Nobody Knows My Name

“Nobody Knows My Name” (1961) is a collection of 13 essays James Baldwin wrote between 1954 and 1961, many of them for Esquire magazine. He was in the US for the Civil Rights Movement, but the essays as a whole give a better picture of his time in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He does visit and write about the US South, the land of his parents, but it is like another country to him. He grew up in New York.

Common themes:

• Exile – Black people are born into exile in the US, and yet can never leave the US behind no matter where they go. They will never be American and yet forever be American.
• The moral blindness of White people – which affects the vision of Black people.
• Duties of the artist – to see clearly and write the truth, to open people’s eyes.

My five favourites of Baldwin’s baker’s dozen:

1. “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” (1960) is the best short essay of his that I have read. I quoted it at length in my post “James Baldwin on the police”.

2. “Princes and Powers” (1957) is Baldwin’s account of the Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists in 1956 in Paris. Richard Wright, Senghor, Cesaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, and others appear.

3. “Alas, Poor Richard” (1961) is about Richard Wright, Baldwin’s mentor, one-time friend, and fallen hero. He had just passed away. When Wright lived in the US he wrote books in which Baldwin found expressed, “the sorrow, the rage, and the murderous bitterness which was eating up my life and the lives of those around me.” Books like “Uncle Tom’s Children” (1938), “Native Son” (1940), and, especially, “Black Boy” (1945) were a “liberation and revelation”.

But then, in 1946, Wright moved to Paris. Instead of freeing him, it cut him off from his roots and made him a shadow of his former self. He hung on the words of his White intellectual friends, like Sartre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, while dismissing those of Africans. In Paris, Richard Wright was adored and could live like a White man in New York. He no longer cared about Black people back home.

4. “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” (1961) is about Baldwin’s writer friend Norman Mailer. Mailer had the talent to become a great writer at a time when the US was badly in need of great writers. But what was he doing? He was running for mayor of New York. Huh? What a waste of his talents. And he was taking witless fools like Jack Kerouac seriously, causing him to write that cringeworthy essay “The White Negro” (1957). Mailer, though, unlike Richard Wright, was still breathing and had a chance to turn it around.

5. “Faulkner and Desegregation” (1956): William Faulkner, still alive, believed that his fellow White Southerners would do the right thing, suddenly, after hundreds of years of doing the wrong thing. Everyone just needs to get off their backs. Sheesh. Baldwin saw Faulkner as being deluded, like most White people, but as a writer he should have known better – and almost did.

– Abagond, 2019.

Sources: Google Images (2019).

See also:

• James Baldwin
  • on being a writer – a quote from the introduction to this book
  • on the police – based on his “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” essay
  • on dusky maidens – based on his “White Boy” essay
• books
  • books I read in 2018
• Richard Wright
• Senghor
• Cesaire
• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Jack Kerouac
• William Faulkner
• The Eleven Nations – the South as another country

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