James Baldwin Speaks to the Protest Novel / The Protest Novel Responds to James Baldwin

James Baldwin Speaks to the Protest Novel

I admire what you’re seeking to do, my friend. I, too, have dreamt the possibilities of this pen. I have held onto it so long that it has become a proxy for these fingers, which is to say all that allows me to hold onto things, which is to say I have never been good at holding on to things. It’s just that you make a caricature of my mother, my brother, the vitality of my nephew’s laugh. They are swallowed inside of you. Each of them becomes a pawn to your politics, a bullet used in ideological warfare that cannot be won like this. It is not your job to prove a point here, to make a statement other than that there can be life amid these pages. Is Bigger Thomas nothing more than a tempest awaiting to erupt? Is Miss Ophelia merely a white knight adorned in ink? To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves. I want to see all of the complexity and mess and joy and distress of being a complex human being, which is to say a human being. Because isn’t this the problem? That we must write the most exaggerated versions of ourselves to show them something they have already chosen not to see? How can they think us more human if we don't write ourselves as such?

The Protest Novel Responds to James Baldwin

You misunderstand me, James. This isn’t for them. This is for you, for us. This here is catharsis. You are right that I have a point to make. Miss Ophelia wasn’t written to show white folks who they are but to show them who they need to be. Bigger Thomas wasn’t made to suggest that we aren’t more than this anger, he was written for our boys to know they’re not alone in feeling it. This is a protest against isolation, against loneliness, against thinking you’re the only one experiencing the trauma that leaves a man full of cracks. Didn’t you say that, James? That books showed you that you weren’t alone in your pain? You talk about humanity, but what is more human than seeing yourself in another? I remember when holding me would have gotten you killed. Now you pen these pages yourself. Is that not a protest, James? Is that not resisting all that they never meant for us to do? We’ve got to protest on these pages. This ink be our picket line. How can we write about the soil and not talk about the blood? How can we write about the tree and not talk about the noose? Ain’t no ars poetica here, James. This here is for our survival.