Name your.

DF: Algerian.

JP: Yeah, exactly. And it’s sometimes a way to deflect away from. But it’s incredible, you have to go and see it, yeah.

KGS: I think they had a weeklong symposium of Baldwin, didn’t they, in December?

JP: Yes, they did. Yeah.

KGS: Yeah. Really intense that.

DF: And there’s a recent book that was published by University Press on Delaney, there was a conference a few years ago on Beuford as the Americans say, we say Beauford but Americans say Beauford. Who was in a remarkable…Dark Rapture, the…one of several portraits of Baldwin, which is absolutely stunning, you can see it, you can google it, it will come up. Which is one of the few…Delaney didn’t often paint nudes, so it’s an incredible picture of Baldwin, a portrait of Baldwin when he’s about 16. And there’s a real intimacy there. You know, Delaney was around 40, Baldwin was around 16, both queer, both the son of preachers. And there’s just…it’s absolutely stunning.

JP: It’s funny that you mentioned that pronunciation differenced as well because somebody was getting wound up when I was saying Du Bois because that is how he said it though but, you know, in France it should be Du Bois, right?

M: Yeah.

KGS: Yeah. African Americans get upset if you [inaudible].

DF: Yeah, it’s…I’m always getting it the wrong way round.

KGS: I wonder what they said when he went…when he moved to Ghana, I wonder if they called him Du Bois, Du Bois.

DF: No idea, it’s such a good question. I mean, he’s such a fascinating figure, kind of, hovering there. So, there was some talk of the Congress of African Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne in ’55 that Baldwin writes about in “Princes and Powers”. And Du Bois or Du Bois was…his passport was given…he wasn’t granted a passport…

KGS: That’s right.

DF: …he couldn’t go, it was that kind of control. Shall we open it up? I mean, there’s so many fascinating comments and I’d like to give people an opportunity in the audience to ask questions.

KGS: Can I just mention first, say something first?

DF: Of course, please do. Sorry, yes, please do.

KGS: Talking about the first piece as hard hitting. So, the first piece in here, it’s by an older sister friend in New York who I know. Because still have salons, people still have salons where artists and writers meet. Where, like, Baldwin we were talking about, you know, his big welcome table, in New York and stuff they would have their salons.

So, where Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr met Baldwin was at the house of the writer Paule Marshall. And she was a student and basically her…the lecturer that she went with who she was being mentored by was a really big figure. And even though he was blind, apparently he was also a big flirt with the women, the women loved him and always wanted to escort him to these things. So that is where she, kind of, met Baldwin and Maya Angelou.

So, in terms of then having something hitting you in the face, I really wanted to say, okay, enter into this energy of meeting Baldwin. So, I did it as like an interview thing with her just talking about it. And it just…you can just imagine yourself in the salon room and just think, why don’t we have salons or why don’t we still have them here? And you just imagine all these well-known pupils in New York all at Paule Marshall’s house, she goes, oh yeah, she’d have them every now and then. And you’d hear about Maya Angelou coming in and going, I hope you have my whiskey, do you know what I mean, and things like that.

So, it really, really needs to have that. So that’s one thing as well in terms of being an anthologist because then the next person after that was Victor Adebowale. And so first of all, he was first. But then I said to Rashida, do you mind if we put you as a first rather than I because I wanted her first, it was more hard-hitting.

And that is really important I think when you’re doing an anthology, the first piece…I mean, you’re putting together a poetry collection or something like that or a short story collection, your first pieces and your middle pieces and your end pieces should be, kind of, the strongest thing. It’s hard to everything but you’ve got to really, kind of, weigh things up. So that was my…our first page the face thing and it’s a lovely…it’s memories, her memories of Baldwin. She talks about meeting Nina, about going to visit Nina Simone as well in concert and then Baldwin just turning up there as well and everybody recognising Baldwin. Yeah.

