"In order to survive... you have to really dig down into yourself and recreate yourself... You have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you." - James Baldwin
Before Audre Lorde provided me with the words to describe how Blackness and queerness overlapped upon themselves, James Baldwin sat his words in my lap and poured entire worlds of queered Blackness into me. I’ve spent quite a while during these times thinking about what it means to be multiple. Baldwin was a Black, gay, American man. He proclaimed his love for the latter frequently and stated that it is because of his love for America that he became so critical of its practices. A world traveler in his later years and a freedom fighter both in practice and by virtue of his very existence, Baldwin was seeped in his own multiplicity.
I have always been a talker, a communicator, a big mouth. Baldwin, like Lorde, Morrison and Hurston would years later, forced me to honor my wordiness and treat it as power. Baldwin was no solitary artist. He engaged actively, critically and best of all joyfully with many of the greats of his time. His relationships with the likes of Toni Morrison and Nikki Giovanni and the conversations they were gracious enough to let us in on have lent me some of the most impactful quotes I’ve come across yet. But it is not only Baldwin’s impeccable wordsmithing that earns him the love and adoration that so many hold for him today. It is his multiplicity, his existence across the lines of culture, sexuality, and race. He outlived so many of those he walked alongside. He watched as we lost Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin in quick succession. He wrote If Beale Street Could Talk from his home in France where he remained for seventeen years before his passing.
I really do insist that others recognize my inherent multiplicity
What I no longer do is take pains to explain it or defend it
That is an exhausting (Exhausting), repetitive (Repetitive), and draining project (Draining project)
To constantly explain and defend one's multiplicity
So I've reached a point where
I am aware of my inherent multiplicity
And anyone wishing to meaningfully engage with me or my work
Must be too - Taiye Selasi
It is within this multiplicity that I first was able to see a conflict so intense that it left me without rest for days on end. My father, who reached his arms out toward Baldwin as a representation of what he believes himself to be, could not stomach all of Baldwin’s multiples. My father, a Black man who speaks French as his first language and considers himself to be well versed on the topic of race, could not bear to reconcile with the idea of Baldwin's gayness. He struggled to remain in touch with the romance he once held so dear within Baldwin's novels as he felt the writer, the creator of these worlds and the romances that live within them, had somehow tainted them with his own. It was within the witnessing of this struggle that I found the courage to abandon such conflict in myself. It is more work to explain and defend my own layered identities to those who have set themselves up as active opposition to such an existence.
I can't be a singular expression of myself
There's too many parts, too many spaces
Too many manifestations, too many lines
Too many curves, too many troubles
Too many journeys, too many mountains
Too many rivers, so many - Solange
Black artists of today are still grappling with their intersections. Solange has made it a point to address her journey toward the acceptance of her own multiplicity through music. Such a journey, especially for Black women, is one that can feel like making a beeline toward freedom. Baldwin made this beeline straight to a French cottage and lived his life without explanation in a peace I admire and am fascinated by. There is such peace, such a physically freeing sense of joy that comes with insisting on your right to exist. Such liberation in refusing to explain yourself and your experience. There is a recognizable weight that comes off of your shoulders when you no longer make it your job to prove that there is light between the spaces where bits of you are overlapping. I am made of overlapping, overrunning, overflowing pieces. As are you.