{"id":6501,"date":"2019-03-07T23:01:19","date_gmt":"2019-03-08T07:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=6501"},"modified":"2019-03-07T23:42:21","modified_gmt":"2019-03-08T07:42:21","slug":"post3-36","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=6501","title":{"rendered":"“\u2018Baldwin the symbol of black transgression and global black anger is simply peerless\u2019\u2014Bongani Madondo on If Beale Street Could Talk, the book and Oscar-winning film”, The Johannesburg Review of Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bongani Madondo, March 4, 2019<\/p>\n

James Baldwin\u2019s novel of half a century ago, If Beale Street Could Talk, now reissued by Penguin Random House, was successfully adapted into an Oscar-winning film by screenwriter and director Barry Jenkins. Bongani Madondo<\/a>reconsiders the text and the film as part of the Transatlantic blues tradition.<\/em><\/p>\n

He was a great master of English prose in whose style two Jameses seemed to blend most naturally: Henry James and King James\u2019 bible.
\n\u2014Lewis Nkosi, \u2018To the Mountain\u2019, Transition no. 79, 1999<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For all his time in exile, and for all of the time he spent dwelling on the agonies of difference, Baldwin always spoke in a radical, cleansing and prophetic voice.
\n\u2014Lawrence Weschler, New York, 2014<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1.<\/p>\n

Tish is nineteen and pregnant. Fonny is twenty-two and in jail for a crime he did not commit. They are badly frightened but intensely brave, painfully alone but very much together, lost in a world they never made but certain of each other. Above all, they are in love.<\/p>\n

This was, in 1974, the basis of James Baldwin\u2019s fifth novel and thirteenth book overall, If Beale Street Could Talk<\/em>. Almost half a century later this is also at the heart of celebrated black filmmaker Barry Jenkins\u2019s screen adaption of the same title. Woven\u2014indeed, serving as the canvas upon which the main story unravels in quite a slow narrative\u2014is the subplot of a bigger life and love story: the main characters\u2019 love of their families, and in turn their families\u2019 love for them.<\/p>\n

All these interwoven tableaux of loves, of racial and romantic intimacies, take place, in the book and in the film, against the backdrop of a world, well their world<\/em>, Harlem, flooded with hate. Although this is a story set in the north, New York City, the original street Beale Street is known, even to us in South Africa\u2014indeed to all jazz- and blues-loving black folks the world over\u2014as kind of blues and jazz heaven in downtown Memphis, Tennessee.<\/p>\n

The title is a nod to WC Handy\u2019s 1917 \u2018Beale Street Blues\u2019, a song whose popularity influenced the changing of the Memphis road\u2019s name from Avenue to Street. Its role in the development and marketing of the blues has long manifested into blues lore. Among jazz and blues royalty, artists such as Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Albert and BB King, Rosco Gordon and Rufus Thomas have all played (on) Beale Street. Cab Calloway, known for popularising the zoot suit and, to a modest extent, as Hugh Masekela\u2019s father-in-law, albeit for a brief time (Masekela was married to his daughter Chris), recorded \u2018Beale Street Mama\u2019, the 1923 Robinson and Turk song (that, interestingly, lent its title to a so-called \u2018race film\u2019 in 1946). The folk-rock poet Joni Mitchell\u2019s \u2018Furry Sings the Blues\u2019 and the band ELO\u2019s Time are a few among a trickle of other artists who have channelled, nodded, name-dropped or wore the street\u2019s inspiration as part of their musical hearts on their sleeves.<\/p>\n

Although a New Yorker and a Europhile globetrotter, in some sort of exile in and out of America, James Baldwin\u2019s deep love and curiosity for the South\u2014and with it, for the blues\u2014is well documented. At the heart of his literary and ideological aesthetic stirs the blues and Southern speech patterns, what Johnny Cash refers to as \u2018Southern accents\u2019. Add classical biblical liturgy and black hymnody and the reader is sucked into a blues lyricism brimful with incertitude: always as description and spirit, words transformed into feeling and assuming a performative cadence all their own.<\/p>\n

Baldwin wrote with the sort of mellifluous beauty that was at once Harlem bred, Southern rooted, and ultimately ethereally global\u2014and thus, ironically, local. Local to where his reader and listener and watcher found themselves at any particular time. We are drawn from anywhere at any moment into any of his works and, by extension, his presence.<\/p>\n

It is not readily known why he referenced this uniquely Southern cultural touchstone in his story of love between Harlem teenagers, but I know why I referenced my own chapter \u2018If Esselen Street Could Talk\u2019 in my book Sigh, the Beloved Country<\/em>: after Baldwin\u2019s 1974 novel. The man\u2019s chokehold grip over my own work as storyteller and human being\u2014had it not been blended into and mitigated by a truckload of secondary influences, such as Amiri Baraka (whose lacerating criticism of and later love and respect for Baldwin is a book waiting to be penned), Ayi Kwei Armah, nineteen-nineties hip-hop journalism, a genre of film criticism rooted in both satire and resistance politics by the likes of Camille Paglia, bell hooks, Armond White and Joe Queenan, for example\u2014would have left me destroyed with envy.<\/p>\n