DF: Yeah, it’s a stunning opening and it’s…you can really tell with this collection that it has been rated and thought through in terms of the structure, it’s not been thrown together, it’s very much, you know, lovingly and thoughtfully…

KGS: And it’s got those images in as well.

DF: Yeah.

KGS: Yeah, Cheryl did a great job getting those photos as well.

DF: Please do…

KGS: Buy it.

DF: …buy it, there’s no other way to say it, you know. So yeah, thank you.

DF: And thank you to all our panellists, really thought provoking. It’s interesting how we put the group together and the way that the sense of place has come up, which is really evocative. Yeah, Baldwin in bars, I…yeah, I felt a bit crass because, you know, Baldwin in the bedroom, fine, [inaudible] Baldwin in the library’s actually very beautiful, very important. But I do…you know, I’ve been to El Faro in Horatio Street, one of Baldwin’s favourite bars where he set a lot of Another Country. And I sat in his favourite seat and had, you know, my usual half pint of Johnnie Walker Black Label. Blue Label if I was feeling flush, which is never the case. And, you know, it’s quite magical to do that. But yeah, so bars. But then when you think about libraries and then different spaces.

KGS: I think that’s where Fred D’Aguiar and David Dabydeen and Caz Phillips, when Fred D’Aguiar writes his piece, it’s in the bar after they’ve received the prize, it’s in the bar and their chatting to Baldwin

DF: It’s all about fermented drinks.

TC: I wonder about Baldwin in the way that he had sex, where he, kind of, found sex and joy. And I think one of the things I’m very interested in is how the ways in which Baldwin was able to show up with his sexuality as an agency as opposed to a sexuality which was, kind of, put upon. I think there’s something very interesting about that when we came, as you were saying Johny, about this notion of deification, of actually there was a, kind of, messiness and a joy within that.

And I think that…I mean, it’s a shame that we didn’t get to get contact because I would have written about that, sort of, side of it because I think that is a disruptive space for notions of what respectability is in terms of Black artists and how we are supposed to show up. And I think that Baldwin as a sexual being is something that isn’t necessarily talked about but he talks a lot about sex in his work. And I think that is something that is…in terms of queer culture, is a very disruptive place particularly because it, kind of, really contradicts and talks in opposition to ideas of the ways in which we should show up as Black people. And I think that’s something very interesting.

And I think it speaks also a lot to his conversations in the work about truth, about showing a truthfulness in the work. And I think that is something I, kind of…in terms of my imagination space, you know, the way…he went to Paris for sex, you know what I mean, he didn’t just go to…he went to find himself. And he had lots of affairs. And he went to Turkey for sex as well.

So, I think there’s something that I find very, kind of, exciting about that in terms of sex is an inspiration, you meet people, you make friends through sex, you fall out, you learn about love, you learn about yourself. So, I think that’s something I was very interested in terms of him as a template artist and that there’s all these other, kind of, very wonderful literary things. There’s the joy of drinking, he’s of that, kind of, generation, drinking, smoking, a bon vivant, the idea that he wrote while he was in parties.

DF: Yeah.

TC: Taking up a desk, you know, in the corner of a kitchen while people are…while jazz was in the background and people were having…and I imagine he, kind of, slunk away and shagged and came back. I think that’s something that’s really interesting about him.

JP: You’re making me think of an amazing…you know, that amazing piece of writing by Jean Genet, where he talks about to find harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance, you know.

DF: Yeah.

JP: And I think…I mean, that’s it, isn’t it with Baldwin because he could take the messiness and present it in a way that was just beautiful, you know?

DF: Genet I was thinking about earlier when you were talking about the Black Panthers because they…although they…you know, there was a lot of homophobia within the Black Panthers but there’s a scene in White’s biography of Genet where Genet’s taken too many Amytals, making him sleepy and less restrained. And he’s with the Black Panthers and he puts on a pink negligee and starts dancing [recording cuts out]. So, there’s, kind of, moments of that. But then you’ve also got Baldwin, who was [sidelined but it was okay for Genet because he was white and French, there was that, kind of, distance.

