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Bill V. Mullen, "James Baldwin: Living in Fire" (Pluto Press, 2019)
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An interview with Bill V. Mullen
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Narrator/Ad Host
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
Let's go.
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Professor Bill Mullen
Wait, is that Glow in the Dark underwear? Boo.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
Yeah.
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Narrator/Ad Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. I'm Mortiza Hajezadeh, your host from Critical Theory Channel. We're glad to have Professor Bill Mullen with us today. Bill Mullen is a professor of English and American Studies at Purdue. His books include Un American, W.E.B. du Bois and the Central World Revolution. W.E.B. du bois, Revolutionary across the Color Line, Afro Orientalism Study of Inter Ethnic Anti Racist alliance between Asian and African Americans and Popular France, Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935-1946. He has been a Fulbright Lecturer at one university in the People's Republic of China. His articles have appeared in Social Text, African American Review, American Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, Jacobian, and elsewhere. Mullen teaches courses in African American literature and culture, American studies, working class literature, cultural studies, and post colonial literature. And today he's here to talk about his great book, James Baldwin Living in Fire, a book which focuses on Baldwin's radical and queer politics. Bill, thank you very much for being here.
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Professor Bill Mullen
Thanks, Mortes. I'm glad to be here.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
Thank you. It's customary to start asking our guests how they became expert in the area that they are. So can you tell us a little about yourself? What made you interested in American Studies and how you became a professor of American studies?
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Professor Bill Mullen
Okay, sure. My PhD is in American literature and was very interested in contemporary 20th century American literature. But I'm also, as a Marxist and somebody who is involved in political organizing from time to time and constantly interested in political questions. I realized the only way I really wanted to study literature was through the lens of sort of radical political movements. And that's really what most of my work has tried to do. My first book is about kind of the intersection of the Communist party and writers and painters and journalists in Chicago. And, you know, James Baldwin was kind of a natural choice for me as a subject because he's at the intersection of radical politics and literature. I mean, he's one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. He was also one of the most profound political essayist. He was also, you know, a civil rights organizer and writer. And for me, it felt like coming full circle when I decided to write the book on. On Baldwin. I felt like I was coming full circle with my own life as an American studies scholar.
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Narrator/Ad Host
And.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
And the book you've written about James Baldwin is fascinating. And one that I like about the book is that there are a lot of facts there which are lesser known. There are lots of videos and documentaries about James Baldwin. And I had a friend of mine who said that I thought I knew James Baldwin until I read this book. So tell us why you decided to write this book. How did the book come about?
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Professor Bill Mullen
I was teaching Baldwin. You know, I've taught Baldwin off and on most of my Life. And in 2012 and 13, when the Black Lives Matter movement was just kind of emerging after the Trayvon Martin shooting, I was drawn back to teaching Baldwin again because of all the extraordinary things he had written about the history of policing and police violence, which a lot of people had kind of forgotten until Black Lives Matter. And then they began to Read Baldwin again. And I was one of those people that was reading, reading his, his past writings to help understand the present, you know, and explain the present and how it was that police, as he said in 1966, were occupying forces in black communities, which really was the, you know, the kind of the target as it were, of the Black Lives Matter movement. So it was partly also out of a g. Personal fascination with his life. I mean he's always struck me. I lived in New York City and, and did my PhD there and taught in, in the City University of New York system. And I kind of felt that Baldwin's life growing up in Harlem and emerging out of that city and becoming a world class intellectual spoke to, spoke to me as well. Not that I have ever like sort of emulated what Baldwin's done, but I felt like I knew something. I wanted to know more about how this, this young black kid from a really, really poor working class family and born in the 1920s, in the first half of the 20th century, had managed to produce this life, extraordinary life, an extraordinary literary life. So there was in some ways a personal connection, I think for me, having been like him, a sort of shape by the experience of living in New York City.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
So let us talk about James Baldwin. He had a very, very difficult life when he was growing up in the US and one thing that he kind of says that same thing was his teacher. Tell us about his childhood and the influence that his teacher had had on him.
