Pour célébrer le centenaire de James Baldwin, né le 2 août 1924 à Harlem, New York, le rappeur et acteur Common a lu une lettre de James Baldwin en mai dernier à l’hôtel de ville lors de l’événement « Letters Live ».
James Baldwin, figure incontournable de la littérature afro-américaine, a écrit cette lettre à son neveu de 14 ans au début de l’année 1963. Ce texte, rédigé un siècle après la Proclamation d’émancipation des esclaves d’Abraham Lincoln, donne une autre perspective sur les défis auxquels font face les Afro-Américains. Il est un extrait de « My Dungeon Shook » et fait partie du célèbre ouvrage de Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.
James Baldwin, une vie dédiée à la littérature et au militantisme
James Baldwin a grandi dans une famille modeste, avec une enfance marquée par la discrimination et les difficultés liées à sa race aux États-Unis. Ses expériences personnelles ont profondément façonné son écriture.
Ses romans, tels que La Conversion (titre original en anglais : Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953), La Chambre de Giovanni (Giovanni’s Room, 1956) et Si Beale Street pouvait parler (If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974), ont été salués pour leur approche sensible et nuancée des questions de race, de sexualité et d’identité.
James Baldwin a également été un essayiste prolifique. Dans ses essais, il aborde avec lucidité les enjeux sociopolitiques de son époque dans des œuvres comme Chroniques d’un enfant du pays (Notes of a Native Son, 1955) et La prochaine fois, le feu (The Fire Next Time, 1953).
Au-delà de sa carrière littéraire, Baldwin a été un militant engagé dans la lutte pour les droits civiques. Il a utilisé sa plume et sa voix pour dénoncer les injustices et appeler au changement, devenant l’une des figures emblématiques du mouvement pour l’égalité raciale aux États-Unis.
« Letters Live » : une plateforme pour les voix du passé
« Letters Live » est une plateforme pour faire revivre des correspondances historiques. Créé en 2013 par Canongate Books et SunnyMarch, ce projet invite des personnalités à lire des lettres marquantes devant un public. Ces lectures mettent en valeur le pouvoir de la correspondance littéraire, qu’elle soit humoristique, émouvante ou dramatique.
Les lettres sont choisies parmi celles cataloguées dans les livres Letters of Note de Shaun Usher et To the Letter de Simon Garfield. Les lettres lues incluent des correspondances historiques, comme la lettre de Virginia Woolf à son mari Leonard Woolf, ou celle de Mahatma Gandhi à Adolf Hitler.
Les événements sont souvent accompagnés de musique, et les interprètes ne sont généralement pas annoncés à l’avance, ce qui ajoute à l’attrait de l’événement.
Des personnalités telles que Benedict Cumberbatch, Gillian Anderson, Ian McKellen, et bien d’autres ont participé à ces événements.
Transcription de la lettre lue par Common pour le centenaire de James Baldwin.
“ Dear James,
I’ve begun this letter five times and torn it up five times.
I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother.
I’ve known both of you all your lives. I have carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk.
Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father’s face. For behind your father’s face, as it is today are all those other faces which were his. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it.
And I know, which is much worse and this is a crime of which, I accuse my country and my countrymen for which, I, neither time nor history will forgive them. That they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it, and do not want to know it.
These innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago.
Well, you were born here you came, something like 15 years ago.
And though your father and mother and grandmother looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls in which into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavy-hearted, yet they were not.
For here you were, Big James, to be loved hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the Loveless World. Remember that.
I know how black it looks today for you. It looked bad that day too. Yes, we were trembling we have not stopped trembling yet. But if we had loved each other, none of us would have survived.
And now you must survive, because we love you and for the sake of your children and your children’s children.
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it is intended that you should perish.
Let me spell it out precisely what I meant by that.
For the heart of the matter is here and the root of my dispute with my country, you were born where you were born.
And face the future that you face because you were black and for no other reason.
The limits of your ambition were thus expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.
You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
Wherever you have turned James in your short time on this Earth, you have been told where you could go, what you can do and how you could do it and where you could live and whom you could marry.
The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you.
Please try to remember, that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
Please try to be clear, dear James.
Though the storm which raises about your youthful head today about the reality which lies behind the words “acceptance” and “integration”, there is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis, whatever for their impertinent assumptions, that they must accept you.
The really terrible thing old buddy, is that you must accept them and I mean that very seriously.
You must accept them and accept them with love.
For these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it they cannot be released from it.
They have had to believe for so many years for innumerable reasons that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them indeed know better but as you will discover people find it very difficult to act on what they know.
To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger.
In this case the danger in the minds of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.
Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars are flamed you would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature.
Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star as an immovable pillar. And as he moves out of his place, Heaven and Earth are shaken to their foundations.
But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers and if the word integration means anything, this is what it means : that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it for this is your home my friend.
Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again. And we can make America what America must become.
It will be hard James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock men who picked cotton and Damned rivers and built railroads.
And in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unsellable and monumental dignity.
You come from a long line of poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer.
One of them said : The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon Shook and my chains fell off.
You know and I know that the country is celebrating 100 Years of Freedom 100 Years too soon we cannot be free until they are free.
God bless you James and godpspeed.
Your uncle, James.”
L’Afrique au creux des lettres