JP: Yeah.

DF: But in terms of, do you know, Topher, the…I’m sure you do but Sedat Pakay’s short film? Because it made me think of that. So, in the film we saw yesterday with Horace Ové in terms of respectability, he’s there in a smart jacket and a tie. And then in that, you see him in his underwear.

TC: In his underwear, yeah.

DF: Which is really [voices overlap]

TC: Because he was a church boy, going to church, I mean, you know, dressing up in a suit, the Sunday ritual. I mean, my father’s African America as you know but my memories of the Sunday ritual is that you present and you peacock the best of yourself within that space. But, you know, even in today’s society, you’ve got the Black church on Brixton Hill which is heavily populated by LGBTQ people. And there’s a, kind of, joke that, you know, you go to church at Saturday night and you turn up at church on Sunday morning and these different spaces require different ways [recording cuts out].

And I think, you know, there are ways in which the…I mean, again, I can only speculate and speculation is quite an interesting thing because just knowing what it was like be a young, pretty kid having people do things and want to do things to you, how you then decide how you’re going to turn that around and the, kind of, spaces to do it yourself. So, Jimmy probably in a very different context in a very different place would find that. And I think him in his underwear is part of that.

M: Thank you. And it’s a really striking…

KGS: It’s a whole new picture of Baldwin. I was just thinking, I’m now imagining him walking around in underwear and writing…and just the exciting way the way people were writing then. You know, now we always think we have to get into a retreat or we have to do this or we have to do that but just like, we’re just not free flowing sometimes, do you know what I mean? We think we’re…maybe we’re constricting ourselves sometimes as artists.

DF: I can see Baldwin, a picture of Baldwin in his underwear looks pretty constricted, he had little Y-fronts. Do we have…sorry about that, no filter on a Saturday, you know. Yeah, we have time for a few questions. Campbell.

Q: I…thank you very much for this really insightful and provocative intervention. I was really wanting to address the, kind of, homogenisation of Blackness as necessarily homophobic. I think it’s such a dominant narrative that I find quite disturbing in a way who…when we think who’s making all these laws actually, is it Black people? Just to think about that.

But also, I want to remind us, you can google Huey P Newton and see his [inaudible] actually, you know, to Topher’s point about desire and how desire is a, kind of, praxis for activism actually and how the Black Panthers use that to the maximum. Their uniforms were not just there to represent symbolism but also around desire and Black [recording cuts out].

Just to say that Huey P Newton in 1970, and it’s online, you can hear it, spoke about unity with…again, it was called gay, the Gay Liberation movement and the Feminist Movement and how that wasn’t antithetical to the Black Panthers actually. And he was one of the co-founders of the Black Panthers. And two people from the United Kingdom, whose names escape me at the moment, were inspired by the Black Panther Party when they went to the meeting to form the Gay Liberation movement in the UK. So we have to be really careful when we homogenise that…

JP: I’m not homogenising that, I’m quoting directly from Eldridge Cleaver, you know, who…

Q: I’m not saying you, I’m just saying we have to be careful because every time I look into our history, for instance, the Trinidad and Tobago flag was designed by Carlisle Chang, who is an openly [recording cuts out] in the ‘60s. So, you know, it’s like thinking…rethinking our own narratives outside of a white supremacy Christian framework actually all the time. I have to do that to myself, I’m not [recording cuts out] about any particular person, but I’m just looking at my own learning and how that is also framed by the necessary narrative of Black homophobia and transphobia. So, I just wanted to, you know, say there is another narrative that becomes invisibilised because that becomes the dominant narrative [inaudible].

KGS: A thought to carry throughout the day in terms of women and listening to things.

DF: Yeah. Just one detail to add and Johny, you might want to come in here. He’s absolutely right and I think with the Panthers, he’s absolutely right with that Huey Newton with whom, you know, Baldwin was friends, he helped to organise a birthday [recording cuts out].

