The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (34 page)

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Baldwin disliked the safety and security of generalizations. He refused to give his readers a safety net. To read him, as with any great writer, is to go to dark places. After
Go Tell It on the Mountain,
instead of writing another “Negro novel,” he wrote an essay denouncing his mentor, Richard Wright, and Wright’s most famous novel,
Native Son
. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” he argued that Wright’s portrayal of Bigger Thomas as a violent man whose violence is justified by what has been done to him is fundamentally flawed. Bigger Thomas is a preconceived and prepackaged image of the African American; he is not a character but a type. “Our humanity is our burden, our life,” Baldwin writes. “We need not battle for it; we need only do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”

Ideology eliminates paradox and seeks to destroy contradiction and ambiguity. While it is generally ruthless to outsiders, it can be consoling when you are in the group that always wears the white hat no matter what. Hatred and ideology, contrary to all appearances, are comforting and safe for those who practice them. They tend to be accompanied by an odious self-righteousness. You don’t need to think—the party has already thought things out for you. This is true whether the ideology in question is of the right or of the left. It does not matter what your ideology is; what matters is that you are ideological. Fox News is a beautiful manifestation of this, but so are the politically correct who seek to put us all in our stultifying box. And even if we dislike the ideology in question, our reaction to it is also sort of comforting, for we already know what they will say and how we will respond. In essence, we need our nemesis—we are codependent.

Baldwin was attacked by many, including a new wave of African Americans, disgusted with the violence that did not seem to abate and impatient with the nonviolent strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. Most notoriously, Eldridge Cleaver claimed in
Soul on Ice
(a book that mixed some brilliance and poignancy with much rant) that Baldwin’s work includes the “most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of blacks, particularly of himself.” Cleaver went on to say that there was in his writing also a “most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writings of any black American writer of note in our time.” He claimed, as was the fashion then among the Black Panthers, that homosexuality was a “sickness” and that the “white man” had deprived Baldwin of his “masculinity.” After years of living abroad, including in Cuba (and, while abroad, appealing to Baldwin for money, which he, generous as ever, provided), Cleaver returned to America and was deeply involved in various religious groups, including the Mormon church, and in the end he became a conservative Republican. Throughout this time, Baldwin remained Baldwin.

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A piece that ran recently in the
New York Times
set me thinking again about Ramin. The article, entitled “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,” begins by asking, “Should students about to read ‘The Great Gatsby’ be forewarned about ‘a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,’ as one Rutgers student proposed?” It goes on to ask whether
Huckleberry Finn
and
Things Fall Apart
should come with a “note of caution” because they address racism. The rest of the article enumerates how students from different colleges have requested that classic works of fiction be labeled with warnings to prevent the students from being traumatized by the books’ painful content. The most chilling part of this terrible story is a draft guide for these new warnings, circulated on the website of Oberlin College: “The guide said they should flag anything that might ‘disrupt a student’s learning’ and ‘cause trauma.’ . . . Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” The guide was removed because of several faculty protests, “pending a more thorough review by a faculty-and-student task force.”

I find it amazing that concepts like race, class and gender, once so incendiary, have now been reduced to these empty but menacing words that explain nothing, whose main function is censorship, justified like all acts of censorship by the self-righteous pretense of combatting oppression. Is this really what they want? Perhaps those at Oberlin and other universities who have caved in to this nonsense should take another look at the world and this country before redefining “privilege” and “oppression”—or simply take another look at how much they charge students to enroll in their institutions. To find this nonsense at universities—whose basis for existence is a mandate to encourage us to question, to think, to imagine and of course to learn. I would like to take the hand of that young man or woman who wants to be warned before reading
The Great Gatsby
or
The Merchant of Venice
(another one of those traumatizing books) and remind him/her of what the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, herself a witness to many horrors and much anguish, wrote: “No one will love you more than you love your pain.”

A few years ago, in an interview with Scott Simon at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sir Ben Kingsley lamented the fact that we are shielding our young people from pain, and teaching them to avoid tragedy. This attempt to eliminate all that strikes us as unpleasant is the real danger to our society—not books and films that bring us face-to-face with ourselves and our world. I don’t believe that Baldwin in his wildest dreams could ever have imagined that the descendants of those people, black and white, with whom he had marched for freedom under the threat of guns, who had braved shackles and chains and prison to fight segregation, would be scared of reading about their own history. Did they suffer so much and fight so hard so that we would become such a bunch of sissies? Did Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Beecher Stowe think that their struggle for the rights of women would come to this? How will we ever face trauma if we cannot bear to read or write about it? What will we say to the young girl in Iran who is arrested and flogged for going to a party, or to the mother in Nigeria whose daughter has been kidnapped by terrorists and sold into slavery, or to the young girls abducted, raped and kept in captivity for years right here in the United States? Should we tell them that we cannot bear to hear their stories?

