"Payin' one's dues": expatriation as personal experience and paradigm in the works of James Baldwin

One April evening in 1980 Baldwin and I were reminiscing as fellow expatriates (I had lived abroad in the Sixties) about the old times in Paris. He had lectured the previous day at Emory University on the "New South," which he had wryly proclaimed didn't exist. He seemed tired, but strangely contented. In answer to a comment of mine, he agreed that, yes, Paris was where "you paid your dues." I know what I meant by this. What Baldwin might have meant poses a question which, curiously, has been neglected in Baldwin studies: the theme of expatriation.(1) It has been widely recognized that the Parisian and, more broadly, the European experience was crucial in Baldwin's personal and creative life, but until a recent spate of publications, the lack of: any substantial biography had left much of that experience in the shadows.(2) Moreover, when analyzing his artistic development:, critics tend to polarize the private and the public. Typically, Giovanni's Room is seen as an intensely personal harrowing of the author's demons while the confrontations of Another Country are perceived as taking place in a more public and political arena (cf. Gibson 317). While it is true that the existential experience of alienation expressed in Giovanni's Room and the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son expands in the final novel, Just Above My Head, to a more historically based view of the confrontation of cultures, neither the early essays nor Giovanni's Room were lacking in social reflection. Conversely, personal resonances abound in Just Above My Head.

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them," Baldwin wrote in 1953 (Price 81). Three years later, shortly after finishing Giovanni's Room, he was to report on the historic Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists held at the Sorbonne in Paris, among whose major speakers were the Senegalese poet and statesman Leopold Senghor and the Martiniquan poet Aime Cesaire. The sense of alienation which Baldwin would distill from his private experience of the expatriate condition was already placed in an historical context by the spectacle of Senghor evoking the unity between art and life characteristic of traditional African culture, but doing so in Paris, in the language of the colonial oppressor.

On a less metaphysical level, the expatriation of artists from America was a common occurrence. Since colonial times, the Grand Tour of Europe, and more particularly visits to Paris and Rome, had signified for the sensitive American artist a return to the locus of Western civilization. The reasons were numerous: the provinciality of American life, the cultural density of Europe, the need for the artist to distance himself. In this respect, Black American writers and artists were no different from their White compatriots. The majority also made the obligatory pilgrimage to Europe, even if social reasons were added to the cultural ones.

Baldwin's sojourn in Paris was a liberating experience, giving him "the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself" (Price 313). David, the White American hero of Giovanni's Room, comments on this search for identity: "I think that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home" (31). Of course, his problem is that he cannot accept the sanction. Yet, even for Baldwin, the question of who he was had not been solved by fleeing the social forces which threatened him; those forces had only become internalized and the question more personal (Nobody xii).

For many Black Americans living in Paris, the perception was a familiar one. America had been a box whose walls were black and white. Depending on which wall one stood against, the choice was a featureless commonality or a shocking alienation. However, this liberation from the box of color, if liberation it were, only delivered them to themselves. At this stage of consciousness, Baldwin's lucid analysis proceeds in the early essays to a demythification of the traditional reasons given for going to Paris. Like many fellow expatriates, Baldwin understood that what he describes ironically as Paris's "fine old air of freedom" was, in fact, a myth compounded of skepticism, fatigue (in 2000 years of history the city had seen so many movements, doctrines, and manifestos), and, finally, the arrogant indifference of the Parisian. The exile seeking freedom "has come, in effect, to a city which exists only in his mind" (Price 93). Thus, Baldwin's project in the early essays would be the deconstruction of a received subject and its reconstruction based on the experience of exile.

I have used the terms expatriate and exile interchangeably to describe Baldwin's situation, but the status which he always claimed for himself was that of an exile (Baldwin and Mead 220-21). Now, exile may be the result of banishment by superior powers or self-exile due to hostile circumstances, and the latter, in fact, does not require physical displacement, as witnessed by the despairing vision of New York proclaimed in Another Country: "It was a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could tell, for money; and its citizens seemed to have lost any sense of their right to renew themselves. Whoever, in New York, clung to this right, lived in New York in exile . . ." (267). For the African American subject in particular, the voyage to a foreign land is an exile that restages the original historical and cultural alienation at "home." In one sense, then, the fact of geographic exile can be seen as the symbolic extension of a radical existential exile, and the knot of internal and external in such a perception is difficult to undo.