ON JAMES BALDWIN
by Colm Tóibín
Brandeis Univ. Press.
147 pages, $18.95
AS JAMES BALDWIN’S 100th birthday passes, I recall the line from Pablo Neruda’s poem “I Ask for Silence”: “I have lived so much that some day they will have to forget me forcibly.” Instead of fading from memory as his work aged, the man Bobby Kennedy called “Martin Luther Queen” has become an unforgettable icon, partly for his writing about the mid-20th-century Black American experience, partly for being a visible gay person, and ultimately for his exceptional abilities as a writer and presenter of important themes.
Renowned gay Irish writer Colm Tóibín has recognized James Baldwin’s entry into the canon of America’s most important writers with a rich, varied collection of five lengthy essays that were originally delivered as the Mandel Lectures at Brandeis University.
Alan Contreras is a writer and higher education consultant who lives in Eugene, Oregon.