Envy directed at a ghost, of course, for Baldwin died in 1986, a good two decades before I could be comfortable with referring to myself as a \u2018writer\u2019, and not merely a hack. This is, of course, the asinine and yet healthy envy writers, were they to be honest with themselves, harbour at all stages of their lives, knowing fully they\u2019d never be half as good as the object of their inspiration\u2019s worst work. Ever.<\/p>\n

2.<\/p>\n

\u2018Jimmy\u2019, as those who would have us imagine they were on a first-name basis with him refer to Baldwin\u2014usually the sort who have hardly earned such intimacy\u2014has been a major inspiration, not only to me but to hordes of, in his language, \u2018American Negro\u2019 artists and ideologues, plus their fellows from Africa and Asia, and Latin and European parts, for yonks. His impact, in the form of literary artistry, church-derived public speaking, sartorial aesthetic, artistic and gender fluidity, and indeed his several phases of ideological and political growth, the righteous anger here, the bitterness there\u2014especially at the collapse of what he might still have hoped would be the attainment of the American Dream<\/em>, brought to ashes via the trilogy of assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Dr King\u2014and ultimately his rhetorical flourish have had unspeakable (largely because its effect is so deep and so wide, of \u2018negro\u2019 expression yet universal experience, so rooted and so rejected; ultimately immeasurable) influence on, at least this<\/em> world, in this<\/em> day and age\u2014more so than, say Nelson Mandela, in their mutually singular real times.<\/p>\n

While he was a popular struggle figure and an underground darling for decades while incarcerated (nineteen-sixties to the nineteen-eighties), the blast of force of Mandela\u2019s power, at least on the global scale, was largely felt in the aftermath of South Africa\u2019s first democratic elections of 1994. The message through which it was transmitted was love: peace and reconciliation, something the current radical young garde<\/em> would do well not to poo-poo. The revolutionary essence of peace as a philosophical and mobilising vehicle is just as socially and culturally transformative as the power of anger to collapse mountains and redirect the flow of oceans.<\/p>\n

It is ridiculously unfair, bad manners even, to compare Baldwin to Mandela, but it is not, I find, unimaginable. And so: measured against the voluble media attention on Baldwin beyond the boundaries of the USA; against the sheer volume of his written and spoken output\u2014fiction, drama, essays, film, text accompanying photography, radio and television interviews\u2014from the late-nineteen-forties to the mid-nineteen-eighties; against the resurgence of Baldwin mania in the last twenty-five years, the last five as its apogee\u2014Baldwin the writer, queer, liberal, black radical humanist, internationalist, fl\u00e2neur<\/em>, Baldwin the symbol of black transgression and global black anger, is simply peerless.<\/p>\n

Add to that that he never really was a formal politician, never ascended to office, never recorded or released music, and never in his life featured in a film.<\/p>\n

In his cover blurb for a reprint of Go Tell It on the Mountain<\/em>, Michael Ondaatje writes: \u2018If Van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our twentieth-century one.\u2019 Reviewing Notes of a Native Son<\/em> in the February 26, 1958 issue of The New York Times, blues poet and Baldwin\u2019s predecessor by a good two years Langston Hughes saw Baldwin thus:<\/p>\n

As an essayist he is thought provoking, tantalising, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of \u2018Jimmy\u2019s\u2019 friends, exiled South African journalist and essayist Lewis Nkosi, whose late-style prowess with the essay form and cultural criticism was inspired by, and notably a performative challenge to, Baldwin\u2019s own lyrical eloquence and intellectual force, once said of him in a travelogue ode, \u2018To The Mountain\u2019 [Transition, 79, 1999]:<\/p>\n

After reading the first novel [Go Tell It On The Mountain<\/em>] what was striking, then, about these essays [Nobody Knows My Name<\/em>], was precisely the discovery in them of the same holy-roller rhythms, the same liturgical cadences of the church sermon, so that behind the prose you imagined you could hear whole generations of Black preachers who ever bore witness in the store-front churches. James Weldon Johnson had worked the same turf when for his poetical diction he had exploited structure and rhythms borrowed from the African-American church sermon.<\/p>\n

Young man\/ Young man\/ Your arms too short to box with God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

3.<\/p>\n

Techno-logically<\/em>, cinema and book-gen\u2019read<\/em> literature are oceans apart. A director who acquiesces to an author\u2019s or publisher\u2019s dictates, and tries to render their film as a word-for-word adaptation of the book upon which it is based, is a candidate for suicide.<\/p>\n

