Baptismal Ocean

I was really struck by the motif of the ocean in Giovanni’s Room. Some version of the sea or the ocean or water is often used to describe David’s relationship to America and David’s relationship to Giovanni. I couldn’t help but track this repetition, considering how pervasive the way in which Baldwin uses it is. 

David’s internalized homophobia makes him believe his sexuality is his original sin. It seems as if David, in escaping across the sea to another land, is escaping a proposed cleansing of his homosexuality. He is jumping from one land to the next, crossing the sea to get there. The water that separates the two countries is cleansing and baptismal. Geographically, David’s sexuality differs. In America, David’s home is his ideal of heterosexuality and conventionality. In France, where David (and James) flees, is where David can practice homosexuality. Despite avoiding the water, David can’t forget his home and the shame that discolors his self-concept. Home is not specific enough for David, it is relational to the sea: “across the ocean” (271). The ocean transcends the different sexualities, he wades deeper into the water as he experiments more with Giovanni. It is an alternate baptism; instead of washing away the original sin, he is submerged in it. In this way, Baldwin is subverting our Christianized ideal of baptism. David is “being led by Giovanni into deep and dangerous water” (250); his life with Giovanni occurs “beneath the sea” (281); life “occurs underwater,” David undergoes a “sea-change” (289); Giovanni drags David with him to “the bottom of the sea” (314). Baldwin exploits the qualities of water: its cleansing ability and its potential for depth and danger. The “dirt” of his sin is not washed away, despite Giovanni’s assurance that the “dirty water” the older gay men swim in will be easily washed away by him and David (256). He is being baptized by Giovanni, but the act is incomplete. He is submerged in the water, yet does not come up for air. This motif comes to exclusively symbolize suicide. David says, “I thought of the people before me who looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it” (304). All those who committed suicide by drowning exist in the between, an incomplete act of baptism, in which they are submerged in sin (as David acutely feels). Yet this is a shame that is not shared by the others. Specifically, Jacques encourages David not to get trapped within this perception of his dirty body because he will end up despising every inch of his flesh (267). 

David soon develops a fear of water, because it is a reminder of his incomplete and subverted baptism. After sleeping with another woman in order to distract himself from the pull of Giovanni, David “hear[s] the water running” and becomes afraid to “go out into that night which had seemed to be calling [him] only a few moments before” (303). Giovanni tries to complicate David’s notion of water when he describes women as “like water…tempting…treacherous…bottomless…shallow…dirty” (285), yet it is Giovanni who represents all of these things for David. He is the possibility of simultaneous fulfillment and paralyzing shame, freedom and imprisonment, salvation and damnation. 

Father and Mother figures

David has a strained relationship with his dad, although his dad does not seem to know this. They are as close as acquaintances, and although David wishes for a deeper tie, he continues to hide himself from his father. After a car accident, David and his father share a tender moment, but David notes that it is fleeting and shallow: “For I understood, at the bottom of my heart, that we had never talked, that now we never would” (235). David puts significant weight into the activity of talking. He cannot “talk” to his father because he cannot communicate his true feelings, thoughts and desires to him. This is why, I will argue, Giovanni and Jacques step in as father figures. 

The joy of reading sections of the text with Giovanni and David is the dialogue. They are intellectual equals—they spar and joke and question each other. Giovanni is able to push David to question his mindset. During a rather philosophical conversation about time, David tries to suggest that people need time to make good decisions: “‘I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel'” (250). This sentiment, of course, mirrors David’s own choices thus far in his life. He has waited to learn to accept himself or be truthful of his identity. Giovanni responds in a way that prods this exact fear: “‘And when you have waited—has it made you sure?’ For this I could simply summon no answer” (250). David reaches a point with Giovanni where he feels stumped and finally begins to wonder if he might be wrong (at least his silence implies this). Because David defined a strong relationship between father and son as one where they can actually talk, I think that Giovanni fills in as a father in this moment. Their conversations digs deep immediately and pushes the other to see a new worldview. This is the intimacy David craved from his father and even acts as a sort of tough love. 

