Disillusioned with American racism,
James Baldwin moved to Paris in 1948. There, the 24-year-old felt
relieved of the rigid enclosures of home. “Once I found myself on the
other side of the ocean, I see where I came from very clearly,” Baldwin
told the New York Times. Disillusioned with South African
apartheid, J.M. Coetzee moved from Cape Town to the U.K. in 1962. Three
years later, Coetzee relocated to earn his PhD at the University of
Texas. Both Baldwin and Coetzee’s fraught relationships with their home
countries led to their departures. With their fleeing from home, these
authors sought to escape their countries and bury their pasts. Yet as
they penned their first novels, the ghosts of home and history still
bubbled upward.
Baldwin’s early days in Paris were spent in the city’s quaint Café de Flore and writing his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Published in 1953, Go Tell It
is a semi-autobiographical, Harlem-set novel centering around the
religious awakening of John; a closeted 14-year-old who struggles under
an oppressive Pentecostal tradition. Baldwin reflected on his character
John in a 1985 New York Times interview: “It’s the me that was me once.”
While later teaching in Buffalo, New
York, Coetzee willed himself to “stop thinking and planning and actually
start writing” and published his first novel Dusklands in 1974. Also semi-autobiographical, Dusklands
is two novellas in one. The first half is about a war propaganda
specialist; the second half is the travel diary of a Dutch colonist in
18th-century South Africa.
In France, Baldwin wanted to forget
America and forge a new understanding of himself: “It wasn’t so much a
matter of choosing France,” he told The Paris Review in 1984.
“It was a matter of getting out of America.” When Baldwin fled Harlem in
1948, the neighborhood was still reeling from the intense race riots of
1935 and 1943. And when Coetzee boarded his flight from South Africa to
the U.K. in 1962, Robben Island had received its first batch of
political prisoners just one year prior.
Both men were troubled. Baldwin was a
victim of poverty and racism. Coetzee was on the other side of the coin.
On his father’s side, he descends from Dutch immigrants who settled in
South Africa in the 17th-century. Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940.
He very much could have stayed in South Africa and enjoyed the benefits
of whiteness in the apartheid era. Still, the only reason Coetzee
returned to South Africa in 1971 was because his U.S. residency
application was denied. As he put it in a 1997 Salmagundi Journal
interview: “I wanted not to go back to South Africa…It was not an
appealing place. Particularly then.” In 1970, the South African
government passed the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, a law that
stripped black South Africans of citizenship in their own country. ... [mehr] https://theoffingmag.com/insight/what-james-baldwin-and-j-m-coetzee-tell-us-about-history-and-home/
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