“[Being] an attentive and heroic witness can mean that you yourself, as that witness, are never entirely seen. And a father is a kind of god in the human psyche, one who sees you and whose vision you must both realize and overcome, overthrow, ruin.
“Maybe James Baldwin was the only star-witness America could trust on any given day because at an early age he had to perform the ritual (or rite of passage) of becoming his own father, seeing himself, which allowed him to see others so clearly.
“But when it came time for the next ritual in the sequence, overcoming that self-imposed vision, betrayal of any limiting concept of the self—maybe it was because the vision was his own, because he was his own master, that suicide so seduced him, as his own father, his own master, he was in his own way.”
Harmony Holiday, “Preface to James Baldwin’s Unwritten Suicide Note,” Poetry Foundation, August 9, 2018:
poetryfoundation.org/preface-to-james-baldwins-unwritten-suicide-note
Above image credit: Library of America.
Below: James Baldwin in France, 1970.