On the line of tough love, I want to briefly mention Jacques, who I think exemplifies this even more. Jacques is an advice giver. He takes David under his wing and, at least in some moments, tries to guide him along a better path than his own. He understands David’s shame and asks him to shed it for the sake of love: “‘Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?'” (267). Jacques, too, is taking on a role that David’s own father never did. For one, he knows that David is homosexual, but he also actively guides David towards a better life. He does so often by bluntly pointing out David’s shame, but also suggests a new path going forward. This protective attitude and tough love resembles that of a father figure. 

Finally, David explicitly connects the caretaker to his mother, who passed when he was young. The caretaker is an older Italian woman who checks up on David and attends to his needs in a way that a mother would, or at least a very friendly neighbor. Before she leaves, David thinks to himself,  “I feel that I want to be forgiven, I want her to forgive me. But I do not know how to state my crime. My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already. It is terrible how naked she makes me feel, like a half grown boy, naked before his mother” (278). It seems that part of the reason David cannot forgive himself for his homosexuality is because he needs his mother, or a mother figure, to do so for him. He wants desperately to be forgiven, to no longer feel like a little boy, naked and scared and guilty. 

The inclusion of these pseudo-parental figures illuminates something larger about David. He lacks these strong relationships with his own parents, and this contributes to the shame and fear he has surrounding his sexuality. In many ways he resembles a child in the text, lashing out easily at those who make him scared and hiding everything he feels ashamed about. This childlike attitude might illuminate his character traits and actions more going forward and stunt his ability to fully accept himself.

Punishment and Suffering

One of the biggest problems with the Black church is its fascination with punishment. You “stray” from the path God set for you and you are punished. You sin and you are punished. You make a mistake and you are punished. Punishment. Punishment. Punishment. There is little reprieve from the idea that we are all set for a fiery end if we do not live life in a way of Godliness.

Alongside this idea of punishment is the idea that you have to suffer. You have to suffer to get into heaven. God is testing you through your suffering. Satan is causing your suffering so he can tempt you. Many Black churches preach that to live in the way of Godliness is to suffer and if you are not suffering, then something is wrong.

I believe so much of this comes from the fact that Christianity was pushed and forced onto the enslaved. To make people comfortable with their own suffering during slavery, preachers taught that suffering was necessary to make it into heaven. A focus on punishment is such a Christian thing. Forgiveness plays a big part in so many other religions and it is just not seen in many Christian churches.

So when you have this fascination with punishment and suffering, you have this intersection where “sinners” are supposed to suffer the most and yet still get punished. And When a “sinner” is not suffering or does not seem to be being punished for their sin, people get up in arms. If you are happy and you are deemed a “sinner”, people will do anything to see that happiness destroyed and they will go out of their way to make you suffer as they do.

Which is weird because it is very clear that you are not supposed to cause harm to other people in the bible. You are supposed to love your neighbor. Yet, because people are so obsessed with suffering and punishment, no one is deserving of love. You see this kind of play out in Go Tell It on the Mountain where characters are constantly looking for love. I wrote about this before but it is really a weird thing where you do not see love in some Christian families because people have to earn love by being as holy as they can. Even when they are holy, they are still undeserving.

Giovanni’s Room — masculinity

If Go Tell It on the Mountain was somewhat about James Baldwin and his faith, Giovanni’s Room is about his sexuality and all the complications included when one starts the journey of embracing their sexuality. Having left America, like so many other writers, Baldwin settled in Paris to escape American Society. Even though he didn’t set the novel in America, the American view of homosexuality and the guilt and shame that others attribute to it comes vividly throughout the first couple of chapters.

From the onset, the readers can see David struggling with his masculinity, self-acceptance, guilt, and everything in between with a lot of self-loathing. What was at the forefront was the focus on gendered expectations that David hinted at. After having his first sexual encounter with Joey, David describes being overcome by fear and realizing that Joey was a boy. He then states: “that body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood” (226). David is internalizing the conventional notions of what it means to be a man (here, one can’t fault him, he was only a child, and this is what he learned), making it difficult for him to come to terms with what occurred, himself and his masculinity. Because he associates manhood with heterosexuality, he feels that his attraction to Joey is wrong and indicates some failure: “how could this have happened in me” (226). From then on, it seems like David was running away from his sexuality — from being mean and cruel to Joey to proposing to Hella and even to him lying to himself when he hangs out with Jacques. Through these relationships, Baldwin is attempting to show how difficult it can be to deviate from stereotypical norms of manhood and womanhood.