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Professor Bill Mullen
Yeah, Baldwin basically said, you know, for somebody who grew up very, very poor, I mean, his mother was a domestic worker, his father worked at a factory, was also a preacher. But that didn't pay really. It was the light. It was reading books and discovering literature that kind of let him rise up, you know, and actually understand what his life actually meant. And when he said, when he was. Started reading like Charles Dickens novels, right when he was 12, 13 year old boy and he's reading about, you know, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield and industrial factory life in Britain and this kind of young, young children growing up in, in hardship. These books really spoke to him. Weirdly enough, you know, he said, I said I felt like I was kind of seeing my own life refracted through literature. And by the time he was about 13, he had become a precocious reader and a really, really fine writer already and was lucky enough to have as a school teacher a woman named Orilla Miller, who was a white woman, very left wing politics. She was at the time, she was his teacher. She was a member of the Communist Party. And she kind of took him under her wing and not only encouraged his reading and writing, but began to take him to theater, began to take him to movies, began to try to push him out into the world because she knew he was an exceptional young kid. And they developed a really tight bond and they remained friends the rest of Baldwin's adult life. And he basically looked back at the experience of her as a teacher and said it was really life changing for two reasons. One, he felt recognized, you know, for his intellect, which really mattered. And secondly, you know, he lived. He lived in a pretty hostile, racist world. And for a white woman to suddenly, you know, show this special interest in him made huge difference for him. He said it was. She was the reason I could never fully hate white people, even when I wanted to kill them sometimes for what they were doing to black people like me. And that's a. That's a great Baldwin story because he was very interested in the. The lives of young black people. A lot of his books, like his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, which is basically. Got a biographical or about it, a young boy trying to navigate Harlem in the 1930s. He thought that black children were not just the future, you know, of the race, but they were like, you know, in some ways, guinea pigs for what racial capitalism did to. To black lives. And there's even a connection there. When I think about somebody like Trayvon Martin or Tamir Rice, you know, young black boys who have been shot down in America. Those are the kinds of lies that. That show up in James Baldwin's novels, you know, and in fact, I think, you know, you could say that he understood. He understood really well that had he had not had better luck or had he not had worse luck, he might have ended up killed by the police as well. One of his first moments of political consciousness was when he was pushed over by a couple of New York City police officers when he was 10 years old. And he said, suddenly I realized that I understood something about the power structure of the world. That childhood experience of sort of thinking about as a young boy what oppression, racism, poverty actually felt like, and trying to find words and books, including his own words, to express it to me, that was the kind of incubator for the great writer and person that he became great.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
And in his book, James Walling wrote this book, Fire Next Time, where he talks about his experience in the church and how he realized even gods are white, God is white, and his disillusionment basically with the church. Can you tell us a little about his religious journey, maybe.
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Professor Bill Mullen
Yeah. So his father was a really devout storefront preacher and a very conservative, kind of fun, what we would call fundamentalist Christian, and wanted Baldwin, his son, to become a preacher, to follow in his footsteps. And Baldwin began preaching when he was about 14. In church. He was really gifted. He was brilliant with language. And a lot of his, you know, development as a writer, I think, began with his. His understanding and the power and the poetry of words as he was learning how to.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
To.
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Professor Bill Mullen
To. To preach. But by the time he was about 16, he was having questions in his mind about Christianity that were related to questions about, for example, his own father had a tumultuous relationship with a. A man who was often times angry and could be sort of abusive in certain ways emotionally. And Baldwin didn't want that model in his life. And he didn't want Christianity to be the kind of crutch that I think he thought it was for his father as a way of dealing with pain. And there was a third element to this where, you know, he was. He was sensing his own homosexuality about the time he was going through adolescence and he was trying to fit into the church. And that was a problem. Like, he knew that if he were to come out as a gay man or to pursue these feelings, it would be pro. A problem for him as a. As a member of that church. And these things kind of pushed him out. Like when he graduated high school in 18. When he was 18, he left the church, left Harlem, moved to Greenwich Village. It was a kind of a break with sort of certain kinds of orthodoxies, sexual and religious. And it started him on a totally different path of self exploration, which involved confronting his sexuality and led him to write partly this book, the Fire Next Time, which was published in 1963 and was a manifesto really on the. America's inability to resolve, like, its extraordinary racial hierarchy. And Baldwin basically prophesied that if the United States didn't get its act together, there would be blood in the streets, which basically became the story, you know, of the later 1960s and the Watts riots and the Detroit riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King. But in. In the Fire next time, what actually drew him to the book was a religious question. He was fascinated by the rising popularity of the Nation of Islam, which was the church established in Detroit in the 1930s, also had strong basis in Chicago, which was essentially merging a kind of black nationalist politics with Islam. And of course, that's the matrix that produced Malcolm X. And by 1960 and 61, Malcolm X is galvanizing you know, especially working class black audiences across the United States preaching, among other things, that Christianity is the white man's religion and that it's always going to stab you in the back. Right. And that was of course, rooted in things like slavery where, you know, Malcolm and others told us that it was the, those, those slave owners who were the most ardent Christians were oftentimes the most abusive masters. Right. So Baldwin goes and meets and interviews Elijah Muhammad, who's the head of the Nation of Islam at the time. And he's trying to understand what is it about this appeal of a kind of anti Christian, anti white supremacist religion to the black masses. And for him, it was like his own, it was bound up with his own, you know, doubts and questions he had had about the, the, the effectiveness and the utility of Christianity for people like himself. Right. Who, as I, as I mentioned, had his own identity questions that he thought the church could not resolve. So the Fire Next Time is an amazing sort of autobiographical moment in his life of religious examination, but also using that book to explode these myths about white Christians benevolence in America. Right. And the, the, the, the, you know, he actually uses the Bible. He uses Noah's. You know, God gave Noah the rainbow sign. First time fire, first time water the fire. Next time the prophecy of kind of the end of the earth as a curse on the United States if it cannot find a way to actually end the brutal suppression and exploitation of black people. So it's a, it's an extraordinary book.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
Let us talk about his journeys before reading your book. I thought he only spent a few months or at most a year in Turkey, but it was the suicide of his friend that kind of pushed him to leave the United States. And he said somewhere, I guess, that if I knew that if I had and left the U.S. that would be my fate as well. So why did he decide to leave the United States? And, and he famously said that he spent 10 years in Turkey. And he famously said that Turkey saved my life. So talk to us about that, please.
