By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Writer Saeed Jones’ introduction to James Baldwin was seeing the author’s face on the back of a book in his mother’s library.
The summer before he went to high school in Lewisville Texas, he started reading Baldwin’s novel “Another Country.” He recalls being absorbed in it, reading it in 24 hours. This was an adult book. “People are having sex,” he recalls. “I snuck into my bedroom and read half that day, tucked it under my pillow, and got back to it the next day.”
The setting of the book was Greenwich Village, a world away from his home in Lewisville.
He recalls the character, a despondent jazz musician, in the book wandering the streets. “Nothing is happening, but I could hear the music of it. I remember thinking I could hear a saxophone playing,” he said. “There’s a jazz band in the living room right now! What’s going on?”
“We lived on the main street,” Jones recalls. “The high school’s teams were the Lewisville Fighting Farmers, the mascot was Farmer John. It was so north Texas and suburban. Reading about this jazzy night in Harlem I really felt transported. I forgot where I was.”
Next came “Giovanni’s Room,” an intense portrayal of gay life in Paris in the 1950s.
Jones would develop his own career as a poet — and memoirist, exploring his identity as a Black gay man. His works include two poetry collections “Prelude to a Bruise” and “Alive at the End of the World” and the memoir “How We Fight for Our Lives.” He’s also edited Buzzfeed and hosted podcasts winning recognition along the way. Jones now serves as an artist in residence at the Harvard Medical School’s master of science media health and medicine.
Earlier this month Jones was invited to BGSU to speak and read in honor of the centenary of James Baldwin’s birth.
Baldwin had an affiliation with BGSU in the late-1970s, first delivering a lecture at the university in 1977, then serving as a writer in residence in the nascent Ethnic Studies Department in 1978, and then as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in 1979.
The afternoon before his speech, Jones spoke to Abigail Cloud’s Literary Editing and Publishing class.
He spoke of his love for writing poetry. That’s the only reason to write it. “Poetry defies market value,” he said. “If I write a poem, I write it because I want it to exist.”
He has little patience for the tortured poet trope.
He advised students not to say “no” to ideas that they deem not promising at first glance. Explore those. Use them as exercises.
Jones also spoke of his work as a memoirist.“I’m interested in what people are haunted by … the things we can’t get over,” he said. “America is so invested in getting away from its ghosts.”
Baldwin was invested in scaring up those ghosts.
In an interview after the class, Jones reflected on rereading Baldwin’s 1963 classic “The Fire Next Time.”
“What stood out for me was the disdain he has for the word ‘innocence.’” Jones continued that Baldwin believes that it is impossible for those who are “the authors” and beneficiaries of a destructive system of racism to also be innocent of its impacts. “That innocence constitutes the crime,” Jones said. “The authors of devastation wanted to be perceived as innocent.
“I feel that a lot of harm right now is draped in great old American goodness,” Jones said. “Baldwin wanted us, and still wants us, to tear down that drape and interrogate it for what it is.”
Baldwin’s prose, fiction or non-fiction “is still so iridescent,” Jones said.
“So often you can read a Baldwin essay or an excerpt from one of his novels. Did he write this yesterday? Did he write this tomorrow?”
But Baldwin cannot be easily characterized. He has many facets. “There’s Baldwin the preacher and Baldwin trying to convince us to take care of each other. But then there’s Baldwin the Black activist trying to keep it together.”
Reading a broad, diverse swath of his work shows the complexity of the author.
“He has such a confident voice on the page that if you read it in isolation you miss out on some of the nuances of his vulnerability.”
The issues that consumed Baldwin are still at play.
“I know we are in a time when conversations around true freedom of speech and censorship are not water-cooler fare,” he said.
As he was walking in East Hall, Jones noticed the large Lawrence Ferlinghetti drawings hanging on the second floor, visible from throughout the building.
The figures in the drawings, made in Sandusky, were originally nude, but a vandal painted clothing over their genitalia. Ferlinghetti then wrote over the additions, lamenting censorship and the close-mindedness of the vandals.
“He just embraced it,” Jones said. “These conversations around censorship and the freedom of art are not new.. …But I will say it’s a scary time.” Citing writer Toni Morrison, he said that this is twhen artists go to work.
“There is a chilling effect. I do feel there needs to be a galvanizing effect. This free exchange of ideas, this dialogue, is worth protecting.”