I find it interesting that some of the themes that we saw in Go Tell It on the Mountain still continue throughout Giovanni’s Room. The same loneliness that we see in John is apparent in David — though for different reasons. I have a feeling that it also exists in Giovanni but I haven’t read that far along just yet to make that claim.

A Tale of Two Sermons

In our class discussions the past two weeks, we have encountered two sermons, one orated by Jonathan Edwards entitled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and the other written by James Baldwin called “Down at the Cross.” While I did not initially view “Down at the Cross” as a sermon, I began to see the common elements of a sermon in Baldwin’s essay when Dr. Kinyon asked us to consider it in class. Baldwin tells two stories from his life and connects them to the Church, concluding with a call to action for African Americans to “do all in one’s power to change [one’s] fate” (Baldwin 346). He chooses words meant to stir emotion in his readers and cajole them to recognize how the Church can perpetuate white supremacy. For instance, he appeals to African American history, remarking how they have fought for so long against white supremacist institutions. He then becomes more specific by discussing how Black people in America “knew that the job had to be done, and they put their pride in their pockets in order to do it” (Baldwin 344). The Black people reading “Down at the Cross” would likely connect with Baldwin’s references to such shared experiences. He uses rhetorical questions and long, complex sentences that read as if Baldwin is preaching off the page about what America should be like and how we might try to better it. 

During her presentation, Theresa asked us to consider Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God, one of the most famous and influential sermons in American history that perpetuates the idea of a vengeful, rage-filled God. Baldwin’s sermon counters this notion by discussing the need for love in the Black Church. He writes, “People, I felt, ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell” (Baldwin 307). Edwards’ fiery language promotes fear surrounding the afterlife, saying that “the God that holds you over the pit of hell…abhors you” (Edwards). Instead of discussing a God of love, Edwards depicts one filled with hate. Baldwin’s sermon, which acknowledges the significance of love in the Church, proves Edwards wrong. 

Sin in Shame

         After reading Part One of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, I was left haunted by the wisdom and counsel that the character Jacques offers to David at the bar David, clearly eaten alive by self-loathing and internalized homophobia, deplores Jacques “lifestyle,” seeing his encounters with men as shameful and loveless acts that only come and go in five dark minutes. Jacques returns with a condemning warning to David about the mask that he is putting up to preserve what he thinks is it dignity, safety, and cleanliness. He pushes David to open himself up to Giovanni, in hopes that David can find love and take one more step toward defeating his own shame.

            Jacques warns David, “… ‘you can make you time together [with Giovanni] anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe’… ‘You play it safe long enough…and you’ll be trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.’” (Baldwin 267).

            Ultimately what Jacques fears is that David will delay his own reckoning with his sexuality until much later in his adult life, when he has much less time and spirit to make the most of his experiences as an openly queer man in the world. He fears that David will surrender to his shame, going on to consider his own natural desires and urges as “shameful” for years and years in order to preserve a pride that can really only be observed from the outside.

            But what I find most compelling is the way that Jacques empowers David with the agency to decide for himself what is dirty and what is clean. David sees his own queerness (and the queerness of others) as something dirty because of the shame that he attaches to it. Tt is unclean, perhaps, because it is hidden; it is that “love that cannot be named” that Baldwin writes of in his Go Tell it On the Mountain. What he sees as clean is a long relationship with a woman, likely Hella. He sees it as clean because it is not hidden; it is named and publicly admired. Jacques pushes David to recognize that he has the power to redirect and reject his shame. David has the power to name his love. He has the power to decide what is dirty, and thus worthy of shame, and what is clean.

I wonder if Baldwin, in Paris, believed these words himself. Did he see dirtiness and cleanliness as relative classifications as it came to sexuality, or did he believe something more objective depending on the queer identity?

Baldwin, BLM, and #StopAsianHate

This week’s presentation on James Baldwin and Religion really got me thinking about community. As our lovely presenters shared with us this past Wednesday, Baldwin argues that some community-like aspect is integral to love. After all, John’s transformation throughout Go Tell It On the Mountain is largely dependent upon the people around him: Elisha, who guides John through his encounter with the “power of the Lord,” and Gabriel, who introduces John to organized religion in the first place, are each necessary components of John’s final metamorphosis from a position of self-loathing to the imperfect beginnings of self-love. (I’d argue that this transformation is more of a bildungsroman than a true religious epiphany, but that’s a post for another time.) In a way which directly opposes Richard Wright’s depictions of a solitary, isolated Black experience, Baldwin argues that humanity is bonded across all of its differing races and creeds through oppression, and that this collective suffering is important to the achievement of holiness and the attainment of love. 