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Professor Bill Mullen
So he first leaves the US to go to Paris in 1948. He's, he's like 24 years old. He goes there because, you know, as you said, he said, if I had stayed in America, I would have either killed somebody or killed myself. He was kind of at the end of his rope about racism in the, in the US he was poor. He had, he, he kept jobs and he lost jobs. He was also desperate to just commit to writing. And he had some examples of people like Richard Wright, who was one of his early idols, who had actually just two years before, in 1946, himself left the United States for Paris for very similar reasons. And Wright and other black writers were beginning to see Paris as a place where, one, it was cheaper to live and two, you wouldn't have to deal with the kind of American racial hierarchy. And so Baldwin found that appealing. And he went and he left and he began. He threw himself into his writing wholeheartedly when he arrived there and began to write the. Some of the essays especially that were first published and helped, you know, put him on the map as a literary figure. He stays, he's in and out of Paris from 1948 to about 1960. He comes back to the United States in the late 1950s after, for example, the Birmingham bus boycott and the beginnings of Martin Luther King's Southern Civil Rights campaign. And he comes back specifically to participate in that movement. He participates partly as a writer. He's assigned by prominent American magazines to go south and write journalistic reports, or what we would call reportage, about the battle to integrate schools, like in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the attacks on black protesters. And it was a huge life changing moment for Baldwin, the like reemerging back into an America where now black people are rising up for, against the same things that made him leave in 1948. You know, he's, he's terribly excited to see people even younger than himself mobilizing en masse against racism, capitalism in America. So he spends, he's in and out of Paris. He goes between Paris and the US in the late 50s. He also spends some time in New York in this period because he's. Among other things, he's also trying to establish a theater career. He begins writing plays in the 1950s. He writes, his first play called Amen Corner is actually produced in the 1950s. He's also, for some time in this period, also works as an actor, tries to train as an actor. And he meets a young Turkish actor in New York City who persuades him to come to Istanbul. He says, come visit, you know, we'll talk theater. We'll, we'll show you. We'll show you my homeland. And so Baldwin takes him up on the offer. And interestingly, he actually goes to Turkey from Israel, which he visits briefly, and maybe we'll talk about that later. But Turkey immediately is sort of a new landscape for him as a writer and as a thinker. There's a vibrant Turkish intellectual community there which he becomes a part of. He falls into the Turkish theater scene by the late 1960s, when he's. He buys a home there. That's how much he likes it. He begins to write. Many of his most important books of the 1960s are drafted from Istanbul. Okay. His 1962 novel, Another country, which is actually, as a title, tells you that Baldwin was thinking about exile. He was thinking about the condition of being outside of America, which by the. By the 1960s had become kind of a permanent condition. And he also feels, I think, two other things in Turkey which are really important. Three things. One, he. He. There's a certain anonymity he has there. He's becoming really famous in America. But Bolton was always. Sometimes felt suffocated by celebrity. He. He was both constantly on television and appearing in magazines. But he absolutely craved a private life. And I think he had a private life in Istanbul that he couldn't have had if he had been living in New York City, for example, where he was constantly under attention and scrutiny and siege. That was one thing. Secondly, you know, Baldwin wanted to live as a gay man where. Any place he could. I think in Paris and in Istanbul. He felt more in some ways at ease with his sexuality and not under the microscope of the American media, for example, which was constantly prying into his life. There's a very good book about Baldwin's time in Turkey called by Magdalena Zaborovska, a scholar, called the Erotics of Exile. And she makes this wonderful argument that Baldwin kind of deepens his sexual identification, self identification as a gay man, partly because he feels emancipated to. To do so when he's in Turkey. And the third thing is, you know, it can. He's at. He continues his. His understanding of, let's call it the east and the west, right? Turkey is this fascinating place that sits sort of straddles, you know, Europe and Asia, right? And that's. That really interests Baldwin, especially after riding the fire next time where he's doing this deep interrogation of Islam. He's now living in a Muslim majority country, right, where he's. He's a kind of racial and religious minority himself. But he's beginning to like Malcolm X. When he goes to Mecca, you know, famously in 1964, and realizes that Islam is a world religion, not just something that black nationalists subscribe to. In Turkey, I think Baldwin begins to understand. Becomes more kind of worldly in his understanding of not not only, like, how Turkish culture and Islam fits into the world, but seeing the United States differently, again from an outside vantage point, which is a huge theme in his writing. Baldwin Olsen said You know, you really only know your homeland when after you leave it. And so Turkey gave him another kind of prism by which to explore what it meant to be a Westerner. But Baldwin once described himself as a bastard of the west, meaning like as a young black boy, like an orphan, right in this so called American family. That perspective, I think helped come into focus for him when he was actually outside of the United States, looking back at it and realizing what exile and expatriateism actually meant for him at a deeper level about his own sort of disease, as it were, about being a black American. Something that Du Bois said, you know, famously creates his double consciousness, this kind of feeling that you're at war with yourself. So that, that he took that war with himself to Paris, he took it to Turkey. It gave him a place to kind of think through these, this, this problem of consciousness in, in areas where he was learning about himself in new ways too.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
