Fatima Bhutto: James Baldwin’s My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation (1963) is elegiac and, like all Baldwin’s essays, and novels, profoundly moving. Writing to his brother’s young son during the dark days when America’s civil rights movement was still a struggling experiment in equality, Baldwin (1924-1987) speaks of the people who, even in their innocence, have rendered the author and his namesake nephew invisible. Writing about liberty, Baldwin understands that condemning your oppressors may be vital but so, too, is forgiveness. “You must accept them,” Baldwin writes of the whites who cast out generations of African Americans, “and accept them with love.” Though the essay is angry, Baldwin’s anger does not diminish his kindness or compassion. He is right to be angry at a country that separated men by colour and that justified segregation through religion and politics. Yet Baldwin’s anger doesn’t resemble anything so crass as bitterness or vengeance. What his anger reveals is pain. “I know what the world has done to my brother,” he writes, “and how narrowly he has survived it and I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” Few essayists can write like Baldwin. His prose is always intimate, he writes openly and without guard. His fury, his poetry, his experiments with form are all evidence of the fact that he never hid his discontent with his country and the society he lived and travelled in; rather, he meditated upon it. I discovered Baldwin’s books in my grandfather’s library in Karachi. And rifling through the shelves in the dark room, which smells faintly of mothballs and old books, I came across The Fire Next Time (1963). I stood reading “My Dungeon Shook”, which is one of its two essays, and when I had finished, took the book to read the essay to my mother. And when I had finished, to my brother. And then I found a copy of the essay online and emailed it to my friends. Baldwin writes how one feels. He doesn’t skirt around anguish and he doesn’t care to disguise the intensity of his convictions. The only duty of a writer, in my mind, is to observe the world around them and to speak of it truthfully and without guise (sorry, using guise is a sort of a guise-y thing to do). Baldwin, and this essay in particular, embodies that more than any writer I have come across. Fatima Bhutto is author of ‘The Shadow of the Crescent Moon’ (Viking)
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 14:57:34 +0000
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