Now, I know that this is a class concerned with Baldwin’s commentary on the Black condition, but I can’t help but feel like a lot of these ideologies are applicable to the current Stop Asian Hate movement as well. In case anyone didn’t know, 2020 saw a 1900% increase in anti-Asian violence. The past few weeks, my Instagram has been inundated with all the relevant statistics and rebuttals of commonly held Asian stereotypes—specifically, the “model minority” myth, which perpetuates the idea that Asian-Americans, through years of hard work and perseverance, have transcended the socioeconomic barriers they once faced and now enjoy a position of relative wealth and success. This argument is problematic for several reasons: it inherently pits the Black and Asian communities against each other in its insinuation that the struggles of Black Americans stem from a simple lack of effort (read: “Black people are lazy and Asians are not”) when, in reality, Asian-Americans simply do not face the same depth of discrimination that centuries of slavery and systemic racism have inflicted on countless generations of African-Americans; it also further marginalizes an already-marginalized demographic of impoverished Asian-Americans who do not enjoy the aforementioned wealth or success attributed to their race.

It is the latter which I find particularly pertinent to our discussions of community and love. We’ve talked extensively about Baldwin’s criticisms of the overly simplistic white-as-oppressor/Black-as-oppressed narrative, as well as the weird American obsession with creating a Black/white binary which discounts the existence of any nonconforming parties (we discussed this in relation to the US Census on the first day of class). The model minority myth erases the racial injustice that so many Asian-Americans continue to face and exacerbates the perceived proximity to whiteness that, according to the racial binary in place, casts them as oppressors rather than oppressed and thus inhibits any opportunity for solidarity with other racial minorities. To synthesize this with Baldwin’s assertions that we are bonded through our mutual oppression and that only through our acknowledgement of this shared experience can we truly learn to love each other, I’d argue that stereotyping Asian-Americans as flourishing, contributing members of society thus alienates them from other communities of color. In masking a history of suffering and racial violence which should unite Asian-Americans with fellow BIPOC, we instead estrange them from other victims of racism. And so, not quite white but not quite un-white, we condemn millions to racial limbo where, denied community with their fellow man, they wait, loveless, for absolution.  

For more information on the model minority myth and historical context surrounding the relationship between the Black and Asian-American communities, please feel free to check out these links(!):
– https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks
– https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/07/19/how-communities-of-color-perpetuate-anti-blackness/?sh=b30d5c516dbe 
– https://www.vox.com/22321234/black-asian-american-tensions-solidarity-history

The Outsider-Within

Rae’Vonne focused on the idea of stranger-hood in Black America and how Baldwin was a stranger himself, both in America and within his family, struggling with his queer identity as well as his Blackness. This discussion reminded me of an idea I had come across while doing an assigned reading in a gender studies class. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins describes the social location of Black women in America as outsiders-within. Specifically, she cites their historic position as domestic workers as endowing them this status. Black women were brought into the most intimate spaces of their white counterparts, giving them the ability to see, hear, and know everything that went on in these households. They were nearly insiders in terms of their accessibility to the private happenings of the white family life, but they would never be considered such as they were Black women being exploited economically for their work. Thus, their Blackness made them the “perpetual outsider[s]” (PHC 11).

I feel as though PHC’s analysis of the Black woman’s position can be applied to all Black people in America today. Collins quotes Alice Walker stating “the gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account” (PHC 12). I think, in a sense, all Black people within this country experience this loneliness–or as we have labeled it, stranger-hood–that makes them remarkably aware of their position as oppressed in society. 

As we have discussed in class, white people do not have to know Black people. They can go their entire lives without more than a few shallow conversations with a few Black individuals–if even that. Black people on the other hand have no choice but to know white people. They live in a white world run by and for white people. This is what makes them, and what made Baldwin, the outsiders-within, and by extension, this is what gives them the ability to see clearly how society operates to their disadvantage. I think this loneliness is what allowed Baldwin to become the ‘prophet’ that he saw himself as and that John became in GTIOTM.

