This reflection on race, oppression and queerness is part of ‘James Baldwin: A Response’, an initiative co-organised by SINK Magazine, Penguin Books and Tomorrow’s Warriors to mark the centennial year of this incomparable poet of the Civil Rights Movement.
You have the grace and good fortune to not see it, for it to be invisible, for you to not see colour through your rainbow eyes in your ivory tower of privilege. You have not stood against a wall with your hands tied and your back to your oppressor and heard the click of a firearm!
Well, I must stop you there good fellow for I most certainly have been up against that wall if you’d pardon the expression and had my collar felt, and not to check the quality of Savile Row’s tailors, I’ll have you know. I have been not only up against the wall, but I have been charged and tried for crimes against humanity.
Then, sir, you know that which I allude to. My crime is to be black; your crime is to love men. Put those two together and you have my motive for moving to Paris!
I have rooms in Paris too sir, where I can most certainly see the stars
You keep your stars, for most of your kind, I’ll always be in the gutter!
He seemed to emit sulphurous indignation as he sat looking oddly vulnerable cross-legged, the smoke from his cigarettes blown out double-nostrilled. I’d not expected our conversation to reach the depths of frankness it had and so suddenly. I skirted my brow with an Indian silk scarf and reflected on our mutually disobliging circumstances.
For all his bordello-flower language and lambent posturing, I see the bravery of the man revealed. Flamboyance and disingenuity disguise despair, his words a carriage through the filth of the masses.
Come sir, I see you are most overcome by the world and its horrors. Might we take a little absinthe to leven our sorrows?
