Refinding James Baldwin
The text that weighed on him at the time of his arrival to Turkey was his novel “Another Country,” then unfinished. The turbulence of civil-rights America, too. Baldwin is said to have come to the residence of Engin Cezzar, a Turkish actor who played Giovanni in a workshop of a stage production of “Giovanni’s Room” in New York, completely spent. Baldwin in flight. We associate him with two countries. The land of his birth, the United States—in which he, a Black man who loved men—could not be physically or psychically safe. The land of his expatriation, France, where he experienced, first, a relative sexual and racial freedom, and, as he aged, a critical confrontation with his own Americanness. A kind of frustration with Baldwin is his alienation from African intellectuals, as he himself describes in his essay “Princes and Powers,” an analysis of the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, held in Paris, in 1956. And so his time in Turkey—in Istanbul, the port city that predated the creation of the “Western World” and the attendant pillaging of the “Dark Continent”—figures in the Baldwin narrative as a liminal space. This is the space explored in the Brooklyn Public Library exhibit, which is titled “Turkey Saved My Life: Baldwin in Istanbul, 1961-1971,” featuring photographs made by Pakay.
It is a little surreal to see Baldwin looking out on the Bosporus strait. It is a little surreal to see his form, in profile, matching with the horizon of the Golden Horn. (Pakay was young when he became friendly with Baldwin, and his photos can convey an awed, staged quality; Baldwin, ever the photographer’s dream, plays along.) It is especially surreal to see Baldwin close to the Blue Mosque. Why? He is taken out of the Western-Christian context. A recent visit to Israel had disabused him of the propaganda representing that country as an intercontinental oasis of racial harmony. Baldwin flaunts his difference in the Eastern city, meeting babies, flirting with everyone, therefore making the city fit itself around his difference. Certain compositions diminish his Americanness, foreground his Africanness. He sits among smoking Turkish men, drinking Turkish tea, as my colleague Elif Batuman notes in a text for the exhibition, going on to describe “the obvious yet somehow thrilling realization that, while he was in Turkey, Baldwin consumed Turkish food.” The writer is a gravity-stealing subject. He had all his life wanted to be desired; he is Pakay’s love object, captured in crowds—a counter to the gravitas portraits we have of Baldwin from his American compatriot, the photographer Richard Avedon.
Baldwin was a social creature, practically drowning in friends. Some of Pakay’s photos have that life-style-magazine glamour. Here is Baldwin in his apron, preparing dinner for guests. Here he is smiling so widely he seems crazed, a man standing beside him, patting his shoulder. Visitors from the States come to him. Here they are eating at Baldwin’s home on the Bosphorus. Beauford Delaney was Baldwin’s mentor and the painter of my favorite portrait of him, “Dark Rapture,” an Expressionistic oil work in which Baldwin is an idealized nude, posing on a bed, flanked by two trees, his body swirling and melting with the landscape. Some twenty years after the painting, Delaney’s protégé is holding a salon across the Atlantic. Delaney appears in the photos, as does Bertice Reading, the actress, and Don Cherry, the oracular jazz trumpeter and composer.