It's fascinating to see how his years in, in Istanbul formed his identity and also his, his artistic identity as well. And I think it also influenced kind of the community that he was with in France as well, because I've watched the documentary some time ago and he had a lot of friends from Arab Algerians in France. But how about. Another fact that I did not know about him was that he did travel to Israel as well, and that's where he came to. And he made an interesting comment about Israel, which I'll let you talk about it. And so he saw, he felt that he was in America again there because of the way Palestinians were being treated.
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Professor Bill Mullen
That's right, yeah. One of the themes I really wanted to look at was James Baldwin's relationship to Palestine and Zionism. And just to give, just to give some context, Baldwin grew up in the United States where there's was tremendous anti Semitism and he had lots of Jewish friends growing up. And some of the first editors that helped publish his work were Jewish. He came to understand racism in America partly by understanding anti Semitism, with which he was always both opposed to and obviously very sympathetic to. Jewish, Jewish. The history of Jews under anti Semitism. And in the 1950s, like a lot of African Americans, they actually saw Israel as kind of a liberation project. You know, this place, this idea that Jews who had been persecuted and thrown out of Europe would find a homeland that was actually somewhat of a progressive idea for like black Americans who, you know, forever had kind of dreamed about, you know, a homeland of their own. You know, Marcus Garvey wanted to take, take Africans, you know, African Americans to Liberia. So Baldwin goes to Israel, intrigued, you know, to sort of find out, well, gosh, is Israel really all that? I thought it might be. But even as he did so, he once wrote 1970, he said, you know, I thought about going to live there when I left America in 48. He said, but which side of Israel would I have lived on? And what he was referring to was the partition, right? That when the united. When the UN created Israel, it partitioned it into the state of Israel and Palestine as separate entities, and the Palestinians had no state. Israel was a state. The Palestinians were stateless people. So when he goes there, what really strikes him? And to go to your comment, he says, man, he said, when I see the Palestinians living across from those barbed wire fences, I feel like I'm back in Harlem. Like, I recognize this, okay? And this identification builds upon something that did happen to him in Paris. He arrives in Paris just a few years before the Algerian revolution begins. And in Paris, he's actually seeing Arabs shot down by the police in the streets because they are aligning themselves with this anti colonial movement taking place in Algeria. He goes to jail in 1955, he's falsely accused of stealing something in Paris. And he looks around, he goes, man, everybody else here is an Arab. They all look like me. And so by the time he's been to Istanbul and he's gone to Israel, he's actually beginning to understand that, as he put it in one of his pieces of writing, I understood that the history of the Arabs was also my history, right? That we had been, to go back to his metaphor, bastards of the west many times, that Western imperial Israel, he said later, was a colonial project. He said it was created, he came to understand, by the French and the Germans and the Americans because they all wanted one. They wanted. They were happy to send Jews someplace else because there was so much anti Semitism in, in, in Europe and North America. But they also wanted a, you know, a, a political proxy in the Middle east so they could kind of have a foothold against the Arab world. And this is, of course, a huge story of the 1950s and 1960s as Arab countries are beginning to decolonize, right? As you know, Egypt is throwing out the British, Algeria is throwing out the French. Baldwin, by the 1960s, is just as passionate about the American civil rights movement as he is the struggle for African and Arab decolonization. And he writes about this especially in this wonderful book called no Name in the street in 1972. And he says, look, if the United States really wanted to be a democracy that put human rights at the forefront. We would be supporting the Arab nations and the Palestinians, not the Israelis, because he had come to understand Israel as an oppressor state, which it is to this day. So I wanted to really tell that story about James Baldwin because I think many people remember him for his writing about civil rights here in the United States, but less for his understanding of civil rights for, say, the Palestinians, which by the 1960s and the 1970s was also a recurring subject for him as a writer.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
And again, that just shows that. That kind of reminded me of my friend's comments when he said that he thought he knew James Baldwin until he read your book, because there are lots of interesting facts there that we don't know much about. And I had a conversation with you a few months ago, and we talked about similarities between James Baldwin and also that great Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani. And you actually drew some really, really interesting parallels between the two in terms of. They had never met each other, of course, and the way they were similar. One was an American guy and the other one was a Palestinian guy. Were both fighting for justice.
