In 1961, a weary and uncentered James Baldwin unexpectedly showed up at the doorstep of the young Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, whom he had befriended years before in New York. Cezzar was Baldwin's choice to play Giovanni in a Broadway adaptation of Giovanni's Room, an adaptation that came to nothing. Baldwin had flown from the U.S. thinking that he would end up in Africa, where country after country was claiming independence and a magazine had tasked him with a writing assignment. But he took an abrupt northern turn to Turkey instead, which was then simmering from a recent coup. The former prime minister was executed and, after 17 months of rule, the military was on the brink of returning power to civilians for constitutional reform. When Baldwin showed up at his old friend's hilltop house, unannounced, the bedraggled writer found himself walking into the middle of a wedding party.
Cezzar greeted Baldwin warmly; he had been sincere when he'd offered Baldwin an open invitation to his home. And the writer needed both a friend and an elsewhere: he was drinking too much, smoking too much, sleeping not enough, and he had hooked his sense of worth on the rambling manuscript he carried in his suitcase. As Cezzar would describe it many years later: "He arrived three years after he promised he was coming to Istanbul ... 'Baby, I'm coming,' then 'Sorry, something happened.' Three years later he said: 'Baby I'm broke, I'm sick. I need your help.'" Claudia Roth Pierpont describes what happened next in The New Yorker:
In this distant city, no one wanted to interview him, no one was pressing him for social prophecy. He knew few people. He couldn’t speak the language. There was time to work. He stayed for two months, and he was at another party—Baldwin would always find another party—calmly writing at a kitchen counter covered with glasses and papers and hors d’oeuvres, when he put down the final words of “Another Country.” The book was dated, with a flourish, “Istanbul, Dec. 10, 1961.”
What I can say about the novel: it sits explosively on the sorts of lived experiences that are hard to talk about at all, let alone altogether in the close juxtaposition of a novel: race, sexual orientation, sex, poverty, cities, masculinity, violence, anger, that arching feeling of doom that muddle days, ambitions, souls. Haunted by these things in life as well as on paper, one can't help but cheer for Baldwin, that he found a place where he could see this project through, faults and all.
Baldwin would return to Turkey again and again over the next decade, choosing the Middle East (as well as France) over the U.S. during the heart of the civil rights movement and its turbulent aftermath. He lived in Istanbul's Gumussuyu neighborhood and favored a book bazaar on the Golden Horn. Some of The Fire Next Time was written in Istanbul (which of course features a searing piece on Muslims in black America: the Nation of Islam). This potent book of two essays is itself awash in fire. It put him on the cover of TIME Magazine in 1963: the May 17 issue. One month before, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was published. One week before, the awful images of firehoses and dogs being set on peaceful protesters in that same city were unleashed. And in a few weeks, when the magazine with his face on it was already dated, Baldwin's friend Medgar Evers would be murdered on the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
In Turkey, Baldwin was attentive to the fever in his native country, but he felt less hindered day-to-day by being culturally mapped as a gay black man, and as a politically-charged artist. After the assassination of King, it was Turkey where Baldwin sought refuge. He told The Paris Review:
You see, I had left America after the funeral and gone to Istanbul. Worked—or tried to—there. Got sick in Istanbul, went to London, got sick in London, and I wanted to die.
Baldwin, a preacher's son, was rather neutral about the Muslim life of Turkey, according to his biographer -- "except perhaps," as Baldwin put it, "that it's a relief to deal with people who, whatever they are pretending, are not pretending to be Christians.'" He did have another kind of privilege in Istanbul, though. According to one report:
"I feel free in Turkey," Baldwin told Yasar Kemal, the country's preeminent man of letters, who replied: "Jimmy, that's because you're an American."
James Baldwin never wrote anything about Istanbul, but his enthusiasm and interest in the place caught the notice of other writers. In the March 1970 issue of Ebony, there is an article by Charles E. Adelse titled "A Love Affair: James Baldwin and Istanbul," featuring the first play that Baldwin directed. It was performed in Istanbul and starred his friend Engin Cezzar. The article has a naive and uncomfortable bewilderment about it. "Why come to Istanbul to create?" it asks. Why indeed!
Someone there asks him again: "Istanbul, why?" The Baldwin eyes fix the visitor with that particularly attentive gaze. Briefly, there is a smile, lips close. Then Baldwin says: "A place where I can find out again -- who I am -- and what I must do. A place where I can stop and do nothing in order to start again." ... Baldwin goes on: "To begin again demands a certain silence, a certain privacy that, at least for me, to be found elsewhere." Friendship brought him to Istanbul, and now one knows that a sort of human quietude, which he needs, he finds there, too. In Istanbul, which has had 20 centuries and more to look at the coming and going of Ceasers and sultans without number, famous man Baldwin's conspicuousness is only that of the invited guest in the house.
More recently, Magdalena J. Zaborowska has written an academic take -- James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics in Exile. In March 1972, Mary McCarthy wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books headlined "A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigres." She classifies Baldwin as a strange case, somewhere between exile and expatriate, in which Turkey is but one manifestation of his longer and larger experience of being "away." And a few years ago, in Turkey, a collection of letters between Baldwin and Cezzar was published. When one journalist met Cezzar in Istanbul shortly after this collection was released, she told him she'd bought the book. "He scowled: 'Don't read Jimmy Baldwin in Turkish, for Christ's sake.'"
"Language is the only homeland," exiled poet Czeslaw Milosz famously said. Zaborowska cites it in her book about Baldwin's "Turkish decade."
From that lovely essay on the artist in The New Yorker:
During his wanderings, Baldwin warned a friend who had urged him to settle down that 'the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.' It was, of course, impossible to make such a place alone.
The work, then, is to "to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life” -- these places where we live, and where we go.
Baldwin's homeland was 'another country,' a shifting state of being a stranger everywhere he lived in America, in Europe, in Africa, and in the Middle East. His life as an expatriate/exile doesn't have the romance of the "moveable feast" years in Paris. Rather, it heaves with a loneliness that is hard to look at too closely, a loneliness that breaks the heart in part because Baldwin never gave up on his native country. He cared. He was attached. He came back and left and came back and left. He wrote. Baldwin was in a constant state of beginning again. This is revealed in his writing -- not just his brilliant pages, but the brave failures too.
About the Image: Photograph taken at an Istanbul coffee house in 1965 by Sedat Pakay. See more in Pekay's online gallery.
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