And there’s also to add…so Johny started to mention Cleaver, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about Soul on Ice, which is really, kind of, difficult to read in many ways. So, Cleaver, kind of, borrows from Baldwin in terms of that writing tradition in terms of the blending of the personal political, flips it round, attacks Baldwin in this really vicious, homophobic diatribe. But also, Cleaver also talks about how it was necessary to enact historical revenge by raping Black women. First by raping them in the ghettos, practice on them in the ghettos. So, there’s a whole, kind of, nexus of…

Q: [voices overlap] homophobia which we have to connect together.

DF: But then…

Q: Yeah.

DF: No, absolutely. No, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off there. The…but then when Baldwin did No Name in the Street says that…he basically says it’s okay that Cleaver called me that. And what does he say? He said, in Cleaver’s mind, I was associated with all those punks and cissies. That’s the language that Baldwin uses. It’s the language that even by that time, the Black Panther Party had said we shouldn’t be using it. Anyway, so I’m just saying it’s messy and complicated, which I think is one of the things that you’re encouraging us to think through this messiness and complexity, which is very useful.

JP: What the Black Panthers did as well, I mean, they’re heroes of mine on the one hand as well, so it’s not a complete announcement of the amazing work that they do.

DF: No.

Q: What’s interesting in terms of historical conversations around radical or not so radical movements around injustice, social justice is that queer politics or queer thinking has embraced…from a Black perspective, has embraced Black, kind of, cultural rebellion. So, you know, even with BLM founded by three queer women of colour. And in my conversations over the last, sort of, 20, 30 years, when we talk about our Blackness and our queerness, the two are intermingled. Traditionally, it’s not that…it’s not…not contradicting what you’re saying, Campbell but traditionally Black politics, if there’s such a thing, has not embraced queerness in the same way.

So, I might show up to your event as a Black artist or a Black cultural thinker or a Black playwright but you’re not showing up to my event as a queer person. And I think that’s a very interesting dynamic that I’ve experienced over my lifetime and we see historically. So, we do have to unpack these, kind of, strange lines that are drawn in the sky around what is acceptable politics and what is acceptable creativity for Black and queer people or Black queer people or Black people, whatever we call it. And, of course, Black feminism and women come into that as well in terms of showing up.

And I…and there’s a picture…and I’m just talking about my life in terms of how I’ve shown, there’s a picture by Del LaGrace Volcano of me and Ajamu X my creative partner when we were in our early twenties, in a white lesbian club, right. And I used…I put it in an exhibition [recording cuts out] rukus! archive of Black LGBTQ culture and history because I wanted to show that that is also part of the politics that we show up for each other. And I think that’s something that Jimmy gave to me in terms of my readings that he was showing up. And this notion of showing up to go with that collectivity is something that’s really powerful for me.

I also wanted to say, I mean, it’s interesting talking about the welcome table because that idea of invitation is something when I talked earlier about the queer consciousness, it’s about the invitation. I think a lot of the misreading of queefr consciousness, it is about absolutism, it’s about, you know, identity politics that’s, kind of, exclusive. It’s about an invitation.

And it’s something…I mean, Judy Chicago’s dinner table is a similar thing, both of which were influences for a sculpture I made that was displayed at Tate Modern. The idea that we gather around a space, that we come to a space. And in that space, we find some kind of communion and we actually have difference in that communion. And that’s, kind of, really revolutionary. It’s because the capitalists want us to be monolithic, the capitalists want to consume, the capitalists want us to be acted upon. And I think that’s really exciting. And this is why I was a preacher.

KGS: [Inaudible] listening to you as well about how, not only do we have to be careful that we, kind of, make sure that we do these categories, et cetera, and we’re open to all the discussions but we’ve got to be careful in terms of which location we’re talking about. It’s going to be different in different locations.