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Professor Bill Mullen
Yeah, yeah. So for those. For those who might not know, Ghassan Khanafani was a Palestinian radical, a Marxist, a journalist, a novelist, and one of the leading members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which in the late 1960s was the. The most militant group fighting for Palestinian liberation. And so much so that in 1972, Kanafani was assassinated by the Mossad, the Israeli secret secret service, for his political activism. And I was really struck by how parallel in some ways, his life was to James Baldwin's. They were born about the same time in the first half of the 20th century. Kanafani was a young, very young person when the state of Israel was created, and he and his own family were. Became what we would call diasporic subjects. Right. They. They had. He lived in. In Jordan, he. And that. That it struck me that in 1948, which was the year that Israel was created, that was also the year that Baldwin left America, like, left his own homeland. And so you have these two writers who are kind of partly exiled from their own land, and they also want to speak on behalf of the exile. And Kanafani spends his entire life, like Baldwin, writing journalism, history and fiction, which illustrates really, the plight of the Palestinians living under Israeli settler colonialism. And he tells the stories like Baldwin does, always from the point of view of the oppressed. Edward Said was a great fan of Kanafani, and he was A great fan of Baldwin and, you know, said for himself, he said. He said, what is Zionism? Zionism is. Zionism must be understood from the standpoint of its victims, right? In other words, it was a political ideology that was. That helped create the state of Israel as a settler, colonial state. But he said, I always wanted to understand it from the standpoint of my.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
Of the.
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Professor Bill Mullen
Of its victims, that that's exactly how Baldwin and Kanafani viewed Zionism. It's how they viewed Western imperialism. It's how they viewed west colonialism. They were both opposed to all colonial wars. For example, Baldwin was a. Like, Canafani was a. Was very strongly opposed to the US War in Vietnam. So, and one other thing that made them similar to me. I mean, Baldwin was hounded by the FBI. He. The FBI opened a file against Baldwin in about 1960, and J. Edgar Hoover, who was the head of the FBI, you know, considered him an enemy of the united. Of the. Of the American state. And this was because Baldwin was constantly criticizing American racism. He was. He was supporting, like, the Cuban revolution in, in 1959. So they were both dissidents, right? That. That would be the other thing. They were dissident writers and intellectuals who were committed, totally committed to using their art and their writing to speak on behalf of their people. In fact, they both said something almost identical about that. Kanafani and Baldwin both said, in effect, the role of the artist is to speak for the people. And I think that had they ever met, I think they would have understood each other perfectly.
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Mortiza Hajezadeh
It was a great comparison. How about James Bolton's relationship with unions? Because he was not only discriminated against by the vast majority of, let's say, establishment, but it was also somehow discriminated against by his own folks, by black people. Some of them were in the unions. Can you talk about his relationship or his critique of capitalism or unions, maybe?
