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- I'll Thank Me Later | 1.24.2024
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It’s Wednesday, January 24, 2024.
Trump has won the New Hampshire primary. The déjà vu came with no nausea this time around. We all saw it coming.
While reflecting on life in America James Baldwin once told a friend, “I can’t breathe. I have to look from outside.”
This week I’m reading, watching, and dreaming about a life bigger than this country. I knew about the pivotal time that James Baldwin spent living in France. In fact, I had a life changing experience while in St Paul de Vence last summer, the small village in the South of France that James Baldwin called home for several years. But I never knew about how much time he spent in Turkey and how important it was to his work.
So today’s entire newsletter is dedicated to Baldwin’s time in Turkey, complete with free copies of the books he wrote while there and links to rare short films about his time.
“I like my thigh with a hot iron scar”
Table of Contents
📚 Reading
“The most glamorous girls you know are reading. They’re up to date. They’re asking questions.”
The following tweet has been the start of a delightful rabbit hole of readings this week.
ppl are already mentioning Zaborowska’s James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade and the Sedat Pakay film but id also recommend Aykan Safoglu’s essay film Off-White Tulips if you can find it
— no earthquake (irl person) (@no_earthquake)
2:22 AM • Jan 16, 2024
James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (2009)
Retracing James Baldwin’s Steps in Instanbul
📚 Pieces James Baldwin Wrote in Turkey
Another Country by James Baldwin (1962)
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968)
Blues for Mister Charlie (Play, 1964)
Going to Meet the Man (Short Stories, 1965)
The Fire Next Time (Essay Collection, 1963)
No Name in the Streets (Essay Collection, 1972)
I’ve spent the past few days wandering through the French Riviera - from F1 preparations in Monaco to the parfumeries of Eze, the crystal clear beaches of Antibes, and the Film Festival After Parties in Cannes.
It’s fitting that I ended my time here in St Paul de Vence, the village where James Baldwin retreated to when he left America in 1968.
If a more special place exists than this little village in the mountains behind Nice, I have yet to experience it.
France isn’t perfect, no place is. But I understand now why James Baldwin and Nina Simone and even our newest ancestor Tina Turner left America and retreated here. I get it now.
I deserve a bigger life than one spent entirely in a place that drains the life out of me and tries to convince me it’s to my benefit. I deserve and desire homes, places of refuge, in places that make me feel alive. And y’all deserve a friend that isn’t constantly drained, stressed, and scared. In France my life has been soft and my head has been clear. I like this version of me.
The French Riviera is a place that makes you ponder the best case scenario and for that reason, like my heroes before me, I know I’ll always retreat here as well…
(from reflections on my time in the French Riviera from my IG post)
🔍 Watching
James Baldwin tells his own story in this emotional portrait. life, works and beliefs of the late writer and civil rights activist are recounted: what it is to be born black, impoverished, gifted, and gay in a world that has yet to understand that “all men are brothers.”
Originally broadcast August 14, 1989 on AMERICAN MASTERS. 90 minutes.
While researching more about author Magdalena Zaborowska for the reading section, I found that she gave a talk at UT Austin in which followed a pre-screening of the PBS documentary.
James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973)
Strikingly shot on the streets of Istanbul, this portrait of the writer and thinker finds him discussing his work, sexuality, and complex feelings about the United States.
12 minutes.
Off White Tullips by Aykan Safoglu (Short 2013)
Aykan Safoğlu’s essay film Off-White Tulips is conceived as a fictional dialogue with the queer African-Amercian author and artist James Baldwin, which focuses on Baldwin’s stay in Istanbul. Safoğlu layers images, subtitles and figures that splice together an associative narrative, linking Baldwin’s identity and biography with the narrator’s personal history.
I truly looked high and low for this film. If you can find it, please email me! But I was able to find a testimony from the artist (above).
Blues for Mister Charlie
Performed by theater students at the City College of New York. Directed by Prof. Eugene Nesmith and videotaped by Orlando McAllister.
I’m putting all of this in conversation with one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever everrr watched…
La Noire de | Black Girl (1966)
This elegantly stark dramatization of postcolonial pain was the first feature made in Africa by a sub-Saharan African to attract international notice. And its powerful social and political undercurrents can be illuminated by a look at the fascinating route Sembène, a talented polymath, took to filmmaking—a circuitous tale that would, in the proper hands, make a thrilling biopic in its own right.
I was first exposed to this film last week when curator and artist Jessica Wimbley put the film in conversation with Fieldwork (1928) by Zora Neale Hurston and her own interpretation, Field Notes (2020), during a film talk at the Crocker Art Museum. Gorgeousness is truly the word to describe it. The film’s protagonist is about the age of my grandmother. I’ve heard so many stories about her world, the post-colonial West African world that my parents were born into. This is the most I have ever seen of that world that exists as a constructed image in my head on film. And I was deeeeeeeply moved to bear witness.
It’s useful to put this film into conversation with Baldwin’s experience of being Black in Europe and even my own experience in the French Riviera where this film takes place. His American identity played a role in how he was received and as did my identity as an African & American woman, born and raised in America.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this newsletter and what you are taking away from it all.
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