Prologue

At the end of September 1961, James Baldwin arrived in Tel Aviv as the guest of the Israeli government. Treated as what he called an “extremely well cared for parcel post package,” Baldwin spent his days being escorted around “this fragile handkerchief at the gate of the Middle East.” He was driven to the Negev desert in the south, the Dead Sea to the east, the Jerusalem hills, Tel Aviv’s famed cafés, Haifa’s art colony in the north, and a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip in the west. “Israel and I seem to like each other,” he wrote in a letter to his literary agent. “I am always worried about wearing out my welcome, and imagined I’d be gone by now: but no, they keep saying, Please don’t hurry.”1

In Baldwin’s luggage were unfinished manuscripts for two of what would become some of his most influential works, prophesying a decade of widespread social upheaval. These manuscripts bore witness to Cold War America’s fantasies of Black incorporability into a U.S. racial formation understood as predicated on a mercurial white supremacy. One manuscript, largely complete, became the novel Another Country, which he finished soon thereafter in Istanbul—a city whose prominent location at the crossroads of Europe and Asia would come to shape Baldwin’s lifeworld for much of the forthcoming decade.2 Another Country thematizes many things, not least being the daily enactments of a violently racialized heteropatriarchy whose deadliness would lead one of its main characters to suicide. “Rufus’s cadaver,” Baldwin would say later, “that’s the black cadaver in the American conscience. All of American society has been built in order to kill—not to deny the black man, or humiliate him, but kill him.”3 The other manuscript contained copious notes for “Down at the Cross,” an essay published in the New Yorker magazine in 1962 as “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” and then by Dial Press in 1963 as The Fire Next Time. In the months prior to his Israel tour, Baldwin had been ruminating on the growing visibility of the Nation of Islam; he publicly debated Malcolm X and interviewed Elijah Muhammad in his Chicago mansion. Baldwin was both terrified and exhilarated by the Nation’s capacity to produce a durable infrastructure to support Black social life while putting the nominally inclusionary elements of white supremacy in its crosshairs. “The universe,” writes Baldwin in the essay’s opening pages, “which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you.”4 Against this ontological exclusion, Baldwin saw in the Nation of Islam a capacity to name and organize a political imaginary that, at its most powerful, provided Black people in America a radically alternative epistemology.

But Baldwin was in Israel for neither of these projects. The New Yorker had forwarded him a substantial advance to write a book about Africa in the age of decolonization, and the Israel trip served as what Baldwin called its “prologue” (49). For many, the new Jewish state, founded in the ashes of the British mandate, exemplified the promise of political independence in an age of widespread decolonization. Yet a reading of the Israeli section of the draft manuscript “will make clearer than any of my letters can, how complex, once I got to Israel, the whole idea of Africa became” (52). So complex, it seems, that the book never came to fruition. As Baldwin recalled later, “When I was in Israel, it was as though I was in the middle of The Fire Next Time. I didn’t dare go from Israel to Africa, so I went to Turkey, just across the road.”5 As he notes to his editor, he feared how political decolonization’s framing of independence would disrupt Baldwin’s own sense of race, that the dawn of African self-determination would require conceiving of Black peoples outside the historically sedimented structures of oppression that had come to define modern Black subjectivity. The “confrontation” at the heart of his proposed narrative required moving against anything like “an exhibition, merely, of journalistic skill” (52). Instead, it demanded “an extremely, even dangerously personal way,” one that would “try to make the reader ask his own questions and make his own assessments” (52). Rather than rely on the positivistic investments of a journalism meant to transparently reflect a stable reality, Baldwin’s time in Israel required a different kind of writing practice, one hinged on readerly interpretation.

Since the Africa book never came to fruition, Baldwin ended up sending the New Yorker “Down at the Cross” instead. This was an essay he had promised to the rival Commentary magazine. Cavalierly submitting it to the New Yorker instead angered Commentary’s editor, Norman Podhoretz, so much so that Podhoretz ended up writing his own riposte, called “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” which, in the face of race radical critiques of Cold War liberalism’s contradictions, will come to hold its own pride of place in the canon of neoconservative thought.

Baldwin’s published writings on Israel make for especially evocative reading in the present. The letters from the end of 1961 signal the dawn of a new conjuncture. The “conundrums” Baldwin finds in Israel inspire critical reflection on the emergence, function, and effects of a new nation-state dedicated to ending the oppression of Euro-American modernity’s others. His letters likewise offer a thick enactment of relationality, a kind of gateway through which to consider how one might navigate a fractured Cold War terrain with eyes wide open to its racial connections, convergences, contradictions, and incommensurabilities. Baldwin writes:

In a curious way, since it really does function as a homeland, however beleaguered, you can’t walk five minutes without finding yourself at a border, can’t talk to anyone for five minutes without being reminded first of the mandate (British), then of the war—and of course the entire Arab situation, outside the country, and, above all, within, cause one to take a view of human life and right and wrong almost as stony as the land in which I presently find myself—well, to bring this thoroughly undisciplined sentence to a halt, the fact that Israel is a homeland for so many Jews (there are great faces here, in a way the whole world is here) causes me to feel my own homelessness more keenly than ever. (49)

From the vantage point through which Baldwin viewed the racialized exclusions of American Cold War liberalism, the overwrought, circuitous, and internally interruptive form of this “thoroughly undisciplined sentence” crystallizes precisely how overdetermined the question of Israel had become. Baldwin recognizes Anglo-American sovereignty’s persistent imprint in how the routine navigation of the region constantly confronted the pervasive bordered contours of political space. Daily interactions were infused with the continuing effects of a war whose definite article presumes a reader knows which war Baldwin means to reference. The war’s singular referent is quickly adumbrated by reflections on the simultaneous internalization and externalization of the “entire Arab situation” outside, and “above all, inside” Israel. We are invited to understand this “stony” view of human life and its sharp morality as the effect of the war’s continuous present, one that contorts the very grammar of its narration and solidified Baldwin’s own sense of “homelessness.” In the face of the Israeli state’s nation-building process, Baldwin reconciles himself with his own commitment to exile. If this was what home meant for modernity’s others, Baldwin will have none of it.

Baldwin’s interrogation of Israel is driven by a keen concern with the post–World War II articulation of race, nation, religion, and empire. The historical drama of anti-Semitism’s resolution in the form of a Jewish nation-state involved a “vast amount of political cynicism” (50), one predicated less on Jewish safety or national liberation than on what he would later call “the salvation of western interests.”6 Baldwin queries the salience of a national peoplehood structured less by Jewish religious tradition or Jewish ethnic belonging than by the twin pillars of an “evil that is in the world . . . which has victimized them so savagely and so long,” and the “resurrection of the Hebrew language” meant to bridge the “tremendous gap between a Jew from Russia or France or England or Australia and a Jew but lately arrived from the desert” (49). Can one rightfully forge a national identity out of the catastrophe of genocide and a singular national language, Baldwin asks pressingly? While the recently arrived Yemeni Jews produced what Baldwin sees as the most beautiful Jewish cultural forms—more so than their Ashkenazi counterparts—their treatment reveals a vicious social discrimination that “the nation of Israel cannot afford, and is far too intelligent, to encourage” (50). Recognition of this discrimination was intensified when Baldwin considered the status of Arabs more broadly, about which he feels “helplessly and painfully—most painfully—ambivalent”:

I cannot blame them for feeling dispossessed; and in a literal way, they have been. Furthermore, the Jews, who are surrounded by forty million hostile Muslims, are forced to control the very movements of Arabs within the state of Israel. One cannot blame the Jews for this necessity; one cannot blame the Arabs for resenting it. I would—indeed, in my own situation in America, I do, and it has cost me—costs me—a great and continuing effort not to hate the people who are responsible for the societal effort to limit and diminish me. (50)

Ten years later, in what was billed as a wide-ranging “rap on race” with the well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead, Baldwin returned to this relation between anti-Black and anti-Arab racisms. By then, there wasn’t much ambivalence at all, especially given the post-1967 entanglement of an expanded Israeli military occupation of Arab territories, an escalated U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia, and Palestinian liberation struggles enacting a global horizon especially resonant with Black liberation struggles in the United States. “You have got to remember,” notes Baldwin, “however bitter this may sound, no matter how bitter I may sound, that I have been, in America, the Arab at the hands of the Jews.”7 Mead—figured in the promotional materials and reviews for A Rap on Race as the “objective” and “scientific” counterweight to Baldwin’s “passion” and “poetry”—had no time for such a formulation, shutting the conversation down: “Oh, fiddlesticks! Tut, tut, tut,” she says. “You are now making a totally racist comment, just because there have been a bunch of Jewish shopkeepers in Harlem. . . . I suggest we drop this because it gets us nowhere and will get us nowhere. These are just a set of imperfectly realized analogies.”8

Were we to follow Mead and bracket as illogical, subjective, or racist the poignant insight into the relationality of race that Baldwin labors to name, we would silence crucial analytical terrain. Indeed, the audio recording of A Rap on Race did just that. Released simultaneously with its print version, the double LP excludes all the lengthy discussion of Israel, Palestine, Arabs, Jews, Yemeni Jews, and the associated questions of time and atonement that Baldwin brings to bear—even as it claims to capture the “as is” quality of an “atmosphere created by . . . freedom and informality.”9 Silencing this relational analytic foretells precisely the attenuated scope of the dawning U.S. commonsense interpretations about Israel and Palestine. Yet such “imperfectly realized analogies”—as if there could be any other kind—were central to its articulation. Remembering them, and listening to their affective complexity, is at the core of this book.