- [36:50]
Professor Bill Mullen
Yeah, I know. Another theme I wanted to talk about was, was James Baldwin's critique of capitalism in, in. In 1972, this book, no Name in the street, he said, I'm a socialist. He said, and if you look at. If you look at his life, his criticism of American racism was inseparable from his criticism of American capitalism. He understood that capitalism produced racism and that you would never eliminate racism until you got rid of capitalism. And something that, you know, very few scholars have written about is his. His exposure to radical politics. When he was a young man, I mentioned Arila Miller, who was a Communist Party member. I mean, her husband took him to a Mayday parade which was the, you know, the day of international communism. When he was a young boy, when he was living in New York in the early 40s, he, he became interested in Trotskyism. He began to read the writings of Leon Trotsky. He met a young Trotskyist named Stan Weir, a working class guy who tried to recruit him to the Trotskyist movement. And Baldwin never joined the movement, but the ideas that he began to read there, which fundamentally argued that capitalism was an oppressive system, those ideas never left him. And if you read his writing in the 1960s, for example, he had this great line which appears in the, this wonderful film, I am not your negro, which some of your audience may have seen. It's a brilliant biographical film about him. But he's, you know, somebody said, ask him what white supremacy was. And he says, well, it's. White supremacy is Chase Bank. And what he meant was, you know, it's, it's the international structure of capitalism which upholds white supremacy. And that starts with the slave trade, right? And, and it runs all the way up through 1980s when he died. And you know, the, Ronald Reagan was President of the United States, the man who gave, who gave us neoliberalism, right, who really argued that the free market would solve everything. I mean, Baldwin hated Ronald Reagan with a passion, not just because he was such a neoliberal pro capitalist, because he had, you know, he had, he had fired Angela Davis when she was a professor at UCLA, 1970, because she was a communist. And James Baldwin was not only a friend of Angela Davis, but wrote this beautiful letter when she was, you know, in jail, charged with, with murder, falsely saying, you know, we got to stand with you. Because if they don't, if we don't stand with you, they're going to come for us in the morning. So my point is, when Baldwin looked at what we would call the American ruling class and saw people like Ronald Reagan, those were his enemies. Those were people he understood from a very young age were his enemies. And so I think when people read his work, you'll notice how important social class is. Almost all of Baldwin's stories are about working class, lower middle class people really, really struggling to stay alive. And that's for him, it's not just a metaphor, but it was his own experience of capitalism. Even when he got, you know, wealthy and successful, he always understood the fragility of, of and the precarity of, of life under capitalism. And he wrote about it to the very end of his life. I think it's a, when I, I said in the introduction to my book that James Baldwin was a revolutionary. And I mean several things by that, but I, I also think that the, the Baldwin that we need to recover now is not just the, the Baldwin of, of Black Lives Matter, but it's the Baldwin who would have probably supported the Occupy movement, you know, that said that, you know, we're the 99% and they're the 1%. That's a theme of his writing too.
- [41:12]
Mortiza Hajezadeh
I think the brilliance of his activism was also his intellect, his intellectual journey was that he never separated, as you mentioned, classes struggle, capitalism from issues of race. He saw them as being two sides of the same coin. And he also called this version of his version of socialism Yankee Doodle socialism, which was, he was calling for and let's say indigenous idea of socialism in America and native. And socialism.
- [41:38]
Professor Bill Mullen
Right. Yeah. You know, I think he meant a couple things by that. He said he was, he was talking about the Black Panther Party and they, they were calling themselves socialists. And what he said was, you know, we black radicals are trying to develop a Marxism and a socialism that speaks to the historical specificity of American history from slavery to the present. And that meant an indigenous socialism that also take up questions of genocide of Native Americans and attacks on migrants and immigrants. Right. So he wanted socialism that would, that would illuminate America's special history of racism and capitalism. But he was also turned off by, for example, Stalinism. He, Baldwin didn't think the Soviet Union was socialist. Right. Like he had. That's that. He learned that from the Trotskyists in the 1940s. That was Trotsky's position. You know, Stalin is not a revolutionary. He's actually a counter revolutionary. So in the 1940s and 50s, Baldwin is basically saying, Russia is not the answer. And this puts him in a little bit of a fix in the 50s. He kind of becomes a little bit of a Cold War liberal for a short time when he says, well, America may be terrible, but it's not Stalin's Russia. And he kind of outgrows that position once he actually begins a deeper analysis of things like American imperialism and the war on Vietnam and, and you know, the continuous attacks on black people in the South. But yeah, he was, he was struggling like so many, you know, I think black left wing intellectuals have done. You know, Cedric Robinson wrote this great book called Black Marxism. Right. In which he's pondering people like Du Bois and Richard Wright and C.L.R James and others who have tried to develop a Marxism which draws specifically out of Black intellectual traditions and black intellectual and black historical experience. Baldwin belongs in that group. You know, he, he is in my opinion, a black Marxist.
- [43:55]
Mortiza Hajezadeh
Let us talk about his rift, his, his disagreement with Malcolm X. And I guess it's a timely one because today that we're talking about it, yesterday was Malcolm X's anniversary, anniversary of his assassination. So what was his critique of the Nation of Islam? I guess he called it the reverse of white supremacy logic. But he changed his position later on. So talk to us about Malcolm X and James Baldwin.