That innocence Holden Caulfield so cherished has not saved one single person from violence and brutality. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” Baldwin wrote in
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,
“but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

One can and should have sympathy with victims of trauma, and society should do everything in its power to help them heal, but dealing with trauma is a serious matter, and not every place can become a trauma center. The solution is not to seek to expunge all pain from the classroom. No one has ever been comforted by knowledge, but numerous individuals throughout the ages have found purpose and passion, been strengthened—in short, have gained the ability to accept life, or the desire to change it—from books. Not sugarcoated stories with happy endings, but challenging, difficult, sometimes traumatic and inspiring stories. But now we on the one hand celebrate phony trauma every day on our reality TV shows (even the so-called news on some channels has become a form of reality TV), and every day our young people are exposed on the Internet or television to sex and violence, but these are mere facsimiles: it has become difficult for us to face real trauma, to face life.

I keep thinking of those classical fairy tales, so full of fear and hatred and pain, each of which had to be experienced before confidence, love and joy could be offered up as a reward for ingenuity under pressure and for surviving hardships big and small. Those tales about eating the poison apple, being swallowed by the whale or being abandoned and left to die in the dark forest. Think of Hansel and Gretel being seduced by the evil witch’s beautiful house made of candy and chocolate, lured by the illusion of sweetness and safety, only to find out that the witch wants to burn them in her oven. Hansel and Gretel had to leave the security of home and face the darkness; they had to learn to recognize the dangers of illusion and discover how to fight back if they wanted to return home with the treasure. Children learn through these stories, as they do now through Harry Potter’s adventures, to be brave, to recognize false conjurers and to fight them. What will happen to our young people if they lose the will to fear and learn? Why do they need to be so protected from pain and offense? Why are they so easily offended, and why, for that matter, are we? How will young people fend for themselves in a world where the Big Bad Wolf comes in so many guises? Baldwin warned his readers that they should beware of fiction, because it was the path to truth. But there was no getting there without pain: “If one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.”

Time and again, I have wondered if our current assault on literature, which so many like to think of as useless and irrelevant, is not a reflection of the desire to remove from the equation anything that is painful or distasteful to us, anything that does not fit our norms or make life easy and fall within our sphere of power and control. In one sense, to deny literature is to deny pain and the dilemma that is called life. Blindness comes in all forms. We seem to feel that through sheer willpower married to technology we can live in eternal bliss, refusing to age, avoiding pain, burying ourselves in self-help and how-to books that foster an illusion of eternal possibility, making us believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that happiness is within easy reach if only we tried harder, and that security will be ours if we simply follow these five simple steps. We are constantly reaching out for aspirin for our souls—happy pills, similar to what the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz mentions in
The
Captive Mind.
Citing a dystopian novel by another Polish writer, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Milosz describes a decadent society somewhere in Europe that is cleverly invaded by an all-powerful Sino Mongolian army by spreading into the market Murti-Bing pills, which transform individuals into a state of serene indifference, “impervious to any metaphysical concerns,” such as art, which appeases their “spiritual hunger.” Such things become “outmoded stupidities” for them. In a society like ours, it is the Murti-Bing or happy pills that kill our desire to face life. Every now and then I find myself thinking of something my daughter told me when she was in medical school: one sign that a patient is dying is that she feels no pain.

We should be teaching our students that they need to have their peace disturbed, that there is a difference between individualism that encourages self-confidence and independence, and narcissism, in which everything and everyone becomes a reflection of ourselves, preventing us from growing, and that so long as they are afraid of trauma, they will remain its victim: their oppressor will once again win. For eighteen years I experienced a revolution, a war, murder and the persecution of people close to me. Even then, in the midst of the sirens and the bombs, we turned to books, because we wanted to make sense of this senseless brutality. We read Primo Levi’s memories of a concentration camp, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry chronicles the darkest hours of the Soviet Union, Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Philip Roth, and we read about ordinary people who showed extraordinary courage in the face of unimaginable pain. Through this we learned how to acknowledge the pain and the horror but also to know that we were not alone—that in the face of all that horror, what you have to do is live, live to the fullest. As Henry James put it, the best way to resist the horror of war is to “feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.”

America’s elite are worried that the country is falling behind China in mathematics, but they should start worrying that it is falling behind in a more fundamental way, in something that was always considered America’s strength: namely, the ability to stand up to any challenge, no matter how difficult or daunting. In Pakistan, a girl called Malala was willing to give her life to be able to learn to read and write. What would it take to rekindle that hunger here? That many of our children are illiterate when it comes to history and literature is a much lamented fact known to all, but do they know what they are missing?

If colleges were genuinely interested in fighting “oppression and privilege,” they would not only teach children the great works of fiction, they would make them aware that a real and serious fight against racism and oppression is being fought in impoverished neighborhoods all around the country. They would encourage their students to get to know the facts of life, beginning with a simple one: according to UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, the number of “doubly segregated” schools has grown in the last twenty-five years. Shouldn’t we be curious as to why we have regressed since the 1980s?  

I don’t really blame those young students who want to tack warnings on books and films on our college campuses. I disagree with them, but I don’t blame them. But I do blame my own generation. Where did we go wrong? Is this what we were fighting for when we came into the streets and demanded freedom? I blame my generation for having neglected to teach our children that in life there are no safe places, that safety is an illusion. “Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark,” Baldwin said in an interview in 1961. “Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”