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Montag, 22. Oktober 2018

What James Baldwin and J.M. Coetzee Tell Us About History and Home / Leila Green. In: The Offing 19 Oct 2018

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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