I’m just thinking because I do a lot of work in Africa, for example. You’ve got to…African culture is different the way that they’re dealing with it and we’ve got to be open and we’ve got to be careful the way we do that. Not only to be…embrace and share, you know, the queerness that is coming from outside into Africa but also to acknowledge it is very different and you’ve got to take it step by step. But they want to get to the same space, we all want to get to the same space, we all want it to be open.

But it’s very, very different from country to country. And it’s also very different historically as well because people don’t always realise that…and I think somebody was saying it about this in the States and how it was years ago. But I know especially in some West African countries, if you’re going to a family event, for example, you know, it’ll be very open, people…there will very openly be queer people there, both men and women.

And people always tend to think that, oh, every African country is all homophobic, it isn’t. And they just don’t use the words, it’s just like these…they’re part of our community and oh yeah, we know that those are the boys who are like that, yeah, so sure, you know, what’s the issue? And they don’t see it as an issue but they don’t even…they don’t necessarily name it. They don’t want to name it or categorise it because they’re just who they are.

So, I think we’ve also got to think about that when we’re talking as well to keep it open. Because, of course, in terms of…and Annie and I were talking, like in Sierra Leone, you know, we claim Baldwin because his sister married a Sierra Leonean, I have to put that in there. So as far as we’re concerned, he’s part of our family.

A: He’s part of the family.

KGS: Yeah. You know, and so many…Sierra Leone, it’s very small, so many Sierra Leoneans. And everybody is so proud of that. They’re very, very proud of that. The very fact that he is gay, that doesn’t mean anything, they’re just very proud of that connection and they will always tell you.

DF: Yeah, thank you. Coming back to what Campbell was saying yesterday about naming I think seems to be the [recording cuts out] thinking through these complex themes.

We have time…what we’re going to do, I’ve just made a decision, just now. I didn’t think about it, I haven’t even thought this through. But we’re going to start the next session because I want a little bit of time to settle, which is going to be Michael Raeburn and a reading by Sea Sharp. So, I’m going to be…I’m sorry, it’s more of me, but I’m going to be having a conversation with Michael, who knew Baldwin, actually met Baldwin at the British book launch of [recording cuts out] how well we planned this. [voices overlap]

Yeah, so I made this just…decision now without consulting anyone. And we’re going to start back at…so we’re due to start at 12 o’clock is that right? So, we’re going to start at 10 past 12 on the dot.

?: Right.

DF: I might even lock the doors if you’re late. And then we’ll…because we’ve got an hour for lunch so we can catch up. And lunch will be provided, it’s free, it’s going to be great. Hopefully, the…I think it was good yesterday, the falafel was a little bit dry. So hopefully that’s my one…but it was good, it was free. It was in a bento box, it’s okay.

Any more…do we have a final question or?

Q: I just wanted to bring it back to the second…first of all, thank you so much, it was a fantastic panel and I very much involved…enjoyed and learnt quite a bit, in fact. I wanted to bring it back to the second speaker. And I’m so sorry, I’ve…

LJ: Lydia.

Q: Thank you, Lydia. I’m really…first of all, I really found your talk very engaging and moving, in fact. And back to this idea of naming. So, I actually thought in looking at this photograph that’s still on the screen here that you were, at one point, going to say or identify yourself in the photograph, so I kept looking. And I was like, is she this one or that one? You did speak about the gentleman who was on my right. Is there anything else about the other people in the photograph that you might want to comment about? Do you know who they were or what they did and your, sort of, relationship to the photograph? Because it’s quite a striking photograph.

LJ: I think for this particular photograph is that the people and how it came to be is still being unpacked.

Q: Sorry, it’s difficult to hear at the back.

LJ: Oh, I’m sorry.

Q: Can you…

M: If you could speak up please.