Films, and books, even biopics and non-fiction, are necessarily artistically works of fiction. To create art is to render experience via tactile or technological objects into consumable documentation. At the core of all art making (religion, too) is the aesthetic urgency and agency of retelling. Thus, often, the medium dictates the shape of the message, often it is<\/em> the message! Consider the following two examples of openings, both voiced by the same character, known as \u2018Clem\u2019, the young woman whose lover is in jail, in If Beale Street Could Talk<\/em>the novel, and later the film.<\/p>\n

The novel [Signet Books, 1974]<\/strong><\/p>\n

I look at myself in the mirror<\/em>. I know that I was christened Clementine, and so it would make sense if people called me Clem, or even, come to think of it, Clementine, since that\u2019s my name: but they don\u2019t. People call me Tish. I guess that makes sense, too. I\u2019m tired, and I\u2019m beginning to think that maybe everything that happens make sense. Like, if it didn\u2019t make sense, how could it happen? But that\u2019s really a terrible thought. It can only come out of trouble\u2014trouble that doesn\u2019t makes sense. Today I went to see Fonny. That\u2019s not his name, either, he was christened Alonzo: and it might make sense if people called him Lonnie. But, no, we\u2019ve always called him Fonny. Alonzo Hunt, that\u2019s his name. I\u2019ve known him all my life, and I hope I\u2019ll always know him. But I only call him Alonzo when I have to break down some real heavy shit to him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The film<\/strong><\/p>\n

As with Raoul Peck\u2019s docu-drama I Am Not Your Negro<\/em>, the screen bursts up with James Baldwin\u2019s words, from the git-go<\/em>: \u2018Beale Street\u2019, the text jumps on the screen, \u2018is a street in New Orleans, where my father, where Louis Armstrong and the jazz were born. Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, born in the back neighbourhood of some American city, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy.\u2019 At which point, as I sat alone in the afternoon screening of the film at the Ster Kinekor art-house theatre in Rosebank, Johannesburg, I wondered: which place in South Africa serves as our collective, metaphorical birthplace? Lovedale College in the Eastern Cape? Cape Town? Soweto 1976? Inside the courtroom of the Rivonia Trial? On the blood-spilled battlefield of Isandlwana?<\/p>\n

But I let the thought go, as it threatened to disrupt my enjoyment of the film. Jenkins is a filmmaker known for the deep and lush fashion with which he photographs black folks in their various skin tones, and their surroundings\u2014in gorgeous browns, sun-down scarlets, deep blues, almost always with a hint of sepia, even if in colour. His films exhort the viewer not only to watch, he invites us in to be part of the family.<\/p>\n

Often the families are wretched, unvarnished, beautiful, ugly. He doesn\u2019t do cinematic voyeurism, he does heartfelt characters, and that\u2019s the beauty of him as a director.<\/p>\n

First time we see Fonny and Tish, they are almost leisurely walking down by the river; it could only be the Hudson. Harlem is both beautiful and familiar.<\/p>\n

It could only be Harlem, but it could also be anywhere, perhaps Alexandra township\u2019s Pan Africa precinct, or down Gugulethu between Mzoli\u2019s eatery and Kwa Sec jazz joint on a Sunday. The backdrop music, Nicholas Brittell\u2019s score, sets the entire pace of the film.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, this pace would drive a Tarantino fan up the wall. Here, the young woman, played by the gorgeous Kiki Layne with her chicory velvety skin and Afro, looks at her lover, played by Stephan James, and utters the film\u2019s first spoken words: Are you ready for this?<\/em><\/p>\n

It is to his and the film\u2019s credit that Jenkins (whose Oscar-best-picture Moonlight was a cantankerous beauty and a lesson in the Eastern European less-is-more school of filmmaking, think Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski\u2019s Dekalog series) never indulged Baldwin\u2019s novel\u2019s opening monologue. While even at his worst Baldwin\u2019s sense for the dramatic, especially his characters\u2019s internal drama, is gold dust, he could be clanky and too layered for a drama feature. What sets the narrative up punchily in the book might prove a drag in a film.<\/p>\n

While Baldwin\u2019s wordiness (one of the best and worst traits all of us Baldwin\u2019s global midnight chirrun, Ta Nehisi, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Garnette Cadogan, Tour\u00e9, Achille Mbembe even, have internalised) might deliver that free associative monologue mad-rush, or dark joy, in a Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee film, it just feels out of kilter for a Jenkins joint. Until such a time as Jenkins is assigned to direct the sequel to Lee\u2019s Inside Man\u2014with Lee as the executive producer. Imagine that.<\/p>\n

A few films had actually prepared me for this sort of pace and magically captivating realism:<\/p>\n