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

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Robert Tomlinson

These final words ring with a stinging irony. For the Jamesian hero, the journey to Europe was a journey home, and although separated from it by the history of the American experience, he had access to this lost home in a way which the African American subject, encountering the African homeland, is denied. The historical distance which separates the post-colonial subject from the lost home, the space of the subject's alienation, is that of the colonial experience, but this distance is perceived differently by the African and the African American. For if the African is alienated from his traditional past, obliged like the Senghor of "Princes and Powers" to construct himself in the capital and language of the Other, he can, as Baldwin said of the Algerians of Paris, "go home." The African American must forge an identity in the land of the Other, a land to which he is denied access but at the same time inextricably bound by the experience of time and history.

The problem of undoing this double alienation in the context of the post-colonial experience is most overtly problematized in Baldwin's final novel, Just Above My Head. This work contains the most extensive novelistic sounding of the theme of expatriation since Giovanni's Room, but for the first time Africa occupies a significant place in the thematic paradigm and the link between public and private is rendered explicit. The discursive configuration formed by the more familiar European material is centered on the gospel singer, Arthur Montana, while the African configuration is assigned to the character of Julia.

For Julia, the relationship with an African lover had been related to both the father who seduced her at the age of fourteen and a history which she felt had also betrayed her. She hoped he could undo both the personal and public violations. In a scene symbolically laid in a New York meeting place of European emigres, The Russian Tea Room, she tells her former lover, Hall:

"You're not history. You couldn't undo it. I couldn't lay it on you. Sometimes, you walk out of one trap, into another. I think I thought that he was history. Because he reminded me of my father. And because he was black, black in a way my father never was. . . . Perhaps I thought that he could undo it." (527)

Julia's situation encapsulates both Baldwin's affirmation of his African roots and the ambiguity of his relation to them. Cued by her story and the spectacle of the other diners (whom he imagines to be refugees), Hall engages in a familiar Baldwinian reflection on memory, now seen as the agency of the subject's relation to history:

In one way, they [the refugees] were certainly more at home in America than Julia or I could claim to be; and yet, in another way, in a way that Julia and I were not, they were homeless. I wondered how much this had to do with what one remembered of home, with how much one could carry out, or with how much had to be left behind. And left behind, after all, how, and in what hands, or even, come to think of it, where? (530)