Can we declare our own salvation?


This has been a recurring question throughout my reading of Go Tell It on the Mountain, Down At the Cross, and more generally in reality. While the Bible articulates that God will be the final judge of all humanity and all individuals, most people have unanswered questions and predictions about their own fate and others’ fate. A capacity for judgment exists in all humans, and Christians believe that the Bible provides moral guidelines to inform one’s judgment. Commandments are the first guidelines that come to mind, but also included in the Bible are stories about consequences humans face for not following God’s word. Humans have expanded upon the judgment terms offered in the Bible and instituted their norms, behavioral expectations, laws, and moral codes, many of whichChristianity and countless other religions heavily influence. These guidelines for human behavior result in consequences for those who do not meet them, such as discrimination, prejudice, and oppression, to name a few.

In Go Tell it Own the Mountain, which is a semi-biographical account of James Baldwin’s life and struggle with his identity and religion, John wrestles with questions regarding his fate because he did not fit within the confinements of the norms for his faith and society. Because Christian views on non-heterosexuality have always been divided and prejudicial, like his characters John, Baldwin struggled to meet his family and society’s expectations as a Black, gay man. His identity as a gay man did not align with common Christian religious teachings about morality and salvation. As a result, Baldwin not only faced judgment and questions about his access to salvation from broader society, but he also had many internalized fears about his fate throughout his life. In Down At the Cross, Baldwin writes of the contention between the Christian message of love and notions of judgment “And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves (310).” Baldwin resented the religious confinements common Christian teachings impose. He considered these teachings to promote hate, and self-resentment, all problems that deeply affected him.

I was very moved to learn that Baldwin had Amazing Grace played at his funeral. It represents an acceptance of himself and his declaration of his own salvation and determination of his fate. While the Bible teaches that God is the final judge, it is clear that humans can make their own determinations about their fate despite ultimately not knowing the result. Baldwin pushed against narratives of prejudice, discrimination, and overall societal oppression that often stem from going against societal norms. His refusal to allow others’ judgments to determine his final judgment of himself is most inspiring.

Identity?

“Other(ed) American in Paris: Henry James, James Baldwin, and the Subversion of Identity” by Eric Savoy addresses a provocative subject matter particularly on the subject of identity. On page 338, Savoy notes, “If knowledge of self – self as implicated, situated subject, but simultaneously as ‘other’ and therefore as resisting agent – is the goal of Henry James and James Baldwin, then ‘identity’ is a dangerous word to describe that goal. Whereas Baldwin and James construct their examinations of self in terms of contraries and doubleness, ‘identity’ posits sameness: the sameness of a person at all times or in all circumstances.” In “Go Tell It on the Mountain” the topic of identity and knowing one’s self are focal points in understanding the characters of each novel. However, the analysis of the word “identity” makes one delve deeper into the appropriateness of the word in its use of defining the characters. 
According to Savoy, if the understanding is that identity is found in a person’s sameness, John has none. John is an outsider in almost every environment he exists in and as a result, he cannot have a sameness or an identity with others in the novel. John, although a son and a brother, is not the same as his other siblings at home. John is not the son of Gabriel and is treated differently, but he feels the pressure to act differently than his siblings. Whether it is the difference between his baby picture and his siblings’ or the hatred he sees in his father’s eyes when he looks at him, he knows he is not the same. At church, John outwardly lives up to his father’s name and tries hard to forge an identity centered around the dedicated work of the son of a preacher. However, internally, John is far from that salvation. John struggles with seeing the light. Between the hypocrisy he sees in the teaching of the Lord versus his father’s actions or God’s role as an executioner and nothing else, John is not “at home” in the church. Although physically with his family and fellow churchgoers, John is not in unison or in sameness with them as even after he is “saved” he cannot find the spirit in his soul that he awaited to bring him closer to God one day. Finally, John could not find a home accepting of his sexuality. John’s first sin of masturbation was inspired by the thought of older boys in the bathroom. His family’s religion taught him that homosexuality was a clear sin. It was introduced and promoted as a reason for which God would strike him. This again left him with a void of identity. Savoy’s piece outlines Baldwin and James’ frustration with the American failure to recognize otherness. John’s life is a manifestation of that reality.