LJ: So, the history of the photograph and who is in it is still being unpacked. Because…where is she? The lady in the white dress I only met last year and it was by complete chance. And she remembers bits. Because in some aspects, it was just a working day and in other aspects, it takes on a great importance to somebody like me who’s thinking, okay, what was he like, what was he doing, where is he going and so forth?

And different people in this photograph think about it differently as well. And how I approach them as well. So sometimes it’s very organic, sometimes it’s through other people. And…but what was really important I think for me is in terms of that I didn’t want that history to be erased, I wanted to really start bringing it together and documenting it.

But also, for me, it was just a personal passion about I have an idea and I know why Baldwin was here in Hackney, in London, in Dalston, at that time but I wanted to really build a picture of it. So, in not having that picture yet, I, kind of, reimagined what happened.

And I was also just thinking about those spaces and Baldwin in his underwear and…which is a bit of a leap but it actually comes back in terms of there is also the space of the home, there is also the space of the spaces that we live in and the spaces of the front room as well. And that there might not have been a dearth of community halls or spaces for meetings but people opened up their homes.

So, it was multiple welcome tables, in a sense, were around in Hackney, in London, all over. And that is where all of this, sort of this exchange, debate, commune, exchange, physical, metaphysical, emotional was actually happening. Because as I go around and talk to people, that’s what they talk about. Oh, yes, he came over to my house and we were there ‘til, you know, two, three o’clock in the morning [inaudible] met somebody and so forth.

And I think that space, homes, being invited in, because that’s also something that’s really, really important that you felt invited. Just because you invite somebody doesn’t mean [recording cut] but if you feel invited, that’s actually a very different thing. And a, kind of, just this energy and activity will happen. And I think lots of people here will know about people coming to their home or you’re going to somebody’s home and tying it into what you’re saying Johny, about bringing something to the table.

KGS: I think him being here in the ‘80s and in somewhere like Hackney is so, so important. I mean, to me it was just as important in the ‘60s and going to the West Indian centre and giving that great talk. This is so impactful just…not just for Londoners at that really sensitive time of the ‘80s, but being in Hackney? That was just amazing, you know.

And so, we had the event last year with the blue plaque. The streets were overflowing, you know, the garbage trucks were just stopping and just joining the people and they were joining in with us. And my goodness, people like Leila Howe came and everything and Margaret Busby was there. It was a real joyous occasion, it was like…for us, it was almost like…because I’m a Hackney person as well, it’s like almost re-energising the fact that…of how important Hackney is.

LJ: Yeah.

KGS: Hackney is not off the map and him being there was really something. [inaudible] the other activist, Andrea Enisuoh more recent.

LJ: Yes, absolutely.

KGS: But all of that was all mixed up with it. Because I can imagine…I mean, I know she’s not in the picture but I could almost imagine Andrea being in that photo.

LJ: Absolutely.

KGS: Yeah.

DF: Just two…we should probably wrap it up. Just a quick point just to…well, firstly, I was very sorry not to be there, it was on May the 17th of last year, the plaque was the day that I had a special birthday. The exact day, yeah my 40th. So, it was my 50th birthday. But it sounded a wonderful occasion.

And just the other thing, as you can tell from Johny’s cockney accent that it’s…I just wanted to, kind of, put it out there that it is…Baldwin is very, very Hackney, as you mentioned, but just a reminder for those of you who weren’t here yesterday. Baldwin was in…went to Edinburgh, he went to Hull. I like to think he said, I’ve been to Hull and back and let me tell you it was wonderful. That’s Louise Bourgeois.

But yeah, so he is…it’s very, very important to think about him in this space but I just wanted to open it up. I live in West Yorkshire but, you know, I just wanted to put it out that he went North as well, he made it to Yorkshire, we have photographic evidence.

So yeah, we’re due back at…we’ve got a little break, so we’ll come back in about 10 minutes if that’s…let’s go quarter past, let’s go wild, 15.

[applause]

End of transcript

James Baldwin and Britain

The Impact of Baldwin’s Artistry on Artists and Writers