Encounters with James Baldwin: Celebrating 100 Years – review

Close encounters: James Baldwin. Photograph: Aurora Metro & Supernova Books

The evening of 7 August saw what was perhaps the greatest outpouring of resistance to racial hatred that the UK has ever witnessed, as thousands of people of all colours and creeds took to the streets to stand against far-right thuggery.

It was on this auspicious night that Encounters with James Baldwin: Celebrating 100 Years was launched at 24-30 Dalston Lane, the very same location where Baldwin spoke in 1985.

The opposition to hatred that washed over the UK that night reflected very Baldwinian values – tolerance and understanding, yet criticism of unacceptable stances.

Encounters with James Baldwin, edited by Kadija George Sesay and Cheryl Robson, draws together reflections by 34 writers, scholars, performers and activists to mark the centenary of the Black American author’s birth.

True to Baldwin’s own generic range, the contributions take a wide variety of forms, from essays and analysis to personal memoirs, poems and letters.

A preface by Stella Dadzie sets the stage, charting Baldwin’s development from his childhood in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s to his role in the Civil Rights movement and his years in France.

Baldwin was at the centre of the political debates of his day, but he was very far from being an arid theorist. On the contrary, the complexity of human relationships is an enduring theme in his work.

His homosexuality set him apart from some others in mid-century Black American culture, but also represented a bridge to people from all ethnic groups. It is perhaps because of his deep understanding of otherness that he was able to reach out so widely.

As Victor Adebowale notes of Baldwin’s performance in television debates: “the white people would be aggressive with him, and he would just calmly respond, just unravelling their arguments in front of them and the white audience. This is the power of him really, that […] he crossed over into the mainstream white universe while still retaining his dignity as a Black man.”

A mark of Baldwin’s intellectual calibre is how well his writing has stood the test of time. We read in this book the moving account of how he made renowned actor Paterson Joseph realise that “while I am an artist first, I am a Black artist by default. In the final analysis, I slowly grew in confidence that my ethnicity, while not all of me, was as vital a part of me as my artistic sensibilities”.

And last but not least, the quality of Baldwin’s writing shines through to all who read him: “urgent yet beguiling, fierce yet unflustered, powerful without pretension, and peacefully present without disregarding a violent past”, in the words of fellow novelist Nducu wa Ngugi.

Perhaps one of Baldwin’s most beautiful aphorisms is: “the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it”. He certainly made a place for himself in the world, and as this rich volume testifies, he helped so many others make places for themselves as well.

Encounters with James Baldwin: Celebrating 100 Years is edited by Kadija George Sesay and Cheryl Robson and published by Supernova Books. ISBN 978-1-913614-41-2. RRP: £15.99.