- [44:23]
Professor Bill Mullen
Yeah, well, I mentioned that Baldwin had, in the 50s, he was really an integrationist in the 1950s. He really thought racial coexistence was possible and necessary. And the Nation of Islam challenged that by basically, you know, arguing that black people should organize for themselves. Right? What, what they would call Malcolm X would call black self determination should be a goal. And Baldwin struggled with that idea, but was eventually one to it. You can see this in interviews. He has, he has conversations with Malcolm X in the early 1960s. And Baldwin is not sold on the Nation of Islam. He's not sold on the idea that black self organizing outside of an interracial framework is the right solution. But across the 1960s, as he loses friends like Medgar Evers who were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen in the south, and Malcolm X is assassinated in 1965 and Martin Luther King is assassinated in 1968, by the time he's experienced the massive loss of life, the kind of what feels like slow genocide against black people in the United States, he really revises his thinking. And he looks back in the late 60s and 19 early 70s and he says, you know what? I probably was being, I was probably playing the good, the good black man to Malcolm X's bad black man back then, because I was talking integration, he was talking black self organizing. He basically, he basically revised his position to say that what Malcolm was saying and doing was right for that time. It was the right message for that time. So he, for him, Malcolm X was at the end of the day, a real hero. Like a real hero. And it's, it's one reason he wanted to write a book about Malcolm and Martin Luther King and Med Grabbers, which he never finished, but it was because each of them had had a huge imprint on his thinking.
- [46:47]
Mortiza Hajezadeh
Thank you. And let's talk about his legacy. So he was this huge intellectual figure. He was very popular, quite well known. But it seems that maybe toward 1990s, his fame, maybe decline is not the right word, but there were other people. So he was not so much in the spotlight as he was before. So what happened back then? But he came back again, like you said at the beginning. I think anything controversial that happens, some of these great writers come back to light again. Like when Donald Trump was elected as the president. Everybody started reading 1960, 1984 again. So, yeah, that's right.
- [47:33]
Professor Bill Mullen
Baldwin was an absolute superstar in the 1960s. He was the most famous black writer in America. He was first black writer to be on the COVID of Time magazine in the 19. But his reputation. His reputation and his writing were also tied to what I will call the civil rights movement and the black power movements because he was so brilliant at both participating and writing about them. When those movements began to fade in the 1970s, Baldwin faded with them. His subject had been lost. His writing subject had been lost. Right. So he was for a while kind of unsure about what. What he was going to even say about the United States. And by the way, he was in and out of the US a lot in the 60s because of the civil rights movement and black power. 70s. He spends more time in France. He goes back to. He bought. He had bought a house in southern France, and he spent more time living there. So he was out of the public eye. Those two things combined to kind of begin to, I wouldn't say diminish his reputation, but he was just, you know, he just wasn't as visible in the 80s. He writes a few books, none of which are as successful as his earlier books, which. Which partly has to do with their subject matter. He writes novels called, like, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone and Just Above My Head. And they're brilliant novels, but they're different than his earlier work. They're more about black domestic life. They're not as what we might. Maybe what might people. They might not be as overtly political to some people as others. And then he. He gets ill. I mean, he's. He's his, His. He's in ill health a good part of the 1980s, and his writing is slowing down. And he passes away in 1986. Now, what's interesting about his death is that as soon as he dies, almost every black writer, including, for example, a relatively still then young Toni Morrison, stands up and says, james Baldwin is why I am a writer. And there's this outpouring of tributes. You can see it at his funeral in New York, where writer after writer stands up and praises Baldwin for kicking open the door for other black writers, right? For giving them a voice for talking politics for Being fearless. Right. Amiri Baraka, who's one of the great poets of that time, calls him God's revolutionary black mouth.
- [50:13]
Mortiza Hajezadeh
Right.
- [50:16]
Professor Bill Mullen
And that begins. It's around that time in the 90s, when Baldwin's reputation as a writer with the public was not maybe what it. What it had been in the 60s in terms of book sales. But he begins, for example, to be taught in American colleges and universities. His books immediately become, you know, part of the canon of what's becoming African American literary studies. Remember, we didn't really study black literature widely in. In. In American universities until really the 1980s and the 1990s. Right. So Baldwin's books begin to get picked up in an academic setting. And. And then I think, you know, he kind of lives in that space through the early 2000s. And then when the Black Lives Matter movement does. Does emerge again, there's this extraordinary rediscovery of his work. Ta Nehisi Coates writes this really beautiful book, between the World and Me. And it's about the Black Lives Matter movement, but it's. It's actually patterned after the fire Next time. It's actually written in the form of a letter to his son. And Baldwin's book was a letter to his nephew. And suddenly a whole Jessica Ward. And so a whole series of writers are writing books, recovering Baldwin. There's new scholarship about Baldwin. There's new essays and appreciation. And it has to do with. It has to do with Black Lives Matter and policing. But it was almost like James Baldwin was so ahead of his time that the time had to change for him, for us to catch up with him. Right. And so suddenly, so many things that he had written 40 and 50 years ago seemed like they were speaking to the. To the moment that we're in. And I think that we could say the same about Shakespeare. We could say the same about Michelangelo. Right. There are artists who constantly interpret the present for us because there's something so deep and extraordinary. And Baldwin's one of those writers. And I don't think Baldwin. Baldwin has so many legacies. And the other one I think is really important to talk about is he was without question the first openly gay, incredibly important, successful black writer, even though it wasn't the main. The main focus of his work. But, you know, your people here should read Giovanni's Room, which is this extraordinary second novel he writes while he's in Paris about a gay male relationship. Right. This is a Nate 1950s. No one's writing books about this in the 1950s. And the book does really well and it, it opens a door, right? So this, so what. What we see in the, in this, in the post James Baldwin world is, is a whole stream of writers, gay, lesbian, queer, who look back and say, wow, you know, James Baldwin helped, helped open that space for us. And that. It's hard to say which is his most important legacy, but I think I would say that that was one of the most important.
