"I'm not the boy you want": sexuality, "race," and thwarted revolution in Baldwin's 'Another Country.'

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Kevin Ohi

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories. (Virginia Woolf 39)

Critics of Another Country have been eager to see in the novel the promise of a transparent sexual utopia grounded in a healing unveiling of a serenely accepted identity. Whether in terms homophobic or racist, or anti-homophobic or anti-racist (rarely, though more often with the former than with the latter, do the poles of either of these oppositions come together), critics have dwelt on a transcendence defined as a coming to terms with one's identity. This transcendence relies on the transparency of revelation in the text and the assertion of this transparency's liberatory potential, regardless of whether or not such liberation is a term of approbation. Such a reading allows "race" and sexuality to disappear from critical view; more precisely, it allows critics to cast them as mere obstructions littering the path of a surpassing transcendence, usually cast in terms of art. Thus, to some critics, Baldwin (or, alternatively, his characters) comes to terms with his identity, and this self-acceptance and self-knowledge lead him (or his characters) to a fuller and more mature development as an artist; the achieved transcendence and clarity then shed the obstructing specificities of sexuality and "race" in the blinding splendor of a universalized artistic insight. To others, Baldwin does not achieve such clarification because he is waylaid by the obstructions: His racial or sexual obsessions or politicized dogmatism smothers his true artistic self. Even those arguments explicitly focused on questions of "race" or sexuality - or on their relation - often do not escape the structuring pull of a privileged transcendence that casts either one, the other, or both as unfortunate obstructions that might, with majestic artistic clarification, be surpassed. Thus, for many concerned with "race," Baldwin's focus on sexuality obfuscates (or, alternatively, movingly metaphorizes) questions of "race."(1) Sexuality, like "race" in certain accounts, appears as an obstruction to be overcome, a blockage in the path to artistic transcendence, even if this transcendence includes a fuller understanding of "race" and racial identity.

In Emmanuel Nelson's reading of Baldwin, sexuality is, in several contradictory ways, an obstruction to be overcome. His essay "The Novels of James Baldwin: Struggles of Self-Acceptance" divides Baldwin's corpus into three stages. These stages show the author's "confrontation with and acceptance of his sexuality" and his struggle "toward a healing and liberating sense of self-acceptance" that manifests a "growing maturity of vision" (11). The relation of this self-acceptance to the closet, however, is a paradoxical one; the sign of both sexual self-acceptance and artistic maturity is a resolute silence about sexuality that can be distinguished from the closet's silence only by a tendentiously psychologized later absence of anxiety. In and out of the closet, one is silent about one's sexuality - in the first instance because one is afraid to speak one's desire, in the second because one has transcended this fear. While I would argue that, aesthetically speaking, the torturous middle ground of frantic and ecstatic self-betrayal is by far the more interesting, Nelson's account ties artistic accomplishment to a conflict-free authorial self-acceptance, and this achievement is tied to an ability to overcome the specificities of gayness, even as his account implicitly ties this overcoming of queerness to the closet.(2)

Michael F. Lynch argues for the redemptive place of suffering in Another Country, for a sacrifice that enables the artistic transcendence of both "race" and sexuality. To Lynch, suffering forces the characters to examine themselves more critically, to accept responsibility for their actions, and, through the perils of self-disclosure and self-scrutiny, to achieve a healing reconciliation with themselves. A healing, Christ-like suffering serves to contain "race" and sexuality as categories to be transcended - or, rather, as vehicles to transcendence. Racism and homophobia appear only obliquely as causes of the suffering that allows them to be overcome in a character's reconciliation with himself, and "race" and sexuality are resolved into more "universal" problems. Sexuality becomes universal love, and the experience of "race" allows African Americans access to a "moral superiority" purchased through their "privileged" experience of suffering. Criticism focused on "race," Lynch argues, "ignores Baldwin's more universal message that one needs to recognize one's faults but also to overcome guilt through forgiving oneself and others" (17), and homosexuality evaporates in the transformation of African American suffering into what Stanley Mecebuh calls "an instrument of moral regeneration in America" (qtd. in Lynch 17).

To Terry Rowden, Baldwin's transcendent vision of sexuality obfuscates questions of "race"; in Another Country, Baldwin's homosexual "utopianism" is secured through scapegoating the black man. "Most works of fiction," Rowden writes,