James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile
by Magdalena J. Zaborowska
Duke University Press
379 pages, $24.95
IN THE FALL OF 1951, the 27-year-old James Baldwin, seeking a quiet place to finish what would become his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, found himself in the Swiss village of Loèche-les- Bains. Baldwin had been living in Paris since 1948, beginning an expatriate life that would continue for the next forty years. There in that mountain village, he was the only black man, and he realized quickly that he was in a place that had never actually seen a black man before. The spectacle of Baldwin’s presence, his experiences of being touched and insulted with fam
iliar racist words tinged with French accents, formed the subject of his essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953). But the essay, in both its eloquence and anger, makes a much larger argument beyond the villagers’ actions. Baldwin uses his encounters as an occasion to ponder the whole history of Western white supremacy, arguing that “the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” It was precisely such dislocations from the Manhattan geographies that mapped the terrain of Baldwin’s literary imagination, where he often came to his profound insights about racism—and homophobia—in the U.S.
Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction almost always focused on the U.S., but were for the most part written outside of its borders.
Giovanni’s Room, his second novel, is an exception. Set within 1950’s Paris, the novel tells the story of the homosexual awakening of David, a young American separated from his girlfriend, who begins a relationship with an Italian, Giovanni. The novel has become a classic in the annals of gay and lesbian literature, even as it complicates the very definition of a stable sexual identity. Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, is set in Manhattan and explores interracial and bisexual relationships among a group of writers and musicians, most of whom come from outside the geographic, sexual, and racial borders of 1950’s America. Begun in the late 40’s, the novel took Baldwin over ten years to finish, only finding its completion on the shores of the Bosporus, in a small apartment in Istanbul. “Once you find yourself in another civilization,” he once said, “you are forced to examine your own.”
Baldwin was in many respects the first global American writer. In his self-imposed exile, Baldwin was given many labels during his lifetime: Negro, black, gay, queer, radical, pacifist, Northerner, race traitor, expatriate writer. He spent his career embracing the vicissitudes of being both outside and inside the many social identities that were both foisted upon him or stripped from him. In the introduction to her fascinating study, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, Magdalena Zaborowska opens with a striking quote from the writer: “Perhaps only someone who is outside of the States realizes that it’s impossible to get out.” Indeed, such an idea echoes a similar one from “Stranger in the Village”: “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” These layered confinements of geography and history gave shape to Baldwin’s literary and political visions and marked his self-imposed exile as a crucial component of his creative work.
There has been much interest in Baldwin’s life and writings since his death in 1987, but his biographers have scarcely considered the influence of his expatriate life on his work. Herb Boyd’s Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin (2008) places him in the context of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s as its played out in the neighborhood of Baldwin’s childhood, but gives little acknowledgment of Baldwin’s homosexuality. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), by the Scottish writer James Campbell, details Baldwin’s life through a reading of his fiction without dwelling on his life abroad. James Baldwin Now (1999), a collection of essays edited by Dwight McBride, focuses more on Baldwin’s sexual orientation, with a few essays focused on his transatlantic migrations.
So it’s a pleasure to read Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, which locates the writer within the global context that forced him to examine the country he left behind. The book situates Baldwin within a complicated constellation of sexual, racial, and national identities, and offers a subtle analysis of Baldwin that moves beyond simple classifications. “This project,” Zaborowska writes, “attempts to bring the conflicting and often contradictory depictions of Baldwin’s person and writings together.” To see Baldwin in Turkey, a country layered with complex histories and divided between Europe and Asia is, as Zaborowska suggests, to see Baldwin anew.
Like Baldwin himself, this book defies easy classification. Part travel memoir, part literary analysis, part biography, and part social history of Turkey in the 1960’s, the book explores the ways in which Baldwin “functioned as a transatlantic black intellectual,” how Istanbul influenced his work, and how he came to affect the cultural and intellectual life of the city. The book is organized around three significant works that Baldwin accomplished during his time in Istanbul: the completion of his novel Another Country, a book which, according to Zaborowska, should be reconsidered as “a record of sorts of Baldwin’s contacts with the new places, peoples, and cultures of Turkey”; his directing and staging of John Herbert’s controversial play Fortune and Men’s Eyes, about homosexuality in prison; and his work on a collection of essays, No Name in the Street (1972), which reflect on the Civil Rights Movement and, according to Zaborowska, offer “a careful analysis of black masculinity in relationship to homophobia on both sides of the color line.” Within each part of the book, she weaves the analysis of Baldwin’s writings in with her interviews of the writers, journalists, artists, diplomats, and family members who populated Baldwin’s life in Turkey. Baldwin was shaped by the city and its people, to be sure, but they in turn were shaped by his works. For example, when Baldwin took on the project of directing and staging Herbert’s play, which was translated as “Düsenin Dostu” or “Friend of the Fallen,” it was a radical move. “The play was a success because it was a revolutionary play for the Turkish audience … this was the first time that homosexuality was vividly being shown [in the theater],” relates one of Zaborowska’s interviewees.
Zaborowska organizes the book around a short film made by Turkish director, photographer, and friend of Baldwin, Sedat Pakay. Entitled “James Baldwin: From Another Place,” the film captures Baldwin’s movements through the city streets and markets over a three-day period in 1970. In one interview, Baldwin says: “Watching people on the streets of Turkey and dealing with some of the people who I know here, one’s aware of the certain kind of uneasiness in them, in relation to the western world, a certain angle (anger?) to their relationship to it. Which echoes something in me … because of our own peculiar relationship to the west.” The film and Baldwin’s words thread throughout the book as a metaphor for a new way of visualizing and understanding his writings. This is particularly true in Zaborowska’s rereading of Another Country as a novel not only about New York but deeply shaped by a hybrid outlook of “East-West urban imaginary.”
The one problem I have with Zaborowska’s study is her casual use of the terms “gay” and “queer”—terms that hold particular meanings today that they didn’t have in the 1960’s. Zaborowska notes that “while Baldwin championed erotic liberation since the 1940’s” he “resisted the term ‘gay’” even in the later years of his life. While Zaborowska doesn’t explore this resistance, it raises a vexing conundrum about how to frame Baldwin’s life in a study that so astutely places him as an outsider to the national idioms of race and sexuality. In the end, the book demonstrates that any account of Baldwin’s life and writings is itself constantly “trapped in history,” searching and stumbling for the very terms of sexual identity that Baldwin so often rejected.
Zaborowska’s book will make you want to reread Another Country and his later works with a new context of understanding. The book illuminates, with a scholar’s focus and a writer’s nuance, how Baldwin’s exile in Istanbul was not simply a theme or escape from the racism and homophobia of the U.S., but also a deeply felt condition crucial to his intellectual and creative imagination. Indeed, the book reminds us that some of the most poignant and insightful writings about sexuality and race in the canon of American literature were composed well beyond our shores.