- [53:36]
Mortiza Hajezadeh
And just following up on his, let's say, rereading and rediscovering James Baldwin. You've taught James Baldwin to a lot of university students. So if you want to maybe recommend a couple of his writings to high school kids, especially these days, where I guess there are controversies around, some books are banned from high schools. I think the importance of Jane Baldwin has never been. Significance of Jane Baldman has never been more important. So what, what would you recommend to high school kids if they want to approach James Baldwin?
- [54:09]
Professor Bill Mullen
Oh, I think. I think go tell it on the mountain, you know, which is what we would call a coming of age story. It's about. It's about high school age kids, it's about himself, it's about growing up, it's about parents, it's about sexuality. It's a beautiful, beautiful story. I mean, the Fire Next Time is such an important book and it's such a moving book and it's such a great work of history of the 1960s, I think that, you know, really should be on everyone's reading list. I think he wrote a really lovely novel that was made into a Hollywood film not long ago called if Beale Street Could Talk. And it's a love story between a young black male artist and his lover. And it's also about the system of mass incarceration. And it was written in the early 1970s, but it holds up so well and so beautifully as a story about black life and black love. And I think the film adaptation is actually really, really exceptional as well. And that's something that is available, I think. I think the, the Raoul Peck film I am not your Negro, which I believe is probably still on Netflix, is a great introduction to Baldwin's life. It's. What's one thing that's beautiful about it is the entire screenplay of the. Of the film is James Baldwin's own words read by Samuel L. Jackson. And it's gorgeous, just beautiful to hear the voiceover. You know what it seems like the voice of James Baldwin hovering over the film. That's a very available point of entry for Baldwin. I think those would be some of the things that I would Recommend. And I mentioned Giovanni's Room, which is such a beautiful novel, too, and a book that doesn't often get read, partly because it's set in Europe and it's about gay life. But it's just. It's. It's extraordinary. It's as radical as anything he ever wrote.
- [56:18]
Mortiza Hajezadeh
And he also wrote a short article to. To teach us. I don't remember the name of the article.
- [56:24]
Professor Bill Mullen
Yeah, he wrote a. He wrote a great article called. It's called A Talk to Teachers. And it was. I think it's available on the Internet. If you Google. Google it. It's a. It's a. He was invited to speak to some school teachers in New York City. I think it was 1963, roughly. It's an amazing piece. Glad you reminded me of it. Like, I think for young people to read, because, you know, he basically says to these teachers, understand that you have these really important black lives in your hands, and it's your job to make sure, one, that they understand how opposed the world is going to be to them, but two, to give them the tools and the confidence to stand up for themselves and to fight. And it's a. It's a great piece. And it's. I think it speaks. It's almost like Baldwin talking to his own younger self, you know, about what he would have liked to have heard when he was growing up in Harlem in the 1930s. Probably. Probably something like what Orilla Miller told him about how you have to learn to fight for yourself. There's one other thing that's a bit more obscure, but it's also on the Internet about youth culture in 1960, I think. 3 Again, it's called Take this Hammer. It's a documentary film that Baldwin made where he walks around the city of San Francisco and he just interviews young black men, mostly living in the city and asks them about their lives. Baldwin's all over the Internet. You can see Baldwin on TV shows and, you know, debating William F. Buckley at Cambridge. But this little film, again, if you're sort of young and black in America, it's really extraordinary to see both the similarities, but also the, you know, the. The differences between our time and that time. It really. It shows you, again how Baldwin was always committed to getting, you know, what. What said called the. The point of view of the oppressed. Right. He was always trying to ask people who were sort of living at the bottom of America what it was like. It's a beautiful film.
- [58:42]
Mortiza Hajezadeh
Professor Bill Mullen, thank you very much for your time. Absolute pleasure to talk to you.
- [58:48]
Professor Bill Mullen
Thank you, Mortise. It's been a fabulous talk with you. I appreciate it.
- [59:04]
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- [59:20]
Mortiza Hajezadeh
Limu.
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Professor Bill Mullen
Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
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- [59:27]
Professor Bill Mullen
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry. Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.